Marcia Talley: Occasion of Revenge

She wiped her brow with the sleeve of her sweater. “Phew! I’m a little out of practice.” Still balancing on Virginia’s back, she used the fingers of both hands to tuck long strands of hair into the elaborate French twist at the back of her head. All around us the crowd had grown strangely quiet, and I was aware of Dante standing next to me with Emily and Chloe peeking out from behind his back.

Eyes bright and round as coins, LouElla surveyed the faces surrounding her. “Well? Isn’t anybody going to call the police?”

The security guard employed by Halsey Field House happily took over for the exuberant LouElla, who couldn’t help but preen in the spotlight like the Comeback Kid. For the photographers who materialized out of nowhere she posed prettily, but when the Department of Defense police arrived to make a formal arrest, she positively glowed.

In short order, Virginia would find herself locked in a holding cell on Hospital Point, while DOD and the Navy Criminal Investigative Service sorted out jurisdictional issues. We’d be interviewed by NCIS in the morning, we were told. What a way to spend the first day of a new millennium!

In the meantime, the Wizards had resumed their zany tricks, and Ruth had called my cell phone to report in. We’d given Ruth and Daddy the startling news about Virginia and, although badly shaken, we agreed to stay at Halsey Field House until they appeared.

I settled down on the bleachers sandwiched comfortably between Emily and LouElla. Paul, with Chloe on his lap, sat next to Dante in the row above us and behind. Adrenaline still coursed through my veins; I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble staying awake until midnight.

“Lady?”

I turned and stared into the freckled face of a gap-toothed kid around eight years old. He held a needlepoint purse in both hands, its tortoiseshell handles hanging limply to each side. “Yes?”

“My mom told me to give this to you. That other lady dropped it.” He straightened his elbows and thrust the purse in my direction.

I squinted at the kid in confusion. “What lady?”

“The one the cops took.”

Holy moley! I laced my fingers and squeezed my hands together while staring into his innocent, pale blue eyes. My good angel advised me to pat the kid on the head and tell him to give Virginia’s purse to the security guard, but there was a bad angel whispering in my other ear so I smiled, said, “Thank you,” and relieved him of his burden.

And burden it was. Even without the gun, the bag weighed a ton. I settled it on my knees and stared at it, trying to decide what to do.

Emily elbowed my arm. “I don’t remember that purse.”

I positioned my mouth a few inches from her ear and said, “That’s because it’s not mine.”

“Then who…?” she began. Her jaw dropped in a pantomime of surprise until she snapped it shut with a quick tap on her chin with the back of her hand. “Mother!”

“I probably should look through it,” I said.

“To find out who it belongs to?” Emily grinned.

“Naturally.” I grabbed the handles and pulled until the purse yawned open on my lap. A black wallet lay on top. I plucked it out and handed it to Emily.

Emily unfolded the wallet, smiled, and turned it in my direction. A younger, darker-haired Virginia Prentice scowled out at me from the corner of her driver’s license. “It’s evidence now, huh?”

Emily returned the wallet and I flipped through its plastic sleeves checking the names embossed on each credit card before I remembered that Darryl would have to account to the police for that particular crime. I reached the last sleeve and flipped it over, not to a credit card, but to a picture of a young bride. My stomach clenched. Julia. Her dark brown hair swirled high on her head in an elegant crown interwoven with seed pearls and orange blossoms. Soft spit curls nestled against each cheek. She was smiling. “Oh…”

Emily leaned close. “That’s Virginia’s daughter, isn’t it?”

“Must be.”

“So sad.” I tucked the wallet into the purse and leaned back against Paul’s knees. “We’ll take it to the police in the morning.”

I was able to keep my hands off the purse for the space of two free throws before being compelled to peer into the bag again-a lipstick, hairbrush, ballpoint pens, some loose coins. I thought I knew why the damn thing weighed so much. I felt along the dark silk lining and discovered a zipper compartment large enough to accommodate several paperback books. I drew the zipper across and pulled out what I knew had to be there, LouElla’s log book, plus a DayTimer, a packet of business cards, and a flat paper bag. I handed the miscellaneous items to Emily and turned to LouElla with the log book.

“Look what I found, LouElla.” I handed the log back to its owner.

“Oh, thank you!” LouElla clasped the log to her chest for one joyful moment, then lowered it and addressed her remarks to its black and red covers. “ You are going right home with me, you little rascal.”

I laid a gentle hand on her arm. “I think you’ll need to give it to Captain Younger, LouElla. It may help prove that Virginia poisoned Darlene.”

“It will?” LouElla’s eyes widened in genuine surprise. “How?”

I retrieved the log, opened it at random, checked the date heading, then leafed forward several months to early December. “Look.” I tipped the log toward her. “This is the day you first saw Virginia fooling around with Marty O’Malley’s mailbox. Darlene died of an overdose of clonidine. The police will check with the AARP Pharmacy Service to see when they sent out Mr. O’Malley’s Compres pills. If that date corresponds with the shipment that disappeared, it may help to convict her.”

LouElla nodded her head. “Good. Shouldn’t be tolerated. Tampering with the mail is a federal crime, you know.” She stabbed the air with an index finger. “Not a good idea to mess with the feds,” she continued knowledgeably. “Because they mean business.”

While I still had the log in my hands, I thumbed back to early summer, remembering the curious notations I had seen there previously. I pointed at one now: jb23 .

“LouElla? What does jb23 mean?”

LouElla’s eyes remained glued to the court where a red-white-and-blue basketball whizzed from one Wizard to another, over heads and under legs, upside down and backward, at a feverish pace. “June bugs,” she explained. “Pulled twenty-three of ’em off the roses that day.”

Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? “Silly me,” I said.

“Mom?” Emily was elbowing me frantically. “Look at this!” She passed me a newspaper article about a fatal plane crash. Stuck to it was a lime-green Post-it note: Too bad you weren’t aboard . “It was in the bag. There’s a card in there, too,” she said. She handed the card to me. “It looks like it came off a computer.” Written across the face of a bucolic landscape were the words You can make the world a better place . I opened the card. Leave it!

Emily stared at me with troubled eyes. “I guess Virginia got tired of waiting for Darlene to go voluntarily.”

As much as I wanted to hear the bagpipers, we were too exhausted and drained to make it back downtown for the annual Parade to Midnight, or to the laser light show in the tent at City Dock. As the magic hour approached, we wandered from Halsey Field House to the terrace outside the Naval Academy Visitors’ Center which overlooks Annapolis Harbor and Spa Creek. Across the harbor, a large neon crab pot steamed on the roof of the parking garage of the Marriott Hotel. As midnight approached, the countdown began and the blue crab began its inexorable descent.