Installment 21

Watercolor by Caroline Hoyt

Note: I asked artist Caroline Hoyt to make a watercolor of a typical Turkish gulet, and how about that? She came up with the work above. Cover?

Working Title: “Slow Boat, Bitter End”

A Rony Boston Mystery

(This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, businesses, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is incidental. Artificial intelligence platforms are used occasionally for research but not for writing assistance.)

Back to the story:

THE OUZO was kicking in. Griselda mouthed a rather loud saloon-a which made me laugh, and the others, except for Barbara, slurped another ouzo.

It was Barbara’s turn, and we had come nearly around the table. The reticent woman from Wyoming hadn’t said much as the lies wended on, so I was happy to hear from her.

We’ve already told you more than I should like to discuss, but you are all fine folks and we’re from a rural area, so I guess we mostly trust people. I hope you all come to Colorado sometime and we’ll have a reunion up at Aspen. My pack of truths is boring. I’m from a Danish background. My great-great-grandfather was one of a dozen or so men and their families who came from Danish farm country to try their hand at farming the prairie in central Nebraska in the late 1800s. Then name of the town they founded was Dannebrog, which means Danish flag, or so I was told. Anyway, my parents met in the one-room school in that town and after they got married, they moved to Wyoming. I was born near Jackson Hole, but I went to university in Laramie. After college, I went to Buffalo — Buffalo in Wyoming — and worked in a hotel, and then I went to Cody, and I met Neil at the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum. We went to a picture show and the rascal told me about his family ranch. I guess I was smitten, and one thing led to another. I’ve enjoyed the ranch life, but I also had a passion for arts and crafts and my quilts won best of fair every year I entered. I would sell them sometimes, and then I just decided to open my own store in Cody, Barbara’s Little Arte Shoppe. Well, I’m not much of a liar either, but what do you think, Abra?

The diversity of this group was sinking in despite ouzo’s capacity to erase all cogency. With only Abra and Henry to go, it was clear we had an assembly of diverse backgrounds, educational levels, career paths, even regions of the United States and Europe. We had a pair of Wyoming ranchers, a Bulgarian businessman, an executive and philanthropist, a history buff, and a Rhodes scholar. I began to wonder what I was doing in this mix. Comic relief? Snarky wise cracks? Connoisseur of cocktails?

Abra said she was puzzled.

It all sounds true to me. I love the story of how you and Neil met, and I think it’s so romantic it must be true. You didn’t say what you studied at Laramie, but I’m going to guess you did go there and studied the arts. So, I’ll say true to the university segment of your biography. But now I’m wondering about the business you said you had in Cody. I’m going to say that yes, you are a quilter of considerable accomplishment. I have known some great ones, too, down in South Carolina. But I doubt that you went into business. I mean, why take a perfectly good pastime and skill and ruin it with the pressures of a small retail business? I don’t think so, Barbara. Should I start gulping now?

No, you are correct. So, I will have a swig, as we call it up in Wyoming.

I’ll join you anyway, Barbara. Saloon-a to your interesting life!

So now I could add a rugged Wyoming woman who also knows the craft of quilting to my list of backgrounds. What was Abra going to bring to our cadre of voyagers? And Henry? I didn’t have to wait long. The toasters were done, and Abra started in.

My story is a bit different than the rest of yours. First, I am a southerner through and through.

Judith sniffed an aside when she said this, so we all were tipped off that the first words out of her mouth were a lie.

I was born right there in Beaufort, but I wanted out of there, so after high school I went to Vassar and studied anything I could get my hands on …

Ha! Judith bellowed with an elbow to her mate.

… I mean books, you smarty — as I was saying, despite my professors’ best efforts to keep me focused on something, I was drawn to literature. You will be surprised, unless you like to read and to read about poetry, that I am a published poet. Roses are red and so on. My family was poor as church mice, and I had nothing but my poems which somehow got noticed. I was invited to enroll at Vassar, but first they made me enroll at Hunter College in Manhattan to catch up on a few subjects, because my high school in Beaufort was so basic. But I liked it, and even though we were on the East Side, I found the Village and a crowd that would welcome both my poetry and the color of my skin. I went on to Vassar, studied, and wrote. One of my poems seemed to register with those in the know, and I met a host of fine literary people. But as fate would have it, they started to get on my nerves. Once someone thinks you are a genius, they seem to want a part of you, as if you will somehow make them famous or smarter, or even sexier. They say an Englishman, always sounds smarter and sexier than an American because he can speak with that delicious accent. Not so for a Black female, who isn’t nearly as persuasive with her intelligence as a jolly old man from London. So, I came home with my poems and my education, and I found this old schoolmate of mine, Judith of the Apocrypha, as I call her. We pooled resources and bought a fine South Carolina home right down on the Beaufort waterfront. We have found happiness and joy together, especially when conspiring to find Holofernes in purgatory and cut off the rest of his business, ain’t that so, Judith?

It was an unusual laugh from Judith this time, a tad nervous perhaps. She giggled and raised her glass to Abra’s fantastic story.

Saloon-a you old diva.

And they both laughed, and heartily.