Garden Gazebo Gallivant Page 12

  I looked at my mother. She was the only one I was going to get a straight story from. One not filled with hyperbole. “Ma! Kimmie really did have an artifact from India?”

  “Yeah, she did,” my mother said.

  “Wow,” I said. “I wouldn’t have ever thought that she would have something like that. Was it actually from the Bardaisan period?”

  “It wasn’t real,” my mother said.

  “What?” I said. “A fake relic? Oh my goodness. Really? Why would she do that?” I shook my head. “So, wait. Was someone after her for a fake artifact?”

  “I don’t know,” my mother said.

  “And,” Miss Vivee raised an eyebrow. “It wasn’t there last night.”

  I tilted my head and thought about that. “Well . . .” I started. “We really didn’t get a chance to search much. Maybe we just missed it.”

  “They found it in her duffle bag,” my mother said.

  “The one we looked in?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “At least it looked like the same one in the pictures the Sheriff showed me.”

  “Who put it there?” I asked.

  “Probably the same person that “ransacked” the house,” Miss Vivee said. “So, the real question is why?”

  .

  Chapter Twenty

  It was getting late, dusk was settling in, and the crickets lulled us into an easy kind of mood. We were sitting on the front porch, my mother and Miss Vivee in the flower covered glider, and me in the large white rocker.

  We were sipping iced tea and chatting, taking a rest from all the talk of murder. But that didn’t stop us from talking about the other taxing topic that was looming over us. The wedding.

  The investigation was at a standstill, at least on our end, and I was getting nervous about not being able to have it at the gazebo. Miss Vivee on the other hand, didn’t seem worried at all. She was confident that all would go as planned. The murder wouldn’t postpone the wedding or the venue. She was sure we’d have everything solved before Sunday’s ceremony.

  I just wish I had her confidence.

  “Has Marge even been working on it?” my mother asked. “I would think she’d go with her contingency plan by now. Maybe I could speak with her?”

  “I don’t understand the idea of a wedding planner,” Miss Vivee said. “You put out a couple of flowers, a few chairs for family, if’n they come, and grab a preacher. Wham! Bam! You’re married.”

  “Very romantic,” I said.

  “I’m sure your mother will tell you, there is nothing romantic about being married,” Miss Vivee said.

  “In the beginning, there certainly is,” my mother said and patted my hand. “Let’s not fill Logan with discouragement, Miss Vivee. Not when she’s so looking forward to hers.”

  “How about we go take a looksee at that gazebo,” Miss Vivee said. “That’ll make you feel better?”

  “I’m not feeling bad, just a little anxious. I just want everything to go like we planned it.”

  “So it’s settled,” Miss Vivee said seemingly not understanding me. “We’ll take a little drive. Check on the gazebo.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Get the car,” she said. “Justin and I will wait for you here.”

  “Oh brother,” I said, and drug myself out of the rocker. “I’ll be right back.”

  ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

  “Will it be the wedding day before I meet Mac?” my mother asked. She and I were sitting on the steps of the gazebo. Miss Vivee was poking around in the flowers she’d had planted for the ceremony. She had me shine a light from one of the flashlights I’d bought for our burglary over her while she worked.

  “Oh!” I said remembering. “When we went to see Mac, he had a magazine article about how honeybees kill hornets.”

  “What?” Miss Vivee said. She stopped fiddling with the plants and came over to me.

  “Hornets are natural predators of honeybees,” I said. And as a defense mechanism, they can generate enough heat to kill them.”

  “You saw that at Mac’s house?” Miss Vivee asked.

  “Yeah. When we went over. He had the magazine opened to that page. One of his National Geographic magazines.”

  “There were bees at the crime scene,” Miss Vivee said.

  “I remember,” my mother said. “My big ‘ole son was afraid of them.”

  “Mac must have used the bees to get rid of the evidence,” Miss Vivee said.

  “What?” my mother and I said almost in unison.

  “That’s why they couldn’t find the hornet,” Miss Vivee said.

  “No one said they couldn’t find the hornet,” I said

  “No one said they did find it, either,” Miss Vivee said. “And did you tell me that Mac didn’t have that mangy dog of his with him?”

  “Rover is not mangy.”

  “He’s a coonhound,” Miss Vivee said. “That’s about as mangy as you can get.”

  “Dog breed aside,” I said. “You don’t have anything to pin on Mac for that murder.”

  “Why else would Mac be out that early in the morning? Especially if he didn’t have his dog. He should have known better,” Miss Vivee said. “Rover could have given him an alibi.”

  “Mac didn’t kill that girl,” I said, this time with a little more force. “Hornets, I’ve learned, are not like bees, they don’t die after stinging someone. It could have just flown off. And he was waiting for the florist to open. That’s his alibi, not that he needs one.”

  “Likely story,” Miss Vivee said.

  “Mac couldn’t do that,” I said.

  “If he didn’t kill her then why did he get rid of the evidence?” she asked.

  “Who said he got rid of the evidence?” I said, frustration surely evident in my voice.

  “You did,” she said.

  “Oh. My. Gosh.”

  “I’m moving Mac up on my list,” Miss Vivee said. “He has just become Suspect #1.”

  “You’ve only got three people on your list,” I said.

  “Not true,” Miss Vivee said. “Justin and I added Nick Stavish and Ho Yung to my list. We decided to add them after the Sheriff found that relic.”

  “Fake relic,” my mother added. “Which they probably didn’t know.”

  I turned and looked at my mother. I knew it was hard not to be swept up into Miss Vivee’s antics, but I’d thought my mother would have more restraint. She should have been setting an example for me.

  “Look-a-there. Speak of the devil.” Miss Vivee pointed across the street. “Isn’t that the car that’s been following you around?” Miss Vivee asked me, cutting our current conversation short.

  “It wasn’t following me,” I said and watched it as it turned a corner. “I just saw it a couple of times.”

  “Well it’s the one that your stalker was in.”

  “He wasn’t a stalker-” I started to say, but then I realized I wasn’t so sure that he wasn’t.

  “They’re looking for that artifact,” my mother said.

  “They’ve already killed Kimmie for it,” Miss Vivee said like the pairs’ reason for being in Yasamee had been confirmed.

  I clicked my tongue. “I thought you said September and Keith killed her,” I said to Miss Vivee. “And you don’t know, Ma, if they were looking for it or not.”

  “Maybe what they came looking for is in that car,” Miss Vivee said.

  “Why would they get what they want, put it in the car, and drive around town with it?” I asked.

  “Maybe they were tired,” Miss Vivee offered. “Didn’t feel like driving back to wherever they came from this late.”

  I sucked in a breath and blew it out.

  “Look,” Miss Vivee said and pointed. “Isn’t that them going into Jellybean’s?” She looked at me. “The Green Hornet and Kato.” She used Micah’s analogy. “I wonder what they’re doing.”

  “Probably going to eat,” I said. “Why do you wanna know?”

  “
Just wondering,” Miss Vivee said her voice trailing off.

  “We’re not going in Jellybean’s and question them, Miss Vivee. If that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “They may be dangerous.”

  “Oh hogwash,” she said and dismissed my words with a wave of her hand. “They haven’t done anything to anyone. Maybe riffled through Frankie’s things at Stallings Inn, but heck we did that. It’s like that Nick one said, they’ve just ‘been chillin.’”

  “We’re not going to Jellybean’s,” I said again.

  “Well how about you drive me past it?” she asked. “Just so I can see in the windows.”

  “We can go that way when we go home,” I said. “But that’s it, Miss Vivee.”

  “Whew! You are so bossy,” Miss Vivee said.

  “I am not,” I said and remembered when Micah had said I was to Bay. I didn’t want to be like that. Bay would divorce me the first year we were married.

  “Okay, Miss Vivee,” I said, trying to sound less dictatorial. “I’ll drive you past it.”

  And that was probably the reason I agreed to let her get out of the car and inspect that black car with the tinted windows with one of our flashlights. I didn’t want to seem authoritative.

  “Pull over,” she had told me after we passed Jellybean’s and saw the two of them just being served. I had gone around the same corner they had, my car now idling next to theirs. “I want to take a looksee.”

  “You are not getting out of this car,” I should have said, whether it was domineering or not, but instead I said, “Be careful, Miss Vivee.”

  I’m such a wimp.

  After I parked, she got out and circled the car shining the light on it. It was parked on a tree-lined street, the occupants of the neat row of houses apparently settled in for the night. She stood on the tree lawn in front of it and stared at it. “We need to search that car.” Miss Vivee said and started kicking her toe around in the dirt, apparently looking for something.

  “It’s locked,” I said. I went and stood by it, looking at it, then turned and looked back at her. “And I don’t know how to break into it.”

  Miss Vivee walked up the driveway of the house where the car was parked.

  “What are you doing?” I said in a whisper.

  She let out a grunt, bent over and picked up what she had found.

  “Watch yourself, Missy,” she shouted and hurled an object my way.

  I ducked as something flew by me, just missing my ear. It smashed into the car window, shattering it into pieces.

  “Oh my gaaaawd!” I said in a strained whisper right before I ran to the next yard, did a side roll and landed behind a bush. Even my mother, her jiggling chest nearly smacking her in her face, tried to run and – I’m not sure if she planned it, or if she fell – hit the ground and rolled – well I guess you could call it a roll – under a bush.

  Miss Vivee stood there. Not moving as if she was waiting to see what happened. Then in a split second it seemed, she was at the car shining the flashlight inside of it.

  “There’s nothing there,” she said as if she really had expected to find a two-thousand-year old stolen artifact just laying right there on the car seat.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “I can’t believe you threw a rock at that car window,” I said. We’d made it back to the Maypop without any blazing sirens in pursuit, and were sitting at the kitchen table, except for my mom who’d gone to bed. I guessed she’d had enough for one day. Micah had wandered down when he’d heard us come in. He was eating cake and drinking a glass of milk.

  “I can’t believe that she was able to break the glass,” Micah said. “That takes a little umph.”

  “I used to play baseball, Miss Vivee said.

  “No you didn’t,” I said.

  “I was the star pitcher.”

  I shook my head and looked at Micah. “No she wasn’t.”

  “You remember that movie with that guy in it that coached a group of women baseball players during World War two? ‘There’s no crying in baseball.’”

  “A League of Their Own,” Micah said forking a big chunk of chocolate cake into his mouth.

  “Yep,” she said nodding. “That was about me.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “They had to change the names in the movie, you know, to protect the innocent,” she said.

  “Why would women baseball players from fifty-sixty years ago need protecting?” I asked.

  “You’d be surprised,” Miss Vivee said matter-of-factly.

  “They had the real women at the end of the movie, you know,” Micah said. “They showed their faces.”

  “I know,” she said swinging her arm in abbreviated circles like she was warming up for the pitch. “I sent a stand-in. I can’t afford for just anyone to see my face.”

  “Probably because she has warrants out for things like vandalism,” I said.

  Miss Vivee raised her eyebrows a la Groucho Marx.

  I shook my head. “Don’t believe her, Micah,” I said. “According to her, she’s over a hundred, used to be a stripper, is so adept in yoga that she can stretch her body twice its length, and now she used to play professional baseball.”

  “Know one thing for sure, Missy,” Miss Vivee pointed a boney finger at me. “I do know Voodoo. So if you want to keep your head the size it is, you shouldn’t mess with me.”

  ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

  Miss Vivee had gone to bed in a huff. I did feel bad for outing her, as it were, but I just couldn’t help myself. She was going to land me in jail if she kept up with her antics, or in the morgue.

  I stepped out of my jeans and pulled on my green and brown plaid pajama bottoms. I lifted my shirt over my head and snapped my bra off, throwing them into the hamper.

  I had wanted to tell her that the only places where there were documented shrunken heads were in Ecuador and Peru, done by the Jivaroan tribes. And I knew she hadn’t gone there and learned any Voodoo.

  Jivaroan tribes . . .

  I smiled. I still knew my stuff. I came up with that off the top of my head.

  Buttoning up my pajama top, I thought, maybe I will teach. I’ve got a lot of knowledge stored up. I hopped onto the bed and propped my head on a pillow. I had forgotten that I was smart, too. Hanging around Mac and Miss Vivee with their vast knowledge had made me feel like I did when I was around my mother. Inadequate.

  I turned on my back, lying across the bed, I stared up at the ceiling. There were a lot of colleges in Georgia. Especially up in Atlanta where Bay and I planned to live. Maybe even work in the Georgia Crime Lab as a forensic anthropologist . . .

  Yep, I could do that.

  Maybe that was my destiny in solving crimes. Not the one Miss Vivee wanted to encumber me with – following behind her as she went on her scatterbrained investigations, making up all of her tall tales. But using a scholarly approach to finding out “whodunit” – maybe even working hand in hand with Bay like they do on that TV show Bones.

  I fell asleep with a smile. I dreamt about me emerging from a grayish mist made by a bee smoker, with Bay guiding a handcuffed man into a squad car, and bees carrying the bones of our victim to its heavenly home. Birds were chirping, and the sun was shining . . .

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Saturday, 8:30am

  One day before the wedding . . .

  The next morning, there was a tang coming from the kitchen, but it wasn’t the delightful aroma of anything Renmar would cook.

  Then I found out why.

  Frankie was buzzing around the kitchen, humming a little tune, hand oven mitt covered, she was peeking through the top door of the double oven.

  “What you doing?” I asked and took a seat at the big farm table. I’d brought my laptop down, I wanted to look up Kimmie’s fake artifact.

  “Fixing breakfast for everyone,” she said. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  I wasn’t sure, because it didn’t smell like anything I wanted to eat.

&nbs
p; “Where’s Renmar?” I asked.

  “Last minute wedding details,” she said.

  Miss Vivee and my mother wandered in through the back door.

  “Morning,” my mother said and smiled at me.

  “Did you guys sleep in the greenhouse?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” my mother said. “We were checking on the flowers.” She held up a collection of them. “We picked some for the tables in the dining room.”

  “Good morning,” Micah said. He stood in the archway that led from the front of the house scratching his head. “Where’s Renmar?” he said. “Isn’t she cooking breakfast?”

  “I’m cooking breakfast,” Frankie said. “How do you like your eggs?” She dipped her head into the fridge and came out with a carton of them.

  “Cooked by Renmar,” Micah sat down and whispered in my ear.

  I laughed and Frankie looked over at us. “What’s funny,” she asked and kicked the refrigerator shut.

  “Nothing,” we said together.

  She looked at us out the corner of her eye before reaching up into the cabinet for a mixing bowl.

  “Sit down, Justin,” Miss Vivee said. “I’ll make you some tea.”

  My mother came and sat on the other side of me, laying the flowers on the table. I lifted the lid on my laptop and powered it up.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Researching that fake-o,” I said and looked at her.

  “Ohhh,” she said nodding. “I got you.”

  It wasn’t that I was trying to keep it secret from anyone else in the room. But I’d learned over the past few days that Frankie always got so emotional about things. And if we had discovered that her stepdaughter was killed over a counterfeit relic, I’d hate to have to witness her eruption after learning the truth.

  Micah hopped up and went to the cabinet and grabbed a glass. “Aargghh!” he squawked, out of the blue. “It’s a bee!” He jumped away from it and tucked himself into a corner.

  “How did that get in here?” my mother said, she stood up, apparently readying herself for battle with it.

  “Probably from the garden,” Miss Vivee said. “Maybe even in the flowers we brought in. We get them often. There’s a swatter hanging on the wall by the door.”