Murder At The Buckstaff Bathhouse

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My name is Doreen Sizemore. I’m a born and bred Kentuckian and I’m seventy-one years old. I still got tolerable good health, all my own teeth, and no cataracts yet that I know of. I been taking care of my sister-in-law for the past few months way down here in San Antonio, Texas. That’s where she and my baby brother, Ralph, live.

Frankly, right now I’m so mad at my brother for taking my good nature and hard work for granted that I could just spit. In all my years on this earth I have never minded helping a body out, but I do hate feeling like I’m being used by people, and that’s exactly what Ralph’s been doing from the moment I stepped foot in his house until Carla’s hair started coming back in after her chemo treatments.

I don’t mind helping Carla none, poor little thing. She’s one of them women who seem to think that if’n she’s real quiet and mousey nobody will notice her and won’t bother to hurt her or say something mean to her. I suppose that works in the animal kingdom. If you blend in with the foliage, the hawk won’t eat you because it can’t see you. But from what I can see, that kind of thinking don’t work none too good in a marriage.

While I’ve been down here, I’ve been trying to talk to her about standing up for herself a little more. I thought it might help her after I was gone, but it’s hard for a woman to stand up for herself when she feels so bad from the chemo treatments she can’t even keep down more than a spoonful of Doreen’s homemade chicken noodle soup at a time.

So there I was, babying Carla along, cooking one thing after another that might tempt her appetite, when my brother comes home from where he works cleaning out the septic systems of San Antonio, Texas.

“Doreen,” he said. “Fix me one of them grilled peanut butter, brown sugar, and banana sandwiches Mama used to make us. You know, the kind Elvis Pressley liked. And while you’re at it, how about slicing it diagonal? Sandwiches just taste better sliced diagonal. And I want me some sweet iced-tea, too.”

I suppose it weren’t a terrible thing he was asking of me. A sandwich and some tea. I mean, Ralph does work hard and it ain’t like he’s got work that he likes or nothing. He just does whatever he can find that’ll pay him a half-way decent pay check. That’s what happens when a boy runs off and joins the navy before he’s even graduated from high school, and then gets himself kicked out for misconduct. It like to broke me and mama’s heart, both of them things did.

Anyway—where was I?

Oh yes. It was the tone of his voice that set my teeth on edge. There was no “please” or “thank you,” in his asking neither. It sounded to me like Ralph had stopped appreciating the sacrifice I was making for him and Carla by being all the way down there in Texas and he was starting to treat me like I was some kind of cheap, second-hand, major household appliance.

Truth be told, I was starting to feel like a household appliance and a cranky one at that. I’d been working my fingers to the bone trying to keep that big ole house going he and Carla went and bought, and his stinky work clothes washed and ironed, and groceries in the house, and meals fixed, and dishes washed up, and that weird-looking rat-dog of Carla’s fed and let in and out of the door a couple hundred times a day and well, my feet hurt, my back hurt, and I’d just about had it.

Take that dog for instance. Me and him had to come to an understanding early on. He kept out of my way, and I fed and watered him in spite of wishing I’d never laid eyes on the ugly thing. I mean, really. Why would anyone go and breed a dog to look like that? And why would someone actually pay money for him like Carla had?

In my neck of the woods, most people don’t pay good money for dogs—mostly, dogs just show up on your doorstep looking for a home. I’ve had a lot of good porch dogs in my life and not a one of them did I pay for. Of course, they weren’t some fancy breed that you could ever tell of. And some of them weren’t all that smart. And none of them had any of them papers I hear tell about. But they were fine for petting and barking at people and being sappy-glad each time I come home from the grocery store or my hair appointment, but that’s about all I ever needed a dog for anyways.

Thinking of dogs makes me start wondering about how my old tom cat is doing back home in South Shore, Kentucky. Esther, who is married to my second cousin, Bobby Joe, and has a new colicky baby and lives next door is feeding that stray cat for me while I’m down here and I haven’t heard from her for awhile.

Funny thing, I miss that cat—bad attitude, open claws, and all. That tom has some scars and some age on him, but he’s still spitting, fighting, and surviving. Reminds me a little bit of Your’s Truly. I got a few scars of my own and if you try to mess with me, the claws will come out. Guess that’s the reason me and that tom get along so well. Neither one of us is going down without a fight and we recognize the warrior in each other’s eyes.

Right now, my brother Ralph is fixing to see some big-time claws if he don’t figure out his way around a can opener right quick. Goodness! What’s he think I do all day that I got time to be a short-order cook for him?

In my opinion, I been here about one week too long. Carla’s getting stronger, I’m getting nastier-tempered, and that Ralph has done got on my last nerve. He even left cigarette ashes all over the kitchen table last night and didn’t clean them up.

Sometimes, when Ralph is down here in Texas and I’m up there in Kentucky, I get all homesick for the sweet little boy he used to be. I remember all them wilted dandelions he’d bring me in his chubby little hands.

After the first week of cleaning up after his mess, I didn’t feel homesick for him no more. That sweet little boy is done and gone and a selfish sixty-five year old man has been left in his place.

Anyway, I told him I was going home, and I also told him that considering how much work I’d done for him, he was going to pay for my train ride. There’s only so much my nerves can take. I’ve just about had it with being gone from home so long, even if I was doing the Lord’s work. I mean taking care of Carla is the Lord’s work, that is. The Lord’s work ain’t fixing no Elvis Presley sandwiches for my lazy brother.

“Why not stay awhile longer?” he wheedled. “I’ll take you with me to a wine tasting. You know we got real good wine makers around San Antonio now. It’s a thriving business.”

He said this like I was supposed to be impressed and that made me mad. He knows I’m a teetotaler. Always have been and always will be. Just like my mama. Like my daddy, too, after he got locked away in the county jail that one time for disturbing the peace. That’s why my sister, Janice, took little Mira to go see him in jail when she was only two-years-old and the prettiest little thing you ever saw.

“Imagine!” Daddy said after Janice had bailed him out. “A man’s grandbaby having to see him sitting there in a jail cell!” He never took a drink again after that one incident and a better man never lived.

Nope. I’m not interested in no wine tasting. I got trouble enough keeping myself on the straight and narrow even with all my faculties still intact.

I tell you what I am interested in, though. I wouldn’t mind a’tall seeing the Alamo. We got kin that got killed there. Long way back, of course. At least that’s what mama always said and she was a Bowie. She said she was only a real distant cousin, but we always did claim Jim Bowie as blood. He was a Kentucky boy. I read up on him in a magazine once when I was young. Did you know he was sick the day he and his friends lost the battle? He was so sick, he was bedridden, but he died fighting in his bed. They say he emptied both his revolvers into them Mexicans when they came after him and then took that knife of his they named after him and fought until they killed him.

According to the magazine article, when they told his mama that her Jim was gone, she said, "I'll wager no wounds were found in his back."

I always loved that. She knew her boy. Knew he’d never turn his back on a fight. Maybe it was knowing there was Bowie blood flowing in my veins that made me a little bit feistier than some old women. I decided back when I was still a young’n after I read that magazine article that when it came my time to die, there weren’t gonna be no wounds in my back, either.

When Ralph invited me to stay another day or two after we saw that Carla was doing better, and offered to take me to that wine-tasting, I told him no-thank-you, but that I would like to go see the Alamo while I was still there in Texas.

Ralph said it weren’t nothin’ much to see. Not worth taking his day off to go look at a pile of old rocks.

So we got into a big fuss and I told him what I thought of him and Carla took back to her bed with a sick headache and I decided I was going home the next day even if I never did get to see no Alamo.

That Ralph is just spoiled rotten. Me and Janice and mama are probably to blame. We babied him something awful when he was little. It was hard not to. He was a doll-baby with them brown curls and big brown eyes. Ralphie was the sweetest little boy. Once.

Where was I again?

Oh yes. He was just fixing to buy me a ticket back home when my niece (Janice’s daughter, Mira, who lives in Arkansas) called to check on Carla. Ralph was a-talking to her, and telling her that Carla was better and that I was going home on the Texas Eagle train, when she let out such a squeal that I heard it coming out of the telephone receiver clear over on the other side of the kitchen.

“Oooh!” she squealed. “Tell Aunt Doreen she’s got to come stay with me awhile. The train comes right through Little Rock. I bet it won’t cost one cent more for her to stop for a visit. Tell her I said, pretty please.”

Now, I have to admit. I was torn. On one hand, I couldn’t hardly wait to get back to South Shore, Kentucky and see how my beat-up tom cat and my house plants were faring. (I’d asked Esther to water them, but with that squalling baby, who knows if she remembered a thing I told her about them plants or not.)

On the other hand, I was downright flattered by Mira’s enthusiasm for my presence.

Ralph held his hand over the phone receiver. “What do you want me to tell her, Doreen?”

“Oh,” I said, putting away the mayonnaise jar from where I’d been fixing myself a cheese and tomato sandwich. “Tell her I’ll come for a day or two, but that’s all. I gotta get myself back to South Shore one of these days or my house’ll forget I live there.”

He laughed, but I was serious. I’ve seen houses just kind of give up when their owners go away for a long, long time. Like they start sagging in on their selves all depressed-looking. I know it don’t make no sense. Houses ain’t got thoughts or brains or feelings. I know it’s just a fancy of mine, but still… I miss my little dump. Me and it has been together a long time.

So I pack up my little red suitcase with rollers that my hairdresser back home, Holly, loaned me and Carla said thank-you and hugged my neck and cried, and Ralph put me on that train the next day. Mira promised to be waiting at the train station in Little Rock, Arkansas to pick me up.

I ain’t never been to Little Rock, although I surely did hear enough about it back in the sixties when all that mess happened down there. To tell the truth, I weren’t all that impressed with the place when we pulled into town. Like most cities, looks like it just grew without any thought to trying to being pretty.

By the time I got there, I was real proud of how good I’d gotten at traveling by train. I knew how to pull that little foot rest out and everything. I have to admit, though, I did keep a sharp eye out for anything illegal going on. Discovering a dead body on a train like I did on the way down to San Antonio, tends to make a person a tad suspicious.

Oh shoot. I’ve gone and lost what I was trying to say again. What was I talking about?

Oh yes. Mira. That’s what I was talking about. I was going to tell you about that Mira. She was always such a pretty little girl when her mama used to bring her home to visit us in the summer. Bright blue eyes, curly brown hair, and just as pert as you please. Never saw a stranger, that one. She and Janice stopped coming after mama died. I ain’t seen Mira since she was in her twenties and Janice passed away and ended up being toted home to be buried. It has hurt my heart some, missing my sister and my niece. Kinda surprised me that Mira wants me to come visit her now so bad.

Mira has not exactly lived a moral life. She eloped with a college instructor half-way through her first year in college, three weeks after he divorced his wife. Made a body wonder just what they had been up to before his divorce. Weren’t none of my business, of course. She wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. I do some figuring and decide Mira must be a little over forty now. Twenty years is a long time not to see someone you used to teach how to make a blow-whistle out of a blade of grass—but that’s what happens when family moves far, far away like Janice went and done.

Yeah, I’ve missed her. Still miss my sister, too, but that can’t be helped.

Anyway, I’m a’looking and a’looking and not seeing her. And then this grown woman who is about ten sizes bigger than the girl I remember hits me like a freight train, a’hugging me and a’crying and carrying-on and saying she’s so glad to see me.

I assume this must be Mira but it is a shock. We’re a big-boned people but Mira looks like she’s been feeding way too good for a long time.

Well now, I’m not exactly a hugging person. Never have been. None of our people ever were. Except Mira’s been away a long time and I guess this is one of them habits she’s picked up here in Little Rock. Poor little thing. So I hug her back the best I can considering I’m still holding onto my suitcase and the pretty new pocket book straight out of Carla’s closet that Carla gave me because it has a strap you can sling around your neck and leave both hands free to travel with.

“This will make things easier on the train,” Carla said. “I want you to have it.”

I miss that sweet girl already and I’m starting to feel bad I didn’t stay longer. I hope she can keep herself fed. That Ralph sure won’t help.

After hugging the breath out of me, Mira took me outside and stuffed me into the oddest colored vehicle I ever saw. It reminded me of Pepto-Bismol and made me feel queasy when I looked at it. Mira was proud as punch over it.

“I got this for selling Mary Kay Cosmetics,” she said. “I’ve been the top salesperson in Little Rock now for three straight years in a row.”

Well, that explained some things. Now I understood all the make-up on Mira’s face. She didn’t look bad, exactly. She looked good, but it was easy to see she’d spent an awful lot of time making her face look pretty while the rest of her was hanging out over her skin-tight quintuple X jeans. Poor thing.

“That’s real nice,” I said.

She chatted along, telling me all about living in Little Rock and all the things they got there that we ain’t got in South Shore, Kentucky. Just like her mama, Janice, always did, God rest her soul, who acted like she’d invented living in the big city.

I didn’t think it was necessary for her to brag so much. I know I don’t exactly live in no thriving metropolis. My neck of the woods is struggling something terrible. If it weren’t for government checks and free lunches at the schools, we’d probably all be out in the woods hunting ginseng and frying up possums just to keep body and soul together.

I didn’t say anything, though. Just kept nodding and exclaiming over all the wonders of Little Rock she was telling me about. It seemed to me like she was trying a little too hard to convince me how wonderful things were. There was a bright, shiny sound to her voice like it had some fake inside of it.

The minute we walked into her mini-mansion, she broke down crying and I found out why. She’d been just barely holding herself together. Turns out that college instructor who’d swept her off her feet when she was a freshman had decided he needed his space. He told her he needed some time to figure things out and he’d moved his stuff out lock-stock-and barrel to “find himself.”

That had been four months ago and what he’d found weren’t himself. It was another college co-ed he’d shacked up with.

I could have told her he would do that in the very beginning if she’d of asked me. Men don’t leave a decent wife and a nice house unless they got their eye on somebody else. They just don’t. That business of trying to find themselves? That’s just husband-speak for I got my eye on somebody a whole lot better-looking than you.

I know these things. I watch my soaps and a body can also pick up an awful lot of good advice at the beauty shop, too. Plus we had us a deacon once down at church who told his wife he wanted to find himself…..but that’s a whole other story.

She said he’d asked her just that week for a divorce since he wanted to marry his new little lady love. Mira was so broken up about it, she said all she wanted was her mama to tell her it was going to be all right. Unfortunately, I’m the closest thing to a mama right now that Mira’s got.

The girl most definitely needed a shoulder to cry on and my shoulders have sopped up a lot of people’s tears over the years. Like I said before, I never resented helping a body out—especially kin—I just take exception to being taken for granted.

So there I was with my coat still on and Holly’s little red suitcase still packed, sitting on a couch, a’holding Mira, and her just a’ sobbing and boo-hooing something awful, the poor little thing.

I patted and said all the things that a woman says to another woman when things like this happen. Like she’s gonna find someone else who’ll treat her better and she doesn’t deserve this, and that fancy college-teacher husband of hers is nothing but a poop-head. I guess the Lord had known all along that Doreen needed to sit a spell in Little Rock, Arkansas to help Mira get over a broken heart.

I missed Kentucky something awful, though. There’s so much heart-break in this world it sometimes makes me want to just go crawl into my little house on the river and lock the door behind me.

I finally got Mira dried up, and I made us some nice rice pudding, which was her favorite when she was a little girl, although I’m afraid that Mira doesn’t need a whole lot of rice pudding these days. I didn’t say anything while she ate most of the pot, though, alternately licking her spoon and boo-hooing.

We finally got ready for bed, and boy, was I ready to lay my head on a pillow! Looked to me like that mini-mansion of Mira’s would have plenty of bedrooms to choose from, but Mira had other ideas. She wanted her Aunt Doreen to sleep with her in her big ole King-sized bed even though I warned her that I snored real bad. She said she didn’t care, she was just so tired of being scared and alone.

It was a shame, though. There must have been five bedrooms in that house, and every last one of them, except for Mira’s, unoccupied. That’s something I don’t understand. Why would anyone need that big of a house unless they have a passel of kids?

I actually asked Mira that question. She said it was because her husband wanted them to live in the right zip code which didn’t make any sense at all to me. The way I figure it, a zip code is just numbers the post office saw fit to complicate things by making us have to stick them on a letter. It don’t have nothing to do with why you pick a house out.

While I tried to parse it all out, she said not to worry about it because she was probably going to lose the house anyway.

I asked why.

She said it was because the house was under water.

That confused me. Her shrubs had looked kind of puny to me when we pulled in, and she’d told me they had been having a drought. It took her some explaining before I understood that they had been paying for ten years on this monstrosity of a house and they still owed more on it than they could get if she sold it.

I know I’m just an old, ignorant, Kentucky woman, but buying ten times more house than you need or can afford just to have the right numbers to write on your envelopes to hand to the postman does not make any sense to me. It made me even more homesick. I love my little two-bedroom house with the yellow kitchen and creaky front porch. Even though whenever it rains too long and the muddy water starts creeping up the river bank fixing to flood, me and my neighbors start worrying about whether our houses might end up underwater for real.

I patted Mira’s shoulder and told her not to be afraid. That she could always come live with Your’s Truly if she ever needed to. I said that my place might not be fancy, but I could put a roof over her head if she ever needed it. Like I said before, I don’t mind helping a person out, especially if that person is kin.

I was trying to make her feel better, but all I managed to do was make the poor girl start crying again.

“Oh, Aunt Doreen,” she sobbed. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so lonely.”

Then she hugged the breath out of me again. I was glad when she finished crying herself to sleep. I climbed out of bed real easy-like and made myself a nest in the bedroom next door where I could hear her if she called out for me. I ain’t kidding when I say I snore. Shoot, sometimes I get to snoring so loud I scare my own fool self!

Anyway, the next morning, Mira looked like a train wreck when she woke up, but after she got done applying all the stuff from the pink Mary Kay bottles she had on her dresser, she looked pretty good.

Then she said something that stopped me in my tracks. She said she wanted to get out of town for the day and go have a spa treatment and she wanted me to go with her and she wanted me to get a spa treatment, too.

I said I did not want to go.

She said she knew just the spa to take me to that would make me feel all better.

I told her I was not the one who had been feeling bad.

She started crying again.

Now, I’ve noticed that there’s times when deep grief looks a whole lot like crazy. Mira was grieving that low-down snake of a husband of hers something awful, and it was making her a little crazy in the head. I absolutely did not need to have done to me whatever it is that they do to people in them spas in order to feel better. I felt just fine. I felt like a seventy-one year old woman who didn’t have nothing wrong with her in the first place.

But when someone you love is hurting that bad, you humor them. You just do. Besides, she said we were only driving an hour away to Hot Springs, Arkansas, which I’d read about in a magazine once and was a little curious about. Plus, I figured she couldn’t cry and drive at the same time. I also hoped that whatever they did in them Hot Spring spas might perk her spirits up.

So we packed ourselves up into her Pepto-Bismol mini-van and headed out to get ourselves worked on. I just hoped whatever it was she had in mind wouldn’t hurt too bad. I read in one of the them fashion magazines at the beauty shop that some of them fancy places do a procedure called a bikini wax. I’m not entirely sure what’s all involved, but it sounds right painful. I decided right then and there that if anyone comes at me with anything involving hot wax, I’m going to respectfully decline. There are some things a body just shouldn’t have to put up with in the name of beauty. Ain’t likely I’m going to be wearing a bikini any time soon, either.

Shoot, I’ll tell you a little secret if you promise not to tell nobody. I accidentally bought me some white bikini panties one time. I hadn’t had my glasses checked for a while, and I thought I was getting my regular kind that cover a body up like God intended. It was an accident that I bought them things, but I didn’t want to waste my money and I’d already opened up the little plastic bag they came in, so I couldn’t hardly take them back to the Dollar store.

I tried to wear them that same morning I opened the package and that was the most miserable Sunday I ever had in my life. Worst thing was, I couldn’t do nothing about it. And it was potluck Sunday. I just had to endure them little bitty things a riding up where they shouldn’t be riding up until the last casserole dish was washed and dried. Then I got myself home and stuffed them things deep into the trash. I didn’t want Horace, who picks up our trash, to see them little panties laying there and start telling people that Doreen had lost her mind and was out trying to find herself a man or something.

Sometimes, in spite of not wanting to live nowhere else, living in a small town ain’t quite what it’s cracked up to be--especially when you got to worry about what people might say over what you put in the trash.

Well, I’ve gone and done it again. Lost my train of thought. I know I did not intend to go down that rabbit hole and start talking about my accidental purchase of bikini panties.

Oh yes—the spa. That’s what I was talking about. When we got to downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, I could surely see why it got that name. Ain’t no mystery there. Everywhere you look there are fountains with steam rising off them. Mira told me that people come from miles around to fill up their empty milk jugs with that hot mineral water, and people used to come and soak and soak in that mineral water. Doctors would even write prescriptions for it. How long to soak, and then how long to spend walking along the promenade walkway they had built special for health purposes. Soak, walk, soak, walk.

They called it “taking the waters” and only rich people could afford it. Rich people can come up with the darndest ideas. Sounded like a big waste of time to me, but I’m not judging. Maybe rich people got problems I don’t know nothing about.

Anyway, Mira said me and her was going to check into the only remaining bathhouse that gave old-fashioned water spa treatments.

I felt relieved. I’m fine with water—being raised beside of the river and all. In fact, I never feel entirely well when I get too far away from it, although I don’t think anyone in their right mind would think soaking in the Ohio River would make them healthier. Too many chemical plants up and down it. No, I’m just relieved because if the Buckstaff Bathhouse is that old-fashioned, I figure there’s a right good chance no one is going to try to come at me with hot wax.

Now, seventy-one ain’t really all that old compared to, say, ninety. There’s things I ain’t ever had to do without—like cars and electricity. I’d like to say that stepping into the Buckstaff was like stepping back into time, but it weren’t any time I’d seen in my day. You could tell that this had been one fancy, expensive place in its day.

First off, everything was marble and tile. Little bitty tile on the floor in fancy shapes and designs. I stood there admiring it in the foyer while Mira made the arrangements at the desk for our spa treatment. Mira said it was a gift from her to me for listening to her caterwaul last night for so long.

There was some Asian people paying for the water treatment, too, a girl and a young man. We had to wait while they got their English sorted out and everyone understood each other. Then we got on an elevator with a cage-like door that they closed and a girl sitting there on a stool operating it. That was a different experience all in its own self. I’m just barely old enough to remember there being an elevator operator at that fancy Marting’s Department store over the bridge in Portsmouth, Ohio back when I was a kid.

The girl was real nice as we went up to the second story. It turns out that women had a whole floor to theirselves. The men’s was on the main floor, the women’s on the second, which didn’t seem fair, but I try not to complain unless it’s really important.

We got up there on the second floor and there was these big, open, echoey spaces everywhere with lots of light. Nothing smelled like chlorine, neither, like it always did over at Portsmouth at the Dreamland pool I used to go to as a kid. Nope. The whole place just smelled like pure water. And everywhere I looked underfoot there’s all these fancy tiles and I think of the hours it must have took to get them fancy tiles placed just right.

Mira really should have prepared me better for what came next, but she didn’t. The elevator girl took each of us to a little tiny dressing room with two skinny lockers in each of them. There was a white wooden chair to sit on, and a key she showed me how to use and then loop over my wrist with a stretchy, plastic thing.

“Take off all your clothes. Put them in here. Lock the locker. Then wait for someone to come put a sheet around you,” the elevator girl said and left.

Now, this put me in a quandary. When she said “take off all your clothes” did she mean ALL my clothes?

“Mira,” I said through the petition. “Did she mean…”

“Yes, Aunt Doreen. Underwear, too. You’re going to be getting into a bathtub.”

So I took off even my skivvies, stuffed everything into the little locker, locked it, looped the key around my wrist, memorized the number 40 that was on the locker, and then sat down on that white painted wooden chair. I was just as naked and goose-bumpy as a raw turkey and I was not happy about it. Then I started wondering how many other bare bottoms had sat on that painted wooden chair, and I stood up real quick again.

Goodness! The things I get myself into trying to be nice to people! If I’d known listening to Mira boo-hoo last night would cause me to end up like this, I’d have turned around and gotten back on the train.

Just about the time I got ready to give up and put my clothes back on, some woman came to the curtain and said, “knock knock.”

Now, all I’m saying is it’s hard to know exactly what to do when all you got on you is goose flesh and some strange woman says “knock knock” into your curtain.

A need to say “who’s there” came over me, as well as a desire to giggle at all this silliness Mira was putting me through, but I stifled my need to try to be funny and just said, “Come in.”

“Turn your back to me, honey,” the woman said, without opening the curtain. “And raise your arms.”

So I did that. Feeling like a dad-blamed fool the whole time. I seen some long, black arms whip a sheet around me quick as could be, and then the woman flipped the edges over my shoulders in what she called “a toga.”

“Now turn around and follow me,” she said, in a real kind voice. “My name is LaToya and I’ll be taking care of you today.”

LaToya was about my height, had pretty, braided hair, and a real nice smile on her face. She must have seen the look of I’m-not-so-sure-about-this on mine because she tried to reassure me. “It’s going to feel real good. I promise.”

Next thing I knowed, she’s taken me to another little cubicle with a big, white, claw-footed bathtub big enough for three people to sit in. Seems like overkill for just me. It was filled with water and there was a little footstool for me to step up into it. I tried to take my sheet in with me, but she pulled it away and there I was, climbing into a bathtub as stark naked as a two-year-old getting a bath by its mother.

I stepped into the mineral water and almost stepped right back out again. It was almost—but not quite—scalding hot. I kinda danced around some before I decided I could stand it to sit down, but it weren’t easy. LaToya had me sink down into it and stretch out until my toes were touching the bottom of the bathtub underneath the faucet, and she laid some kind of a board behind my back to relax onto, and she stuck a rolled up towel behind my neck, and then she turned something on that looked like my cousin Benny’s little outboard trolling motor. It started riling up the water something serious.

“You just relax now,” LaToya said, and closed the curtain to my little cubicle.

I have a confession to make. I was raised with no bathtub at all. No shower neither. We washed ourselves in the river most weeks. In the winter I was raised taking a once-a-week all over bath in a tin tub in the same water Janice and Ralph had theirs.

When a person grows up without a bathtub, you never really get over the luxury of having one and I finally let myself relax and just luxuriated like I knew Mira and LaToya was wanting me to.

That water felt so good a bubbling away. Kinda made everything I’d been through the past weeks drain on out of my body.

I was just about to doze off when LaToya says, “Knock Knock” again and brought me in two little plastic cups of mineral water. “Just sip it” she said. “It’s warm.”

Well, I started to sip it and was shocked that it was as hot as the bathwater.

“It comes straight out of the ground like that,” she explained. “It’s just mineral water and real good for you.”

So I sipped down two plastic glasses of water so hot you could of stuck a Lipton tea bag in it and made tea. Then LaToya left me alone again and I sunk down deep into the water and for the next twenty minutes I felt like I was one of them rich women who used to come and spend weeks here.

“Knock Knock,” LaToya said, from outside the curtain. “Bathtub time is up.”

I hated to leave that big old bathtub, but she was right. It was time. The heat had already made my legs a little wobbly. LaToya helped me out, wrapped me back into my sheet, and we went marching off to what she called a sitz bath. By this time, I had lost all track of Mira and I was beginning to lose track of time, too. I was starting to warm up to just doing whatever I was told because everything I was being told to do was feeling awfully good.

Then LaToya had me put my shiny-hiney right smack down in a porcelain seat full of hot water. She leaned me back, stuck my feet on a towel-covered footstool, and draped me with that sheet again. This, she told me, was supposed to limber up my lower back. She forgot to whip the curtain closed this time and for a few minutes, I had a view and could see what all was going on around me.

There was one young woman lying quietly on a blue, cushioned, table who was kinda interesting. I knew I had seen her before. She was the small, Asian girl who had been signing in ahead of me and Mira when we came through the front door. It surprised me that she had chosen to wear a purple bathing suit underneath her sheet. I had no idea a bathing suit was allowed in this place. This one weren’t no two piece either. It was a one-piece with a skirt.

“Oops!” LaToya walked by and whipped the curtain shut. “Sorry about that.”

Once again, I was enclosed in my little cubicle, which was fine with me. I hadn’t gotten all that much privacy at Ralph and Carla’s. I liked the feeling of being in this little cocoon.

I hate to admit it now, but I spent just a little time feeling superior to the Asian girl because I had started feeling like an old hand at that sheet business. I was enjoying the whole process and didn’t need the prop of a purple bathing suit to feel comfortable.

LaToya came back in about ten minutes about the time my lower back started feeling all loosey-goosey. Then I got the mummy treatment over where the Asian girl had been a few minutes earlier. Hot, wet towels were wrapped around my feet and legs and behind my back and neck, and then LaToya put a nice cold towel over my forehead, and handed me two glasses of iced mineral water to drink.

After I’d downed all that water, she laid me back and covered me up with that sheet again.

“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she said.

Okay, I admit it. I fell asleep and didn’t know nothing at all until she woke me up and broke the bad news that the steam cabinets were not working. I took a look at the metal, closet-looking things with a hole for a person’s head to poke through and decided that I was fine with the fact that they were broke.

She took me to this needle shower, which shot at me from all directions from the top of my head to my knees for two minutes. It was like being in a waterfall and I could hardly get my breath. Then LaToya dried me off, wrapped that sheet around me one more time—it was starting to get a little wrinkled and draggy by now--and left me sitting in the room where I’d get a massage.

Except for a few hugs at church now and then, I don’t get touched a lot, and I weren’t sure I was going to be comfortable having some stranger a’rubbing on me, but a nice lady named Tracy started working out all the kinks in my shoulders and back and asked me what in the world I’d been doing to be so knotted up.

That’s all she asked, but it surely did unleash a flood of words. I don’t know what got into me. I started telling her everything. She heard about my selfish brother, and Carla, and that whole mess of finding a dead body on the train to San Antonio. Don’t know if she bothered to listen to a word I said, but by the time that girl was done, I was purring like my old stray tom cat the first time I gave him a whole can of tuna all for his own self.

I’m not sure I’d ever have gotten off that table if she hadn’t told me she was done. She showed me the way to the locker rooms, me with that sheet wrapped around me, dragging it behind me like a draggled-tail chicken, but happy as a clam I was feeling so good.

I pulled the curtain closed behind me, dropped my sheet on the white wooden chair, inserted my handy-dandy little key that was dangling from the twisty thing on my wrist into the lock, and the locker didn’t open.

I grabbed hold of the locker handle and shook it a bit trying to get it unstuck. That’s when I realize two things at once. I had stuck my key into number 39 instead of number 40, and there was a tiny piece of purple shiny material sticking out of number 39. Unfortunately, my shaking had loosened the door enough that it suddenly flung itself open and a body came tumbling out.

Someone had gone and stuck that little purple-bathing-suited Asian girl inside that locker. I know it only took about a second, but for me, time stood still. I watched that poor girl unfold out onto the floor like it was a slow-motion movie.

I hate to admit it, but I acted like a complete nut. I grabbed my damp sheet, held it up to my chest like it could protect me from whoever had done this terrible thing, and then I backed out of that little cubicle screaming my fool head off.

After that, one of my dizzy spells hit. As I passed out flat on the floor my last thought as I lay there was, “Somebody sure did put a lot of time and thought into laying out this pretty tile floor.”

It ain’t every day that a dead body is found in the Buckstaff. In fact, I think this might have been the only time ever. Lucky me. I sure hope I don’t become a murder magnet like that Miss Jane Marple in all them Agatha Christie novels I used to read when I was a girl. I remember thinking that if I was one of Miss Marple’s friends I’d a’high-tailed it away from that woman as fast as I could since there always seemed to be a dead body showing up every time she took a trip or went to a party.

I woke up from my dizzy spell shivering something awful, with Mira sitting there on the floor in her street clothes patting me and telling me to wake up and one of them police women feeling for a pulse like she thought I was dead. I sat straight up and saw a policeman kneeling beside the dead body and the staff standing around looking upset and miserable. I was awful relieved to find out that Mira had managed to cover the important parts of me up with that sheet. Pretty sure I didn’t accidentally land all that modest.

An Asian man was crying in the corner with a policeman standing there patting him on the shoulder. I recognized him as the man who’d stood in front of us at the desk while the Asian woman signed them in. He was damp and disheveled and looked like he’d just been drug up from the floor beneath where the men-folk got their spa treatments.

I glanced up at LaToya. Her face was set in stone and she didn’t look at me or smile. Tracy weren’t paying any attention to me either, even though she’d been awful kind-acting when she was giving me my massage. Only Mira seemed to really care that I was laying there on the floor. When you get right down to it, the only people you can depend on is nearly always your own kin folk.

“How are you feeling Aunt Doreen?” Mira asked.

“With my fingers.” I weren’t really trying to be smart-alecky, I just didn’t want to get into a rehash of my dizziness problem right now. “I need my clothes.”

“They won’t let you have them yet,” Mira said. “Your clothes are in the locker where they have everything taped off. And…that girl hasn’t been moved yet.”

“I need me some clothes.” I insisted.

“Can my aunt have her clothes?” Mira asked the nearest officer. “She’s cold and she’s had a shock.” Her voice took on a warning tone. “Her son, Owen, is an attorney and has a real short fuse when it comes to his mother. I sure wouldn’t want to be you or the owners of the Buckstaff if Miss Doreen here ends up in the hospital over this.”

“Owen?” I blinked. That fall must have knocked something loose in my brain. I didn’t remember having a son, let alone one named Owen.

“Yes, Aunt Doreen.” Mira winked at me real solemn and meaningful-like. “You know how Own gets when it comes to you and your health.”

It weren’t right for her to lie like that, but as fast-thinking as Mira was, I could see why she was such a good saleswoman that she got to drive a pink mini-van around the city. The mention of my new son, Owen-the-lawyer, made the staff make things move fast.

The next thing I knew, I was dressed in the same kind of clothes that the staff wore—kind of like them shirts and pants that nurses wear—except these had the Buckstaff logo on them instead of little tiger and fishies like some of the nurses wear back home over across the bridge at Southern Ohio Medical Center. Someone even found me a pair of clean fuzzy socks and some slippers. Some underwear woulda been real nice, too, but beggers can’t be choosers.

Like I said. The staff was all there, crowded around. Their expressions were a combination of being sick at heart, and sheer curiosity.

“Who was in charge of this dead woman?” one of the cops asked.

LaToya stepped forward. “Me.”

“Do you have any idea what happened to her?”

“No, sir,” LaToya said. “I’d left her sitting in the massage room to wait for Tracy to finish with Miss Sizemore.”

Tracy spoke up. “When I finished with the Sizemore woman and came out to get the girl who ended up….well, you know…she wasn’t there. Me and LaToya both thought she’d changed her mind about the massage and went home. That’s happened a few times when someone getting a massage groans a little too hard.”

At that point, Tracy shot a stony glance at me like I’d done something wrong. Well, I might have groaned a little. The massage had felt good. I was just trying to let her know I appreciated it.

A policeman started questioning me then and I wished I had something to tell him, but I didn’t. Just that I got mixed up on the lockers and had found a dead girl in one of them. I left out the part about me screaming my fool head off. I did not think it had any bearing on the case.

Mira wanted to get me out of there but I dug in my heels. Maybe it didn’t matter to her, but I wanted my own clothes that I’d stuffed in that locker, and I was going to wait until they let me have it. My pocket-book that Carla gave me was in there, too. It didn’t have a lot of money in it, but it did have my driver’s license and even though I can’t drive real good anymore because of the dizzy spells, I didn’t want to lose it. I was afraid the people at the DMV wouldn’t give me another one.

About that time, I saw a man coming in dressed in street clothes. He took one look at the dead girl sprawled out on the floor in her purple bathing suit and let out a loud sob.

“Darling!” he said. “Who did this to you?”

Of course, she didn’t answer because of being dead and all.

Then he started fighting his way toward her while staff and police people tried to hold him back.

I kept wracking my brain, trying to figure out why he looked so familiar. I lost track of Mira for a while. Then I saw she’d wandered off and was looking out the window at the city of Hot Springs. Just as well. Things were getting kinda cramped where I was.

“Mira?” I walked over to her, just as the man collapsed onto the floor, sobbing and LaToya tried to offer him a cup of that iced hot mineral water. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” She turned her face toward me and I saw she’d been crying again. “It’s just so crowded I thought I’d get out of the way. Are you ready to leave now?”

“I was ready to leave the minute that girl’s body came falling out of the locker.”

“Good,” she said. “I’ll head on downstairs and bring the car up to the front so you won’t have to walk so far.”

“What about my pocketbook and things?”

“Give them this.” She handed me her pink Mary Kay business card. “Tell them to call us when they’re finished and I’ll come get your things.”

They were so busy trying to calm the man down, the police woman who had been patting my hand didn’t pay a whole lot of attention when I handed her Mira’s pink card.

“We’ll be in touch,” she said, and slipped it into her pocket.

Mira didn’t make me sleep in the king-sized bed with her that night. She’d calmed down some by then. I figured that maybe getting dunked in all that mineral water had been good for her.

As for me, although all that mineral water had felt real good at the time, I was all knotted up again because of finding that poor dead girl’s body. I couldn’t stop thinking about who could have done it. LaToya was a big woman, but she weren’t fat. She was muscular. I’d felt that strength when she helped me get out of that big bathtub.

Tracy was a strong woman, too. You’d have to be strong doing all the massaging she done in a day. It took some muscle to put the kind of pressure on my back that she’d done. And to do that all day long every day? She had to have some strength.

I had heard one of the policemen saying they thought the girl’s neck had been broken. It takes some strength to break a person’s neck. How do I know this? Because I used to help Mama wring chicken’s necks before cooking them for Sunday dinner. A human neck had to be a lot harder than that because a chicken’s neck is a lot skinnier.

LaToya hadn’t been looking all that sympathetic when I’d seen her standing there. Tracy had just seemed annoyed. I hadn’t seen enough of the other staff members to read them very well.

I wished I could figure out who had killed the girl, and then go talk to the police about it, but I weren’t a Miss Marple who could astonish the police people with her clues and revelations. I was just plain Doreen Sizemore from South Shore, Kentucky who had the bad luck—twice—of finding a dead body where there shouldn’t be one.

Even though I was as tired as a tail-chasing hound dog, I didn’t sleep well that night. It weren’t only because of the murder either, even though that didn’t help my peace of mind none. I hate to admit it in mixed company, but I got the trots that night. Bad.

If you don’t know what “the trots” are, that’s Kentucky-speak for having to go number two a lot. It comes from trotting back and forth to the outhouse. Except I didn’t have to use the outhouse. I had my pick of Mira’s four shiny bathrooms. I was too sick to appreciate having so much variety. I just used the one right beside my bedroom. An old woman doesn’t always have the best control in the world and I figured I’d better get there fast. My stomach cramped and hurt all night long.

Well, I didn’t die that night. In the morning Mira got on her computer, did a little reading, and told me that from what she could see, sometimes people get diarrhea when they have a good massage because it releases poisons in their body and them poisons have to come out somewhere. That was news to me. If that was what was happening, I surely must have had a lot of toxins in me and I knew who to blame—namely, Ralph. That brother of mine would make anyone’s body toxic.

Mira left early that morning on an emergency beauty call and left me to finish my toast and jam all by my lonesome.

I was finishing the dishes and pondering what a beauty emergency was, when the doorbell rang. I didn’t know how to load Mira’s dishwasher, so I was washing them by hand. I dried my hands off with a dishtowel and went to answer the doorbell, but I was careful. I made sure I looked out the window first. I saw two police people, a woman and a man standing there.

Now I seen enough TV shows to ask to see their badges—which they showed me. Problem was, I never seen a badge close up before so I didn’t know if they was real or not. For all I knew, them badges could have been out of a Cracker-Jack box. But they looked real, and the police people looked real, so I took a chance and invited them in.

I hoped maybe they’d brought my things from the locker, but they said my things would have to stay at the crime scene a while longer. I couldn’t see how my skivvies and dog-eared social security card could help them with figuring out who killed Miss Purple Bathing Suit, so I wished them good-luck with that.

They didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, though. So I tried to be patient and wait for them to come out with whatever it was they wanted to say. They asked where Mira was and kinda smiled when I told them she had gone to help someone who was having a beauty emergency, her being a Mary Kay consultant and all.

What they said next threw me for a loop, though. They wanted to search the house.

I was just flabbergasted. Search Mira’s house? What did they think they were going to find? An illegal shade of lipstick?

I gave them permission though. I knew Mira didn’t have nothing to hide except a broken heart, and my own life has always been an open book. It’s had to be, living in South Shore and all where everyone knows everyone else’s business pretty much all the time. At least it’s been an open book up until them accidental bikini panties I stuffed down deep in the trashcan so Horace wouldn’t see them.

Anyway, they made a sort of hunt through the house, but the only thing they took was Mira’s computer that was in her bedroom. I tried to protest, saying she used it for her Mary Kay business, but they said they needed it. I told them I was pretty sure Mira would be mad about that. They said to call my son, Owen, the attorney if she had a problem with it. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed like one of the officers kinda smirked when he said that--like he knew Owen was a figment of Mira’s imagination.

I felt bad about that. I was kind of warming up to the idea of having a son named Owen.

Well, seeing that computer walk out the door in the arms of the police was pretty upsetting to me because I knew it was all my fault. I should have told them they needed a search warrant instead of just letting them look around inside like the dummy I am. Even though I don’t have no attorney son I ain’t completely ignorant about the law. I watch TV.

I wandered into Mira’s bedroom after that and stood there and stared at the spot on the table where she’d kept her computer. I kept wishing I could go back and do things differently from the moment the doorbell rang. For one thing, I probably would have minded my own business and not opened the door.

Mira had made a little office out of one corner, even though she had rooms to spare, and it surely looked bare without the computer there. Then I noticed something else about her room. There was a picture missing. I remembered it from the first night I’d stayed with her in her room while she boo-hooed.

Suddenly, it struck me. That is why the man in the bathhouse had looked so familiar. He’d been the man in the picture but aged several years. I hadn’t recognized him right off because he’d been dressed in a white tuxedo in the picture.

Now, I know it seems strange that I wouldn’t recognize my own nephew-in-law except a lot of years had gone by since it was taken. Plus a tuxedo can make an even big difference in a man’s looks. I hadn’t attended the wedding because it was so far away and as far as I could remember, my sister had never sent me a picture of Mira’s husband. The framed photo that had been on Mira’s dressing table was the only time I had laid eyes on the man.

For a minute or two, I pondered why she hadn’t acknowledged him while he was down on his knees, and sobbing in the bathhouse. And then I pondered what the connection was between him and girl in the purple bathing suit. And then I pondered over how Mira had turned away while he was there. And then I pondered about the fact that Mira had kind of disappeared early-on in the whole bath house experience.

As everything came together in my mind, I got a bad chill down the back of my neck. I didn’t wait. I took off out of that house like a bat out of hell and thanked the Lord Jesus that the policemen hadn’t quite finished settling the computer into the trunk of the patrol car yet when I came barreling out of that house and didn’t stop until I was right beside that squad car.

“You got room for one more?” I said, panting. “I don’t want to wait around for Mira to come home. Not anymore.”

After a few questions, they stuffed me in the back of that police car and took me to headquarters where I felt a whole lot safer than I did sitting there in Mira’s house waiting for her to come back.

Like I said before. The line between deep grief and crazy sometimes gets a little blurry.

Turns out that Mira had managed to hack into her husband’s e-mail account (he’d used the name of his new girlfriend as his password, the big dope) and she’d read the e-mail between them where they were chatting about the girlfriend taking her brother, who was visiting from Japan, to the Hot Springs Bathhouse the next day at ten o’clock. Turns out them Japanese people like their hot water soaks. Mira’s husband said he didn’t want to do the bathhouse, but he would meet her and her brother afterward for lunch at a certain restaurant near there.

Mira hadn’t been trying to be good to me after all. She’d planned to go to that bathhouse all along so she could get a good look at that girlfriend of her husband’s. She’d planned to confront her and ask for her husband back, but Mira told the police later that the minute she got a good look at that skinny little body, she’d just snapped in the head and twisted that skinny little neck real hard without thinking.

Too late, I remembered Janice telling me about Mira taking some kind of karate when she was a teenager and how she’d been real good at it, too, but I had forgotten all about that. She hadn’t looked much like a karate person when she picked me up at the train station.

Mira said when she’d seen what she’d done, she wanted to cover it up fast before someone found the girl. She looked around and there was no one to see her, so she’d stuffed the girl—who probably didn’t weigh more than eighty pounds--in the first empty locker she came to. Too bad it had to be next to mine. She thought it would give her more time to get out of there than risking someone else coming in and finding her. Mira didn’t sound like an adult woman when she was talking about any of this. She sounded more like a little kid who had broken a dish and hid the pieces hoping no one would find out.

It was a mess.

After I got in the police car, they put out an APB (that stands for All Points Bulletin in case anybody don’t watch the television set like I do) for Mira’s car. They found her two states over trying to make her get away. Poor thing. It’s kinda hard trying to blend in with the traffic when you’re driving a Peptol-Bismol-pink mini-van. The Mary Kay training doesn’t include how to hot-wire and steal someone else’s car when the pink one is making you stick out like a sore thumb.

Turns out there had never been a beauty emergency. Mira had taken off and left me stranded there at her house with no way to get to the train station at all. If the police hadn’t come, I’m not sure how long I’d have sat there waiting for her to come home.

Mira is in a facility for the mentally deranged now. She wrote me the other day and reminded me of my promise to let her move in with me if she ever needed a place to live. She wanted to know if the offer still held good.

I ain’t no coward, and if push comes to shove, just like Jim Bowie, there won’t be no wounds in my back, but I’m thinking that if Mira gets out any time soon, I might have to go visit Ralph and Carla again.

Ralph ain’t such a bad guy. Not really. Fixing him a Elvis Presley sandwich now and again don’t seem like all that bad a thing right now.

Not if Mira ever heads my way again.