The Eastern Market’s pedestrian forecourt was crowded—it appeared that every local and tourist had come out to enjoy the cold, sun-filled day. People of all ages milled about beneath the white canvas stalls of the vegetable, fruit and flower vendors. A dozen speed bikes encircled one of the tall white gothic columns which served no purpose except to please the eye. A few of the restaurants had even braved the winter weather and set out tables and umbrellas.
Anna loved shopping at the market—no matter the time of year, lovely spring days with the cherry trees in bloom, dripping sweat in humid summers, or chill autumn evenings, it was a festive experience. It beat shopping at Safeway hands down.
The 136-year-old market was the hub of the Capitol Hill neighborhood and the destination for organic produce, meats, poultry, and seafood. The delis were fabulous for cheeses, pastries, and one’s daily bread meant just that. Frothy cappuccinos went down like silk; students hooked up to free Wi-Fi in coffee and tea shops. In spring and summer there were concerts and art festivals. The restaurants in the area catered to every taste from French to Thai.
She pulled up in front of the Eastern Market where arts and crafts and Christmas tree vendors lined the forecourt. Salvation Army bell ringers were doing a brisk business. “I’ll let you guys out here while I find a place to park. Don’t wander off!”
“Let’s meet at the donut stand,” insisted Lila, opening the passenger door. “I can smell them frying from here. My mouth is watering. C’mon, Clara-Alice, Get your tush in gear!”
Anna finally found street parking, and the ten minute walk to the market took her past the condo complex where she once lived. She was smiling to herself, feeling the spirit, enjoying the ambiance which was akin to a big warm hug. Couples were strolling past, arms loaded with bunches of flowers, wines and breads, the fresh yeasty fragrance perfuming the air. Singles hurried past, Bluetooth in ears, waving their hands around as if conducting invisible orchestras. Who knew? Perhaps they were. A young family of four was hauling their Christmas tree home on a big-wheeled red wagon. Now and again she found herself being stared at by a man—once even by a tattooed and pierced teenager. She winked at the boy and he turned red. Small things could bring such pleasure. Yet, in the far reaches of her mind she was thinking: If things with Kevin and Clara-Alice don’t work out, I’m selling the house and moving back to Capitol Hill.
Lila and Clara-Alice had wandered off. Anna stood in line to buy fresh poultry; selected wonderful cheeses, both local and from abroad, bought two loaves of crusty baked breads, some fresh crab meat from the Bering Sea, and a pecan pie. She was paying for a selection of flowers at an outside vendor when Clara-Alice and Lila reappeared.
“We’ve been looking all over for you!” declared Clara-Alice. Her totes were overloaded, and hanging from both arms, as were Lila’s.
“So, I see,” Anna said.
“Oh, don’t be pissed,” Lila entreated. “We waited as long as we could hold out. We were just going to check out the deli, then the breads got our attention, then the Greek pastry... You know how it is in there.”
“I know. I followed my nose, too.”
“I’m played out,” moaned Clara-Alice. She was slightly out of breath, and her arms were sagging, no doubt from trying to keep up with Lila. “My feet are killing me. How far away did you park?”
“Not far. On the street by The B Spot.”
“Oh! I love their teas,” gushed Lila. “Let’s dump all this stuff in the trunk and take a load off our feet. Besides, I have to pee.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Why are we stopping here?” Caburn asked. “It has the worst coffee in D.C.”
“Three reasons,” Helen said. “One, this is where I told my friends to meet us. Two, it has Wi-Fi so the owners are used to people hanging out for an hour or two, and I can get your notebook set up, and three, I’m in the mood for Thai iced tea.”
Caburn headed for the comfy sofa in the small shop. Helen stopped him. “Get that table over by the wall, and start unpacking this stuff.” She went to the counter, ordered her tea, and Caburn a coffee. He did as he was ordered. No matter how bad the coffee, he needed the caffeine. He was worn to a frazzle.
It had only taken twenty minutes at the bank to arrange for him to bank online and he came away with a temporary password. In addition, the ATM card that had been living in his wallet as an unused credit card for two years had been activated. They had to wait in line at Verizon for forty minutes, and another twenty to set up an account and get the Verizon Wi-Fi gadget, then drive all the way outside the city to an Office Depot to purchase the laptop, which was called a notebook. Helen wouldn’t let him write a check at either Verizon or Office Depot. She insisted he use his ATM/VISA which was the same as a credit card, except the money came out of his checking account.
He was starting to doubt the wisdom of internet banking. He had been perfectly content living in the Twentieth Century with a checkbook. Before he came to D.C. he’d only ever used cash. He’d been raised pay-as-you-go and couldn’t find anything practical about charging stuff, then having to pay for it when the bill came in. Pay when you bought it and you were done. On the other hand, there was the Nesmith thing, and he needed to learn this stuff. The week of forensic accounting training he’d had early in his career was buried so deeply in his memory, he couldn’t dredge up a decimal point.
Helen plonked his coffee in front of him, then swept the empty boxes off the small table into the tote on the floor. She plugged wires into the notebook and the Wi-Fi gadget. “Plug these into the wall behind your chair,” Helen told him. “The Wi-Fi card needs to charge. We can use it while it’s charging, though.” In a minute flat she had his bank site on the screen, and turned the screen towards him. “Okay put in your temporary password.”
Caburn went through his pockets, coming up empty. “Maybe I left it in your car.”
“Look in your wallet, Frank. Geez. It’s with your ATM card.”
“Oh, yeah.” He spread the paper out on the table. Helen used her finger on the little pad to move the cursor.
“Now type it in that box where the cursor is blinking.” The screen changed. Error.
Helen sighed. “Try again. Three mistakes and you’re locked out, Frank.”
“You do it. I’ll watch.”
“Your account will come up. I’ll know how much money you have.”
“So? I’m not gonna give you any of it.”
“Okay... Done.” Her eyes slid to Available Balance. Oh, my goodness lots of zeros there. Selling wheat to the Russians was really profitable. “Now you have to change the password to one you make up and won’t forget.”
“I need to drink my coffee first. I can’t think on an empty brain.”
“Just a mix of numbers and letters. Can your brain handle that?”
“My birth date?”
“No.”
“Your birth date?”
“Very funny.”
“Hi, ya’ll.”
Caburn looked up. White noise filled his head.
Helen stood and yanked on Caburn’s collar to get him on his feet, too. “Frank, I want you to meet my tenants. “Guys, this is Frank. He works with me.”
By its own volition, Caburn’s hand reached out, and he found it being enthusiastically pumped with a hand almost as large as his own. Worse, the hand had fingernails from the crypt—long, pointed and painted black.
“I’m Savannah, but you can call me Clarence.” The tenant had blond hair extensions, eyelashes longer than a horse, and a neck thicker than a moose.
Clarence air-kissed him on both cheeks. All the oxygen in Caburn’s lungs whooshed into the universe. All the molecules in his body shriveled. Something zapped the strength in his legs. “Ungh... Ungh... Ungh,” he said.
“I’m JoJo. I don’t have an extra name,” said the other creature, a foot shorter, with gel-spiked purple hair. In a lightning strike, JoJo had a hand around Caburn’s neck. She came up on tiptoe to plant a real kiss on his cheek.
&
nbsp; “He’s just darling,” Clarence said to Helen of Caburn. “Smells wicked, too. A homophobe?”
“Big time,” said Helen. “He has nice manners, though.”
“I’ll get us some iced tea,” said Clarence. “Another round for you guys?” He/she whisked Helen’s glass and Caburn’s cup off the table.
“Thai, for me,” said Helen. “Thanks.”
Caburn folded back into his chair. He shot a look at Helen, didn’t like what he saw, so turned his attention to the notebook screen. A password came to him. He typed it in. Nobody would guess it in a thousand years.”
“What’s up with the notebook?” asked JoJo.
“We’re bringing Frank into the electronic world.”
“He’s having a hard time with it?”
“Thick head—thicker fingers,” Helen said.
“You want some help, Frankie?”
“Frank. It’s Frank. And I’ve got it. Thanks.” He confirmed his password. Error! Damn it.
“That’s a good password,” JoJo said, watching his fingers play over the keyboard. “Kuru—eaters of the dead. But, it’d only take a hacker with a good algorithm about twenty minutes to land in your account. It’s case sensitive, though. You went lower case the first time you typed it in, and caps when you confirmed it. And you ought not use the last four digits of your Social. Too easy to guess.”
Caburn cut his eyes toward Helen. She had snide and smirk all over her face. Okay—so he was thick, but not that thick. He pushed the computer towards JoJo.
Helen handed her the list of accounts she’d insisted Caburn make. “Put everything on auto-pay,” said told the young girl.
“Utilities too?”
Clarence returned with their drinks. With immense precision and utter concentration, cups and glasses were lined up on the table. A bottle of hand sanitizer and some wet-wipes materialized out of a purse as big as a duffle bag. The huge hands were ritually cleaned, then the table. JoJo lifted the notebook. Caburn scooted back in his chair. Next came the cleaning of glasses and cups—sides, rims; each carefully handled with the cloth to swipe the bottoms. Finally, each libation was placed just so in front of the others around the table.
Clarence cleaned two sugar packets before stirring them into his/her tea.
Helen caught Caburn watching her tenant. “Clarence has OCD—an obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
“I’m not ashamed of it. It’s—”
“—Time-consuming,” piped in JoJo. “He makes us late for everything.”
Caburn distinctly recalled Helen telling him these tenants were call girls. How the heck did they...? He jerked his mind away from that ugly vision, and glanced at Helen. More ugly. Mind and body ugly. She planned this. Induced him. Bullied him. He determined he was not going to let her see he was steaming like a fumarole. All innocence, Helen was watching JoJo’s nubby little fingers flying over the keyboard.
Clarence took a great gulp of tea. “I was so thirsty!”
Caburn thought: If you’d been in the Sahara, you’d be dead by now.
JoJo stopped typing and took dainty a sip of tea. “I’m done.” She dug into a pocket, took out a pencil stub and a miniscule scrap of paper, wrote something, and passed it across to Caburn. “There’s your password. It’ll work for everything, including your Gmail account—that’s your e-mail. It ought to be good for a few months. And, umm—you were two months behind on your truck payment—it’s up to date, now.”
“What the hell—?”
“Just teasing,” said JoJo.
Caburn’s face burned. “Thanks for everything Helen. And uh...uh, you guys, too. It was a pleasure meeting you. I’ll just pack this stuff up and take a taxi home. No problem. Nope. No problem at all. I’ll kill you back at the office, Helen. I mean, I’ll see you back at the office.” Shit!
She pivoted her shoe on top of his. “Not yet, Frank. Let JoJo take a look at Nesmith’s little book. You know—you put it in your breast pocket when you thought I wasn’t looking.”
“You can’t be serious. This is a State Department case.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” said JoJo. “I help the government out from time to time. It’s sort of like my community service—you know? Instead of going to jail?”
“JoJo had a peek into our computers a few years back,” Helen explained. “About the time we were getting ready to jump on Saddam Hussein.”
“But, I was only fourteen. It was just for fun.”
Caburn slid the book across the table with his forefinger. Savannah/Clarence grabbed it and cleaned it with a wet-wipe. Helen buried her long nose in her tea glass, snickering. JoJo turned pages, running her finger down each. After two minutes she closed the book and handed it back across the table. “It’s weird,” she told Helen. “I think I can figure it out.”
“Don’t you need a copy?” Caburn asked.
“Oh, no. I got it.”
Caburn’s mind was playing tricks on him. Did that funny looking little thing with the purple hair and kohl-rimmed eyes just glance once through Nesmith’s book of codes and numbers and say, ‘I got it.’
“Eidetic memory,” said Helen.
Caburn shifted in his chair, felt his knee touch another. He looked at Clarence. One of the horse eyelashes winked. Oh, merciful God. He found his hat under his chair, put it on and snapped the brim. What else? His overcoat. The computer. The WI-FI card. He shot a look at Helen, daring her to say a word and began gathering them up.
~~~~
“Please, God, don’t let there be a line at the bathroom,” exclaimed Lila when they entered the packed tea shop.
While Lila and Clara-Alice made for the restrooms, Anna got in line to place their orders. She was still at the order counter when Lila and Clara-Alice returned.
“Whew. For a moment there, I thought I was gonna embarrass myself,” said Lila. “What’re we having?”
“Sweet peach tea over ice—if that suits.”
“Oh, yeah. Anything hot might set our bladders off again.”
Anna paid for the order, and they picked up their teas. “I don’t think we’re gonna find a table,” she said.
“Oh, look!” said Lila, signing with her tea to a table against the far wall. “There’s that man whose hat landed on my porch. At least that’s the hat. See if that’s him when he turns around.”
“No,” said Anna. She knew it was Frank Caburn, even from the back.
“Well, he’s standing up. He’s leaving. C’mon—let’s grab the table before someone else does.”
A young mother with a baby in a papoose chest wrap nudged Anna. “Are you done? We’d like to pick up our drinks.”
“Oh.” Anna apologized, moving out of the way. When she looked up, Caburn was staring at her from across the room. He took his hat off. Their eyes met and held. She felt goose bumps and weak knees. Oh, that’s seriously bad. He looked her up and down and seemed a little self-conscious as he made his way towards her. He’s not a mind reader. Just be natural.
“Are you doing okay?”
“I’m good.”
“Your neighbor—the one who found my hat—”
“Lila Hammond.”
“Right. She said you took a leave day. I didn’t mean to upset you last night.”
“I didn’t take off work today because I was— Can we skip this?”
“Absolutely. Whatever you say. Your ground rules.” He was thinking dinner, a good wine, a warm fire, exploring the promise beneath the low-cut sweater she wore. So much for putting his best foot forward. But he never claimed to be a saint.
“Good. Because I just felt like Christmas shopping. Which reminds me, there’s a trunk full of food I need to get home before it spoils.”
“How can it spoil? It’s colder than--”
Helen materialized at his elbow, her claw-like hand squeezing his bicep while smiling at Anna. “I believe you’re Anna Nesmith,” she said. “I’m Helen Calloway, one of Frank’s supervisors. Has he been taking care of things for you?”
> Anna looked confused. “I don’t need anything taken care of, do I?”
Caburn listened to this exchange and thought: Helen, you are dead meat, if you take this lady on. She’s smarter than any ten of you and me.
“We do like to take care of our families when situations such as these pop up, especially when we must deal diplomatically with a foreign government. And the French, well, you know the French.”
“That’s just it,” said Anna, perplexed. “I do know the French. I spent a year there after I graduated from college. I found the French people very warm, and welcoming and helpful. So, if you could diplomatically bring Kevin home, I’d appreciate it.”
Caburn looked down at his shoes to hide his smile. Oh, yeah. Now, he was enjoying himself.
“We will. We will,” said Helen. “Frank has filled you in, hasn’t he? And you have his card, our office number, his cell phone?”
“Anna!” called Lila over the heads of other patrons. She was waving her arms over her head, signaling for Anna to join them at the table.
“It looks like my mother-in-law and her friend have routed you and your friends,” Anna said to Caburn. She left him standing there with Helen.
“Uh, Helen, I don’t think this is a good thing. I’ve got Nesmith’s little book in my pocket and JoJo’s got the contents in her memory. One word said wrong and the game is up. How would we explain to those women what we know and when we knew it—and kept it from them? We’re sitting on dynamite. You need to get your tenants out of here.” He didn’t say it, but he was uncomfortable exposing Anna to the likes of Savannah/Clarence and JoJo. One never knew for certain how broadminded another person… “Maybe we ought to call Albert, get his take on—”
“No. We’re not calling Albert.” She pulled her car keys from her coat pocket. “Here, you take my car back to the office and pick up yours. Clarence can take me to pick mine up later.”
“That sounds like a plan.” Caburn was relieved, but not by much.
Once back at the table he saw the plan had gone to hell and back. Mr Clean was sanitizing the computer keys. Nesmith’s mother was either mesmerized or catatonic. Impossible to tell. Lila Hammond was bent forward excitedly waiting for something to come up on the screen. Anna was sitting, back straight, hands folded demurely in her lap, as if she had afternoon tea with a bunch of weirdoes every day of her life. Caburn moved a chair so that he could sit on her left, which put him between Clarence and Anna. She didn’t so much as fidget when he pulled his chair up. He stared at Helen a few seconds. She gave a slight shrug.
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