“Hello, Smoochy,” I said and reached out to pet her. She licked my hand.
Tannya walked over and gave her a hug too. Smoochy Poo growled and barked at Tannya.
Tannya instinctively pulled her hand back. Miss Kitty looked down at her. “No, no, Smoochy. Be nice!”
Having scolding the little dog, she turned to us. “Oooooh, girls, I’m so excited for this next adventure!” Then she gave me another hug.
We settled into a booth near the back and the waitress brought us all diet pops, on the house. Miss Kitty maneuvered around Smoochy and pulled an iPad out of her bag.
“Here,” she said and handed it to Tannya. I bit my lip and watched as Tannya looked at it front and back, and then at all the ends.
“What the hell is this?” she finally asked.
“It’s an iPad,” I said.
“Oh, yeah!” she said as her face lit up. “I’ve heard about these. How’s it work?” she asked.
Miss Kitty turned it on and asked for the website address. Tannya watched in amazement as Miss Kitty worked the touchscreen. “Wow, I was wondering how you were going to type on it. That’s neato! I need to get me one of those!” I made a mental note—future gift idea.
We spent the next hour and a half looking it over and learning more. The crew Tannya had signed up for was on the ship named Ocean’s Lie. The site didn’t list all the crew, but it had the leads on there as “Captain Morgan,” “The Flying Dutchman,” and “Long John.” The site listed the next LARP as on Thursday, May 1, and to inquire via email for more information. Information would only be given to members whose booty had been received.
We looked at other ones, too, and figured out that the ship on my lake was named Poseidon’s Zebra Mussel. I let out a snort. I loved that name. They had the names of the lead crew: “Captain Caesar Wayde,” “Willy,” and “Gun-Powder Gertie.”
“Ha! That has to be Aunt Val!” We all giggled.
“Oooh, we need pirate names too!” Tannya said with a grin and squirmed in her seat with excitement.
I raised my eyebrows and looked at Miss Kitty. She shrugged. “Sure, why not? Sign me up. Looks like fun,” she said.
My jaw fell. Oh, boy!
“How about you, Sara? Are you in?” Tannya looked eager.
Miss Kitty giggled and elbowed me playfully in the ribs. “Aw, come on, Sara. You have to! You’re our leader,” she said.
“Leader? The hell I am! This was not my idea. I’m not the leader.”
“Fine I’ll be the leader,” Tannya said. “Let’s get you signed up!”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to sign up, but signing up on a different ship than my neighbor and aunt seemed like a bad idea.
“I don’t think I should. What would my aunt say if I had my name on crew list to the ship trying to take her loot?”
“You’re right,” Tannya said. “We can’t do that. We have to start our own LARP crew.” I looked over to Miss Kitty, who was playing on the iPad.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
Miss Kitty nodded and looked up. “Yup, I agree. And it’s easy enough. You just have to register your ship’s name and the names of at least three leads on your crew: a captain, first mate, and second mate. There’s no charge. We just fill out this simple form. Then if we want to participate or plan any events we update those on this site.”
“Seriously, you guys, this is dumb!” I tried to reason. Part of me was totally in, the other sane part was telling me not to get involved.
“It’s not dumb! Sitting back and watching a pirate movie take place on your lake and not being involved is dumb,” Tannya said.
“I think we should create our own crew and register, but I also think that Tannya should still sign up for the other one,” Miss Kitty said. “She can be our spy.”
“Yes! That’s genius! I’ll do it!” Tannya said with a fist pump. “You can count on me!”
Oh, geez. If this were a Lifetime movie, it wouldn’t end well, and Tannya would die first. But the more I thought about it, which wasn’t very much, the more I thought it might actually be a good idea. It’d be nice to have a spy on the inside, someone who knows when and where they’re going to strike. It was all very silly. At the same time, Aunt Val worked very hard to steal treasure, and she cared very much about Wayde. I didn’t want to see her get hurt. She didn’t have a lot, and this was the longest she’d stuck around any location in a long time. She must really like him. I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to join the Ocean’s Lie, and Poseidon’s Zebra Mussel had a crew that seemed a bit too crazy for me.
“I’ve already started registering our crew,” Miss Kitty said. “We need names for the ship and names for us.”
“We need a ship?” I asked.
“We have a ship, we just need a name,” Tannya informed me.
“What ship?” I asked.
“Well, your pontoon, duh!” Tannya said.
“What? Whoa there! The pontoon? The pontoon is not a ship. It’s a twenty-foot boat.”
“Yeah, the pontoon! It’ll work great! Besides, it’s all we have.” Miss Kitty said.
“It’s too small. There’s nowhere to hide on it!” I protested.
“We don’t need to hide,” Tannya said. She shot her fist in the air again and said, “We come to conquer!”
“All right,” Miss Kitty said staring at her iPad and typing. “Names … what’s your pirate name, Tannya?”
“Ohhhh! Gosh, let me think.” We all got quiet and thought hard. After a few moments Tannya answered with a big grin. “You can call me Tannya Tytass.”
We laughed. Miss Kitty said, “My name will be Candee Barre.”
I couldn’t come up with one so Miss Kitty decided for me that I would be “Sara Narra,” as in “sayonara.” They thought it was funny, and frankly I didn’t care, so she typed them all in. Then Tannya proclaimed the name of the ship Ella Vashow. In my head I agreed that the three of us doing anything was in fact a hell of a show.
After a few more minutes, Miss Kitty put down her iPad and picked up her pop and raised it in a toast. “To our next adventure!” she said. We all clinked glasses and drank.
“Let’s go to my house first and get some junk, and then we’ll go over to my cousin’s house and steal some treasure.”
“We need gold spray paint and some gold Rit dye too,” I told her. “The treasure has to be gold.”
We all loaded into my Jeep. I had the cargo room. We headed to the hardware store. Miss Kitty ran in and bought six cans of spray paint and three small bottles of Rit dye. “It’s all the gold they had,” she said.
I made a right out of the lot and drove to Tannya’s. I’d never been there before. I knew the area she lived in but had never seen it. She was a ways out of town and it took about twelve minutes to get there.
We pulled up into the driveway to see a modest rambler on the right side of the driveway with an attached garage. A bit further down the lot was a tin pole shed. The yard was nicely kept. The house looked good too. She was single, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if it weren’t.
“How many acres do you own?” I asked.
“Thirty.”
“It’s a nice place,” Miss Kitty said. I guess she’d never seen it, either.
“Thanks! I do my best. I think we’ll start in the shed. Scooter left a ton of stuff here and hasn’t been back for it. I haven’t seen or heard from him in quite a while, so I doubt he’ll miss it. He’s probably too high to remember he still has anything here, anyways.”
“What kind of stuff?” Miss Kitty asked.
“Who knows what we’ll find. That man was crazy for most of the year we were married. Shortly after our wedding, he lost his job and started entertaining himself with drugs and reality TV.” She rubbed her eyes. “He was a bit obsessed with Doomsday Preppers.” She let out a big sigh and looked at us nervously. “He was a really nice, responsible person when I met him. Drugs changed him.” She seemed ashamed and apologetic.
; I put the Jeep in park and we got out. “Tannya, we aren’t here to judge you. Both our husbands were not who we thought they were when we married them. We’re all in the same boat, love.” I gave her a hug, and Miss Kitty wrapped her arms around both of us too.
“Men suck,” Miss Kitty said. “I’m quitting men!”
We broke the hug. Tannya and I stared at her. “What? It was just a thought. But really, now who’s judging? Think about it, you never hear talk about the divorce rate of homosexual couples, do you?”
“No, no you don’t.” Tannya nodded in agreement.
“Let’s check out the shed, shall we?” I said.
“I’ll be right back. I gotta get the key,” Tannya said and walked to the house.
When she returned she unlocked the door and we stepped in. The shed had a large roll-up door on the front. Tannya hit the button and the door went up. As light entered the room we all three gasped at the sight.
11
The shed was full top to bottom! It was like something off the TV show Hoarders. Except that it was organized. Boxes of stuff were piled a foot or two above our heads. Along the left side of the shed, we saw a food hoard of cans and boxes to last a single person a year or more. To the right were all kinds of guy things—chain saws, vises, lawn mowers, a million hand tools, yard tools, boat motors, tackle boxes, fishing poles, and lots and lots of boxes of nails and screws.
Further down a bunch of scrap metal and large engine parts caught our attention. I didn’t know what they were for, but there were a lot of them. Off to the left, way in the back corner behind the wall of food was a living area.
“What the fuck?” Tannya yelled in anger.
Against the back wall was a makeshift living room—a beat-up old couch, the cushions worn thin, and a couple old blankets tossed on it. An old console TV sat on the floor across from it. The screen had a crack in the corner, and the wood veneer was barely holding together on the front. Pizza boxes and empty cans of fruits, vegetables, and tons of empty two-liters overflowed a garbage can in the corner. A month’s worth of newspapers were spread about, and an old desktop computer was set up on a few old palettes taking the role of a coffee table.
“Oh, my God!” Miss Kitty said.
I stepped forward and looked at the date on the newspaper on the top of the pile. It was last week’s.
“Current,” I told them.
Tannya had her hands on her hips. She was red with anger and started pacing. Then she noticed the wire from the computer and followed it. Miss Kitty and I followed her to the back of the shed. There was a little hole drilled in the tin near the bottom back corner. Three wires went through it.
After a few moments we figured out that someone had spliced and split her cable, her internet, and her phone lines. She went back in to the shed and used her cell phone to call her landline. A hand set under the blanket on the couch rang very quietly.
“What the hell?” Tannya said with a confused look as she picked it up and ended the call. “Why would he have this? I would know if someone called him.”
“He could call out on it, though, and you wouldn’t know,” I said.
“And he could listen in on your calls, and you wouldn’t know either,” Miss Kitty added.
“He’s stealing phone, internet, and cable!” she shouted.
“I’m assuming this is your ex we’re talking about, right?” I asked.
“Has to be. That low-life son of a bitch! I’ll kill him!”
“Easy, girl!” Miss Kitty said. “We ‘Ella girls’ don’t get mad. We get even!”
“‘Ella girls’?” I said.
“Yes, our ship is Ella Vashow. That’s our new calling card,” Tannya said with a nod at Miss Kitty. Miss Kitty smiled and fist bumped her.
Wowzers, I shouldn’t be here. These two are going to get me wrapped up in a mess again, I thought as I looked around the shed.
“We need a plan!” Tannya said.
“Yes … yes we do,” Miss Kitty said and rubbed her hands together.
“Maybe you should call Rex,” I offered. “If it’s Scooter, then he’s trespassing … and stealing. Rex could put him in jail.”
“If and when he returns,” Tannya said. “I wanna kill him now.” We stood there a moment while she thought. “No, I think for now we’re going to pretend we didn’t see anything. I want to think on this a bit. Scooter’s gonna pay for this, but I’m not sure how yet.”
“Well, what do you want us to grab for the treasure?” Miss Kitty asked.
“Nothing. Let’s just go to my cousin’s and get some stuff. We’ll worry about replacing it later. She’s gone for a while anyway, and I’m sure she won’t care.”
“When was the last time you talked to her? Are you sure she won’t care?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure. If she does, I’ll just pay her for the stuff. We can just keep track of what we take. It’ll be win-win either way.”
We hauled ourselves back in the Jeep and drove away. While I was driving back towards town, Miss Kitty was pressing Tannya to discuss what she planned to do on the shed situation.
“Has he been there since you kicked him out?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Tannya said shaking her head. “I never go out to that shed. Seriously, I’ve opened the door maybe twice since he left and that was to reach in and grab the rake that’s right by the door. I never even looked in. For all I know he’s been there all along.”
“Judging by the shape the couch was in and garbage, I’d say it’s been a while. It looked pretty settled.”
“Man, that pisses me off!” She pulled her top lip into her mouth and tightened her eyes. She looked livid. I’d never seen her like this. She’s always been the chipper or excited one. “I’ll get him for this, but not just yet.” She stared out the window hard at nothing while I drove.
“Take a right,” she finally said a few miles later. “Milly lives down this road.”
Miss Kitty leaned up from the back. “If she lives out here, why does she have garage sales? She can’t get much traffic.”
“She has nothing better to do. Like I said, she seems to add to her collection rather than get rid of anything. She’s a hoarder.”
“No! Really? Like the people on the show for real?” I said. I always thought it would be fun to climb through someone’s house and then clean it. That show was motivating, too. Every time I watched it I got up and cleaned out a closet as soon as it was over.
“Well she’s probably not that bad, but she has way too much stuff.”
We pulled up to an old farmhouse. We saw no animals in the barn and the fields were grown over. Tannya informed us that her cousin had bought it from her grandparents when they moved to assisted living three years ago.
“Where’s Milly?” I asked, getting nervous now that we were the trespassers.
“In Iowa for her sister’s wedding. It was this past Saturday, but she planned to be gone this whole week, too. I’m supposed to stop over and feed the cat and scoop the litter and get the mail every few days.”
“So, we don’t actually have to go into the house with you, right?” Miss Kitty asked with a disgusted look.
“No, the stuff’s in the attached garage. I’ll run in and check the cat. You two start getting stuff from there. I’ll meet ya when I’m done.”
I parked right in front of the garage. Her cousin must have had the garage added onto the house after she bought it, because it looked brand new, and the house attached to it certainly wasn’t.
We all got out and walked up to the service door of the garage and waited while Tannya opened the lock. She flipped on the light and we looked around.
“I’ll be right back,” Tannya said and disappeared through another door into the house.
The garage was full—tables set up everywhere and stuff set out and priced and nicely organized. I glanced around. She had very nice stuff. I was surprised.
Miss Kitty walked over by a smaller table near the automatic garage door
and found a bunch of plastic bags. “Here,” she said. “Let’s load up.”
I grabbed a bag and started walking around. I found myself by the far wall looking through the clothing rack. It was a dowel hanging from the rafters by chains and full of really nice looking clothes, most still with tags on them. Some were brand names, and the prices she had on them were great. “Wow, look at this!” I said and held out a beautiful rayon dress shirt.
“Very nice,” Miss Kitty said with a smile. “Is that new?”
“Yeah, it still has tags! A lot of them do!”
“This is a beauty too!” she said and held up a crystal vase. “It’s lead crystal! Two bucks!”
“What the heck?”
We continued showing each other great items, and then I found them … It was like sky opened up, and the sun gazed down on them as the choirs of heavenly angels sang … the one and only Louis Vuitton Vanity Pump in patent monogram canvas. MY DREAM SHOES! I had been in love with these shoes for months, ever since I saw them in a magazine. I actually picked that magazine up from time to time, just to look again.
I had looked them up on the internet a while back and found out that they retailed for $875. Which was a ton of money. I had money … I had lots of money, and I was pretty conservative considering I got a fresh ten Gs every month. These were going to be a treat to myself! And now here they were. I rushed across the room to an area under a table and dropped quickly to my knees and scooped them up and hugged them. “Oh, my God!” I screamed with excitement. I was literally bouncing with joy.
“What?” Miss Kitty asked and rushed over.
“Oh, please let them be my size!” I prayed.
Miss Kitty gasped and covered her mouth as I reached down and whipped my shoe off my foot. I didn’t even look at the size of the Louis Vuittons. I just shoved my foot into them. “Are those—” Miss Kitty asked.
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