Good Graces (36 page)

As good as spending some time alone with Dave and seeing Henry behind the soda fountain at Fitzpatrick’s sounds, school’s going to start soon and I do not want to get rapped on the knuckles by Sister Raphael when I show up the first day with a half-written assignment. I also gotta finish so Troo has enough time to copy it. Summer is almost over. The block party is in three days.

I tell Dave, “Thanks, but I can’t. I gotta get the rest of my charitable story written,” so he goes over to Vliet Street with his toolbox alone.

Troo is in the bathroom in front of the mirror putting the finishing touches on her ventriloquist act for the Queen of the Playground contest before she goes over to Fast Susie Fazio’s for a sleepover and some
cannolis
. Mother is on the phone with Aunt Betty jabbering about this new man she is dating who is a real catch because it’s Mr. Stanley Talmidge. Troo thinks Mr. Talmidge looks like Quasimodo and that he’s lucky to have something else going for him. He owns the Uptown movie theatre.

So that’s why I come out to my and Daddy’s bench in the backyard to write more of my story with my flashlight. I need some peace and quiet, but that isn’t working out either.

Mr. Moriarity’s dog is barking worse than ever. I think Lizzie broke his heart and is now seeing the Johnsons’ poodle. The crickets are rubbing their legs together to beat the band. I can’t usually hear them, but tonight a strong warm breeze is bringing the sound of the kids at the playground trying to get in their last licks. Loudest of all are the cookie factory dads and their wives out on their steps, giving each other their two cents’ worth on the mystery of Father Mickey’s disappearance. “What do you think coulda happened to him? Do you think he was kidnapped? Murdered?”

Even though it’s been weeks since Troo and me buried Father, the neighborhood just won’t shut up. Even during Mass this Sunday, which Father Louie returned to say from his special dry retreat, I could hear people taking guesses in the Communion line. And it’s not only up at church or on the stoops. No matter where you go or what you do, Father Mickey’s missing is the subject of all conversations. There was even a story in both newspapers with a picture of him looking so sharp, and a quote from Mrs. Latour: “He was a saint. I don’t know how we’ll manage without him.”

Mostly, it seems like people are leaning toward foul play. The cops especially think that. Dave and Detective Riordan have been searching the rectory for clues and when they’re not doing that, they’re working hard to find Father’s body in the lagoon and Jack Hoyt Woods and garbage cans because you got to have a dead one to prove something like murder. Troo and me aren’t worried a bit. Well, Troo isn’t.

The police are also asking everybody a lotta questions about their whereabouts the night Father disappeared. They’re even questioning kids. I got the jitters over that until Troo reminded me that we can count on Artie and Mary Lane. When Artie is grilled, he will keep mum about the revenge plan no matter how high-strung he is. My sister told him if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut about us being up at the rectory that night he has to give back the coonskin cap. And Mary Lane, I’m especially not concerned about her spilling the beans. She’s been tortured by the best in the world—nuns. So detectives asking her a couple of questions wouldn’t bother her at all. (The one thing that is bothering her, though, is why the picture she took of Father up at the rectory slapping Troo that night didn’t turn out. I told her it musta been bad film, but she is leaning toward evil spirits. I expect very soon to hear one heck of a blood-dripping-gypsies-with-wieners ghost story.)

Everybody has been so caught up in thinking about Father Mickey’s vanishing that they’ve already forgotten about the other big news we’ve had. Mrs. Galecki has come out of her coma! Doc Keller told Mother at her visit this week that it is still nip and tuck, but he has high hopes that Mrs. G will recover—not fully, but at least she might be back to where she was in the first place. Dotty and drooly, but not dead.

Because it was all very under-the-covers, hardly anyone in the neighborhood knows the way I do why Mrs. Galecki got so sick in the first place. I was sure that Father Mickey had given her too much or too little of her medicines to try and murder her for her inheritance money, but it turns out that I was wrong. Mrs. Galecki had something running through her that wasn’t supposed to be there and
that’s
what made her go into the coma. A much happier Mr. Gary told me after a couple of whiskey sours and some hands of Old Maid, “The docs don’t know what it was in Mom’s blood, only that it was something they’d never seen before. Something foreign. It’s a real mystery.”

Not to me, it isn’t. I mighta been mistaken about
how
Father Mickey attempted to murder her, but I’m not mistaken that he did try to. Father was the
only
person from around here who had been to someplace foreign. Aunt Betty told me the afternoon Troo and me went to the Five and Dime that he was sent to a bunch of different places after he left the seminary and one of them was the Congo, which is in the dark continent of Africa. I’ve seen those little Pygmy people in Tarzan movies. They’re always sneaking around the jungle trying to poison somebody. That’s what Father Mickey musta done. Not with a blow dart, that’s stupid. I bet he mixed some poison he borrowed from the Pygmies into Mrs. Galecki’s fresh-squeezed lemonade on one of those days Ethel went out to do her errands.

Of course, my good friend was let off the hook for any wrongdoing because Ethel has never been anywhere foreign. So, hurray! She has not had to pack up her things and move down to the Core. She is right where she belongs, next door with Ray Buck sitting in the screened-in porch this very minute, which is another reason why I came out in my yard besides wanting to work on my “How I Spent My Charitable Summer” story. I wanted to listen to their low talking and clinking ice cubes and jazzy music, which is such an improvement over Mr. Gary’s
Oklahoma!
music, I just can’t tell you. Right before he left for the airport to go back to California, I gave him the two leather coin purses to take back to Father Jim so they would steady match, but in all the excitement, I forgot to ask him if he remembered to talk to his mother about changing back her Last Will and Testament so Ethel will inherit the money she needs to open her school for children when Mrs. Galecki really does die, which I’m not too concerned about anymore. For goodness sakes, if Pygmy poison can’t kill her, what can?

“Ya alright over there, Miss Sally?” Ethel calls over the fence.

“Now that you’re back, I am,” I holler. “I don’t think I could take much more of hearin’ about the wind sweepin’ down the plains.”

Ethel rewards me with her million-dollar laugh that I have been missing. It is so rich and there is no end to it. “Thought ya’d like to know that the doctor told me this afternoon Miss Bertha might be comin’ home next week if she gets more of her strength back. Ya still got the Nancy Drew story to read to her?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I checked it back out of the library last week, hoping she’d ask.

Ethel says, “That’s good. Real good,” and I don’t know if she’s talking to me or Ray Buck because she’s gone quiet again, so I get back to being busy, too:

Just thinking that Rhonda might be right makes me shiver on this hottest of hot nights. Troo and me may think we are home free, but just like Granny always says, “The best laid plans of mice and men,” which I take to mean that somebody could have the most genius plan in the world and you could still find yourself caught in a trap. I’m worried about Wendy Latour blowing it. She could say something after church one of these days like, “Father Mickey . . . fall down go boom,” but since nobody really pays attention to her except Artie and me and her mother, who is real busy with the rest of her brood, that
should
be all right. And me, I’m worried about me. I know from experience that it’s hard to keep a secret this big even if it’s for the best of all reasons. I would like to tell Dave the whole kit and kaboodle about what happened to Father Mickey. Maybe someday I will. After Wendy Latour passes away. Right after her funeral, once I can walk and talk again, I could come clean as long as Dave promises on his life not to tell Troo that I told him. We’ll see.

Dave opens the screen door and calls, “Sally?”

Like I’m caught doing something that I shouldn’t, I jump and say, “What?”

I’m surprised he’s back from Mrs. Goldman’s so soon. I’m a little bit disappointed, too, when I see that he is empty-handed. I was hoping he’d stop at Fitzpatrick’s and bring me back a quart of Peaches ’n Cream. He is usually very thoughtful about things like that.

“Could you come in here, please?” he says. “We have visitors.”

“In a minute, okay?”

Aunt Betsy and Uncle Richie must have stopped by, which is good news. I haven’t had a chance to get up to visit with them as much as I’d like to, but Nell has been spending almost every day there except for when she’s cutting hair. Nell and Aunt Betsy have really hit it off. Wait, that’s not exactly right. Dave told me that
Peggy Sure
and Aunt Betsy have really hit it off, which makes a lot more sense. It must feel so good for the mother of dead Junie to hold a little girl in her arms again.

I close my notebook and call next door, “See ya tomorrow at the block party?” I’d love for Ray Buck to come, but it’s especially important that Ethel doesn’t skip it. I want her to see the fruits of our labor.

“Wouldn’t miss it for all the barbeque in Mississippi,” she drawls back. “Sleep tight, Miss Sally. Don’t let them bedbugs bite and if they do . . .”

“I’ll beat them with my shoe, Ethel. Night, you two lovebirds,” I say, wishing when I tug on the back screen door that it was me and Ray Buck lazing around that porch together, only he’d be a lot younger or I’d be a lot older. I’d be a lot browner or he’d be a lot lighter. I know it’s just a crush, Henry doesn’t have a thing to worry about, but I got to say, that man is the answer to the
Who Wrote the Book of Love?
question. Ray Buck makes my toes curl.

When he hears the door slam shut, Dave calls out to me, “We’re in the living room,” and that’s followed up by a baby crying, so it must be Nell and Peggy Sure paying a visit and not my aunt and uncle like I thought. That’s okay with me. Troo and me bumped into Nell last week at the Five and Dime. I think she might be getting a little better from whatever she had. She didn’t look like she was going to win any beauty pageants soon, but her teeth were brushed and she wasn’t talking to the hot pads in aisle six or singing to herself, which is a step in the right direction. (I have been making dirty phone calls to her on a regular basis so maybe that could be what’s picking up her spirits. I heard her tell Mother that she has a “secret admirer.”)

I say, “Hi, Nell,” as I push open the swinging kitchen door.

I can see through the dining room straight into the living room. There’s a baby in there all right, only it’s not Peggy Sure. This baby is chubbier with lots of dark hair and it’s not sitting in Nell’s lap, but is getting bounced on the knee of somebody I thought was gone forever. Somebody who I was sure escaped a dragnet and moved to Brooklyn to work in a pizza palace. Somebody who is Greasy Al Molinari!

S
itting next to Greasy Al on our davenport, I’m shocked to see somebody else I thought I would never see again as long as I lived. Dottie Kenfield! So that baby . . . that’s got to be the one she was supposed to leave in the unwed mother’s home in Chicago!

Dave says, “Come in, Sally.”

I don’t. That wouldn’t be safe. I’m sure fugitive-from-justice Greasy Al must have a gun on Dave’s back like in that Humphrey Bogart movie when he was holding that nice man against his will, but then I think that can’t be right. Mother and Dave look calm and Dottie seems content and the baby’s quit crying and . . . and this is something I never saw before. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Greasy Al Molinari is grinning from ear to ear!

Dave smiles and pats the seat of the red velvet wingback chair, but I don’t move from the kitchen doorway. If he’s not here to hold Dave hostage, the only other reason I can think of to explain why Molinari’s sitting in our living room is that’s he’s piping mad about the poison-pen letters Troo wrote him in reform school every Friday. He’s come to get his revenge by ratting Troo out.