Whistling In the Dark Read online

  The funeral crowd was just about gone when Mr. Gary drove up to the curb in front of the church and ran up the hill toward Father Jim. Mr. Gary said something to him and then Father Jim yelled and kinda cried, “No matter how you look at it, it’s a mortal sin, Gary. A mortal sin.”

  Granny always said that funerals were hard on everybody and the word fun should not start them out.

  Nell poked me in the ribs with her elbow and said, “Did you hear me, Sally?”

  “What?” I was still looking at Mr. Gary, who had put his arm around Father Jim’s shoulders and was walking him back toward the rectory. Father was a little bent over at the waist and his arms were out to the side like he was walking on a circus tightrope, like if he made one false step he would tumble down to the ground and never get up again.

  Nell said, “We’re gonna go see Mother.”

  Eddie said in a very proud voice, “Aunt Margie arranged it. She said your mother is getting better.”

  For a second I couldn’t think of one thing to say because in my heart I had already accepted that Mother was going to die, even after Rasmussen told me she wasn’t.

  Troo yelled out, “Hip, hip hooray!”

  “Really, Eddie?” I asked.

  “Aunt Margie said your mother is gonna be okay. Not right away, but she’s not gonna die.”

  Mother had been gone almost all of June and five days of July and now she was coming back to us. My breath was taken right out of my body. Mother was going to be okay. Just like Rasmussen said. I looked over at Troo. She was hopping like mad from foot to foot.

  “Eddie is going to take us right over to St. Joe’s,” Nell said as we walked toward the parking lot. “I had a long visit with Mother last night and she can’t wait to see the O’Malley sisters.”

  After we got in the Chevy and drove a few blocks I was surprised by how the world looked so much better than it did yesterday. The sidewalks seemed cleaner and the cars shinier and even Paul Anka on the radio sounded better than usual.

  Nell flipped down that visor above the windshield and looked at me and Troo in the backseat after she checked her makeup. “And I got some more good news.”

  “So your bosoms have stopped growing?” Troo said again. See how funny Troo could be? Even Nell laughed.

  She turned toward us and put her hands on the seat. “Eddie and I are getting married.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Troo said in her absolutely amazed voice.

  Eddie started laughing and Nell said, “We’re engaged.” She lifted her left hand up close to my face and there was a little golden Irish ring on it with hands that met in the middle. “It was Mrs. Callahan’s engagement ring. She gave it to Eddie to give to me.”

  I felt like I’d just gotten off that Tilt-A-Whirl ride they had up at the state fair, my head spinning and everything looking cattywampus. I really didn’t believe one more thing could happen this summer. But it had. Now Nell was getting married.

  When we turned down Fifty-ninth Street, I said, “We should stop real quick at Granny’s and tell her about Mother getting better.”

  Eddie said, “Okey-dokey,” and turned down the block that took us to Granny’s, first stopping at Delancey’s Corner Store to get some Camel cigarettes for himself and Cokes all around. Nell went in with him because it seemed like she wouldn’t let go of his hand anymore, which Eddie didn’t seem to mind. I guessed Eddie decided that he liked Nell’s bosoms better than Melinda’s because he couldn’t take his eyes off her “thirty-six deelightfuls,” as he called them. Nell was proud of those bosoms, too. So the two of them had liking those bosoms in common. Just like me and Henry had our books and chocolate phosphates and airplanes in common. Mother shoulda never married Hall, because I couldn’t see one thing they had in common.

  When Nell and Eddie went in to Delancey’s, Troo leaned over and said, “You just go tell Granny by yourself, okay?”

  “Sure.” I knew she was feeling so happy about Mother not dying and us living at Rasmussen’s until she got home and Hall going to jail that she didn’t want to wreck all that happiness by seeing Uncle Paulie and playing peek-a-boo with him. Or by looking at those Popsicle stick houses, which could really get anybody feeling bad since before the accident Uncle Paulie had been a carpenter.

  I thought right then was as good a time as ever. Maybe the best time because I had not seen Troo this happy for so long that I sorta wanted to be a shiny bow on her happiness package. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something.” I was getting ready to tell her what Daddy had told me. That the car crash wasn’t her fault.

  Troo was looking out the window at some kids playing one two three O’Larry outside Delancey’s. “Just forget it,” she said. “I’m not listening anymore to your imagination about Rasmussen. He’s not the murderer and molester.” And then Troo turned to face me and came in real close with both hands on my cheeks, and whispered, “But I think I know who is.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  When Eddie and Nell hopped down Delancey’s Corner Store steps, Troo turned a pretend key on her lips and threw it out the window. It was her way of telling me to keep my mouth locked up tight about her knowing who the murderer and molester was. A warning not to say anything to Nell or Eddie. She wanted to keep it hush-hush between the O’Malley sisters.

  Eddie handed me and Troo a Coke through the car window and then the other two that were left in the carton. “Give those to Granny and Uncle Paulie.” I guessed that getting married agreed with Eddie, because he was sure acting more grown-up. Almost like Mr. Anderson in Father Knows Best.

  He drove down ten houses and parked the Chevy under the big oak tree in front of Granny’s house that she called a bungalow, which is just another word for the smallest kind of place that a person could live in. Granny could’ve used a much larger house because she was a big woman both up and out, especially in her arms, which had a lot of flappy skin hangin’ off of them. But her face hardly had any lines and her hair was thick and white like homemade bread and she kept it in a pageboy. She also had perfect teeth that she kept in a glass full of water when she wasn’t using them. If you ever met her you might think to yourself that she reminded you a lot of that guy on the dollar bill.

  “Don’t take too long, we have to be at the hospital by eleven,” Nell called after I’d gotten out of the car. “Dr. Sullivan is going to meet us there and tell us all about Mother. And don’t tell Granny about Eddie and me, I want to surprise her.”

  Seemed like nobody wanted me to tell anybody about nothin’.

  I knocked on Granny’s front door that coulda used some paint and waited for Uncle Paulie to answer it, which he always did, because Granny moved so slow with her crippled knees that you could be sitting on that porch until the cows came home if you waited for her. When he pushed open the screen door, I said, “Hi, Uncle Paulie.”

  He had on what he always had on, tan pants and a white T-shirt that showed off his pretzel-rod arms with the most pale freckles of anybody I’d ever seen. His hair was thick red and started back on his head a bit and looked like it should belong to an entirely different person.

  “Peek-a-boo, Troo.”

  “No, I’m Sally, remember, Uncle Paulie? Troo has red hair just like yours.” I sort of pushed past him and went looking for Granny. She was in the kitchen filling up her copper teapot with water.

  “Hi, Granny. Got a present for you.” I pulled open her refrigerator and put the Cokes inside for later. Granny loved Coca-Cola. Drank almost a whole six-pack every day. It gave her vim and vigor, she said.

  Granny’s thyroid-condition eyes got bigger when she said, “Well, hello there, Sally. What a nice surprise. Care for a cuppa?” She didn’t hug me or anything. Granny didn’t go in for hugs.

  “No, thank you. I can’t stay long. Troo and Eddie and Nell are waiting for me in the car. We’re going to see—”

  “Peek-a-boo, Troo! Peek-a-boo, Daddy!” Uncle Paulie came up behind and put his hands over my eyes.

&
nbsp; I peeled off his fingers that smelled of glue and sort of laughed out of politeness, but I was thinking that Uncle Paulie was getting weirder and weirder by the minute and maybe Granny should put him in the orphanage up on Lisbon Avenue.

  “That’s enough now, son,” Granny said. “You go back into your room and work on your houses.”

  Uncle Paulie said down to the floor, “Okay, Ma.”

  Granny waited until Uncle Paulie shuffled off and then said, “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

  “Mother is getting better. Nell says she is over the hump,” I said, excited to tell her such good news about her sick daughter.

  “You’re a day late and a dollar short, Sally m’girl.” Granny reached up to the cupboard and took out one of those dainty teacups she had that were from the old country. “Officer Rasmussen has stopped by almost every day that your mother has been in the hospital to tell me how she was doing.”

  I must’ve made quite the face because Granny smiled.

  “Why’d he do that?” I asked.

  The copper pot whistled and Granny switched the burner off. “I thought you knew that Dave Rasmussen and your mother were friends.”

  That was one of the main things I really loved about Granny. She knew a lot of stuff about everybody who lived in the neighborhood and she was never shy about telling you. Like the fact that Brownie McDonald got kicked out of the seminary for drinking up all the Communion wine and that Mrs. Delancey from the corner store used to be Shelly the Snake Girl in a dancing club downtown. (I think that’s why Mrs. Delancey gave Granny half off on her Coca-Cola, to keep that to herself.)

  “So Officer Rasmussen, he’s a good egg?” I asked her.

  “Always has been. Even if he is Danish.” Granny didn’t have much use for anybody that wasn’t Irish. “And his father was a good egg, too. Ernie, his name was.”

  Watching her pour that water over her tea bag, I suddenly realized how much I’d been missing her. It felt so nice to sit at her little kitchen table with the uneven legs and listen to her go on and on about the people we knew. Just like the good old days. I so wished for a minute that Granny was the hugging kind.

  “You know the Rasmussen family used to own the cookie factory,” Granny said. “Sold it to some big company from out East in fifty-five.”

  I could hear Eddie beeping his ah oooga horn.

  Granny stuck her spoon down into her sugar bear three heaping times and stirred it into her cup. “You knew that Dave and Helen were engaged a long time ago, right?”

  I did not! Being friends was one thing. Rasmussen and

  Mother engaged? Like Nell and Eddie? Granny must have that wrong. “Engaged to be married?”

  “Oh, yes. They had the wedding date all picked out. But Dave’s mother, Gertie, who always thought too highly of herself, by the way, told Dave that he could do better than Helen. That Helen wasn’t high-class enough for him.” Granny made a tsking noise. “Never did like Gertie Rasmussen. Always lording her money over everybody. And very vain about her legs, which were quite nice, but not that nice.”

  Granny poured a little milk into the cup until it was creamy tan and then came and sat down next to me. “But then Dave broke it off because as much as he loved Helen, he didn’t think it would be right to go against his mother’s wishes since Gertie was sick with tuberculosis by then. So your mother married Nell’s father, instead.”

  Once again, for the millionth time, I was so amazed by the way grown-ups knew things that kids didn’t and how good they were at keeping those things on the q.t.

  Uncle Paulie was whistling “Pop Goes the Weasel” in his bedroom. And Eddie honked his horn again.

  “I thought after Nell’s father died that Helen and Dave would get married then,” Granny said, blowing on her tea.

  “But your mother married your daddy instead because she was still mad at Dave for not going against Gertie.”

  You had to watch Granny sometimes. She could give you blarney and I thought I’d caught her. “If that’s all true, then why didn’t Mother marry Rasmussen after Daddy died?”

  “Well, like I always say, my girl Helen can be as ornery as a pack mule with a bad back. She got that from her father, by the way. Stubborn runs worse in the Riley family than a pair of cheap nylons.” She took a nice full sip from her cup. “In other words, Sally, your mother was too proud. She was having a lot of money problems because your daddy didn’t leave her anything but a pile of bills and you girls. Helen didn’t want Dave to know how bad off she was. A slice of humble pie right about then would’ve solved all her problems.”

  Granny let loose a long Irish sigh. “Helen always was willing to cut off her nose to spite her face.”

  Why, for God’s sake, would Mother cut off her nose? “Then Hall showed up,” Granny grumbled.Mop

  “Then Hall showed up,” Granny grumbled.

  Oh boy. This was goin’ to take a while. Granny couldn’t stand Hall. “Think of how desperate your mother must’ve been to marry a shoe salesman she only knew for two months. You’d think she would’ve been a little marriage shy by that time, eh?” She gave me a sip of her tea. “You know what I always say about that marriage, Sal?”

  Yes, I did. Over and over again. “Once bitten, twice shy?”

  The car horn beeped again and you could tell by how long he held it down that Eddie was getting really sick and tired of waiting.

  “Exactly.” Granny heard the horn, too. “Sounds like Eddie is having a hard time keepin’ his shirt on.” And then under her breath, it sounded like she said, “And his pants.” She held up her hands. “Before you go, just rinse out those socks in the bathroom sink. My arthritis is really acting up today.” Her hands did look like claws or something so I knew she wasn’t faking, which she did sometimes. When she didn’t want to do something, she’d tell me she was having “palpitations,” and since there was no way I could tell if she was having palpitations, I did it because I didn’t want to think about what kind of trouble I’d be in if Granny got palpitated to death. “Paulie needs them socks for work tonight, so hurry it up,” she said, pushing me on the back toward the little hall. Granny was so dang bossy. This was who Mother inherited it from. Troo, too. And also that do-you-smell-dog-poop look that she was givin’ me.

  “Okay, okay.” I had that dumb feeling in my stomach about not getting over to see Granny more often and also thinking mean thoughts about Uncle Paulie’s weirdness, so I walked into the bathroom and stuck my hands into the cold gray water. I took out the first black sock and wrung it and hung it on this wooden drying stick Granny had in the tub. Then I reached down into the water again and pulled out another, and when I did I happened to get a look at myself in the mirror above the sink. My nose was sunburned and my hair had gotten almost as white as Granny’s. I looked a little older, I thought. Eddie beeped again, this one so long that it got into my head and that was all I could hear, so I hurried and squeezed the water out of the next sock and turned to hang it up on the . . . Oh my God. Sweet Jesus, Mary and Joseph! It was a pink-and-green argyle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Uncle Paulie is not a murderer and a molester,” Troo said, trying not to let her poofy lips move. She’d seen this ventriloquist on The Perry Como Show and had changed her mind about working up at The Milky Way. Now when she grew up Troo wanted to be either Edgar Bergen or Sal Mineo. Either or. But with a leaning toward Edgar Bergen since Troo said that all that drumming might give you a headache and it would be real funny to be able to throw your voice like that. You could get some people in trouble if you could do that.

  We were sitting on these plastic chairs with metal legs over in the waiting area. Nell and Eddie were talking to the desk lady in the lobby of St. Joe’s. Troo had her Nell tattletale list rolled up in her hand.

  “Big deal if Uncle Paulie has some of those socks,” Troo said. “Lots of people have pink-and-green argyles. Willie had some on last week. And Johnny Fazio had some on at supper last night. Even Bobby
at the playground wears ’em.”

  “Yeah, but . . . ,” I tried to say.

  “I think the murderer is . . .” Troo swiveled her head around to make sure nobody had snuck up on her, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that even if they did, they probably wouldn’t be able to understand a darn thing she was saying. I sure couldn’t. “I think it’s Reese Latour. It’s just bubbling inside him, trying to get out. Reese is evil, Sal. Real honest to devil evil.” She ran her hands down her arms, trying to warm up her goose pimples. “Did I tell you that he pulled Fast Susie’s bikini top down last week when she was suntanning in the backyard?”

  I shook my head.

  She shivered. “Reese could murder and molest with his eyes closed.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll just see,” I said quietly, because Nell and Eddie were coming back and I didn’t want to make too big a deal out of it because now I was pretty sure that Rasmussen was not the guilty party and I had been so sure he was. So I figured if I might be wrong about Rasmussen, I might be wrong about Uncle Paulie. I didn’t want to get everybody all riled up. Especially since Troo was right about Reese Latour. If you opened him up and looked inside, his heart would not be red and bursting with love. It would be rotting maggot hateful black. Reese would murder and molest in a breeze. I hoped Troo was right. Everybody would be a lot better off if Reese went to jail. Especially poor Artie, who wouldn’t have to listen to Reese telling people that he was a harelip, like they couldn’t see that for themselves. And even worse than that was the way Reese treated Wendy and called her the idiot and made fun of the way she talked. And that was not even taking into account the way Reese always looked at Troo, like he had the hots for her . . . it gave me the honest-to-God skin-crawling creeps. Yeah, Reese Latour could definitely be the murderer and molester.