Go, Ivy, Go! (4 page)

The two exchanged glances. “Grandma comes and goes,” she said. “She isn’t here right now.”

“Maybe I can meet her sometime?”

“We might be able to arrange that,” Tam/Tasha said.

“I remember some people named Caulkins used to live here. I guess they moved away?”

“We don’t know any Caulkins, do we?” Tam/Tasha asked the Man-of-Muscle.

“We rent through an agency, so we don’t have any contact with the actual owners. We asked if the owners wanted to sell, but apparently it’s some big company that’s buying up everything in the neighborhood. Look, why don’t you sit down for a minute?” The guy motioned me toward
the sofa. “You look a little pale. Finding a dead body in your bathtub must be traumatic.”

”Would you like something to drink?” the woman asked. “Green tea? Coffee?”

A tranquilizer, perhaps? To help rid you of bizarre delusions about bodies in bathtubs?

“Thank you, no. I’ll just go back to the house so I’ll be there when someone comes. The body is in the upstairs bathroom.”

“How about if I come with you?” the guy suggested. “Just in case you need help or something.”

Help? “I wasn’t planning to move her. And it’s a little late for CPR.”

Admittedly, that was a little snarky, because I knew they didn’t believe me, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ll come along anyway,” he said. “Just in case.” This time he left the
in case
open-ended. In case my mind slipped even further, and I forgot where I was going? In case I had some bizarre delusion about outer space aliens hiding in trees?

Eric disappeared down the hallway and came back pulling a t-shirt over his head, flip-flops on his feet. I was fascinated by the size of both the footwear and t-shirt. Was there a place called Muscles-R-Us where guys like him shopped?

“Have you seen anyone at my place in the last few months?” I asked.

“You were living there when we moved here in February,” Tam/Tasha said. “Remember? We met once when you were carrying a grocery sack home. I asked if you needed help, but you said you could manage. Then a funny looking vegetable fell out of the sack and I asked what it was, and you said it was a parsnip. But you usually avoided me.”

“I wasn’t here in February. And I never buy parsnips.” The Lord no doubt created parsnips for a purpose, but I’ve not yet found what it is.

Tam/Tasha peered at me more closely. I wasn’t sure if she thought my memory was fading like some old photograph, or if she was confused because of something I’d encountered before.
You little old ladies all look alike. I can’t tell you apart.
Whoever named these the Golden Years must have mislaid his glasses. How about the Invisible Years? Not that elder- invisibility is all bad. I’ve found that it can come in rather handy at times.

Eric tucked my hand under his arm, and we headed for the door. “You want to come with us?” he called back over his shoulder to Tam/Tasha.

“Sure. I don’t have to leave for work yet.”

So we tromped back down the street to my house, short, dumpy me between these tall, blond specimens of youthful magnificence. At the back door I said, “Thanks for walking me home. I’ll be fine now. I’ll just wait outside for the police to arrive.”

“We can wait with you,” Eric said.

“You really think someone will come?” Tam/Tasha asked Eric over my head.
      

“I think they have to check out everything,” Eric answered, also over my head.

“No matter how implausible it sounds?” I tossed in.

Guilty expressions flooded both their faces, and finally Tam/Tasha said gently, “You have to admit finding a body in your bathtub does sound unlikely. Maybe what you saw was just, oh, you know, rags and stuff someone dumped in there.”

For a moment her comments made me doubt myself.
Had
I made a mistake and seen dead toes that were really only . . . what? What else looks like blackened, shriveled, dead toes? What else smells like
death
?

No, I wasn’t mistaken. Dead toes. Attached to a dead body. But I felt a little defensive. “I’ve found dead bodies before.”

Eric and Tam/Tasha exchanged glances over my head again, and she patted my shoulder. “Don’t you just hate days like that?”

They didn’t believe me, but I resisted an impulse to march them upstairs and prove there really was a dead body in the bathtub. If it was a crime scene, strangers shouldn’t be wandering through.

Hey, not a crime scene just because there was a dead person in the bathtub, I instantly reminded myself. Perfectly normal deaths probably occurred in bathtubs all the time. No doubt there were government statistics on that somewhere.

“Would you like to come out to the motorhome and sit down while we wait for the police?” I suggested politely.

“I’m just going to run upstairs and take a look around, okay?” Eric said. “Maybe we’ll discover this is all a misunderstanding and we can call 911 again and cancel—”

I tried to interrupt with my concerns about contaminating the scene, but before I could finish the sentence, Eric had already disappeared into the house, his flip-flops flapping. Tam/Tasha sat on the back steps..

She patted the worn step beside her. “We can sit here. I’ll stay with you.”

I sat down in the approved spot. “Okay. Thanks.” I decided this would be as good a time as any to nose around for information. “Quite a few houses here on Madison Street appear to be vacant. And a lot more rentals than there were when I was living here.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of going downhill, isn’t it? But we still like it. We’ve saved up some money, and we asked about buying the place we’re renting. But some out-of-state company owns it, and, like I said, they
seem to be buying up everything they can get hold of. We’ll probably have to move again once they get everything bought.”

“What does this company intend to do with the houses?”

“We’ve heard all kinds of rumors. One is they intend to build a new shopping mall. Or maybe a high-end condo complex or retirement home. Or the buyer is a survivalist billionaire who’s going to build a mansion-fortress where he’ll be safe from nuclear or zombie attack, whichever comes first.”

Any of which involved destruction of my old house.
I squirmed around to look back at it. I loved this old place. Even with sagging window screens and a dead body in the bathtub
, I loved it. I changed the subject.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure about your name. Is it Tam or Tasha?”

“Well, uh, both. I mean my real name is Tammy Ockunzzi but my professional name is Tasha Tremaine.”

Before I could speculate about what kind of profession, she added, “I’m an actress. Tammy sounds so, oh, you know, cheerleader-ish, and Ockunzzi
— I
mean, Eric is a sweet and wonderful guy, and I love him very much. But the name Ockunzzi…” She gave me a help-me-out glance.

“Ockunzzi sounds fine to me. Very sturdy.”

“Okay, I know not wanting to use Ockunzzi probably sounds snobbish or pretentious or something, but an agent I talked to a few weeks ago said it didn’t project an attractive image.
It’s really
hard to spell too, and she said it
could really hold me back.” She squinted into space as if trying to picture Ockunzzi on a marquee somewhere. I gave it a squint too. Okay, Ockunzzi wasn’t exactly charismatic, but it was a good, honest name.

“Maybe you need a new agent,” I suggested.

Tam/Tasha ummed.

“Does Eric mind?” I added.

“No, but he keeps forgetting. So I have to remind him. I’m trying to use Tasha all the time now so we’ll both get used to it.”

“Missouri doesn’t exactly seem like a hotbed of opportunity for an acting career.”

“We’ve thought about using the money we’ve saved to move out to California, but I’m taking acting and singing lessons here, and I do get an acting opportunity now and then. If I have to do something else for the money, I just pretend it’s an acting job. Like last week I had a three-day job walking dogs for this dog-walker woman who was sick. So I did it as if I were in a movie, where I was playing the part of a private investigator using the dog-walking as an undercover disguise.”

“An interesting approach.”

“Right now I’m about to start this new acting job. Except it’s very hush-hush and I can’t talk about it.” She touched a finger to her lips. “But it’ll be terrific experience.”

I was mildly intrigued by a hush-hush acting job, but before I could ask anything, a thud from somewhere in the house interrupted. Tasha turned and peered uneasily through the open door behind us. “What was that?”

“There’s nothing up there but the dead body. And Eric looks as if he can take care of himself anyway.”

“Oh, he can! He won the Muscle Man of Missouri title last year.” Tasha paused and gave me a sideways glance. “You really do think there’s a dead body in that bathtub?”

“I’m sure of it. I
saw
it.”

“I’ll just run upstairs and make sure everything’s okay, then. Sometimes Eric—”

She didn’t say what sometimes happened when Eric encountered dead bodies in bathtubs, but she hastily stood up and rushed inside. After a moment’s hesitation, I followed. Hopefully, fingerprints and footprints in the bathroom wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t, after all, a
crime
scene. The woman just happened to die there. I carefully avoided any contradictions to that thought. Like, can a dead woman pull blankets up over her own head?

Tasha was already at the bathroom door when I reached the top of the stairs. She screamed.
Like a psycho sitting on a pin. It didn’t sound like acting.

Chapter Four

I ran down the hallway. Tasha was kneeling beside something on the floor of the bathroom. I looked over her shoulder.

Eric. Crumpled like a dishrag. A muscular dishrag, of course.

“What happened?” I gasped. I don’t believe in zombie uprisings, but something had apparently zapped
Eric .

The blankets that had covered the body in the tub lay in a tangled heap on the floor.
Eric must
have yanked them off. I started to look in the bathtub but instead turned my head away.
I didn’t need to see any more of the body. Tasha peered over the rim of the tub. She turned greenish and made a muffled urpy sound. She hurriedly put one hand over her mouth and the other on Eric’s forehead.

“I think he … lost consciousness,” she said.

I interpreted that. “He
fainted
?”

“Eric has a very sensitive nature.” She sounded defensive. “I guess we didn’t really believe there was a dead body in the tub. But there is. It’s … uh … deteriorated. There’s a
big
hole
in it. And the teeth are all strange.”

A body that had been in a closed-up house in Missouri for – how long?
Deteriorated
was probably a euphemistic way to put it.
Strange
teeth
was a puzzler, and
a big hole
had ominous implications. Making this a picture of an older woman climbing into the tub for a peaceful passing into eternity was getting harder to do.

I didn’t say
I told you so
about the dead body to Tasha, but I was thinking it. Along with,
The next time a little old lady tells you there’s a body in the tub, you’ll believe her, won’t you?
What I said was, “Does he need a doctor?”

“No, it’s happened before. Gruesome things really get to him. Remember that old G
odfather
movie
?
He went out like a light when he saw the dead horse’s head. He’ll be okay in a few minutes. But I think we should get him out of here so he won’t look in the bathtub again when he comes to.”

“Good idea.”

She got one arm and I, carefully avoiding looking in the tub myself, grabbed the other. The arms were limp and floppy, but moving Muscle-Man was one of those easier-said-than-done activities.

“How much does he weigh?” I muttered. Dragging the motorhome might be easier. At least it had wheels.

“Two-forty-five. Only eight percent body fat. But he’s very sensitive,” Tasha repeated.

High
sensitivity and low percentage of body fat didn’t make him any easier to drag out of the bathroom. After considerable grunting and tugging, we finally got most of him out in the hallway. His flip-flops had come off in the process. His toes, though still muscular, looked oddly vulnerable now, and he still hadn’t
regained consciousness.

“I’m sorry we didn’t believe you,” Tasha said.

“It was nice of you both to come help anyway. You might make use of that scream if you ever need one for an acting part. It was a real goose-bumper.”

“Really?” Her blue eyes brightened. “I’ll remember that. Thank you.”

Hopefully she wouldn’t decide to practice it here on Madison Street. There hadn’t been any sirens – or maybe it was just that the scream had numbed my ears to siren sounds - but now I heard a vehicle outside.

“I’d better go down and talk to the police,” I said. “Don’t touch anything.” Rather tardy advice, of course, considering that we’d more or less mopped the floor with Eric.

Going down the stairs, I wished my friend Matt Dixon, who was a detective on the police force the first time I got involved in a murder, was still here. But he was now a Special Agent with the FBI, and he and his wife Haley lived down in Arkansas.

I went out the back door expecting to see a police car and officers, but what I saw was another motorhome in the driveway behind mine. A familiar motorhome. And getting out of it – Mac!

I was so glad to see him. I wanted to run and throw my arms around him. But his stiff shoulders as he strode toward me instead had me saying, “What’re you doing here? I thought you were off to Montana to look for ghost prospectors.”

“I decided to stop in here along the way.”

He spoke as if it were like a pit stop for a burger and fries, but a straight line from central California to western Montana does not run through Missouri. He’d taken something like a fifteen-hundred or more mile detour to get here.