Mummers' Curse
The Mummers’ Curse
By Gillian Roberts
Copyright 2012 by Judith Greber
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1996.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Gillian Roberts and Untreed Reads Publishing
Caught Dead in Philadelphia
Philly Stakes
I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia
With Friends Like These
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
In the Dead of Summer
The Mummers’ Curse
AN AMANDA PEPPER MYSTERY
Gillian Roberts
Praise for
The Mummers’ Curse
“The comic gift is like a charm: You either have it or you don’t. Gillian Roberts has it and uses it to good advantage in this latest addition to her Amanda Pepper series.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune “
The Mummers’ Curse
is typical Roberts, who manages to balance Amanda’s amusing outlook on life with a tough, well-plotted mystery.”
—Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel “Amusing and satisfying.”
—Contra Costa Times “This is the best Amanda Pepper since she made her first appearance in
Caught Dead in Philadelphia…
Delightful style.”
—Meritorious Mysteries
Acclaim for Gillian Roberts and her previous Amanda Pepper mysteries:
“A stylish, wittily observant, and highly enjoyable novel.”
—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
“Lively... Breezy... Entertaining.”
—San Francisco Chronicle I’D RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA
“Literate, amusing, and surprising, while at the same time spinning a crack whodunit puzzle.”
—Chicago Sun-Times WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…
“A pleasurable whodunit with real motives, enough clues to allow a skillful reader of mysteries to make some intelligent guesses, and a plethora of suspects.”
—Chicago Tribune HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION
“Roberts concocts colorful and on-the-mark scenes.”
—Los Angeles Daily News
“Tart-tongued, warm-hearted Amanda’s sixth case is as engaging as her others, and here she gets to do more detection than usual.”
—Kirkus Reviews
For Tobi and Jerry Ludwig with abiding love for both of you from both of me (even though you wouldn’t strut New Year’s morning).
Acknowledgments
HEARTFELT THANKS TO THE STAFF OF THE NEW YEAR’S Shooters and Mummers Museum, particularly Jack Cohen, Library Coordinator, Palma Lucas, Executive Director, and museum volunteer Bill “Curley” Conners of the Ferko String Band for providing me with memories, stories, articles and studies, and for being so patient and helpful with my questions. A special debt of gratitude to Dr. Charles Welch, who not only wrote the book on Mummers on which both Mandy and I relied, but who duplicated an invaluable tape for me when I needed it most.
To Pat Fleck, for research assistance beyond the call of duty and geography, to Amy Reisch, for providing a fresh viewpoint on Philadelphia, and to Sheila Winokur for knowing “the neighborhood”—many, many thanks.
As always, it is a joy to have such generous and talented writer friends as Susan Dunlap and Marilyn Wallace sharpen my focus when and where it blurred.
And to Jean Naggar, my agent, and Joe Blades, my editor, thank you, thank you, for being who you are and thereby making telling stories a pleasure as well as a profession.
Lastly, gratitude to Nancy Ramsey and Rusty Schweikart for sharing the saga of their cat’s final chapter, and greetings to Sid, wherever he now is…
Sometimes we see things only after they are out of sight.
To me, having grown up in Philadelphia, New Year’s Day meant the Mummers’ Parade, an all-day festival of thousands of extravagantly costumed men strutting and playing their special string-band music.
And every January 2
nd
, I forgot all about them. Until, that is, I moved 3,000 miles away and found myself, one New Year’s Eve, describing those parades to people who’d never seen them. When I saw and heard my friends’ reaction, I belatedly realized what a unique treasure they were. How on earth had I taken this phenomenon for granted? I had to write and tell people about them.
Alas, given my murderous inclinations, my “tribute” to the Philadelphia Mummers was to kill one of them during the parade while thousands of people watched. My apologies.
Out in the rest of the world, things have changed a great deal since
The Mummers’ Curse
was written. Not the strutting, dancing people who parade. They’re a more diverse group now and they include women, but mostly they are still splendidly who they were since the parade began 101 years ago.
But you’ll notice as you read this on a device that would have seemed a futuristic fantasy to Amanda, that she says, as if it were a ridiculously far-fetched idea, that maybe she should get a fax, or e-mail, and she’s still obliged to use the school’s payphone when she needs to make a call. Technology has raced ahead with no regard for tradition. Happily, the world of the Mummers has not.
Gillian Roberts
August 2012
One
“YOU’LL CATCH YOUR DEATH.” MY MOTHER HAD LIVED IN FLORIDA a long time, and her weather perspective was sun-damaged. I said nothing.
“Would it be a bad idea to listen to me once in a while? Might make a good New Year’s resolution.”
In hindsight, that wasn’t a dumb suggestion. Alas, one doesn’t get hindsight until it’s too late to use it, so I didn’t listen to her suggestion to listen.
Nor did she stop nagging. “I can’t believe you’re dragging a grandchild of mine along with you,” she said. “The
high
is supposed to be five degrees. It says so in the paper here.”
The Southland paper was always full of happy news and it was always the same: extra, extra! rotten weather everywhere else.
And, indeed, damp, bone-crunching misery had been our lot for a while and was predicted as well for the first day of January.
“I told you to come here for winter vacation,” she said. “It was eighty-four today.”
I had called to wish my parents a happy New Year and had, in a desperate but ill-chosen attempt to make conversation, mentioned that Mackenzie and I were taking Karen, my sister’s older child, to the Mummers’ Parade the next morning. In fact, we three parade-goers were spending a quiet New Year’s Eve together at home, the better to have hangover-free eyes and ears the following day.
I thought my folks would be impressed with this show of domesticity. I was spending New Year’s Eve with a six-year-old. I thought they’d happily misinterpret that as a sign I was headed in what they perceived as the right direction. But the only direction my mother ever clearly perceived was hers, be it philosophical or geographical.
“Five degrees there and beautiful here,” my mother repeated.
Ever since she moved south, the woman has suffered from the delusion that I crave data on comparative atmospheric conditions. The greater the disparity between the mercury hither and yon, the more urgent her need to share this news. Had they only invented the Weather Channel sooner, she’d have been a natural as its anchorwoman.
“We took a walk,” she said. “On the beach. At sunset. Daddy and me. Tonight.” Semaphore-speak, telegraphese, teensy sentences, as if my mind were too frostbitten to absorb more than one fact at a time. “It was balmy. I was sweating by the end.”
“Make sure to wear sunblock,” I said briskly. “You don’t want your face looking like beef jerky. Meanwhile, I’d better check on Karen and…”
“Poor child will freeze.”
“Stop making her sound like the little match girl. It’s her cultural heritage.”
“Freezing or matches?”
“The Mummers’ Parade. If we needed to strut our stuff on a warm day, we would have been born in New Orleans. We’re tough, we’re
Philadelphians
. Having our parade on the least likely day of the year seasons us, makes us all that we are.”
“Karen doesn’t live in Philadelphia,” my mother said. “She lives outside the city. They have their own traditions.”
I pictured the Main Line denizens in their duck-patterned golf pants playing banjos and doing the Mummers’ strut around the eighteenth hole. It did not compute. “I think clipping coupons is their folk tradition, Mom, and it’s not entertaining to watch.”
“Oh, Amanda,” she sighed. We were ending the year as we’d begun it, with my mother vaguely disappointed in my choices and actions. At least there was symmetry.
*
“Hey, Karen,” I said the next day as we shivered on the sidewalk. “What’s two and a half miles long, sixty-nine feet wide, twelve feet high, and covered with feathers?”
“A riddle,” she said. “Good! But is there a knock-knock part?”
When I shook my head, she gave up. “The Mummers’ Parade!” I said, although it was difficult making merry through clattering incisors. As we watched the last of the parading comics, I recalled why I’d skipped the last several dozen parades. The air and wind acted like a sushi-master’s knife on my skin. The environment was sufficiently evil to make in-person parade-watching a spectator sport for masochists, but not evil enough to postpone the event. Parades were rescheduled when rain or snow endangered the expensive and fragile costumes and instruments. Nobody worried about endangering spectators.
“What this city needs is the sense to stage an outdoor extravaganza when the weather’s decent.” Mackenzie said this with a wink and a good-ol’-boy drawl that was meant to, but didn’t, take the edge off his words.
It would, indeed, be lovely if so oversized and lavish a spectacle were held when there was a hope of benign weather. Instead, it’s an annual challenge, our gritty Yankee street game—Mummers vs. Mother Nature. Both show up in full regalia and do battle from dawn to dark. The contest generally ends in a tie.
But this isn’t something else to blame on Philadelphia, something the city could arbitrarily change. “It has to be now,” I said.
“Why?” Karen asked.
Mackenzie cringed. Or maybe it was only the cold that put the crease between his eyebrows and made him say, “Not again.”
I ignored him and turned toward Karen. “Because mumming has roots back a thousand years or more,” I said. “The Druids made noise to scare off demons in the dark part of the year. People in different parts of Europe wore masks and costumes—in fact
mumme
means mask or disguise in German. They gave plays for their neighbors, all at the time when the old year was dying.”
Mackenzie slumped as if his backbone had abruptly dissolved.
Why had I suggested this outing? As I recalled, it followed a heated debate over whose parade was better. This was based on pure hometown boosterism, given that neither one of us had ever actually seen the other’s event.
But Mardi Gras gets such excessive PR, I had virtually spectated.
“Obviously,” Mackenzie had said, “Mardi Gras is better known because it’s better.”
I had to educate him. “Wrong. Mardi Gras is a capital S social event—as in Society. It’s status to belong to a certain Krewe, and I’m sure not just anybody can join. The Mummers put on as spectacular a production—but they’re working class and always have been. This is a folk celebration, not chronicled in the Society pages. These are people who don’t keep detailed records of their every move or declare that there’s a pecking order of social correctness within their clubs. There are rivalries—good natured and based on skill or success or style, and the members have to like a new guy before he’s accepted, he needs to be sponsored, to come to a few meetings—”