Bad Housekeeping

by Maia Chance

  “Well, there’s your leverage,” I whispered to Effie.

  “And then some.”

  “Let’s ring the doorbell.”

  “No, no. This is so much better. We can keep our leverage in our pocket and wheel it out if and when we need it. That way, if we don’t need to blackmail Karl to stop the demolition, why, we can save our leverage for later. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of Karl Knudsen in the future as the inn’s renovation progresses.”

  Effie was treacherously organized. And I wasn’t sure how comfortable I was with all those wes.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “The front curtains were shut, so Karl won’t see us.”

  We scurried over the front lawn, across the street, and into the Cadillac. Effie revved the engine, and we lurched away.

  “That was wrong,” I said. “We shouldn’t have done that. I feel dirty. You can’t blackmail Karl, okay?” I needed a muffin or—wasn’t it pushing lunchtime?—pizza.

  “I won’t blackmail him yet,” Effie said, “but I must admit it feels nice to have something up my sleeve in the event that Chester doesn’t finish the wiring in time. Where to next, Agnes? And don’t say that revolting pizza place on Route 20.”

  “Pizza? At this hour? No. And honestly, I’m not sure what to do next. I’d like to poke around into the drug deals at Club Xenon, but I have no idea where to start. I’m assuming that now that Budzinski is dead, the club will be shut down, and no way am I going back out to Jentry’s farm under any circumstance. Maybe we could corner Gothboy and get him to fess up. He seems kind of wimpy. We could find out where he lives and do a stakeout.”

  “Sounds like a terrible bore,” Effie said.

  “As far as I know, detectives spend a ton of time sitting in their cars on stakeouts and eating donuts.”

  “Nancy Drew never ate donuts, and she was forever driving around in her convertible.”

  “Let’s go back to the inn,” I said. “You can cheer on Chester, and I can make some calls and try to figure out where I can find Gothboy.” I was also sweating it that Effie might really blackmail Karl Knudson about stalking his ex-wife if things got down to the wire, but I didn’t want to say that out loud. Maybe she’d forget about it.

  Chapter 21

  When Effie and I arrived at the inn, Chester’s Datsun was parked out front, and so was Otis’s motorcycle.

  My belly clenched. I was getting hungry, okay?

  As I pushed through the kitchen door, my phone rang. I dug into my backpack and answered it. “Hello?”

  “Miss Blythe?” a young man said.

  “That’s me.”

  “This is Eric Tanaka at the Pressley Program in Syracuse. Remember we spoke about your Boston Herald piece on the murder in Naneda?”

  Sassy molassy. The winsome little dude who thought I was a big-time journalist and his ticket into the profession. “Yeah, of course.”

  “Okay, well, I did some more digging into our old files, and I found some stuff that I thought might be interesting to you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  The kitchen door opened, and Otis walked in, looking awesome as ever in faded jeans and a T-shirt that showed off his pecs. Otis and Effie started talking. I sank onto a chair.

  On the phone, Eric Tanaka said, “Not all the old files—paper files, I mean—had been entered into the database by the data entry students, it turns out, so I looked through the boxes of files for the students who entered in fall 1972—they’re stored right here in the school—and I found Kathleen Todd’s file.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yep.”

  “But you said you couldn’t find her name.”

  “I couldn’t—and that’s because she had changed her name. But the name change was noted in her file, because I guess she changed it sometime between when she applied for the school and when she actually started the course.”

  “Okay, and what was her original name?”

  “Larlene Black.”

  “Larlene Black,” I repeated. “Any address? Like for an orphanage in Massachusetts?”

  “I couldn’t find one. The file included her original application for enrollment, but she’d listed a PO box in Syracuse as her address.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, great work, Eric. Keep me posted.” I hung up. “I need to e-mail my journalist friend in DC and make her give this kid some kind of internship,” I said to Effie and Otis. “Otherwise, I may combust with guilt.”

  Otis grinned.

  Effie was uninterested in guilt. “Am I right in understanding that Kathleen Todd’s original name was Larlene Black?”

  “Yeah. She completely changed her name. And doesn’t Larlene ring a bell?”

  “It sounds like a kooky bit character on a 1950s sitcom,” Effie said.

  “The magazines,” I said, pointing to the kitchen table. “Think!” I eyed Chester’s leftover Cheetos on the table, but since Otis was standing right there, I decided not to scrounge. Cheetos-powder rings around the lips is not a lovely look.

  “Still no bells ringing,” Effie said.

  “Those magazines were addressed to Earlene Roy,” I said. “Doesn’t Larlene sound like Earlene?”

  Effie tipped her head. “A bit. But—”

  “I think this is our big break in the case. Let’s go.”

  Otis and Effie exchanged a look: Alert! Cuckoo bird on the loose.

  “Why are you two just standing there?” I asked, pausing on my way to the door.

  “I guess the word is . . . tenuous,” Effie said.

  “So? I’ve got a hunch, and we need to go to Scump. Oh—and I’m doing the driving.”

  “Your license is at the Goodwill,” Effie said.

  “So? It’s a stolen car, and the police told us we can’t leave Naneda, so if we get stopped, we’re screwed anyway.”

  “Can I come?” Otis asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  * * *

  Scump, New York, according to the map on my phone, was just over one hundred miles away, near Oneida Lake, north of Syracuse. Kind of a blank spot on the map, honestly. Not quite the Adirondacks but nowhere near Lake Ontario either.

  We gassed up. I was behind the wheel, and Effie insisted on chain-smoking in the back seat, so Otis was next to me. This felt weirdly marital, like I was Mom and Otis was Dad and Effie was our chain-smoking toddler. I turned up oldies on the radio—something for everyone, right?—and off we went.

  “I’m liking those sunglasses on you, Agnes,” Otis said once we were on the Thruway, giving me a sly, sidelong grin. It was so sunny, I’d been forced to borrow Aunt Effie’s face furniture.

  I gripped the wheel tightly. I couldn’t help it: each and every time Otis said something that was, at least ostensibly, a compliment, my blood pressure went up. I was going to have to drag all that Hagness Blimp stuff out into the open before it made me crazy.

  “Listen, Otis,” I said, “I know you’re used to being all ladies’ man, and that’s cool. Heck, I think you’re entitled to it. You’re a, um, a handsome guy.” I swallowed.

  “Gee, thanks, Agnes,” Otis said. There was a lilt of humor in his voice.

  “I’m not saying that to butter you up. I have no interest in handsome personally, although I am fully aware that there are women who do.”

  “Where are you going with this, Agnes?” Effie called from the back seat. Smoke wafted. “I know it’s old-fashioned, but I still believe gentlemen should do the asking.”

  “I’m not asking anything!” I said.

  Otis swiveled around to look at Effie. “Anyway, Mrs. Winters, I already asked Agnes out on a date, but she turned me down.”

  “Don’t give up,” Effie said to Otis. “She’ll come around.”

  “Do you guys realize I’m sitting approximately ten inches away?” I said.

  Effie leaned back in her seat. “Well yes, darling, but you’re so obtuse, you might as well be ten miles away.” />
  My gas pedal foot sank toward the floor. The speedometer crept up. “Okay then, since we’re getting into this, Otis, I’ll tell you why I didn’t accept your invitation for a so-called date. Number one, because I just broke up with my boyfriend—no, fiancé!—of eight years. Number two—and this is on a related note—I don’t accept pity dates.” Actually, I’d never been asked on a pity date before. In fact, before Roger and I got together, I hadn’t really done dating of any kind.

  “Is there a number three?” Otis asked. His usual bantering tone was gone.

  Well, good.

  “Yes,” I said, “there is a number three, and thanks for asking. Number three is the way you completely and utterly humiliated me before senior prom!”

  A long silence. I kept my eyes on the road.

  “I didn’t,” Otis finally said.

  “You did!” The speedometer flickered toward eighty. I rocketed past a guy in a U-Haul who gave me the finger. “You said you had something important to ask me after fifth period and to meet by my locker. Then, when I got to my locker, a big crowd of your—your—those popular jock assholes and mean girls and your brother Garth were already there waiting for the show, and there was that sign on my locker!” Hot, furious tears surged out of my eyes, but I didn’t bother to wipe them away. “Hagness Blimp?” My voice cracked. “Ring a bell?”

  “Agnes,” Otis said gently, “that wasn’t me. You thought I did that?”

  I glanced out of the corner of my blurry eye at Otis. His mouth hung open in amazement.

  “Of course it was you! And yeah, okay, I’m willing to admit that people can grow and change out of their highs school selves, although for the most part, people really don’t. We’re all walking around with the same egos and insecurities we had when we were seventeen years old.”

  “So true,” Effie said.

  “Agnes, you’ve got to listen to me,” Otis said. “I didn’t set you up. I didn’t write those awful signs. I can’t believe you thought that was me all these years! Is this why you never returned any of my e-mails during college?”

  I snorked my runny nose. Who cared? In a beauty pageant, or heck, even in a Miss Congeniality pageant, I’d be finishing dead last at this point. “Okay, then how do you explain the coincidence that you asked to meet me in the very spot where all that happened?”

  “How do I explain it? Simple. I was going to ask you to go to prom with me.”

  “But—”

  “My jerk brother Garth knew it. He did all that other stuff. The signs. Arranging for his goons to stand around and watch.”

  “Garth. Garth?” I let up a little on the gas. I couldn’t believe my ears. All these years, I’d harbored a grudge against the wrong brother?

  From the back seat, Effie said, “You still could’ve asked her to the prom, you know, Otis.”

  “I would have,” Otis said. “But by the time I got there, you were gone. I couldn’t find you anywhere. You were absent from school for the rest of the year. I tried calling, and you wouldn’t take my calls. I went to your front door a bunch of times, and your dad and your housekeeper kept shooing me away. So then I wrote you a letter apologizing for my brother and mailed it to your house. Did you ever get that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I . . . well, I didn’t read it.” Lauren had helped me turn it into confetti; we’d assumed it was only more taunting.

  “And after that, we graduated, and I went to my mom’s for the summer. Back then, Mom lived down in Corning.” Otis rubbed the back of his neck.

  “The one that got away,” Effie said, almost purring.

  I wasn’t sure if she meant me or Otis. And I didn’t know what to think. I mean, I believed Otis. Partly because I wanted to, but also because this story fit so much better with the Otis who had been my goofy pal in AP Chemistry. But heartbreak doesn’t just heal instantaneously like a jacket zipping up. All the soreness I’d harbored for so long was still there . . . but now it was sort of dangling out there with no place to land. And the weirdest thing was, now that I couldn’t bear a grudge against Otis, there was no reason for me not to have a big bad crush on him.

  Which meant I was going to have to think of a new reason. Fast.

  * * *

  Scump wasn’t one of the darling villages of upstate New York with big old houses, clapboard churches, huge trees, and cute downtowns. No, Scump was a tumbledown gas station/bait shop/used-truck dealership and, farther down the highway, a squat restaurant called The Moose Look, billowing sour smoke. A discount mattress emporium and an all-terrain vehicle dealership rounded out the offerings. They certainly liked their tubby tires in these parts.

  “Take the first right after the gas station,” Otis said. He was manning the map on my phone. “That should be Scump Pond Road.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was feeling nervous. I’d had two hours to think over what Otis had told me. He suddenly seemed available to me in a way he hadn’t before. And he was sitting right next to me, sending over faint whiffs of aftershave and waves of masculine self-assurance.

  I believe the word argh sums it up pretty well.

  “This?” I asked, turning onto a dirt road.

  “I guess.” Otis craned his neck. “I can’t see a sign.”

  “Could be covered in all that growth, though.” As we jostled up the rutted dirt road, branches scraped the sides of the car, and rocks clunked against the undercarriage. “Sorry,” I said with a glance at Effie through the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t be. I’m enjoying every second of it. I can only hope that Paul will get to see his precious car when I’m through with it.”

  “Is Paul your—” Otis began. I shushed him with a dark glance.

  We passed trailer homes and small houses sunk back into dank trees, each with an average of four vehicles parked out front and satellite dishes the size of hot tubs. After about half a mile, I spotted a rusted-out mailbox with a peeling American flag sticker and the number nineteen.

  “I guess this is it.” I turned down the driveway.

  Nineteen Scump Pond Road was a long, narrow trailer home balanced on cinder blocks. A sofa rotted sideways into the weedy front yard. A battered station wagon was parked at the bottom of the steps. As I turned the engine off, I noticed one of the curtains twitch. I gulped, and it sounded deafening.

  “You okay, Agnes?” Otis said.

  “Sure. Except . . . people have guns.”

  We hadn’t even mounted the steps when the door creaked open and a frail woman emerged. A tangle of clear tubes attached her to an oxygen tank on wheels.

  “Whaddaya doin’ on my property?” she yelled with surprising power.

  “Ms. Roy?” I said.

  “Mrs. Roy. Hate that miz crap. Earlene, everyone calls me.”

  Bingo.

  “Whaddaya want? You city slickers lost?” Earlene wore baggy old jeans and a brand-new-looking sweat shirt that said Proud to be an American.

  “We aren’t exactly city slickers,” I said. I mean, come on. I looked like a geeky PE teacher in my sweats and Star Trek shirt.

  “Got yerself a nice Cadillac,” Earlene said. “Least it’s American-made.”

  “Yep, she’s a real beauty,” Otis said.

  Earlene looked him over, the oxygen tubes at her nostrils glinting in the sun. “You look like a country boy.”

  “I am, Mrs. Roy.” Otis tossed her his bright white smile.

  “What the eff happened to your windshield?” Earlene asked.

  “Oh,” I said, “um, it was a little accident at the firing range. We were having a picnic . . .” I coughed. “We were wondering if we could talk with you for a minute.”

  “What about?”

  “About Gracelyn Roy.”

  “Gracelyn?” Earlene’s eyes widened.

  “And Larlene.”

  At Larlene, Earlene’s wasted body quivered. “You ain’t cops. What are you?”

  “Friends,” I said.

  A pause. “All right. Come on in, I guess.”


  Chapter 22

  Inside Earlene Roy’s trailer home, the odors of microwave burritos and rot mingled. Copies of Soap Opera Digest and dusty knickknacks cluttered surfaces. A huge flat-screen TV dominated the living area, switched off. Earlene gestured to a couch caving in with bottom-prints. Effie, Otis, and I sat in a row.

  Earlene sat in a newer-looking La-Z-Boy recliner on the other side of the coffee table and tenderly arranged her oxygen tank and tubes. “Okay, shoot,” she said.

  I took the lead. “Did you know someone named Larlene Black?” I’d already guessed she did, but I wasn’t prepared for her reply.

  “’Course I knew her. She’s my daughter.”

  My breath caught. “Your daughter?”

  “Yep. My only child.”

  “Did you know she . . . died?”

  “’Course. Saw it on the Channel Seven news. But seeing as I ain’t laid eyes on that little snot for about thirty-five years, I can’t say I feel too sad. You guys want some Crystal Light?”

  “No, thanks,” Effie, Otis, and I said in unison.

  I said, “But Kathleen—that’s what she changed her name to—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Earlene said.

  “—well, she told people she grew up in an orphanage in Massachusetts.”

  “She would’ve liked growing up in an orphanage. Heck, she told me that about every day when she was a kid. A real Miss Priss she always was, acting like she was too good for me and her dad and the whole town of Scump. Called us trailer trash. As soon as she finished up at the high school, she took off. I never did see her again, but I heard about her, through our relations.”

  “Your last name is Roy,” I said, “but Kathleen’s—Larlene’s—last name was Black?”

  “Me and her dad weren’t married.”

  Okay, that added up. “And Gracelyn Roy—she’s a relation too?”

  Earlene’s withered lips curled up at the corners. “My niece.”

  Oh. My. Gawd. Magnum, P.I. had nothing on me. Nothing. “So Gracelyn and Kathleen were cousins?” This was freaking unbelievable. Somehow, not a single person in Naneda seemed to have caught on to this.