Silenced by the Yams

CHAPTER Three

Frankie being arrested for murder was even worse than Mama Marr performing a detailed latrine inspection or Colt accidentally-on-purpose forgetting my precious pet name. I was frantic. “Frankie didn’t kill anyone!”

Howard looked doubtful. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do. Even you know that Frankie was never a killer. You have to tell them they’re wrong!”

My day wasn’t going well and Howard knew it. He did his best to calm me down. Logically, I understood that Howard couldn’t sway the decision of the DC police to arrest or not arrest Frankie Romano for the murder of Kurt Baugh. It wasn’t his jurisdiction. At the very least I needed more information. Poison? What kind? How? Where? Howard shrugged at my questions. What good is having a husband in the FBI if he can’t give you the answers to why your friend is in jail?

I stewed over the problem and another cup of coffee while Howard disappeared to God-knows-where. Eventually, I decided to put the issue temporarily to rest. I needed to disinfect my house in the three hours I had left before the invasion of the seventy-nine year old Polish gendarme of guck and grime. I’d figure the Frankie thing out later. Right now I needed to round up the troops and devise a battle plan for cleanliness.

At eleven o’clock on a Monday morning in the lazy summer month of July, not one Marr daughter was downstairs even pretending to be awake or alert. I hollered up the stairs. “Girls! Downstairs now! We’ve got work to do!”

Once the words were out of my mouth, I cringed, knowing they would never elicit an immediate and active response. I listened. Crickets were likely to chirp before a girl would stir. But they couldn’t fool me. They were awake. What was needed here was some incentive. I thought a moment, then hollered up again, “We’ve got work to do eating these two dozen Danny’s Donuts before your father finds them!”

Danny’s Donuts were the best, biggest, melt-in-your-mouth donuts not only in Rustic Woods, but the entire Washington, DC Metropolitan Area. I cringed a second time when the pounding of six feet scrambling on the floor upstairs actually shook the walls. Because, of course, there were no donuts, Danny’s or otherwise, in my house. The best I could come up with might be a moldy piece of toasted cinnamon bread or three freezer-burned French toast sticks. I was sailing on a sea of guilt by the time the girls had assembled before me in our foyer at the bottom of the stairs. Guilt that I was such a lame mother that I didn’t even have decent breakfast food in the house, guilt that I actually lied to get their attention, and guilt that I would never rise to Mama Marr’s standards of the perfect housefrau for her perfect only son.

“Where are they?” asked Amber, who held a pathetic Puddles in her arms. He looked sadly at me in his blue, lace trimmed baby doll dress and matching bonnet tied neatly under his little gray chin. His despair was in direct contrast to Amber’s magnificent, semi-toothless smile that lit up her freckled face. Poor Puddles. I had to give him credit for putting up with Amber. Maybe he thought they were related since her hair was just as curly as his own.

Everything had happened so fast, I found myself without a reasonable explanation for my lie. “Um . . .” I was vying for time.

Bethany stood with a book in one hand and the other hand on her hip. A you-did-it-to-us-again look crossed her face as she peered through her smart, Tina Fey-style glasses. Bethany was eleven going on thirty-seven. She didn’t say anything, which was worse than her saying anything at all.

I gulped.

Sixteen year-old Callie, the spitting image of her father‘s dark eyes and hair, readjusted her long locks into a half-hearted ponytail and narrowed her eyes at me. “There aren’t any donuts, are there? This was your ploy to rally us for manual labor.”

I shrugged. “You can write your tell-all book later. But just for the record, kids in Africa have to walk miles every day in the hot blistering sun to carry gallons and gallons and gallons of water to their town and all I’m asking you to do is vacuum a few floors and wash some windows.” When in doubt, try the privileged children lesson. All mothers attempt this. Few succeed. Yet, I couldn’t stop. “And you know what they get as a reward for their hard work? Not a Danny’s Donut, I guarantee you. Probably just a few grains of rice, or a half a potato. Raw.”

Bethany slid Callie a look. “At least she’s off her Slumdog Millionaire ‘kids in the slums of Mumbai’ kick.” She turned back to me. “Have you been watching Out of Africa again?”

“I needed a Meryl Streep fix, what can I say? But that does not negate the fact, Miss Smarty, that Mama Marr will be here by two o’clock and we’ve got a house to clean.” I pointed to Amber. “You—you’re on cupboard detail. Get a washcloth and start wiping. Bethany, your mission, which you have no choice but to accept, is to vacuum every floor, upstairs and downstairs. Callie, you’re bathrooms.”

“Of course,” Callie said, rolling her eyes. “The oldest kids always gets the grossest job. Why don’t we have a maid like the Horners?”

“Because your dad is an agent for the FBI, not a CEO for a Fortune 500 Company like Mr. Horner. Nor am I a DDS for a chain of dental offices like Mrs.—I mean Dr.—Horner. Poor people like us have to get our hands dirty.”

“Well frankly,” said Amber, letting Puddles escape from her arms, “I think Dr. Horner is the poor one. I’d rather wipe cupboards than put my hands into people’s icky, slobbery mouths.” She scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue. “She must cry herself to sleep every night.”

I doubted that. Judi Horner was one of the most together women I’d ever met. She was Super Woman and Mrs. America all rolled into one. I’d hate her if she wasn’t so darned nice. And if she wasn’t our family dentist. I have to admit to buttering her up with compliments just to make sure she wouldn’t conveniently find five “cavities” to drill.

Everyone agreed, grudgingly, to work, but only after I located Howard and convinced him to run and get two dozen Danny’s donuts, pronto. I had my sweaty head in the oven, scrubbing furiously with a steel wool pad, when someone tapped my shoulder. I jumped and bumped my head on the top of the oven. I extricated myself and discovered that the tapper was Peggy Rubenstein.

“Ciao, Bella!” she said with a smile. “Didn’t mean to scare you—Amber let me in.”

My fine friend Peggy was a pasty-skinned, red-headed, stout lady of obvious Irish lineage who had converted to Judaism before she married and then to Italian-ism after she married. She and her husband, Simon, spent a month-long honeymoon in Italy. Ever since, she has talked Italian, walked Italian, cooked Italian and often forgotten that her maiden name was O’Malley, not Minnelli.

“It’s okay,” I said, pulling off the long blue rubber gloves. “I needed a bit of a break.”

“Spring cleaning?” she asked.

“It’s July.”

“Summer cleaning?”

“More like panic cleaning.”

She nodded her head slowly and with instant understanding. “That’s right. I forgot Howard’s mother was coming—when does she get here?”

I looked at my clock. “A little over an hour. Howard should be leaving for the airport soon.”

“How long is she staying?”

“A week. I think.” I pulled myself off the floor, every joint in my body screaming as I did so. “Actually, I forgot to ask.”

Peggy shook her head and frowned. “That’s not smart. If I didn’t set a time limit for Mrs. Rubenstein, she’d never leave.”

“You call your mother-in-law Mrs. Rubenstein?”

“She won’t let me call her Mother. She says she wants to be certain this marriage is going to work out first.”

“How long have you and Simon been married?”

“Nineteen years.”

“What’s she waiting for?”

She shrugged. “My untimely death, I think. Anyway, I just stopped by for a minute. I promised Roz I would help her pack today.”

Roz Walker was our friend and my next door neighbor. She had finally had too much of the “dangerous living” in Rustic Woods and convinced her husband, Peter, to ask for a transfer. His company was more than happy to send him to Oakland, California. When I showed her an internet article that listed Oakland as one of the Top 10 most dangerous cities in the U.S., she didn’t even blink before saying, “Yes, but you won’t be there, so it has to be safer for me.” She tried to back peddle and tell me that I shouldn’t take that statement personally, but truthfully, it was hard not to. And if she learned that not only was I in the same room as a dead man last night, but that my friend, Frankie, had been arrested for the man’s murder . . . well, that’d pretty much nail it for her. The fact of the matter was that I did seem to attract trouble the way the North Pole attracts toymakers with odd wardrobe choices.

“Tell her I’d love to help too,” I said, “if I didn’t have Mama Marr coming.”

“I’m sure she’ll understand. You’re coming to the farewell party, right? You can bring Howard’s mother.”

“Of course we’ll be there. She’s my friend and I love her. I may never forgive her for moving, but I love her.”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything else. An awkward silence set in. Peggy is never at a loss for words, so I jumped on it right away. “Spill the beans,” I said. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“I was afraid of this.” Her expression was sympathetic. “You haven’t seen it. I wasn’t sure.” She took a deep breath and reached into her purse, pulling out a piece of newsprint that looked like it had been clipped from the morning paper. She handed it to me. “I’m sorry,” she winced.

I took the paper with a terrible sense of dread. “So I guess I don’t have to tell you what happened to me last night, huh?” I asked, assuming she’d read the whole story with any half or full untruths included.

When I unfolded the newsprint, I gasped at the headline, which was way worse than I ever could have imagined. Local Movie Reviewer, Barbara Marr, Linked to Mafia-Related Murder of Action Movie Director, Kurt Baugh.

Boy, I thought. When Roz read this, she’d order Peter to seek a transfer to Mars.