Amanda Flower: Maid of Murder

“Please, India? I haven’t seen you in forever, and I want you to meet Kirk. You can bring a date if you want.”

I snorted, but after ten more minutes of listening to Olivia’s pleas, I finally agreed. As bridesmaid-in-waiting, I had an obligation.

After she hung up, I pulled the sheet over my head with a moan and asked Templeton to put me out of my misery. I peeked out from the sheet when he didn’t respond. He looked like an overbroiled chicken splayed on the hardwood floor. “If you are not going to help me out, I’ll just have to call Bobby, won’t I?”

Templeton blinked at me. I picked up the phone and hit speed dial. When Bobby McNally answered, I said, “I need a favor.”

“It’ll cost you,” a churlish and groggy Bobby answered.

“How much?”

“How do you like children?”

I groaned.

Bobby opened his front door with a flourish. “So, I won’t have to answer even one question for the horrid Library Quest?”

Bobby and I were the two full-time reference librarians at the Ryan Memorial Library at Martin College. Every year, the admissions office planned Martin’s Campers Week in late July, a week where Martin alumni can send their precious darlings, known to Martin as future tuition-payers, to terrorize college employees. Library Quest was the bane of our existence because the admissions staff, usually recent Martin grads who had majored in recreation, released about fifty kids into the library at a time for a game of Fun Facts. One of the asinine rules of the quest forbade kids from using the Internet to find the answers to the list of questions they clutch in their hot little hands. Let’s just say that the up-and-coming generation doesn’t know how to use a print index. Shoot, I could barely use one.

“Not a one,” I said.

I stepped into his Spanish-style bungalow, a half block from campus. The homes circling the perimeter of Martin were an eclectic bunch, constructed by turn-of-the-century Martin faculty. Bobby told everyone his home had been designed by a Spanish professor in 1910. He had yet to produce the documentation required to support his claim. He bought the house last year and coddled it like an infant.

Bobby perched on the sofa to tie his shoes. Tall, well built with black Irish coloring, he was a handsome lad of the Emerald Isle with a colorless Midwestern accent. He was also annoyingly persistent when he was scheming his way out of work. “Not even a science one? You always give me the science ones. If I knew anything about science, I wouldn’t be working at that miserable excuse for academia.”

“Wow,” I commented. “You should work for the admissions office.” I headed for a chair, caught my flip-flop under a sixty-four by forty-eight, stunningly beautiful, and perpetually wrinkled Navajo rug Bobby had found at a Columbus bazaar, and my knees hit the floor. Fickle inertia. “Ow.”

“Pick up your feet when you walk,” Bobby advised.

I rolled to my seat on the offensive rug and examined the strawberry on my knee. The lute-playing characters on the rug mocked me. “This is a hazard.”

Bobby picked up the black-and-white photograph of his father in his police sergeant dress uniform that I had knocked off an end table and shook his head. “Not if you know how to walk. If I got a dime every time you hit the skids, I’d be a rich man living in the Virgin Islands with a model on one side and a waitress on the other.”

“Bobby.” I growled.

He gave me a hand up. “Hey sweetheart, I’m doing you a favor. Let’s go.”

We climbed into my ancient made-in-America sedan. The car was a hodge-podge of parts of several automobile manufacturers. The late great-uncle who’d willed it to me had loved to tinker. Unfortunately, his favorite tinker toy was his car. Most of the car’s body is powder blue, but a smattering of rust red and olive green decorated the front and rear fenders.

“You really need to get a new car,” Bobby said. “This thing’s an embarrassment.”

“If you hate it so much, you could’ve driven.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know where these people live.” Before I could tell him offering up the address wouldn’t have pressed me much, he said, “Okay, tell me again why I am being subjected to this barbeque.”

“I doubt the Blockens will have barbeque. Too messy.”

Bobby shot me a look.

“I told you about the wedding.”

“Oh please, I know how many weddings you’ve been in, and this is the first time I’ve had to babysit you.”

“This one’s different.”

“Why?”

I ground my teeth. “Because of Mark.”

“Really?” Bobby said, sounding intrigued. “How’s that?”

Uh-oh, I thought, I know where this is going. “Mark had a thing for the bride, but it was a long time ago. And I haven’t seen any of the bride’s family since then, so it may be awkward. You’re the distraction.”

“Tell me about this thing your brother had for the bride.”

I thought about my telephone conversations I’d had with Mark earlier that morning with a wince. Had may be the wrong tense when describing how Mark felt about Olivia.

I eyed him. “You really want to know?”

“Of course I do. I should know what I’m getting myself into. I left my body armor at home, so no cat fights, please.”

“Olivia lived on the same street two doors down from us. Her parents still live there. Mine moved after Dad’s accident.”

I thought back to the day Olivia and her parents arrived with that huge moving truck. It was amazing how well I remembered even though I was barely four at the time. It’s funny the memories that the mind retains with crystal clarity.

I was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt that my mother had made. It was too big for me, but she had said there was no point making it smaller because I was growing like a weed on steroids. I was already the tallest girl in my preschool class.

From my yard, I watched the couple and their daughter with glossy brown hair, cut to the shoulder, go in and out of the house. The girl skipped around the yard, twirling. Her mother yelled at her several times about grass stains. The girl waited until her mother’s back was turned and twirled again.

The moving van had been in front of the house for two hours before I worked up the courage to walk over. I inched up the street; stopping every few feet to inspect the ground as if the cracks in the sidewalk were oh-so-interesting. Eventually, I found myself in front of the house. It was a huge Victorian at least a hundred years old that sat on two lots. The rest of the houses in the neighborhood, including mine, were made from the same faux colonial cookie cutter used in the 1950s to satisfy the baby boom generation and sat on postage stamp–sized properties.

The mom and daughter looked at me. The girl smiled, but her mother pursed her lips. “What is she wearing? It looks like a neon pillowcase.”

I looked down at my shirt, which I had been so proud of up until that moment, and felt ashamed. The pair in front of me wore clothes bought at the mall. I knew because it was the kind of clothes my older sister, Carmen, complained we never bought because Mom and Dad said shopping at the mall fed consumerism. I started to back away. I desperately wanted to go home and change my shirt.

The girl looked at her mother with her chin jutting out. “I like her shirt, and she’s going to be my friend.” She walked to my side and took hold of my hand. Together we sat on the grass cross-legged and watched the big men unload the truck.

Bobby’s voice shook me out of the memory. “I’d appreciate it if you not daydream while driving. I do have a will to live.”

I shot him a look. “Do you want to hear this, or not?”