The Red Hat Society's Queens of Woodlawn Avenue (15 page)

They were fragments of bone.

Great. I had dug up old Flossie’s dog or cat, the remnants of that first Queen of Hearts’ beloved family pet.

At least, I thought it was a family pet. Until I scraped away more dirt and saw the very distinct shape of a human tibia,
along with a metatarsal or two. A little more scraping revealed some vertebrae. Connected to a human skull.

Grace said later that my scream took ten years off her life. She called 911, thinking I’d been attacked by one of the transients
who sometimes roamed the neighborhood looking for odd jobs. The next thing I knew, two armed Metro patrol officers appeared
around the corner of the house, Grace hard on their heels and brandishing a baseball bat.

“Ma’am? You okay?” the first officer asked. He was young, not much older than my son Connor, and he had the freshly scrubbed
look of someone who hadn’t been beaten down by life—at least, not yet. The second officer, older, harder, and more cynical-looking,
ducked into the garage in pursuit of my phantom attacker.

“No. In there,” I said, pointing with a trembling finger toward the hole. The young officer stepped into the flower bed and
looked down.

“Holy crap.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

“What is it?” Grace asked, coming to peer over my shoulder. “Are you okay, Ellie?” And then she gasped when she, too, saw
what was in the hole.

Officer McFarland, according to the name on his badge, reached for the radio at his belt. “I’d better get crime scene over
here.” His dark eyes bore into mine. “Ma’am, do you have any idea who this is?”

I shook my head, throat too dry to speak.

Grace peered into the hole again. “What’s that in there with him?”

“Where?” I asked.

Officer McFarland stepped up beside me and looked down. “It looks like hair.” He pulled out his billy club, stuck it into
the hole, and fished out the object. A matted clump of brown emerged, and when he flipped it over onto the ground, you could
see some sort of material or netting underneath.

“It’s a toupee,” he said.

“Marvin Etherington,” Grace said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’d recognize that bad toupee anywhere.”

“Who?” the officer and I asked simultaneously.

“Flossie’s husband. Marvin Etherington. He ran off in 1947. At least, that’s what Flossie always said. She had him declared
legally dead and collected the insurance money. And he wore the world’s worst toupee.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“How many other missing men with bad toupees would be buried in your flower bed?” Grace’s papery cheek had gone pink beneath
its veneer of pancake makeup and face powder. She meant to appear calm, but her high color revealed her distress. I guessed
it would have been rather disconcerting to come face-to-face with the bones—and toupee—of a deceased former neighbor.

Officer McFarland pulled out a small spiral notebook and began jotting things down. “He disappeared in ’47, you say?”

Grace nodded. “It took a while, but Flossie had him declared dead. Legally dead. She collected enough life insurance money
to put the girls through college without having to go back to work.”

The officer scowled. “Where can I find this Flossie?”

Grace snorted, some of the tension in her face receding. “Mount Olivet Cemetery. In the family plot.” She winked at me. “If
you want to interview her, I’d be happy to go along for the ride.”

Officer McFarland didn’t appreciate Grace’s flippant reply as much as I did. I also suspected it was her way of dealing with
the shock. “That won’t be necessary, ma’am,” he scowled. “If you ladies would just wait in the house, I’ll do my job.”

“Yes, officer,” I said in my most placating tone, the
one I’d cultivated for the days when Jim came home from a fifteen-hour day in surgery. If there was one thing I knew how
to handle, it was a fussy man.

Grace balked at being ordered around by someone fifty years her junior, but before Officer McFarland could take exception
to a senior citizen with no respect for his authority, I hustled her away. I wanted to know a lot more about the late Marvin
Etherington and how in the world he wound up in my flower bed.

W
ithin a short time, the crime scene unit rolled up in front of my house. Young Officer McFarland called me outside again to
ask me more questions, so it was some time before I could corner Grace and find out more about the first Queen of Hearts.
The crime scene people dug a pit the size of Cleveland in my backyard, but eventually they recovered all of Marvin Etherington’s
various bits. I know that because I’d done my time in dissection lab while in nursing school at Vanderbilt. On more than one
occasion, I’d carried a bunch of bones in an unassuming paisley print bag from the lab to my dorm room for further study.
So as I watched the forensic pathologist lay out Marvin’s remains on a tarp, I could tell he was all there. And it didn’t
take a trained eye to see the hole in the back of his skull. Whoever had done him in must have hit him so hard that, ironically,
he’d probably never felt it.

When I returned to the house, Grace was running the dust mop around the scarred hardwood floor of my dining room. The Queens
of Woodlawn Avenue certainly
weren’t hesitant to make themselves at home in one another’s houses.

“Did they find all of him?” Grace asked as she swept the lint and dirt into the dustbin.

“Everything except the missing part from the back of his head.” I slumped into one of the dining room chairs. “Not much doubt
about how he died.”

Grace pulled out the chair next to me and sat down. “Don’t judge Flossie too harshly. Marvin was a trial to her. Always staying
out late, carrying on with other women.”

“Oh, I’m not judging her,’ I assured Grace, thinking of Jim’s last phone call. I knew too well how Flossie must have felt.
“But wouldn’t divorce have been less risky?”

Grace frowned. “Not back then. Women didn’t have as many rights, or any assurance they’d get custody of the children. Not
like you young things today.”

“Well, I can sympathize with her murderous intent.”

Grace patted my hand. “You’re lucky. You have choices.”

I tried to return her smile, but the truth was, I didn’t feel lucky. I felt screwed over. And none of this had been my choice.
My husband, my house, my seat in the dining room at the country club now belonged to another woman whose only claim to fame
was that her breasts had yet to sag.

“When the police are done, we’ll have our bridge night,” Grace said.

“Bridge night? Grace, how on earth am I supposed to play bridge? They’ve just found a murdered man in my back flower bed.”

She looked genuinely puzzled. “Marvin Etherington’s
been dead a long time. And you didn’t kill him. Why should that keep you from going on with your life?”

I looked at her, mouth agape.

About that time, Officer McFarland knocked on the front door yet again, and when I answered he politely thanked me for putting
up with all the hoopla. “We’ll send someone back to fill up the hole.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I assured him. “I can take care of it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” And I was.

Because it had occurred to me during my conversation with Grace that if my life was going to move forward, it might be a good
idea to bury some dead bodies of my own in that big hole in the backyard.

Okay, I wasn’t literally going to bury a body, although the thought of Jim laid out in that hole had a certain appeal. No,
I wasn’t going to give Officer McFarland a reason to come back. What I was going to lay to rest were more like symbols. Tokens.
Mementos. Things I was done with. Not things my kids would want some day, like our wedding photos or the picture of the whole
family made on the cruise ship on our twentieth anniversary a few years ago. I wanted Connor and Courtney to have some happy
memories of their parents’ marriage.

“Why don’t you take a shower and get ready for the bridge game?” Grace said when I’d closed the door on Officer McFarland.

“I’ll change in a minute. First, I’ve got to do something.”

I went to my bedroom and took the memory box off
my nightstand. I wanted to do this before I lost my nerve. When I came back through the living room, Grace got up from the
couch and followed me into the backyard.

“Ellie? What are you doing?”

“Burying my husband,” I said. “Just like Flossie did.”

The shovel was still lying next to the hole, and when I saw the size of the yawning cavern along my back fence, I almost regretted
not taking the officer up on his offer of help.

“Ellie, you can’t fill that whole thing in by yourself.”

“Yes, I can.” I had no idea if I really could. Ironically, I could have really used Jim’s Bowflexed-honed biceps at a time
like this. Without further ado, I dropped the box into the hole. It landed with a satisfying thud.

“Are you sure about this?” Grace’s words were cautious, but she had a smile on her face. A smile that said she understood
the symbolism perfectly.

“Remind me to thank Flossie in my prayers for the inspiration.”

We both laughed, and I picked up my shovel and began to scoop dirt into the hole. The thick clods that fell on the box echoed
like the ones I’d heard at funerals when the gravediggers started to cover the coffins.

By the time I had the whole half-filled, I was sweating and blisters had formed on both hands. By the time the hole was completely
full, my hair was plastered to my head with sweat and I was starting to smell about as rank as the compost heap at the other
end of the flower bed. Grace had left long before since she was hosting the Queens that night and needed to attend to her
hostess duties. The only sounds in the backyard were my own
labored breathing and the slice and whoosh of the shovel as it conveyed the dirt.

Finally, I threw down the shovel and sank into a heap on top of the mound of dirt, exhausted. My earlier elation had slipped
away under the physical strain of filling the hole, and I just felt spent. But I had done it. I had taken my life with Jim
and given it the funeral it deserved.

Now I just had to conquer the urge to pick up the shovel in my blistered and bloody hands and start digging it back up.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I
f someone had told me a month ago that by the end of April I’d have launched my own business, taken a lover, joined the Red
Hat Society, been named the chair of a nearly non-existent committee for the Cannon Ball
and
found a dead body in my backyard, I would have laughed.

I wasn’t laughing now, though.

I dragged my aching body to Jane’s house that night with little enthusiasm for red hats or bridge lessons or even for Linda’s
delectable lemon tarts. Per usual, though, the Queens of Woodlawn Avenue refused to let me wallow—or even take a breather
for that matter.

Tonight, they intended to teach me how to keep score. I had watched the rest of them scribble down numbers in the “we” and
“they” columns, above and below seemingly arbitrary lines, and it was all Greek to me. And I wouldn’t have minded it staying
that way.

The other Queens, though, were determined.

“To make game, you have to score a hundred points. The first team to win two games takes the rubber.”

Okay, I could wrap my brain around that much, but things became much foggier when they started talking about bonus points,
partscores, and the difference between the numbers above and below the line.

“Let’s say you make game,” Linda said, writing down
100
below the line. “Then you’re vulnerable.”

“Vulnerable? What does that mean?”

“It means you’re halfway there,” Grace said. “But you’re also in more danger.”

“Why would it be more dangerous to be ahead?”

“Because the penalties for not making your contract are doubled.”

“That hardly seems fair. If you’re ahead, you shouldn’t be penalized twice as much for getting set.”

Jane laughed. “Whoever said bridge was fair? It’s a lot like life. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

“It’s like raising the stakes in poker,” Grace said. “The more you wager, the more you win.”

“It still doesn’t seem right.” After all I’d been through in the last month, I was in a frame of mind to be rewarded for the
risks I’d taken, not penalized.

“Look on the bright side.” Linda smiled encouragingly. “If you’re vulnerable and you win the next contract, then you win the
rubber.”

“Just remember not to overbid when you’re vulnerable,” Jane advised. “By the same token, you can be a little more aggressive
when you’re not.”

It was the weirdest definition of vulnerable that I’d
ever heard, but it also made a strange sort of sense. At least it did to me. I’d thought I was ahead in my life until Jim
had dropped the Tiffany bomb, and I’d suddenly discovered just how very vulnerable I was.

Keeping score, I learned that evening, wasn’t any more straightforward in bridge than it was in real life.

H
enri turned out to be as demanding a client as he was a lover, which was saying something on both counts. I spent the next
week running back and forth between his office, his apartment, and my house. I was faxing him invoices at a furious pace as
my billable hours piled up, but to my consternation, none of them seemed to be getting paid.