Down on the Charm

by E L Wilder

  Probably just her imagination. Thank god. Keep it under control, Hazel.

  She and Tyler crossed the street and sauntered onto the green. Hazel sipped the coffee and immediately spat it back into the cup.

  “Tyler, this is hangover coffee,” she said, grimacing. “I thought you said this would be a killer cuppa.”

  “I’m pretty sure if you drink too much it’ll kill you.”

  “Has Linda’s coffee always been this bad?!”

  He shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.”

  “That’s debatable. It’s downright criminal.” She blanched at her own reference

  “Come on. It’s not that bad, is it?”

  “Just thinking about Juniper,” she said.

  “Linda is right. The truth will prevail.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, of course. How go the carriage repairs?”

  “That’s our next stop,” he said.

  They crossed the village green, passed the old Revolutionary War monument, and headed to a stately brick colonial with green trim desperate for touchups. When Tyler started up the driveway, she stopped in confusion.

  “This is Linda’s house,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “Tommy Wilkins?” she asked, incredulously. Tyler just turned to her and winked before waltzing—a little too jauntily she noted—toward the renovated garage set just behind the house.

  Tommy Wilkins of feeling-up-Charlie fame. Tommy Wilkins, inventor of the notorious aerial Tombardment and leader of the Tom Squad, both of which had earned him the nickname Tom the Bomb and Nuclear Tom. Tommy Wilkins, who in a different day and age would have been medicated until he was as placid as a Buddhist monk. Tommy Wilkins was practically the caricature of everything Hazel’s mother had feared about putting her in public school, the sloped-forehead bogeyman of the unwashed masses. Which had summed up his appeal to half the teenage girls at Larkhaven High—Hazel included. He was everything that a Bennett was never supposed to be, and before she and Tyler had started dating, she had suffered a brief infatuation with him.

  “Tyler!” she called at him, her voice wavering with desperation.

  He kept walking, and only shrugged, as he disappeared into the garage. A sign over the door read, Aftertune Delight, and showed a lusty-looking cartoon car beckoning her. This was exactly the sort of thing she had feared about coming into town. There were the people she wanted to see—like Linda—and the people she had hoped to avoid—like Linda’s son.

  But if this were about the carriage and about helping out Juniper out, then she was willing to face down the darkest parts of her high school history.

  She stepped inside the garage. The air was thick with the smell of oil and even thicker with heavy metal riffs blasting from unseen speakers. A beat-up sedan was hoisted up on the car lift. A man stood underneath it, tinkering as he belted out the lyrics to “Enter Sandman.”

  “Tommy Boy!” Tyler shouted.

  A man that bore no resemblance to the Tommy Wilkins in her memories stepped out from beneath the sedan. The Tommy Wilkins she had known was athletic, as lean as a skeleton, and sported a shameless Bieber cut. Now he was a big barrel-chested man with a sizable beer belly and a feral chestnut beard. But there was something there, the devilish glint in his eyes, the crooked-toothed grin, that was nothing but Tommy Wilkins.

  “Hey, slacker,” he said to Tyler, grinning and coming forward for a hearty bro hug. When he saw Hazel, his jaw slackened and he staggered back like he had been punched in the face.

  “Aw hell,” Tommy hooted. “If I’d known royalty was comin’, I’d have washed the monkey grease off my hands.”

  “They would have still been filthy,” pointed out Tyler.

  Tommy broke out that crooked-toothed grin. “Hazel Bennett.”

  “Tommy Wilkins. I barely recognize you.”

  “I was a later bloomer. The boy you knew as Tommy Wilkins is dead. Beyond Tommy Wilkins, man.” He patted his belly.

  “Or human beer container,” suggested Tyler.

  “Same thing,” said Tommy, grinning. He turned his attention back to Hazel. “And what about you? You look like you just stepped off a magazine cover, Hazel Bennett. Or is it Helena Rose now?”

  “Oh please. You saw me throw up at senior prom. We’ll always be on a casual basis.”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t mean no harm. But anyone that gets out of here is automatically a legend.”

  “Well,” she said. “I didn’t get very far. Here I am with you two shmucks.”

  Tommy burst into a deep belly laugh. “You’ve gotten funnier. Which is good—’cause this sap just keeps getting sadder and sadder.”

  Tyler looked decidedly dour. “You know how to make a guy feel special,” he said.

  “What’s that you got there?” asked Tommy, nodding to Hazel’s cup with a definitive look of dread.

  “Some of your mom’s coffee . . .” said Hazel.

  Tommy chortled. “Next time, I’ll save you the trouble and just pour some five-dubya-thirty directly into your mouth.”

  “Well, Tommy,” interrupted Tyler. “As charming as the Wilkins clan is, we didn’t come just to shoot the breeze. We’re here to talk business about the carriage.”

  “You can fix it?” asked Hazel.

  “Oh aye,” Tommy affirmed. “I’m a tinkerer at heart. I can fix anything. Just like your man, Tyler, here.”

  Hazel playfully raised her eyebrows at Tyler, and he shrugged innocently and said, “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

  “I’ve tried to get him to come work for me, but it’s hard to nail the bugger down.”

  “I told you,” Tyler said, a smile finally starting to crack. “I can’t afford to live on your wages. Though it’s better than nothing. I’m currently on the dole.”

  “I guess the Misses will be picking up the check for this one?” said Tommy, laughing.

  Tyler’s goofy grin evaporated.

  Fantastic.

  “It’s not going to be cheap,” Tommy said, almost by way of apology.

  “How much?” asked Hazel.

  “Well, I can’t say for certain until I get the carriage over here and start getting to work. But by way of estimate . . . about ten grand.”

  “Oh . . .” said Tyler, deflated.

  “I’ve got it,” Hazel said. She reached into her satchel and fished out her checkbook. “You take personal checks?”

  “For ten gees? That would be a first.”

  She handed the finished check to him, but he held up his hands in refusal. “Hold up. I don’t do payments until after the work is done.”

  “Consider it a deposit. Come and get the carriage when you can and get started immediately. We need it for the twenty-first.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “A pleasure doing business with you, Tommy.”

  He eyed the check, his eyes adding two more 0s to the proceedings. “Likewise.”

  * * *

  They crossed the green again, heading back to Yota, when Hazel stopped in her tracks and sucked air through clenched teeth. “Oh no.”

  It took Tyler a few steps to realize she had fallen behind. “What’s up?”

  He followed her gaze to the line of parking spots on the north side of the green, where stood the same man she had seen before. There was no mistaking him now—the dark greased hair, the two-hundred-dollar Ray Bans, the pink button-down. Classic Marco from head to toe.

  She cursed softly.

  “You know that guy?” asked Tyler.

  “In another world,” she said.

  Well, there was no use putting this off. She crossed the green and approached like she owned this town. The walk was a feature of the Helena Rose toolkit, perfect for working red carpets and galas—and it was one of the first things she’d had made sure to leave behind in LAX.

  “Marco!” she called out. “You look a little lost and very out of place.”

  He looked up and smiled, a perfectly calculated grin that he saved only for h
is biggest clients. “I could say the same about you,” he replied. “I know Birkenstocks are making a comeback, but you look positively rustic.”

  “What are you doing here, Marco?”

  “What, you think I could just sit by while Helena Rose disappears from the face of the earth? I was worried sick about you. When you didn’t return my calls or texts, I had to resort to desperate measures.”

  She glared at him.

  “I take care of my clients, Helena. What do I always say, love?”

  “Let Marco do for you what you shouldn’t have to do for yourself,” she said. “It’s not that I’m not happy to see you, Marco. But your being here puts some things in jeopardy.”

  He looked perplexed.

  “We had a deal,” she said. “This life, where I came from, who I was—it was supposed to remain as secret as possible.”

  “And it will!” he said. “It will! I’m a vault, love.”

  “How do you know the paparazzi haven’t trailed you?”

  He held up his arms and gestured to the village green and the surrounding buildings. “Do you see any paparazzi? Niente.” He leaned in closer and put an arm around her shoulder. “Seriously, what are you doing here, love?” It was hard to mistake the disdain in his voice. “I mean it’s very quaint and everything—very New Englandy and Robert Frost—but now is not the time to run away.”

  “I’m not running away.”

  “Nobody would blame you,” said Marco. “A messy breakup with Chet, you get a little testy with some journalists, you skip out on Colbert. My first instinct would be to get out of town, too. But that’s not the right move. This is a press opportunity—”

  “I don’t want to see the press right now,” she said, and then pointedly added, “I’d like to keep it that way.

  “I’m offended!” he said, not offended in the slightest. “I would never jeopardize your privacy.”

  “Unless it kept me in the papers.”

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m just looking out for you and your career. That’s why you pay me the big bucks, right? Listen, we can salvage this. We do a PR tour—I’ll book you on Ellen, we’ll do the whole talk-show circuit. This isn’t a PR nightmare. This is a PR dream.”

  “Marco,” she said, “I just need a little time. My family needs me right now.”

  “I can read a headline,” he said. “What better way to help them—your sister—than by going and proclaiming your undying support for her so that millions, billions, can hear you. Start a movement. A campaign. Free Juniper! I don’t know. We’ll hire an agency to do the marketing. Bumper stickers. GoFundMe. Rallies. Whatever.”

  “Marco, this isn’t a social justice cause. This is a criminal investigation.”

  “Okay, forget the campaign. But let me start making calls and get you booked on late night, early morning. Let’s just get back to LA and talk about this over breakfast at Eggslut.”

  “Pardon?” said Tyler, wading into the conversation, eyebrows raised.

  Marco noticed Tyler for the first time, and he looked him up and down. “Who’s this, your brother?”

  Hazel laughed. “No,” she said. “This is a friend. Tyler. He’s a writer.”

  “A writer. Got any projects?” asked Marco.

  Tyler shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, one involving a carriage.”

  Marco considered Tyler carefully for a moment and said, “Nobody is producing period pieces right now, kids.” Then he turned back to Hazel. “This place is cute and everything, love, but it doesn’t suit you.”

  “You can take the girl out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the girl,” said Hazel.

  “Not a problem,” he said. “I’m strictly here to get the girl out of the farm.”

  “You’re welcome to stay at my family’s house tonight,” she said. “And we can talk there. But I’m not coming back to LA right now.”

  “No can do, love,” he said. “I have a flight booked out of Burlington tonight. Two tickets, actually. First-class, of course.”

  “Marco, I’m not leaving with you.”

  “I didn’t come all the way out to the middle of East Nowhere just to return empty-handed.”

  “I’m sorry, Marco,” she said. “This is where I need to be right now.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. As long as I need to. But let me buy you lunch,” she said. “There’s a joint here with some killer coffee.”

  Tyler stifled a fit of laughter and tried to pass it off as a cough.

  Marco shook his head. “I’ll take my chances back in Burlington. If you change your mind, call me before I leave. Hell, call me after I leave. We’ll figure this out. We can come back from this.” With that, he took his leave, hopping into his rental car and zipping off with a squeal of his tires.

  Hazel and Tyler jumped back into Yota and headed back to the farm with Hazel riding shotgun. She didn’t think she could or should be operating heavy machinery at the moment anyway. She was too preoccupied. Was Marco right? Was she doing more harm than good being here on the farm? Could she use her celebrity to help Juniper and was she being foolish and selfish trying to protect her own privacy? Marco had said he’d booked a ticket for her back to LA. She wondered what would happen if she went back to the farm and packed her very small bag.

  “He seems nice,” said Tyler. “And important.”

  “Marco manages a few top-name celebrities.”

  “Like you,” he said.

  She nodded reluctantly. “Like me, I guess.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he said. “Pay Tommy outright.”

  “Why not?” she asked. “I have the money and it’s for my family’s farm. It only seems right that I pay for it.”

  He was quiet for a minute. “I know. I just wanted to contribute in some small way.”

  “Tyler,” she said. “You did contribute. This whole thing is your idea. I would have never thought of this or found a guy skilled or crazy enough to restore it on such short notice.”

  He screwed up his face in consternation.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but we need to figure it out if we’re going to keep spending time together.”

  He sighed. “You’ve built an impressive life for yourself,” he said. “It puts the accomplishments of a small-town errand boy to shame.”

  She knew she should have felt sad for him, but all she felt at that moment was sour. She had come home to get some perspective, to unwind, to figure out her next step. Not to massage the wounds of an old flame—it was just one thing too many to have to manage right now. “Nope,” she said.

  He laughed sheepishly. “Nope?”

  “If we’re going to hang out again, you can’t do that. No pity-parties, no moping. Let’s just have out with it. We’ve made our life choices and we can’t unmake them. I’m sorry that I left you here when I ran. I really am. I know it wasn’t part of our plan, but nothing that happened after Gammy died went according to plan. I wasn’t thinking.” She wanted to say that because the matriarch witch of the family had just passed, it meant that all the burden fell on her. That there would be no leaving. Ever. “If I hadn’t gone then, I might never have escaped.”

  He nodded slowly. “I just assumed that if I lived decently—was kind to people and all that junk—that everything else would take care of itself,” he said. “I’m almost thirty and I’m just now realizing that isn’t how life works. Maybe if I had been more selfish, I’d have found some success. Or at least be able to pay my bills.”

  “Are you saying that I’ve lived selfishly?”

  “No,” he said earnestly. “That’s not it at all, but I don’t have a beach house in Malibu or an apartment overlooking Central Park.”

  She didn’t have either of those things—the beach house or the apartment—but that wasn’t even the point. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Part of her heart was breaking for her friend, who had clearly been struggling in her absence, b
ut another part of her, a part that was flaring up, sucking the oxygen out of the room, and threatening to turn into a towering inferno, felt incensed at having to defend or downplay her own struggles.

  “Tyler Cortez,” she said. “I’m going to say this because you’re a dear friend and I love you. But nobody is going to make me feel guilty about what I’ve gone through and what I’ve achieved.”

  He was quiet. She could sense there was more to this than just her monetary success, the fame she had achieved when she’d left home and moved west. But whatever it was, she had no idea, and to be brutally and mercilessly honest, she didn’t have the bandwidth to even consider it right now.

  “I don’t need to be rich,” he said. “I’m just looking to find my place.”

  Tyler pulled into the farm entrance, passing beneath the massive oaks.

  “Maybe once I solve this whole murder thing and get Juniper back on the farm—” She stopped suddenly, realizing what she’d said.

  “Wait,” he said. “You are trying to solve the murder?” He seemed to have entirely forgotten the other stuff for the time being.

  She sputtered to explain, but managed only, “Well, with Charlie’s help.”

  “Charlie?” He looked at her like she was crazy, taking his eyes off the road for what she felt was an unreasonable length of time. “And what have you and Charlie uncovered so far?”

  That was a doozy of a question. How had he flipped this so she was the one on the defensive now? That hardly seemed like a fair turn of events. How did she even start to explain this? That she had uncovered some financial malfeasance? That there was a rogue spellcaster loose on the farm? That, by the way, all of those fairytales you grew up hearing, they’re actually grounded in fact?

  As they passed the North Meadow, she turned to look out her passenger window. She had expected to see Ronnie’s old pickup truck still parked outside the sheep barn, but she hadn’t expected to see nearly half a dozen trucks crowded there, and small crowded gathered nearby.

  “What’s going on over there?” she asked.

  “Oh no no,” he said. “No changing subjects.”

  She spotted what the commotion was all about. The entire sheep barn had collapsed in on itself.