That morning, they were speaking in intimate, nasally tones, which could imply only one thing: serious gossip. The topic was my relatives. At first, I felt annoyed. But then I began to suppose that landlords and their families were probably common enough subjects of discussion among tenants—as if we were special in some way. Their gossip about us was like a minor version of tabloid coverage of the Royal Family of England.
     There I was, Princess Ruth, in a blurry newspaper picture with a tiara catching the light, dressed in a yellow-cream chiffon gown with matching gloves. The caption read, “Young Princess Takes Trip into Twilight Zone and Helps Mason Solve Mystery of Tenacious Tea-Drinking Tenants.”
     They’d be surprised.
     I stirred the paint and dipped my brush carefully into it and wondered if I was overdressed in the picture, when a bug flew straight into my eye. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, then blinked rapidly. I shook my head, but finally I had to put the paintbrush down, wipe my hands on a clean spot on my paint cloth, and try to rub the nasty insect out of my eye. As it teared, I suffered a quick comedown from the analogy with royalty, and I turned my attention back to the tea party.
     They seemed to be speaking with sympathy about Uncle Joe who lived with my Grandpa Flaherty on the third floor of our house.
     “Don’t you just feel so sorry for him?”
     “All that shrapnel in his head.”
     “And his seizures.”
     “Who could ever hire him?”
     “I do . . . so pity him,” croaked Miss Reese in her distinctive voice, a combination of wet phlegm and dry gravel.
     “Huh? Huh?” asked Mrs. Ferry. “Who’s got a tire rim? And who’s pitching in?” For the moment, she was deaf and obviously bored.
     No one answered her directly, but it seemed that they got the message. All this pleasantness was rather dull. These women were usually in possession of up-to-the-minute news about the neighborhood or at least had some revealing critical commentary about the past to disclose.
     They were quiet for a few seconds, but Mrs. Sullivan finally turned the tone of the discussion around to something more contentious.
     “Though I don’t see his disability as a good enough reason for them to raise our rent,” she complained, not being one to maintain a prolonged sense of compassion.
     “We didn’t start the bloody war, did we now?” asked Rhoda. “It’s not our responsibility that they have to rent the third floor out to non-paying relatives who can’t work,” she hissed, always eager to say something mean.
     “Have you seen Lois Fante lately?” replied Mrs. Sullivan. I had noticed that topics of discussion could change unexpectedly so long as a negative, newsy tone was maintained.
     The women mumbled inconclusively, but Mrs. Ferry’s hearing was restored. “I haven’t,” she added quickly.
     “Ha!” said Mrs. Sullivan, in obvious delight at both what she knew and what the rest of them didn’t. “Pregnant again, can you believe it?” She spoke with disgust.
     “She can’t be,” said Mrs. Ferry, now fully engaged. “She just had another baby.”
     “Ugly little shrimp of a thing,” Mrs. Reese managed to get out between drags. She turned and blew her smoke out the window. I bent over quickly to dip my brush and hoped that she didn’t see me.
      “Probably wants to prove to her husband that she can have one of his,” laughed Mrs. Sullivan maliciously. “You know she had one in the oven on her wedding day, and from what I heard, it wasn’t that thick Al’s.”
     “He’ll find out, sooner or later,” said Rhoda. “They always do when their wives attract men like flies to honey.”
     As if she knew anything about sex, in or out of wedlock, or even flies for that matter, I thought to myself, slapping the paint vigorously on the porch floor, having finished the small railing under their window. I really couldn’t stand that Rhoda Ann.
     I thought Lois was beautiful, that she looked like my old Barbie doll come to life, with her long, always shaved legs that were better any day than a bone china collection. These women were just withered, jealous, and nasty.
     Perry and I could beat them in court. Paul was out sick, and I was Perry’s detective. A number of young married women had been killed in a middle-class area of Cambridge, Massachusetts in “The Case of the Nosy, Nasty Neighbors.” People feared that it was a serial killer. But I, through careful espionage, discovered that a  husband of each of the women had had a “chance encounter” with one of the Nosy Neighbors within a week of his wife’s death. Over a cup of lukewarm, greasy tea, the Neighbors had filled the husbands with innuendoes and half-truths about their wives “attracting men like flies to honey.” The husbands became enraged at these stories of betrayal and trickery, and each plotted and carried out the murder of his wife. In one case, a Mr. F actually killed his wife when she was pregnant with their second child.
     Because the Nasty Neighbors knew what was happening, they began blackmailing the husbands. They forced the husbands to give them bone china cups and saucers and jewelry from their dead wives. Mrs. S secretly carried the jewelry with her at all times, carefully disguised as a hump on her back.
     As Hamilton Burger was about to finish his closing speech to the jury about the guilt of one of the husbands, I passed Perry a note about the hump. After a short adjournment, he asked a female policewoman to help Mrs. S to her seat, whereupon the policewoman frisked her back so hard that jewels of all shapes and sizes came tumbling out. Mrs. S tried hitting the policewoman with her cane, but by this time, many more officers had appeared, and she was carried off to jail.
     Perry revealed to all that Mrs. S had a pathological hatred of wives because the man who impregnated her had refused to marry her, and she was forced to raise the ugly Rhoda Ann alone, claiming that she was a widow, when all the time, she was an unmarried, fallen woman. The rest of the Nasty Neighbors quickly disbanded, and Perry let them go because it was Mrs. S who collected all the loot and who masterminded the entire operation.
     I discovered that with all the intrigue going on with Perry, I had painted myself into a corner, so I laid my brush across the paint can and was about to climb down the somewhat shaky side porch railing when they started talking about my Great Uncle Bob. I had to stay. Uncle Bob was the mystery man of our family. I picked up my brush again and painted over and over the bit of porch right under their front window.
     Uncle Bob did not live locally. I was never certain where he was, but was pretty sure that it was Florida, Nevada, or California. Someplace flashy. Every Christmas, he sent us a huge basket of exotic foods, most of which my father wanted to throw out. Anchovy paste. Stinky cheeses that tasted delicious. Elaborately wrapped fruits. Jars of artichoke hearts. Black pasta, which my father thought was sinful. He said that no God-fearing person ever ate black food. My mother always surreptitiously pulled out the jar of black caviar and shoved it into her apron pocket.
     Miss Reese was talking about Uncle Bob’s wife. That was a revelation. I didn’t even know he had a wife. I painted carefully, deliberately.
     “Oh, Betty’d been a right looker in her time,” said Mrs. O’Connell.
     “But she ran around,” Miss Reese added quickly, blowing her smoke out the window. It came straight at me. I think she knew I was listening.
“So did he, and with good reason,” Mrs. Sullivan added, a little too forcefully, I thought, as I made a mental note to reinvestigate Rhoda’s parentage. Imagine if Great Uncle Bob were her father? No wonder he stayed away.
     “What really did happen? I mean really. Not the gossip. The truth,” asked Mrs. Ferry, who had maintained her hearing ability for a record time.
     “Well, I certainly wouldn’t know personally,” said Mrs. Sullivan, unconvincingly. I was gradually beginning to believe that she knew my Uncle Bob, perhaps very well.
     Miss Reese inhaled, sighed, and coughed deeply, sounding rather put out that Mrs. Ferry would suggest that distinctions existed between truth and gossip. Then she paused and gasped, in a rattley sort of way, glancing again out the window.
     “He got rid of her.”
     I had been poised in a small, dry space and was painting as much of the side railing as I could reach to justify my still being relatively close to the front window. But with this revelation, I lost my balance and landed right on the wet porch floor. My legs and hands, and the back of my shorts felt like they were sinking in the thick, yellow-cream paint. The whole side of the porch would have to be redone, and my shorts might never get clean.
     But I couldn’t move. Not yet. There had been a murder in my family, and these women knew about it.
     In “The Case of the Nosy, Nasty Neighbors,” I had somehow—like Jeff or Perry—suspected the truth all along about husbands killing wives. What I hadn’t known was that my own poor Great Uncle Bob may have been one of those husbands driven to murder by the innuendoes of these horrible women. It was all rather exhilarating.
     “You mustn’t speak so judgmentally,” whispered Mrs. Sullivan, sounding like she was about to cry. “He may have had his reasons, even if . . .”
     “That’s enough, Mrs. Sullivan,” interrupted Mrs. O’Connell with authority. “I’m the only one who should be explaining this. I have always lived here and knew Bob when he was just a boy, and I knew his wife all my life.” Mrs. O’Connell paused for a while and loudly slurped her tea, as if to hold the floor even while she wasn’t actually talking.
     “He got rid of his wife.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”
     “Isn’t that just what Miss Reese said?” Mrs. Ferry cried out. But no one paid her any attention.
     “Got rid of her all right, and her so pretty in her time,” continued Mrs. O’Connell.
     I was now sweating all over. Mrs. O’Connell grew up on the second floor right across the street. Uncle Bob had lived in the second-floor apartment where we now lived. Did Mrs. O’Connell, like Jeff in Rear Window, spy on my Uncle Bob? Had Uncle Bob, like Lars Thornwald, hacked his wife up in our bathroom? Could he have then boiled the bones clean and packed them up in those lavish food baskets? Did he later walk, ever so nonchalantly, under cover of darkness, to the Charles River where he gradually dumped the bones of his poor wife, night after night?
     “Of course he had to go away after . . . I mean he would, wouldn’t he,” sighed Mrs. Sullivan. I became convinced that she was trying to find an excuse for why he had left and never come back for her and their love child, the ugly Rhoda Ann.
     “What will they do with him?” I wondered to Perry. “He won’t be arrested at first,” Perry wisely replied. That vagrant suspected of cannibalism who sleeps in the Cambridge Common will be  picked up now that a rower on the Charles has discovered one of the bones. When questioned about Betty’s whereabouts, Bob said his wife was vacationing with her sister. Perry defended the vagrant, all the while having Paul stake out Bob’s apartment. Paul waited in the bushes outside Mrs. O’Connell’s house for Bob to go out. Then he stealthily broke in, checked the food hampers, and found bone fragments in them.
     The last day of the trial, Hamilton Burger argued for a life sentence for the vagrant. Perry Mason called Uncle Bob to the witness stand. At first, it went well. They talked about Beluga caviar and white truffles. Everyone was impressed at their sophistication. But then Perry produced a bone fragment. Bob could stand it no longer. He confessed that he had cut up his wife, boiled her bones, skimming the fat off, which he’d buried with his roses in the back garden and which caused Mrs. O’Connell’s pesky dog to dig around them. He admitted that he then carried the bones slowly to the Charles, every night for two weeks.
     Suddenly I heard all the old ladies shuffling inside. The tea party was breaking up, and I had to get away. I struggled to get myself out of the paint I’d been sitting in. My body felt stiff. I pulled hard, and ran across the porch and up the stairs to my mother.
     Rushing in the door, I was hit with hot dampness. My mother was singing at the sink and washing dishes wearing her bright pink rubber gloves. She was also cooking some black pasta for dinner. With the pasta pot boiling over and her continual running of hot water, the kitchen was almost foggy.
     “Mom,” I blurted out, “why didn’t anyone ever tell me that Uncle Bob murdered his wife?”
     She kept on running the water and washing dishes, but she did stop singing. After finishing the plates, she turned and looked at me, and then, hearing the sizzling water, glanced at the stove.
     “Oh, Ruthie, look!” she cried out. “The pasta! Can you get that burner?”
     I went over and turned it down, and left little yellow-cream fingerprints on the stove. I noticed that my left sneaker was making paint marks on the floor. What a lousy criminal I’d make, I thought to myself. I’d leave clues all over the place.
     My mother was now noisily rinsing the silverware. It must have been over 100 degrees in the kitchen, and I was starting to feel rather faint.
     “How’s the porch coming?” she asked. “If it’s got as much paint on it as you have on you, it should be almost finished.” She smiled fondly at me.
     But I was not in the mood for talking about the porch, and I didn’t want her to distract me from the main question. “It’s alright,” I grumbled. Had she even heard me ask about Uncle Bob?
     I moved closer to her and began to feel a bit nervous about having mentioned the murder. Maybe it had really upset her, and she would feel that I was too young to be told all the gory details about it. “Today is probably too humid to have anything dry very well,” I said conciliatorily, thinking of the pools of paint near the Sullivans’ front window, and wondering whether I should ask her again about Uncle Bob.
     Finally, after checking every glass she washed against the light coming through the window, she shut off the hot water and began yanking at her rubber gloves. She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows.
     “Murder?” she asked and gave me a long stare.
     I looked down at the floor. I know that Jeff would have said something like, “You bet I mean murder,” and he would have sounded believable and sincere. But gradually I was feeling how different I was from Jeff, and Perry, and Rod.
     “Wherever did you hear such a story?” she asked, lifting my chin up with her index finger so that I had to look directly at her.
     I didn’t reply, and she didn’t seem to expect an answer.
     “Could it have been at one of those gossipy tea parties downstairs?” she snapped. And then, talking more to my absent father than to me, she said angrily, “This is the worst part about not having a single house. We have to live with all of these ridiculous busybodies.”
     Looking back at me, she shook her head. “How many times have I told you not to listen to those women?” She picked up a dishcloth and began to dry the dishes, piling plate upon plate so noisily that I worried they might break. Then I’d really get in trouble. Upsetting my mother and making a mess of the porch.
     Then she stopped abruptly. “Ruthie, Bob didn’t kill his wife.”
     I was filled with disappointment. Of course she felt she had to lie to me. No one wants those kinds of things known about their own family members. But she was still talking.
     “Bob only divorced Betty. But for those Irish Catholic old biddies, especially Mrs. O’Connell, Betty’s sister, there probably isn’t much of a difference.”
     “Her sister?” I asked. This plot was more convoluted than even Perry could have realized.
     “C’mon. Clean yourself up so you can start to help me,” my mother said and then added with a crack in her voice, “Betty is fine. She lives with her other sister on Cape Cod. All of this malicious gossip drove both Bob and Betty away. They were lovely people, even if they weren’t right for each other, and I miss them both.”
     I was stunned. He got rid of his wife. All the thrill and terror of having a murderer in the family slipped away. A divorce. No blood in the bathroom. No boiling and hacking in the kitchen. No fragments in the baskets. No bones in the Charles. No fat in the garden. No arrests. No trial. No murder. No Perry. No Lars. No Rod. No case.
     Mrs. Sullivan died that fall, and Rhoda Ann moved away early the following spring. That was the end of the bone china tea parties. When my mother and I were cleaning out the boxes Rhoda left behind, we came across some old photos of a humpless, very pretty Mrs. Sullivan who was quite young and was holding the hand of a good-looking man. I didn’t know if it was Mr. Sullivan, Uncle Bob, or some stranger, and wondered if my mother knew. She tossed the pictures into a large garbage bag and went back to sorting through the kitchen cupboards. I picked up the bag and was on my way out the back door to throw it away when my mother called to me.
     “Look at this!” she laughed. She was holding up a huge, filthy old spaghetti pot that looked like it had been just about burnt through. “Why would anyone save a piece of junk like this? And who would use it? I can’t even imagine that either of the Sullivans would have been strong enough to lift it empty, let alone if it was filled with water and pasta.” She put it outside the door to be thrown away.
     But I knew someone who could use it. Someone who had. Lars was meticulous, but since he had so many bones to boil night after night, it was possible that they may have burned dry in the pan a few times. His lover had hidden everything that could support the case against him. The police were on their way, and there hadn’t been time to get it all out of the house.
     When I came back from throwing out the garbage, my mother had moved to the bedroom where she found a number of wicker hampers. She came out holding one in each hand. “Do you think we should throw these out or give them to the Goodwill shop? They seem to be in fine condition.”
     “No, throw them out,” I said definitively.
     It was always safer to try to destroy all the evidence.