Chapter 25. Mrs. O’Leary Burns Up the Phone Lines
Mrs. Jonathon O’Leary rubbed at her eyes. She sat on her lumpy couch in the back room, trying to peer through the snow on the television screen enough to make sense of the program. The reception was poor enough that she wasn’t sure if she was watching a rerun of a sitcom, or maybe it was a baseball game.
It had been a long night.
A long day and a long night.
Why, the last half hour was the first time the phone had stopped ringing all day.
She looked at the clock on the mantle. It was nearly 11:00.
People wouldn’t be calling now, except possibly Mabel, who, ever since she had hit 70, couldn’t sleep a wink.
The first call of the day had been Victoria Moon King’s stylist, a chatty and gossipy woman who liked to be the first to report any juicy tidbit. She informed Mrs. O’Leary about the first lady’s fainting spell, along with the supposition that she had a food allergy, maybe peanut butter, or gluten, or maybe it was unfertilized eggs. Her own nephew was allergic to vegetable oil. Can you imagine? The faint was a bit of news, though anyone who knew Victoria Moon King knew that she had the occasional fainting spell. But a food allergy? Ridiculous. Mrs. O’Leary used her long-practiced probing techniques to get at the truth. A question here, a little misdirection there, a bit of flattery here, an intuitive leap there. In this way, she was able to isolate the school paper as the culprit for today’s faint.
She didn’t get out much, Mrs. O’Leary. She was pretty much housebound, since Mr. O’Leary had met his maker, taking their ’64 Dodge Dart with him. But she had contacts all over town, and she made use of them to get some insight into the newspaper in question. It was the photographs, she eventually learned. Mrs. O’Malley was able to tell her that much. Mrs. O’Malley had gotten a copy of the school paper at the grocery store, and was happy to describe the photographs in detail. Of course, this description was intermixed with Mrs. O’Malley’s opinion that the end of the world, finally, had come close enough that even the newspapers couldn’t ignore it. These creatures, she was sure, were those that had been prophesied by Nostradamus. Or maybe it was Revelations. She couldn’t remember where she had read it exactly, but she was clear that these were the “Posse of Darque Men come to Smite our Idle-Borne Age.” Mrs. O’Malley had brought in all of her nine cats and awaited the smiting with righteous glee. Helga Weissstrüdel, another caller, had a copy of the paper as well. She had dismissed it out of hand, though, as a ploy on the part of the students to avoid the hard work that school, wellaccomplished, brought, and slack off for yet another day of their lives. The administration of the school had likely been complicit in the act; for one thing the students weren’t likely able to write well enough to put out the paper on their own, and besides such a diversion was just what the principal needed to avoid questions about plummeting test scores. Miss Weissstrüdel had been a high school English teacher for 45 years, and she knew what she was talking about.
Mrs. O’Leary followed up Miss Weissstrüdel’s call with a call to Marianne Wilson. Marianne had no opinion about the photographs, but was properly concerned about Victoria Moon King, who wasn’t acting at all well since her husband had tried to rise above his station by running for Mayor. And won the office, mores’ the pity, though Lord knows he got it more because of his connections with the Moons than because he was a King. Clearly, it was a case of him taking his last name too closely to heart; alas, he wasn’t the first King to do so. The Kings might think they’re royalty, but when Mayor King’s grandfather had moved here, he didn’t have a dime to his name, or a pocket to stick it in that didn’t have a hole in it. They had made their fortune selling fertilizer. Did Mrs. O’Leary know that? Fertilizer! Mayor King had never done an honest day’s work in his life. He had it made in the shade, simply because his forebears had followed cows around all day with a wagon and a shovel. Not one of the Kings, in fact, had ever done an honest day’s work; they just waited until nature happened, and scooped it up and sold it to some poor schmuck who didn’t have the sense to scoop up his own fertilizer. And, as if that wasn’t enough, they didn’t pay the local farmers a dime, and after all wasn’t it them who were feeding the cows? And anyway wasn’t it was the cows that had done the real work in the first place? And here Mayor King was following in his family’s footsteps, only now the cows were citizens and taxpayers, doing all the work and paying Mayor King to do nothing except stand there with a shovel. Victoria Moon King, the poor girl, didn’t have a chance. It’s no wonder she’d gotten so uppity, trying to make that man feel like a King when the only job he was qualified for was dunging out a barn.
On top of these happenings about town, there was a smattering of the usual fare: Annie Wentworth called to tell her that she had seen old John Manganelli sailing through a stop sign as if it weren’t there at all, yet another indication that he shouldn’t be driving in the first place, how old was he anyway? Shouldn’t there be an age limit, at least for men, who aged so much more precipitously than women? And besides, after he missed the stop sign he swerved down the road outside her house, swerved just as if he had been drunk, and maybe he was, and nearly ran over Millie Tucker on the sidewalk. When are they gonna do something? Caroline Frincham called to say that she was having a terrible pain in her legs, she probably had a blood clot, and her no good son still hadn’t come over to help her with her garden. She had called him three times and every time he said he would be right over but he never came and she hoped he would at least have the decency to feel bad when he found her, dead on the sidewalk from a blood clot on the brain, and with a dandelion in her hand, pulled all the way to the root like she always did because those dandelions, once they got aholt of your yard, sure didn’t let go, and it was a good thing that she would pull that dandelion even if it did kill her, because her son, if he came at all, would just have sprayed some weed killer on the thing, and turned it all brown and ugly, but it would be back full growed in a couple weeks, see if it wasn’t, and what’s more spreading seeds like wildfire. Johanna Harrison had called to report that she had seen Mark David—again—in the grocery store with a woman who was not his wife. When was she—the wife—going to wake up and face facts and put a leash on that man? And who did the other woman think she was anyway, coming to their God-fearing town to prey on men who wouldn’t have her in the first place if their heads were on straight, which they never were?
Mrs. O’Leary, in other words, was a nexus of information.
She didn’t get around much, but all signals went through her, then were amplified and sent on.
Another of those signals was the fact that the principal up at the high school had been seen about town in the late afternoon and evening, asking after the school newspapers—the newspapers she had been hearing about all day, now—and taking all the copies that remained. She had heard that not just once but three times, from three different people. What, she wondered, could that mean?
Surely, those photographs held some truth that most of the folks in town were choosing to ignore.
And now, as if the long day and long night weren’t enough, her TV reception was going all akilter, nothing but snow and the occasional ghost floating through the middle of it. Maybe it was a hitter on his fourth ball and taking his base, or maybe it was Klinger walking from one end of the compound to another in his dress. She couldn’t tell, and the distorted sound from the set wasn’t giving her any clues.
She hoped that the reception would improve, of course, but she wasn’t about to go out into the back yard and give the aerial a wiggle. Not after dark.
She peered out the window at the aerial in question. It rose above a disused barn. It would be easy enough, were it daylight, to tromp out there and turn the crank a bit, but she made it a practice to wiggle the aerial only before twilight. That sheriff next door was a hazard. Had been a hazard, in fact, as long as she had lived there, and that went back to the time when he really was a sheriff.
If he saw her out there after dark, he’d like as not to shoot her with that six-gun of his, and only afterwards stop to ask if she was a trespasser. Why, if half the stories she had heard about that man were true….
The phone rang again. Mrs. O’Leary looked at the phone, then at the clock on the mantle. It was 11:15. No doubt, it was Mabel. Mabel went to bed religiously at 9:30, but of course could never get to sleep, what with all the noise the neighbors made, all the frightening stories on the news, all the things she had to worry about herself ever since Ed had died.
Mrs. O’Leary turned down the sound on the set and picked up the phone. “Hello, Mabel,” she said. “Couldn’t get to sleep?” But it wasn’t Mabel. It was Gayle Donaldson, from across town. “Sorry to bother you so late, dear,” offered Mrs. Donaldson.
It was a fake apology, no doubt about it; Gayle never felt apologetic to anyone. She’d call at three in the morning, if that’s what it occurred to her to do. But, she didn’t call very often, and she always had an interesting tidbit or two to proffer regarding some well-known name on the ritzier side of town.
“Oh! Hello Gayle!” said Mrs. O’Leary. “How nice to hear from you! I was just sitting here thinking of you!”
“Oh, I know,” replied Mrs. Donaldson. “And I you. We really must get together sometime.” Of course, both ladies knew that they would do no such thing.
“I’m calling,” said Mrs. Donaldson, “to ask if you know anything about Victoria Moon King. I’m awfully worried about her. She came home this afternoon looking perfectly awful. She looked for all the world like she had just gotten out of the shower in some cheap motel room. Her hair was messed up, you know how she likes to keep it so nice, and she was still carrying the towel!”
“It’s interesting that you should mention that, because I did hear about a small fainting episode this morning in the salon.” “Fainting, is it? Goodness.” Mrs. O’Leary thought she might cast out a hook, see what she could catch. “I heard it was from looking at the paper. You know, those monsters.”
“Now don’t be ridiculous, dear. Only a man has the power to make a girl swoon so. Though I do admit that Victoria is a bit on the conservative side for such romantic trysts. Maybe she’s having a midlife crisis.”
“Romance?” asked Mrs. O’Leary. She wasn’t surprised to hear it. Not because Victoria Moon King was likely involved with any man, but because Gayle Donaldson saw Harlequin visions of epic romance in every circumstance. Gayle was married to a fabulously wealthy man, but he was almost never home, preferring the business climate in New York, or maybe it was just the weather he preferred. In any case, he left Gayle to sit at home with little to do other than to read the perhaps two dozen series romance novels that showed up in her mailbox every month. Romance was everywhere, for Gayle. Everywhere, that is, except in her own life. “Anyway,” said Mrs. Donaldson, “I do know that the man in question is now stalking her.”
“Stalking?” replied Mrs. O’Leary. She was on auto-pilot now, repeating key words every now and again to show that she was listening, even though she wasn’t. She was losing interest in the story. It was so obviously off-base. Still, she wanted to keep Gayle on the line. A telling detail might be in the offing, if she listened long enough.
“Yes, stalking. Evidently, he was spying on her from the alley behind their house. Then, in a fit of passion, he broke his way through their very fence! It was quite a manly display. Though it was a bit gauche, if you want my opinion.”
“Busted through the fence, you say?” said Mrs. O’Leary. That was interesting. A real-life, verifiable fact, that. “There’s a hole in their fence, then?”
“I heard,” said Mrs. Donaldson in a conspiratorial whisper, “that he’s Swedish.” Her tone suggested that nothing more need be said.
“Well, goodness,” said Mrs. O’Leary. “Swedish.” But she was finished listening to Mrs. Donaldson. Surely, there wasn’t really a paramour in Victoria Moon King’s closet, Swedish or not. Therefore, the hole in the fence must have been made by something else. One of those creatures from the newspaper, perhaps, that the high school principal was so concerned about? One of Mrs. O’Malley’s Darque Men? She wondered how she might receive verification of the hole in the fence, perhaps get some dimensions. She excused herself to Mrs. Donaldson—the teapot was starting to squeal in the kitchen, she said—then hung up.
Who could she call, this late at night? Who might have any knowledge of Victoria Moon King’s fence? Or, barring that, could go have a look at said fence? Her mind raced through possibilities. Though it was, she considered, getting awfully late to be calling anyone.
She looked at the clock again. Almost 11:30. And this, dear reader, is an important detail. Mrs. O’Leary looked at the clock on her mantle at 11:26 p.m. on Friday night, when, were this a more ordinary night in front of the TV, her attention would no doubt have been drawn to her window, where a dark shadow appeared for a hanging instant and then was gone. It was Schmoozeglutton. She wouldn’t find his footprints until early the following morning.