Mermaids in the Basement Read online

“Evidence.”

  “Look here, Detective,” said Honora. “Joie’s fall was an accident. No one in this house laid a hand on her.”

  No, I thought, but someone outside the house had slipped Valium into her strawberries.

  “I could get a warrant,” said Detective Bass.

  “I’ll just get the pearls,” I said, and hurried into the kitchen. I picked up a green Limoges bowl where I’d stashed the loose pearls. Tucking it in the crook of my arm, I hurried back to the living room. The detective shook out what appeared to be a small bag and tipped the bowl over the edge. The pearls slammed against the paper like gunfire.

  “One more thing, Miss DeChavannes,” he said in an offhand voice. “How long will you be in town?”

  “A week,” I said. “Maybe two. Why?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d inform us of your whereabouts. I might need to bring you downtown for questioning.”

  “Questioning!” Honora cried. “If this isn’t the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever encountered.”

  “I might need to get a statement from your granddaughter, is all.”

  “Can’t you get it now?”

  “We’re waiting for test results,” said the detective, looking uncomfortable.

  “May I ask for what?” Honora snapped.

  “I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.” He picked up the bag. “Now, can you show me where the crime occurred?”

  From the kitchen doorway, Honora and I looked down into the garage, watching the detective set up little numbers beside each blood spatter. Then he pulled out an ancient camera and took photographs. The way his eyes darted into nooks and crannies, I could tell that he was looking for the object that had bashed in Joie’s head and bloodied her nose. Finally, we followed the detective outside to the Circe fountain. “Maybe I’m slipping or something,” he said, bending down to snap a photograph, “but Miss DeChavannes’s story doesn’t match the evidence.”

  “Why don’t you give her a lie detector test?” Honora said, her voice icy.

  “Look, miss, I just said her story didn’t match. I didn’t accuse her of nothing.”

  “Because she’s innocent,” snapped Honora.

  After he left, she went straight to the phone. She called the mayor and the district attorney; both men had been guests at the party. Then she called my daddy but was forced to leave voice mail.

  “Louie, this is your mother. I thought you’d like to know that Renata’s pearls have been arrested. Of course, your daughter is still free; but the minute that changes, I’m disinheriting you.”

  Later that afternoon, Honora stood beside an iron table that was crammed with orchids, jade plants, and African violets. She tipped a watering can over an orchid. Zap paced behind her, sniffing the brick floor. The windows were open, and I heard gulls crying in the distance. Gladys was stretched out on one sofa; Isabella was curled up on the other with a washrag draped over her eyes.

  “I’m just so woozy,” she said.

  “How much did you drink last night?” Gladys asked.

  “Hardly any,” said Isabella.

  “We need to call Dr. Bryant,” said Honora.

  “No doctors until I’ve had lunch,” said Isabella, lowering the rag. When she saw me, she smiled. “I heard about the police confiscating your pearls. But before we start plotting, make your grandmother feed us.”

  “How about a fried oyster sandwich?” asked Gladys.

  “I gave up oysters years ago. They’re polluted.” Isabella raised her arms over her head and stretched. “I’m positively starving. In fact, I could eat a zebra. Don’t laugh. I ate one in Kenya.”

  Gladys disappeared into the kitchen, and I flopped down on her sofa. I looked over at Isabella, hoping she would have more stories about my father, but she put the rag over her eyes. Honora glanced over at me and winked.

  “Has Daddy called?” I said.

  “Haven’t heard a peep,” said Honora. “I left two messages with his answering service.”

  Gladys returned with a pot of jasmine tea, four mugs, and a plate of gingersnaps, all of it balanced on a red tooled-leather album. She set the tea and cookies on the wicker coffee table, then carried the album over to the sofa, sat down beside me, and opened the book.

  “I don’t know who these people are,” Gladys said. “Honora, get over here.”

  “Where did you find that?” Honora set the can on the iron table. Her shoes scratched over the bricks as she walked over to the sofa. I leaned against Gladys, staring down at the pictures. They were black-and-white, the old-fashioned kind with crinkled edges. Honora sat down on the other side of Gladys, and Zap shot across the room onto the sofa, then flopped his head on my grandmother’s leg.

  “This album reminds me of how old I really am,” Honora said, glancing over at the book. “Why, I’m an artifact.”

  “Speak for yourself, darling,” said Isabella, picking up the teapot.

  “When was this taken?” I pointed to a creased snapshot of Chateau DeChavannes. Honora and Chaz were standing next to the rose garden.

  “That’s me and your grandfather right after we got married,” she told me.

  “Chaz was a bore,” said Isabella. “I hate it when widows canonize the dead.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of canonizing Chaz. Ah, here’s one of you, Isabella,” Honora said. “It was taken before you went to Hollywood and got famous. You were dating that optometrist. What was his name?”

  “I never dated any optometrist. Let me see.” Isabella walked over to the sofa and peered over Honora’s shoulder.

  “Didn’t his girlfriend jump off an observation tower in Louisiana?” asked Honora. The Yorkie flipped over on his back and touched Honora’s arm with his paws, inviting her to play.

  “I don’t remember.” Isabella shrugged.

  “The tower was in a state forest,” Honora said. “In fact, I might have a clipping somewhere.”

  “Oh, yes. That optometrist.” Isabella waved an imperious hand, dismissing the album. “Gladys, what prompted you to drag this up?”

  “I’m trying to jog Renata’s memories,” said Gladys.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake. You don’t need pictures. I can tell her what she needs to know.”

  “First, tell us about the optometrist’s girlfriend,” said Gladys.

  “It wasn’t my fault she jumped,” Isabella said. “I didn’t even know the woman.”

  “Well, she knew you,” said Honora, scratching Zap’s belly.

  “That was never proved,” Isabella said.

  “They said she left a cart full of groceries at the Fairhope A&P,” Honora said. “Just ran off and left her ice cream to melt and then hightailed it to Louisiana and climbed that tower and jumped.”

  “Stop it, Honora.” Isabella frowned. “If she’d wanted to die, she could have stayed in Point Clear. She didn’t need a forest. She had an entire bay at her disposal.”

  “But you have to admit, it was a horrible way to die,” Honora said.

  “How would you know? When did you become a self-proclaimed expert on fatal falls?” said Isabella.

  “My husband was a neurosurgeon,” said Honora. “That’s why.”

  “What happened to the optometrist?” I asked.

  “I left for California.” Isabella shrugged. “But I heard that he fell into the most dreadful funk. Nowadays I believe they call it depression. Anyway, I lost track of him. Men are such flippant creatures. Easily bored, easily distracted.”

  “They’re predators,” said Honora. “But darling ones. Men haven’t changed since the days of the Neanderthal. But we females are constantly evolving. In the old days, all a woman needed was an apron and a Betty Crocker cookbook. Today’s woman needs good genes and a plastic surgeon.”

  “Ain’t nobody cutting on me. I like myself the way I am,” said Gladys.

  “And I happen to like younger men.” Isabella bit into a gingersnap.

  “You should read today’s horoscope,” said Honora. “Yo
u’re a Taurus, right? It says a sacrifice now will benefit your love life later.”

  “I haven’t had a love life since 1978. Or was it ’79?” Isabella folded her arms and gazed off into the distance, wildly tapping her fingers. “But you’ve got a point. Maybe I’ll start trapping small animals and offering them up to the gods.”

  “You can buy hamsters in bulk at PetSmart,” said Gladys.

  “She’ll need more than hamsters,” muttered Honora. “She might have to start mutilating cattle.”

  Gladys flipped the pages, stopping near the middle of the album. “Oh, look. Here’s you and Shelby sitting on the dock. It was right after the divorce.”

  “Y’all were living with me,” said Honora.

  “Do you have any pictures of Uncle Nigel?” I asked, and Gladys gave me a sharp look.

  “I’m sure I do,” said Honora. “Why?”

  “I found this in Mama’s trunk.” I reached into my pocket, pulled out the birthday invitation, and handed it to Honora. Zap lifted his head and sniffed.

  “We all went to that party,” said Honora.

  “Why was the invitation in the trunk?” I asked. “Did it hold a special meaning for my mother?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Honora pushed the invitation into my hands. Gladys twisted a button on her dress and wouldn’t look at me.

  “Is somebody going to fill me in?” I said. “I’m not a child anymore.”

  The three women stared at each other. Finally Gladys said, “I think she meant to tell you, baby. She didn’t believe children should hear sad stories.”

  “I’m thirty-three,” I said. “What was she waiting for, my fifty-first birthday?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” said Honora. “Shelby didn’t know she was going to die so soon. She was waiting for the right time.”

  “But it never came,” I said.

  “Well, she’d built a new life with Andy,” she said. “He loved you, Renata. And in many ways he was more of a father to you than Louie. Can’t you see why your mother wouldn’t have been eager to dredge up the past?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I wish you didn’t view the world in such stark contrast,” said Honora. “Bad guys in one corner, saints in the other. How can you write screenplays with such a narrow view of human nature?”

  I flinched. Long before I’d burned my screenplay, the Caliban executives had pretty much said the same thing. I’d chalked it up to lost mojo, but maybe it was something more. I squeezed my hands together. Then I said, “You could have told me.”

  “No, I couldn’t. It wasn’t my place to tell.”

  “That’s a mother’s job,” said Gladys.

  “Is it a father’s?” I asked.

  “Louie’s not much of an historian, and you know it.” Honora flipped to another page that showed wedding pictures.

  “But your mother never loved Kip,” said Gladys.

  “Kip?” I sat up straight.

  “That’s who your mama had the affair with,” said Isabella. “He was a beautician.”

  Gladys got to her feet and shook her finger at Isabella. “You just couldn’t wait to tell, could you? And you promised not to.”

  “I lied,” said Isabella. “Listen to yourselves, how mysterious y’all sound. The girl needs to hear the truth about her mother and Kip.”

  “What, did he give her a bad haircut?” I laughed and pointed to my head.

  “No, dahlin’,” said Isabella. “Kip Quattlebaum had a way with women. He couldn’t be beat giving permanents. Plus, he gave Shelby more time than your father ever did.”

  I just sat there, shaking my head. This was the most ridiculous story I’d ever heard. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “My mother slept with her hairdresser?”

  “Actually, he was mine,” said Honora. “And a damn good one.”

  “He broke up Louie and Shelby,” said Isabella.

  “I always blamed myself for inviting him to Nigel’s party,” said Honora.

  “If it hadn’t been Kip, it would’ve been somebody else,” said Isabella.

  “Wait a minute. We’re talking about my mother? Better known as Miss Death Do Us Part?”

  “She wasn’t always that way,” said Isabella. “Before she married Andy VanDusen, she was sort of fun.”

  “I can’t listen to this.” I bolted off the sofa, and the invitation fluttered to the bricks.

  “Sit back down. You asked for the truth,” said Isabella. “You said you could take it. Obviously you cannot. There’s your reason why your mother didn’t tell you.”

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” said Honora. “It shocked all of us.”

  “I wouldn’t of believed it, either,” said Gladys. “But I was there. I saw them fall in love.”

  “It wasn’t love,” insisted Honora.

  “Maybe not,” said Gladys. “But it was something close to it. It’s a long story. We’ll need more tea.”

  “Tea, hell,” said Isabella. “Illegal substances won’t be enough.”

  “Start talking.” I picked up Gladys’s hand. “Tell me everything.”

  Chapter 19

  GLADYS SAYS, THIS IS HOW IT STARTED

  My mama used to say that a poppy seed would tell if someone was unfaithful. Take the seed and lay it on your left hand, then hit it with your right fist. If the seed pops, your lover has been unfaithful. Dropped scissors is another sign that your sweetheart has been untrue. But neither seeds or scissors was involved when Shelby fell in love with that man-hairdresser.

  Louie, he worked all the time at Ochsner, learning how to cut up hearts and sew them back together. He’d bought Shelby that little house in Covington, where her people lived, so she wouldn’t be so lonely. It was a square blue house with curlicue trim work and a big yard with two pecan trees that dropped nuts on the garage roof.

  Shelby hated that house. She didn’t want to look at the lake where her sister had died. And to reach New Orleans, they had to cross the Pontchartrain twice, going and coming. She couldn’t make Louie understand. To make things worse, he started taking little jobs on the weekend. Moonlighting, he called it. Every weekend he would be gone from Friday morning until late Sunday evening. The rest of the time he was working, leaving her alone with me and Renata.

  Shelby and I passed time by planting a little garden, mainly tomatoes and cucumbers. She would set the transistor radio in the grass, then walk out to help me weed. Seems like all the stations was playing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—I forget who sings it—and she’d yank them weeds with a vengeance. She jerked up crabgrass, then threw it in the trash can. “Do you know what I’ve done?” she asked me. And I said, “Pulled a weed?” “No,” she said. “I have married a man just like my father. But instead of hunting, Louie is addicted to hospitals. He’s a workaholic.”

  She sat down in the grass, big old tears hitting her knee. “Oh, Gladys, I’m so afraid I’ll end up like my mother. Turning my loneliness inside out the way she did.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just put my arms around her and rocked back and forth, like she was a baby. “I know his work matters,” she said, wiping her nose, “but if he’s going to be gone all the time, I’d rather live in New Orleans.”

  “Baby, have you talked to Louie? Told him how you feel?”

  “About a thousand times.” She didn’t want to worry him, didn’t want to nag. She’d seen firsthand how Emma had drove Thaddeus away. Despite her unhappy childhood memories and a deep-seated hatred of Covington, Shelby tried to make the best of the situation, but it wasn’t easy. Those rare days when Louie was home, the telephone wouldn’t stop ringing—patients, nurses, other doctors. He wore a contraption called a beeper, and it would chirrup when the hospital needed him. He never took it off except when he undressed. Sometimes he’d lose it and tear the house apart.

  “Shelby? Have you seen my beeper?” he’d ask, opening a drawer, riffling through the silverware. He tore the garbage bag, spilling coffee grounds on
the floor. “Honey? Did you put it somewhere? Come on, Shel, help me look.”

  “I am not your beeper’s keeper,” she said.

  Well, I’ll just tell you. Marriage is too hard without adding telephone calls and beepers. Before my husband Dolph went to Angola, his mama like to drove me crazy. Called on the phone four or five times a day, but I knew better than to disrespect the woman who’d birthed him. Dolph bitterly complained about those calls, but he couldn’t make her stop. So he took it out on me, griping about my cooking, or how I kept house. Every marriage needs peaceable moments—no talking, just being. Floating together in sweet silence. It took Angola Prison to stop his mama, but I am drifting.

  Back to Shelby. She was determined not to repeat her parents’ mistakes, so she poured herself into child rearing. Renata was three and a half, and she was a mama’s girl all the way. Shelby hired a man to plow the sunny side yard, then she and the baby planted a fairy-tale garden: Wizard of Oz poppies, Jack’s beanstalks, Sleeping Beauty’s rose trellis, and Johnny Appleseed trees. They’d read every children’s book at the St. Tammany Parish Library, and Renata knew most of them by heart. Shelby printed simple words on index cards and practically taught that baby to read.

  On the few occasions that Shelby and Louie went out to dinner, Renata would burst into tears and beat against the screen door, begging her mama not to leave. I tried everything I knew to distract that child, but she wouldn’t budge from that door until her mama returned. Shelby got to where she didn’t like to leave the baby, and in a scary way, she became the very thing she’d tried to avoid: she’d turned into her own mama. Shelby wasn’t housebound, but she was baby-bound.

  Honora drove over once a month to see the baby, bringing wine, champagne, and some toys that made the awfullest racket. Shelby loved anything that Honora did. They were closer than any mother and daughter, and it wasn’t because of their shared love for Louie or Renata. Emma Stevens’s illness may have had something to do with it, along with Thaddeus’s absences.

  For whatever reasons, Shelby and Honora just tooked to each other. They walked in downtown Covington, sharing a vanilla ice cream cone, or painting each other’s nails. If a person didn’t know that Emma Stevens existed, they might have thought Honora was Shelby’s mother, not that they looked alike in the least. Honora was tall, with dark eyes and straight chestnut hair, and she wore tailored clothing. Shelby’s sun-streaked head barely came up to Honora’s chin. But they was alike on the inside. Those two could carry on conversations in their thoughts, finishing each other’s sentences aloud.