I don’t care how bad her and our mother want their breakfasts on the table by 7:30 a.m., I cannot let this life-changing, great-good-luck murder slip through my fingers. Birdie is such a spaz, but there’s probably enough time for very coordinated me to do a solo snooping mission over the cemetery fence. If I’m quick about it, I can also make my way over to Mr. Peterman’s final resting place to ask Mr. McGinty, who lives in a nifty shack not far from the Gilgood mausoleum, if he heard or saw anything suspicious last night. He is the caretaker, after all, and one of Birdie’s and my closest friends, so I’m sure he’d cough up any information he might have.
That’s a very solid plan except for the fact that only a complete moron would leave her 98% unpredictable sister on the back porch all by herself to get into God only knows what. So after I tell Birdie, “Get down offa there before you break your neck,” I’m seesawing on whether I should lash her to the railing or the screen door handle with the cat’s cradle string she’s got in her pocket before I run over to Holy Cross, when wouldn’t ya know it, the biggest party pooper on the planet wrecks my investigating plan, the same way she did last night when she got home from her stupid date.
“Theresa Maria,” our mother shouts from inside the house. When I don’t answer, she very foxily moves on to the smallest chick in our henhouse. “Robin Jean? Where are you?”
Uh-oh.
I spin back around and reach to slap my hand over my sister’s mouth, but she ducks and shouts back, “Me and Tessie are on the back porch, Mommy!”
Damnation!
Birdie shouldn’t have told her where we were or called her that, but she can’t help it, poor thing. She cannot resist our mother the way I can. Louise is to my sister what necks are to Count Dracula.
FACT: After the widow Finley quit her job at the hat shop that she got so we could eat after Daddy died, she came up with the idea of finding a new husband to pay the bills.
PROOF: She didn’t think she’d be able to catch a guy if he thought he’d be stuck with two more mouths to feed besides her luscious one. So if she should happen to come across Mr. Tall, Dark, Handsome, and Not Married when we were out doing errands, she wanted him to think she was a kindly relative or a do-gooder taking two little girls who weren’t her daughters for an outing and not who she really was, which was our very foxy mother weaving a wedding web. “Once I get a decent man to fall for me, girls, when the timing is right, I’ll introduce him to you two,” she told Birdie and me with eyes that looked full to the brim with what I’m sure were probably crocodile tears. “After I seal the deal, you two can start calling me Mom again, but until then, you need to call me Louise.”
She must’ve not heard Birdie call her the forbidden “Mommy,” or me, “Tessie,” because she doesn’t say anything when she pokes her red head through the squeaky back screen door other than, “What are you two doing out here?”
Because I’m the Finley sisters’ mouthpiece, I step up and say, “We were just—”
“I didn’t ask you, Theresa,” our mother says when she steps onto the porch with a look on her face that could freeze the cemetery pond in the middle of August. “I asked Robin.”
Of course, I’d be worried as hell if I thought Birdie was going to cough up that information the way she did our whereabouts, but I can tell by the way she’s giving Louise the once-over that my sister’s mind hopped its rickety rails the second she got a load of our mother in the gray pencil skirt, black nylons with seams that run in a perfectly straight line up her bathing-beauty legs, a blouse the color of blooming lilacs, black high heels, and gold earrings.
When Birdie doesn’t answer her quick enough, Louise snaps her fingers and says, “Pay attention, Robin. I want to know what you and you sister—?”
“Holy cow!” her daughter with the half-baked brain shouts at our mother. “You look good enough to eat!”
Now, I’d love to disagree with her, but I can’t. This morning and every morning, noon, and even when she’s sleeping, our mother really is one very scrumptious-looking broad.
Birdie sniffs the air—she’s also got an excellent sense of smell—and adds on to the compliment that she already flung Louise’s way, “And you smell so yummy, too. Like . . . like pears in the night!”
I have to try very hard not to laugh, because I get a big kick out of it when she gets mixed up like that, so did Daddy, but our mother, who must’ve gone to the little girls’ room to stare at herself in the mirror when God was handing out funny bones, does not find Birdie telling her that she smells like pears in the night hilarious. So before Louise can get her pert nose pushed outta joint even further, I jump in and explain, “What Robin meant to say is that you smell very nice, too. Like your Evening in Paris.”
Louise sighs strong enough in my sister’s direction to fluff her too-long bangs, then does a sudden about-face and asks me, “You two weren’t thinking about paying a visit to the cemetery, were you?”
She always had a conniption fit when someone tattled to her after they spotted Birdie and me visiting Holy Cross, but now that she’s running for treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society she almost froths at the mouth when she gets wind of any gossip about the Finley ghouls, which is what some people around here call us instead of the Finley girls, on account of our never-ending love for the dead.