by Inman Majors
Penelope watched this exchange with barely concealed glee. As far as she knew, Missy’s tastes in foods were limited to Captain Crunch, nachos, and Italian submarine sandwiches minus the lettuce. Penelope had never seen her eat an actual vegetable, fruit, nut, or herb, other than the lime that came with her after-work margarita. Her spice of choice was salt.
“Try you a little bite,” Buford King said. “Spring onions is what some people call them, but that name is technically incorrect. They are similar species, but not the same. That there is ramp. Allium tricoccum. It’s like if an onion and some garlic had a pretty little delicate child.”
While Missy hemmed and hawed about not wanting to ruin her supper, and how she’d add the ramp to her daily salad later that evening, Penelope allowed herself to smile openly and freely at the stream of lies coming from her boss’s mouth. Deceit, evasion, and treachery—Missy’s stock-in-trade—were nothing in the face of an earnest Hillsborian offering his largesse. She might as well be refusing to sample a tasty bud while lounging on the HHR’s beanbag chair. Or an Iris her mother thought should be transplanted to her front flower bed. A gift offered by a Hillsborian simply could not be refused.
“Just one little bite,” said Buford King with an encouraging smile. “Just to be sociable. You can save the rest for that special salad later tonight. You’ll like it. I just know you will.”
“Just one little bite,” said Penelope, nodding insincerely. She knew Missy was paranoid about giving offense to the working people of Hillsboro, the ones who kept the AC units going at Rolling Acres and the septic lines clear. And the working man before her was going to be asked to do the most important task she’d ever asked anyone: taming Dimwit’s skunk army.
Scratching her nose with a tan and very obvious middle finger, she grinned at Penelope and shoved the ramp bulb. Penelope was pretty sure she’d just swallowed it whole, but Missy made a good show of chewing and murmuring sweet nothings as the Critter Catcher grinned his approval.
“I told you,” he said. “And plenty more where that came from. I’ll round up a good sackload for you before I head out. But now I reckon you’d like to talk a bit about our striped, odiferous friends of the wild.”
“Yes,” said Missy, though casually gagging. “I do. We have a skunk problem. A big one. And I need someone to get rid of them as quickly as possible.”
The Critter Catcher smiled with his eyes only and said: “How big is big?”
“Like a skunk army. They surrounded me the other night while I was out making my nightly rounds and forced me back into the office. They’ve basically got the run of the place.”
“Is that right?” said the Critter Catcher. “Is that right?”
“I told her it was probably just one skunk,” said Penelope.
Buford King now turned to Penelope and offered her a candid assessment. “Just one, you say. Just one?”
“Yes,” said Penelope, as Missy again scratched her nose with a flicking middle finger. “Maybe a mother with some babies. But definitely not a skunk horde stalking her like a pack of coyotes.”
“A skunk horde? I like that,” said the Critter Catcher. “It has a nice ring to it.”
“They were organized,” Missy said, moving around so that she was side by side with Penelope. “I think the guy in that trailer on the hill is training them.”
“Trained skunks,” said Penelope in a sneering tone. “Really? Did you see them?”
“No, but I smelled them. And I felt them, too. Their presence. It was like they were moving down the hill in a calculated fashion. Mr. King, that’s possible, isn’t it?”
Penelope let fly her choicest scoff. The Critter Catcher looked from one to the other of them, smiling a bit, then up to the sky, and then to the woods where the delicious wild ramp grew, the cloudberries and purple dead nettle. He seemed to realize he was being called upon not just as a resident wildlife expert but as an umpire in an ongoing dispute. A lone cloud crossed the sun, and the day grew dark and momentous. Then a crow cawed in three short bursts from the woods and the Critter Catcher nodded as if that was the signal he was waiting for.
“The skunk,” he said, “is a very unusual animal . . . a sensitive animal . . . an intelligent animal. One might say, a very intelligent animal.”
Penelope could feel Missy smiling beside her but refused to give her the satisfaction of looking. Her boss spoke up perkily now.
“So they could organize and work as a pack? And they could be trained?”
“Oh yes, they can be trained. Yes ma’am, indeed. I’ve trained a fair number myself.”
“I knew it,” said Missy with a smug nod of her Wayne’s World cap.
Penelope did not really know as much about skunks as she’d led Missy to believe, but she threw caution to the wind. “Do they travel in organized packs?”
“The skunk,” said the skunk man, “is generally a solitary creature.”
“I thought so,” said Penelope.
“But very intelligent, as you said,” offered Missy. “And trainable.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Is it fair to ask, then,” said Missy, placing her tan hands behind her denim cutoffs and pacing around a bit, “if a trained, domesticated skunk would act in the same way as a wild one?”
“That is fair to ask,” said the Critter Catcher. “And a very interesting question.”
“I thought so,” said Missy.
Her employer was trying not to gloat in front of an earnest local whose help she desperately wanted, but Penelope thought she was doing a poor job of it. She’d swished her ponytail there at the end, which was about as sassy as it got.
“Do you recall,” said the Critter Catcher, “what time of day this skunk encounter occurred?”
“Around midnight was the approximate time of my initial encounter,” said Missy. “They are nocturnal creatures primarily, if I’m not mistaken.”
The Critter Catcher looked off in the distance for a moment, eyeing a redbud in full bloom. He took a bit of ramp from his pocket and helped himself to a nibble. Then he pulled his pipe from another pocket and tapped it thoughtfully against the side of his knee. He was deep in skunk reverie now.
“Well, that’s a bit like the ramp and spring onion debate. Most people would call the skunk nocturnal. Most scientists even. But in truth, the skunk is crepuscular. Which means he likes to do his wanderings during twilight. Just before dawn. And just after dusk.”
“That’s fascinating,” said Penelope.
“It is, isn’t it?”
Penelope could tell this crepuscular news had thrown Missy for a loop and smiled sympathetically at her.
“Are they never out except for those hours?” Missy blurted.
“A good solid moon might have them out around midnight,” said the Critter Catcher. “Or other, less explainable factors.”
The skunk man had said this bit about less explainable factors with the faintest hint of a mysterious air. Penelope heard it and knew Missy had too. She’d perked up considerably since the crepuscular setback and fairly sang out, “So, Mr. King, in your professional opinion, could we rule out the possibility that I saw a skunk at midnight?”
“No we could not.”
“Or the possibility that I saw more than one, and perhaps many of them?”
“That would be unusual, yes. But females do often share a den in cold weather. It’s a cooperative thing when den space is scarce.”
“Cooperative,” said Missy. “Cooperative.”
“He said in the winter,” Penelope piped in. “It was seventy degrees last night.”
Missy waved this off with a dismissive flick of the wrist.
“So,” she said, eyeing Penelope the way Penelope was eyeing her. “So, in your opinion, can we absolutely, positively rule out the possibility that I not only saw a multitude of skunks but that I may have also been surrounded and menaced by that same multitude?”
“Well,” said the Critter Catcher. “Well, well, well
. Are you asking for my professional opinion? Or my personal one?”
Saying this, the skunk man looked directly into Missy’s eyes. He stood equidistant from them, as proportionate as his truck in the parking space, ramp hanging loose from one pocket, his pouch of tobacco poking out of another. He was smiling wryly to himself, as if aware he was the arbiter of a great ontological debate about not just skunks, but the whole of nature’s mysteries. The day was quiet except for the distant steady tapping of a woodpecker. Now the Critter Catcher focused his smile on Penelope, seeing if she was reading the table correctly. His answer—which could only please one of the women before him—would depend on Missy’s response. That was what the smile was saying, Hillsborian to Hillsborian, and Penelope knew she’d just been given fair warning.
Missy paced around a spell, and squished her tongue around in her mouth, as if in search of ramp residue. She was highly agitated and her eyes never left Penelope’s. If she guessed wrong, Penelope could walk away from Operation Dimwit without a backwards glance. They both knew this. Those were the implied stakes. They’d both been intractable and now here they were. Penelope kept her face as straight as she could and looked neither at her boss nor at the skunk man. The woodpecker’s thumping was louder now, steady and eternal, and Penelope tried with all her might to concentrate on that sound.
“Personal,” Missy said.
Penelope nearly groaned, but didn’t. Had she blinked? Did she have a tell?
Mr. King looked wistfully at Penelope before replying. They’d once been family, after all.
“These are unusual skunks,” said the Critter Catcher in a warm soft whisper that spoke of bourbon barrels and the light winds of Valhalla. “Unusual indeed. Special skunks, even. And in my personal opinion—which is what you asked for—my intuitive personal opinion is that you absolutely cannot rule anything out. The skunk is one of the Creator’s most fascinating and mysterious creatures.”
11
A few hours after engaging in brinksmanship with Missy—and losing—
Penelope was en route to her date with Fitzwilliam. She had her windows down and was pushing her factory-issued speakers to the absolute limit. Finding Cheap Trick’s powerful beat regenerative, she began to feel the evening might be better than she’d feared. It couldn’t possibly be worse than haggling over cosmic skunks and stalking Dimwit.
Then again, she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to. That lucky guess at personal hadn’t bound her to a thing. Implied consent meant nothing in a Virginia court of law.
Feeling consoled by jurisprudence, she envisioned the quiet evening before her. If her friends’ conjecture was correct, she’d be home early enough to start on the second coat of turquoise. Unchaste Places would be whispering warmly in her ear as well. Maybe she’d get frisky and take a look at the complicated present from her friends. She was an adult with a house to herself, and a taxpaying American. What she did with her body was nobody’s business but her own.
Her optimism grew with each car she sped by. Cheap Trick had that effect. She was scooting along at a fair clip, utilizing both lanes freely. Surely that nose whistle was a one-time thing.
Nearing the county line, where the landscape got wild and woolly, she thought of chiggers and bites and how many Theo had accrued in his first half day of camp. She felt itchy just thinking about it. The fact that his inhaler wouldn’t arrive until Monday troubled her. Then again, it was virtually impossible to get Theo to physically exert himself, other than in his hell-for-leather pursuit of Plinkies, so maybe his lungs wouldn’t be unduly taxed. At the moment, he was likely lounging on the sidelines during a kickball game, claiming some higher intellectual calling or another.
This notion made her smile and she felt better about Theo surviving until the albuterol arrived. She was dying to know his frame of mind when James dropped him off, but couldn’t bring herself to call her ex to inquire. That was just asking for a trip down Camp Sycamore memory lane. Knowing her luck, he’d launch into a few heartfelt lyrics from the camp theme song:
Along the banks of placid lake
Among the dewy dells
Oh, Sycamore, Camp Sycamore
Where friends I’ll surely make
As much as she’d like to keep mentally making fun of James, it was time to shift gears and focus on her night at Pemberley. She was surprised that Fitzwilliam lived so far out. This was true boondocks. She’d already driven by the road that led to the HHR’s cabin—where a burn pile always smoked and tabs on the Illuminati were scrupulously kept—and the farmhouses were getting farther and farther apart.
And then she saw two pink balloons affixed to a mailbox, one reading WELCOME, the other PENELOPE! She checked to confirm that this was indeed Lambton Lane. The gravel drive wasn’t what she’d expected, nor the overgrown hedge that blocked any view from the road. It looked like the entrance to a local militia outfit where men prepared for the end of days by shooting beer cans and riding four-wheelers.
She took a deep breath, upped the volume on “Surrender,” and made the turn through the hedges and toward her date, with the soft clunk of rocks kicking up beneath the car. Twenty seconds elapsed and still she hadn’t located the house. She passed a pond with a gazebo beside it, and now the landscape opened up to rolling hills interspersed with fruit trees of some sort, neatly separated into orchards by split rail fences. What looked like grapes grew on several of the hills and a small wooden sign said, Slowly Now: Quail Preserve.
She came next to a raised bridge. As the planks rattled beneath her, she looked down to see a lovely bubbly creek and benches for gazing upon it along the mossy bank. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” which she remembered from Mrs. Sketchins’s frighteningly effective junior English class, popped into her mind and she wondered if this was where Fitzwilliam came to indulge his literary passions. She also wondered if perhaps Fitzwilliam was on the wealthy side.
This thought was confirmed when she crested a hill and saw the manor. And make no mistake, it was a manor. Just the sort, in fact, that heroines in her erotic novels often found themselves in. Rebecca Dunmoore, the small-town computer genius from Des Moines—more book smart than street—had found herself nude and blindfolded in the wine cellar as her boss, Franz, tempted her with rich cabernets and a lot more in Beyond Secret, the book she’d read just before Carnal Liaisons and Unchaste Places. This thought made Penelope’s heart jump a bit. She didn’t want to be confined like Rebecca Dunmoore, out here in the middle of nowhere. She let her mind race for a spell, just for sport, but was reassured by the thought that if any funny business occurred, she could crack Fitzwilliam over her knee like a dry twig.
Gravel had given way to a paved drive that circled a spewing fountain, and Penelope couldn’t decide whether to park here or over in front of the four-car garage. Fitzwilliam had driven a VW bug to their date at Starbucks and she couldn’t imagine what other vehicles lay within. If there were more, she hoped to see the rest of his fleet. As was commonly known, she was a bit of a car junkie. She’d never had a cool car, sports or otherwise, but she’d made out in quite a few, and not just Winston Hackler’s RX-7, though that had proven the gold standard for hot guy/hot car combo.
She decided to park in front of the fountain, near the main entrance, and disembarked from her twelve-year-old jalopy, smiling at herself and her car-tarty ways. While ringing the doorbell, she noticed the brickwork at her feet, which spelled Pemberley. Wow. He really was a Fitzwilliam.
The door opened and there he was, wearing an apron over the same cardigan he’d posed in on LoveSynch. Penelope thought it much too warm for sweaters, but perhaps the house was cool, his blood thin. He looked every bit of sixty-five. He might need compression socks for all she knew. A very fat cat peeked from behind Fitzwilliam’s boat-shoe-thin ankles, flicking its tail this way and that in a haughty manner.
“Penelope,” Fitzwilliam said, tilting his swooping mane of grey hair into a bow. “My dearest lemon sorbet of the Internet. Promptitud
e is a virtue, don’t you know? And surely one of the seven holies. Frankly, I can’t keep the virtues straight. The seven deadly sins, well, those I’m quite well versed in. Yes, quite familiar with those. Ha ha ha. You are right on time. Right on the sixth bell.”
At this, a great chiming commenced from inside, the loudest grandfather clock Penelope had ever heard. She wondered if this thing gonged all night, and if it did, how Fitzwilliam ever got any sleep. It fairly rattled the noggin. That same head was now being kissed lightly on both cheeks in rapid succession, a greeting one didn’t often encounter in Hillsboro. Penelope wasn’t sure what to do. She pursed her lips, in case she was supposed to cheek-peck back, and tried to avoid swaying her head to accommodate the received kisses, lest she crack the old squire’s grey head. She’d never felt less European.
“Yes, right on the sixth bell,” said Fitzwilliam, after his blitzkrieg on her face was over. “Do come in, my dear TheosMom75. Come in, come in.”
Fitzwilliam shut the door behind them. For a moment, it was just Penelope and the cat looking at one another. As was her way, she bent down and said, “Hello, Algernon. It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for inviting me to your house.”
As a reply, Algernon mouthed a silent hiss.
Fitzwilliam hadn’t seen this and said: “Yes, yes. This is the great playboy bachelor about whom you’ve heard so much. Mr. Algernon Moncrieff the second. Esquire, raconteur, and true lord of the manor.”
Algernon showed what he thought of this flattery by offering his backside to Fitzwilliam and sauntering out of sight.
“Oh ha ha,” said Fitzwilliam. “Yes, yes. You just leave us, my dear bumptious boy. Pretend as if you aren’t interested in our guest. Oh yes, I am sure. Places to go and people to see. We know, we know.”
Fitzwilliam gave Penelope a playful wink as Algernon’s fluffy tail swished out of sight, then stood beside her as she took in the surroundings. She was in the first grand parlor she’d ever seen, other than the one at the governor’s mansion in Colonial Williamsburg, which she’d visited on a school trip in fifth grade and only dimly remembered. She did recall—vividly—her friend Debbie pretending to play a fife and dancing a jig in a way that was really funny. At least until they got snatched out of there by Mrs. Turnbull for disturbing the bewigged man’s presentation.