by Tim Tharp
“You must have talked to Linda,” she said. “Come on back.”
We followed her to a small office where a little gray-haired lady sat behind a cluttered desk. The lady was talking on the phone and held up a finger, a signal for us to wait until she finished. When she hung up, the pantsuit lady explained who we were, and Linda smiled and asked us to sit down. There were only two chairs, so I stood while Audrey and Trix settled into their seats.
“I thought there were only going to be two of you,” Linda said. “But the more the merrier.” She tapped at her keyboard, bringing something up on the computer. “Let’s see—you were the ones interested in taking over Ashton’s route until she comes back.” She looked up at us. “And we all know she will be coming back, don’t we?”
“Definitely,” I said. “No doubt. But—”
“Okay, then, we’ll put you right to work.”
What I was getting ready to say, before she cut me off, was that I never mentioned anything about actually taking over Ashton’s route. I just wanted to talk about it. Maybe get a list of who she delivered to. But for a little five-foot-nothing lady with a slight hunchback, this Linda was a real go-getter. Never letting me get in a word, she popped up from her desk and led us to the back room where the meals were being prepared. Audrey and Trix gave me looks like, What’s going on? But all I could do was shrug.
The back room was a regular meal factory—part kitchen and part assembly line. There were probably thirty people flocked around two long tables, putting sandwiches together and stuffing them into white foam containers. A lot of the volunteers looked to be retired, mostly old ladies, but there was also a sprinkling of old men, along with a few teenage girls. None of them looked like they came from the same kind of rich neighborhood that Ashton came from.
“We do three meals a week,” Linda said. “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Hot meals are only on Wednesdays. Let’s find you a place at the table so that you can start putting your meals together. Then I’ll go over your route with you. Usually, we like to send teens out with an adult, but with a big boy like you, Dylan, I don’t think we need to worry. Do you know the city streets pretty well?”
“We’re experts,” Trix said. She looked as if she thought the whole thing was highly amusing.
The assignment was to slap turkey sandwiches together, plop down a dollop of potato salad, and finish off with a handful of chips and a pickle spear. I was wedged in next to one of the old men, who introduced himself as Bernie and showed me the routine. Compared to the old ladies, who were real masters, he was pretty slow. Obviously, this was more of a social thing for him. He made the typical old-guy comment about how I was lucky to be the escort of two lovely ladies and kept up a running conversation about where I went to school and where he went to school and how things had changed since his day. I liked him. I also figured he might be a good source of information.
When the chance finally opened up to throw in a question of my own, I asked if he knew Ashton, and his eyes lit up. When Ashton first started working for FOKC, she had been teamed up with him to make deliveries, and he got to know her pretty well. Then her brother got involved too, at least in the delivery part. He didn’t come in to help fix sandwiches because of some kind of school activity, but Ashton would go pick him up so she wouldn’t be on the route alone, which was an FOKC no-no.
“Ashton Browning,” Bernie concluded. “She’s a real corker.”
I didn’t know what a corker was, but it sounded positive.
“They have to find that girl.” A look of concern washed his smile away. “If they can find that Mormon girl in Utah, they can find Ashton.”
I knew about the Mormon girl from one of my true-crime shows. She was abducted by a nut who thought he was some kind of prophet. It was quite a while back. The nut brainwashed her with his crazy-prophet act, but she finally got away. Things hadn’t been good for her while he held her captive, but she seemed to deal with the whole thing in a heroic way. I admired her. Maybe she was a corker too.
I asked Bernie if he thought Ashton might’ve been kidnapped by some nut too, and he’s like, “No, no, I wouldn’t ever say that. But I just don’t see how that girl could have any enemies. I pray she just ran away for a little while and that she’ll come back as soon as she sees how much her parents really love her.”
“Really? She didn’t think her parents loved her?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Young people—they can get on the outs with their families every now and then. It’s normal. I tried to run away once, but I ended up down at the pool hall, playing pool all day long. When I got over being mad, I went back home, ate green beans and meat loaf for dinner, just like nothing ever happened.”
“So, what was Ashton on the outs with her family about?”
Bernie picked up a slice of bread and scattered a healthy layer of turkey across it. “The usual thing, you know—didn’t think her parents understood her. She had a boyfriend they didn’t like. Or maybe they hadn’t met him, but she just knew they wouldn’t approve of him. Something like that.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Did this boyfriend happen to be named Rowan Adams?”
“She never did say. Why? You don’t think the boyfriend had something to do with her going missing, do you?”
“I don’t know.” I snapped the lid shut on another meal. “But anything’s possible.”
CHAPTER 22
When we finished fixing the meals, it was time to load them up, which wasn’t that easy. They don’t really make BMWs like Trix’s with hauling stuff around in mind. We figured the trunk would be too hot, so I ended up having to share the backseat with a whole pile of meal boxes. Linda explained our route, along with a few rules such as how we should greet the people, what we should do if they weren’t home, and what topics of conversation to avoid. “Don’t mention the word charity,” she said. “Don’t comment on their homes, no matter how bad they might be, and always smile.” She supplied us with an example of the kind of smile she was talking about—cheery and wholesome. “We’re not just in the business of feeding people,” she added. “We’re also in the business of spreading good cheer.”
Ashton’s route ran through a mostly Hispanic area south of the river. It wasn’t really what I would call a bad neighborhood. Audrey and I had driven around there a couple of times before, checking out the cool flavor of the place—green buildings, orange buildings, lowriders, vendors pushing their tamale carts down the streets. It was a place where people sat on their front porches by the dozen. They even cooked out in the front yards. None of that hiding behind a stockade fence with the grill so neighbors couldn’t horn in.
As we started handing out meals, though, it was strange—none of the folks on our route were actually Hispanic. Mostly they were ancient white people—old ladies or old men who lived alone. They’d probably bought their houses way before the Mexicans migrated in and just stayed, unlike the younger set. Maybe they liked their houses too much to move, or maybe they were too set in their ways for a change, or maybe they just weren’t bigots. Of course, I didn’t ask. Linda hadn’t told us not to, but I figured she would have if she’d thought of it.
Another question was, Why didn’t any Hispanics want meals? I thought it could be because they didn’t like turkey sandwiches, but Audrey suggested they might be too proud to accept charity.
“Or maybe they just don’t trust us,” Trix said.
And I’m like, “Why wouldn’t they trust us?”
“Because they might be here illegally,” she said. “And they don’t want us to turn them in.”
“I wouldn’t turn them in,” I said. “They never did anything to me.”
Another topic Linda hadn’t told us to avoid with our customers, or whatever you call them, was the Ashton Browning thing. As we went from house to house, I always mentioned how we were filling in for Ashton and followed that up with a couple of questions about what they thought of her. Surprisingly enough, many of them didn’t know she was missing
. Either they didn’t pay attention to the news or they never knew her whole name and couldn’t see well enough to identify her picture on TV. But one thing was for sure—they all loved her.
“She had a real good sense of humor,” said one old-timer who came to the door in his bathrobe. “I’m a pretty good one with a joke myself, but she always came right back with one of her own.”
An old lady with lavender hair told us, “She was the only person who ever came up these front steps that my Mikey wouldn’t bark at.” Mikey was the homely dachshund who’d gone crazy barking at us when we knocked on the door.
“She used to go get my pills for me,” said another lady. “One time she even ran down to the store to get me some toilet paper, and believe you me, I needed it.”
I didn’t follow up with any more questions about that.
A couple of old ladies got to know Ashton especially well. Apparently, they didn’t like to go outside, not even onto the front porch. The first old lady, Miss Ockle, only cracked the front door to see who we were, but she was friendly enough and asked us to come in, unlike most of the others, who just grabbed their dinners and said goodbye before we could get much info.
“Yes, come on in, come on in,” said Miss Ockle. “If you’re friends of Ashton’s, I know my mother would love to see you.”
Her mother? This was a surprise since Miss Ockle appeared to be about a hundred years old herself. Her hair was dyed a faded gold, and her eyebrows were penciled on. She wore a shin-length flowered dress that could have doubled as a curtain. All in all, she looked like something from two universes away.
She led us into the cramped living room, where her mother sat hunched in an overstuffed chair, one of those walkers with tennis balls on the legs standing next to it. Her eyebrows matched her daughter’s, but she’d given up the dye job in favor of a natural yellowish-white color and wore an old nightgown instead of a dress. She had tubes leading from an oxygen tank stuffed into her nostrils. Obviously, she had trouble breathing, but that didn’t stop her from puffing on a cigarette.
After several tries, each louder than the one before, Miss Ockle got the idea across to Mrs. Ockle that we were friends of Ashton’s. A little smile bloomed beneath the nose tubes. Although Mrs. Ockle was only about the size of an adult pelican, her voice was a deep nicotine croak. “Ashton made better sandwiches than my own mother,” she said.
For a second, I feared that Mrs. Ockle’s mother—Miss Ockle’s grandmother—might be waiting somewhere in an even smaller room, but I remembered we only had two sandwiches for the household.
The subject of sandwiches propelled Mrs. Ockle into a story about peanut butter and jelly from her childhood, which threatened to throw us completely off schedule, so I cut in with a question about whether Ashton had ever talked about having any enemies.
“That girl?” Miss Ockle said. “Impossible.”
“Who?” croaked Mrs. Ockle.
“Ashton, Mama. Ashton. The sandwich girl.”
“That girl could sure make sandwiches.”
“Well,” I interrupted before the peanut-butter-and-jelly story cranked up again. “How about her brother? Did he have any enemies?”
Neither of the Ockle ladies seemed to know what I was talking about, so I explained that her brother had been the one helping her on her delivery route.
“Oh no,” said Miss Ockle. “That wasn’t her brother. He was her boyfriend.”
“Who?” asked Mrs. Ockle.
“Ashton’s boyfriend, Mama.” Then louder: “Ashton’s boyfriend.”
“So handsome,” Mrs. Ockle said dreamily. “He lived right next door.”
“No, Mama. He didn’t live next door. He just knew the people who lived next door.”
“He didn’t know the people who lived next door,” Mrs. Ockle argued. “Ashton knew the people who lived next door.”
“Oh, Mama. First you say her boyfriend lived next door, and then you say Ashton knew them. Make up your mind.”
“Who?”
Miss Ockle turned to us. “I do know one thing—the children on the street loved Ashton. I used to peek out the window and watch them run up to her, grinning like she was the Holy Mother herself come back to earth.”
By now it was pretty obvious we weren’t going to get a whole lot more useful information from the Ockle ladies, so I made an excuse to get out of there. Miss Ockle saw us to the door, but before we left, she touched my arm and peered into my eyes. “He really was her boyfriend,” she said. “I can tell those things. Just like I can tell that red-haired girl is your girlfriend.”
“Uh, enjoy your meal,” I said. That was all I could think of.
CHAPTER 23
On the front porch of the Ockle house, Trix burst out laughing. “I love those old ladies,” she said. “I want to be just like that when I’m a hundred.”
“I’ll turn your oxygen on for you,” Audrey said, and Trix was like, “Awesome.”
And that’s when I heard the kids laughing in the backyard next door.
“Listen,” I said. “Hear that? We should go back there and check it out.”
“What for?” Audrey asked.
“You heard what Miss Ockle said. The neighbor kids loved Ashton. Maybe we can find out something about this boyfriend of hers.”
Trix laughed. “Boyfriend? You really think those old ladies knew what they were talking about?”
“Yeah,” Audrey added. “I’ll bet it was Ashton’s brother all along.”
And I’m like, “Maybe, but the Ockles seemed pretty certain. Besides, Mrs. Ockle said the guy with Ashton was handsome, and you have to admit that doesn’t exactly fit Tres Browning.”
“No,” Trix said. “But when a woman gets to be Mrs. Ockle’s age, she probably thinks every teenage boy is handsome.”
Still, I didn’t think it would hurt to go back and ask a couple of questions.
“Okay,” Audrey said. “We’ll wait in the car. Just make it quick. We still have dinners to deliver.”
The house was on the corner, so I walked around the far side to talk to the kids over the chain-link fence. There were eight or nine of them, ranging in ages from around two to twelve, laughing and shouting as they played some kind of chaotic game, possibly tag except a ball was involved.
“Hey,” I called to the oldest, a pretty Hispanic girl with long black hair parted on the side. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
She froze and stared at me for a moment but didn’t answer.
“Tú y yo habla, por favor?” I asked, trying to piece together the little bit of Spanish I remembered from middle school. She backed away.
I pointed to my chest. “Amigo del Ashton.”
That didn’t help. I wouldn’t say she ran onto the porch and into the house, but she wasn’t loafing around about it either. Crap, I thought, now she thinks I’m some kind of skeevy child molester.
“You’re funny,” said a boy of about nine, who was closer to the fence than the others. “You don’t talk right.”
“You got me there,” I admitted. “But I’m just delivering meals to people around the area and thought it would be a good idea to get to know the neighbors.”
The boy walked closer. “You deliver meals to the crazy ladies next door?”
“The Ockles? They’re not crazy. They’re just a little different. Actually, they’re nice once you get to know them.”
Then a brick hit me on the back of the head. Well, okay, it wasn’t actually a brick—it was a fist—but it felt like a brick. My glasses flew off and my knees buckled a little, but I didn’t fall down. “Holy crap,” I said. I picked up my glasses and turned around to see this huge Hispanic dude standing there. He had a deep blue maze-like tattoo on his shaved head and a gold tooth that was about two shades warmer than Miss Ockle’s dye job. And twice as shiny.
“Whatchoo doing back here, sick puppy?” he asked, both fists balled at his sides. He didn’t look angry so much as happy to get the chance to beat someone to death.
> “Dude, I’m just trying to be friendly. I’m in the neighborhood delivering meals to people.”
“We don’t need none of your meals here,” he said.
“I know, but I was next door at the Ockles’ and I just thought—”
He stepped closer. “That’s your problem. You shouldn’t go around thinking.”
At this point, I was like, This is it. My life’s over. This is what it must be like for a pilot the split second before his plane crashes into the side of a mountain.
But I never hit the mountain, and it never hit me. Just then another guy came striding up from behind Tattoo Head. “Hold on,” he said. “Back off, Oscar. Dylan’s all right.”
And Oscar’s like, “You know this pendejo, Beto?”
“Yeah, he’s a good guy. He came to Hector’s funeral.”
Sure enough, that’s who it was—Beto Hernandez, Hector Maldonado’s cousin, only he’d traded in the black suit and hat he wore at the funeral for jeans, a black-and-white sport shirt, and a straw porkpie that put mine to shame.
He stepped over and shook my hand. “Good to see you,” he said. “What brings you over to this neighborhood?”
I explained I was just doing some volunteer work, filling in for Ashton Browning after she went missing. “Ashton who?” Beto said.
“Ashton Browning. She’s been on the news. She disappeared from the nature park up on the North Side.”
“Did you hear anything about that?” he asked Oscar.
Oscar shook his head. “I don’t pay attention to what goes down on the North Side,” he said.
“She used to deliver meals next door,” I explained.
“To the crazy ladies?” Beto said. “Yeah, I think I do remember seeing a pretty blond girl over there sometimes.”
“She was probably with her brother, a skinny little dude with brown hair and a pale turtle face?”
“Her brother? Do you remember seeing her brother, Oscar?”