Hearse of a Different Color (Hitchcock Sewell Mysteries) (7 page)

“Please. Have a seat.”

She did one of those moves, running her palms down over her fanny to flatten her skirt out, then sat down and crossed her legs. I dropped into my chair and balled my fists together, an automatic habit when I’m talking to the bereaved. I’ve been trying for years to break it.

“So how are you doing today, Miss Waggoner?” I pulled my hands apart and picked up a shake-shake paperweight from my desk. It had a little plastic crab in it, wielding a mallet, a vengeful smile and with the words
MY TURN
printed atop its shell. “A little better, I hope?”

Vickie Waggoner seemed to weigh my question before answering. “I’m not exactly sure how I am,” she said. “Confused, I guess. None of this is seeming real. I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for.”

She gave me a blank look. Like an actor who has gone up on their lines. I decided to get the hard part out of the way up front. I set the shake-shake back down on the desk and explained to her the problems we were having trying to get the grave dug for her sister. I rattled off the situation with the backhoe and the rest. I reminded her that it’s rare for Baltimore to get such a series of excruciatingly frozen days. She crossed her legs again as I prattled.

“We might have to put off the burial for a day. I’m very sorry. You’ve been through enough already, I know. It’s our job to make this part as painless as possible for you. I’m afraid it’s not shaking out that way.”

The woman’s gaze traveled around my office. There’s nothing terribly exciting to see. I have a framed print of a Magritte on the wall opposite where she was sitting, but that’s pretty much it. No bangles, no baubles. No coffin catalogs lying around. I was trying not to notice the physical similarity between Vickie Waggoner and her sister, but I was failing in my efforts. I had just worked on Helen, so the dead woman and I had a bit of history now. I had massaged Helen Waggoner’s cheeks with my thumbs. I had spent some time on her lips. I had run a brush through her black hair. This is the part of my job that sends some people screaming out of the room, I know. But that’s what I do.

Vickie Waggoner recrossed her legs and settled her gaze on me. “I want to apologize for yesterday. I sort of unloaded on you. All that stuff about my mother, I mean. I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for. You needed to talk.”

“I’m sure you have better things to do with your time than to hear about some stranger’s mother who was a two-bit stripper.”

I pointed out that she hadn’t precisely branded her mother a stripper. “The word you used was dancer.”

“You know what I meant.”

“They don’t do much ballet down on Baltimore Street.”

“Exactly.”

Our conversation bumped suddenly off the road. We sat there in our chairs looking at each other for about ten seconds. It was Vickie who broke the silence.

“I’m doing it again,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Dragging my mother into the room. I really don’t know why I can’t get her out of my head.”

“Your sister has just been taken away from you. It’s natural that you’d want to turn to your mother.”

“And she’s not there, right?” She gave a mirthless laugh. “Well, that fits.”

A drunk driver must have been at the wheel of our conversation, because it veered across the road and for the second time in less than a minute went straight into another ditch. Vickie Waggoner was tensing up. Her green eyes looked at me pleadingly. My turn.

I asked, “How is the little boy taking all of this?” Not exactly a cheery icebreaker. But something.

“Bo? Oh, he doesn’t get it,” she said. “He’s too young. I tried telling him that his mommy is in heaven, and he asked if we could go there and visit her. Now, every time we leave my house, Bo asks, ‘Are we going to heaven?’ ” She let out a large sigh. “I’m afraid he’s starting to think that your funeral home is heaven.”

“That’ll twist him up.”

“I know. I … to be honest, I don’t know what kind of a stand-in mother I’m going to be for him.”

I considered telling her how I had been raised by my aunt after my parents died. It can be done. Done well. I let it pass.

“I don’t really know him,” Vickie was saying. “Helen and I … We haven’t had much to do with each other for a number of years now.”

“I had kind of gathered that.”

“She and my mother … they were cut from the same cloth. You know what I mean?”

“You don’t have to explain.”

Apparently she did. Her gaze rested on my Magritte as she spoke. Mine settled on her. Simple enough.

“I guess … I don’t know. I guess my mother tried, but she never knew what to do with either of us. She was a very self-absorbed person. She and Helen fought like cats and dogs, but you know what? They understood each other. I mean I’d actually get jealous sometimes when the two of them started in on each other. That’s crazy, isn’t it? But I would. They cared enough to rip each others’ throats out. I think … in a way, I think that was how Helen demanded love. She insisted that our mother pay attention to her, even if it was just to scream at her.”

“And you?”

“Me? I was the one who didn’t cause any trouble. I was the well-behaved one. But I was the freak. In that family, anyway. And meanwhile, Helen was well on her way to being so much like our mother it’s scary. If she … if this hadn’t happened, she would have been the mother of
two
fatherless children. Just like Mama.” She looked at me. “Did you know Helen was pregnant?”

“It was in the coroner’s report.”

Vickie let her hands rise and drop onto her lap. “Oh God. What am I going to do about Bo? I don’t know anything about raising children.”

“You’ve got to give it some time,” said Mr. Platitude. “You shouldn’t expect to be up to speed so soon. What about the father?”

Vickie took a slow take on my question. “The father.”

“The boy’s father.”

“Oh. Him.” Vickie shrugged her shoulders. “Like I said the other day, there’s not much to say. Helen hooked up with a loser. She actually made the mistake of counting on the guy for awhile. I guess you could say she learned that from our mother. Making the mistake of counting on losers, I mean. They were both tough women, but they were soft in the center. This guy Helen got caught up with … all he did was drag her through the sewer. You’ve got to understand. Helen and I grew up around men like that. Losers and letdowns. Men have always been a temporary thing with the Waggoner women.” She floated a weak smile. “It’s our legacy.”

I let that one pass. “You said that Helen never knew who her own father was, right?”

“That’s right. I didn’t know who mine was either.” This time the smile was a little braver. “There was a game we used to play when we were kids, where we’d pretend that different men in the neighborhood were our fathers.
My
father is the man in the grocery store who keeps winking at Mom.
My
father is the man who drives the M-6 bus.
Mine
is the ice cream man. It was a game, but it was also longing. That’s obvious enough. For awhile, Helen was convinced that she had actually figured out who her true father was. It wasn’t a game this time.”

Vickie shifted in her chair so that she was looking out the window. The sunlight split her face in two. She continued, “Our mother was seeing a guy at the time. He bartended at one of the clubs where she worked. He was sort of rugged looking, a pretty good-looking guy. Especially to a twelve-year-old, which is how old Helen was at the time. This one was hanging on longer than most of them and Helen got herself convinced that it was because he was her real daddy and that he wanted to be with his family.” Her gaze followed after something out the window. I couldn’t see what it was. “He came over one night. This guy. When our mother was working. He had the night off I guess. He knew she wouldn’t be there. He tried to force himself on Helen. Who knows, maybe he was picking up on her daddy vibes, and he took it the wrong way.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“No. I’m not excusing him. Anyway, our mother had already given both of us the talk about how to defend ourselves if we ever got into trouble. Especially that kind of trouble. Helen was a tough little scrapper. I happened to come home just a few minutes after she had kicked him and he was still on the floor, doubled over. Helen was fighting mad. She was standing over him screaming at him.
“You’re not my daddy! You’re not my daddy!”
She waited until the guy got himself out of there before she burst into tears. Oh my God, she just turned to water in my arms. I think that’s probably the closest we ever were. In fact, I know it was.”

Vickie stared off at the memory. My phone rang. I immediately hit a button that flipped the call to my answering machine. It was Bonnie. I turned the volume down.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Go on.”

“Well. That was the end of the game, that’s for sure. Helen refused to tell our mother about what had happened, and she made me promise not to tell either. Of course, the guy dumped our mother right after that. She was pretty upset. That’s when she and Helen really started in on their fighting with each other. They were at each other’s throats all the time. It was fire and gasoline, I swear. But like I said, they were basically the same person. Underneath it all, Helen wanted so much for that damn woman to love her. That’s probably why she fought so hard.”

Vickie broke off her story and looked over again at the Magritte.

“What is that?” she asked.

“It’s a Magritte.”

It was Magritte’s
Fiddle
. A woman seated on a verandah by the shore of a lake with a violin bow in her hand and a fish tucked under her chin. It was a gift from Julia. Vickie squinted at it, as if maybe that would make more sense of it. I could have told her. It wouldn’t.

She turned back to me.

“I brought you something.”

She unsnapped her purse and reached in and pulled out a photograph. She leaned forward and slid it onto the desk. I picked it up. The photograph was, of course, of Helen Waggoner. It was of Helen and her son, Bo. It appeared to have been a recent photograph, for the boy looked pretty much as when I met him the previous day. The two had their faces pressed together. Helen was giving her son a big bear hug. This was when I was able to make my assessment. The dead waitress had beautiful eyes. Large, chocolate and lovely.

“It was just taken in October,” Vickie said. “Bo’s third birthday.”

The pair in the photograph looked like the happiest, healthiest, most wholesome pair of people on the planet. The photograph had been taken outside. There was something about it that seemed familiar to me. Then I saw what it was. In the background was a large, slanted pane of glass reflecting the green of trees as well as something that I couldn’t exactly make out, something brown and white.

“Did you take this?”

“Me? No. I found it in Bo’s room when I was packing his things for him to come over to my place.”

“This was taken at the zoo.”

“It was? How do you know that?”

“Here. Look.”

She rose partway out of her chair to lean over the desk for a look. “In the background, see? That’s the new visitors center. I was out there just the other day for its opening. That’s an antelope, I think, in the reflection.”

Vickie dropped back into her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. The sun was angling in through the window behind her, slicing a golden streak diagonally across her lap. A partial corona hovered about her hair.

“It’s a good picture of my sister,” she said simply.

I agreed it was. But what was I supposed to do with it? I suppose this was how Vickie Waggoner wanted to remember her sister, despite everything. Smiling and happy on a beautiful autumn day with her son. What I had down in the basement was a ravaged wreck, halfway gutted and stitched back up with a crude Frankenstein scar. I couldn’t work the magic that would return Helen Waggoner to the pretty, smiling woman in the photograph. I had done what I could. But my best shot could never be good enough.

Vickie Waggoner was crying softly. I hadn’t even heard her start.

“My sister deserves better than this,” she said in a small voice. “This is so unfair. She … to live the kind of life she was living, and then end up like this. My stupid, stupid sister. She deserves to be alive. She …”

The floodgates opened. The woman hunched over in my small armchair and brought her hands to her face and wept with abandon. About time, I’d say. My guess is that she had been holding it all in. Maybe for the sake of the boy. That’s no good. I let her have her cry, sliding a box of Kleenex to the corner of the desk. It would have been rude of me to just sit there and look at her so I picked up the photograph and studied it again. I agreed with Vickie Waggoner. This woman didn’t deserve to die. She was all of twenty-five. She had this little boy and another child on the way. She was carving out her place in the world. Helen Waggoner looked out at me from that photograph with a large, happy, going-to-live-forever smile, a smile she would never smile again. Not in this life anyway. Now she was simply a ruined creature in the dark basement directly below us.

Heavy stomping sounded from overhead, followed by laughter and a high-pitched squeal. I knew what Billie was up to. Her old Bride of Frankenstein routine. She probably had Bo cornered and was tickling him unmercifully. I looked back down at the photograph. Somebody out there was responsible for making an orphan of this little boy. His mother would never again hear her son’s high-pitched squealing or his laughter. She would never again be there when he cried. All that was already over.

It was totally unacceptable.

“I’d like to help you find out who did this.”

I wasn’t even certain that I had spoken out loud until Vickie looked up from her tears and blinked her red-rimmed eyes at me. A mixture of uncertainty and grief. And a bruised look from the running makeup.

“I don’t really know what I can do. But … but I want to help. Is that okay with you?”

That’s when I learned that Vickie Waggoner also had a beautiful smile. Just like her sister’s. It was the first time that she’d shown it to me.