Sure enough, Birdie belly laughs and says, “S’awright, Tessie!”—thank God.
To get us where we need to be as soon as possible, I, the president of The Mutual Admiration Society, decide that it’d be a smart idea to take a shortcut to Mr. Gilgood’s mausoleum, but I don’t want to take a completely different route than the one I watched the murderer take last night. I don’t want to screw up and miss any important clues along the way like broken branches or a torn piece of clothing, which are the first things Indians, the best trackers that ever lived, check for in the Saturday shoot-’em-ups when they’re hunting down people with forked tongues.
I hold my hand up and tell Birdie, “Wagons, whoa,” and spin back toward the house to look up at our bedroom window so I can get my bearings, and when I do, my Wigwam socks get almost clean knocked off!
I can perfectly see above the white towel Birdie hung out our window to let Charlie know the location of today’s meeting and straight into our bedroom! Clear enough to count the daisies on our wallpaper and admire the paint-by-number picture I did of the sad hobo clown in honor of Daddy that’s hanging above the Finley sisters’ bed. What an eye-opener! I never thought for a second that when I watch what’s going on in the cemetery, that someone could be doing the same thing to me.
“Look! The mausoleum!” my sister shouts. “Go, Bird, go!”
“Nooo,” I yell when she whips her hand out of mine and rabbits off. “Come back here! I . . . I gotta tell you something really, really, really, really important!”
I just got a very bad thought.
Now that I know that looking out of my bedroom room is a two-way street, that means the villain I saw last night could have seen me seeing him wading through the very gravestones that I’m up to my waist in before he disappeared behind the Gilgood mausoleum with the limp body.
If I’d been staring out of any other upstairs window of the house, that dastard wouldn’t have noticed me in the shadows, but dang that powerful nightmare-repelling night-light I stole for Birdie from the five and dime! It lights up our bedroom like it’s the Miss America stage, and that murderer had a front-row seat!
Could I now be #1 on the perpetrator’s hit list?
With a bullet?
Of course, the bad guy would have no way of knowing for sure that I saw his face, and I have no way of knowing for sure that he saw mine, but I got to BE PREPARED for the worst.
Too crafty to come out in the open to knock at our back door so he could kill the kid who saw him out of her bedroom window last night, if I was him, I would bide my time and hide behind Mr. Gilgood’s final resting place and wait for me to show up to satisfy my curiosity so he could end my life before I could turn him in to the cops who would end his and . . . and my poor little sister is running straight into his murderous arms!
9
NO GUTS, NO GORY (NO JOKE)
I’m screaming, “Birdie! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!” but she keeps ripping toward the mausoleum that the kidnapping murderer could be hiding behind. I’m close enough to tackle her, but just like when I shove her through our milk chute to open our squeaky back door when Louise locks us out because she wants to have “a few minutes of peace,” this is one of the times in life when my sister’s featherweight tininess really pays off. The kid’s got fancier footwork than Daddy’s favorite boxer, Rocky Marciano. She’s bobbing and weaving so fast through the gravestones that erupt out of the grass that I can’t catch up to her until after she smacks the front of Mr. Gilgood’s final resting place with both of her hands and yells, “I win!”
I do not tell her, “Congratulations,” and dig a Hershey’s kiss out of my pocket.
I slam the Red Owl bag down at her feet, stomp on it, grab her T-shirt in my fist, and quietly hiss out, “Goddamnit all, Bird,” because the murderer could be right around the corner waiting to silence me for good. And then, of course, he wouldn’t stop there, would he? He’d need to murder my sister next, because she eyewitnessed him offing me. Daddy would roll over in his grave, if he could, if I let anybody harm one blah-brown hair on the head of his precious tweetheart. “I’m warnin’ you, ya run off like that on me again, cross my heart and hope to die, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“You’ll what, Tessie?” Birdie smarts back.
“I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” I’d die for her—might even be about to—but the only thing I want to do right this second is slap the smirk she’s got smeared across her face all the way to 84th St.!