by Sara Rosett
We both heard a rifle shot in the distance. Our gaze locked. “Starting early today, aren’t they?” I said, trying to play it cool since the sound was obviously far away from us.
“Yep, it was from the wildlife area,” Mitch confirmed, but grooves etched into his forehead as he frowned.
“Okay, you go on. I’ll call Dan and ask him to take a picture of his coin and e-mail it to us. Then, if they’re all the same,” I took a deep breath and said, “I’ll call Detective Waraday.”
I was still thinking about the coins during the morning stroller brigade workout. I’d called Dan right after Mitch left this morning. I’d forgotten about the time change and I hoped that Dan had been awake enough to remember he’d had a conversation with me. If he thought my request was slightly odd, he hadn’t said anything.
We crested the rise in the new area of the subdivision and paused for a biceps workout with elastic bands. We were slightly past the point where Dan had collapsed. I counted through the reps and tried not to think about what a scary sight it had been to see Dan whisked away in an ambulance. Tina counted down to the last repetition and we switched to working our triceps. Colonel Pershall, Mitch, and Dan. Why them? Why that combination? What did they all have in common?
Nothing.
Mitch and Colonel Pershall were in the military, but Dan wasn’t. Dan and Mitch were related, but Colonel Pershall didn’t even know Dan. They weren’t even acquaintances. Mitch and Colonel Pershall were pilots. Dan worked in Internet technology. Besides the fact that they were all male, I couldn’t find any common denominators. Mitch seemed to be the only link between the two.
I twisted the bands in my hands, thinking about those names, and suddenly had a thought. What if it was like one of Livvy’s grouping problems—which one doesn’t fit?
“Ellie? The bands?”
“Oh, here you go,” I said and handed the bands to Tina, lost in thought.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Um…yeah. Just thinking. I have to make a phone call. I’ll catch up with you at the next station,” I said.
“Okay, ladies, let’s enjoy the next flat section,” Tina said and headed back to the head of the pack. The strollers streamed by me as I pulled out my phone and dialed Mitch’s number.
He sounded distracted when he answered, so I said, “Are you busy right now?”
“The bread truck is here. We’re about to step. Like the ringtone, by the way. What’s going on?”
So he was going to play it cool now and pretend that he didn’t care if I changed his phone, but I knew he couldn’t be happy that “Feelings” announced he had a call.
I’d completely forgotten about his flight. The bread truck was a boxy truck that took them out to the plane. Now was probably not the best time to talk about my suspicions, but I wanted to bounce them off him and if I was right…well, he needed to know. I heard a shout in the background and said, “I was thinking about Dan and the coins, trying to figure out some connection between you, Colonel Pershall, and Dan, but I couldn’t come up with anything.”
“Yeah, me either,” Mitch said.
“But what if we switch it around? What if one of you guys doesn’t belong in the equation?” I ran my hand back and forth across the stroller handle.
I paused, waiting to see what he’d say.
“Probably Dan. I mean, he’s my cousin and all, but I worked with Colonel Pershall, saw him every day, lived in the same city, and worked in the same place.”
“Exactly,” I said, glad that he’d drawn the same conclusion as I had. “What if one of the incidents was a case of mistaken identity? What if someone mistook Dan for you?”
There was silence on the line, but I knew I hadn’t lost the connection. Finally, he said, “You think someone thought they were shooting at me?”
“As much as I’d like to say no, I think it all fits together. You jog nearly every day. You and Dan are the same height and build and both have short, dark brown hair. Even your mom thought she’d seen you—not Dan—leaving for your jog the afternoon of the family reunion. And, to top everything off, we were all wearing the same T-shirts, so there wouldn’t have been any difference in the clothes, either.”
“You really shouldn’t sound so excited at the thought that someone was taking potshots at me.”
“Mitch! I’m not excited. Well, okay, maybe a little bit, but it’s only because it’s a step toward figuring out what’s going on.” My voice sobered as I said, “You know the thought of someone trying to hurt you scares me to death.” Nathan kicked his feet, impatient to get moving, which caused the stroller to move backward and forward. I released the brake and pushed with one hand.
“I know, but I’m fine right now and I intend to stay that way. We need to see that coin Dan got in the mail before we make any more assumptions. His coin might be completely different.”
More noise from his end indicated he had to go. I said, “Call me when you land, okay? And fly safe.”
“Always do,” he said.
We said good-bye and I put the phone back in the basket of the stroller. I caught up with the group, but my thoughts were centered on Mitch and why someone would want to harm him and Colonel Pershall. I still couldn’t work out that one.
Megan Fleet was trailing along, barely keeping up with the group. I picked up my pace and caught up with her, thinking it would be nice to have another friend in the neighborhood. School was starting and Abby and Nadia would be extra busy. I’d see less of them and I tended to get wrapped up in my own activities. Maybe it was time to make an effort to get to know Megan a little better. “How are you doing?” I asked, glad to see she returned for another stroller workout.
“Sore, but I keep telling myself it’ll be worth it. I’ve got to get back into my size fours.”
“Size four is long gone for me,” I said with a laugh. “I just want to stay the size I am right now and not go up.”
“Hey, did you see that?” Megan stopped and pointed to one of the completed but still vacant houses. A FOR SALE sign stood in a yard of dirt along with a few stubby plants. “That house with the red brick and the black shutters—I thought I saw a face in the window.”
“Probably just a contractor or work crew.”
“I don’t know…we looked at that house. It’s finished. It’s probably just kids,” she said with a shrug. “Last week, I saw some teenagers I didn’t recognize in one of the empty houses. As soon as they spotted me, they cleared out.” She glanced back at the house. “I always check out that house because we almost bought it. You know how it is when you buy a house. You’re always comparing, trying to figure out if you got the best deal. I really hope the value holds in this neighborhood. I think we picked a bad time to buy.”
“Why’s that? Magnolia Estates is a good neighborhood and property values have gone up. We didn’t buy, we’re renting, but that’s what the neighbors say,” I said as Nathan’s movements caused the stroller to bob back and forth again. Livvy was deep in a picture book and didn’t care if we were moving or not.
“I wish we’d rented,” Megan said dismally as we started walking again. “It looks like we’re moving in the spring. Henry’s tried to get a job at the wing. He was so sure he would get a PCA, but he got a PCS.”
“Let’s see, PCA,” I managed to say between huffs as we took the next hill. I scrolled through my mental list of acronyms and translated the military talk. “That means Permanent Change of Assignment, right? So he thought he’d get another assignment here at Taylor at Wing Headquarters?” PCS stood for Permanent Change of Station, a move to a new base. So much for a new friendship. Oh well, if nothing else, the military had taught me to make the most of the time I had with people. Then there was always e-mail after the move.
“Yes. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to break even on our house. If not…” Her voice trialed off and I smiled sympathetically. Buying a house when you’re a military family is always a gamble. Will the market hold? Will property valu
es go up enough in the short time you’re in the house to make it worthwhile? If values drop, then renting looks more like a wise investment instead of throwing money away. Megan looked so depressed that I asked where they were going. Sometimes the new location is enough to cheer you up.
“It’s the UAV squadron in the desert.”
“Oh, too bad,” I said as the road curved and we reached my favorite turn, which shifted the intense sunlight from our faces to our shoulders. Usually the words “the desert” referred to the Middle Eastern deserts, but this time Megan was talking about being reassigned to a base in the desert of the United States, specifically, Nevada. “How’s Henry taking the assignment?” UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, were touted as the future of the air force. They were control aircraft that gathered intelligence, even deployed missiles, and dropped psy op leaflets. Pilots flew them from remote locations on the ground through remote control and hated the assignments because it took them out of the cockpit. They wanted to fly a “real” plane. For years, a UAV assignment was considered the kiss of death to an aviator’s career. I’d heard the military was shifting to special training courses that would allow nonpilots to train and then fly the drones, but pilots were still being assigned to fly the UAVs.
I glanced at her and now that the sun wasn’t glaring in my eyes, I could see her better. Her mouth quirked down. “There’s not much he can do at this point.”
“Ab time,” Tina announced and soon we were too out of breath to carry on the conversation.
When I returned from the stroller brigade workout later that morning, I was drenched in sweat and still stumped as to why someone would target both Colonel Pershall and Mitch. I fought off my worries and focused on keeping things as normal as I could for the kids. I slid a book on tape into the player and left Livvy with instructions to turn the pages when the chime sounded.
I managed to shower in record time and changed into my organizing work clothes—jeans, a short-sleeved navy shirt, and tennis shoes. Organizing was dirty work. For initial appointments with potential organizing clients, I dressed in business casual, but once I switched to doing the actual work, helping people sift and sort through the accumulations of their lives, well, that required clothes that weren’t dry clean only.
I checked the computer, but there wasn’t an e-mail from Dan. I debated calling him again, but didn’t, deciding I should give him until at least after lunch before I began pestering him.
The doorbell rang and Livvy jumped up and ran for the door, announcing, “Mom, Anna’s here.” Nathan chugged along in her wake, repeating, “An! An! An!” Obviously, they were heartbroken I was leaving them this morning. I gave the kids kisses and told Anna where I’d be.
“Got it, Mrs. Ellie,” Anna said, addressing me in the traditionally Southern way, adding the title of Mrs. to my first name. With her soft accent, it sounded like “Miz” Ellie. She dropped a tote bag full of craft items on the table. “We’ll have a good time.” She turned to the kids and said, “Do y’all want to make sock puppets?” I left them practically jumping up and down with excitement.
I don’t think they even noticed when I left the house. I’d been waiting for Nathan to go through the clingy-don’t-leave-me stage, but I was beginning to think he’d skipped it altogether. Somehow my expectations about what my kids were going to do or how they were going to develop were always slightly off. Scratch that. If I was honest with myself, I was usually totally off base and they completely surprised me.
My organizing client, Stephanie, lived in a subdivision down the road from ours, but that was about the only similarity between the two neighborhoods. Regal Oaks dwarfed our neighborhood in size since a golf course was part of it and the houses were more like mini-mansions than the more modest homes in Magnolia Estates. The lawns were expansive, cut through with circular drives that bisected wrought-iron fences.
I spent the short drive to her house thinking about the coins. I didn’t like the ideas that were popping into my head. I resolutely pushed those dark thoughts away. There was nothing I could do about it now and Mitch was right, worrying wasn’t going to change anything.
I sent up a quick prayer for protection for him and our family, then I checked my phone as I pulled up in front of Stephanie’s house. No messages or missed calls, which was good. I never worried about Mitch when he was flying. It was his job, so routine that I rarely even thought about it, but today I couldn’t help counting the hours. I knew he was probably safer in the air than on the ground, but I would feel better when his flight was over. Five more hours until he was down.
Stephanie looked surprised to see me when she opened the door. She raised her carefully sculpted eyebrows. “Ellie?”
“Hi. It’s Wednesday. Eleven o’clock.” She looked perplexed, so I added, “Our usual time?”
“Oh, that’s right. I meant to call and cancel. I’m hosting a meeting this morning, but I’m sure you can carry on without me,” she said, throwing the door open. “This is a perfect example of why I need you.”
In the few years that I’d been a professional organizer, I’d found my clients fell into two categories, the reluctants and the affluents. Reluctant clients were embarrassed. They really wished they didn’t need a professional organizer. They felt they shouldn’t have let their lives get so disorganized. Affluents were at the opposite end of the spectrum. They were accustomed to hiring help for everything. They freely admitted their need for help without the least bit of guilt.
Stephanie definitely fell into the affluent category. She’d originally hired me at the beginning of the summer to organize her garage and pool house. When that project was finished, she decided she wanted to clean out the loft area at the top of her curved staircase. Designed with bookshelves across one wall, the area made a perfect reading nook. Stephanie’s interior designer had placed two leather club chairs, a low table, and reading lamps in front of the bookshelves. In the year that Stephanie and her husband, an electric company executive, had lived here, the art objects and leather-bound books had been rearranged to make room for growing stacks of papers. Everything including bills, homework papers, bank statements, and school lunch menus had mushroomed from the lowest shelves and now teetered waist high. Stephanie had said, “I’ve decided I must do something about that mess of paperwork upstairs. I’d like to tackle that next.”
Like the private school her children attended and the Lexus she drove, I had a feeling Stephanie considered me a status symbol. I’d heard her on the phone. “Darling, I can’t talk right now. I have my professional organizer here.” She did very little of the organizing. She flitted in and out of the room and made it quite clear that answering questions would be the extent of her involvement, which probably should have bothered me more than it did, but I figured it was one of the easiest organizing jobs I’d handled. She wasn’t that unorganized. A few weekends and she could have sorted out her pool house and garage herself. Ditto for the paperwork in her loft. But if she wanted to pay me to do it, I’d certainly show up each Wednesday, do the work, and cash her checks.
“You go on,” she said, nodding at the sweeping staircase. “I’ll pop up to check on you. I have to finish the food and then change out of this old thing. “This old thing” was a designer hoodie, sweatpants, and white shirt. The T-shirt alone probably cost more than my whole outfit.
I went upstairs, passing vanilla-scented candles ringing an arrangement of fresh calla lilies on a marble-topped table in the entryway. Stephanie went in the dining room and began removing petit fours from a pink bakery box and putting them on a tray. I dropped my Kate Spade tote onto one of the club chairs. As far as handbags went, I could probably go toe to toe with Stephanie, if it came to a competition. I had a weakness for designer bags and I spent more of my earnings from my organizing jobs at online auction sites than I should. The tote was big enough to hold all my organizing paraphernalia. I pulled out my markers, sticky notes, garbage bags, and file folders, then I rotated my shoulders and got to work, picking
up where I’d left off last week.
Stephanie trotted upstairs later to look over some papers I’d set aside for her. She’d changed into a pair of black pants and a sleeveless turquoise sweater with a red circular pin clipped on the collar. The clothes were casual, but I knew they hadn’t come from the discount rack. She glanced through the papers and answered my questions. When the doorbell rang, she said, “Carry on. If you finish before we do, let yourself out through the kitchen.”
The message was clear. Don’t disturb us and don’t be seen. The women began to arrive. The voices swelled and I could hear them exclaiming over the food. The voices moved to the living room as I sorted homework papers from utility bills. I whittled fives stacks of paper down to the essentials, clearing several shelves for Stephanie. My time was almost up. I labeled what I’d done, then began packing up supplies. I’d hoped the meeting would disband before I had to leave, but it looked like I’d have to try to sneak out. I hadn’t been paying that much attention to the ebb and flow of voices. I’d assumed the meeting was for one of Stephanie’s many charitable causes, but then I heard a voice I recognized, a breathy, childlike voice. I paused in the middle of my sorting as Carrie Kohl’s voice floated up to the loft.
Tips for Busy, Budget-Minded Moms
Decluttering Your Schedule
If you don’t have enough time blocks for all your weekly activities, you’re going to feel overwhelmed. Just like you have to declutter your home, sometimes you have to declutter your schedule. Approach the task as if you were thinning your closet. Purge your schedule, keeping the things you really need to do and the activities you enjoy.
Look for ways to cut back or reduce hours spent on certain activities. Perhaps instead of volunteering every week at your kids’ school, you could volunteer for one-time special projects, like the book fair or field trips.
Work schedules are often unmovable, but if you see an opportunity, ask if you can telecommute, even one day or one afternoon a week.