Elvis and The Dearly Departed. Peggy Webb

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 Charlie, what did Grover Grimsley say about Bevvie?”

      “Nobody’s seen her since last Tuesday when she left the Serengeti.”

      “Look on the bright side,” I tell him. “Nobody knows when we can bury the doctor. And his children certainly aren’t going to waste their time standing around viewing the body of a man who cut them out of his will.”

      “I’ve never lost a body. You and Lovie have to help me find it before anybody knows it’s missing.”

      Good grief. Lovie can barely find her car keys and I can’t even find my dog. How does Uncle Charlie expect us to find a missing corpse? Still, I can’t disappoint my favorite—and only—uncle.

      Mama sweeps in looking like the empress of a small county in a purple tunic embroidered with gold and green dragons, black toreador pants, and cute wedge-heeled espadrilles I covet.

      “You’re late.” Uncle Charlie kisses her on the cheek. “How are you, Ruby Nell?”

      Richer, I’m hoping, but now is not the time and place to ask.

      “How’d that old codger escape, Charlie? Knowing him, I thought he might have come back from the dead, but I didn’t see any resurrected rakes driving a black Mercedes on Highway 78.”

      The four of us go into his office for a family summit. The gist of it all is that although the doctor’s public viewing won’t be held till Bevvie turns up, everybody in town who read the obituary knows he’s dead and anybody could have done the dastardly deed. (Mama’s term for the body snatching.)

      The bottom line: Lovie and I will search for the wandering corpse while Mama and Uncle Charlie stall the Latons on the remote chance any of them will find the milk of human forgiveness in their souls (another of Mama’s terms) and want to see their dead daddy.

      “Daddy, we can’t just go barging around town asking if anybody’s seen a corpse.”

      “Go about your ordinary business, Lovie. Between you and Callie, you see just about everybody in Lee County on a daily basis. And, sweetheart, be discreet.”

      He might as well tell a brass band to tone down.

      In the parking lot, Lovie and I devise a plan.

      “What are we going to do first, Lovie?”

      “Eat cake. My house.”

      Back in her glorious rose-colored kitchen with the shiny green-tiled countertops, she heats a frozen cinnamon/pecan coffee cake and pours rich Colombian coffee into two china cups.

      “I wonder if the doctor had enemies?” I dig into the coffee cake.

      “What doctor doesn’t? I’d like to kill mine every time he does a pap smear.”

      “Any one of his disgruntled patients could have stolen him. This is depressing.”

      “Have another piece of cake.”

      “Maybe we ought to start with the obvious suspect.”

      “Who would that be, Callie?”

      “Bubbles Malone. One, she’s the wild card in this Laton farce, and two, she’s big enough to move the body.”

      “Don’t forget three. She inherited all the money. She and the doctor had to be tight.”

      “My point, exactly,” I tell Lovie.

      “But why would she want a corpse? And how in the heck would she get it home, wherever that is?”

      “Maybe she didn’t fly in. Maybe she drove. Anyhow, we don’t have to figure out why. Or even how. Just who.”

      “Got any bright ideas, Sherlock?”

      “We could just march up and ask Grover where she lives, but he’d never betray attorney/client privilege. And if he would, I wouldn’t have him for a lawyer. Besides, he might have contacted her through her lawyer.”

      “Maybe I can pump the information out of him.”

      I swat her with my napkin. “I’ll put Bubbles’ name on the beauty parlor grapevine while you check out all the motels.”

      “Been there, done that.”

      “Smart aleck. Let’s just see if we can find her.”

      “Then what? Tie her to a tree with my bra and torture her with hot fudge till she confesses?”

      “I’ll think of something.”

      After I leave Lovie’s I barely have time to whiz by my house to check on the California Latons, feed the menagerie of homeless pets I’m trying to decide whether to keep, and see if Elvis is back. As I dump cat food into seven separate dishes and feed the bottomless pit cocker spaniel, I figure that if I keep rescuing stray animals my pet food bill will exceed my mortgage.

      Elvis is still missing, much to my dismay, and the Laton gang is nowhere to be found, much to my wicked glee. I briefly consider calling Jack for a missing dog bulletin, but I’m in no mood to bite off more than I can chew, so I change clothes and head to Hair.Net.

      My first customer is already there, waiting outside in the 1967 funeral hearse she bought and converted to her personal limousine by painting it neon green with Gas, Grits, and Guts in hot pink on the side.

      We go inside and I set about mixing the strong ammonia solution for Fayrene’s permanent wave.

      The last time I did a perm Elvis deliberately found a dried-up, flattened frog and left it on my front porch with the morning paper.

      I start rolling Fayrene’s hair in tissue paper and random-sized rods, and casually drop Bubbles Malone into the beauty parlor grapevine.

      “She came by the store yesterday,” Fayrene says, then proceeds to give me a blow-by-blow account.

      The minute she leaves I rush to my office to call Lovie. All I get is her voice mail.

      “Lovie, call me the minute you get this message.”