like I stepped out of Vogue.
“Lovie, leave your van here and ride with me. Elvis is missing, and I want to find him.”
Without a single question, Lovie hefts herself into my maroon four-wheel-drive pickup, which is my alter ego. If I could be a truck I’d want to be a take-charge Dodge Ram with a kick-ass Hemi engine. Nobody messes with this sucker.
I pull out of the parking lot and head to the east side of town toward the King’s birthplace.
Every time we pass by, Elvis howls. Tupelo Hardware, too, for that matter. On the corner of Front Street and Main, it still looks very much the way it did when Gladys Presley bought her son’s first guitar. The owners have marked a big X on the spot where he stood and love to claim credit for starting him on the road to fame. As a tribute to the King, the store keeps a fading cardboard poster in the window of a young, skinny Elvis caught in swivel-hipped splendor.
They sell Elvis guitars, too, and I’m not ashamed to admit I have one. Jack was going to teach me to play it, but we all know how that turned out.
Lovie and I are bumping across the railroad tracks east of the hardware store when my cell phone rings. She digs it out of my purse.
“It’s Jack.”
“Tell him I’m not talking to him. Permanently.”
She hands me the phone.
“Hello, Jack. Why aren’t you out chasing women?” Mama’s innuendo at work.
“You’re the only woman I want to chase and I’m still looking for Elvis. Where are you? I’m picking you up.”
“Do me and the world a favor. Go by yourself. Save condoms.” I hang up.
One of Tupelo’s landmarks rises in the distance—a water tower the city no longer uses that’s shaped like a golf ball on a tee. I hang a left, then wheel into the parking lot beside the shotgun house where Elvis (the icon, not my dog) was born. It’s two rooms with front and back doors aligned so you can shoot through the front and out the back.
Suddenly I’m out of steam. I just sit in the Dodge Ram gripping the steering wheel.
“That does it,” Lovie says. “You’re spending the night with me.”
She rummages for her cell phone. This could take two weeks: she has a purse the size of Texas. I hand her mine and she calls Janice Laton.
“Callie won’t be home tonight. I trust everybody can get along fine without her…. Great. Oh, if her basset hound shows up, give us a call.”
She gives Janice both our numbers. “Let’s get out of here, Callie. We need hot fudge.”
It’s getting too dark to see, anyway, and I’ve never known a problem that couldn’t be made better with chocolate. I head back west in the gathering gloom. We nab her van at the funeral home, then end up on Robins Street.
You’d expect somebody Lovie’s size to have a house like mine—ten-foot ceilings, big rooms, massive closets. She lives in a doll’s house, a little pink cottage on a postage-stamp, magnolia studded lot a few blocks from the heart of downtown Tupelo. The only spacious room in her house is the kitchen.
She makes two hot fudge sundaes, then rifles through her CDs and selects Pachelbel’s Canon in D. We sprawl on her blue velvet sofa with our feet on the coffee table, needing no communication except music and chocolate.
Lovie’s penchant for highbrow music surprises most people.
When she was sixteen, she wanted to be a classical pianist. She’s a genius at the keyboard and could easily have been a professional musician, but after Aunt Minrose choked to death on a chicken bone at the Sunday dinner table, Lovie gave up lofty aspirations in favor of ice cream and boys. But even so, she still looks like a plus-sized Rita Hayworth.
After dinner I borrow one of her one-size-fits-all nightshirts with a slogan that says Hero Wanted, Apply Here, and we settle in for a marathon of watching old cowboy movies.
“The great thing about westerns is that you can always tell the bad guys by their black hats.” Lovie says this in a way that makes me wonder if she’s just searching through all those men till she finds one with a white hat.
The thing is, Jack wears black all the time, but deep down if I thought that made him one of the really bad guys I wouldn’t let him touch me with a ten-foot pole. Or any other size, for that matter. But that man has settled into my heart and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get him out.
The miniature Big Ben on Lovie’s TV chimes half past midnight. I head to bed while Lovie stays behind to watch The Lone Ranger.
“I never could resist a man in tight pants and a mask,” she says.
She loves to leave you laughing.
Lovie’s phone wakes me up at the crack of eight. In my opinion the day shouldn’t start till ten o’clock. I luxuriate in my cousin’s single bed. The tiny guest room has rose-sprigged wallpaper that makes me think of being in the middle of my gardens.
The phone keeps ringing.
“Lovie, do you want me to get that?”
I take her silence as either a yes or an indication that she’s going deaf. I pick up the bedside phone and say, “Hello.”
“Callie, is that you?” It’s Uncle Charlie. “You and Lovie have to get over to the funeral home. Quick. Leonard Laton’s gone.”
“Where did he go?”
“Are you awake, dear heart? His body’s missing.”
After I roust Lovie out of bed, we climb into my Dodge Ram and hotfoot it to the funeral home.
The only other times I’ve seen Uncle Charlie this upset were when Aunt Minrose passed away and when he lost his favorite fishing pole in the Tennessee/Tombigbee Waterway.
“What happened?” I ask, and he leads us into the viewing room where we get a shocking view of Leonard Laton’s empty casket. “Who would want to steal the doctor’s body?”
“Not Janice or Mellie,” Lovie says, “unless Janice wants to leave him in a field for the vultures.”
“Besides,” I say, “neither one of them looks stout enough to tote a dead body. Unless they were in cahoots.”
“Those two?” Lovie says. “If they were Siamese twins they’d try to live in different states.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Yesterday before Janice stormed off in her rental car I overheard her telling Mellie she’d fly her lawyer out from California. Mellie said she’d eat arsenic before she’d trust anybody with an earring in the wrong ear.”
“My question is how?” Uncle Charlie closes and locks the casket. “I have a security system. It would take an expert to crack it, but apparently that’s what happened. There was no sign of forced entry.”
“Uncle
