The Complete Honey Huckleberry Box Set

by Margaret Moseley

  I had to call Janie Bridges — my other housemate — to hold Bailey while I answered the ring and collected the envelope. Yes, I agreed, it was strange to have a letter delivered to a dog. The world was strange now, hadn’t he noticed? And, yes, it was going to be a hot fall; the leaves probably wouldn’t even change until November. And thank you. And good-bye.

  “For Bailey?” Janie asked about the envelope.

  “Seems so. Guess I should open it though?” I joked.

  “I should say so. What if it’s a poisoned dog biscuit? I bet it is. And from the postman, at that.” That’s my Janie. Always on the lookout for the dark and dangerous side of life, she lived, breathed, and ate mysteries. Came from years of selling mystery books to customers in her converted gas station/bookstore in West, Texas, a long stone’s throw away from Fort Worth. Now she lived with me. I liked to think it was because she had no place to go when she left her husband. However, I think it was because lately it seemed I was always stepping into mysteries and murders more often than Bailey left deposits in my backyard.

  “So, open it,” Janie demanded.

  And so, I did. The key fell out of the tear I made in the envelope. It landed with a plonk on the hardwood floor of the foyer. I reached for it before Bailey could scoop it up with his teeth but not before he had a good sniff at the brass object. As I closed my hand around the key, Bailey took off running in circles around Janie and me, barking to beat the band.

  “Anything else in the envelope?” Janie asked.

  I tore open the rest of the dirty envelope and looked on both sides of it, but the key was all there was. “Nope, nothing else.” I reported. “Hush, Bailey.”

  Janie took the key from me and examined it. “Who would send a key to a dog? And why?”

  “It’s a mystery to me,” I said and slapped my hand against my mouth, but the words were out there, hanging in the wind.

  “A mystery? Yes, a mystery.” Words cannot describe the look on Janie’s face. Pure bliss would be an understatement.

  I tried to take control of the situation. “Okay, okay, it’s no big deal. Just a key, after all. We’ll figure it out, but in case . . . just in case . . . there are any dead bodies with this mystery,” and I added what I thought was a joke to the circumstances, “promise me, Janie. This time, no screaming.”

  She didn’t hear me. Her eyes glazed over, and she held the shiny key up in the air like the Holy Grail. Suddenly, as I watched the bright, swinging key, I remembered the dream I had during the night, and my eyes glazed as opaquely as Janie’s.

  There is comfort in dreaming an old nightmare. The tall angled ceiling of the long, crooked hallway that leads inevitably to the same dark room is as familiar as the veins on the back of my hand; a hand that reaches ahead in the despair of a troubled sleep and touches air. There it is again — the rasping noise that signals the sighs and whimperings of the room. I know the sounds come from behind the desk. I remember that, as I begin the seemingly never-ending fall that culminates in a jarring crash to the floor beneath the desk. There I cower, my glasses flung far from my searching fingers. Blindly, I peer into the shadows. Blindly and thankfully. It is almost over. I just have to scream, and it will be over. I will wake up safely. Just one scream . . .

  When I was a little girl, my father would rescue me from the aftermath of the nightmare, taking me by my hand and guiding me through the house as we searched for the source of the demons that had disturbed an innocent sleep. The two of us would wind up in the kitchen, eating cookies and making milk mustaches. He died when I was eighteen, but the comfort of his presence is still with me. “It will be all right, Honey. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  I had struggled to sit up in bed. My new life form comforter is the umpteen-pound Labrador retriever named Bailey, and he stood over me on the bed, a scraggly paw on each side of my body. His black eyes were filled with concern as I said the right words to end the nightmare. “It will be all right, Bailey. There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  We trooped down to the kitchen, the same one my father and I had sat in years ago, and I poured Bailey’s milk in a bowl after I opened the new package of Oreos. “You can’t eat chocolate, sweetie. It’s dog biscuits for you.” We slurped and munched the last traces of the nightmare away.

  I let him lick the white stuff from one of the cookies as I asked him, “Bailey, I haven’t had that nightmare in ages. Don’t you think it’s strange that when things are going well for me — the best they’ve ever been, in fact — that I would have it now?” I broke apart a cookie and let him enjoy the innards of another Oreo as I pondered my own question.

  “I have all the money in the world. A fantastic job. Good friends. Men who love me to the point of craziness and . . . you.” Bailey took a forbidden bite of the chocolate part of the cookie and sat back. He glanced at the open package on the kitchen table and then back to me. I closed the cookies with a raised-eyebrow look at the expectant dog. “Don’t press your luck, buddy.”

  Back in our upstairs bedroom, Bailey quickly claimed his own brightly flowered pillow, and I don’t think he heard me when I asked, “I have it all. What could possibly go wrong? And another thing,” I told the uninterested dog, “I don’t wear glasses. My vision is twenty-twenty. Why would I need glasses in a dream? What is it I need to see?”

  As I stood and watched Janie do her mesmerizing trick with the key and felt Bailey snuffling eagerly by my side, I realized my world was getting ready to tilt again, and I did not need this in my life.

  TWO

  Unfortunately, Bailey’s key was not all that came in the mail. Sam had also handed me several other envelopes, ones I ordinarily would not have opened. There were bills from Texas Electric and Southwestern Bell. I take these unopened to my accountant and personal financial adviser, Steven Bondesky. He pays all my bills.

  Not that I couldn’t. I mean it is my money. It just makes it easier for him to keep my expenses for income tax purposes. Lately, I have taken to just stuffing them in a large envelope and sending them on to him. I frowned at the envelopes in my hand.

  Sensitive to a point, Janie asked, “Something wrong?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so, but I thought I just sent my bills to Bondesky. Can’t believe I’m already getting more. Did I sleep through a month?”

  Janie grimaced, “Hardly. I don’t think you’ve been getting any sleep at all. I hear you up at all times of the night. Not that I blame you. Those last murders were awful. Just awful.” And her round face clouded up as she remembered the destruction and waste of life we had just experienced over in east Texas.

  In distraction from the memory, I nervously opened the electric bill.

  “Janie, it says here that they are going to cut off our electricity!”

  “What?”

  “Yes, cutoff is today. Wait; let me look at this one from the phone company. Janie, I haven’t paid my phone bill.”

  Janie took both bills from me and reexamined the contents. “What on earth?” she asked. “You know Mr. Bondesky has paid these. Or Evelyn. They’re so efficient. You better call them and straighten it out.” Then she laughed. “While we still have a phone, that is.”

  We were still standing in the foyer by the front door, so I just turned and went to the phone there. It’s on a small table next to the shelves containing my late father’s miniature horse collection, a small and sentimental reminder of the man who had loved me so. I absently patted the brass rear end of the largest horse, a replica of Man ‘O War — minus a foreleg. I smiled as always as I remembered the day I had broken that leg. My finger pushed the automatic dialer for Bondesky’s office phone.

  “What will I do with Bailey’s key?” Janie asked while I waited for someone to answer.

  “Here, I’ll take it,” I answered and reached for the key, which I laid alongside a small jade horse on the second shelf. “Funny, there’s no answer.”

  “Try again. Maybe they’re out for lunch,” And Janie headed towar
d the kitchen. “I’m going to make us some lunch. Tuna fish sound okay to you?”

  “I’ve pushed it twice. Not even the answering machine. This is so strange. Yes, tuna is fine. And iced tea, please.”

  I continued to listen to Bondesky’s phone ring. It was a lonely and eerie sound. I could imagine the ring echoing throughout Bondesky’s office.

  “Leftover coffee okay with you? Our water is turned off.” Janie stood in the doorway with a surprised look on her face.

  “The water’s off? Janie, what on earth?” I repeated her earlier exclamation.

  “You better go over there . . . to Mr. Bondesky’s,” she declared.

  “Yes, I should. I will. But, Janie, this scares me. Why wouldn’t my bills be paid? Bondesky always takes care of it.”

  “Maybe you ran out of money,” she guessed.

  “Janie, you know I have four million dollars. You helped me pack it up to take to his office, remember? All the electric, telephone, and water bills in the world don’t cost four million dollars.”

  She put a finger on her cheek and asked, “Now tell me again. How well do you know Steven Bondesky?”

  Good question, I thought as I drove from my south-side home to Bondesky’s west-side office. I knew him well, I decided. From when I was a little girl. In fact, you could say I had inherited him from my father. Steven Bondesky had been my father’s accountant and had made investments for him.

  They had also been involved in some financial schemes involving inventions — which was what my father was — an inventor. And a kinda of patent person. I never have really understood it all, but I’m sure it was all on the up and up with my father. With Bondesky, I felt the jury was still out.

  However, I did as my father had told me to do and trusted the tough-speaking accountant to help me after father died. That was when I was eighteen, the year I graduated from Paschal High School and a day after my father died. Which was exactly a day after my mother died. You might say I was thrust into real life at a young age, but because my parents were older when they had me, I had been drilled all my life to expect just such events. I knew from kindergarten what to do when your parents died, and calling Bondesky had been at the top of the list.

  At twenty-nine I can look back and see how unprepared I was to cope, but with the help of friends like schoolmate Steven Hyatt and the shrewd Steven Bondesky, I had made it this far with little damage to the body or psyche.

  Well, slight damage.

  I hadn’t counted on all the deaths that had occurred in the past few months.

  With my mother’s instructions ever in my ears, I handled death pretty well. I remember crying when she told me that a cousin of a neighbor had died. She’d sniffed her inherited post nasal sniff and said, “Now, Honey, why are you crying? You didn’t know Mr. Phillips. Save your tears for someone you cared about. No sense in wasting good tears.”

  And so, I had waited and then cried over the death of Steven Miller—the garage attendant who had appointed himself a guardian angel — and for Clover.

  I had cried for Clover.

  Which thought brought me back full circle as I pulled onto Steven Bondesky’s asphalt parking lot.

  I hadn’t seen Bondesky since we both cried over Clover’s death a few weeks ago.

  I looked at the empty parking lot, the tall grass growing in the cracks in the walkway, and the water starved petunias in the stone containers by the entrance.

  Where was Steven Bondesky?

  And where was my money?

  THREE

  In the South — and we consider Texas to be in the South — we yoo-hoo our arrivals, so I did the appropriate call at the front door of the office and then at each of the windows. Then I banged on all of the above, but with the same futile results. No answer. Nobody.

  Or . . . no body.

  Maybe, I thought, Bondesky was in there — in his office — dead. A few months ago, that would have been a foreign thought to me, but, hey, when you live with someone who thinks Lucrezia Borgia was a heroine and you keep falling over bodies by the score, you change your point of view.

  I remembered the new prefab building Bondesky had erected in memory of his late good friend Jimmy, who I called Jimmy the Geek and whose body had been one of the ones over which I had fallen. The building was called Jimmy’s Place, and the door was always open, and the coffee was always hot. Mostly derelicts and policemen dropped by and took advantage of the air-conditioning, free donuts, and clean rest rooms.

  I thought, as I went around the back to the metal building, what if someone had stopped by, someone new, and had killed them all? Then had headed into Bondesky’s office and did away with Bondesky and his secretary Evelyn Potter? I tend to think like that now.

  I passed on the Southern hello call and just pushed open the door to the building.

  Inside, it was dark and shadowy.

  No one was there.

  I switched on the overhead light.

  The coffeepot was empty, and no donuts lay on the plate by the pot.

  I was just about to turn off the lights and leave when I heard, “What the hell?”

  “Who’s there?” I called as I stood with one hand on the exit door.

  “Who’s there?” was the response.

  “Me. Honey. Bondesky?” I asked into the area of the voice. It didn’t sound like the accountant’s frog voice, but I had to make sure.

  “No, it’s not Bondesky. Where is he?” asked the man, who came out of the rest room into the light.

  Seeing the man who emerged did not restore my recent lapse of faith in human nature. I kept that safety grip on the door as I said, “I don’t know where he is. Who are you?” Besides being Mr. Clean, I said to myself.

  This giant of a man, bald to a fault, came toward me with deceptive speed, reaching the door before I could exit. With his huge restraining hand on mine, he asked again. “Where is Steven Bondesky?”

  I went straight to the heart of the problem. “Am I in danger here?”

  He laughed and removed his hand. “Not from me, honey. I’m just trying to find Bondesky.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. I’m looking for him myself. I’m afraid he’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Well, everyone I know lately has died. And, yes, he must be. He’s never not here. Is that a double negative?”

  “A double what? And who are you? His honey?”

  “No, well, I’m Honey, but Honey Huckleberry. I’m one of Mr. Bondesky’s clients.” I backed away from the big man, out into the sunshine of the day. He followed me.

  “I’m a client, too,” he said. “And Mr. Bondesky owes me some dough.”

  “And your name being . . .”

  He stared hard at me, screwing up his eyes so that they disappeared into wrinkles in his tanned face. “Sledge Hamra. I’m a PI.”

  His proclamation overcame my natural snicker to his name. “A pie? You’re a pie? What does that mean?”

  Sledge Hamra rolled his eyes, causing them to do more tricks in his face. I had never noticed before how eyes become so important in a head without hair. Of course, I had never met anyone as bald as this pie before, either.

  “P-I. Private investigator.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is Honey Huckleberry your real name?”

  “Is Sledge Hammer yours?”

  He laughed unexpectedly, then stared at me some more. Finally, he said, “Actually my name is Alvin Hamra. That’s spelled H-a-m-r-a . . . not hammer. My friends call me Sledge.”

  “And they are legion, I am sure. But tell me, Mr. Hamra, where do you think Bondesky is? And Evelyn? How long have you been looking for him? I mean, how long has he been missing?” We walked toward the main building as we chatted these pleasantries.

  “I’ve been out of town. Got in last night. I’ve been trying to reach Bondesky by phone for almost a week now. No answer. So, I came out here. Just got here a few minutes ago. What’s your story?” We stopped by the front door.

&n
bsp; “Steven Bondesky pays all my bills for me. And they haven’t been. Paid, that is. So, I came out to see him. Should we call the police?”

  “Nahh. We’ll just go in and take a look-see. Okay with you?” He gave me a sideways glance.

  “Sure, whatever you think,” It occurred to me that my five-foot-two slight frame would be no match for whatever Mr. Hamra wanted to do, anyway.

  “You sure have funny colored hair,” he said as he whipped out a strange knife-looking object from his baggy gray slacks.

  I watched as he did something with the knife and the lock. “You’re a funny one to be talking about hair,” I retorted. “Is that legal?”

  Hamra — I didn’t know him well enough to think of him as Sledge—turned the knob and opened the office door. He stopped and looked at me again. “How much money do you have invested with Bondesky?”

  “A bunch,” I admitted.

  “Yeah? Well, so do I. Makes me think we own part of this establishment, don’t you think?”

  “I buy that,” I agreed, looked around to make sure no one saw us break into the office, and followed him into the building.

  FOUR

  Bondesky’s office was about what you would expect a deserted building to look like. Nothing remarkable. No clues.

  No dead bodies. Not even a whiff of one.

  “Disappointed?” asked my partner in break-in.

  I was indignant. “Of course not. What? You think I wanted to find Bondesky dead? I just thought we would find something that would give us an idea of where he is. He was so depressed the last time I saw him.”

  “Ha! So, we’re looking for a suicide note? If we find it, it better have instructions on how to get my money.” The big man kept inching his way around the office.

  Evelyn Potter’s area, the reception room, was clean and sterile. Not even the desk drawers revealed a single personal item. Only letterhead stationery and a box of tissues.

  It was the old man’s office that would hold the clue to his whereabouts, I thought as I went in the opposite direction of the professional investigator. Sledge Hamra headed toward Bondesky’s big desk, and I went toward the little gray file cabinet in the corner.