Silenced by the Yams - By Karen Cantwell Page 0,7
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