Dr. Bellingham
Mrs. Finch
Savilla?
Aunt DeeDee—Never.
SEVENTEEN
Momma had been born with one blue eye and one brown eye, but after being diagnosed with ocular melanoma at seventeen, they’d taken her blue eye and replaced it with a glass one. She chose to match the color to her remaining eye in order to draw less attention to her new disability but she told me that, even in her sixties, she’d never gotten used to looking in the mirror and seeing the same-color eyes on her face.I liked what made me different, she would say.So should you.
Without the two distinct colors, Aunt DeeDee always forgot which eye was which.They did such a good job that I can hardly tell the fake, she’d say from time to time.
Momma’s cancer lay dormant for decades before roaring back to life with a vengeance. After trying all of the mainstream options, she and Aunt DeeDee and I traveled to Oklahoma City for her last chance at a cure. In those days, I often regretted not having a sibling, someone who would travel with us, be another pair of ears to hear the news with us. Aunt DeeDee was great, but sometimes, despite her efforts, I felt like a third wheel as she and her sister—my mother—chatted in a kind of shorthand from their own childhood together.
During the week at the experimental treatment facility, the incessant drip of the IV and the beeping of the monitors became our soundtrack.
On our third day there, Aunt DeeDee walked in with an armful of magazines and game books—sudoku, crosswords, and word finds kept her mind young, she claimed. Momma was fast asleep because the drugs they pumped into her were strong, and her body was exhausted. I figured Aunt DeeDee would settle herself next to Momma and keep quiet until she awakened. Instead, my aunt’s cheeks burned pink, and a bead of sweat broke out along her hairline as she started fiddling with the machines, pressing buttons and glancing at the emergency call. I could practically see her heartbeat elevate as I thumbed through aBetter Homes & Gardenssomeone had left in the lobby.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to press those,” I whispered as my eyes darted back and forth from her to Momma, who seemed perfectly fine from my vantage point and not worth Aunt DeeDee’s angst.
When Aunt DeeDee moved closer to my mother’s face, shining the light from her phone into Momma’s eye to better examine her, I knew what was wrong. The eyelid covering Momma’s glass eye had popped open, and with the unmoving pupil, Aunt DeeDee had thought for a few terrifying seconds that she’d died.
“Allow me,” I said, leaning over my mother and shutting the eyelid with two fingers. “It’s a bit like a lever. Remember?”
Aunt DeeDee grabbed her heart in relief and rushed out of the room to find a bathroom and splash water on her face.
When Momma woke up, it tickled her to no end. Aunt DeeDee was appalled at our hilarity.
It’s not funny. I just… I got turned around and forgot which eye… I haven’t slept through the night in weeks… I thought you were dead and gone,she ranted, loudly enough that a nursecame to quiet the three of us down.I swear. You two will be the death of me, Aunt DeeDee said, pointing at us.
Momma and I guffawed. That was the kind of person Momma was—able to stare death in the face and keep in good spirits.
I didn’t inherit that trait from her.
That’s why I’d lain awake ruminating in my tiny cottage on the first night of the pageant, trying to put pieces together, trying to figure out how Mr. Finch’s disappearance could possibly relate to a stolen crown and my aunt. But more than that, I feared that someone else—namely me or Lacy or even one of the Finches—might be next to disappear. We were, after all, closest to the case.
Last night I’d grabbed my clothes from the bathroom and stolen back to the Finch apartments to place the ledger back in the liquor cabinet right before returning to my cottage. Thankfully, I was still awake when Katie Gilman had swung by to check on me. She’d given me a long hug from my aunt and encouraged me to get a good night’s sleep, so I’d be fresh in the morning.
I needed that sort of motherly advice and, after tossing my fancy romper onto the floor, I finally fell asleep for four or five hours before waking up to the screeching caw of peacocks.
If you think of peacocks as silent creatures of majestic wonder, the only way I can think to explain their early morning sound is like this: With one hand, scratch your nails against a chalkboard—hard, really dig in—and with the other, ring two discordant bells against your ear. That’s how my eyes opened to my second day at the Rose Palace.
A puddle of drool had escaped the side of my mouth sometime during the night, and I creaked one eye open as I stretched out a hand, patting the empty side of the queen bed.
