Citizen Insane (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #2) (6 page)

“Are all PTA meetings this titillating?”

Chapter Five

ODDLY, BUNNY AND MICHELLE’S FELINE fracas in the school parking lot had lifted my spirits. Maybe I was just reveling in the knowledge that someone might have bigger problems than me, who knows? Regardless, Bunny was losing control in a big way. She’d progressed from wacko quack to super psycho freak. Of course, I still wanted to know why the FBI had been called out to her house for a mere rabbit hit and run, but I’d needle Howard for that info soon enough. Right before I castrated him.

After Roz dropped me off, I opened my front door, expecting to find things quiet with Amber in bed, Bethany reading in her room, and Callie watching TV or talking to friends on her computer.

So much for expectations. Instead, I was greeted by an unusually warm, domestic scene. Comfortably cozy on the family room sofa, my mother sat, book in hand, flanked on one side by ten year old Bethany and on the other side by six year old Amber wearing a tiger’s tail and cat ears. Just two months earlier Amber had waved her fairy phase goodbye and sleuthed into her Josie and the Pussycats phase. I was going broke keeping her in DVD sets of the old cartoons, many of which she could now recite from memory.

Callie was curled up in the overstuffed comfy chair, a red blanket hiding everything except her beautiful head. Norman Rockwell could not have painted a more perfect picture himself. I touched a hand to my heart.

The girls, engrossed by the story being read to them, didn’t look up as I entered. Finally, I thought, after all of these years, there was hope for my mother. She could be like other grandmothers—warm, loving and maternal. I sat on the edge of Callie’s chair and took in the literary moment, wondering what lovely, pretty little fairy tale she had chosen.

“’There isn't any night club in the world’,” she read in a calm yet dramatic voice, “’you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you're with some girl that really knocks you out.’”

I jumped to my feet. “Mom!”

She peered at me over her tortoise shell half eye glasses. “What dear?”

“What are you reading to them?”

Innocently, she turned the red paperback around so I could see the title. “
Catcher in the Rye
. It’s a great American novel. You really should expose these girls to better literature. All I could find were some miserable books about that little brat on the prairie. No imagination. This, you can sink your teeth into.”

I grabbed the book from her hands. “This is not appropriate! What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that they needed exposure to art.”

“Art?
Catcher in The Rye
? I’m barely comfortable with Callie hearing this stuff, but come on—Amber and Bethany?”

“This ‘stuff’ as you so blithely dismiss it, is considered some of the most important writing of the twentieth century. I’m taking a college literature course—reconnecting with the classics. You know, I dated JD for a brief time.”

Again, with a big fish tale.

“You dated JD Salinger?” Suspicion was evident in my tone.

“It was a long time ago,” she said, adding a nonchalant wave of her hand. “Before I met your father.”

Everything my mother claimed to have done in her life, including an ambiguous stint on Broadway, auditioning for the role of Bond girl, and getting drunk with Ernest Hemingway, happened before she met my father. Since she would never confess to her real age, I figured she was either a very precocious teenager, or she met my father when she was sixty.

“Mom, JD Salinger was a recluse.”

“Only after we dated.”

If her story was true, Salinger’s fear of people was finally explained.

She exhausted me. The woman simply exhausted me. More than anything, I just wanted to crawl into bed and put the horrible day behind me. I looked at my watch.

“Mom, it’s ten o’clock. Amber and Bethany should have been asleep over an hour ago.” I waved in the direction of the stairs. “Go girls. Get up there now.”

“We want more! Please, Mom?”

“You heard me—up there now.” Reluctantly and with the speed of two sloths, they did as I asked, Amber dragging her sad tiger tail behind her.

“Callie, you too. Shoo!” Callie performed the required teenage eye roll. She was a skilled eye-roller. Almost as good as her father.

“Why me?” she wailed as the eyeballs spun. “I’m not a baby.”

“I’m sure Grandma has somewhere important she has to be. Hang gliding lessons? Bungee jumping off Memorial Bridge? Climbing Mount Everest maybe?”

A skilled master at initiating awkward moments, my mom stared me down without giving up an answer. Silent seconds ticked away. Sweat beaded on my forehead. Callie wiggled restlessly then snuck silently away. When the Grand Intimidator had achieved the desired effect, she spoke.

“Actually,” she pulled the tortoise shell frames slowly from her face. “I will be going momentarily. I expect my ride any second now.”

I wondered why she would need a ride until it hit me—her Mini Cooper wasn’t in the driveway when I got home.

The doorbell rang.

Intuition and experience told me she was up to something.

Her eyes lit up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July. “There he is now!”

He? Either she had a boyfriend or . . . before I could consider the alternative, she shot out of her chair and leapt to the door. She was amazingly agile for a woman with such large bone mass. Something akin to the progeny of a gazelle and a wooly mammoth.

“Russ! Come in. I’ll get my things.” She was gushing.

Poking my head around the corner, a vision of supreme studliness befell my weary eyes.

She dragged me into the foyer. “Barbara, meet my friend, Russell Crow.”

I laughed.

Russell smiled.

“I get that all the time,” he responded with a half-chuckle. “Spelled C-R-O-W though. No E on the end.” Russell smiled real nice.

“Oh, who needs that E anyway?” I blabbered while soaking in his six-foot plus, plentifully abbed-frame, wavy blonde hair and deliciously rugged but blemish-free skin. He was a god. An Adonis. A godly Adonis had walked into my house in little old Rustic Woods,Virginia. My heart skipped about twenty beats.

“Russell is a fire fighter at the station just down the road. I met him at my Citizen’s Fire Fighter Academy.”

Of course, he was a fire fighter. They’re all hunks. It’s true—go to a station sometime and just try to find a fat and ugly fireman. They don’t exist. I couldn’t help from smiling.

“He’s the single fella I mentioned earlier,” my mother added.

My smile fell, my heart stalled, and my face flushed frantic fuschia.

While I quickly pondered very specific and merciless methods for murdering the woman who supposedly gave me life, Russell squelched the flames of my embarrassment by offering his hand for a shake, “You can call me Russ,” he said. “And don’t let your mother worry you. I’m not married, but I am seeing someone.”

“Thank goodness, because I’m married! I mean, not that if you weren’t married . . . I mean . . . well if I weren’t married . . . do you have a gun? A cross-bow? Because if you did, I’d ask you to end my misery right now.”

Russell Crow’s feathers didn’t ruffle even a wee bit. He continued smiling, unfazed by my incoherent dithering. “No worries. We have to get going.” He put his hand up for a farewell wave. “It was nice meeting you.”

“You too,” I managed to squeak while shooting deadly daggers of doom toward my mother who scooted out the door.

Before the door closed behind them, I heard Russel yell. “I’ve got it now!”

The door opened and Russell’s dreamy head appeared.

“You’ve got what now?” I asked.

“Where I’ve seen you before.”

“You’ve seen me before?”

“Were you over on Green Ashe Place earlier today? Talking with an FBI agent?”

I nodded.

“I thought so. I never forget a face. Especially such a pretty one.”

I gulped. “That agent was my husband, Howard.”

“He’s a lucky man.” He pulled his head back out and closed my door.

Holy cow. Talk about combustion. Fires were ignited in regions that hadn’t been ablaze for some time. A cold shower was in order. I was a married woman, after all.

Upstairs, Amber laid in bed with covers up to her chin, cat ears still in place, and awaiting her goodnight kiss. We rubbed noses.

“Mommy, what’s a prom?”

“It’s a special high school dance. Why?”

“Callie is being a grouchy pants and Bethany says it’s ‘cuz she’s hoping Brandon will ask her to the prom, but he hasn’t yet.”

I smiled. “That makes sense.” Brandon had been around our house a few times and I wondered if Callie was hoping for more than friendship.

“Not to me it doesn’t. Does that mean that she wants to kiss him? If it does, then that’s just plain yucky.” She stuck out her tongue. “Samuel Tinker said he wanted to kiss me on the playground and I told him if he tried, I’d punch him in his peanuts.”

“Where did you hear that word?”

“Emily Barnes. Why? Is it a bad word?”

“It depends on where you think his peanuts are . . . located.”

“In his stomach. Where else?”

“Good. Well, from now on, just call a stomach, a stomach. To avoid misunderstandings.”

“Why would there be any missed understandings?”

“Trust me.”

She sighed. “I don’t want to grow up, thank you very much.”

“Why?”

“You people seem to make everything way too complicaketed.”

“Complicated.”

“See what I mean?”

We exchanged kisses and I turned out the light.

Bethany’s room was dark, but I could see a flashlight under her covers. The girl lived to read.

“Good night, Bethy.”

“’Night Mom.”

“Promise you’ll turn the flashlight off before eleven?”

“Sure, Mom.”

I found Callie at her desk in front of the computer, her fingers dancing furiously on the keyboard. She’d pulled her thick, walnut hair off her shoulders with a band.

“Hey, gorgeous,” I said, sitting on the edge of her bed.

She didn’t look up. “Hey.”

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Homework.” Her fingers kept typing.

I traced little blue flowers on her bedspread. “Oh.”

“Do you want something?”

“No.” I cleared my throat while I looked around her room. “Not really.”

“That’s a Grandma move.”

It mortified me that she was right. “I was just wondering . . .”

She stopped what she was doing and turned her head to peer at me with an annoyed expression. “Mom.”

“Has anyone asked you to the prom yet?”

“There’s more to that question, isn’t there?”

“I don’t know . . . is there?”

“What’s with the vague-speak?”

“I was just trying to communicate in your own language. Isn’t that how teens talk? Stepping around the real issue, but everyone knows what you’re talking about?”

“In your day maybe. Teens have evolved since the sixteenth century. Now we just come out and ask. It’s much easier that way.”

“Touché.” She was a witty one and I couldn’t help but grin. “Well, from one decaying, primeval mother to one progressive, worldly teenager: has Brandon asked you to the prom yet?”

The corners of her mouth tugged reluctantly into a pretty smile and she shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?” I was tingly with excitement for her. “But you think he’s going to ask?”

“I think so. He keeps showing up out of no where and acts sort of weird. And he texts me like fifty times a day.”

I nodded. “That’s a sure sign. He’ll get up the courage soon enough. You just let me know when we need to go dress shopping, okay?”

I kissed her forehead. “Go to bed at a decent hour, would you?”