A Body at Bunco (4 page)

“Puddin, you might go through all the wine and then who would take you home? As for Miles. ... I think this is supposed to be a hen party.”

Miles said with dignity, “I actually have played Bunco several times. Which sounds as if it’s several more times than you have, Myrtle.”

Myrtle diligently measured out the dry ingredients. “I suppose that desperate times call for desperate measures. Puddin, you may sub tonight as long as you come back tomorrow to help me clean up the mess from the party.”

Myrtle carefully made the cookies, despite numerous distractions. She put them in the oven. “I need to go get ready. Puddin, can you keep an eye on these and pull them out when the timer goes off?”

Puddin shot her an exasperated look. “How am I supposed to cook and clean at the same time?”

“I don’t know, but I guess you’ll figure it out if you’re interested in playing tonight.”

“Do I look all right?” asked Miles, now looking rather self-consciously down at his khaki pants and button down shirt.”

Puddin gave Miles a sideways, appraising look. “Maybe take them ink pens out of yer pocket,” directed Puddin. “Kinda nerdy looking.”

“Well, he
was
an accountant. That’s a fairly nerdy profession,” said Myrtle.

Puddin nodded in agreement.

“An engineer,” corrected Miles coldly.

“Same thing. The point is that you look fine for tonight. You look fine for really any occasion that might arise, actually. You could even speak to the rotary club in that outfit. But I need to change.” Myrtle quickly moved to the back of the house.

Chapter Three

Unfortunately, she also apparently needed to do laundry. In her mind she’d pictured herself pulling out a long, yellow and white shirt dress with a belted waist. It didn’t seem to be hanging in her closet, though. Nor did the navy funeral dress, which was her go-to sometimes as a fallback. Racking her brain, she remembered that there had been an unprecedented two days in a row last week when she’d had to wear a dress for longer than the four hour limit when she considered a dress to be clean enough to go right back on the hanger.

Myrtle groaned and opened up the hamper. Maybe she could throw one of the dresses into the dryer real quick with a dryer sheet and it would be fresh again. She discovered that the yellow and white shirt dress appeared to have a large coffee stain on it. The navy one had a hem torn out. Was there some diabolical gremlin determined to sabotage the Bonkers game tonight?

She finally settled on a pair of black slacks and a red, long-sleeved top made out of some sort of blousy material.

“Myrtle?” Miles called from the front of the house.

“Yes? What is it?” It better not be another catastrophe.

“You don’t seem to have enough wineglasses for Bunco,” observed Miles politely.

“What? I have eight glasses,” said Myrtle. She looked at her rumpled appearance in her bedroom mirror and made a face at herself.

“Bunco requires twelve players.”

“
What
? Twelve people over here?” This was a vital piece of information that Elaine had apparently forgotten to transmit.

Miles’s voice continued from the front. “If you don’t have twelve wineglasses, I can bring some from home.”

“Of
course
I don’t have twelve wineglasses. Who has twelve wineglasses? We’ll be stuffed in here like sardines.”

“Okay, I’m off to get my crystal then,” said Miles.

Myrtle gave herself a final once-over in the mirror, found she wasn’t improved, and decided she was out of time to beautify herself or to bake any more refreshments. There wouldn’t be enough cookies to go around, but at least she’d made a stab at it. No wonder there was so much alcohol. Although, under the circumstances, Myrtle might end up making a dent in it herself.

There was a light tap at the door and Elaine came in. She was about as rumpled looking as Myrtle was. “Hope things are going better over here than they are at home. Thanks for this again, Myrtle.”

“Oh, it’s no problem,” said Myrtle automatically. Although, of course, it was. “By the way, who is coming over tonight? Do I know them all?”

“Well, between you and me and Puddin and Miles we make up one of the three tables. I’ve got Georgia Simpson coming in, you know her from book club,” said Elaine.

Myrtle winced. “Glad you told me. Hopefully I can stay far away from Georgia. She wears me out. Big voice, big hair, tattoos.”

“That’s right. She’s a regular. I
thought
that Tippy Chambers was going to have to cancel at the last minute and I’d have to grab Erma from next door to sub. But luckily, Tippy finished whatever it was that was keeping her,” said Elaine. She took a large, furry die out of a plastic grocery bag and placed it as a centerpiece on one of the game tables.

“Luckily,” said Myrtle darkly. She’d have found a way to cancel Bonkers if her despised next door neighbor was on the invite list.

“So that leaves the others. There’s Mimsy, Poppy, Estelle, Florence, and Alma,” ticked off Elaine on her fingers. “I think you might know some of these ladies, although I’m not sure if you know Estelle. She lives in that house with the really modern architecture.”

“I know who those women are, but I don’t really
know
them. And you’ve left someone out,” said Myrtle. “That’s only eleven players.”

Elaine knit her brows. “Who am I forgetting? I hope I haven’t forgotten that someone wasn’t coming or else I really
will
have to grab Erma from next door. We hate playing with ghosts.” She frowned. “Oh, I know. Luella. Luella White is the last one.”

Myrtle brightened. “Luella White? Wonderful.”

“You know her?” asked Elaine.

“I’m supposed to
get
to know her. Sloan Jones at the paper thinks she knows all sorts of juicy gossip that might help get us more readership. I wasn’t sure how on earth I was going to spend time with her…until now.”

There was another tap on the door and Myrtle grouched, “Grand Central station.” It was Miles, carrying a tray with four very prissy-looking crystal wineglasses.

“I ran out of glasses. I didn’t realize that I needed twelve,” said Myrtle in a meaningful voice to Elaine.

Elaine seemed to miss the subtext. That could, however, be considered understandable under the circumstances and the plumbing nightmare she was experiencing. “Those are lovely glasses, Miles,” she said.

He smiled at her. “They don’t get a lot of use at my house so it’s good to let them actually serve a purpose. They’re sort of family heirlooms.”

Myrtle eyed the wineglasses warily. They seemed very delicate indeed. “Hope they won’t break on my watch. I don’t need anything on my conscience. Were they your mother’s?”

Miles’s dearly departed mother had passed away too young and seemed rather idolized by her son.

“No, I think they belonged to my mother’s sister. Or my mother’s mother’s sister…a maiden aunt who ended up buying her own crystal when she’d given up on getting married. At any rate—they’re pretty old,” said Miles. He started arranging them on the table with the other glasses and wine bottles.

Myrtle rushed back to the kitchen, pulled out a platter for the cookies and checked on Puddin’s progress. Puddin was looking even more disheveled than usual with sprigs of brown hair hanging limply around her face. The red sauce was cleared up (for the most part, although Myrtle still saw a spatter here and there on the counters) but the floor felt a bit oily still. Puddin had indeed pulled the cookies out, although they looked rather crunchy.

There was a knock at the door. Myrtle grumbled, “Why don’t they just walk in? It’s a party. They were invited. No one’s going to shoot them for trespassing.”

The knocking continued. “Puddin, can you get that?”

Puddin jumped up quickly. Quickly enough for Myrtle to wonder if she’d really just been lounging around in the kitchen until she heard Myrtle come in. “Okay, Miz Myrtle.” She flounced off to get the door. Myrtle could hear her saying, “Playin’ the game? Come on in…I’ll get her.” Then she hollered, “Miz Myrtle, the people are here.”

“Puddin is always so wonderfully direct, isn’t she?” murmured Miles to Myrtle.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to put ‘wonderful’ and ‘Puddin’ in the same sentence,” said Myrtle.

As everyone entered, Puddin’s gaze drifted once more toward the drinks table. “Guess I’d better get myself a wine glass so’s I fit in with everybody,” she told Myrtle.

Myrtle was too busy trying to herd the cookies onto a platter with her plastic spatula to really listen. Elaine followed her into the kitchen and murmured, “We probably should keep everyone out of the kitchen or else you’ll have olive oil tracked all through your house. Here, I’ll carry in the cookies for you. Maybe we should put them on a few different plates and scatter them around the room for the guests.”

Myrtle knew some of the women who were coming into her house. Actually, since Bradley, North Carolina, was so small, she knew who
all
of them
were
. But she wasn’t friends, personally, with most of them. She did recognize Luella White—a small, stern woman with tightly pressed lips, brightly colored clothes, rather too much perfume, and a somewhat disapproving expression on her face. Luella didn’t look like the type of woman who was going to gossip easily and freely, despite what Sloan said. Myrtle could only hope she’d join Puddin at the wine table and loosen up a bit.

Miles walked over to join her. Myrtle said, “It looks like the game night starts out as a social hour.”

Miles smiled. “The entire night is a social hour, Myrtle. The game is really just an excuse to socialize. The whole point of each round is to roll three dice to get the number of that round. First round, you roll for threes. Second round for twos. If all three dice are the number you’re supposed to be rolling for, that’s a Bunco.”

Myrtle stared at him. “There’s got to be more to it than
that
, Miles. Surely, you’re missing something. Like the whole point.”

“The point is the
socializing
. As I was saying.”

Myrtle sighed. “Well, in my head I’m going to be trying to make it harder than it is. I’ll be looking for a full house or two of a kind or something. And I guess I need to figure out how to sit near Luella White, if the whole evening is supposed to be about visiting.”

Miles raised an inquiring eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you and Luella were such good friends.”

“I don’t even know the woman. But Sloan wants me to extract information from her so that the paper can have a scoop. Or, actually, lots of scoops.”

Myrtle turned and startled at the sight of a rather sweaty Dusty very close to her. “Ah! Dusty, you scared me!” she scolded.

“Wasn’t trying to. Just telling you I’m done.” His gaze was expectant and Myrtle couldn’t figure out why.

“Done? With what? Surely not the gnomes—that was ages ago. I thought you’d left for home.”

“It took a while. And you have lots of the little guys,” said Dusty.

Miles moved away. He must have anticipated a reaction.

“Oh no. Did you put
all
of them out? I’m sure I didn’t ask you to put
all
of them out. Just a representative delegation. I never put them all out unless Red’s infraction was really unpardonable.” Now that she was hosting a party, she found it hard to believe that she’d potentially asked Dusty to put all the gnomes in her yard. It could mean it was rather crowded in both yards and now she had a house full of guests.

Dusty squinted at her, working through the vocabulary. “I was tole to put ‘em out. And I did. Feeling I should get a tip for it, too. Lotsa work you know.” His narrowed gaze landed on his wife who was gleefully guzzling a large glass of wine out of Miles’s prissy crystal and chatting as easily with Bradley socialite Tippy Chalmers as if Puddin were president of the Junior League.

Myrtle said hastily, “We’re going to borrow Puddin for a little while to round out a game we’re playing. Puddin mentioned she’d subbed for Bunkers before.”

Dusty’s expression was stony. “So I been slaving out there and she’s been partyin’?”

“No, she’s been sopping up a catastrophic spill she created. Look, let me just grab my pocketbook and I’ll give you a little something extra. I swear, I don’t even know how you got all those gnomes to even fit in my yard,” she muttered.

“Weren’t easy,” said Dusty nobly.

“We’ll have someone drive Puddin back home,” said Myrtle absently as she pawed through her purse looking for cash.

Dusty noted gruffly, “Looks like Mr. Miles is sick.”

“What?” Myrtle jerked her head up in time to see Mils carefully spitting into a large paper towel.

“Excuse me,” said Miles, grimacing. “Myrtle, these are your cookies?”

“Is there a problem with them?” Myrtle folded her arms in front of her.

“What, exactly, did you put in the batter?” asked Miles delicately.

At that moment there were other coughing sounds and exclamations emanating from the living room.

Myrtle’s mind whirled. “Nothing! Nothing special. Just the usual—baking powder, sugar.”

Miles closed his eyes. “And apparently other things. It’s a shame I couldn’t have helped you out. The wine glass crisis distracted me.”

His last words were punctuated by a tremendous crash.

A guest named Poppy came in with the remains of one of Miles’s heirloom crystal wineglasses. “So sorry,” she said solemnly. “It leaped right out of my hand. Someone squealed after they ate something and it scared me.”

Miles spotted the ingredients on the counter and said, “Myrtle, this is baking soda, not baking powder.” He opened up the white canister next to the baking soda box and said, “And this appears to be salt, not sugar.”

Myrtle said darkly, “That Puddin passed them to me. I swear she’s trying to sabotage the whole evening. Both she
and
Dusty.”

“I’ll toss the cookies out,” said Miles.

Myrtle said, “And
don’t
tell anyone who made them!”

Miles gave her a look that told her that people already had their suspicions.

Myrtle was surprised when everyone rather quickly put their pocketbooks down at various spots at various tables. Elaine said, “The hostess gets to start out at the head, or winning, table and everyone else draws a score sheet out of a pile. If they don’t have a star on their sheet they have to sit at the middle table or the losing table.”