Silenced by the Yams (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery #3) (3 page)

He grabbed my hands as I headed to the bathroom. “This won’t take long. Just give me a few minutes.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No. Not wrong. Just—”

Bethany called up from downstairs. “Daddy!” she shouted. “Your cell phone is ringing!”

Howard threw his hands in the air, frustrated.

I gave him a quick peck on the lips which turned into a lingering kiss. A vision of Mama Marr wrinkling her nose at my grimy kitchen made me pull away before the kiss turned into anything more. “Get your phone and I’ll get a shower.”

The hot, steamy shower was so heavenly that I delayed my chores longer than I probably should have. A night’s sleep had softened the horror of the previous evening, but a third shower was exactly what I needed to kick-start my morning. I thought about Andy Baugh and wondered how he was feeling. He’d looked so desolate the last time I saw him. That was when they wheeled Kurt’s body out of the banquet room on a gurney.

After the shower, I slipped into the shorts and a t-shirt and ran some mousse through my curly hair, noting that a few more gray strands had moved in. I’d throw on some makeup and get into a nicer set of clothes after cleaning. Grabbing the coffee mug, I threw back another swig as if it were a shot of tequila, then padded my way downstairs to round up the girls and begin Operation Dirt-be-gone.

When I hit the landing at the bottom of the stairs, the front door opened into me, causing my coffee to spill all over the foyer rug.

“Oh, Spam!” Yes, “Spam” is an interesting interjection, but necessary since the day my six-year-old Amber was heard telling a neighbor about “those damn squirrels” that steal our bird food. Nowadays I curb the cursing and find cleaner-but-similar words to replace the “dirtier” variety.

Back to the coffee spill—now I had a coffee stain to clean, as well. It was either that, or hide the rug. Burn it, maybe. Mama Marr would take one look at that thing, shake her head, and say: “Oy, Barb-ara. You don’t know how to take a stain out?” Then she’d tsk and mutter, “I don’t know what they teach these girls in school no more.”

I pulled the door fully open to see who had caused me this grief.

“Hey, there!” my friend, Colt said, as he stood all smiles on my front porch in his sporty shorts and Life is Good t-shirt. Colt Baron was one of those men who definitely aged with grace.  When I met him in college he was a blond, trim, and muscular surfer boy.  Today, he was still blond, trim and muscular, but he was all man.  Little lines that grow around the eyes might make a woman look old, but on Colt they were like butter cream frosting—the proverbial icing on the cake.  Whereas Howard had a significant amount of gray, Colt had just a touch that blended in nicely with his feathery blond wisps of hair.

And he looked way too chipper for my current mood.

I scowled. “You made me spill coffee and Mama Marr is coming! I don’t have time for a coffee stain.”

His smile fell. I immediately felt two feet high after noticing that he wasn’t alone. He had a friend with him. A pretty female friend. A pretty, female, brunette, way-younger-than-me friend. “I’m sorry,” I said. “My mother-in-law is coming this afternoon, my house is a wreck—by her standards at least—and last night a famous movie director threw up all over me and then croaked, so my stress meter is in the red-zone right now.” I cleared my throat. “You know how it is.”

The pretty thing hanging onto Colt’s arm tightened her grip as her eyes widened.

Colt’s smile returned. “Up to your old tricks, huh, Barb?”

Barb?

Did Colt just call me Barb? My something-is-wrong-here radar detected a disturbance in The Force.

He continued. “Barb, this is Meegan.”

I was still reeling from the fact that he was calling me Barb instead of Curly. The fun and fancy-free Colt Baron had called me “Curly” from the first day we met over twenty-five years ago. Etiquette told me to offer my hand to Meegan for a shake. The green-eyed monster told me I should slap her alabaster, taut, wrinkle-free face and ask her what she’d done with the Colt who still carried a torch for
me
and called
me
cute little pet names. “Um,” I stuttered. “Where are my manners? Come in.” I motioned them into the house. “Nice to meet you, Meg.”

Neither of them moved, but pretty-young-thing grimaced and shook her head. “Meegan,” she corrected me in a pretentiously timid tone.

“Oh, I’m sorry—Meghan.”

Her grimace deepened. “Mee,” she said, as if talking to a three year old.  “Mee-gan.”

That slap was feeling pretty necessary, but I fought it off. “Meeeeee-gan,” I said with a hint of over-emphasis (okay, more than a hint). “Come on in.”

Colt cleared his throat. “We can’t come in,” he said.  “We just stopped by to get my kayak out of your garage. We’re going to hit Aquia Creek today.”

Meegan giggled. She was just too darned adorable with her sweet, short hair and her ready-for-adventure ensemble. I wondered at her age. Her boobs were way too perky for her to be over thirty. Colt was forty-six. Who did he think he was? Hugh Hefner? “Okay,” I said. “Have . . . fun. I guess.”

Howard joined me at the door. He did that macho man-nod to Colt, and then smiled when he saw Meegan. I felt a strong urge to elbow him in the gut or possibly withhold sex for a week. This girl was making me feel very violent.

“Dude,” Colt said, acknowledging Howard’s nod. “We’re just getting my kayak out of your garage. We’ll be out of the way in a minute.”

“Sure,” Howard said. “You need help?”

Colt shook his head. “We’ve got it, thanks.” Colt stored his kayak, a tent, and a couple of other items in our garage and he knew the code to the opener, so he really had no need to let us know at all except good manners. Or maybe to show off his nauseatingly nubile companion. He winked at me and rubbed his hands together. “Don’t forget our date tomorrow night.”

Meegan frowned and Howard rolled his eyes. “How can I forget?” I said, smiling. “Are you picking me up?”

He looked awkwardly at Meegan then at me. “Probably best to just meet there. Meeg and I . . . have plans. During the day, I mean.” He squeezed his new girlfriend’s arm. “It’s not a real date—I’m just giving Barb some lessons in shooting a hand gun.”

Her eyes widened and she clapped her hands like my daughter, Amber, when I let her have Captain Crunch for breakfast. “Oh! That sounds fun and scary at the same time! Will you teach me, too?”

I could tell Howard was holding back a laugh. “Well, have fun kids,” he said to the duo. He took my arm. “Barb, I need to tell you something.”

“Later!” Colt waved and they were off to our garage.

Howard closed the door and I sensed he was about to tell me something very serious. I wondered if this was the “something” he wanted to talk about upstairs or about the phone call. Usually a call on his cell phone was a call to work, which meant I would have to pick up Mama Marr from the airport.

“You’re going in to the office, aren’t you?”

He shook his head. “It’s not that. But I have some bad news. That phone call was from a DC cop that I know. It’s about last night.”

I already knew that Kurt Baugh was dead. What could be worse? “I don’t know if I want to hear this.”

“It’s Frankie.”

The floor swam under my feet and I grabbed the wall for support. “Frankie’s dead too?”

He shook his head. “No. He’s been arrested—for murder. Looks like he poisoned Kurt Baugh.”

Chapter Three

Frankie being arrested for murder was even worse than Mama Marr performing a detailed latrine inspection or Colt accidentally-on-purpose forgetting my precious pet name. I was frantic. “Frankie didn’t kill anyone!”

Howard looked doubtful. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do. Even
you
know that Frankie was never a killer. You have to tell them they’re wrong!”

My day wasn’t going well and Howard knew it. He did his best to calm me down. Logically, I understood that Howard couldn’t sway the decision of the DC police to arrest or not arrest Frankie Romano for the murder of Kurt Baugh. It wasn’t his jurisdiction. At the very least I needed more information. Poison? What kind? How? Where? Howard shrugged at my questions. What good is having a husband in the FBI if he can’t give you the answers to why your friend is in jail?

I stewed over the problem and another cup of coffee while Howard disappeared to God-knows-where. Eventually, I decided to put the issue temporarily to rest. I needed to disinfect my house in the three hours I had left before the invasion of the seventy-nine year old Polish gendarme of guck and grime. I’d figure the Frankie thing out later. Right now I needed to round up the troops and devise a battle plan for cleanliness.

At eleven o’clock on a Monday morning in the lazy summer month of July, not one Marr daughter was downstairs even pretending to be awake or alert. I hollered up the stairs. “Girls! Downstairs now! We’ve got work to do!”

Once the words were out of my mouth, I cringed, knowing they would never elicit an immediate and active response. I listened. Crickets were likely to chirp before a girl would stir. But they couldn’t fool me. They were awake. What was needed here was some incentive. I thought a moment, then hollered up again, “We’ve got work to do eating these two dozen Danny’s Donuts before your father finds them!”

Danny’s Donuts were the best, biggest, melt-in-your-mouth donuts not only in Rustic Woods, but the entire Washington, DC Metropolitan Area. I cringed a second time when the pounding of six feet scrambling on the floor upstairs actually shook the walls. Because, of course, there were no donuts, Danny’s or otherwise, in my house. The best I could come up with might be a moldy piece of toasted cinnamon bread or three freezer-burned French toast sticks. I was sailing on a sea of guilt by the time the girls had assembled before me in our foyer at the bottom of the stairs. Guilt that I was such a lame mother that I didn’t even have decent breakfast food in the house, guilt that I actually lied to get their attention, and guilt that I would never rise to Mama Marr’s standards of the perfect housefrau for her perfect only son.

“Where are they?” asked Amber, who held a pathetic Puddles in her arms. He looked sadly at me in his blue, lace trimmed baby doll dress and matching bonnet tied neatly under his little gray chin. His despair was in direct contrast to Amber’s magnificent, semi-toothless smile that lit up her freckled face. Poor Puddles. I had to give him credit for putting up with Amber. Maybe he thought they were related since her hair was just as curly as his own.

Everything had happened so fast, I found myself without a reasonable explanation for my lie. “Um . . .” I was vying for time.

Bethany stood with a book in one hand and the other hand on her hip. A you-did-it-to-us-again look crossed her face as she peered through her smart, Tina Fey-style glasses. Bethany was eleven going on thirty-seven. She didn’t say anything, which was worse than her saying anything at all.

I gulped.

Sixteen year-old Callie, the spitting image of her father‘s dark eyes and hair, readjusted her long locks into a half-hearted ponytail and narrowed her eyes at me. “There aren’t any donuts, are there? This was your ploy to rally us for manual labor.”

I shrugged. “You can write your tell-all book later. But just for the record, kids in Africa have to walk miles every day in the hot blistering sun to carry gallons and gallons and gallons of water to their town and all I’m asking you to do is vacuum a few floors and wash some windows.” When in doubt, try the privileged children lesson. All mothers attempt this. Few succeed. Yet, I couldn’t stop. “And you know what they get as a reward for their hard work? Not a Danny’s Donut, I guarantee you. Probably just a few grains of rice, or a half a potato. Raw.”

Bethany slid Callie a look. “At least she’s off her
Slumdog Millionaire
‘kids in the slums of Mumbai’ kick.” She turned back to me. “Have you been watching
Out of Africa
again?”

“I needed a Meryl Streep fix, what can I say? But that does not negate the fact, Miss Smarty, that Mama Marr will be here by two o’clock and we’ve got a house to clean.” I pointed to Amber. “You—you’re on cupboard detail. Get a washcloth and start wiping. Bethany, your mission, which you have no choice but to accept, is to vacuum every floor, upstairs and downstairs. Callie, you’re bathrooms.”

“Of course,” Callie said, rolling her eyes. “The oldest kids always gets the grossest job. Why don’t we have a maid like the Horners?”

“Because your dad is an agent for the FBI, not a CEO for a Fortune 500 Company like Mr. Horner.  Nor am I a DDS for a chain of dental offices like Mrs.—I mean Dr.—Horner. Poor people like us have to get our hands dirty.”

“Well frankly,” said Amber, letting Puddles escape from her arms, “I think Dr. Horner is the poor one. I’d rather wipe cupboards than put my hands into people’s icky, slobbery mouths.” She scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue. “She must cry herself to sleep every night.”

I doubted that. Judi Horner was one of the most together women I’d ever met. She was Super Woman and Mrs. America all rolled into one. I’d hate her if she wasn’t so darned nice. And if she wasn’t our family dentist. I have to admit to buttering her up with compliments just to make sure she wouldn’t conveniently find five “cavities” to drill.