Oh, boy.
That is what my English Gammy would call, if she was a detective, THE CASE OF THE STICKY WICKET. I didn’t want to hurt my friend’s feelings and I can tell that I have by how craggy his salt-map face is looking. “I went to the library a few weeks ago and Miss Peshong dropped this book in my wagon all about detecting and I learned that when it comes to solvin’ crimes that I needed . . .” It’s going to take too long to explain how I step-by-step reached this awful conclusion about him, but I can tell him how Modern Detection expects a gumshoe to have means, motive, and opportunity. “I couldn’t figure out what your motive would be to do something like that, because you are a very nice, religious gentleman, but you are also tall and thin like the guy I thought I saw carrying what I thought was a murdered body last night, which you had the opportunity to do because you live here.” I fan my arm around the shack. “And the means to commit that crime are your very strong grave-digging arms that could easily strangle a gal or stab them with your switchblade knife. And the icing was stuck on top of the cake when Birdie and me came over here this morning to look for evidence behind the Gilgood mausoleum and we found this.”
Uh-oh.
It isn’t in my pocket.
“Actually, I found this in the leaf pile behind Mr. Gilgood’s mausoleum.” Birdie opens up her hand to reveal his beloved medal with a minx of a grin. What a show-off! She must’ve pickpocketed it offa me when we were sitting so close together on our back porch eating the Sealtest ice cream.
Of course, Mr. McGinty says, “Oh! Wonderful!” and looks overjoyed beyond belief to get back his holy lucky medal, but I am about to find out that’s not only because it kept him mostly safe during the war. Before he fastens it back where it belongs, he aims a sweet look across the table and says, “Martha gave it to me the day I shipped out.”
“So that’s why it’s got your initials and hers on the back!” Charlie jumps out of his seat and shouts like he just found gold in them thar hills.
“Not ’cause the two of you are gonna get married and go on a honeymoon in Wisconsin Dells,” I add on.
FACT: Mr. McGinty and Sister Margaret Mary really are twins.
PROOF: Their eyes pop wide and their jaws drop open at exactly the same time.
“Do you want to set the record straight or shall I, Jimmy?” our principal asks.
“Let me,” he answers, which is only right. He is our good and dear friend and this nun is not either one. “Tessie, what you heard last night was me shouting a warning to Martha to watch her step because the lights in that part of the cemetery, as you know, have never worked properly, and she was dangerously close to falling into Mister Peterman’s open grave. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough with my warning, and the screech you heard was the one she made when she lost her footing, tumbled into the hole, and knocked herself out.”
Hmmm . . .
I am very, very good at recognizing people’s voices, especially if I’ve heard them talk hundreds of times and they sound a lot like Mr. Ed “Velveeta” Herlihy, but I guess it is possible that I might not have recognized Mr. McGinty’s voice last night at 12:07 a.m. I was so wrapped up in practicing my Miss America routine, and I have never heard our soft-spoken friend yell, not once, even when I have forgotten to give him my woo . . . woo . . . whoot whistle when I come across him in the cemetery and accidentally scare him half to death. From years of experience, I know that people can sound very different when they raise their voices. Butch Seeback goes from sounding like a sock puppet to a stuck pig, and Birdie can go from sounding like a cooing pigeon to a squawking chicken when she gets all worked up, and Charlie’s father, who barely talks at all? I can hear him bear-growling at his boys all the way to our house when he has had entirely too much joy juice.
“So you pulled your sister out of the grave and then you carried her limp body over to the Gilgood m . . . m . . . mausoleum so you could revive her,” Charlie says, like he is an expert on getting knocked out, which he might be from all the times he watched his father deck his dearly departed mother.
FACT: I am the worst gumshoe on the planet.
PROOF: The facts that Mr. McGinty just laid out at his card table.
In my defense, at least I got the description of the man right, and I was also correct when I thought that the screech I heard sounded familiar, but what about . . .