I Scream, You Scream

by Watson, Wendy Lyn

  “That’s right,” Bree said. “I forgot they dated.”

  Shelley glanced at Bree before nodding. “Yeah. They weren’t dating when she died, of course. Broke up just before Eddie’s high school graduation.”

  About the time Eddie’s disposition took a turn for the worse, I thought. Maybe Miranda dumped him, and he didn’t take well to rejection. Was it possible that Brittanie and Eddie had dated and Eddie had lashed out when he was thrown over for Wayne? I couldn’t imagine what Brittanie would see in Eddie. But then again I couldn’t really imagine what Brittanie saw in Wayne.

  “Still,” Shelley continued, “they might have patched things up eventually, after Eddie finished college and moved home. I mean, they were really in love, you know? He never did get over her death. Finally, he flunked out, started running drugs from South America, got busted for selling dope, ended up doing a little time.”

  “Eddie went to prison?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine soft, wifty Eddie surviving in prison. Maybe Eddie was tougher than I was giving him credit for.

  Shelley blushed, and her expression grew guarded. “Yes. But that was a mistake, a long time ago. He’s grown up since then. Eddie’s a successful businessman,” she concluded, just as Finn and Ted returned to the table with a round of fresh drinks.

  Ted laughed. “Right,” he said, picking up the thread of their fight as though he’d never left. “Snake-oil salesman, more like.”

  “Oh, hush. You’re just jealous.”

  “Dang it, Finn,” I whispered as he handed me a bottle of beer. “I give you one little job. . . .”

  “I suck at pool,” he whispered back.

  “Jealous of what?” Ted was saying. “Eddie’s new-age bullshit green lawn care?” Contempt dripped like venom from every word. “I sell a quality service for a reasonable price, don’t charge a premium for a bunch of crap.”

  The temperature in the room dropped, and Shelley’s face hardened into a mask of pure hate. “You shovel shit for a living.”

  “It was good enough for your daddy.”

  Shelley stubbed out her cigarette in the black plastic ashtray. By the look on her face, she would have rather put it out by cramming it in Ted’s smug smile. “Leave Daddy out of this. He didn’t even have a high school diploma, and look what he built for his family. And Eddie, he built up his lawn-care business from scratch. You never built a thing in your life, just waited around to pick up the scraps Daddy left behind.”

  “Bullshit. Frank Collins was a good man, and I was grateful to him for giving me a job. But I put my own stamp on Soil Systems after he passed. I’m the one who made the connections with the agricultural extension and started doing the soil and well-water testing. That’s where we make our biggest profits. So don’t tell me I just rode on your daddy’s coattails.”

  Shelley tapped another cigarette from her pack and lit up. “Yeah, you just love sucking up to those rich bitches in the Master Gardeners, making sure the damn dirt is good enough for their precious roses.”

  “Now who’s jealous?” Ted asked with a sly smile.

  “Shut up,” Shelley snapped, but a glimmer of a smile teased the corners of her mouth.

  “Uh-huh,” Ted said, “you know you want this.” He stretched back and patted his own abs.

  “I said, shut up.” All the heat was gone from Shelley’s voice now, and she gazed up at her husband through her eyelashes.

  Bree, Finn, and I exchanged looks of disbelief. Five minutes before, I had thought they might come to blows, and now I was worried they’d have makeup sex right there on the table.

  Bree cleared her throat. “I’m gonna sing,” she announced, pushing back from the table and abandoning us.

  Finn quickly followed her lead. “Tally, you wanna dance?”

  I did not want to dance in the slightest, especially not with Finn Harper. But I didn’t want to watch the bizarre mating ritual unfolding at the table.

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  Onstage, Bree launched into Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” I caught a glimpse of her—clutching the mic in both hands, eyes closed, head thrown back in abandon—before Finn pulled me into his arms.

  “That’s the second time tonight I’ve saved your bacon,” Finn said, his lips pressed close to my ear. “Your debt is mounting.”

  I tipped my chin to look him in the eye. “These days I pay all my debts with ice cream. What’s your favorite flavor?”

  He tucked my head back into his shoulder and leaned in close. “Cherry,” he murmured as he tugged me closer, molding me to his lean body.

  It felt like coming home. His hands rested on the curve of my waist; my fingers brushed the soft fringe of his hair; my head fit just beneath his chin. We swayed gently as Bree’s achingly clear voice sang of lost love and the hope of reunion.

  “If you’re lost, you can look and you will find me,” she sang. But I wasn’t lost at all. Finn had already found me. His scent—familiar beneath a new cologne, a different soap—and the slow, strong beat of his heart filled up an emptiness I hadn’t even known I possessed.

  We rocked, barely moving, until the melancholy melody faded away. And then, for just a breath of time, we stood still, bodies entangled.

  The first tinny beats of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” jolted us apart.

  I laughed nervously. “Just like back in the high school gym, huh?”

  Finn studied me like a puzzle. “Yeah,” he said finally, “just like high school.”

  We made our way from the dance floor to the bar. Finn ordered another beer, and I switched to diet soda so I could drive us all home.

  “Sorry I dragged you out here,” I said before taking a sip from my drink, using the swizzle stick like a straw. “Made you sit through that freak show”—I waved in the general direction of Ted and Shelley’s table—“and we didn’t even learn anything particularly useful.”

  Finn lifted his chin just slightly. “Not so fast. Maybe you didn’t learn anything useful, but I did.”

  I chucked him in the shoulder. “What? Were you holding out on me?”

  He clutched his upper arm in mock pain. “No, of course not. But,” he added, bending low to whisper in my ear, “I had to wait to get you alone.”

  My pulse kicked up a notch, and I felt my face blaze with heat.

  “So? Spill it.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, clearly proud of his investigative prowess. “Ted wasn’t just blowing smoke about Eddie being a scam artist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Apparently, Eddie’s organic fertilizer and weed killer is nothing but the usual chemical stuff, mixed with some manure and repackaged.”

  I digested that nugget of information as we inched our way around the edge of the growing crowd, looking for a quiet nook in which to talk. We finally settled on a spot behind a stack of amplifiers that completely obliterated our view of the stage. That location had the added benefit of letting us snag Bree when she finished her karaoke set.

  “Whoa,” I said, settling one hip on the edge of the stage. “So all those people who are paying a premium for earth-friendly lawn care . . .”

  “Are getting royally ripped off,” Finn concluded with a nod.

  “How does Ted know?”

  Finn shrugged. “I asked him the same question, and that’s when he clammed up. I don’t think he meant to tell me about the scam at all. Just too drunk to stop himself.”

  “Mmm,” I agreed, sipping through my tiny straw again. I caught Finn watching my mouth and quickly lowered my drink. “Shelley seems really protective of her brother. I don’t think she’d be so quick to forgive Ted if he got Eddie arrested for fraud.”

  “Ted didn’t tell me outright how he knew about Eddie’s shenanigans, but my guess would be that he tested the stuff. From what he was saying, that’s what Soil Systems does now. In addition to managing septic systems, they test soil and groundwater for chemicals.”

  I nodded. “That could be the secret tha
t Eddie’s blackmailer was threatening to expose. So the big question is whether Ted did the testing on his own or whether someone else sent him the samples.”

  Finn made a face. “I can’t imagine shaking Eddie down would be any better for Ted’s marriage than getting him thrown in jail.”

  “Good point. So that would seem to suggest that someone else sent the samples to Ted for testing. And maybe that’s our blackmailer.”

  “My guess is Wayne,” Finn said. “Eddie can’t have much money, and who else has a motive to pull the rug out from under a helpless old stoner like him?”

  I had to concede that Wayne was the obvious choice, but I wasn’t convinced. “Wouldn’t Wayne be better off exposing Eddie? Like you said, there’s no indication Eddie has a lot of money stashed away to pay a blackmailer. If Wayne drove Eddie out of business, he would make more in the long run than he could through any blackmail scheme.”

  “That’s what I love about you, Tally,” Finn said, a dopey smile spreading across his face. “You’re so honest, you assume everyone else is, too . . . even criminals. Wayne doesn’t have to choose between blackmailing Eddie and running him out of business. He can do both.”

  I snorted. “Believe me, I know Wayne’s not honest. But he’s also not that subtle, you know?”

  Finn laughed. “Yeah, I know. I’ve seen those neon green trucks.”

  “Exactly. No way Wayne could hatch such a convoluted plan. If he found out Eddie was scamming people, he’d want the world to know ASAP, and he’d want his picture next to every headline.”

  The only validation I got from Finn was a miserly nod. “Look,” I huffed, as Bree skipped down the stage steps, spotted us, and headed our way, “if Ted did tests on a soil sample for Wayne, Wayne would have to have the results somewhere. He didn’t like to bring work home, so let’s just go through his office. If we find the results, then we have our answer.”

  “Great plan,” Finn said, a note of sarcasm in his voice. “I’m sure Wayne will invite us right in and let us have a look around.”

  Bree, glowing from her triumphant onstage performance, clapped her hands together. “I don’t know what you two are talking about, but it sounds like we get to break into Wayne’s office. And you know I’m all about breaking and entering.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. No one is breaking into anything.” I rummaged around in my purse, fishing out a bristling key ring that I held up high for all to see. “I have the key.”

  chapter 23

  “Shh,” Bree said, her finger to her lips, “be vewwy quiet. We’re hunting wabbits!”

  She and Finn, who had continued to drink their way through karaoke night while I sobered up to drive, fell all over each other giggling like little girls. We huddled together outside the low concrete office building of Wayne’s Weed and Seed, doing our best to avoid the halogen lights that lit up the parking lot. The signature Wayne’s Weed and Seed trucks were arrayed in neat rows, with the one closest to the main road decked out in giant magnetic letters that spelled BRIT, LOVE YOU 4-EVER BABE, W.

  “Seriously,” I snapped under my breath, “if you don’t both keep it zipped, I will make you wait in the car.”

  After a round of shushing, they grew quiet for a moment, and I was able to flip through my keys until I found the one with the bright green sticker on its bow. It slipped easily into the keyway.

  From behind me, Finn whined, “Tally, Bree’s touching me.” The sputtering giggles started up again.

  I swallowed a pissy comeback and turned the key in the lock, breathing a sigh of relief when I felt the tumbler give. I’d been a little worried that Wayne had had the locks changed after the divorce.

  I had my hands braced on the door, ready to push, when Bree yelped, “Wait!”

  “For the love of . . . Bree, you about gave me a coronary. What is your problem?”

  She pointed to a decal on the door, announcing that the building was protected by an alarm system.

  “Nah,” I said. “That’s just for show. Wayne had a security system once, but he kept forgetting the code, and he racked up huge fees for false alarms.”

  I opened the door and slipped inside, with Finn and Bree tumbling after me. I led the way through what passed for a showroom, wincing when Bree crashed into a cardboard display for drought-resistant turf grass. Rather than risk someone breaking a leg—which would get us caught for sure—I flipped on the light in the plain-Jane hallway leading back to the offices, but I didn’t want to leave it on for long: it was a straight shot down that hall to the front door and then to the street, and there was no way to hide that light from random passersby.

  So as soon as we entered Wayne’s personal office, I turned on the office light, flipped off the hall light, and shut the office door.

  I pointed to two armchairs upholstered in a dark green twill. “Sit.”

  My partners in crime dutifully settled into the chairs and began whispering to each other. I don’t know what they were saying, but they both thought they were pretty funny. Meanwhile, I did my best to ignore them and get down to business.

  At home, Wayne Jones was a messy man. He left his clothes wherever he removed them, so vast drifts of sweaty undershirts would amass beside his side of the bed, and stinky socks sometimes sat in the middle of the kitchen floor. I found dirty coffee mugs by the toilet, in the shower, and oddly, in the fireplace. Trying to right his messes wore me out.

  But at the Weed and Seed office, he took pains to hide the chaos. His bookshelves were orderly, his wastebasket empty, and his computer monitor dust free. The smooth stretch of his oak desktop held a phone, a pencil cup stocked with sharpened number twos and blue ballpoints, and a single silver-framed picture of Brittanie.

  I studied the picture. Brittanie’s head was turned and tipped back, her mouth open in a toothy smile, as though she were laughing up at someone standing behind the photographer. Her hair blew wild about her freckled face, and the rosy-gold glow of late-afternoon sunlight drenched the scene, turning her usually pale blond hair to molten amber. I almost didn’t recognize her. In that picture, Brittanie looked fresh and young and real. I imagined that she hated the picture, and I felt a stab of affection for Wayne for choosing that one shot for his desk.

  Unfortunately, Wayne’s obsessive tidiness in the office was purely superficial. Inside the drawers and filing cabinets, chaos ruled. Wayne could find just about any document, even the most insignificant scrap of paper, in an instant, but if there was some method to the madness of his filing, it had managed to escape me for the full seventeen years of our marriage.

  I started with the big drawers on his desk, hoping Wayne would want to keep blackmail documents close at hand. In the first drawer, I found a dozen take-out menus, about three years’ worth of utility bills, antacids, a half dozen brightly colored plastic poker chips, and an orange-haired miniature troll doll.

  “I have to piddle,” Bree announced.

  “Good heavens, you two turn into such babies when you drink,” I chided, opening the second drawer. “You’re a big girl, Bree. You know where the bathroom is.” I glanced up in time to catch her sticking her tongue out at me. She closed the door behind her on her way out of the office.

  “Any luck?” Finn asked, as I began thumbing through the higgledy-piggledy mass of papers in the bottom drawer.

  “Not yet.”

  Just below a half dozen customer invoices, I discovered a handful of nine-by-twelve-inch clasp envelopes held together by a binder clip. The first thing I noticed as I flipped through them was that they all had labels—JULY COUPONS, PRESS CLIPPINGS, THANK-YOU CARDS—typed directly onto the envelopes rather than printed on adhesive labels. And I mean typed: the printing had the same slightly offkilter look as Eddie’s blackmail “invitation.”

  “Whoa,” I said softly.

  “What? Did you find something?” Instantly, Finn sounded sober again.

  “Maybe.”

  He came around the desk to look over my shoulder as I released the bi
nder clip and fanned the envelopes out. The envelope second from the bottom was different from the others, a paler shade of tan, and it was labeled simply E.C.

  Finn and I exchanged looks of incredulity. Could Wayne really be so whacked-out that he would label his blackmail file?

  When I opened the envelope, I glimpsed a single sheet of paper with a blaze orange logo in the corner, a pair of intertwined S’s. I pulled the sheet free, and, sure enough, it was from Soil Systems, Inc., Ted Alrecht’s company. I skimmed through the short introductory paragraph, about completing a full-spectrum chemical analysis on the submitted sample labeled COLLINS GREENCARE, but then I hit a wall when I got to the list of results. “Benzo” this and “4.5-dioxyethyl” that . . . I didn’t know what the laundry list of chemicals did, but they sure as heck weren’t organic.

  Behind me, Finn whistled softly.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “That’s not exactly a smoking gun,” he whispered. “I mean, anyone could submit a sample and say it came from Eddie’s service. But this would sure be enough to prompt a full-blown investigation.”

  “You think?”

  “Oh, yeah. If someone sent this to me, as a reporter, I’d be on Eddie Collins like white on rice.”

  I pushed the results back in their envelope and was adjusting the clasp when Bree came scurrying back into the office.

  “Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit,” she breathed. “Tally, I’m so sorry.”

  Before I could ask her what she was sorry for, Wayne appeared in the doorway to his office.

  “Tally?” Wayne said, peering around uncertainly, as if he wasn’t sure he was in the right place.

  “Wayne. What are you doing here?” I gasped.

  “I was driving by when I saw the light”—he waved over his shoulder, and that was when I realized the hallway light was back on—“and I thought I better check it out.”

  He lowered his brow in confusion. He pointed a finger at my chest. “Better question is what are you doing here? And with them,” he added, waggling his finger to encompass Bree and Finn.