Our Red Hot Romance Is Leaving Me Blue

by Dixie Cash

  Debbie Sue hung back. “Y’all go on out,” she said, patting Buddy and Vic on their backs. “Me and Ed need to talk to Justin for a minute. Shoptalk, you know?”

  “I want to go with Vic,” Edwina said.

  “Ed, shh,” Debbie Sue said. She walked with her husband and Vic to the front door and stood watching until they were outside. As soon as she closed the door, she said, “Listen, y’all, I know those two guys. There’s no use arguing with them about us staying. But they’re both going out of town tomorrow afternoon and we’re gonna finish this thing. Ed and I’ll be back here tomorrow night.”

  “We will?” Edwina said, wide-eyed.

  “Yes, Ed, we will. I know something happened. And I can hardly wait to hear the details from Buddy on our way home.”

  By now, Edwina had her purse in hand and was standing by the front door.

  “Don’t forget to call me when you can, Ed,” Debbie Sue said to her. “There’s a story you haven’t finished telling me.”

  “There is?” Edwina said.

  “Oh, yeah, Ed. There is.”

  “The story is me getting home in one piece on the back of that motorcycle.”

  twenty-four

  Standing in his front doorway, Justin watched the Domestic Equalizers and their spouses drive away into the darkness. God, his head was whirling. He’d had Rachel, then lost her and now he had an opportunity to have her again—not physically, but he would have her again spiritually. He was no longer in denial. He no longer questioned his own sanity or Sophia’s claims. She did have the ability to conjure up souls departed from this world and if one had chosen to communicate with Edwina, perhaps tomorrow night the communicating spirit would be Rachel.

  “Justin?”

  Sophia’s soft voice interrupted his musing and he turned to her. “Sorry, I was lost in thought. Are you all right? I mean, these sessions must be hard on you. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  A hint of moisture glistened in her eyes. “Then, then you believe me? You believe in me?”

  “I believe in you, Sophia. You’ve been fair and upfront from the beginning. You have a special gift and I’ll be forever indebted to you. Beyond what I’ve agreed to pay you, I mean. Without even knowing the outcome, I’ll always be thankful. You’re going to bring my Rachel back to me.”

  “Back to you?”

  Sophia echoing his questions only added to the confusion that continued to boil in Justin’s brain. He seemed to be saying the wrong things, but then he didn’t have a clue what the right things were either. He decided on a more direct approach. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but I’m a little baffled. Did I say something wrong? Have I done something wrong?”

  Sophia moved to an armchair in the living room and picked up her purse. Hooking the strap on her shoulder she looked at him again, her eyes filled with an emotion he couldn’t interpret. All he knew was that a man could get lost in those hazel eyes.

  “Justin,” she said firmly. “I need to be sure you understand that I can’t, as you say, bring Rachel back to you. Our duty, or rather, my duty, is to help her cross over. She was crying at the barn because she’s a soul in anguish, Justin. One that needs to be guided to the light. Unlike Little Pearl, Rachel isn’t a spirit who enjoys making an earthly visit to harrass. Her soul is supposed to be at rest, but something has been holding her earthbound. I fear that something is you and the way you continue to hang on to her. She left the message on the refrigerator door for someone to help you let her go. You must send her away, Justin.”

  How could he send Rachel away? Wasn’t she already gone? Aside from that, he didn’t know if he had the will to send her away. Flesh-and-blood woman or spirit, wasn’t she still his wife? He didn’t want to lose her a second time. He swallowed hard, suppressing a sob. “But on our wedding day, we swore…I swore to love her until death do us part.

  Sophia came to him and took his hand. “And you did that, Justin. I have no doubt that you did that. I also have no doubt that nothing in your vows said you owed her life-altering fidelity after death. You can’t be faithful to a spirit and still live a normal life on earth.”

  Justin knew that, but hearing Sophia verbalize it had a profound impact on him. What was wrong with him? Typically, he had too much common sense to get caught up with spirits and seers.

  Sophia led him through the open doorway and pulled the door shut behind them. Standing on the porch, illumination supplied only by stars and the lamp shine through the window, she said softly, “Why don’t you stay with me tonight at the hotel? You shouldn’t be alone. Fear of the unknown is just part of this business and I’m largely unfazed by it. I’ve been present many times when my grandmother had to help the living while guiding a loved one’s spirit into the light. I don’t want you to be afraid, Justin.”

  What was she suggesting now? Justin yanked his hand from hers and stared at her. “I am not afraid of Rachel.” But even as he said it so firmly and emphatically, he wondered. Maybe he was afraid and didn’t know it.

  “Of course you aren’t. I didn’t mean to imply you were frightened. But you must understand that the spirits do not have the same personalities as their mortal hosts. I feel you need to be away from this house for tonight. You need a distraction. Won’t you please come with me?”

  He shook his head. “No. Sex with someone I barely know would cause more problems than it would solve.”

  She drew a quick breath. Her eyes grew wide and her lips parted. After a few beats, she said, “I’m sorry, Justin. I didn’t mean to suggest…There are two beds in my room. All I’m offering you is company.”

  At that, Justin felt his self-righteous bluster collapse and he felt stupid. He found himself helpless to offer a reason not to go with her. The fact was that her invitation wasn’t even remotely seductive, but rather, an expression of genuine kindness and humanity. And not since the day he buried Rachel had he needed both of those things as much as he needed them tonight. “I guess I could do that. Let me grab a few things from inside.”

  He re-entered his home, threw some things in a small duffel and returned to the front porch.

  “Wow, that was fast,” Sophia said.

  “I don’t require much. Besides, if I need makeup I’ll just borrow yours.” He followed up that remark with a chuckle, a feeble attempt to lighten the moment.

  Sophia smiled. “That’s okay. But I’m a little darker than you are.”

  As the car drove away, a noiseless shuffling of letters on the refrigerator door occurred:

  C U AGIN.

  At home, even after brushing her teeth several times, Debbie Sue still had a nasty taste in her mouth. A million thoughts and questions raced through her mind. On the drive home, Buddy had told her about her body having been taken over. She deliberately hadn’t told him about the “Boo” message on the refrigerator door. Mostly because she didn’t know what to think. Her common sense and her innate skepticism were being dismantled. Not only did she not know what to think, she didn’t know what to do. She felt uprooted.

  And now she wondered if she should tell Edwina about the “Boo” message. Edwina had seemed traumatized by the evening’s events from beginning to end. After riding to Justin’s house on the back of Vic’s Harley, hearing that a ghost had sent another message to the Domestic Equalizers just might push her over the edge. Hell, Debbie Sue was on the edge herself.

  She checked her own refrigerator door and was relieved to see no message. She didn’t really believe Rachel Sadler’s ghost had made its way from Justin’s house to hers, but the way things were going, who knew what might happen next.

  She opened the refrigerator door and stared at its contents. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but adrenaline was pumping through her veins. She was on a mission to consume something sugar laden and carb loaded. Buddy had stepped outside or he would be giving her a lecture on the merits of eating healthy. Health issues be damned, she intended to pig out.

  Her cell phone blasted “The Eye
s of Texas” and she knew without looking that at this time of night, the caller was Edwina. She grabbed her purse, dug out the phone and flipped it open. “Is that you, Ed?”

  “Debbie Sue,” Edwina gushed, “are you all right? This is Debbie Sue, isn’t it? Or is it Little Pearl?”

  Debbie Sue returned to the refrigerator. She was more focused on a round plastic container that had been pushed to the back of a shelf than on answering Edwina. She bent down and pulled out the container.

  “Girl, if you don’t answer me I’m gonna blow a gasket,” Edwina declared.

  “It’s the real me, Ed. Cool your jets. And your gaskets.”

  “How do I know it’s you? I need a signal.”

  “Oh, forgodsake, ask me a question only Debbie Sue Overstreet would know the answer to.”

  “Oookaaay. Let me see…Who’s the only other person you’ve slept with besides Buddy?”

  “Quint Matthews,” Debbie Sue answered with finality.

  “Who’s got the biggest package?”

  “Dammit, Ed, I’m not discussing packages with you.”

  “I know. But I figured I’d give it a shot all the same. Inquiring minds want to know.”

  Debbie Sue propped the phone between her ear and her shoulder as she peeled the top from a bowl and sniffed the contents, which appeared to be pudding. But she couldn’t recall a time she and Buddy had ever had pudding. Taking that as a sign the stuff should be gotten rid of, she dumped whatever it was down the garbage disposal.

  “When y’all were driving home, I suppose Buddy told you everything that happened at Justin’s,” Edwina said.

  “Yeah, he yakked non-stop all the way home. When we went out to Justin’s, I think he really believed nothing would happen. Seeing it with his own eyes really got his attention.”

  “Was he scared?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes you can’t tell what Overstreet the Stoic is thinking. He was awestruck, for sure. But being a total realist with both feet on the ground, he wasn’t yet ready to surrender to the ghost idea. You know Buddy. If something happened he couldn’t explain, he probably didn’t believe his own eyes.”

  “Hm. Vic was impressed. Not blown away, but impressed.”

  “He wasn’t scared?”

  “Nah. Vic’s been eyeball to eyeball with machine-gun-toting terrorists. To him, a little ghost is child’s play. But I’ll tell you this much, Debbie Sue, I was scared shitless. I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.”

  At that moment, Debbie Sue decided to postpone telling Edwina about the “Boo” message, at least not until this whole thing had reached a conclusion. In fact, Debbie Sue thought, she might never tell her. “I know. But why, Ed?”

  “My God, Debbie Sue. A dead person took over your body and I saw it with my own eyes. If I hadn’t already gone to the bathroom, I would’ve peed my pants. Don’t you remember? Didn’t it affect you in some way?”

  Debbie Sue gave up on the contents of the refrigerator and began to rummage in the cupboard, found half a tube of Pringles. “You know, Ed, I don’t remember a thing. Not one thing. But I sure as hell can still taste cigarettes. I swear, I don’t know why anyone smokes. I know the nicotine is addictive, but I can’t figure out why. Blech!”

  “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t miss it,” Edwina said wistfully.

  Debbie Sue didn’t doubt it. She still remembered the ordeal of Edwina kicking the smoking habit years back. In some ways, the pain hadn’t ended yet. Edwina still constantly quoted from the many books she had read to distract her from smoking.

  “Buddy told me this Little Pearl person said some pretty lousy things to you, Ed. I feel bad those words came out of my mouth.”

  “You couldn’t help it. I know that. But it made me remember what a black-hearted bitch she was. Made me appreciate Vic more than ever.”

  “That isn’t possible.”

  Edwina sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

  “I wish we hadn’t had to leave,” Debbie Sue said. “I wish we could’ve seen what might have happened next.”

  “Humph. There’s not a doubt in my mind the next person to make an appearance would have been Rachel Sadler. But Buddy obviously wasn’t willing to take the chance. And Vic wasn’t gonna disagree with him.”

  “Oh, hell, no. Buddy Overstreet was jaw-clenched set on us leaving. And you know how tight his jaw can get.” Debbie Sue finished off the tube of Pringles. “So, Ed, quit stalling and let’s hear it before Buddy comes back into the house. Why were you arrested for prostitution?”

  “Where did Buddy go?”

  “He went outside to pee off his new deck.”

  “But it’s only a foot off the ground.”

  “It’s a man thing, Ed. If he’s got a deck, he’s got to pee off it. So tell me why you were arrested.”

  “It’s a dumb story,” Edwina said. “When I was married to Jimmy Wayne and lived in El Paso, he got fired from his job almost the day after we got married. Not just any ol’ job suited Jimmy Wayne’s, uh, sensibilities, so he had a hard time getting hired somewhere. We had bill collectors hounding us, so I found a job as a seamstress in a strip joint.”

  As far as Debbie Sue knew, Edwina had never sewn a stitch. Her brow tugged into a frown and she stared into space, trying to envision Edwina hunched over a sewing machine sewing thongs and pasties. “Strip joints need seamstresses? I’d come closer to believing you were a hooker.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Hell, Ed, you can’t sew. You told me yourself you thought a stitch was something you got in your side if you ran too hard.”

  “Trust me, there wasn’t a whole lot to sew. It was more like gluing and taping. I went through cases of Super Glue. Anyway, I didn’t know it then, but apparently, the owner was running an after-hours nooky concession in the back room. The cops raided it and took everybody to the station, including me.”

  Though the arrest had occurred years ago, Debbie Sue felt compelled to defend her longtime friend. “But you weren’t selling…er, nooky…Were you?”

  “Oh, hell, no,” Edwina said. “But it took a while for them to sort out that little bit of information. Meantime, my little girls were staying at home with—”

  “Oh, no, not Little Pearl,” Debbie Sue finished.

  “That’s right. She couldn’t find Jimmy Wayne to tell him to come and get me, naturally, so she had to come down to the courthouse and post my bail. She never let me live it down.”

  “Have you told Vic about that?”

  “Yep, on the way home tonight.”

  “If I know Vic, he wasn’t mad.”

  “Nah. He kind of likes that I’m a woman with a record. He even wants me to sew up another one of those costumes for myself.”

  Debbie Sue grinned, knowing that Vic was serious and that Edwina would do it. She only hoped the crazy woman didn’t show up in the Styling Station wearing the costume.

  “So what about tomorrow night?” Edwina asked, lowering her voice. “Are we really going back again?”

  “You bet your ass we are.”

  “Oh, hell, Debbie Sue. Do we have to?”

  “Of course we have to, Ed. We’re too deep into this to give up on it now. Buddy hasn’t even told me not to. I think he knows he’d be wasting his breath. What did Vic say about another session?”

  “I think he’d love to be there, but since he can’t, he just said make sure I don’t hurt anybody.”

  “So there you have it. Approval. What more do you need?”

  “Extra underwear?”

  “Listen, Ed, if Little Pearl shows up this next time, you’ll be ready. You just tell her to take a hike. I mean cut her from the fuckin’ herd, Ed. You don’t have to take abuse from a dead woman. From what Buddy said and what you’ve told me, she sounds like a big-ass bully. Stand up to her and she’ll hightail it.”

  “That almost sounds like you knew her,” Edwina said.

  “Well after all,” Debbie Sue said on a chuckle, “we’ve sort of shared the s
ame skin.”

  “And she and I’ve shared the same kin,” Edwina said.

  “It’s like in The Lion King, Ed. The circle of life. Hakuna matata.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Edwina replied. “Tuna and tomata.”

  twenty-five

  Though Sophia chatted casually about nothing all the way to Odessa, and Justin dutifully chatted along with her, in the back of his mind, he couldn’t stop thinking about seeing Debbie Sue become a different person right before his eyes. If Edwina hadn’t said Debbie Sue had never smoked in her whole life, he wouldn’t have believed what he had seen.

  They reached Sophia’s hotel after nine o’clock. She excused herself and left the room immediately. Now that a few miles and a little time had passed since the bizarre and disturbing incident had occurred in his home, Justin wondered if she regretted inviting him to her room.

  He should have followed her in his own truck instead of riding with her in the rental car. Why hadn’t he? As it was now, the only transportation between them was the Aero and he couldn’t take it and return to his home and leave her stranded.

  He picked up the remote control, powered on the TV and stretched across one of the beds, surfing through TV channels, glad to have the preoccupation and noise. Besides everything else that was going on, he was doing his best to understand the knotty position he had put himself in—alone in a hotel room with a beautiful woman he hardly knew. The decision to accept her invitation now seemed questionable at best. He knew from experience that people in crisis often make poor decisions, and he felt that was certainly what he had done. Crap, he didn’t typically act out of foggy emotions.

  He could well imagine what his co-workers at the fire station would say to him—Damn man, when did you become such a wuss? A sardonic grin curled Justin’s mouth. He would like to see his fellow firefighters go through what he had over the past few days. Being seen as a wuss was the least of his concerns.

  The sound of the key in the lock catapulted him from the bed to one of the armchairs. Having Sophia see him lying on the bed seemed too intimate, too presumptuous. The door opened and she came in with four canned soft drinks and packages of snacks, balanced on a long, flat box.