Keepsake Crimes (23 page)

Baby, ever the diplomat, gave a gentle laugh. “Isn’t that the cutest,” she said as she continued to thread pink ribbon through the top of a scrapbook page that she’d just punched with little
V
s. “Spoken like a new bride. All sweet and innocent and still agog over the joys of marriage.”

“But so misguided,” added Tandy. This time she leveled a somewhat more accusing gaze at Gabby.

“Sakes, yes,” agreed Baby. She gently took one of Gabby’s hands in her own, focused her baby-blue eyes on the girl. “Honey,” said Baby, with all the sincerity she could muster, “you’re a married woman now. You have to learn how to
handle
your man.”

“But Stuart thinks—” began Gabby again.

“It doesn’t matter what
Stuart
thinks,” snapped Tandy. “What do
you
think?”

Tears were streaming down Gabby’s face now. “Carmela,” she implored, “
help
me! You know I don’t want to quit for good. Just for a while. Until things blow over.”

Carmela leapt from her chair and swept Gabby into her arms. “I know that, dear,” she told her. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

Gabby continued to sniffle. “It’s just that . . . well, somebody broke into our house last night while we were over visiting Stuart’s cousin. And now Stuart is mighty jittery.”

“Oh no!” said Tandy. “Why didn’t you say something sooner? Now
that’s
a different story.”

“Dear lord,” said Baby, clapping a petite hand to her chest. “Did you-all lose your valuables? Your silverware and jewelry and such?”

Gabby continued to sob. “Some jewelry, yes. My ruby ring and the cameo I inherited from my grandmother. But the worst of it is that our house looks like we were positively
invaded!
The robbers emptied out all the drawers and messed things up pretty bad.” Gabby wiped at her streaming eyes. “It looks like a hurricane blew through. I have no idea where to even start.”

 

 

AS IF CARMELA DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH GOING
on in her life, business was positively booming at Memory Mine this morning. A gaggle of tourists had come pouring in, delighted to have found a dedicated scrapbooking store.

“We’re from a little town in Ohio,” said one of the women excitedly, “and we don’t have a real scrapbooking store.”

“Right,” echoed her chubby friend who had just picked out a pair of scallop-edge scissors along with a pair that would create a lacy Victorian edge. “We have to pick stuff up at the mall whenever we can. Or drive up to Dayton when they have their scrapbooking conventions.”

There’s gotta be something strange in the ozone
, Carmela marveled to herself.
My assistant quit, everything’s in turmoil, and suddenly customers are pouring in here like crazy.

“Tandy,” called Carmela, as she tried to ring up three customers at once even as she was trying to explain molding mats to another. “Do you by any chance know how to operate a cash register?”

Tandy’s eyes grew big. “Me? Uh . . . no.” Obviously, it had been more than a few years since Tandy had held down a job.

As the door flew open once again, Carmela’s first thought was,
We stuff one more body in here, and the fire marshal’s gonna shut us down.

But it wasn’t another customer, it was Ava. She took one look around, saw the panic on Carmela’s face, and plunged right in.

“You want to put that on your charge card?” she drawled as she plucked the Visa card from the hand of a woman hovering near the cash register. “No problem, sugar.”

Sure enough, within five minutes, Ava had cashed out half of the customers and was now showing a die cutter and some alphabet templates to two other women.

“You’re a lifesaver!” Carmela whispered to Ava when she had a spare moment.

“Where on earth is Gabby?” asked Ava. “She call in sick today?”

“Not quite,” said Carmela.

Ava rolled her eyes. “Oh, oh,
that
doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not,” Carmela told her.

 

 

BY NOON THINGS HAD SETTLED DOWN, AND
Carmela, buoyed by her windfall of business, had phoned a nearby deli and had salads delivered for everyone. She, Ava, Tandy, and Baby sat munching them now at the back table. They rehashed events at Baby’s party, still awe-struck by the food and giggling over some of the more colorful characters who had been in attendance.

“So tell me about the incredible disappearing Gabby,” Ava finally prompted as she carefully spooned vinaigrette over her spinach and citrus salad.

“She just up and quit,” pronounced Tandy.

“Well, it wasn’t quite
that
abrupt,” said Baby. “Her husband sort of strong-armed her into it.”

“Plus her house was broken into,” said Tandy, gesturing with a forkful of greens.

Ava shook her head. “This crazy city. They feed us all sorts of statistics that are supposed to convince us crime is on the
decrease
, then you hear something like this.” She shook her head again. “Poor Gabby. She’s having a tough time right now, but I think she’ll be back.”

“I
know
she will,” said Carmela confidently. “Gabby loves this store almost as much as I do.”

“We all love it,” declared Baby.

“Ava,” said Tandy, “what about
your
store? I would think you’d be jumping right about now. I mean, tomorrow’s the big one . . . Fat Tuesday!”

“Tyrell’s at the store today. He’s even better at working the crowd than I am.” Tyrell Burton was Ava’s sometime assistant, a twenty-two-year-old African American who was also a grad student in history at Tulane. Tyrell’s great-grandmother was purported to have emigrated from Haiti and been known to dabble in voodoo lore. Needless to say, Tyrell took great delight in his rather strange pedigree and never tired of spinning a few good yarns for the tourists.

“But the
real
reason I stopped by,” said Ava, “was to give you a heads up on something.” She paused, unsure of just how to relate her story. “The thing of it is, Carmela, I just stopped over at Bultman’s Drug Store to pick up some photos I left to be developed.”

Carmela nodded. She’d used Bultman’s many times herself before she’d switched to digital photography a month or so ago. Bultman’s was just down the block from Memory Mine and awfully handy. She still sent a lot of her customers there, since Bultman’s offered photofinishing in both matte and high gloss.

“So I picked up my photos from that fellow Dirk who’s always at the counter,” continued Ava. “You know, the one with the pierced tongue and bowl haircut?”

Carmela nodded. She knew Dirk. Everybody knew Dirk.

“Anyway, he asked about you,” said Ava.

“What about me?” said Carmela, stabbing at an oversized crouton.

“Well,” said Ava, “here’s where the story starts to get a little strange. It seems that someone had just been there ten minutes earlier asking if there were any photos for you.”

Carmela gave Ava a quizzical gaze. “Somebody tried to pick up my photos?”
What is this all about? Jekyl Hardy trying to do a good deed, maybe?

“According to Dirk, this
person
said they were running errands for you and wanted to know if your photos were ready.”

“But I didn’t drop anything off to be developed,” said Carmela. “Now that I’ve gone digital, all I have to do is
print
photos off my computer.” She thought for a minute. “And I
still
haven’t used up all the shots on my Leica.”

The last time I used that camera was the night Jimmy Earl died
, thought Carmela.

“I know that, honey,” said Ava patiently, “but the point is, somebody was trying to pick up your photos.” Ava paused. “You don’t think that’s a trifle strange?”

“I don’t think it’s strange at all,” said Tandy. “I leave my film all over town. I’d be
delighted
if one of my friends volunteered to pick up my finished photos.”

Carmela shrugged. “I don’t know, Ava. In the scheme of things, it doesn’t seem worth worrying about.” She stood up and stretched. And, as if on cue, the front door burst open and four women with delighted grins lighting up their faces poured into her shop.

“Good afternoon,” Carmela called to them. “Welcome to Memory Mine.”

C
ARMELA’S scrapbook for Saint Cyril’s Cemetery was coming together nicely. Over the past week, in stolen moments here and there, she’d put together the introduction page as well as two double-page spreads. The material the Preservation Society had provided her with had been rich, indeed, and Carmela was quite pleased at how good everything was looking. In a couple days she would present her initial work to Donna Mae Dupres and her cemetery preservation group and, hopefully, get their final blessing to complete the project.

“Carmela, what
are
you doing with those photographs?” asked Tandy. She had watched Carmela take two perfectly good photographs, a black-and-white photo and a color photo, then cut them both into strips. Now, Tandy’s curiosity had gotten the better of her.

“Oh,” said Carmela, “it’s a fun technique I picked up at a scrapbooking convention last year. You take a color photo that you like and also have it printed in black and white. Then you cut
both
photos into strips and weave them together.”

“What?” said Baby, her interest piqued. “This I have to see.”

“Here,” said Carmela, laying the photo strips out. “What you do is alternate strips, see? A color strip, then a black-and-white strip, then a color strip again. When you weave the photo back together, you achieve a kind of checkerboard result. Or mosaic. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, the results are just wonderfully effective.”

“Wow,” said Baby, watching as Carmela’s deft fingers wove strips from the two photos into a single, finished piece.

“Isn’t that a great effect?” asked Carmela. “The color strips make it look contemporary, but the black-and-white strips give it an aged feel.”

“I love it,” said Tandy, “but how do you keep all the various strips in place?”

“Turn it over gently and use some photo-safe adhesive tape,” said Carmela.

“Saint Cyril’s is going to absolutely
love
this,” said Tandy. “Can I look at the rest of what you’ve done?”

“Sure,” said Carmela. She slid the pages she’d already completed and carefully encased in plastic sleeves across the table to Tandy.

Together, Tandy and Baby studied Carmela’s handiwork. They were obviously impressed.

“You know what you’re missing?” asked Tandy, rubbing at the tip of her nose.

“What’s that?” replied Carmela.

“You don’t have any photos of the oven crypts.”

Oven crypts were walls of crypts with front openings that looked something like bread ovens. When they were first built, they housed the final remains of indigents. To day, however, the oven crypts were much in demand by ordinary families. Coffins were slid into these so-called ovens and, after a couple years of New Orleans’s heat and humidity, a sort of natural cremation took place. The contents and the coffins were reduced to almost nothing. The human remains were then swept back into a kind of pit in the rear of the oven crypt and the pieces of the coffin removed. The real estate, such as it was, was now available for yet another occupant.

“I
thought
I had some,” said Carmela, as she shuffled through the various envelopes of photos that the Saint Cyril’s group had given her. After a fairly thorough search, however, it appeared she
didn’t
have any photos of the oven crypts.

“And you’re right, Tandy,” said Carmela. “The oven crypts
are
historically significant. Some of them are even older than the family and fraternal organization crypts.”

“Plus they form the outside walls that surround Saint Cyril’s,” Baby pointed out. “That’s important, isn’t it?”

“I’d say it’s critical,” said Carmela. “Which means I’d better stop by Saint Cyril’s tomorrow morning and shoot a few photos. I just hope it doesn’t rain.” Carmela noted that the day had started out partly cloudy and was rapidly becoming overcast. Fact was, the weather forecasters
were
predicting rain for Mardi Gras day tomorrow.

“I hope it doesn’t rain on our parades!” declared Baby.

“But if it does rain, your photos might turn out nice and eerie,” suggested Tandy. “Very funereal.”

“The problem is,” said Carmela, studying her pages, “I’m not exactly shooting for eerie. Saint Cyril’s Cemetery Preservation Society specifically requested historic.”

“I suppose a preservation group would look at it that way,” allowed Tandy. “Most of the time, folks are so rabidly obsessed with our cemeteries and the notion that New Orleans keeps its dead so close by, you sometimes
forget
there’s a historic aspect.”

“It’s those darn vampire stories,” said Baby, shaking her head. “Just way too much vampire lore and mythology. Outsiders probably think we walk around with garlic wreaths strung around our necks.”