Frame and Fortune

by Misty Simon

  “Mighty prim and proper, but still not an answer.”

  I broke before he even batted an eyelash. “Okay, I was going to tell you in a couple of minutes, if you’d given me a chance.” He looked doubtful, so, of course, I started blabbering away. “No, really, if you’d given me a second, I definitely would have told you right away. But we went to the restaurant, and then we came home. Then we were eating, and you know how rude it is to talk with your mouth full. I was going to tell you immediately, but then I remembered Bella was coming over soon, and I wanted to be prepared to tell her anything we’d found out.”

  Just then the doorbell rang. I had never heard a more welcome sound in my life. I ran to the door, escaping the kitchen as quickly as my heavy thighs could carry me. After throwing open the door, I immediately wished for a more welcome face.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked Jackson, a.k.a. the Bastard, Bella’s ex-husband. I’d had about enough of him, too, even though I’d barely seen him. But he couldn’t seem to leave Bella alone, no matter what she wanted, and I was almost to the point of wanting to ask Ben to go over to take care of the jerk.

  “That’s not exactly the Martha’s Point way to open a door, now is it?” His smile was oily. I swear he was less attractive every time he opened his mouth—which still put him at pretty attractive, but I wasn’t feeling it this time.

  “Do you have a purpose here, or should I let my big German Shepherd come chase you off the porch?” I was half tempted to slam the door in his face, but I’d had it today. Here was someone I could take my anger out on without real fear of reprisal. Nice word, good thought.

  “Someone ought to teach you a thing or two about manners.” His smile slipped while his skin flushed at his neck. He pulled at his collar, then rubbed forcefully at his throat. I guessed from the look on his face that he was trying to calm himself down. I wasn’t about to let that happen, since I was obviously getting under his skin. I was doing it for Bella. Honestly.

  “Ought they? Because I think you ought to get the hell off my porch before I set Boris on you. He likes men a lot. Your leg might never be the same.”

  He took a stumbling step back at that but then smoothed his hair, moving forward again. “I know you don’t have a dog, bitch,” he said in a low, mean voice. “In fact, I know a lot about you that you aren’t even aware of. You’d better watch your step.” He straightened up, quickly looking over my shoulder while I stood there like a statue.

  “What’s up, Jackson?” Ben said from behind me, not sounding any more cordial than I had been only moments before. I would have kissed him, but I appeared to be completely petrified. Me, Ivy, who’d been shot at and tied up like a turkey. But there was something infinitely mean glinting in Jackson’s eyes as he glanced at me before looking away again.

  “Ivy and I were having a little chat. I want to help Bella in any way I can through this ordeal. I was telling Ivy not to hesitate to call me.” He handed over a business card with a number scrawled on the front in blue pen. “That phone is always on, so any time you need anything, you give me a buzz. Any time at all.”

  A screech rent the air before the sound of his last word disappeared. “What in the living nine hells are you doing over here, Jackson! I told you to stay away from Ivy. Didn’t I tell you to stay away from her? She has a job to do, and she certainly doesn’t need your help.” Bella came bustling up the sidewalk at full steam ahead. I was surprised her hair wasn’t flaming from the sides of her head. She looked that pissed. I was willing to bet those four-inch heels of hers could do some serious damage.

  Jackson seemed to have the same thought. He turned on his heel and strode across the grass before she made it to the porch steps. Pretty smart of him to beat feet to his car. He’d parked in my driveway, which wouldn’t have irritated me too much except that he squealed his tires as he backed out onto the street. With a jaunty wave of his hand out the sunroof, he was gone.

  Bella huffed as she stood on my front porch. She looked like an angry bull, but there was no way I would tell her that. Instead, I ushered her into the house and asked if I could get her a glass of wine while we made our reports.

  ****

  “What I don’t get is why everyone is being so closed-mouthed,” Bella said, leaning back on my couch and sipping from a glass almost as big as a cereal bowl. I’d drive her home tonight if I had to, or she could crash here. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have a semi-permanent guest.

  “I think it’s because it’s you.” Ben put his beer bottle on a coaster sitting on the coffee table (good boy!). Leaning back, he put his arm behind my head on the loveseat. “I think some people around here think it’s a shame you didn’t run this good ol’ boy, Trev, out of town like you did last time with Jackson, but that you actually killed him, instead.”

  “That’s preposterous!”

  “Good word,” Ben and I said at the exact same time.

  Bella beamed for a brief second. “I thought you’d like that one.” But then the smile fell from her face while her eyes narrowed. “So Dennis won’t tell you anything?”

  “No one at the station will tell me anything. It’s not only Dennis—it’s everyone. I can’t even get outside people to tell me what they saw, or heard. The only person talking is some old lady everyone says is senile. She has some half-cocked story about a god coming from his travels with a knapsack on his back.”

  Why did we always get the loonies? I asked that very question, which caused Bella to snigger into her wine.

  “Why wouldn’t we? This is my life, after all. If it can be screwed up, it will be. I can’t even get divorced right, apparently.”

  “What?” Ben and I said in unison, again. The first time was funny, the second time made me feel like we should be wearing matching sweaters and sporting unisex hairstyles. Yick!

  Bella hiccupped while rolling her head back and forth on the upper edge of the couch. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it at all. In fact, I don’t even want to think about it, to be honest. And I seem to be the only one in this whole damn town who hasn’t had their picture frames stolen, so now the police are sniffing around me for that, too. They think I’ve turned to a life of crime.”

  How bizarre was that? Bella hadn’t ever stepped a toe out of line her whole life here, that I knew of. Why would they start looking at her for everything going on in town?

  But in another bout of what I was fast thinking was truly a talent for reading minds, Bella lifted her head from the back of the couch and stared right at me. “I had a few run-ins with the law when I was younger. Even though the records are sealed, some of the people still on the police force here have really long and vivid memories. They’ll never let me live it down, especially now with the Bastard back in town.”

  My look must have been pure puzzlement, because Ben jumped in before I could start with all the questions I had hovering on my tongue.

  “Are they still harping on the joyriding?”

  “Yeah,” Bella said. “And that wasn’t my fault, but no one ever believed their golden boy Jackson could have been behind it.”

  “And the flowerbed thing?”

  “Now, that was my fault,” Bella said, laughing and pulling on the end of her mahogany hair. “I was trying to help, but I have the blackest thumb I think God ever created. And when I was done it looked more like I was trying to vandalize than plant.”

  Since I could sympathize with her plight—I sucked at gardening, too—I leaned forward from the loveseat and patted her arm. “Did someone press charges on that?”

  “Yeah. Thelma Boden has never forgiven me for messing with her prize roses.”

  Well, that would explain why she and Thelma had never gotten along when I saw them together. But it was all so long ago, why did it have anything to do with now? Other than the car, I hadn’t heard anything about stealing. What would Bella be doing with so many frames anyway? Which got me to thinking.

  “What do you think som
eone’s doing with all those frames? Who could possibly need that many? And in so many different sizes?” I asked, looking at Ben as the wheels churned furiously inside my head. In a flash, I remembered seeing an advertisement in the daily paper about a new art gallery going in on one of the streets shooting off from Main Street. But how truly bizarre was it to steal frames for displaying art in a shop? Wouldn’t the owner run the risk of someone being able to identify one of their frames? And why would anyone start up a gallery if they couldn’t even afford to frame the pictures they were displaying? It was all too ridiculous to say out loud, so I kept my mouth shut as Ben and Bella continued to detail her youthful escapades.

  “There was that one time when I accidentally broke the front window of the drug store.” Bella cradled her head in one of her hands. “I still shop outside town for my prescriptions to avoid Lloyd Drummond.”

  “You were a little hellion,” I said, finally jumping into the conversation, leaving all my questions on the back burner of my mind. If I didn’t have something useful to add, at least I could show them I was listening.

  “Not really a hellion, just incredibly clumsy. Along with helpful without actually helping.” Bella smiled with all her teeth, but I could tell it was a sort of mask at this point. The strain of all this was cutting into her. I remembered when I was the primary suspect for another murder and how shaken I had felt, how powerless.

  In a burst of compassion, I grabbed Bella’s hand and squeezed, maybe a little too tightly from the way her eyes went squinty. “Sorry.” I cleared my throat. “I just want to tell you that nothing is more important than figuring this out now. We have to get you off the hook.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if you’d get rid of Jackson, too, while you’re at it.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Sweat slicked my hands as I picked up the phone the next morning. I had fought long and hard for the backbone I now enjoyed. I had gone until the age of twenty-four kowtowing to whoever was in charge and never really standing up for myself. Looking back, I could freely admit the old me was nothing compared to the new me. But sometimes the old me couldn’t help but pop up. This definitely qualified as one of those times. I almost wrapped myself in a brown blanket before I dialed the number, but I didn’t have one around anymore. Bella had come over months ago to clear out my house of all that comforting color I used to wear. Even my underwear had been brown without me realizing it. But I won’t bore you with that. Let’s get back to the phone call of doom, shall we?

  I dialed the first three numbers, then steeled myself to dial the last four. What was I doing? Who did I think I was? What did I think I could do that Ben hadn’t been able to? All these thoughts whirled through my head as I listened to what felt like endless ringing but was really only two short blips before the call was picked up on the other end.

  “Martha’s Point Police Station, how may I help you?” said a cordial voice.

  And that was the nicest anyone was to me for the next ten minutes while I got bounced around all over the place from voicemail, to hold, to the front desk, where I was put back on hold. I think I might have even talked to the janitor at one point, but I couldn’t be positive.

  Finally, finally, I got the woman I was looking for. Detective Bartley picked up the phone and said, “What do you want, Ivy? I haven’t got time for this.”

  I cleared my throat three times over her weary sighs. Then I plunged in at long last, sure the ball of terror lodged in my throat had dissipated—at least enough to talk coherently. “I want to help with this thing against Bella. I have some ideas, but I need more information, which no one is giving me.” I squeezed my eyes shut, like she could really see me over the phone. I had an ace in the hole, but I wasn’t ready, or willing, to use it just yet.

  “And why, may I ask, do you think I should give you anything? Maybe the reason no one is giving you information is because you aren’t a trained officer of the law; neither are you a detective. You’re not even a private investigator like your boyfriend. We aren’t giving him any information, either, in case you didn’t know.”

  That about covered all the things I knew she would say to me when I picked up the phone. But I was still at a loss as to what to say to defend myself. I had to make her give me the info without tipping my hand.

  I must have stayed silent too long because she said, “I have to go now. I have pressing things to take care of, and this murder isn’t going to solve itself.”

  “Wait!” I yelled into my end of the phone. “Please don’t hang up yet!” I almost never used exclamation points, but I was nearing desperation here. I had nothing, and it had been days since the murder. It had never gone on this long the other three times I’d solved the case. And I was mighty uncomfortable with the fact that I had less going for me now than when I’d started.

  “You have thirty-seven seconds,” she said.

  “That’s an odd amount of time,” I said, before I thought better of it.

  “You just wasted five and that was another three.”

  “Okay, okay.” I wished I were standing there in front of her. She wouldn’t be able to ignore my imploring eyes, or my clasping hands. But I wasn’t, so I had to put all that pleading into my voice. I cleared my throat, again, as she told me I had about twenty left. “All right, jeez. I’ve helped you three times now solving the murders in this town. I think it’s time for a little quid pro quo. I want in on this one like I was in on the last one when you invited me to help you. You’d still be searching for Horace if it weren’t for me, and you know it.” There I’d said it. Phew! Now I was out of breath. I was also listening to a dial tone. Damn.

  ****

  Fortunately, I wasn’t able to get hold of Ben after my colossal failure, so I left him a message. I had been bargaining on the police letting me in this time, especially since it was my friend, and I really had been instrumental in leading them to the last three criminals. Actually the number was six, since I’d also caught an underwear thief, a toilet paper/paper goods stealer, and a diamond thief, on top of the three murderers. But did that count for anything in the present? No, of course not. It had been foolish of me to think they were actually going to officially let me help them. Duh.

  After telling Ben’s voicemail my failure, I shut my phone off and went in search of Bella. She was probably still as miserable as she’d been yesterday, but maybe she knew something she didn’t know she knew because I hadn’t asked the right questions. And if you followed that line of reasoning, good for you, because I was still trying to get my mind around it.

  Anyway, I headed over to Bella’s shop. Once there, I gawked in surprise at how full the small storefront was. She hadn’t been kidding when she’d said everyone and their mother were coming in for one service or another. The resemblance of some of them was unmistakable. This is where I could make a horrible joke about inbreeding, but I will contain myself, thank you very much.

  I didn’t think I could handle being in that small space with so many people who didn’t like me. They might not have liked Bella, either, but right now she was a novelty. So she was relatively safe, which meant I would get an even worse tongue-lashing from some of the old biddies in there getting their blue hair curled.

  I decided to wander around to the back of the building, maybe finally do some real clue searching. The front door of Bella’s Best hadn’t been forced, according to Bella, but that was about the only piece of information I had at my disposal. So either the person who’d deposited Trev in the freezer had a key, or they had come in through the back.

  I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find anything the police hadn’t already, but there was no telling. A couple of times in the past they had overlooked certain things in their hot and unwieldy pursuit of putting someone—anyone, sometimes—behind bars.

  I walked down to the end of the sidewalk, turned left, then made my way into the alley running behind the buildings on this block. The five stores between Waverly and Broad on Main were connected like a set of row
homes. Even though the sun was shining out front, it was dank and semi-dark back there. I noticed the alley wasn’t wide enough for two cars to pass each other, and the buildings on the opposite side were warehouses. I had no idea what they housed, but it was irrelevant right now.

  Could someone have killed Trev in one of these darkened warehouses, then dragged him over to Bella’s? Surely some of the people back here must have known about her beauty salon. Maybe it was someone who got their hair done at Bella’s Best. Maybe they were unhappy with the way she’d dyed them, so they were giving her the ultimate payback.

  I was being ridiculous, but it was certainly keeping the gloom back here at bay. I wouldn’t want to walk down here at night—that was for sure.

  Big green trashcans were spaced along the wall. I wasn’t making a point to be quiet, but I did have soft-soled shoes on. Once I thought about it, I purposely walked on anything that wasn’t concrete. With little forethought from me, this actually paid off for once in my life. I heard a deep voice rumbling on the other side of Bella’s big trash bin and stopped dead in my tracks.

  “I told you I’d get it to you as soon as I could,” the voice rumbled. I could hear the man clear as the sky above, but it took me a moment to place the voice.

  It was Jackson. I tried to hide in a crack in the wall, forcing my big body back, back, back against the rough surface behind me, hoping he wouldn’t come looking around the bin. I hadn’t forgotten the way he’d threatened me and called me a bitch. Or a fatty, for that matter.

  But there wasn’t anywhere else to hide unless I was willing to go down to the next set of trash bins. And to tell the truth, I wasn’t leaving before I heard more of this conversation. Call it a gut instinct, but promises like the one he’d made a second ago usually involved something the promiser didn’t have and would need to get.