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As soon as I got back from giving my statement to Officer Reyes, I joined Morticia and Georgia, who were out back by Marsha’s cottage getting ready for the evening festivities.
Oliver had dredged up a couple of dilapidated folding tables from the basement under the Bird Cage, Georgia had covered them with clean sheets, and Morticia was swathing the edges with battery-operated fairy lights.
The effect was quite pretty, and I told them so.
“We know how to make the best of what we’ve got,” said Morticia.
“That should be the Little Tombstone motto,” I said.
“Even if the best ain’t much?” said Georgia.
“Where’s Maxwell?” I asked.
“He’s got the animals inside,” said Georgia pointing to the open doorway into her cottage. “He’s getting them all into costume.”
“What are we in for?” I asked.
“Well, it was going to be a reprise of sea chanties from his birthday party, but I’ve been informed that a new number has been added to his repertoire.”
“Oh?”
“Ya Got Trouble.”
“Have I got trouble?”
“No, the song from the Music Man: Ya Got Trouble. It’s an emphatic statement of fact.”
“I can’t wait,” I said. I’d have enquired further into the evening’s entertainment, but my phone dinged.
It was a text from Roberta Bagley consisting of a single word: Done.
I immediately dialed Roberta’s number.
“You got Dale and Tilda to leave? How?”
Not even the police had been sanguine about such an outcome.
“I brought Nancy with me,” she said.
Nancy Flynn and her sidearm, most likely, but I didn’t like to ask questions. It was probably better not to know.
“You should have seen Dale’s face,” said Dr. Bagley and giggled, her sorrows forgotten for a moment, or perhaps it was mild hysteria brought on by the stress of everything she’d endured over the past week. “The police came to see me,” Roberta continued, her voice sobering. “They seem to think Duke’s death might not have been an accident.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I don’t know what to think.”
I had a feeling things were going to get even more distressing for poor Dr. Bagley before this was all over.
After I hung up with Roberta, I went inside Georgia’s cottage to see what horrors Maxwell was visiting upon Earp and Hercules in the name of wholesome family entertainment.
I had expected something at least a little ridiculous in the way of costumery, and my expectations were not disappointed. In keeping with the Victorian-era apparel of the play, Maxwell had done his best to approximate historical attire for the pug and the piglet while still incorporating the sparkly bits he’d picked out previously from Aunt Geraldine’s stash of doggy outfits.
Earp was wearing the same tiny top hat he’d worn as ring bearer for Hank and Phyliss’s wedding, along with a chartreuse sequined vest and a cravat improvised from an old headscarf my late grandmother used to wear to cover her curlers.
Hercules was wearing a wide-brimmed hat constructed from pieces of a yellow foam mattress topper stuck together with hot glue. Maxwell had found some old plastic lilies somewhere, and those too had been glued to the foam base. The whole monstrosity had been anchored to the unwilling piglet's head with a piece of wide, bright blue satin ribbon (source unknown).
“What’s this I hear about: Ya Got Trouble?” I asked Maxwell.
I was expecting a preview of the coming attractions, but Maxwell clamped his mouth shut and went silent.
“I guess I’ll have to wait and see,” I said. “Well, break a leg.”
“Why would I break a leg?”
“It’s just an expression.”
“It’s kind of mean.”
“I don’t actually mean I want you to break your leg.”
“Then why say it?”
The kid was right. When he’s right, he’s right. Maxwell is much like Georgia in that way.
I pulled out my phone and looked up the expression, “break a leg,” just so Maxwell wouldn’t think I was some kind of monster.
“Break a leg is an English idiom used in the context of theater to wish a performer good luck,” I read aloud. “It is an ironic or non-literal saying of uncertain origin (also known as a dead metaphor) commonly said to actors and musicians before they go on stage to perform.”
“But why do they say it?” Maxwell persisted.
“There are about ten theories listed here,” I said, “but none are compelling.”
“Well, I’d rather not break a leg!”
“Fine,” I said. “I withdraw my previous statement and wish you success in your performance.”
By the time I’d finished my idiomological wrangling with Maxwell and gone back outside, guests had started to gather outside Marsha’s new cottage.
The woman of the hour was there, appropriately groomed and coiffured for the occasion. I had worried when Ledbetter had first announced that his mother intended to take up residence with us at Little Tombstone that it would be unbearable for everyone involved.
Marsha Ledbetter was a retired school principal, former head of her home-owner’s association, and unquestionably the sort of person who needed a challenging project to prevent her from trying to micromanage everyone in her orbit.
Fortunately, she’d arrived to join the Little Tombstone family just as Georgia was offered a full-time engineering position with a firm in Santa Fe, and the problem of what to do about Maxwell’s education had reared its ugly head.
Mrs. Ledbetter had been a godsend, as it turned out.
As I stood on the front step of Georgia’s cottage and watched Marsha accept the admiration of the guests on the remarkable transformation the rundown tourist cottage had undergone in a remarkably short time span, I looked around for the man responsible.
Oliver, our handyman at Little Tombstone, had been working overtime for months, first to complete the apartment over the Curio Shop to house Hank and his new wife. Then, to take the tiny cottage slated for demolition and turn it into something even a woman like Marsha Ledbetter would be proud to call home.
I found Oliver up a ladder round back of Marsha’s cottage, attaching one last bit of fascia board to the eaves.
“You’ve done a beautiful job,” I told Oliver when he’d finished hammering in the last nail and climbed down the ladder. “Marsha’s very pleased, and I think we both know what an accomplishment that is, considering what a wreck this place used to be.”
Oliver smiled at the compliment.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said.
I expected him to bring up something about one of the buildings or perhaps announce that he was taking a much-deserved vacation, but it wasn’t either of those things.
“I heard about Duke Dundee,” said Oliver.
“How?”
“Janey overheard Nancy talking about it at the Bird Cage.”
Word was finally getting out. It wouldn’t be long now until everybody knew.
“It’s a tragedy,” I said.
Oliver didn’t seem to share my sentiments because his next words were, ”I don’t think it was an accident.”
That made a growing number of us around Amatista, but I wanted to know why exactly Oliver held that view, so I kept quiet and waited for him to divulge his reasons for thinking so.