Death of a Domestic Diva

Why on Earth would someone like Tyra Grimes want to come here?

I'd gotten Paradise the attention it supposedly wanted. But now that it had it, the town didn't really like the price of fame.

So I slunk on back to my laundromat, kept on cleaning and washing, even cleaning up the stockroom.

Truth be told, I was waiting.

Tyra's announcement felt like a big, fat, dark storm about to break wide open and suck up all of us—my customers, me, and everyone else in town—spinning us around until we were dizzy and confused before spitting us out back to Earth.

I was waiting for the storm to hit. But there were no provisions to take in, no way to protect people I knew and loved. So I just waited, hoping I was wrong, hoping the storm wouldn't come at all.

But of course it would. It had to.

Dedication

To Gwenie, who likes to say,
“you gotta laugh sometimes, ma
.”

Contents

Why on Earth would someone like Tyra Grimes want to come here?

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Paradise Advertiser-Gazette

Want to be in the next Josie Toadfern Mystery Novel?

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Acknowledgments

No book is ever created without the support of others, and I am particularly indebted to the following people. Any errors are mine alone.

      
•
   
Judy DaPolito—friend and writer, who read nearly every draft, provided great feedback, and kept telling me: “you can do this.”

      
•
   
Joe Niehaus—writer and Kettering Police Department Sergeant, who provided guidance on the nuts and bolts of police procedure.

      
•
   
Bittersweet Farms and its Executive Director, Charles R. Flowers, who so graciously hosted me on a visit to its residential program in northwest Ohio for persons with autism.

      
•
   
William M. Klykylo, M.D., Wright State University School of Medicine, Professor, Department of Psychiatry.

      
•
   
Authors and experts in stain removal whose web sites and books provided a wonderful education: Linda Cobb, Jean Cooper, Don Aslett, Heloise, and the Iowa State University Extension.

      
•
   
David, Katherine and Gwendolyn—the family team of my dreams—and of my daily life. Thank you.

1

Time moves differently in a laundromat.

How differently depends on the person.

For Becky Gettlehorn, who stood in the corner folding clothes for a family of seven, I suspected it moved slower. Sure, she had two of her little ones with her, but the older three were in school on this glorious April day in Paradise, Ohio. Four-year-old Haley was busily coloring under the folding table, while three-year-old Tommy was at the front of my laundromat getting his hair trimmed by my cousin Billy. Becky had a peaceful, almost dreamy look on her face, as if the rhythm of folding countless tiny T-shirts and towels and jeans and her husband's Masonville State Prison guard uniforms and just the occasional blouse was somehow soothing—a welcome change from, say, fixing macaroni and cheese for seven in the tiny kitchen of the Gettlehorn bungalow on Elm Street.

For my other Monday morning regular—the widow Beavy—time seemed to move frantically. Once upon a time, Mrs. Eugene Beavy had as many children as Becky, plus one, and I reckon that back then—when my laundromat was still owned by my aunt and uncle—she was a lot more like Becky. But time, besides moving differently in a laundromat, also has a way of taking its toll. Now, Mrs. Beavy had one load, maybe two, every week, but she always seemed overwhelmed by them, even though she did only her outer clothes, as she called them, at my laundromat. Once she confided to me that she did her undies at home in her kitchen sink, because, as she said, she didn't want the whole damned town of Paradise gawking at her panties and bras and extra-support stockings. I've long ago given up on pointing out to her that the whole damned town of Paradise, even with its tiny population of 2,617, could not fit in my laundromat, and even if it could, its citizens would hardly be interested in observing Mrs. Beavy launder her undies.

For me, laundromat time moves as normal time. I'm Josie Toadfern, owner of Toadfern's Laundromat, the only laundromat in Paradise, Ohio. I'm a stain expert—self-taught and proud of it. Best stain expert in all of Mason County. Maybe in all of Ohio. Maybe even in all of the United States.

And on that fine spring day about four weeks ago—before trouble came to Paradise—I was using that expertise to finish up the last of Lewis Rothchild's white dress shirts. By the clock that hangs on the wall behind my front counter, it was 1:45. Hazel Rothchild would be in at precisely 2:10
P.M.
to pick up her husband's shirts. She was always on time and always fussy about the shirts. Lewis was the third-generation owner of Rothchild's Funeral Parlor. He was also heavy and sweated a lot, and I did what I could about his shirts (pretreating with a mix of equal parts water, cheap dishwashing soap, and ammonia usually worked). Still, Hazel always found something to complain about, saying that he had to look his best for his clients. And I always resisted pointing out that actually, he had to look his best for his clients'
families
, his clients being, after all, dead. (A good businesswoman must know when to bite her tongue.)

Hazel would command all my time once she arrived, so I decided to check on my other customers now. I trotted over to Mrs. Beavy, who was fiddling with the cap on her bottle of detergent.

I peered at her clothes whirring around in the washer. “You're on the spin cycle,” I said, gently taking the bottle of detergent from her. I put the detergent on the folding table and picked up the bottle of softener.

“Oh. That means it's time for the cream rinse, right?”

“Fabric softener,” I corrected kindly, although I could understand her confusion, given that my ever-down-on-his-luck cousin Billy was demonstrating his Cut-N-Suck haircutting vacuum attachment by the big window that fronts my laundromat. His hope was that Paradisites would come in for his free demos, and then buy their very own six-payments-of-$5.95-per-month Cut-N-Suck hair-clipping vacuum attachment, which was supposed to allow the user to clip hair while the trimmings got sucked into the vacuum.

“I'm not going to get hair in my blouses, am I?” Mrs. Beavy asked nervously, pointing toward Billy.

“No, no, not at all,” I said, measuring fabric softener into the dispenser on top of the washer.

“Because Cherry warned me I would, and I don't want hairy blouses.” She added in a whisper, “Makes me glad I do my undies at home. Because I surely don't want hairy panties.”

I thumped the bottle of softener back down on the folding table. Mrs. Beavy jumped, and I immediately felt sorry. I smiled at her, glancing over at the TV, mounted on a rack just to the right of the entry door, positioned so that anyone in the laundromat could see it. “It's about time for your favorite show. You want me to turn it on for you?”

She smiled back at me, instantly soothed. Her favorite show was, of course, the Tyra Grimes Home Show. Everyone in America loved, or at least knew about, Tyra Grimes—a home decorating and lifestyle expert with a cable TV show filmed right in New York. She had books and videos, plus a company that made dishtowels and bath towels and sheets and other stuff for the home—all very stylish, of course.

On the way to the TV, I took a detour by Becky, chatted for a few seconds about how fast her kids were growing, and suggested she help herself to my supply shelf for a dab of plain glycerin to treat the mustard spot on Haley's new sun dress. Then I went on over to my cousin Billy.

“Mrs. Beavy is concerned about hairy panties,” I said, loudly, over the whir of his canister vacuum.

Billy frowned at me as he shut off his vacuum. “Shush, Josie,” he said in a hush-hush voice. Then he patted little Tommy Gettlehorn on the head.

“You look great, son!” he pronounced, switching to the booming voice he'd once used in the pulpit at the Second Reformed Church of the Holy Reformation—before he'd taken to drinking from depression over his wife running off with a quieter parishioner. Billy had lost his job after having been found one too many times with a bottle of wine in his desk in the office of a church that used sanctified grape juice at communion.

“Doesn't he look great, Josie?” Billy boomed.

I resisted a knee-jerk “Amen!” (I am a demure Methodist) and said instead, “Yes. You look great, Tommy.” And in truth, his burr hair cut was nicer than I would have expected the Cut-N-Suck—or Billy—to be able to produce.

Tommy looked up at us and smiled the best he could, given that he was frantically rubbing little hair bits away from his nose. He sneezed, wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve—another laundry item for his poor mama—then ran off, zipping around washers and dryers and folding tables, hollering, “Mama, mama, look at me! Josie says I look great!”

Billy gave a little-boy grin, an expression at odds with his beefy, square-jawed face, his short, stocky build, and his new haircut—a black burr as thick as a bush, on account of his first Cut-N-Suck demo having been on himself. The style made him look like an escapee of some kind.

Billy leaned toward me and whispered, “I think Becky Gettlehorn is really interested in buying a Cut-N-Suck.”

I frowned at Billy and whispered back, “Even at $5.95 a month, she can't afford it.”

“But it comes with free electric tweezers—and a rotary-action nose-hair trimmer!”

I folded my arms. “Billy.”

He sighed. “Demos and sales have really fallen off ever since last week when you-know-who started her little protest. She's at it again.” He jerked a thumb at my front window.

I have, for advertising purposes, painted on my front windowpane a much-larger-than-life toad atop a lily pad with a cartoon-like bubble coming out of its mouth with the words, “Toadfern's Laundromat. Always a leap ahead of dirt!” (A good businesswoman must know when to use marketing.)

To see what Billy meant, I had to kneel down and gaze out below the bottom fringe of the lily pad. I then saw short stubby legs in stiletto heels trekking back and forth in front of my window. The legs belonged to Cherry Feinster, owner of Cherry's Chat and Curl, the only hair salon in Paradise, which happens to be next door to my laundromat. I stood up again.

Besides attending to customers, Cherry had been marching with a sign protesting Billy's demos. I'd complained to the chief of the Paradise Police, John Worthy, but he'd said that even though I was correct, ours was a free-market economy; Cherry also had her right to free speech. So long as she didn't physically stop anyone from coming into my laundromat, there wasn't much I could do about her protest—other than threatening to stop doing the towels from her shop . . . but I needed the business.

“Mrs. Beavy says Cherry's telling people they'll get hair in their laundry if they come in here, Billy,” I whispered. “And I think she may be right.” I stared pointedly down at the burst of telltale little black Gettlehorn hair clippings on my floor, a sight that did not please me. I keep my laundromat spotless. People do not like to wash their undies—or other garments—in a grimy laundry.