Blessed Is the Busybody (2 page)

“Do I have to put on different clothes?”

I recognized a challenge when I heard one. “Not if you don’t care what people think.”

“Not people. The ladies’ group.”

“Last time I looked
they
were people. And it’s the Women’s Society.”

“Society women. Ladies.” Her shrug said it all. “Is the witch flying here on her broom?”

This particular metaphor was the first of its kind, but no mystery. “Mrs. Falowell. And can the cute stuff, okay?”

“She acts like a witch.” Deena picked at the edge of a counter where the Wedgewood blue laminate was cracking. Children, I discovered long ago, make it their sworn mission to expose and highlight all flaws.

I couldn’t blame my daughter for disliking Gelsey. They’d a had an unfortunate run-in. Last month Lady Falowell had caught my daughter riding her bike across the church lawn in a shortcut to the street. She had lectured Deena at length on the expense of grass seed and fertilizer and respect for church property. Deena, never easily intimidated, had suggested that the Women’s Society buy her a horse to replace the bike. The horse could keep the precious grass mowed and fertilized. What a bargain.

Ed had heard every detail of that conversation from a number of different sources, all of them female and post-sixty. Luckily for us, most had been smiling as they recounted it.

I tried to calm the waters. “Sometimes when people live alone, they get stuck on certain things that seem silly to the rest of us.”

“She doesn’t have anything else going on in her life so she picks on kids.” Deena had been a PK—preacher’s kid—from birth. She knew the score.

Picks on kids. On ministers. On the partners of ministers. “Something like that,” I said.

“How long is she going to be here?”

As long as it took to drop hints that whatever we thought of the Society’s plans for pruning our yard didn’t matter. Because the Reverend Edward Wilcox, his wife Agate Sloan-Wilcox, and their two obnoxiously precocious daughters wouldn’t be living in Emerald Springs long enough to disapprove.

I scoured the counter and wondered why that thought made me sad. Emerald Springs and I are not simpatico. The town doesn’t have a Chinese restaurant, for heaven’s sake, never mind Thai, Salvadoran, Ethiopian. The movies that make their way to the local triplex in our one and only shopping mall routinely rate two thumbs down. Emerald Springs is a one-horse town—or would have been if Gelsey had acted on Deena’s suggestion.

“I don’t know how long she’ll be here,” I told my pouting daughter as I tried not to think what that pout would do to hormonal teenage boys in a year or two. “They’re coming to look at the yard. And you’ll be on your best behavior.”

Any argument was forestalled by Teddy and Ed’s return. Moonpie streaked up the stairs, probably not to be seen or eulogized for the rest of the day.

Teddy joined her sister. They weren’t peas in a pod, my darling daughters, but they clearly had the same father. Ed’s reddish blond hair, Ed’s dark blue eyes. Teddy was thin and athletic, the bane of every little boy on her soccer team, and the lusher Deena was on her way toward being a different sort of bane. But sisters they clearly were.

I, on the other hand, look only like myself. Ed once described me as “not quite.” My eyes aren’t quite brown, not quite hazel. My hair’s not quite black. My body’s not quite fashionably thin—I have boobs that make “dartless” clothing a joke.

I’m not quite pretty, although I suspect this never deterred a man, who only saw the boobs anyway. And in my opinion, this particular “not quite” was a blessing. I gave up trying to compete with other women once I realized I was not quite in the contest.

I developed other parts of myself. Parts that are clearly going to waste in Emerald Springs.

“I think I hear a car,” Ed said.

In a rush I remembered everything I hadn’t done. Taken out glasses and placed them on a tray. Filled them with ice. Opened cans of juice and poured them in a glass pitcher. Discovered the latest hiding place for our paper napkins. The board was early by more than ten minutes, but I should have expected that. Gelsey was the sort of woman who would try to catch Ed off guard.

“You greet, I’ll finish here,” I told my husband. “But change the shirt first.”

He looked down as if trying to imagine what might be wrong. It said Harvard, after all. “Something with a collar,” I prompted. “Something without writing on it.”

He left for the master bedroom. I made my best guess on the napkins and celebrated a minor victory in the third drawer of an old maple cabinet in the corner. Deena grudgingly agreed to change her clothes, too, and left the room, and Teddy agreed to let the board in after they knocked. Even Gelsey would have trouble finding fault with our Teddy in her beribboned pigtails and favorite denim jumper.

Motherhood is the best training for doing everything in double time. I finished piling cookies on the platters, got out the ice trays, and managed to open the juice cans. I was feeling on top of things, minimally in control of my destiny, when a scream from our front yard put an end to that.

“Teddy!” I knew the scream hadn’t come from my daughter since it had clearly come from an older, hoarser throat, but I was determined to make sure the next one didn’t come from Teddy, either.

I sprinted down our center hallway and arrived at the front door before Teddy could open it. Another scream followed the first. Louder and longer, ending on a wail that indicated another would begin as soon as the screamer drew a breath.

“Go upstairs and get your daddy,” I told Teddy, barring the door with my body. I wasn’t sure we needed Ed, but I was sure my daughter shouldn’t be a party to whatever had happened outside.

Curious Teddy was less sure, trying to peer around my body and out the sidelights. Hands firmly on her shoulders, I turned her and sent her off to get her father. Teddy was on the landing and out of sight before I pulled open the heavy front door. A woman lay across our wide front porch, staring glassy-eyed at the sky blue tongue and groove ceiling.

It only took one horrified glance to see she was badly in need of one of Teddy’s funerals. And clothing, for that matter. Except for the tattoo of a cobra with a skeleton’s head curving around one ample breast, the dead woman, a hard-used blonde, was stark naked.

2

Between her third and fourth marriages, my mother the craftswoman took up needlework. Entire months passed unnoticed as she watched HBO and crocheted extravagant afghans for my two sisters and me. We, the Wilcox branch of the family, own three of that treasured collection. Now one of them, a granny square in hand-dyed earth tones, covered a body on my front porch. Another—a more upbeat turquoise basket weave—draped the trembling shoulders of Sally Berrigan.

“I don’t usually scream like that,” Sally said.

I perched beside her on the parsonage sofa, patting her shoulder with a hand that trembled, too. “That’s okay. You don’t usually find bodies.”

Sally, who ran the public radio auction each spring, who ran three miles four times a week, and who’d run—unsuccessfully—for mayor of Emerald Springs during last fall’s election, shuddered and fell silent again.

“We can certainly fall apart, or we can pull ourselves together and do whatever needs to be done,” Gelsey said.

Gelsey’s pronouncement had the ring, if not the humor, of a church signboard. I tried to think of a response that wouldn’t sizzle the parsonage air, but my brain was still caught up in the nightmare of a stranger lying naked on my front porch.

Ed came inside at that moment, as if sensing the need for his pastoral presence. “Jack just arrived. He’ll wait outside for the police.”

This meant Jack’s job was to guard the body and make sure it didn’t surprise anyone else. He was a hunky young man in his midtwenties, the son of Yvonne McAllister, who was perched on the other side of Sally, trying not to fly apart.

Jack was a first-year associate in a local law firm, enticed home with a promise that he could help with the firm’s criminal cases. I suspected this body was as close to a criminal act as Jack had come since his return to Emerald Springs. Ed had called him because Jack and Yvonne lived only one street away.

“Why aren’t the police here?” Gelsey demanded.

I wondered the same thing. Our small police department had a notoriously quick response time. I had expected them to beat Jack by minutes.

Ed’s voice was deceptively calm. “There was a car accident on campus. They’re on their way.”

“We pay enough taxes to expect better service.” Gelsey cracked consonants like whips, but her pallor belied the edge to her voice. Even Lady Falowell can’t dictate to her circulatory system.

“The last tax levy failed,” Sally pointed out. “We
don’t
pay enough taxes. That was one of my platforms.”

“And the reason you lost the election,” Gelsey snapped.

Ed tried to distract them by addressing me. “Where are the girls?”

“Deena has Teddy in her room.” Deena’s room looked out over the backyard and the church next door. Not usually an asset, according to my daughter, but a genuine asset now.

“Did Teddy see anything?”

“No, thank God.” And I had. Profusely.

“What was she doing there?” The question came from Gelsey, and she
wasn’t
asking about our youngest daughter.

“We don’t know,” Ed said. “Hopefully the police will shed some light on it.”

Ed was beginning to sound comatose. Serenity was his response to stress, but sometimes his calm appeared to others as dispassion, or worse, disinterest. In Ed’s family of origin, the only way to be heard was to speak quietly and politely. In my family that was a recipe for exclusion from every conversation.

“This is the parsonage, and
you
are the minister,” Gelsey said.

“For Pete’s sake, that doesn’t mean he’s responsible for everything that happens here,” Yvonne said. She was one of the younger women in the Women’s Society. Midfifties and as thin as a blade of grass, she chain-smoked whenever she was out of Gelsey’s sight. Right now she looked like a woman who badly needed a cigarette.

“I think Reverend Wilcox might well be responsible for whatever happens in this house and on this property.”

Gelsey turned to face my husband. She was dressed as casually as I’d ever seen her, in mulberry linen slacks, a matching knit shirt, and a diamond tennis bracelet heavy enough to affect her backhand. Gelsey owned extraordinary jewelry. Genuine stones and the purest precious metals. Heirlooms, she had told me once, as if that would have been perfectly obvious if I were just from a “certain” class.

“Who is that woman?” She paused. “Who
was
she?”

I fully expected Ed to shake his head. After all, how would he know? The dead woman was certainly not our average middle-class congregant. I had seen every inch of her. She was somewhere close to my age, but from appearances she had lived a harder, faster life. I’d glimpsed piercings to go with the tattoo, scars on one arm, coarse skin and short bleached hair, both of which were poorly cared for.

I also glimpsed surprisingly little blood, although clearly, even to my untutored eye, she had suffered a head injury. The close-cropped platinum hair had not hidden the bruises and one deep gash.

“Her name was Jennifer Marina,” Ed said.

I caught his eye. “Ed, you knew her?”

“She stopped by the church office a couple of times.”

“And why was she stopping by
this
morning?” Gelsey said.

I didn’t like Gelsey’s tone, but how unusual was that? At our first meeting Gelsey had looked me over carefully, and proceeded to interrogate me about my family background. I had failed on all fronts except one. I had not, despite all natural inclination, told Gelsey where she could stuff her evaluation.

Now Ed didn’t tell her, either. He nodded, as if the question were perfectly reasonable. “I doubt she was stopping by today, Gelsey. I can promise each time she came to my office, she was fully clothed.”

If Gelsey heard the vibrations of sarcasm, she didn’t let on. “But you admit you knew her? What did she want?”

Ed didn’t blink, but I could see he was losing his temper. His voice grew even softer. “I’m sorry, but it was private.”

“Private?”

“Not everything that happens in the church is a matter of public record,” I said, defending my husband, although I was curious, too. “I’m sure there’s not a single church member who’d want everything they’ve said or done at Tri-C exposed.”

“All that’s a matter for the police,” Ed said. And as if he whistled them out of thin air, brakes squealed and a police radio squawked from Church Street, just in front of our house.

“I’m sure the police will want statements from the three of you,” Ed said, addressing the Society board as he headed for the front door. “Then I’m sure you’ll be anxious to go home. Aggie will let you out the back way.”

The door closed behind him. For a moment the room was ominously still. Then Gelsey said, “This church was founded in 1866, and in all the years since, we’ve never had a scandal to rival this one.” She addressed the board, but her eyes flicked to me. “Not until Ed Wilcox took over our pulpit.”

People twist facts during moments of crisis. Gelsey had twisted a few. Through the centuries, the Consolidated Community Church of Emerald Springs, Ohio, has suffered a number of scandals juicy enough to linger through generations in the hearts and minds of parishioners and more important, in the poorly kept church archives. I know, because I agreed to serve as historian this year.

Generally I don’t take volunteer positions in the church. Who wants to go head-to-head with the people who sign your spouse’s paycheck? But historian is a job I can do by myself. Just me and those ceased-pledging-and-breathing members whose secrets rest in scrapbooks and file cabinets and 8 mm movies of church picnics and ministerial installations. Call me crazy, but no one in the great unknown wants to fire my husband, paint the parsonage walls Ace Hardware puce, or give me advice on how my children should dress on Christmas Eve. Reindeer antlers, it seems, are not in the best of taste, particularly when teamed with a bulbous, electrified nose.

The archives are a wealth of information, and I’ve shared some teasers with the Women’s Society board, along with my grandiose plans to put Tri-C’s history in apple pie order and present it a la PowerPoint at the September meeting. True, dead blondes on the parsonage steps are a new twist in the life of the church, but we’ve had flaming love affairs, scandalous divorces, and once, during the Civil Rights era, a fiery cross on the front lawn. My presentation could turn out to be a real corker if Deena finishes helping me put all this on computer.

I thought of this as the room fell silent, because I didn’t want to think about what Gelsey was really saying. Here was another excuse to fire Ed. All she needed were a few more facts.

Yvonne and Sally tried to cover Gelsey’s words. They took me up on my offer of fruit juice and cookies and followed me into the kitchen while Gelsey remained in the living room. I suspected she wanted to be first in line when the police began questioning witnesses.

“Of course this isn’t Ed’s fault,” Sally said. “Gelsey’s upset, and that’s how she acts. You always see her at her worst. I’m sorry you don’t see the same woman we do.”

I stayed a mile away from that. “Everybody reacts to stress differently.” By now the ice in the glasses had melted, and I poured the water in the sink and went to the freezer for more.

Sally dished out cookies on individual plates, although none of us were hungry. The batch with nuts had smoldered in the oven while I was busily discovering a body on my porch. The kitchen still smelled of smoke and cremated chocolate.

Sally set the plates on the table. “When I ran for mayor, Gelsey was the one who funded my campaign. She said I’d never win, but the town needed to hear what I had to say.”

I nodded Buddha-like and breathed deeply.

Yvonne took her turn. “When my husband died, Gelsey was the one who took care of all the paperwork. I was in a fog for weeks, and when I came out of it, everything was in perfect order. And she made sure somebody in the church brought Jack and me dinner every single night until I could take care of things on my own.”

At that moment I wanted to believe Gelsey performed these lovely acts simply to create a debt her friends could never repay. But I knew better. Gelsey did not like Ed, and she did not like me or our children. But no one inspired this kind of loyalty solely by manipulation. If emotional blackmail was the case, there would be resentment, too, and I heard none in their voices.

Sally lowered hers. “She’s usually a help to the minister and his family. A support. I don’t understand this. Everybody likes Ed. Everybody likes you.”

“Everybody” was, of course, an exaggeration, but I liked the sound of it. Surely even the lone voice of a powerful woman couldn’t silence the multitudes.

The conversation was cut short when Ed came into the kitchen, followed by Jack. Jack was dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt that advertised Mud Wrestling Mondays at “Don’t Go There,” a particularly notorious bar on the western outskirts of town.

“This is what the enterprising young attorney wears?” I asked, giving him a quick hug. Jack is a love. Cute, sexy, intelligent. Sometimes I wish I had a daughter old enough for him, and sometimes I fantasize I’m ten years younger and minus one husband.

He pulled the shirt away from his chest. “The perfect crime scene wear. I’m a trendsetter.” His smile wasn’t steady.

Ed came over and dropped a comforting hand on my shoulder. “The police are securing the area. They’ve asked us to wait inside.”

Even though I knew it was too early, I had to ask. “Do they know anything?”

“Well, now they know her name.”

“Good thing you knew her. She wasn’t exactly carrying identification.”

I wished I could get Ed off to the side to ask what he knew about Jennifer Marina, what they had discussed, why she was living in Emerald Springs. But even if I’d been able to, there was an excellent chance he wouldn’t tell me. Ed takes his role as a counselor seriously, and confidentiality is a large part of it.

“Would you like to check on the girls?” he asked. “I’ll stay here.”

I shot him a grateful smile. I wanted to tell our daughters what I could, to assuage the worst of their curiosity before it got the better of them.

When I left the kitchen Ed was pouring fruit juice over ice and asking his guests what they were feeling at the moment. Pastor to the core.

Deena’s room is big enough for triplets, but that hasn’t stopped her from filling the space. She has two desks. One for Ed’s old computer, one to spread out books when she does homework. Her canopied double bed with a gingham and calico quilt and dust ruffle takes up one corner, and shelves take up another, filled with the Black Stallion, Harry Potter, and a musty, garage sale set of the Harvard Classics. She has a green striped beanbag chair against one wall, courtesy of my old college dorm room, and that’s where she and Teddy were cuddled right now. Deena was in full big sister mode, but I figured she was only good for another half hour tops.

“You two doing okay?” I stood in the doorway, waiting to be asked into the inner sanctum.

“What’s going on?” Teddy didn’t move. Deena’s attention was so rare and mine so ordinary, she had clearly chosen her position based on relative value.