I most often make things disappear from Gert Klement’s house because I want her to think that she’s got that old-person sickness of going hard in her arteries, but sometimes I just swipe her stuff because I am a big believer in an eye for an eye. She’s trying to steal so much from my sister and me, so tit for tat, right? And, okay, sometimes my fingers get sticky at Kenfield’s Five and Dime, Dalinsky’s Drugstore, and Melman’s Hardware, too, but only if I run out of important supplies like Tums or Hershey’s kisses or Three Musketeers bars, or if Birdie or Charlie need something important ASAP. Like the night-light I stuck under my T-shirt at the five and dime that’s so powerful it lit up the insides of my sister’s brain and made her nightmares stop and makes me feel like I’m already on the Miss America stage when I’m practicing my routine in the middle of the night. And the Bowie knife I stole from the hardware store? That was for Charlie, because whittling is one of his most important hobbies. And fine, there was this one time that I slipped two pairs of hose out of Janet’s Dress Shop on Lisbon St. and stuck them in the bottom of Louise’s unmentionables drawer when her last pair got a runner in them. (That was kind of a kooky thing for me to do, I know, but what the heck. All the gal’s got going for her is her looks.)
So anyhoo, there Birdie and me were last night over at the Abernathys’. I was about to spy into Skip’s bedroom window, hoping to catch him counting out the money he stole from the pagan babies, when his dad came banging out of the back door of the house to light up. Cigar smoke gives my sister a sneezing attack, which is why we had to hotfoot it out of there before we had the chance to get the goods on our suspect.
“As a matter of fact,” our neighbor who’s got her nose stuck into everybody’s business, but the farthest into the Finley sisters’ business, tells Louise so high and mighty from the other side of the hedge, “a very troubling incident took place in the neighborhood last night that I’m quite certain will turn out to be a matter for the police.”
Uh-oh.
Just like I was afraid of, it looks like the wretched geezer got the better of me. She must’ve watched Birdie and me sneaking toward the Abernathys’ out of her front window after she turned her lights off and she’s about to rat us out again. Not only to our mother, but the men in blue, too.
Louise must also be worried about that, because her good-smelling Jergen’s lotion hands are clamping down around Birdie’s and my necks. She knows the cops showing up at our front door would wreck her chances to be the new treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society. Under no circumstances do those gals want one of their muckety-mucks to have jailbirds for kids, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen if Gert squeals on Birdie and me. Officer Mick Dunn, Davey Dunn’s dad, came by the house to lecture us in the living room the last time we got caught spying into our neighbors’ windows. He made Birdie and me sit on the sofa, but he stood and gave us a good talking-to. “I’ll let you off with another warning,” he threatened, “but if I have to come back one more time . . .” He looked over at our mother fuming in Daddy’s favorite chair, and then he narrowed his already somewhat beady eyes at us and pointed to the handcuffs that were hanging off his creaky black leather belt. “You get my drift, girls?”
Birdie didn’t, of course, because she was smiling her head off when she asked him if she could play with his billy club, but I certainly did. And so did the gal standing next to me who’s turned whiter than my Holy Communion dress. “A troubling incident?” Louise asks as she clamps her fingers tighter around her daughters’ necks. “What kind of troubling incident?”
The #1 person on my SHIT LIST is not looking at our mother anymore, she’s glaring even harder at me with eyes the color of an enemy submarine lying in wait at the bottom of the ocean when she says across the hedge, “Sister . . . Margaret . . . Mary . . . has . . . gone . . . missing!” My mother gasps, so Birdie does, too, but I gotta keep my wits about me. Getting questioned by Gert about any crime committed in the neighborhood from stolen merchandise to fires to broken windows is nothing new. She raked me over the coals about the missing Pagan Baby money, too. That’s how come I’m 100% positive that I know what’s gonna come out of her mouth next. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about Sister’s disappearance, would you, Theresa?”
“Me?” I answer with my second-best most innocent look because I already used my first-best most innocent look up on Louise. “I certainly do not know anything about Sister Margaret Mary going missing, Missus Klement. Goodness gracious, that’s . . . that’s . . .”
The best news ever!
But, obviously, it’d be stupid to give my sworn enemy that kind of ammunition to use against me, so I put on my this-is-the-worst-news-ever look, the kind all the movie gals get—Loretta Young, she does the best horrified looks so beautifully—and say to Gert, “That’s . . . terrible news!” even though it’s anything but. In fact, I’m pretty sure what I might be beholding here is the living, breathing Holy Trinity of famous sayings!:
1. The Lord’s one about giveth-ing and taketh-ing away.
2. Mr. Walt Disney’s one about dreams coming true.
3. Daddy’s one about never, ever throwing in the towel.
Here I was feeling so down in the mouth because I thought Gert was going to tattle on the Finley sisters to Louise and the coppers, and on top of that, it was starting to look like I’d imagined it all and bloody nothing took place in the cemetery last night, but now . . . my cup run-eth over-eth! Birdie and me are not going to get spanked and we’re not going to the hoosegow, and sure, the Mutual Admiration Society might’ve lost the chance to solve a murder, but we just got our first-ever missing person case dropped in our lap instead!
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.