A Bird's Eye View of Murder (PAPERBACK) Frankie Chandler #2

At six the next morning, I woke to the incessant ring of my telephone. I rolled off the couch, smacked my knee on the coffee table, then lurched into the kitchen, almost tearing the phone off the wall when I answered.

Only one person would call me this early—a time-zone challenged woman from Wisconsin.

“Hello, Mother.”

She didn’t waste time with niceties. “Why are the police asking me about your aunt? What have you done to her?”

“I haven’t done anything!” That sounded too much like my childhood mantra, so I assumed a grownup voice and asked, “Why do you ask?”

“A Detective Bowers called.” She paused. “He was very polite.”

If Charles Manson had shown up at my parents’ door, a swastika clearly carved in his forehead but uttering please and thank you, Mom would have given him the
benefit of the doubt.

That was a dirty trick, calling my mother. I’d let Bowers know what I thought of him next time I saw him, but for now, I needed to focus on damage control. What bits of information had he wheedled out of my sweet,
unsuspecting mother with his manipulative manners and false charm?

“What did he want to know?”

“Nothing important, but that’s not the point. He was the—” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “police.”

Mother loves the police. She cries when anything in uniform passes during a parade—even the scouts—but her experiences so far have been limited to admiration from afar.

I repeated my question for the third time, taking the roundabout way. “Martin Bowers is a friend of mine.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that. Martin is a nice name.”

“So, what did the two of you chat about?”

She immediately responded. Chatting was something upstanding people did with neighbors and family. Chatting didn’t have nefarious connotations.

“This and that. Nothing worthwhile that I can see. He wanted to know about the bust-up between your aunt and Elvira Doud, but that’s old news.”

“She married. She’s Elvira Jenkins now.”

“How nice.”

Elvira. Auntie had known the victim well enough to have a bust-up, the little liar. Worse, Bowers knew she knew. The bright side, I supposed, was that I knew he knew she knew.

“Bust-up? There was a bust-up?”

“Everyone knows about that! The entire town had bets on who’d lose the first tooth. Those girls were sturdy country girls, and when you steal someone’s boyfriend using their own Lemon Blueberry Buckle recipe, well, Elvira was just asking for it.”

Lemon Blueberry Buckle. Elvira won the Blue-Ribbon Babes
competition with a Lemon Blueberry Buckle recipe. Once I started breathing again, I repeated it back. The whole scenario sounded unbelievably stupid.

“Elvira Jenkins, I mean Doud, stole Auntie’s Lemon Blueberry Buckle recipe and used it to steal her boyfriend? That sounds like a bad Debbie Reynolds’ film.”

“Debbie Reynolds didn’t make a bad film. And then that nice man, Martin, asked me if your aunt kept in contact with Elvira over the years.”

I noted that he was no longer the police.

“I debated over telling him about the letters,” she continued, “but it’s really not fair to hold things back from an officer of the law.”

“Letters?” I whispered, clutching the counter for support.

“Oh, you know. Just nasty things that Gertie needed to get off her chest. Eighteen-year-old girls are so unstable, what with hormones.” She whispered the last word. “Though it would have been better if she had burned them instead of mailing them. I don’t know how many made it through after Elvira left Loon Lake. The post office forwarded them for a while, but then they started coming back, unopened. How long does a forwarding order last?”

“So, Aunt Gertrude drove Elvira out of Loon Lake with a campaign of harassment?”

“Don’t be silly.”

Silly? I thought it was a pretty practical conclusion.

“She left for love. She followed what’s-his-name after he joined the Army, or Navy, or some branch of service. The boyfriend. They all called him by some nickname that didn’t make sense to me. Of course, I never did get most jokes.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t think so.”

I gave her a minute to scan her memory banks.

“You never told me,” she said. “Why did Martin call me in the first place?”

I’d been hoping that Mom had forgotten that little point. I wished I could lie to my mother, but it seemed cruel to keep her out of the picture, especially if Auntie was about to be hauled in for murder.

“Elvira may have died.”

“Oh, dear.”

“It might have been murder.”

There was a pause. “Did Gertie do it?”

“Mother!”

“It’s better to face these things. If you went to Mass once in a while—”

There was a rustle from the direction of my bedroom. “Auntie’s awake. Do you want to speak to her?”

“Just tell her I’m setting the prayer chain in motion. I don’t know what Father Jakius is going to say. I’ve still got him praying for you.”

I heard my mother yell “Albert!” as she hung up the receiver, which coincided with Auntie’s morning descent on my kitchen.