Masking for Trouble

by A J Maybe

  Ty retreated to the living room, and I called to Sherry: “Hey, it’s my Mr. Miyagi!”

  “Huh?” Sherry said, shoving her thick black pixie cut hair into submission with one hand and casually swinging a cast-iron pan with the other.

  “Uh, you know. My mentor, my teacher.” I held up the box of donuts.

  “Mmm, right.” She squinted, concentrating as she tried to do the math in her head. “What time is it? Those can’t be ready yet.”

  “Well I just, you know, I was eager to get started.” I didn’t want to tell her about my intruder, and the warning left on the porch, not with the distinct possibility that the intruder was sitting in the next room.

  “Mmm. Okay.” She looked at the pan. “We’re getting tired of eggs anyway,” she concluded, hanging it up. “Donuts and coffee is a balanced meal.”

  “A cop’s breakfast!” Kasper hooted, shuffling his leather-slippered feet into the room and reaching for the box. “May I?”

  “Of course!” I said. “They’re for everyone...right Sherry?” I added, in case they weren’t.

  She nodded, her signature eyebrow raised in annoyance. “I just said we could have them for breakfast.” She might not be a morning person.

  Kasper frowned into the box, his untamed brows knitting together in concern. “Thought these were supposed to be sourdough,” he said. “They’re not cracked on the top.” I bit my lip, ashamed by the truth of it. Sourdough donuts should look like a freeze-frame of an explosion, with the inner dough just starting to burst through the crust.

  “And no glaze?” Kasper said. “A sourdough donut needs glaze.” I winced. A glaze would’ve been captured beautifully by the crackling ridges, and these donuts had neither. Kasper hefted a donut and grunted, buckling his knees like it weighed a hundred pounds.

  “They’re, uh, Euro-style.”

  “I think that’s offensive to Europeans,” Sherry said, assessing the box’s contents from beside Kasper’s elbow.

  “As a proud Estonian, I can say: these donuts are offensive to donuts,” said Kasper.

  “I think they’ll taste better than they look,” I said. “I tripled the nutmeg — why cheap out, right?” I heaved one out of the box for myself and sank my teeth into it. Well, tried to sink in my teeth. I ended up gnawing off a chunk of the crust and chewing carefully.

  It tasted… okay.

  Kasper gnawed cautiously at his. “Honest review? Texture like rawhide, taste like a farmer’s boot.”

  “They’re a little… earthy,” I said.

  Sherry tapped one with her fingernail. It thunked. “So how do you take your eggs, Piper?”

  I guess I was invited to breakfast even though I was a failure on the donut front. Ty sat opposite me and I watched him closely. “So, you always pop over this early in the morning, Ty?”

  “Here was here all night,” Kasper said.

  “How fun. Like a slumber party.” Unless he’d snuck out to leave me a message after Kasper and Sherry were sleeping.

  “Ty was drinking beer,” Sherry said, like she was tattling.

  Ty smiled sheepishly. “A little.”

  “Too much to drive! Too much to walk, maybe,” said Kasper.

  “It helps me sleep!” Ty said, defensively. “I’ve had a hard time sleeping at my dad’s place lately.”

  He stays at Barry’s place, I noted.

  “Tyler gave up his own place after the last wrestling tour,” Kasper informed me. “Was staying with Barry, helping out his father, like a good son, after the Cupcake Machine was shut down.”

  “Ah, yes, Jimmy told me about... all that. Tragic stuff.”

  “Oh?” Ty said, tension in his voice. “What did Jimmy tell you?”

  “He explained how he wanted to take the business nationwide. Since, you know, operating in Saint Mauvais wasn’t, uh, it wasn’t going to work out.”

  Ty snorted and pushed back from the table. I recognized the temper in him.

  “Is that what you and Rex were arguing about at Soggy’s? That bylaw of his?” I blurted. It just popped out, all direct and rude like that. I clamped my hands over my big dumb mouth.

  “Piper.” Kasper’s cluck was low and disappointed.

  “I mean, I, uh—”

  “No, no,” said Ty. “That’s fine. We had words, yeah. We always did. Rex even got to shoving about it, but I hate fights. He took a walk to cool down, but... ” Ty trailed off, studying his hands.

  But that was the last time anyone saw Rex alive. Other than his killer.

  “You hate fights?” I said, skirting around the more obvious question. “I thought you were a wrestler? Or training to be one?”

  Ty nodded. “Aye, that’s right. But that’s not fighting. That’s entertainment. It’s theatre. I can’t stand to be around real violence.” I must’ve still looked skeptical, because he went on. “You don’t believe me?! The cops already talked to me, and you’ll notice I’m not in jail. Just ask LT! We were at Soggy’s all afternoon, through the supper hour. Drinking beers,” he said, looking at Sherry, “Too many to drive and almost too many to walk. Then I started staggering to dad’s place and LT took Leo for a run at the park, where he found Rex.”

  I hung my head. “I’m so sorry, Ty.”

  I was going to say more, but a wind chime interrupted.

  Kasper grunted as Sherry got up to retrieve her phone. “Somebody better be dead, to send a message during breakfast,” he said.

  “It’s Lion Tamer,” Sherry said, not looking up from the screen.

  Kasper looked stricken and gave up on his morbid joke. “Not really dead, is he?”

  “No…” she said, and turned the screen around. I squinted at it.

  Hey Sher-bear. I gotta go, k? You were rite: cops think I killed Rex. It’s my past. They’re gonna set me up, give me the ole frame job, but I’m not stickin around 4 it. I’m getting rid of this phone, in case they track it. Might miss the next tour. Tell the guys.

  Big favour to ask: can you go get Leo and take care of her for awhile? Can’t take her with me. She’s bad at hiding. You know how she gets. And she eats too much. Kasper knows where. Lots of food and water in the room, she’s okay for awhile. Due for a change I think.

  “Oh LT!” I said. “Running will only make you look guilty!”

  “He cannot hear you,” Kasper informed me. “Do you know how cell phones work?”

  “I know, I know. Send him a message, Sherry — tell him not to run! They’ll find him and arrest him for sure.”

  Sherry nodded and swiped at the screen for a few seconds, then frowned. “It’s not going through.”

  Ty shook his head. “That’s LT. He’s a decisive guy. I guarantee he sent that message one second and smashed the phone the next.”

  Kasper harrumphed and pushed back his eggs. “I guess we’re off to the Thessalon Motel. Better get some pants on me.”

  14

  A Donut is a Donut

  “Thessalon?” I said.

  “Yeah. That was the only place Lion Tamer could find that would let Leo in.”

  “He should get that dog registered as a service animal,” I said. It occurred to me that the OPP detachment was in Thessalon. The reasonable thing to do would be to go report my late-night visitor. Now that I was in a calmer frame of mind, I’m sure I could make a report without mentioning the meaning of the bottles.

  I briefly pictured tricking Ty into coming with us, and then turning him in on the spot, but it’s not like I had any real evidence. Not yet, anyway.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m heading to Thessalon. Why don’t I give you a ride, Sherry, and we’ll pick up the pooch on the way?”

  I was eager for more girls-only time, when we could talk witchy stuff.

  Kasper snorted. “I saw your car! You can barely fit Sherry in beside all that junk. Where would Leo sit?”

  Fair point.

  “No,” Kasper decided. “We’ll go, all three, in my truck.”

  “But first, pants,” Sherry said, lo
oking pointedly at Kasper’s weathered flannels. They both disappeared into their rooms.

  Ty popped into the bathroom with his training clothes in hand and reappeared a moment later. With Kasper and Sherry still getting changed, Ty and I were alone in the dining area. I forced myself to take long, steady breaths. It wasn’t like I was entirely alone with him. Sherry and Kasper were just on the other side of those walls, I reminded myself. No big deal.

  If Ty is the guy, it’s not like he would try anything with Sherry and Kasper in the house, right?

  “You know,” he said, eyes steely and focused on the far wall, “my father was a good man.”

  Of course he was. Everyone says so. What a strange thing to say.

  “People thought he drove that pink truck because he couldn’t afford to repaint it, but he wasn’t embarrassed about it. He just liked to mess with people. Thought it was funny.” He leaned against the table and looked to the door. His face strained like something under a heavy load.

  “Sure,” I said uneasily. “I get that. A real man can obviously drive a pink truck.”

  “He liked to push people’s expectations, you know? So here he was, this big beefy world champion, selling cupcakes from the belly of a unicorn. And I didn’t have any problem with that!” he insisted, as if I’d accused him of it.

  “No, of course not,” I said. But it sounds like you have a problem.

  “Jimmy wanted me to take over the business, you know? That his big plan for global cupcake domination — that the son would succeed the father. But I just...you can’t do everything, you know?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s the problem with my generation. They told us ‘you can do anything you want!’ and we thought they said, ‘you can do everything you want’. See the difference? You can’t do everything; you have to pick one thing.”

  For once, I kept my mouth shut, for fear of stoking Ty’s fire. He was proving to be more introspective than I’d imagined, and more passionate.

  He stalked to the door, pushing his palms into his eyes and trying to control a hitched breath. “I just... it’s not that I didn’t want to go into business with dad! I did! But I had to do my own thing, my one thing. And that was wrestling. It still is wrestling.”

  “Okay,” I murmured as he jammed his feet into tan work boots without lacing them.

  “And I just… I wasn’t ashamed of him!”

  “Nobody thought you were,” I said through a shaky exhalation, though I had no way of knowing what the general consensus around the Cove was, let alone the indie wrestling world. Ty shook his head and escaped out the door, letting the screen rattle shut behind him. His big truck roared obnoxiously to life and raced out the driveway.

  My heart raced. That was not what I expected. I had assumed Ty and his father had this ideal relationship —the son following dad’s footsteps, each one proud of the other and all that, but maybe that was a mistake.

  Was the pink truck really such a big deal? I didn’t think so, but maybe in the hyper-macho world of wrasslin’ it was. It certainly contrasted sharply against Ty’s noisy behemoth.

  A memory from my own childhood slammed into my brain: my father’s car. Maroon, boxy, a little rusty. A Tempo, I think it had been. It had rattled whenever it idled because of something called a ‘harmonic dampener’.

  Useless thing! my dad cursed. Does nothing — just a money grab! Six-hundred bucks to fix it, and all it does is make noise. So it didn’t get fixed. Dad thought winter tires were a money-grab too, so he refused to pay full price for new ones. He got a great deal on a used set and we had to drive across town to get them, then cram four dirty old tires plus our family into that little car.

  Turns out, they didn’t fit. Wrong rims for the Tempo. So he found some rims, and since he thought paying a shop to switch the tires over was a waste of money too, he tried to do it himself, wrecking the rims in the process.

  We slid through every stop sign in St. Mauvais that winter, skating around on nearly-bald summer tires. In February, my mom was running to the office supply place and turned totally sideways in an intersection, hopped the curb, and crunched the rear door into an oak tree.

  I guess the rear passenger-side window was a money-grab as well, so it got fixed with plastic vapour barrier and red tape. The tape came loose in the freezing cold and after that the wind caught the flapping plastic, making a whirring, whining call as the car accelerated, like some cheap Hallowe’en sound effect.

  I was old enough to be mortified about it. Then one day in class Mrs. Fera announced a new project, and hey, we needed partners, and Elise Higgins, that little twit, announced she’d be partners with anyone except for Piper Mars.

  Her infuriating, matter-of-fact voice rang in my head and I felt a blush crawl over my cheeks, even sitting there by myself in Kasper’s dining room, 25 years later: “The Mars family drives a ghost car! They’re witches!”

  I guess that’s when I learned the value of keeping up appearances.

  A month later, I found out that my dad had saved money on tires so that we could take a weekend trip to the Great Bear Indoor Waterpark & Resort on spring break. It was the sweetest reason to forfeit your family’s safety that I could think of.

  My sister reminded me not to make a big deal about the trip at school, since everyone else had gone three or four times already. “Just play it cool.” And I did.

  Dad had picked us up from school, asking “So? Excited for Great Bear Water Slides?!” He’d said it like an announcement, loud enough for everyone to hear, and I’d played it cool, just like my sister said. I’d rolled my eyes, blushing red I’m sure, and slid into the maroon embarrassment of a car.

  Tears welled in my eyes now, as they had then. My dad had tried so hard. What a dumb, ungrateful kid I’d been. I was older and wiser now, but apologizing to my dad wasn’t an option. I hadn’t seen him since I was thirteen.

  Does Ty feel this same regret?

  “Okay!” Kasper’s voice rumbled. “Let’s get the road on the show, as they say!”

  Sherry appeared, shaking her head at Kasper.

  I turned my head to hide my tears and darted to the entryway, wiping my eyes as I bent to get my shoes on. “Here’s the thing,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady so they wouldn’t wonder why a grown woman was randomly crying at breakfast, “You two get the dog, okay? I’ll just do my thing and you two do yours.”

  “Bah!” Kasper said. “I have to show you what a real donut is. We’ll all go. The bakery in Thessalon makes the best anywhere.”

  Sherry gasped. I assumed she was insulted that he would put the bakery’s donuts over hers.

  “Well, maybe not the best,” said the old man. “A donut is a donut, after all.” He looked toward my box of weaponized dough. “And a hockey puck is a hockey puck.”

  “A good donut requires good intentions, and perfect attention,” Sherry said. “Attention to measuring the perfect amounts, and waiting the correct length of time.”

  Kasper nodded, approving of Sherry’s teaching.

  I sighed. “Okay, but my thing might take a while.” I took a deep breath, nervous to acknowledge the encounter out loud. “I have to go to the OPP. I had an uninvited visitor last night.” I gave them a rundown of my scare, omitting the detail of the bottles and how they linked to the past I was desperate to keep hidden.

  Kasper nodded gravely. “Yes, yes, that is serious. Bears almost never leave notes, so it is not a bear. The police must know. And maybe you should stay here tonight, for protection.”

  A few days ago, I would’ve laughed at the idea that I, the strong, capable, fully-grown Piper Mars, could need protection from an 80-something-year-old and his five-foot-nothing sidekick, but that was before I knew that one was a master of joint locks and the other was an accomplished witch.

  Maybe I’d take Kasper up on the offer of a slumber party. As long as I could pick up my laptop and get their wifi password for the night: I was way behind in updating Brennan and I still had to
see the rest of that email from The Familiar Faces.

  We strapped into the dusty red truck and sped across the island, then over the poetic curve of the Familiar Bridge.

  I realized that neither Kasper nor Sherry had questioned why I wanted to drive an hour each way to make a report in person, instead of just phoning it in.

  They can’t help if you don’t ask. You have to open up.

  “Kasper? Sherry? I have a confession. I’m not going to the OPP just to file a report. I have a little scheme in mind, and I need your help.”

  15

  Dog in the Big House

  Hands on the wheel, Kasper leaned forward and trained his Santa Claus eyes on mine. “Help? I love to help.”

  “The road!” Sherry yelped. “Watch the road!” She adjusted her seatbelt as Kasper steered the truck back to the correct lane. “But yes, what’s this scheme? Are we going to steal the truck back?”

  “Awfully bold to do it in broad daylight,” Kasper said, nodding. “I like bold. Might catch them off guard that way.”

  “Love this plan, Piper.”

  “No! We’re not stealing the truck,” I said, smirking at the thought. Imagine The Familiar’s headline: Bridge Trash Arrested after Wildly Unsuccessful Attempt to Rob Police Station. “No,” I repeated, “I need to get it back the right way, so I can actually run a business out of it.”

  “Ah,” Kasper nodded sagely.

  “Which is why we need to solve the murder,” Sherry said.

  “And prove that the truck wasn’t involved.”

  “Okay. How?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But it’d be good to know what direction the OPP are looking. So while I’m filing the report about my late-night visitor...maybe you could do like you did last time, Sherry? Catch a few case details for me?”

  “Last time there was paperwork I could read, just laying out.”

  I nodded. It was unlikely to get so lucky again. “Yeah, but you must’ve used some power to read it all so quickly, right? You could barely see over the counter, and the top page was just a cover sheet without any real info, from what I saw. There must’ve been a remote viewing spell involved, or something?”