It was a lovely evening.
Margaret didn’t like to impose, because her mama had always told her that she should never a borrower nor a lender be, and in all too many situations, Margaret did feel as though she was borrowing something, well, private, when she sat down to a family’s dinner table.
But not here. Oh no, here she was a warmly welcomed guest, and if she took off her glasses, darling Mrs. Jensen even looked a bit like Mama had, so many years ago. Her head cocked just so as she listened to little Bethy’s recitation of the words she’d learned to spell today.
And it was so nice to see that Bethy was going to turn out just fine after all. Margaret had been terribly concerned when she’d heard the little girl had been sent home from the first grade. Perhaps Mrs. Jensen was right, and it was a private school with more attention that the girl had needed. Certainly she had turned things completely around; such a pretty dress, with matching ribbons for her hair, and the sweetest little smile. Margaret supposed that there was something to angels being shown as lovely blond girl children.
To be sure, it was really too soon to tell about the older boy, Robert. Margaret still eyed him a bit warily. They had had a bit of a problem after she’d discovered the windows of her poor old Buick shot out, clearly with a pellet gun. She hadn’t been able to drive it since they’d taken her license back in ’99, but Margaret believed in keeping the faithful old car up all the same, and it wasn’t as though it were a junker to suffer such insults. The memory of the cursewords Robert had flung at her when she’d nicely asked him to clean up the glass overshadowed his shining clean face. Even now, though he was slicked up in his nice button down shirt, and his hair was nicely combed down instead of in those impudent spikes, she still wondered about that certain glint of something wrong in his eyes.. Perhaps he had what Papa used to call a touch of the lavender.
Truly, it would come as such an awful blow to his father. Fathers always did take that sort of thing harder than mothers, Margaret noticed. But Mr. Jensen was such a masculine sort of fellow. He had his predinner cocktail about half drunk, and the smell of his pipe tobacco took Margaret back through the years to other warm family moments.
Margaret was glad Mrs. Jensen had remembered to pull the dining room curtains, it made the room so much cozier. Come to think of it, there wasn’t much that Mrs. Jensen ever forgot when it came to taking care of her family. If she peeked under the table, Margaret knew she’d fine Mr. Jensen in his warm, comfortable slippers, having been met at the door with them as was only proper. The meal, too, was absolutely divine; a stuffed chicken with peas and carrots and cornbread, potatoes and gravy, just as pretty as a picture. Soon now it’d be time for the cobbler, which rested on the freshly polished sideboard.
It was so nice to see a family doing things in the proper ways, what with all the outlandish things going on in this day and age, Margaret thought. She remarked as much to Mrs. Jensen, quietly of course, and Mrs. Jensen beamed. She hadn’t always done these things up right, she confided to Margaret, and was glad to have had a firm helping hand in mending her ways.
Margaret patted her hand kindly. Wasn’t anything to it, Molly dear, every woman needs a push in the right direction from time to time, and of course, it does fall to the elders to lend their wisdom, that things be done rightly by.
Reluctant to end such a lovely evening among such lovely people, Margaret nonetheless donned her gloves and took her leave promptly at 8:30. The children really out to be put down soon, they were beginning to look positively glassy eyed.
She declined the offer of a ride home, after all, it was just two streets over, she said, and she really ought to walk and keep herself trim. Margaret hummed to herself all the way, thinking about how lucky she was to have been with them this evening.
“I just don’t get it. What kind of sick bastard gets them all together like its an episode of Father Knows Best and cacks the whole lot of ‘em?” Detective Ridley scrubbed at his forehead. He’d seen a lot of weird shit in the city, and had come down South to return to some kind of gentility and charm.
The macabre scene in the Jensen’s dining room had shot that idea all to hell.
Dressed in what Ridley thought of as their Sunday best, they’d been posed around the table as though they were sitting down to dinner… a fine dinner which remained right there on the table with them. Mr. Jensen’s pipe had long since smoldered out, not that Ridley had ever known him to smoke at all. Mrs. Jensen’s hair had been done up in a perfect French twist, with some kind of glittering hairpins. Hell, the nutty shit had even gone and polished the kids’ shoes.
Ridley had called in the forensics team from the city, and he shut the panel doors on the scene before Barney could get more of an eyeful and spread the gossip hither and yon.
And hell’s bells, there was old Miss Scanlon there at the end of the walk, clutching her flyers for the Methodist rummage sale. There was police tape at the gate, but poor dear Miss Margaret (as she was known around town) wasn’t stirring a foot till she had word of ‘those lovely people’, as she kept calling them.
She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief when Ridley told her, and when she looked up, her eyes were huge and watery behind the old lady glasses. “That’s such a terrible shame, Rupert. They were just the loveliest people you’d ever care to meet.”
Curiouser and Curiouser 