by Maia Chance
I hitched up the straps of my minibackpack. “Yeah. Who are you?”
He lifted his helmet off. His longish honey-brown hair stood up and didn’t lie back down.
“Oh.” My pulse quickened. “Otis.”
“I didn’t know you were in town, Agnes. You look great.”
He didn’t even sound sarcastic. Weird. “What’s up, Otis?”
“What’s up? I haven’t seen you for, what? Ten years?”
“I’ve been in town almost every Christmas.”
“That explains it. I go down to see my mom in Philly at Christmas.” Otis’s coffee-bean-brown eyes shone.
Great. Otis was just as good-looking as he’d been in high school. Scratch that. He was more good-looking, because when guys start getting little wrinkles at the corners of their eyes, it’s a good thing. No one drops hints about SPF thirty to guys. He still had the same firm chin; the slightly crooked prominent nose; the quick, broad white grin; the thick dark eyebrows. Otis and I were “buddies” for about a year in senior AP English even though, well, I’ll put it this way: we both had letterman’s jackets, but Otis’s said swim team, and mine said debate squad. He still had the swim team body. I suppose I still have a debate squad body.
Oh, and those quotes around “buddies”? Those are because in high school, I was secretly, madly in love with Otis. He was officially the first guy to have broken my heart. I was over it, though. Of course I was.
I set off on the crosswalk, finally mustering a smile for Otis. “Nice to see you again.”
“Glad you’re back in town,” he said. I heard his motorcycle engine turn over, and he blatted away.
This is the problem with hometowns. You can’t escape your high school self.
Chapter 2
The Naneda Public Library is an old brick building set back from the sidewalk on a lush lawn overarched by maple trees. It’s a five-minute walk from Main Street, so by the time I mounted the steps, my bangs were stuck to my forehead, and I was out of breath.
There had been maybe a miniscule grain of truth in Roger’s parting shots regarding me and exercise. Hypocrite.
A poster on the library door said, “Local Celebrity Author Gracelyn Roy, Best-Selling Author of Country Kitsch-ins, book signing tomorrow, 7 PM,” accompanied by a photo of a lady with dimples and curly red hair.
I went into the cool, hushed library foyer. Historical documents and photos about Naneda filled display cases. More Gracelyn Roy posters bedecked the walls. Rooms through archways housed the library stacks and public reading rooms, and the office was behind a glossy oak door. Chris the Slug would be in the office. Chris was the one I needed to talk to about getting my job back for a little longer.
I shoved the door. It hit something solid. I heard shrieks and a thunk, and then something shattered.
Crud.
The door had two-way hinges, so instead of pushing the door again, I carefully pulled it. On the other side, a woman knelt, picking orange-and-white shards off the floor. Beside her lay a cardboard box. Another woman stood over her with another box.
“Oh my gosh!” I said. “I’m so sorry!”
“Did you shove the door, young lady?” the standing woman snapped. With her ash-blonde hair helmet, WASPy good looks, and silk paisley scarf, she could’ve been Martha Stewart’s stunt double. “Just look at the mess you’ve made.”
“It was an accident,” I said. I knelt and gathered up a couple shards.
“Oh, thank you,” the kneeling woman twittered. She was plump, and she wore a rumpled floral dress with a lace collar. Her short cottony hair was drugstore blonde.
“Thank you, Dorrie?” the Martha stunt double snapped. “You’re thanking her for destroying one of our town’s irreplaceable relics?”
“Oh, well, Kathleen, I only . . .” A flush mottled Dorrie’s cheeks.
“This was an irreplaceable relic?” I held up one of the orange-and-white shards. “It looks like a mixing bowl my grandma used to have.”
“Pyrex,” Kathleen said. “It belonged to one of Naneda’s most famous ladies, the cookbook author Mary Whittaker, and it is my sworn responsibility to protect these relics at any cost.”
This was getting dippy. I picked up the last shard, handed it to Dorrie, and stood.
“Agnes?” a man said.
“Hey, Chris,” I said. “I was just coming to see you.”
Chris the Slug, head librarian, trundled toward us in a shirt that looked like a tablecloth. “Agnes, are you bothering Mrs. Todd?”
“I—”
“This young lady destroyed one of Mary Whittaker’s Pyrex bowls,” Kathleen said. “I think she did it on purpose.”
“Agnes!” Chris hissed. “Seriously?”
“On purpose?” I said.
“Anyone else would have pulled that door,” Kathleen said, “yet you heard us coming and shoved with all the might in your doughy little body.”
I narrowed my eyes. I am not a confrontational person at all, but something in me just snapped. “Watch it, lady. I’ve had a pretty rotten day so far, and I’m not really feeling like I have a lot to lose.”
“It looks like you’ve got about twenty pounds to lose,” Kathleen said.
Chris said, “Treat Mrs. Todd with some respect, Agnes. She’s the chairman of the historical society.”
“Chairwoman,” Kathleen said.
Okay. This was starting to make sense. Kathleen Todd was the rich widow who had donated the boxes of old magazines that Chris was too chicken to get rid of. The mildewed 1960s issues of Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens were in bad shape, and the library already had copies of those issues, anyway. But since Chris clearly kowtowed to Kathleen, they were sitting in a utility closet in the nonfiction stacks. I didn’t think I’d met Kathleen before, although Naneda was small enough that she looked familiar.
“Apologize, and I won’t press charges,” Kathleen said to me.
“Press charges? You’re insane!”
“How dare you!”
“I’ll just go take this box to the temporary storeroom,” Dorrie whispered.
“No.” Kathleen stopped Dorrie with a hand. “I want as many witnesses as possible.”
“Witnesses to what?” I said. “Witnesses to me wringing your neck?”
“Oh!” Kathleen cried.
“Kidding,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Please, Mrs. Todd.” Chris twisted his pudgy hands. He turned to me. “Agnes, are you here for your final paycheck? Because I put it in the mail this morning.”
“Um, no. Well . . .” I swallowed. Kathleen and Dorrie weren’t going to budge. Fantastic. “I was wondering if I could have my job back. At least for a few more weeks.”
“I hired a permanent employee. Someone with a library science degree.”
“Do you want me to beg?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, Agnes, but the job is no longer available. Now, Mrs. Todd, let’s get all this sorted out. Here. I’ll take the box with the broken pieces and—yes, Mrs. Tucker, why don’t you take Mrs. Todd’s boxes and—right. Good.”
My glasses began the slow slide down my nose. I watched the three of them maneuver through the doorway with the boxes.
On the way out, Kathleen swiped at the Gracelyn Roy book-signing poster taped to the door. She shredded it right down the middle of Gracelyn’s curly red head and tossed it to the floor.
Chris scooped up the torn poster. “Uh, Mrs. Todd—?”
“Gracelyn Roy will ruin this town,” Kathleen snapped.
“Oh, Agnes, I almost forgot,” Chris said over his shoulder. “You’ll still be helping out at the book signing tomorrow, right? You wouldn’t want to give the Blythe family a bad name, would you?” He made a juicy wink, but I knew he wasn’t joking. He is, after all, the slug. Once, for example, Chris suspended a six-year-old’s library card for a year after the little boy returned a book with chocolate smeared on the title page. He’s ruthless.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
I pictured myself booting Chris’s creased khaki butt as he waddled after Kathleen and Dorrie. The door swung shut.
* * *
I spent the rest of the day in Dad’s den watching an Alfred Hitchcock marathon, eating muffins, and e-mailing my friends who lived in cool places like San Francisco and Brooklyn, asking if they needed a roommate. Even if Roger was going to come to his senses, I had to be proactive, right? And I kept telling myself Roger would come to his senses, even though he had not called. But I hadn’t brought my cell phone charger in my backpack when I’d stormed out of our apartment before lunch—I hadn’t brought much of anything—and now my phone was out of juice. Of course, Roger had a low-genius IQ (that’s what his mom told me once), so surely he knew he could call me at Dad’s.
Dad’s phone didn’t ring. I began to have a hard time remembering exactly why I had ever liked Roger in the first place, which made me feel guilty.
After gorging on a Betty Crocker–style dinner prepared by Dad’s housekeeper, Cordelia—roast chicken, scalloped potatoes, creamed spinach, and Jell-O with marshmallows suspended inside—I went upstairs to my childhood pink-princess bedroom. Cordelia kept it spick-and-span, along with the rest of Dad’s large white colonial house.
I stayed up late reading one of my old Nancy Drew books. It was almost one o’clock when I checked my e-mail for the last time on Dad’s study computer. Nothing in my in-box but spam. Nothing from Roger. Nothing from my friends in San Francisco and Brooklyn.
As I lay in a miserable ball in my canopied bed, I had this sensation that everything holding me up—the mattress, the floor, the house, the ground—was giving way like cake in a rainstorm.
* * *
The next morning, I decided that the way to cope was (a) to refuse to think about Roger and his abs bimbo, (b) to eat more muffins, and (c) to distract myself by asking Great-Aunt Effie if I could help out at the Stagecoach Inn for a few weeks. Sure, I had turned her offer down, but I was running low on options, and she was family. Hey, maybe it would even be fun watching her dig through cobwebs and mouse poop.
At breakfast, Dad told me he had no idea where Great-Aunt Effie was staying but that she might be found at the inn since she’d said something about getting started right away with lifting its condemned status. “She’ll sure be glad for a hand,” Dad said. “I’m worried about her, you know.” He tapped his temple.
“What?” I said. “Dementia?”
“No, it’s just that she’s always been . . . skittish, I guess is the word. Erratic. She’s had five husbands, for Pete’s sake.”
Cordelia the housekeeper was at the kitchen counter, dumping fresh grounds into the coffeemaker. She had a short brown perm and wore a ruffly apron over crisp slacks and a blouse. She kept herself trim with artificial sweetener in her coffee and by not eating the food she cooked. “Agnes, don’t forget to keep the security system armed,” she said. “The code to disarm it is 8-7-8-7.”
Cordelia insisted on a security system for Dad’s house as well as for her private apartment above the garage. In my analysis, this was just her being territorial, since Naneda is the kind of town where people leave their doors unlocked.
* * *
After four of Cordelia’s famous strawberry muffins and two cups of coffee, I dug my old ten-speed bicycle from the garage and wobbled off in the direction of the Stagecoach Inn. It was a quarter till eight o’clock.
Ten minutes later, I turned off Main Street, near where it fed out to Route 20, and onto the inn’s overgrown driveway. Potholes booby-trapped the asphalt. Rusty beer cans, a toilet seat lid, and a crumpled lawn chair lurked in the ditch. An orange-striped cat sprinted across my path and disappeared into a hedge. The driveway opened out onto a big weedy lawn graced with large trees. Naneda Lake sparkled in the morning sun. Across the lake, vineyards striped sloping fields. The first hints of autumn gold tinged the rolling forestland beyond.
And there was the inn. Three stories of circa-1850 peeling paint, dangling shutters, and missing windowpanes. An enclosed porch stretched along the lakefront side. Chimneys hosted cawing crows. The entry porch had once-white pillars and grand double doors. A red sign on one of the doors said,
Condemned
as
Dangerous and Unsafe
Danger—Keep Out
So basically, a horror movie set.
I hopped off my bike and leaned it on its kickstand in the drive.
Great-Aunt Effie emerged on the porch just as I was mounting the steps. She wore huge sunglasses, white slacks, a black blouse, and electric-pink pumps. “Oh, it’s you, Agnes,” she said. “I thought I heard crunching on the drive.” She took a calm puff of her cigarette and inspected my blue T-shirt, which read Naneda High Band Camp. I’d found it, along with a pair of too-small jeans from high school, in my closet at Dad’s.
“I used to play the clarinet,” I said.
“I see. And the . . . shoes?”
I glanced down at my orange sneakers. “They’re comfortable.”
“But at what cost, darling?”
“I’m not here for a makeover, okay?” I leaned my butt on the porch railing. I heard a crack and felt it give, so I straightened and folded my arms. “I just came to see if you were okay. And, um, I was hoping I might take you up on your offer after all. To help you here at the inn, I mean.” I told her my terms: it was a temporary arrangement, no blowing cigarette smoke in my face, and no discussion whatsoever of Roger.
Effie agreed. “This is because you didn’t get your library job back,” she said.
“Well, yeah.”
“And because you are somewhat straitened, financially speaking.”
“Um. Yes, actually.” I had maybe eight hundred dollars in my bank account. Thankfully separate from Roger’s.
“And then, of course—since you are a Blythe, and Blythes always have a surplus of neurotic energy that must be channeled, or they become morose and fixate on carbohydrates—you require a diversion until you figure out a way to leave town, at which point you will promptly do so without looking back and go on to lead a fruitful and exciting life elsewhere, in . . . Paris?”
“I was thinking Brooklyn.”
“Oh, dear God. Well. I’ve always adored honesty.” Effie dropped her cigarette onto the porch and swiveled her pink shoe to crush it. “It saves so much time. Come through the inn—I’ve got to collect my handbag in the kitchen, and the car is out back. I was just on my way to the hardware store. They open at eight. I’ve got piles of tool-type thingies to buy, apparently—that’s what your cousin Chester said. He rattled off an entire shopping list when he stopped by last night.”
“Chester?” He was in on this insane project? Chester and I have been fighting over the last slice of Thanksgiving pecan pie since we were toddlers. He’s . . . well, you’ll see.
“It seems that the inn is condemned only because all the wiring is hopelessly out-of-date and dangerous—this is what the code-compliance officer at City Hall told me yesterday—and it just so happens that Chester worked as an electrician once.” Effie led me into a grand, murky entry hall with a long spill of dirty staircase.
“Looks like the Addams Family would find it pretty homey,” I said.
“Use your imagination, Agnes.”
“That’s the problem. I am.”
We went past the staircase, through a door, and into a kitchen. The kitchen was spacious, filthy, and outdated, with saggy linoleum floors and dank and musty odors.
Effie said, “I think they remodeled in the fifties—see? The stove and refrigerator are salmon pink. They didn’t shut the business down until the seventies, and after that, the inn served as a boarding house until the late eighties.”
“Great-Uncle Herman and his wife, right?”
“Yes, and Herman’s father and grandfather before that. It’s a family tradition.”
“Which is why you’re hoping to resuscitate it.”
“Not hoping. I will.”
I was too young to remember th
e inn as a boarding house, but I’d seen old postcards of the place in its heyday from the late nineteenth century up until World War II. The headquarters of the prosperous Chester Stagecoach Company had been built on the site in 1808 by my ancestor Joseph Chester (yes, my cousin’s namesake). In 1847, the place burned down, as nineteenth-century buildings so often did. Blame it on the whale-oil lamps. By this time, the railroad had mostly driven stagecoaches out of business anyway, so Joseph Chester built a hotel instead—but the Stagecoach Inn name stuck. With its scenic location, charming hospitality, and wholesome old-fashioned offerings like canoeing, fishing, and swimming, the Stagecoach Inn became a summer holiday destination for generations of families.
Effie had collected a costly looking white leather handbag from the table. “Just through here, darling.” She opened a door off the kitchen, which led to a glassed-in back porch.
I went first. I tripped on something and stumbled. I braced my fall on another door that led outside and turned to see what I’d tripped on. It was a foot in a driving moccasin. A foot attached to a leg. Attached to a body.
Chapter 3
My heart squeezed. “Oh my gosh,” I whispered. “Oh my gosh!”
“Whatever is the matter with . . . oh. Oh, dear me.”
Effie and I stared at Kathleen Todd’s body, sort of half lying, half hanging by the neck with her scarf—the silk paisley scarf she’d been wearing in the library yesterday—caught in the wringer of an old-fashioned washing machine. Kathleen’s face was bloated and livid, but her ash-blonde hair helmet still looked perfect.
“That’s some strong hair spray,” I said stupidly. A pause. “Um, Aunt Effie? I think she’s . . . dead.”
Effie drew a shuddery breath. “It would seem so. Strangled herself with her scarf—Ferragamo, but likely a knock-off because I do see a few stray threads—”
“How could she have possibly strangled herself? Look! Her scarf is caught between the rollers of the wringer, and it has been—” I swallowed bile. “It has been—”