Love & Gelato(8)

“Hell-ooo,” the woman trilled again. “Anyone there?”

I gathered my hair into a bun so I wouldn’t scare anyone, then went over to the window to see two people who matched their voices exactly. The woman had fire-engine-red hair and wore high-waisted shorts, and the man wore a fishing hat and had a massive camera around his neck. They were even wearing fanny packs. I stifled a giggle. Addie and I had once won a costume contest dressed as Tacky Tourists. These two could have been our inspiration.

“Hell-o,” Real-Life Tacky Tourist said slowly. She pointed at me. “Do you speak-a the English?”

“I’m American too.”

“Thank the heavens! We were just looking for Howard Mercer, the superintendent? Where can we find him?”

“I don’t know. I’m . . . new here.” The view caught my eye and I looked up. The trees outside my window were a rich, velvety green and the sky was maybe bluer than I’d ever seen. But I was still in a cemetery. I repeat: Still. In. A. Cemetery.

Tacky Tourist looked at the man, then back up at me, settling her weight into one hip like You can’t get rid of me that easily.

“I’ll check to see if he’s in the house.”

“Now you’re talking,” she said. “We’ll be around front.”

I unzipped my suitcase and changed into a tank top and running shorts, then found my shoes and headed downstairs. The main floor was pretty small and, besides Howard’s bedroom, the only room I hadn’t seen yet was the study. I knocked just in case, then pushed my way inside. The walls were lined with framed Beatles albums and photographs, and I stopped to look at a picture of Howard and a few other people throwing buckets of water on a huge, gorgeous elephant. Howard was wearing cargo pants and a safari hat and looked like the star of some kind of adventure nature show. Howard Bathes Wild Animals. He obviously hadn’t spent the past sixteen years sitting around missing my mom and me.

“Sorry, Tacky Tourists. No sign of Howard.” I headed for the front, all ready to tell The Tackys I couldn’t help them, but when I walked into the living room I jumped like I’d stepped on a live wire. The woman was not only waiting for me out front, but she’d pressed her face up against the window and was peering in at me like an enormous bug.

Over here. Over here! she mouthed, pointing to the front door.

“You’ve got to be joking me.” I put my hand to my chest. My heart was going like a million beats per minute. You’d think life in a cemetery would be a lot more . . . dead. Ba dum tss! My first official cemetery joke. And first official eye rolling at own cemetery joke.

I pushed the door open and the woman trundled back a couple of inches.

“Sorry, darling. Did I startle you? You looked like your eyes were going to bug out of your head.” She was wearing one of those stick-on name tags. HELLO, MY NAME IS GLORIA.

“I didn’t expect you to be . . . looking in.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry, but Howard’s not here. He said something about having an office; maybe you could go look for him there?”

Gloria nodded. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, here’s the problem, doll. We only have three hours before the tour bus comes back for us, and we want to be sure we see everything. I just don’t think we have the time to be traipsing all over looking for Mr. Mercer.”

“Did you see the visitors’ center? There’s a woman who works there who might know where he is.”

“I told you we should try that,” the man said. “This is a home.”

“Which one’s the visitors’ center?” Gloria asked. “Was it that building near the entrance?”

“I’m sorry, I really don’t know.” Probably because the night before I’d been way too panicked to notice anything but the army of headstones staring me down.

She raised an eyebrow. “Well, I hate to inconvenience you, darlin’, but I’m sure you know this place better than a couple of tourists from Alabama.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

“What?”

I sighed, casting one more hopeful glance back into the house, but it was as quiet as a tomb. (Ack! Second cemetery joke.) Guess I was going to have to jump headfirst into this whole living-in-a-memorial thing. I stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind me. “I don’t really know my way around, but I’ll try to help.”

Gloria smiled beatifically. “Grah-zee-aye.”

I walked down the stairs, the two of them following after me.

“They sure do keep this place up nice,” Gloria observed. “Real nice.”

She was right. The lawns were so green they looked spray-painted, and practically every corner had a grouping of Italian and American flags surrounded by patches of Wizard of Oz–worthy flowers. The headstones were white and sparkly and didn’t look nearly as creepy in the daylight. But don’t get me wrong. They were still creepy.

“Let’s go this way.” I marched toward the road Howard and I had driven in on.

Gloria nudged me with her elbow. “My husband and I met on a cruise.”

Oh, no. Was she going to tell me their life story? I slid a quick glance at Gloria and she smiled engagingly. Of course she was.

“He’d just lost his wife, Anna Maria. She was a nice lady, but real particular about how she kept house—one of those who puts plastic on all the furniture? Anyway, my husband, Clint, had passed a few years earlier, so that’s why we were both there on the singles cruise. They had great food—just mountains of shrimp and all the ice cream you could eat. You remember that shrimp, Hank?”