The Glass Is Always Greener (9 page)

“It’s like this, Mrs. Timberlake,” Pastor Sam said, turning to face me. He had the whitest, straightest set of chompers I’d ever seen this side of a TV camera. “I was never good at school. And I really sucked at sports. But I did have a gift for remembering people’s names and faces. When you’re part of a four-thousand-member congregation, Mrs. Timberlake, and the pastor remembers your name, and possibly a little something personal about yourself, that’s when you feel important. You feel singled out and special. You’re in denial that he can do the same in regards to everyone else there.”

By then we’d caught up with the others. “And you can do that?” I said. “You can remember all four thousand of your congregants by name?”

“That’s how I make my living.” He chuckled. “And I keep track of who’s been healed of what, and when. Call it my gift. And just so you know, I never ‘heal’ anyone who I know to be really ill. That would be just plain wrong.” He tried to lock his blue eyes on mine, but I refused to let him. “I only bring my brand of healing to those folks who are already whole in body and spirit, and together we dance in the light. If in the process I help them be shed of some collateral ailment, then I say praise the Lord!”

“Hallelujah!” Tina said.

“Ooh Abby, wasn’t that just the most inspiring thing you ever heard?” C.J. moaned.

“
Au contraire
, my dear,” I said. “That was a bucket of
merde
.”

Chapter 10

O
oh, Abby, you better explain yourself,” C.J. said. “Those are fighting words and this man’s kinfolk now.”

“C.J.,” I said calmly, “get ahold of yourself. He’s a con man. Surely you didn’t buy that ‘dancing in the light’ baloney.”

“Abby, aren’t you the big liberal that’s always preaching that ‘hey, whatever works, that’s what counts’? If Cousin Sam’s congregants feel better after dancing in the light with him, then it really isn’t your business, is it?”

“C.J., don’t desert me. We’re supposed to solve Aunt Jerry’s murder before six. Time’s a-wasting.”

“Abby, let me be,” my buddy said, her voice quavering. “You know how important family is to me.”

Indeed I did. My ex-sister-in-law wants nothing more than to
belong
. Maybe it’s the herd instinct she got from that supposed goat DNA, or maybe it’s because she grew up believing that it really was a stork that dropped her off on Granny Ledbetter’s doorstep. Whatever the reason, she has a thirst for roots and a hunger for the type of validation that can never be awarded her in the city she chooses to call home.

In Charleston, South Carolina, a newcomer is anyone whose people arrived after the War of Northern Aggression. For a handful of the elite, it is the War for Independence from Britain that is the marker. Charleston is “it,” the epicenter of creation, the mile marker from which everywhere else must be measured, for to be from anywhere else is to be from “off.” This is not merely hubris on the part of Charlestonians, mind you; to be fair, one must keep in mind that Charleston is where the Ashley and Cooper rivers join together to form the Atlantic Ocean.

So, yes, I understood where my dear friend was coming from. However, that didn’t mean I had to like it.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ovumkoph,” I said. “Somehow I don’t think this is the last you’ll be seeing of me. And just so you know, if you harm even one hair on C.J.’s chinny-chin-chin, you’ll have me to answer to.”

“Ooh, Abby,” C.J. squealed, “you’re the best friend ever!”

“Yeah,” I said, as I gave her a great big old hug. But if that was really true, then why did I feel like I had a flock of Canada geese wearing miniature army boots marching over my grave?

Melissa Ovumkoph answered the door with freshly painted toenails. I know this because she told me so, although I might have guessed that by the special thongs she was wearing: there was a division between each toe. Her hair was in curlers and there was something on her face resembling egg white. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about her appearance was her lips. Whereas they had once been enormous, they were now leaking collagen, and resembled half-inflated inner tubes. She shared that with me too.

In short, I would not have answered my doorbell looking like that, so I gave her extra points to start with. Melissa was either a very self-confident woman, and to be admired, or extremely depressed, and to be treated lightly.

“Life really sucks when you don’t even have the money for a pedicure,” she said, waving a foot through the crack in the door.

“I know what you mean. I had to do my own highlights one year when my kids were in high school; it was the pits.”

“Hey, you’re serious, aren’t ya?”

“You’re darn tooting, I am. I snagged too much hair through the cap with that thingie and ended up looking like a skunk.”

She opened the door wide. “Fiddle-dee-dee. Wherever are my manners? Please come in. You must be Robbie’s friend. Aggie, isn’t it?”

“Abby.”

“Ya sure?” Her speech was somewhat muffled, given the challenge of speaking with flapping, out-of-control lips. “I mean, ya look more like an Aggie ta me. You know, old-fashioned like. Now myself, I always thought I looked more like a Caitlyn instead of a Melissa. Ugh, Melissa, I can’t stand my name.”

“Then why don’t you change it?” I said.

“I just might,” she said. “Now that the old lady didn’t leave me nothing.”

I cringed at hearing her callousness, even though I’d come prepared for just that. But somehow I wasn’t prepared to see how utterly middle class Aaron and Melissa Ovumkoph lived. Family money had either not trickled down to this branch, or had run right through them like a sieve. It was no wonder they’d been so disappointed not to be mentioned in the will.

Melissa threw several armloads of clothes off a sagging purple and brown plaid sofa. “I was doing laundry and hadn’t gotten around to folding yet. Heck, I’m always doing laundry. Betcha ain’t never seen a man sweat as much as Aaron.”

“I won’t contest that,” I said. I glanced around the room. Their decorating style consisted of dark, faux wood paneling and cheaply framed prints of dogs playing cards.

“Ain’tcha gonna sit?” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Ain’t them pictures cute?” she said. “We seen them at a garage sale. Aaron says we oughta hang on ta them ’cause someday some snooty professor type will say that they’re folk art, and then even copies like these will be valuable. I tell ya, Aggie, he ain’t worth much as a husband, but that Aaron is pretty smart. Hey, ya want something ta drink? Got some red wine, and some white wine, and some Cheerwine.” Cheerwine is a popular Southern soft drink that goes well with Moon Pies in the event that RC Cola is unavailable.

One of the tricks to good sleuthing is to always accept an offer of refreshments. That allows one at least a modicum of time to do some snooping. A body should take care, however, not to ingest the comestibles—unless said goodies are also consumed by the host or hostess—lest one should awaken in a crate in the port of Shanghai, staring up at the face of a Cantonese madam named Huang Lu. Been there, done that, is all I want to say about that experience.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Do any of those wines come with a cork—no offense.”

“Oh, none taken. I just hate them uppity folks and their corky ways, don’t you? Screw them, I say!” She roared with laughter, as she tossed back her long bleached mane and slapped her thighs.

“Yeah, what a bunch of winers,” I said, and pretended to carry on as well.

Laughter is indeed contagious, and it is best caught from our own selves. Just by pretending to laugh, I began to laugh, and soon I forgot that I was pretending. Then suddenly Melissa and I were laughing at cues taken from each other, and then we just couldn’t stop. Together we laughed until there were tears in our eyes, and I felt my bladder dangerously constrict.

“If you don’t quit making me laugh, I’m going to—”

“What? Pee in your pants?”

And then we were off again, me and the woman who had egg white on her face and curlers in her hair, and with whom I had nothing in common. But I had a job to do, so after several minutes of shamelessly rolling about on the brown and purple plaid sofa like a college student stoned on pot, I got it back together enough to ask for wine in a box—color unimportant—and some Moon Pies if she had some.

Then, as soon as she’d padded out of sight, I was all business. A more careful look around the room confirmed my initial impression: this was a family that either had no assets, or chose not to invest them in feathering their nest. If suddenly handed a thumbnail-size bar of soap and a towel no larger than a dinner napkin, I might be persuaded that I was back in the one-star West Virginia motel in which Buford Timberlake and I spent our honeymoon—oh, but there had to be a footprint on the ceiling to complete the mood.

Of course poverty doesn’t necessarily equate with pedestrian taste. We’ve all heard of folks down on their luck who’ve still managed, through creativity, to build very attractive and sometimes astonishingly beautiful spaces for themselves. But not so Aaron and Melissa Ovumkoph. I even did a two-second reconnaissance of their downstairs powder room. The only bit of decorating in there was a hand-lettered sign hanging over the toilet that read:
just do it!

“Here we go,” Melissa said, barely giving me time to throw myself back on the sofa. This second time around I learned that there was a broken spring.

“This is mighty gracious of you,” I said.

“ ’Tain’t nothing.” She handed me a glass tumbler half filled with a murky, deep maroon substance. It looked like the fake wine we used in high school plays, and which was supplied by Miss Odell Jordan, one of the English teachers. We were instructed not to drink the foul fluid, so of course we did, and we all got sick, but we never did find out what it was.

“To
chai
-yum,” she said, murdering the pronunciation of a great Jewish toast.

“Skoal,” I said.

“Well, drink up. It’s fresh. I just now broke the seal on the box.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I took a sip. Whatever harmful parasites I might have been harboring at the moment were, without a doubt, instantly killed. Ditto the good ones. It was going to be a yogurt kind of evening for me once I returned to the hotel—assuming I survived. The wine I’d swallowed wasn’t rotgut bad, it was eat-a-hole through my guts bad.

“Good, ain’t it?” she said. “One night Aaron didn’t come home, and I just knew he was cheating on me with that no good sister-in-law of mine, so I drank me two boxes of this stuff. Got me a good buzz going that night, I tell ya.”

“I bet you did,” I said. “Say, Caitlyn—I’m sorry, but you really do look like one—I mean, Melissa, what did you think of Aunt Jerry’s taste in jewelry? Pretty gaudy, if you ask me.”

“Oh no, hon, ain’t no such thing as too gaudy when it comes to hot rocks—that’s what I call them big stones. The bigger, the better. They’s some that just goes in for diamonds, but Aaron says you gotta keep an eye out for them colored rocks too, because some of them is just as valuable.”

“Like the emerald ring she tried to give me?”

“Yeah. But you didn’t want it. You said that loud and clear in front of God and everybody. Tell me, Aggie, are you nuts, or what?”

“Probably the what. But I didn’t refuse it; I just refused to wear it then.”

“Oh no, ma’am. We all heard you tell her that you didn’t like them big stones and that she could shove it up her you-know-what.”

“I did not!” I said.

“Cheese and crackers, you don’t need to get so worked up about it none. I’m just saying that’s what it sounded like to some. Personally, I didn’t hear exactly what you said—uh, anyway, that was the impression I got.”

“Well, hear me now, please. The ring is still legally mine.”

She stared at me. “Yeah, like whatever.”

I tried out various smiles, but after getting no reaction after far too long a period of time, dove back into the fray. “Did you know that the ring was stolen off her cold dead finger sometime before the police arrived yesterday? Of course there is an excellent chance that the thief and the killer are one and the same person.”

Melissa’s eyes grew as wide as dessert plates, and her mouth gaped open to the point that I could see what she’d had for breakfast. Seriously, I am entirely certain that she was genuinely shocked by the news.

“H-how do ya know?” she finally gasped. “Who told ya the ring was missing?”

“The police told me.”

“Wh-when did they tell ya?”

“Last night. I’m a suspect too, you know.”

She deftly snatched my glass of maroon poison away from me. “Just one minute there, hon. Maybe
you’re
a suspect, but we ain’t.”

“You mean the police haven’t interviewed you?”

She was on her feet in a clichéd flash, motioning vigorously toward the door. “You need to be leaving now, Aggie; our visit is over.”

I took my time standing. “Mind if I have a Moon Pie for the road?” I said.

She held out the plate of pies, still in their cellophane wrappers. “Take two—three if you wish,” she said. “I ain’t trying to be dis-sociable-like, you understand?”

“Indeed I do,” I said.

“Maybe under different circumstances, Aggie, you and I might have been good friends—best girlfriends even, on account of we’re so much alike. But this suspect stuff—Aaron and I can’t handle none of that. The old lady got bumped off because somebody had it in for her. So be it. We say leave it at that. We ain’t even going ta her funeral.”

I slipped three pies in my purse; no telling when and where supper would be. “If you hear anything else about my ring,” I said, “please let me know.”

“Bye now, Aggie,” she said, and practically pushed me out the door.

Aaron Ovumkoph owns and operates his own business in a strip mall on Sardis Road. If I have a hard time describing his business, it is because Aaron had a hard time deciding what exactly his business should be. The end result was one quarter watch repair business, one quarter shoe repair business, and half gift card and sundries shop. This mishmash might have succeeded in less throwaway times, but it was my guess that the repair jobs barely paid for his overhead. As for the cards and sundries; the former turned yellow and curled in the sunlight and the latter turned thick or watery in their tubes or jars. To be succinct, nothing sold.

This would explain why Aaron alighted on me like a mosquito after a rain the second I walked in the door. “Yes, ma’am, how can I help you? Everything you see here is fifty percent off—today only.”

“Very nice,” I said, lying through my small, but fairly even, teeth. “However, I’m really here just to—”