Silenced by the Yams

CHAPTER Twelve

I threw open the door to see Peggy dancing around and brushing frantically at her legs. “What are you two doing? You scared the devil out of me!”

Roz pounded on Peggy’s shoulder. “I told you we should’ve just knocked!”

“Ow, that’s my bad arm!” Peggy shouted, still dancing and still brushing. “Do you see it? Where did it go?”

I shot Roz a questioning look.

She shrugged. “She claims a spider dropped on her.”

Callie had flown down the stairs in a panic. When she saw it was just her mother’s silly friends, she rolled her eyes and huffed back up.

“Callie,” I whispered, “check on Mama and make sure we didn’t wake her, okay?”

Her only answer was another eye roll.

I turned my attention back to the late night interlopers. Peggy had settled down, but looked around warily. “You should have seen it. He was huge. I think it was a black widow.”

Peggy was famous for her fear of spiders. In her mind they were all the size of small rodents and they were all black widows or brown recluses.

“If it was a black widow,” I said, “it would have been a ‘she’ not a ‘he’. And again, what are you two doing?”

“We were trying to hang this on your doorknob.” Peggy held up a mint green envelope. “It’s an invitation to the farewell party.”

“I didn’t need an invitation.”

Peggy slid a guilty look toward Roz, who shuffled uncomfortably in her tan loafers. Roz had been my best friend since I moved into our house nearly six years earlier. She was small in stature but big in action. She had three kids under the age of seven, was den mother in the local cub scout pack, volunteered in the senior center and had just finished a stint as PTA president at our kids’ elementary school. She stood before me now in her typical attire—a floral print rayon dress and loafers. I was pretty sure she owned at least a dozen loafers in different colors to match the fifty-plus floral print dresses she owned. What was really disgusting was that even at ten thirty at night, every hair in her blond Dorothy Hamil bob lay in perfect formation. A cherry picker could come by, grab her up and shake her around like a martini mixer and when it put her back down, those hairs would all fall back into line like the Rockettes in Radio City Music Hall. My hair, on the other hand, given the same scenario, would freak out and when the dust settled, I’d wind up looking like Edward Scissorhands on a particularly bad hair day.

Despite her perfections, I just couldn’t be jealous of Roz—she was my friend, and I felt another twinge of sadness that she was moving so far away.

But right now, both Roz and Peggy were acting like Laverne and Shirley after a slapstick mishap at the brewery. I suspected that the invitation was just an excuse.

“Why didn’t you knock?” I asked them both.

Roz sighed. “I admit it. I really just wanted to come over and see how you were doing. Then I chickened out and told Peggy just to leave the invitation on the door, but it kept falling off. We were about to make a run for it when you opened the door.”

“Why would you chicken out?”

She shuffled nervously again. “You know.”

“Because bad things happen to you when you’re around me.”

“Bad things happen around you period. You’re a disaster.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

She had a point. I was, after all, waiting for my private detective friend, Colt, to pass me information about an ex-Mafia goon who was in jail for poisoning a famous movie director. I doubted this was a typical occurrence in the Roz Walker household. And she wanted to keep it that way.

So I wouldn’t tell her about that.

“Come in,” I said, stepping aside to make way, “I was just sitting down to some cookies and milk.” The coffee would have to wait for later.

We sat around my kitchen table, dipping Oreos into milk, and chatted like the old days. Peggy rattled off the invitees to the Walker farewell party. The list was extensive—all of the families on our cul-de-sac; our new friend Bunny and her fire-fighter fiance, Russell Crow; most of the members of the Tulip Tree Elementary School PTA, as well as the Principal, Vice Principal, office staff and several teachers; friends from the senior center, and the other den leaders of the Cub Scout Pack.

I was in awe. “How are you going to fit all of those people in your house, Peggy?”

She bit her lip. “It’s going to be tight—most everyone who has RSVP’d is coming. Thank goodness we put the new deck on this Spring. People can mingle outside.”

I offered to bring extra chairs and Roz was pretty sure the PTA would loan her some chairs as well.

Roz discussed the trials of closing on their house sale and coordinating with movers and cleaners. She was busy up to her earlobes and I offered to help in any way I could. She said she’d probably need to ask Callie for a couple more days of babysitting while she tied up the final strings. She was looking forward to getting settled in California. She planned to volunteer for Senator Emilio Juarez’s campaign for presidential nomination if he threw his hat in the ring. She’d always wanted to be involved on the volunteer side of politics.

I raised my cup of coffee to toast. “Here’s to always being good friends, no matter how far apart we live.”

Peggy and Roz raised their mugs and we clinked to seal the pact.

Finally, Roz yawned. “Man, this pumpkin is out way too late,” she said standing to leave. “I’ll stop by or call tomorrow once I know when I’ll need Callie.”

I walked them to the door and suppressed a giggle as Peggy commented that she couldn’t believe how much energy she had so late at night. She thought she might go home and bake some bread.

After I locked the door behind them, I went to my purse to check my cell phone for a text from Colt.

It turned out that I had two texts waiting for me.

The first was from Colt at 12:01: Met with Frankie. Heading to car now.

The second was from Howard at 12:04: Dun 4 the day. B home soon.

I clicked the back button to view the current time, worried I’d have a Colt/Howard collision—it was 12:24. Howard was long over his jealousy of Colt, but he would not be happy that we were collaborating on Frankie’s case. My fretting was cut short by the buzz of another incoming text. This one was from Guy Mertz: We need 2 talk.

Boy, Roz was right. I was a disaster.