But even though what Charlie said could’ve happened last night, because those greasers do have hot-to-trotting and fighting as their two main hobbies, I’m not even close to being sold on that idea. So when my sister bats her slightly bulging eyes at him and says, like she thinks his idea is the best idea she’s heard of since the invention of peanut butter and marshmallow on Wonder bread, “Charlie, that’s such smart thinking!” I’m starting to feel like the odd man out around here, and like maybe I need to spend some time refreshing my sister’s memory about which of us Charlie is engaged to.
My fiancé stops climbing and says to Birdie, “Thank you for the vote of confidence,” but then he turns and says to me, “I really hate to break it to ya, ’cause I know how m . . . m . . . much you’re counting on this now since she wasn’t m . . . m . . . murdered, but . . .” Whatever he’s about to tell me, isn’t going to be good. “Sister M . . . M . . . Margaret M . . . M . . . Mary getting kidnapped by M . . . M . . . Mister Mc . . . Mc . . . McGinty or anybody else is very far-fetched.”
That’s such an awful thing for him to say that I’m too shocked at first to form words to argue with him, and if Birdie opens her mouth to agree with him one more time, I don’t care if she is a featherweight, I’m going to smack her clean off this step!
FACT: The Finley sisters were in the cemetery all morning, so we’ve been out of touch, or what Modern Detection calls “incommunicado.” You wouldn’t believe what can go on in this neighborhood in a couple of hours. Babies get born every five seconds, Mr. Skank gets a new customer on his table, some kid breaks another kid’s nose and sends him to the hospital, fires get set, windows broken, the gals have gab sessions over their backyard fences and hang out some other poor gal to dry.
PROOF: I’m getting a very bad feeling in my guts that Charlie is getting ready to tell me something he heard about our principal’s disappearance that I don’t want to hear.
Reaching into my pocket, I make a wish on Daddy’s holy lucky Swiss Army Knife before I choke out the question Charlie better say no to, if he knows what’s good for him, “Sister hasn’t turned up, has she?”
“Not that I heard, but . . .”
O, thank you, St. Jude, patron saint of lost objects and persons, for sleeping on the job!
“What I mean is that when I heard Missus Klement tell my dad that Sister M and M had disappeared,” Charlie explains as the three of us go back to hiking up the rest of the church steps, “I got some ideas about what mighta happened to her and kidnapping wasn’t one of them. Statistically speaking, somebody getting snatched for ransom happens about as often as a triple play.”
Charlie is on rock-solid ground now. Just like undertaking Mr. Art Skank, he knows a lot about Braves baseball and who swings and misses and how many bases get stolen and how often the Green Bay Packers win or lose, and it’s not only sports he keeps track of. My fiancé marks down what flowers are the most popular at the cemetery, what people’s favorite colors are, who dies from what disease or accident, which Masses get the biggest crowds, how many and what kinds of birds he sees, and I guess how often nuns get kidnapped. (He’s never said, but I bet he even keeps track of how many mothers do away with themselves and how many times their sweet boys are the ones who find them in their garages.)
This constant recording of things is not one of Charlie’s better qualities. This is one of his wrinkles I will have to iron out after our honeymoon in Wisconsin Dells. He’s too black-and-white, too much like Joe “Just the facts, ma’am” Friday. I’d like him to spend less time noticing how often things do happen and more time thinking about what could’ve happened, because being able to picture a crime in your mind is a very important part of being a gumshoe, according to Modern Detection. “The ability to envision possible scenarios that may have unfolded during the commission of a crime is an essential skill an investigator must endeavor to achieve.”
So with the words of famous Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst nightmare” Bellflower still ringing in my ears, and because the “Secrets of a Happy Marriage” article said that even if a wife completely disagrees with their husband, sometimes it’s better to pretend that you don’t because that can cause fur to fly, I say to Charlie, “If you’re so sure Sister Margaret Mary wasn’t kidnapped, what other possible scenarios do you think unfolded to make her disappear?”
“You coulda unfolded on her, for one thing,” he says adorably. “And accidents are always a major cause of missing persons. Maybe Sister went down to check the hole that Two-Ton Thomkins made in the basement steps and she fell in and nobody found her yet, the same way Timmy Martin is always falling into abandoned wells and doesn’t get rescued until Lassie shows up. Or maybe Sister’s disappearing wasn’t an accident at all. She coulda done something on purpose.”
“Like what, Charlie?” a practically drooling-all-over him Birdie asks.
“Well, she coulda run off to get married like that priest at Mother of Good Hope did, or maybe she quit her job like that gal in The Nun’s Story did.”