Angel Sleuth

by Lesley A. Diehl

  Kaitlin wondered about this. She’d never heard of geese spitting caustic saliva, but she said nothing. Now that Dr. Baldo was all right, she wanted to get home to sort out the issue of uninvited house guests.

  “I’m glad everything is fine,” she said.

  “It’s fine, except for my car,” Baldo said.

  “And for poor Mrs. Pippel,” said Mary Jane.

  “Yes, yes. Except for Leda.” Baldo flapped his hand in dismissal, turned, and got into his car. They watched him pull away from the curb and drive off in the direction of the hospital.

  “He didn’t seem all that upset about his date’s unusual death, did he? He should have called the police,” said Mary Jane. Her hands rested on her shapely hips, her gaze following Baldo’s car. “I don’t much care for your village doctor.”

  Kaitlin felt she should come to his defense. “He’s been here forever. I know he was Leda’s doctor, and he’s the county medical examiner. I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

  “I’m not,” said Mary Jane. She took Jeremy’s hand and they started to walk back the way they had come.

  “What do you think, honey?” she asked Jeremy.

  What an inappropriate question for a child, Kaitlin thought, but Jeremy replied in a serious voice, “There was a reason why the geese attacked him.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” said Kaitlin, “They attacked me first.”

  “I don’t think so. I think they rushed down the hill to get to him, and you got in the way,” said Jeremy.

  Kaitlin looked in surprise at the young boy. “Really?”

  “Really,” insisted Mary Jane.

  “Just what kind of work did you say you did?” She directed her question to Mary Jane, but Jeremy replied to it.

  “We told you. We’re companions. Heavenly companions.”

  Kaitlin stopped walking and tried to envision what he meant.

  “Angels,” he said. “Guardian angels.”

  Chapter 2

  The three of them continued down the sidewalk, Kaitlin trailing behind, her brain muddled by Jeremy’s pronouncement. She must have misheard him, she told herself.

  Once in the house, Mary Jane sprinted up the stairs toward the “teeny” front bedroom she had selected earlier. Kaitlin remained standing in the downstairs foyer looking up the staircase. Her mouth hung open. She wanted to say something, but words, over which she once had mastery, wouldn’t come. Mary Jane leaned on the railing and smiled down at her.

  “So?” managed Kaitlin.

  “So…” began Mary Jane.

  Ah, now we’re getting somewhere, thought Kaitlin. She’s going to explain everything and once she does, I can throw them out and get back to my writing.

  “Is there a pool hall in town?” Mary Jane asked.

  What? Maybe she’d misheard both of them. This time she’d check. “Pool hall? You want to know about a pool hall?” Mary Jane nodded.

  The woman must be a lunatic, thought Kaitlin. Her first impulse was to yell at her, but instead she took a deep breath and forced herself to remain calm. She’d had some experience dealing with delusional people, so she knew enough to go slowly.

  “Okay, yes, there is one. Kenny’s House of Billiards.” She stretched her lips across her teeth and turned the corners of her mouth upwards in the imitation of a genuine smile. “But let’s forget about the pool thing. Look, Mary Jane, you really don’t want to move in here with me.” She used her best mental health voice.

  “Don’t tell me you’re worried about Jeremy’s pets. He’ll keep them in his room or in cages in the kitchen. They won’t be any problem. I asked your mother and she said you weren’t allergic.”

  Mary Jane crooked her finger at Kaitlin. “C’mon up,” she said, as if the house were hers.

  Kaitlin mounted the stairs with reluctance. This conversation was going nowhere.

  Mary Jane opened her cavernous suitcase and began pulling out her clothes. “You can help me unpack. It’ll calm you down after your confrontation with those geese and that horrible Dr. Baldy.”

  “Baldo. And he’s just a little eccentric, that’s all.”

  Mary Jane made a “tsk, tsk” sound of disbelief as she hung the articles in the closet. Kaitlin noted that everything she pulled out of her bag was frothy or swirly or velvety or stretchy. And in primary colors. The visual overload made her dizzy, but she leaned against the door opening in what she hoped was a posture of casualness and tried reason once more.

  “You see, I’m a writer. I write children’s books and right now I’m having a little trouble…”

  “A writer! Yes, we know. We do. Your mother said you were working on something big. Well, we’ll be quiet as church mice then so you can get some work done.” She smiled her big smile and hummed softly as she straightened the hangers.

  “Uh, about that angels’ thing Jeremy said. He’s got some imagination, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, he’s imaginative all right. Don’t you just love kids like that?”

  “You’re not really angels. Right?”

  Mary Jane sat down and patted the bed. When Kaitlin joined her there, Mary Jane put her arm around Kaitlin’s shoulder and pulled her close. Surprisingly, it felt good, comforting, like when she was a child and her mother hugged away her bad feelings.

  “What do you want me to say?” Mary Jane asked. “I don’t want to lie to you, but I don’t know what I can tell you that you’ll find believable.”

  “Just tell me the truth,” said Kaitlin. She leaned into Mary Jane’s embrace and her body felt like it was thawing, warming after a long day out in the winter cold.

  “Well, then. No big thing, but we are angels, you know.”

  Kaitlin jerked herself upright and moved away from Mary Jane. “No big thing! It is a big thing. You just march in here and say you’re angels. What am I to make of that?”

  “What do you want to make of it?” asked Mary Jane. Her voice was gentle.

  “And quit doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I ask you something, and you answer me with a question. It’s making me crazy.”

  “At the risk of your mental health, what do you want to know?”

  “Where are your wings?” asked Kaitlin. Icy sarcasm penetrated her tone.

  “Now you’re just poking fun,” Mary Jane said. Her smile was gone, replaced by a look of sadness. Kaitlin felt a stab of shame, knowing she’d put it there.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but this is new to me. I’ve never met an angel before.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Okay, I don’t know if I met an angel before.”

  Mary Jane seemed to take Kaitlin’s uncertainty as a signal to fill her in on angel lore.

  “See, we’re not regular angels. No wings or such. We’re guardian angels. We take care of people, hence the name of our association, Heavenly Companions, Inc.”

  “Inc?”

  “You don’t think we’re some rinky dink backwoods group do you?”

  She was doing it again, asking a question to answer a question. Kaitlin sighed. How long would it take until she got the real story out of this woman? Angels indeed. She hoped she wouldn’t be pursuing this avenue of exploration all month, because she didn’t have all month. She didn’t even have tonight. A horrifying thought crossed her mind. What if they stayed the entire summer?

  “How long do you plan on staying here?” she asked.

  “Something could come up any day if there’s an emergency, but we’re hard to place, you know. Jeremy and I work together and then there’s his animal thing, so the committee has to take into account our special circumstances.”

  Back to her original premise. The woman clearly was mad, kind of a nice and pleasant crazy, but she belonged in a hospital, not in the front bedroom.

  Kaitlin’s head was spinning. Maybe if she laid down for a short nap, she might think clearer when she got up.

  “You look exhausted, dear. After that goose thing and all. Ho
w about a nap? Just the thing. We can talk later. I’ll help get Jeremy settled, then I’ll send him for take-out and we can have a little chat over food.”

  She never said anything about a nap to Mary Jane. Was the woman reading her mind?

  Kaitlin nodded numbly and headed for her room, stepping gingerly around Hester who sat in the middle of the hallway cleaning her face.

  Half an hour later, she still couldn’t get to sleep, so she dialed her mother. She didn’t want to alert Arlene to what her two visitors claimed as their profession for fear Arlene would think writer’s block had taken away her reason. Instead she tried to pry more information about the two out of Arlene.

  “I don’t remember Aunt Mary or Cousin Mary or whoever she was. What’s her relationship to Mary Jane and Jeremy?”

  “Darling Kaitlin, leave the poor thing alone. She’s out of work and has no place to live. You’re having a rough time too. I’d think you could be a little more sympathetic.”

  Why would no one reply to her questions?

  “Mom, I don’t think they’re all they pretend to be.” Or was it, they pretend to be something they’re not?

  “Met anyone new in town?” asked her mother, changing the subject.

  Kaitlin knew what her mother was asking. “There are no available men in Aldensville.”

  “There’s your old boyfriend. What was his name? Hank? Or Harold?”

  “Hiram. Mom, I just got burned by my husband leaving me for another woman. I need some healing time. Time alone, just me and my computer. No visitors and no men!” She slammed down the receiver and sat up.

  “We’ve got sushi take-out,” yelled Mary Jane from the kitchen.

  Oh, crap. Raw fish served by two lunatics. Just what she needed.

  * * *

  “Did you read the newspaper headline this morning?” asked Mary Jane.

  Kaitlin had stumbled down to breakfast, looking for her jolt of caffeine. For a minute she had forgotten about her guests, but the memory of yesterday came back in a rush aided by the whirring noise coming from a cage in the kitchen’s far corner.

  “What’s that?” she asked. Mary Jane put a cup of coffee in her hand.

  “A gerbil, of course,” Jeremy said. He sat at the kitchen table tearing up shreds of lettuce.

  “There you go, Buddy,” he said. He placed the bowl of greens into the cage. The spinning wheel came to a halt and with it the buzzing sound. A small, furry, not too unattractive creature with a short fluffy tail emerged from the contraption and sniffed Jeremy’s offering.

  “He likes peanuts better, but the people who won him have been over-feeding him. He’s here so I can get his weight down.”

  Great. Now she was running a day spa for rodents.

  Kaitlin fell into a kitchen chair and grabbed the paper. She’d deal with the growing circus in her house after her coffee and newspaper fix.

  Mary Jane leaned over her and pointed out the headline with a red lacquered nail. “Advice Columnist Dies under Suspicious Circumstances,” it read.

  Mary Jane’s finger tapped the word “suspicious.” “See. I thought so,” she said.

  The story provided few details about the death, but it hinted that the circumstances were unusual. All it said was Leda Pippel, advice columnist for the local weekly, fell down the stairs in her home and died. Fell? Pushed? Don’t get carried away, Kaitlin told herself. The autopsy was pending.

  “Creepy, huh?” said Mary Jane.

  Kaitlin nodded her head and took a final sip of coffee from her cup. Mary Jane filled it again.

  “This is typical Delbert Glover, the newspaper’s editor,” Kaitlin said. “He likes to embellish the headlines to increase readership. Poor Leda. Now she’s the subject of some exaggerated tale provided by Delbert’s runaway imagination.”

  Mary Jane placed two slices of wheat toast with orange marmalade in front of her.

  “I thought you said there was another man in Leda’s house last night.”

  Kaitlin remembered the ghostlike shadow among the trees on Leda’s lawn and shivered.

  “There was, I think. I wonder if anyone else knows about that?”

  “Could you find out?”

  “Well, I guess I could. My best friend from high school, Brittany, is the editor’s assistant.”

  “You could drop in on her on your way to the Cappuccino Café,” said Mary Jane.

  “How did you know I’m going to the café?”

  “You go every morning, don’t you?”

  She held up the coffee pot and arched one eyebrow at Kaitlin.

  “Uh, no thanks. I’ve got work to do.”

  Kaitlin went upstairs, got dressed, and sat, as she had done for so many weeks, in front of her computer, but the muse avoided her once more. A visit to Brittany, she decided.

  She poked her head into Mary Jane’s room as she passed by. “Want to come with me?” she asked.

  “Sure.” Mary Jane tossed the “Billiards Today” magazine she’d been reading on the floor. She grabbed her red shawl and tucked her feet into black patent leather ankle boots. Today she was dressed in a purple gypsy skirt and off-the-shoulder teal blue blouse. Kaitlin wore a clean tee and cut-offs.

  “Does Jeremy want to come along?” asked Kaitlin.

  “No, he already went out to check for hurt and abandoned animals.”

  “Uh, is he going to keep all of these critters here, in the house?”

  “Only in his room. He’ll find homes for them eventually.”

  Eventually, thought Kaitlin. Like Christmas.

  “Don’t worry. We won’t be staying that long. The Heavenly Companions, Inc. Northeast Chapter is meeting the end of August. We’ll have a placement by then.”

  Kaitlin sneaked a sideways peek at Mary Jane. She didn’t look crazy.

  Mary Jane threw her arm around Kaitlin as the two of them descended the stairs. “And by then, your book will be finished.”

  “It’s not going to be if the publisher doesn’t get me a new illustrator.”

  “Maybe I can help with that,” said Mary Jane. “What happened to your old illustrator?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”

  As they exited the house, Mary Jane stopped, raised her arms, and inhaled deeply. She did a pirouette on the sidewalk and flapped her arms about as if she were going to fly. Kaitlin looked up and down the street wondering if any of Aldensville’s citizens had observed the performance.

  “Don’t you just love it?” asked Mary Jane. She tucked Kaitlin’s arm in hers.

  “Nothing like a walk in the spring air. Exercise. It’s just the ticket to blow out the cobwebs and make room for creativity.” She gave Kaitlin a meaningful look.

  “I’m getting exercise…”

  “You need ‘writing exercise’, like warming up before you plunge into the big stuff.”

  Kaitlin shook her head. “You just don’t understand.”

  The woman irritated her, but then, in a way Kaitlin couldn’t begin to explain, she also sent a feeling of warmth radiating from her toes to her nose.

  “What’re you smiling about?” asked Mary Jane. She pulled open the door to the newspaper office.

  “I’m not.”

  Kaitlin did a mental check on the position of her lips. “I am.”

  The woman standing behind the counter had blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and wore a red polka dotted dress.

  “Hi, Kaitlin,” said Brittany. She looked not at Kaitlin but at Mary Jane. Mary Jane met her scrutiny stare for stare. Up and down, up and down, went their gazes, covering every aspect of the other’s appearance.

  “Where are my manners?” Kaitlin said. Before she could make the introductions, Brittany walked out from behind the counter in red platform shoes that matched her dress and stuck out her hand.

  “Hi, I’m Kaitlin’s friend Brittany. I love your skirt. It’s not something I could wear, but it looks so good on you.”

&n
bsp; Mary Jane smiled and pumped Brittany’s hand with vigor. “Yeah, thanks. My name is Mary Jane. My son and I are house guests of Kaitlin. Is that dress vintage?”

  “Yeah, I got it at the What Goes Around, Comes Around Shop. It’s just down the block.”

  “I’ll check it out.”

  Mary Jane reached out to finger the material. “Have to iron it, I bet.”

  “Yeah, but worth it.”

  Good God, thought Kaitlin, they’re bonding. My best friend and this strange person like each other.

  Brittany gave Mary Jane a final smile, then turned to Kaitlin. “You know, you’re just the person I wanted to see. You read about poor Mrs. Pippel today?” Both Mary Jane and Kaitlin nodded. “Well, the newspaper needs someone to write the advice column. Just until we find a permanent replacement. You know, someone who knows the town, can write, and maybe a person who has some credentials in the area of human behavior.”

  Brittany leaned forward slightly, a look of excitement on her face. Kaitlin finally realized her friend expected some kind of a reaction. From her.

  “Sure. That sounds good.”

  “Great.”

  “Of course, Delbert does the hiring, right?”

  “Right, but I’ll talk to him when he comes in today. He’s out covering the opening of the new farm equipment dealership down the road. Meanwhile, congratulations, Kaitlin. I’m sure I can convince him you’re just what we need.”

  Kaitlin stood motionless in front of Brittany. Mary Jane, standing close by, smiled up into her face. “Yes, congratulations, Kaitlin. This is just what you need to get a jump start on your book.”

  Finally it dawned on her that these two were suggesting she take over Leda Pippel’s advice column.

  “Oh, no,” she said. She backed up toward the door. “You can’t mean me. Not me.”

  Chapter 3

  They did mean her. Both of them stood there looking at her with absurdly supportive grins on their faces.

  “I’ve got a book to finish. And I haven’t written one word on that for the past month. What makes you think I could possibly devote my time to answering letters asking for advice? I’m the one who needs help. Forget it.”