Into the Sweet Hereafter

by Kaye George

  “It’s getting off the ground.” Mrs. Gerg grinned at the younger women. “We’re determined to keep crime down in our beautiful city.”

  Tally didn’t think the crime rate was very high at the moment, but fighting it gave Mrs. Gerg something constructive to do and kept her from a hobby of hers, which was, unfortunately, collecting piles of things from garage and yard sales around town to give to Tally. Tally was running out of room to store the cheap treasures Mrs. Gerg delighted in bringing her. She hadn’t received any in three weeks, since the Crime Fritzers started their organized patrols, so Tally was in favor of the group.

  Mrs. Gerg walked away in her ancient shoes with run-down heels. She had walked miles in them during the time Tally knew her, so Tally had quit worrying about her feet, as she had when she first knew the woman.

  Lily lurched forward, shoved from behind by a careless pedestrian. The offender hurried off without saying “excuse me” and Tally caught Lily so she wouldn’t fall into the plate glass window.

  “Are you all right?”

  Lily straightened up. “I’m fine.” She winced.

  “Is your back hurt?” Tally held her arm lightly, to make sure she stayed upright.

  “I think I took an elbow, but it’ll be okay.”

  “You’re sure? I can get you some ice.”

  Lily waved Tally off. “No, no, I’m fine. Really. But I’m going to call Planet Earth about this.” She pointed to the piece of plastic that was melting the fastest. It glistened and looked sticky. “They need to give us a refund.”

  “I think that guy hit you with his crutch,” said Raul, gently touching Lily’s back, where she’d been pushed. Lily turned to face Raul and gave him a radiant smile.

  Tally saw the concern on Raul’s face as the two lovebirds gazed at each other. Yes, there was something there, and that something was sizzling across the air between them.

  * * * *

  Yolanda and Raul soon went back inside Bella’s Baskets and Tally and Lily returned to Tally’s Olde Tyme Sweets to continue their workday.

  Tally wondered if she would ever tire of walking into her shop through the front door. Everything she had done with it had worked, in her opinion. The soft chime to indicate the door was open, ideally to tell them that a customer had entered. The walls, done in muted, swirling pinks and lilacs on the walls, the gleaming glass cases full of sweet treats and candies for the day. She loved even the things she hadn’t changed—the wide-plank wooden flooring and the cute overhead lights with Mason jars for shades.

  Molly Kelly was holding down the fort; that is, the salesroom in the front of the sweet shop, waiting on a group of Red Hat ladies who wanted treats for their next meeting. The local Red Hat Society had a large chapter and Tally was glad when they’d decided to use her shop as their official treat supplier for their meetings a few months back.

  Tally paused a moment to take in the blended scents of her candies, chocolate, caramel, baked goods, even a whiff of peanut butter, before she retired to the kitchen, which was behind the salesroom, to whip up a batch of Mallomars. She had noticed that the glass display case was low on them. In the front, she saw Lily tie on her pink smock, designed to match the wall colors, and greet the next group to come through the front door and sound the chime, three teenage boys who looked hungry. It was too noisy to hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, fashioned to look like a little fat baker wearing an apron, his hands pointing to the minutes and hours.

  A little later, Tally was dipping caramel squares in warm chocolate and setting them on waxed paper when Molly shuffled into the kitchen with her shoulders slumped, her head down. Tally tried to read her expression. “Are you okay, Molly?” It didn’t seem like it.

  Molly hung her head even lower and, since she was shorter than Tally’s five-three, obscured her face. Tally pulled a stool out at the granite-topped island where she stood working. “Take a load off, Molly. Tell me what’s bothering you. If I can’t help, I can listen.”

  Molly raised her head and gave her a hopeful look. “That sounds nice.” She climbed up onto the stool and rested an elbow on the countertop, letting her cheek drop onto her fist. “I don’t really know. I think things are just piling up.”

  “How is your mom’s treatment going?” Tally knew her mother was being treated for cancer, but she thought the woman was expected to recover.

  Molly shrugged. “Okay, I guess. But it’s hard on her.”

  “Are you worried about your dad?”

  “I always worry about him.”

  Her father, an auto mechanic, had hurt his back at work and was on disability. Tally wasn’t sure of his status. “Is he on disability forever now? Or can he go back to work some day?”

  “He can’t work on cars,” Molly said, lifting her head off her fist, finally. “He and Mom fight. She thinks he should do something else. He doesn’t think he can. And Howie, well…”

  “What does Howie say?” Howie, a mechanic who worked where Molly’s father used to, might know more. Molly was dating Howie, as far as Tally knew.

  Molly shrugged again. “We don’t talk about him lately.” She screwed her face up and squeezed a couple of tears out of each very blue eye. “We…don’t talk…about…anything.”

  “Are you not seeing each other?” Tally hoped that wasn’t true. They were an ideal couple and had seemed very much in love.

  Molly gave one last shrug, wiped her eyes with her apron, and jumped off the stool to return to the front of the store. That was too bad. It seemed they were on the outs.

  Tally wasn’t sure that session had done poor Molly any good. She finished the caramels and went into the office to work on paperwork there.

  * * * *

  “Can I use the phone in here?” Lily asked, poking her head into the office door during a lull in customer traffic. “I want to call that place.”

  “What place?” Tally wondered why she wouldn’t use her cell phone.

  “Plastic Earth.”

  “You mean Planet Earth?”

  “Oh yeah, Planet Earth Plastics. It sounds funny saying I’m calling Planet Earth, doesn’t it?”

  They both giggled. Tally stuck around to listen to the call, curious about what Lily would say and how she would conduct herself. It turned out that she didn’t say anything or conduct herself at all because the company didn’t answer her call.

  “I guess there’s a time difference, right?” Lily said, giving up reluctantly.

  “It’s on the other side of the world, so probably.”

  “Maybe I’ll just email or write.”

  They both perked up at the chime of the front door opening, telling them that some customers had just entered.

  “I’ll do it tomorrow,” Lily said, and headed for the salesroom.

  At a few minutes past seven, after cleaning up the shop, Tally closed up and walked the few blocks through the warm evening to the house she rented from Mrs. Gerg, on East Schubert Street. The crape myrtles, planted in depressions in the sidewalks, weren’t blooming yet, but their branches were full of lush green leaves, rustling in a slight breeze Tally was grateful for. It lifted her straight hair off her damp neck.

  Nigel, that huge black-and-white tuxedo Maine coon cat, greeted her at the door. If he were a dog, his tail would be wagging. As it was, he started talking to her in his cheerful chirps, no doubt inquiring about din-din time.

  “Soon,” Tally reassured him. “I just need to get my slippers on and pour a glass of iced tea. Then I’ll get you something to eat.”

  Now, in the early part of June, the temperature was still in the high sixties this time of night. She’d gotten warm walking home. After they had both eaten, she took him into the backyard in his harness.

  “Look, Nige.” She gazed skyward and pointed above, through the small, tough leaves of the live oak. “There’s a full moon tonight. Isn’
t it beautiful?”

  For just a moment, she felt sorry for herself, being outside under a romantic full moon, the smell of jasmine on the fence next door wafting into her yard on the slight breeze, with a cat as her only companion. But the thought of Raul and Lily and the glowing looks they’d given each other brought a smile to her lips. Molly and Howie were another matter, but they had dated for a long time now. Tally thought they would probably get back together. The perfect evening seemed to call for thoughts of romance, even if it wasn’t her romance.

  * * * *

  Yolanda Bella arrived at Bella’s Baskets on Friday in a good mood. In the last few years, she’d had many differences with her overbearing father, who didn’t think she had what it took to make her business succeed. But last night she’d taken a check over to the ranch her parents owned on the outskirts of town.

  When he opened the front door, she stuck the check out. “This will repay one fourth of what I’ve borrowed from you,” she said.

  She got a kick out of his blank stare. He took the check and looked at the amount, then frowned. “Can you afford this?”

  She twisted a strand of her glossy dark hair, trying to act nonchalant. This was a big moment for her, but she didn’t want him to know that. “I said I’d repay you, and I am.”

  “I don’t want you to run out of cash,” he said.

  That was exactly her problem, right there. He always thought she needed rescuing, needed to be taken care of. What she needed was to be treated as an adult.

  “I’ll let you know when I have the next payment.” She had driven away, pleased with herself. She hadn’t taken any of his bait, had remained calm. And the truth was, she could afford the amount she had given him. Business was very good.

  The next morning, if she’d known how to whistle, she would have been whistling as she came through the back door, greeted by the heady smell of lilies. The whiff she took tickled her nose and brought out a couple of big sneezes.

  Her employee must have laid the bunch of lilies on the counter earlier. He was now at the front of the shop.

  “Miss Yolanda!” Raul summoned her, sounding frantic, and she ran to the front. He looked stricken. “Look what happened.”

  Bright sunlight streamed through her display window. Then she noticed the rays glinting off a few small shards of shattered glass on the sidewalk outside. The window was broken.

  * * * *

  Heading down the sidewalk to open her store, Tally Holt saw a commotion ahead.

  “Tally, look!” Yolanda, standing outside the front of her store, shouted and waved her forward. She sounded distraught.

  When Tally approached, she could see why. The sidewalk before Bella’s Baskets sparkled with broken glass. The window had been smashed.

  “What happened?” Tally asked. There hadn’t been a storm. Someone must have broken it, but why? She heard a crunch and realized she had stepped on some glass fragments with her sneakers.

  “Somebody threw a rock through my window,” Yolanda wailed.

  Tally took a good look, as well as she could, through the police personnel photographing and measuring. There was a lot more glass inside, looking like ice crystals on the contents of the baskets.

  “They’re gone!” Yolanda pointed at the window.

  “What’s gone?” Tally looked more closely, then she saw it. The new plastic replicas were gone. There were no puddles where they had been, though. They hadn’t melted. They were missing completely.

  Who would steal cheap plastic pieces of candy? Pieces that were falling apart?

  And why did the window smell so lovely? Tally peered inside the store and saw Raul, who had gone back to arranging some stargazer lilies on the work counter. That’s what she smelled, the lilies.

  Detective Jackson Rogers emerged from the knot of police personnel. “Tally, you and Yolanda come over here. I need to let you know what happened.”

  They joined him a few feet away from the growing crowd. “It looks like someone stole the plastic candies,” Tally said. “Is that right?”

  “Yes, to begin with.” Detective Rogers glanced at the notepad he was holding. “At four in the morning, a member of the local crime watchers group observed a brick being thrown through the window and one party scooping up the plastic pieces.”

  “Oh, so you caught the thief?”

  “Tally, stop interrupting me.” Jackson’s words were stern, but he smiled when he said them. His gray eyes, that could be hard as steel, matched his warm smile at the moment. He grew more serious as he continued, though. “The crime watcher was beaten and the thief escaped with the goods. We got a description and think we should be able to apprehend him soon.”

  “Someone got beat up?” Yolanda put a hand to her mouth. “Was it bad?”

  “He’s in the hospital.” The detective looked at his notes. “A member of the neighborhood watch group.”

  “A ‘he’ and not a ‘she’? For sure?” Tally asked. “Not Mrs. Gerg? She’s a member of that group. They go walking on patrol through the downtown at night.”

  Jackson gave his head a slight shake. “We’ve asked them to stay in their vehicles. They’re also not supposed to apprehend anyone. Unfortunately, this is what can happen when they disregard our recommendations. But no, it was not Mrs. Gerg. It’s a member of her group, though. It’s the…” he consulted his notes again “…Crime Fritzers. Another thing we’ve told them is that they’re not supposed to be alone. They are always supposed to patrol in pairs.”

  “Yes, that’s her group. And the injured man was in the group? In the Crime Fritzers?”

  The detective smiled. “Crime Fritzers. Yeah.” He chuckled, a brief twinkle hitting his gray eyes. “Sorry. Funny name.”

  Tally had to smile, too.

  “But y’all don’t have the thieves,” Yolanda said. “Does anyone have any idea why they were stealing those pieces of plastic? They’re not expensive.”

  “They’re a little too cheap, in fact,” Tally said. “Lily ordered them because they were economical and environmentally friendly. But it turns out that means they dissolve. And way too quickly.”

  “Really?” Yolanda turned to her. “Y’all didn’t tell me that.”

  “Did you notice they were starting to melt yesterday in the sun?” Tally said. “I asked Lily about them last night before we closed. She had noticed they were melting, too, but didn’t want to say anything. She hoped they would hold up. I thought they would, too. I was going to leave them a few more days. In fact, she tried to call the company, but couldn’t get them to answer the phone.”

  Yolanda threw her head back. Tally thought she might be asking for strength from above.

  “I know, Yo. We should have just taken them out.”

  “Are you finished?” Jackson asked. “I need to get back to work.” He walked over to a large, burly officer Tally recognized as Officer Edwards. It looked like he was leading the physical, forensic investigation. From her experience with him, she knew she could trust Edwards to be thorough and fair, no matter what turned up, since he had always been so in the past.

  “Wait,” Tally said. “Is there any reason he wanted to steal them?”

  “We’re working on that,” the detective said, and walked off, leaving Tally and Yolanda looking at each other, perplexed.

  “I wonder when we can clean up this mess,” Yolanda said.

  Tally saw one of the crime scene people swabbing a piece of the broken glass. It had a dark substance on it. Blood? Had the person who broke the window gotten cut? Maybe they could get DNA from that. If they would bother with DNA tests for such a cheap theft.

  When Tally told her workers what had happened, Molly said, “I can get hold of Ozzy. He can do the glass really fast. I’ll call him right now.”

  Tally had no idea who Ozzy was, but thanked Molly. “I’ll call Yolanda and tell her.”
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  The crime scene tape came down at about noon and Yolanda called Tally, whose shop had opened nearly on time and was doing a booming business. Probably, Tally thought, because the crime team with their bright yellow tape was a draw for curiosity seekers. Once they had checked out the basket shop activity, they naturally walked next door and were lured into the sweet shop.

  “Can y’all spare a minute, or one of your workers, to help me get my window space cleaned up?” Yolanda asked Tally when she answered her cell phone. “I have someone coming later today to put in a new piece of glass.”

  “Ozzy, right? You got same-day service. Great. I can come myself. I think everyone in town has been here today already, so it’s slowing down now.”

  Three young women currently worked for Tally. Molly Kelly and Lily Vale worked every day but Monday, the day the shop was closed. Her third employee, Dorella Diggs, came in Wednesdays and Fridays. On those days, Tally could afford to take time away from the shop.

  Tally called to her employees that she was going out to help Yolanda. “I might as well do some shopping for the store, if there’s time after that.”

  “Will you be back by closing?” Lily asked from behind the counter, where she was ringing up a sale on a bag of Mallomars.

  “I’m not sure. It’s a mess, with all the broken glass. Can you just close up if I’m not back by seven?”

  “Sure. Don’t worry about it. My cousin is working late, too.” Lily had been living with her parents, but they had moved away and she was living in an apartment with her cousin Amy, who worked in the office at a real estate company.

  Tally assured her that she wouldn’t worry about it. She had, finally, three dependable, trustworthy women working for her. It made her life easy.

  As she walked up to the window where Yolanda was leaning into the opening, carefully picking glass shards off the floor of the display space, a white pickup pulled up and parked nose- in at the curb. A magnetic sign on the side of it advertised Ozzy’s Odd Jobs with a local phone number in bright red lettering.