The Mutual Admiration Society(51)

“Good remembering!” I pull her up to her feet and give her four pats on the back. “And right after our meeting, we need to . . . ummm.” That was a close call. I almost reminded her about #9 on the TO-DO list, the making-a-real-confession-to-Father-Ted one, and I don’t want her to go very hellfire on me again. “We need to get the latest gossip about Sister Margaret Mary’s disappearance offa Kitten. But . . .” I take her face into my hands. “Before either one of those things can happen, we got one more really important caper to pull off first, Bird.”

“What one more really important caper do we have to pull off first, Tessie?”

“We gotta climb back over the black fence.”

Having good timing has never been more important, so I almost cry with relief when she turns back to the magnificent gravestone, and says, “Roger that, Daddy. Tessie and me have to go now, but we’ll see you tomorrow, same time, same station.”

The chocolate-covered cherries and the chat Birdie had with our father must’ve been an even bigger shot in the arm than it usually is, because she’s doing a great job of imitating me—monkey see, monkey do—when we scurry away from our most favorite place in Holy Cross to weave through the tombstones toward our final destination—Charlie’s house.

We’ve done a great job so far, and we’ll be home free once we get past the grave of MRS. ELIZABETH HUGHES APRIL 16, 1923–JANUARY 31, 1957. She got murdered by Mother Nature. A giant icicle cracked free of Mrs. Hughes’s roof and dive-bombed her head when she was shoveling her front porch during the bad storm two winters ago.

Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.

What are all these cars doing here?

Damnation!

Birdie’s bad memory must be rubbing off on me or something, because I forgot all about Mr. Peterman’s funeral again.

Because we can’t reach the cemetery fence until we get past the mourners that are gathered around the hole, I grab Birdie and pull her down behind Mrs. Hughes’s tombstone and tell her, “Stay put and keep your lips zipped. I gotta surveil.”

Just like I knew it’d be, the service that the old priest at St. Kate’s is presiding over today is already in full swing and very crowded, because so many of the fathers in the neighborhood are chocolate chip cookie makers at the Feelin’ Good factory that Mr. Peterman was the foreman of. The deceased to exist was also head usher at church, which is also a big muckety-muck deal. I bet more people showed up for Daddy’s pretend funeral, but there’s gotta be at least a couple hundred visitors bunched around the open grave like a big black bouquet. Of course, most of them are gals, because they don’t have jobs. Other than her friend Mrs. Jablonski, who had to start handing out shoes at Jerbak Beer and Bowl after her husband never came home from the Red Owl with a gallon of milk, Louise is one of the only mothers in the neighborhood that has to work for a living.

Birdie tugs on my T-shirt and says with a teasing smile, “Betcha a quarter that Father Joe croaks before he gets to the valley of the shadow of death,” because that’s what we always bet one another after we find out that he’s the one saying the funeral service when we’re sitting out on our back porch and watching the goings-on over here.

Boy, oh, boy, it really would be so helpful if Father Joe, who rumor has it said Mass on the Mayflower, got called back to his Maker in the next few minutes. Him keeling over into Mr. Peterman’s grave would create such a great distraction, the kind that Modern Detection mentions in one of the chapters. It says that gumshoes should come up with something big and flashy if they need to take people’s minds off them and put it on something else. Starting a fire, that’s a good distraction, which I’d have no trouble doing if I had a pack of Lonnigan’s matches on me, but they’re back home in my nighttime sleuthing shorts.

On the other hand . . . when Father Joe says Sunday morning Mass, it’s hard to hear his sermon over all the snoring, so maybe his mumbling long-windedness alone will be enough of the distraction Birdie and me need to get past the group of grievers, because everyone standing around the grave might fall asleep.

Once I do a little more surveilling and I’m sure of the safest route we need to take to the fence, I squat back down behind Mrs. Hughes’s tombstone and tell my accomplice, “Okay. First we’ll run and hide behind the hearse, then we’ll cross the road, and then we gotta haul heinie into the bushes and crawl toward Charlie’s backyard. Go low and slow, but not too slow, just . . . just go where I go, step where I step, and please, honey, whatever you do, don’t make a racket.”

While the Finley sisters are snaking from tree trunk to tree trunk before we make a run for the hearse, I’m not all that worried that someone at the funeral will hear Birdie if she does start singing or yelling out my name, because as usual, the neighborhood gals are making rackets of their own.

FACT: Most of them who are doing “Cry Me a River” scenes around Mr. Peterman’s grave aren’t really sad.

PROOF: Those gals have what are called “ulterior motives,” which is nothing more than having a sneaky secret reason for doing something other than the obvious reason for doing something.

You get a lot of credit around here if you genuflect deeper than everybody else, sing hymns louder than everybody else, and push out more kids than everybody else, so the only reason most of the gals showed up at Mr. Peterman’s funeral today is to grieve better than everybody else. Mrs. Ann Tracy is the parish’s overall “Best Mourner,” but Mrs. Sophia Maniaci is breathing down her neck because she’s Italian. (Besides being the best cooks, the wops are the loudest people in the neighborhood and they wave their hands around a lot when they talk, so it’s a very excellent show they put on.)