Into the Sweet Hereafter

by Kaye George

  A small man jumped out. He was compact and wiry, probably in his forties, and had a horseshoe mustache, coming down to his chin on either side of his mouth. “Which one is Mizz Bella?” He looked at Tally first and she pointed to Yolanda.

  Yolanda straightened up and dusted her hands off on her bright yellow skirt. She had topped it, in her characteristic fashion, with an orange, scoop-necked peasant blouse. “You brought the window already? Great.”

  Tally stared at him. Molly was right. Ozzy was very, very fast. She would have to ask her how she knew him. He was a handy guy to know.

  He unclipped a large piece of clear glass from the holder on the side of his truck.

  Tally whispered to Yolanda, having doubts in spite of being impressed by his speed. “Are you sure it’s the right size? How did he know how big a piece of glass to bring?”

  Yolanda laughed. “He came and measured right away. Right after Molly called him.”

  Tally nodded, reassured. “Yes, that’s good then. I’m glad she mentioned him.”

  “Wait just a sec,” Yolanda said. “We need to get the rest of this debris out of here.” She dashed inside and came back with a large paper bag, a small whisk broom, and a dustpan. She and Tally scooped up what was left of the broken glass, taking care not to cut their fingers. Then Yolanda swept the bottom and poured the debris into the large bag. Tally spotted some other detritus, some dull pieces of things that weren’t broken glass. She leaned farther into the window and decided they were pieces of a broken plastic Whoopie Pie. As she picked them up, shiny green stones fell out. She gathered those, too, and stuck everything into Yolanda’s bag. Maybe the stones were inside the plastic pieces to weigh them down or something. But it was curious that they were so pretty. She wanted to look at them more closely later, when she had time. They would be able to finish removing the baskets and other decor from inside later, but this cleanup of the bottom was much easier from the front.

  “Okay, we’re done.” Yolanda gestured toward the open space with the shards of remaining broken window glass clinging to the edges.

  Ozzy moved with precision and speed and had the broken pieces removed from the window frame and the window glass replaced in what seemed like minutes, as Tally and Yolanda watched. After he finished, he said he’d send a bill.

  The two women stood looking for a moment at what was left of the display. The baskets remained, full of goodies and beribboned to match their themes. The dogwood and crape myrtle boughs were still there, too, and undamaged.

  “I guess I have to redo the whole window now,” Yolanda said.

  “I don’t think you need to do that. It doesn’t look that bad. You should pick the tiny pieces of glass out of them, I think. But they look okay. It’s just that the candies are missing. If you didn’t know they’d been there, you wouldn’t think anything is wrong. We have a few more we didn’t use, don’t we?”

  “Not enough.”

  “You’re right. They would look lonely if we put them in there.”

  “That’s it, lonely,” Yolanda said. “I’m exhausted. You want to get a snack?”

  “Yes, I can do that. I didn’t know how long this would take so I told the girls I might not be back. But your shop is still open. Can you leave?”

  “Ha. You notice I haven’t had any customers since you came. It’s nearly closing time anyway. I’ll run inside, stash this bag, and tell Raul to close up. Let’s go celebrate surviving the Broken Window Incident.”

  Tally grinned. “Let’s do that.”

  2

  After Tally checked on the employees closing up her shop, she waited outside while Yolanda went inside Bella’s Baskets for her purse. An older sedan, so dark blue it was almost black, pulled up. Two men got out and approached Tally, appearing friendly. It was just before seven, so the sky was still bright. The sun wouldn’t set for another hour and a half. Tally felt the heat radiating up from the sidewalk as the men walked over to her. One of the men was older, heavyset and balding, with a belly that, from the front, made it impossible to tell whether or not he wore a belt. The younger one was taller, but fit looking and had a full head of hair. She recognized the younger man as the son of the new fire chief, since he had picked Dorella up from work twice. Tally assumed he and her employee were dating, now that Dorella and Tally’s brother Cole were no longer seeing each other. When Armand Mann was hired as the fire chief from the Dallas Fire Department, the local paper had done an interview with pictures of the family. The size of the fire chief’s son and his longish blond hair reminded Tally of Thor from the first time she saw him. But without the hammer. Their car idled, nose in at the curb, as the regular traffic passed by.

  The fire chief’s son was the first to speak, introducing himself to both women. “Hi, I’m Ira Mann. My partner and I want to reassure you that the Crime Fritzers are on top of this.” He hadn’t actually met Tally, but she had seen him through the window when he picked Dorella up.

  “On top of…the broken window? The plastic?” Tally looked at the car again. “You don’t have the Crime Fritzers sign on your car.”

  “No, we’re not on official patrol,” the other man said in a gravelly smoker’s voice.

  “Yeah,” Ira added. “Unofficial, extra patrol. We’ve put on extra units for the crime wave.”

  “Crime wave? What crime wave?” Tally asked.

  Yolanda came out in time to hear Ira’s statement. “Yeah, what are you talking about? Have other shops had broken windows?”

  “Not windows, per se,” Ira said. “But a lot of theft is going down. Home robberies, too. We’ve beefed up patrols to try to catch the perps.”

  “Okay.” Tally said. “Good luck.”

  “Can we get some intel?” Ira asked.

  “We’re on our way out,” Yolanda said, brushing him off. “The police have all the information.”

  Yolanda started to hustle Tally away from them, but Tally turned back. She knew Yolanda was aware of Detective Jackson Rogers’s dismissive view of the Crime Watch group, but what could it hurt if more people looked into the problem?

  “I think that’s great,” she said to them. “The more help the better.”

  Yolanda, Tally could tell, was not in favor.

  Ira whipped out a notepad. “Okay, then. What can you tell me about this incident?”

  Yolanda and Tally looked at each other. Tally pointed and spoke. “Well, this window was broken and some plastic candies were stolen. It doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Time of the incident?” Ira’s pencil scribbled across the notebook.

  “During the night,” Yolanda said.

  “You’re with the Crime Fritzers?” Tally asked. “Shouldn’t you know about this already? One of your members got hurt trying to stop the thief.”

  “Oh,” said the older man, realization dawning on his chubby face. “This is where Walter got beat up.”

  Ira wrote a few more words. “Thanks for your time.” He wrote his phone number on a blank page, ripped it out, and handed it to Tally. “Let us know if anything else comes up.”

  They had left the car running and the AC-cooled air tumbled out when they opened the doors to climb back in.

  After they drove away, Yolanda said, “Anything else? Like what? What’s going to come up? What help are they going to be anyway?”

  “You never know, but…I think I have to agree with you. Ira doesn’t inspire much confidence, does he?”

  Raul came out the front door and locked it after himself. “See you tomorrow, Yolanda. Who were you talking to just now? Those guys that drove off?”

  “They were part of the crime watch group,” Yolanda said. “They thought they could help out, somehow. You know, that Fritzer group.”

  “I think my cousin is in that. Mateo. He talks about it all the time. Miss Tally, is Lily at work today?”

  “Yes, she’s g
oing to help close up. You’re welcome to go over.”

  Raul headed for the sweet shop and Yolanda and Tally headed for Otto’s to snag an outdoor table.

  * * * *

  Pleasantly full of Otto’s wurst plate, which had been accompanied by a salad of locally grown ingredients (roasted beets, feta, candied pecans, pickled red onion with caraway vinaigrette), and having parted with Yolanda, Tally nestled in the corner of her secondhand navy-blue couch with Nigel. The television news proceeded without her attention as she answered her phone. It was her mother, Nancy Holt.

  “Where are you, Mom?” That was usually her first question.

  “We’re on Gibraltar.” Her mother sounded excited, but she always did, wherever in the world it was she and her husband Bob were performing. “They loved our first performance. The open air theater in the Gibraltar Gardens is one of the prettiest venues we’ve ever had.” Her mother was given to expressing herself in superlatives, which Tally found charming. Usually.

  “You just got there yesterday. You did a show already?”

  “Went straight from the plane to the theater. Our flight was delayed coming in, so we had to rush. But we made it just fine.”

  Tally’s parents, who were musicians, actors, and dancers, did it all, touring most of the year with brief stops back home in Fredericksburg every once in a while.

  “Oh no, I’m sorry,” Tally said, thinking the rushing around must have been hard.

  “It was nothing. We’ve had delayed flights before. How’s Cole?”

  Tally hadn’t spoken to her brother for over a week, so had no idea.

  “Is he still in Tucson?” her mother asked.

  “I don’t know. He said this one was going to take a while.” He had been in Tucson installing one of his sculpture creations when he called.

  “Maybe I’ll try to call him then. But you’re doing okay? The shop is still okay?”

  Tally assured her it was. There was no sense worrying her mother about the theft. There was nothing she could do from Europe. “Take it easy, Mom. Give Dad a hug from me.”

  They made kissy noises over the phone and Tally was soon in bed, trying to sleep and hoping her own windows would be intact in the morning. Ira had said there were home robberies going on. She had always felt perfectly safe here, in her own home. Tonight, she wasn’t sure she did.

  3

  The next morning, as she arrived at work, Tally gave a grateful glance at her unbroken front windows and went inside. As she was sticking her purse into her desk drawer, Lily came into the office from the kitchen.

  “Would you look at this email before I send it?” Lily held out a sheet of paper with a letter printed on it. “Do you think it reads okay?” She screwed her mouth to one side self-deprecatingly, but the effect just made her young face, framed by her long red hair, even more charming.

  Tally took it and glanced over the computer-printed text. “You’re filing a complaint?”

  “Well, I don’t know if filing is the right word. Registering? I want the company to know that their product is substandard. It shouldn’t melt in the sun like that. I can’t call them, so email should work.”

  Tally started to agree, then thought she remembered seeing the web page Lily had ordered from. “Wait. What did their ad say? Can you pull up their website?” Tally sat and poised her hands over her computer keyboard.

  “Yes. Here, I’ll show you.” Lily leaned in, typed, and brought up the page she had ordered from. She read the screen, then straightened. “Oh,” she said, sudden surprise in her words.

  “Compostable, it says,” Tally read. “Made of newest-generation compostable plastic. The most evolved in the business. Lowest temperatures and shortest times needed for decomposition. None better than ours.”

  “I don’t remember reading that,” Lily said. “I noticed that they had a local address and I used them because I think buying local is always good.”

  “It is,” Tally said.

  “But look at this.” She went to the corner of the office and picked up an empty box. “They came in this and it says Made in Myanmar, along with all these characters I can’t read. That’s not exactly local.”

  “Don’t be discouraged. We’ll order something else.”

  “Yeah, something that doesn’t return to the earth in days.” Lily looked deflated and discouraged.

  “They didn’t cost that much,” Tally said, trying to cheer her up. “Don’t worry about it at all. No problem. Okay?” She couldn’t step on the initiative Lily showed with her projects. Look how well the web page she designed for the store had turned out, she told herself.

  Lily didn’t look convinced, but left the office and got to work mixing up a batch of fudge.

  In a very few minutes, Tally heard Lily humming in the kitchen. She poked her head out the office door to see a dreamy smile on Lily’s face, as she stirred the fudge. She perched on a stool at the island, the bowl clanking a bit on the taupe granite top.

  “Did you and Raul go out last night?” she asked.

  Lily gaped. “How did you know?”

  “Just a hunch.” Tally winked before ducking back to tidy her desk. Tally was about to leave the office and get to work so they could open at ten, when Detective Jackson Rogers called on her cell.

  “Are you and Yolanda doing okay?”

  That’s sweet, she thought. He’s checking up on me.

  “Molly called someone she knew and Yolanda already has her new window installed,” Tally said.

  “I’m glad. So her business won’t be interrupted today, too, then.”

  “The only loss is the plastic candies.” She closed the screen she and Lily had been looking at and locked her computer so she could get to work in the kitchen when she finished the call. She reached for her apron smock and tied it on over her cotton shirt and blue jeans, juggling her cell phone.

  “I have to tell you, that’s pretty strange. They aren’t worth stealing, are they?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. They didn’t cost much. In fact, Lily and I were just talking about how they were probably too cheap. She feels bad because they were biodegrading by the second day.”

  “We will definitely be looking into them more closely. There must be something we’re missing.”

  “Oh, I have one the thief didn’t get.” She had stuffed it into the paper bag when she and Yolanda cleaned out the window debris. “A broken Whoopie Pie. Do you want to look at it?”

  “Are you free for dinner tonight?” She heard the smile in his voice.

  She was sure he could hear the same sort of smile in hers. “Sure am. What time?”

  * * * *

  Tally and Detective Jackson Rogers met at the Auslander, one of the most German restaurants in the very German tourist town. Jackson was wearing his usual off duty jeans and T-shirt. He and Tally nearly had matching wardrobes, except for the sizes. His clothing would drown Tally’s short frame. But they both preferred casual clothes whenever possible.

  “Do you want to see the Whoopie Pie?” Tally started to pull the bag out of her purse. “The remains of it?” She had put it into a smaller bag when she got it from Yolanda to show to Jackson tonight.

  “Let’s eat first,” Jackson said. “I might want to spend some time looking at it.”

  Tally didn’t know that there was that much to see, but left the paper bag in her purse for now. After she had done justice to a plate of schweineschnitzel (pork loin) and Jackson had put away a Reuben, he ordered a second beer for himself and asked to see Tally’s evidence.

  She fished out the paper bag and handed it to him. “Be careful. There might be some pieces of broken glass in there with it.”

  He looked inside, and after tilting the bag to catch the light, reached inside and pulled out a piece that was about a third of a plastic Whoopie Pie.

  “It’s sticky,” he s
aid. He handled it with his napkin.

  “Yes, it was degrading in the sun. Melting.”

  “It might have captured some fingerprints.”

  “I guess my mine will be on it.”

  “Maybe there are some others, too.” He set it down and reached into the bag again with a fresh paper napkin from the holder in the middle of the table. “What’s this? It’s not plastic.”

  “Oh, I forgot. There were some green stones near the Whoopie Pie. I was going to look at them at home, but didn’t get around to it. I stuck them in there so I wouldn’t lose them.”

  Jackson picked up the stone between the tips of his thumb and forefinger with the napkin and held it, turning it and examining it closely. “I think this is jade.” It gleamed in the overhead twinkle lights suspended from the ceiling. He tilted his head, peering inside the bag, and the lights glinted off his soft gray eyes, too.

  “Jade? What’s that doing there? We didn’t have any jade in the window.”

  He picked out another piece of the melting plastic with yet another paper napkin. Another small green stone was stuck to it. “I think the candy must have had the jade inside it.”

  “Inside?” That was strange, Tally thought. “Why? To weigh it down?”

  He shook out some more stones. He squinted, looking at several of the pieces of jade and poking them with the tip of his unused spoon. “This looks like good quality jade. It might be worth quite a bit.”

  “You’re a rock expert?”

  “Not rocks, jewelry. And not an expert, but my uncle is. He owned a jewelry shop in Fort Worth for over thirty years. This is gem-quality jade.”

  “So they aren’t merely green rocks, they are…gems? Valuable gems?”

  Jackson kept turning the jade pieces over and over. “This is really good stuff. Look at that color. I think it’s jadeite. Burma jade, people call it. It’s quite distinctive.”

  The server came to clear their plates. “Do you want dessert?” she asked.