“Oh well,” I say. We sit down to wait. “How did Ernie get this?” I ask.
“Maybe the Tarot guy made it?”
“But how did Ernie get it from the Tarot guy?”
“Bought it?” Joe guesses.
“I doubt he spent money on anything other than Viagra. Somebody else had to have it and he took it from them. Someone he had access to…”
“The Tarot guy said he provided a service for Fred, didn’t he?”
“You think he made a tape for Fred of himself and Feather having sex? Would Fred want that?”
“People want weird things.”
“So Fred had the tape and Ernie took it from his trailer?”
· * * *
We are right on time for dinner. The detective questioned us about where we found the tape and the photo, and how we found them. I had to mention Squirt and the trip to the tarot master earlier. I did not mention the Nerf gun or mirrors. Let the man find out something for himself.
When we arrive at my trailer, we can hear faint strains of Sinatra, and there’s a wonderful cloud of garlic and tomato smells around my trailer.
“On the George Foreman grill?” Joe asks.
“My mother borrowed Miss Tilney’s portable cooktop.”
One of the folding tables is covered in a white tablecloth and set with real dishes. My mother says, “Joe, will you pour the wine for us?” She’s got an apron tied around her waist. It’s made out of the curtain material. I feel like I’m in The Sound of Music; I wonder if they made me any play clothes from the same material.
“I’m going to wash my hands…,” I tell them.
“The sewing machines are in the shower, so don’t go turning it on,” Miss Tilney yells.
“…in the sink!” I yell back.
When we sit down to eat, my mother raises her glass. “This is nice,” she says. We all drink to that. The place does look okay. I mean really okay. The cacciatore looks delicious, and the warm bread, folded into an Ikea basket, is fragrant and steaming. An Ikea pillar candle sits in the middle of the table in an Ikea hurricane.
“I just don’t want it to be nice is all.” I tell them.
“Oh, not that again,” Miss Tilney says.
Joe bows his head. My mother looks puzzled. “You don’t like what we’ve done with the trailer?” she asks.
“Don’t indulge her,” Miss Tilney says.
“That’s not it. I came down here to escape from feeling anything. I don’t want to feel nice or attached or well… anything.”
“Good luck,” Miss Tilney says. “What kinda life is that?”
“Better than being hurt,” I tell her.
“Hurt?!” Miss Tilney says, “Ha. Soon we’ll be dead. I’d worry about THAT if I were you.”
“It’s not a good habit to get into,” Joe says.
“What habit?” I say.
“Running away.”
“It’s just a short term thing,” I say.
My mother raises her eyebrows. She knows I’ve been running away for years, and so do I. I look around. Three elderly faces look back at me kind of sad, kind of pissed. “Pass the bread please,” I say.
The table is a bit subdued for a few minutes and I force myself not to say anything. Every time I open my mouth, I say something stupid anyway.
My mother tells us more about her trip through the Everglades, and how the guide let my father drive the boat and how my father almost killed them going through a tunnel of mangroves. “If we didn’t duck, WHEW, there go our heads!” my mother laughed.
“That engine just brought something out in your father, Lola. He was free as a bird, not really watching where he was going…”
“My father—free?” I say.
“I know, but…”
Miss Tilney nods happily. “Did I ever tell you about my father?” she asks.
I don’t even know you, I think, but I shut up.
“He was a fishing boat captain,” she says proudly. “We used to live a block away from the lighthouse in Plum Island. That’s in Massachusetts,” she adds.
“That’s nice,” I tell her. I don’t know what it is with this “nice” thing but it’s kind of contagious.
“That’s not the story,” she snaps at me.
“Sorry,” I say.
“One day a dead whale washed up on the beach. It was huge. It was a WHALE, after all. And it stunk. Lord, did it smell. A crowd gathered. I was a little girl. We all put our shirts up over our noses. It was Clammer Ted’s idea to cut off its tail. I guess he felt like if we could chop it up, we could get rid of it in pieces. But just cutting the tail off took ten men a good hour. The poor men were almost dead from the smell. Once they got the tail off, they realized that now there REALLY was no way to get rid of it. They couldn’t tie the whale to anything, they couldn’t pull it out to sea or drag it somewhere and bury it. They had chopped off the only part of the whale that could have helped them.”
She sits back and puts her fork down.
“And…,” I say.
“And what?” she says.
“What’s the point of the story?”
“The point is that people do that all the time, chop off the part that could save them.”
“What happened to the whale?” Joe asks.
“Oh, they blew it up. Tommy Leonetti, who was the mayor at the time, but who always did drink too much to be commonsensical, decided to stuff the whale with dynamite and blow it to smithereens. Thank God my father pulled me way back from the crowd for that moment. The whale blew up into a million little bits. It rained whale. There was whale everywhere. Whale hanging from the telephone wires, whale on the roof, whale on the windows. It was all over the town for weeks, until we had a good nor’easter. And that was that.”
“Life,” Joe says chuckling.
“I would have just buried it, made a big huge mountain right there…,” I say.
My mother reaches over and pats my hand like I’m the old lady in the bunch.
Chapter 44
“I checked out Susie and Richie’s Facebook page,” Miss Tilney tells me. She’s standing outside with her pruners and her pompom robe when I take Dreamer out in the morning.
“Why do they have a Facebook page?”
“Everyone has one. Don’t you know anything? Susie is the head of her High School Reunion Committee. She grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Her class is very active,” she tells me.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the class reunion this year is taking place in Disney World.”
“Uh huh.”
“They’re leaving the day after tomorrow for Disney is what I’m telling you. They’re making a break for it.”
“Day after tomorrow! They can’t just up and leave, can they? I have to call the detective, see if he knows this.”
“Oh, and did your mother tell you?” Miss Tilney adds.
“Tell me what?”
“We’re going into business, me and her.” Miss Tilney points the pruning shears at my feet. “That’s right, and don’t make her feel bad about it. She’s all by herself up there in New Jersey and lonely, and down here she feels needed. Get it?”
“What kind of business?”
“Sewing. Home décor. That kind of stuff.”
I stand there blankly.
“Because it’s hell living on those Social Security checks.”
I say nothing.
“So don’t pipe up and ruin things is what I’m saying. Don’t go raining on your mother’s parade just because you’re not happy.”
“Who says I’m not happy?”
Miss Tilney looks at me. She’s got her blue eyebrow thing going again. She shakes her pruners meaningfully.
I see the curtains twitch in George’s trailer. Someone is watching us. “Be careful,” I tell Miss Tilney. “Don’t say anything about Susie and Richie.”
“Everybody knows they’re going to Disney,” she says. “Susie’s been wearing her Mickey Mouse cover-up
to the pool for the last week!”
I walk off with Dreamer. Susie and Richie are leaving? My mother is moving in?
Joe catches up with me as I round the corner. “Where’s the fire?” he asks me. “Why’re you walking so fast?”
“Did you know that Susie and Richie are leaving for Disney the day after tomorrow?”
“Nope,” he says. “Do the cops know?”
I slow down and call Detective Johansen and leave a message on his cell phone.
“Let me ask you,” I say to Joe. “What happens if my trailer just tips over? Like a bus crash. And me and my mother and Miss Tilney end up in a big pile in the icky swamp, and we have to climb all over each other to get out.”
He raises his eyebrows.
“Now that’s there’s furniture, I think it’s a lot more likely all the weight is just going to shift one day, and there we’ll be topsy turvy in the muck… all the furniture and sewing machines on top of us.”
“Topsy turvy?
“I thought a mobile home would be a good idea, but now…”
“All homes are mobile homes, Lola. There’s really no such thing as security. No such thing as immoveable. Everything shifts and changes.”
“Maybe I need something more solid,” I say. Then I pause. There I go again with the solid stuff. It got me into my whole inert marriage in the little stone cottage. “I could be swamped at any second.”
“Swamped?”
“You know, I could fall into the swamp.”
He nods slowly. “Are we talking an emotional swamp here, or a swamp-swamp?”
I sigh.
“You just keep moving forward,” he tells me quietly. “One moment at a time.”
I’m living in the now, I think, I’ve been forgetting to say that. I think I’ve been too busy to say that. “Maybe I think too much,” I tell him.
“Maybe,” he says.
“Why is Johnny calling me?”
“To keep the idea alive, I would guess,” Joe says. “He probably needs the idea in his life. The possibility of you. The question is, do you need the idea of him?”
“I don’t know anymore,” I say. “I think I’ve been keeping it alive too though.”
“It’s just an idea,” he tells me. “It can’t really keep you company on a lonely night.”
“I know it,” I say.
I look around at the swamp. The reeds are waving gently in the breeze. “Did you know that my mother is moving down here and she’s starting a business… with Miss Tilney… in my trailer?” I ask him.
“Hmmm,” he says. “Wonder if your mother likes Bingo?”
I sigh. “Tonight we’re going to the rest stop, right?”
“What is our plan anyway?” he says.
I shrug. “Don’t you have one? It was your idea.”
“But you’re the detective.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, I don’t know. We’ll hide in the bushes and watch to see what happens. Although those bushes will really be spooky at night.”
“We’ll go early.”
“Then what?”
“We’ll just play it by ear.”
“Somehow this plan does not fill me with confidence.”
We walk on. I might even be getting in shape, I think. This walking thing is good for me. After a while, Joe says, “I found out where the path is.”
“Path?”
“Through the swamp.”
“Oh no,” I say. Who wants to go on a path into a nasty swamp?
He points to a gap in the chain link fence. There’s a slight abatement of foliage there, but I wouldn’t call it a path per se.
“That?”
“Let’s go,” he says.
“What if we get eaten by an alligator?” I ask.
Joe keeps walking.
“Do they have quicksand in Florida? What if they have quicksand in Florida?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t want to go in there,” I tell him, kind of pleading.
He just looks at me. “We’re going in,” he insists.
The path is on a raised berm and winds here and there are looping along the edge of the swamp. Little lizards and frogs keep scurrying off in front of us. Mosquitoes are humming around us in clouds. “Do you see any snakes?” I ask.
“Not so far,” he says.
“I don’t like this,” I keep telling Joe. “These mosquitoes!”
“Focus,” he tells me. “Look for birdhouses.”
Finally, after what seems like a million scary curves in the path, we come around a bend and, there’s a birdhouse. We both pull up suddenly. “Surprise, surprise,” Joe says. We look at it. It’s a gray weathered little house, unexceptional really, except it’s on a 4x4 post sitting about eight feet high in the mucky muck of a tiny shady pond area and there’s no hole for a bird.
“Is that one of Ernie’s?” I say.
“It has a heart on it,” Joe says.
There’s a heart where there’s supposed to be the hole.
“How are we supposed to get to that?” I ask.
Joe looks at the birdhouse and at the post. He looks around. “There’s got to be some way,” he says. It takes him a couple minutes while I stand there swatting bugs, pretending to be looking also. I really don’t want to move. Joe finds a wide board about eight feet long hidden behind a cypress tree about ten yards away. He considers it. It’s notched in a couple places at the end. He aims it out toward the birdhouse and slides the notched end down the post until it catches a couple feet above the marsh. The notches slide over some bolts on the post and there’s a kind of click.
“Ernie made a gangplank,” Joe says smiling. The board slants right from the berm path to the birdhouse. “Would you care to do the honors?” Joe asks me.
I don’t want to at all. “What if I fall into the slop?” I ask.
He says, “I’ll go then.”
I look at his skinny little legs, his big glasses. “I’ll go,” I say. I edge out onto the plank until I get to the birdhouse. I can reach it easily.
“Does it open? Is the heart a door?” Joe asks.
I press on the heart. There’s a little give, a little click and a door pops open.
I look inside
There’s a zip lock bag inside with six rubber bands around it. It’s filled with little blue capsules. Ernie’s stash of steroids?
“I’m coming back,” I say. He nods.
When I get back to solid ground, I say, “Maybe we shouldn’t have touched it.”
“You better call that detective again,” he says.
So I call him. He doesn’t like it that we took the drugs out of the birdhouse “We HAD to,” I tell him, “There were mosquitoes.” But he’s too mad to listen.
Then I ask him what he’s doing about Susie and Richie leaving for Disney, and he tells me to stay out of it, that he has it covered, and he hangs up on me.
Joe and I trudge to the path’s entrance to wait for him. No-see-ums nip at my scalp and the inside of my ears. The swamp pulses with humidity. It’s awful in here. Still, I keep thinking about how satisfying it was to press on that heart, to hear it click, and to have the little door open up.
Chapter 45
When I get to the office Squirt says, “Fluffernutter doughnut?” and holds out a box. I look in. She tells me, “This one is Fluffernutter and this one is Tapioca.”
“Are you kidding? What happened to good old jelly doughnuts?”
“Oh, they have jelly: Pomegranate Acidophilus or Red Ants—that’s a kind of pepper jelly. I wouldn’t recommend either.”
“Is this the same bakery that makes the meat bagels?”
“Yes.” Squirt beams. “It’s right around the corner from our house. It’s called the ‘Creative Kitchen.’”
“Well, some people take creativity too far.”
“You just have to train your taste buds to be surprised.”
“What?” I say.
“You have no sense of adventure.”
“Tha
t’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
Squirt doles out my telephone pink message slips. “Mrs. Black called, call her back. Mr. Drainage wants to know if you found out anything. Mr. Drainage again, same message.”
“Thanks,” I tell her and start to walk away.
“We have to go back to the tarot guy’s office.”
“What,” I say whirling around. “Why? No way!”
“I think we should ask him about the tape.”
“I already know about the tape.” I tell her about finding it in the workbench.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“The doughnuts distracted me.” And the birdhouse, but I don’t tell her about that yet.
“So Ernie was taping the tarot guy and Feather?” Squirt asks.
“No, he didn’t know the tarot guy. He could never have gotten in his house to take it. And it WAS taken in the red living room.”
“Then the tarot guy had to take it.”
“Then how did Ernie get it?”
“He had to steal it from Fred and Feather’s house.”
“Then Fred had to be the video taper.”
“But why would Fred want take a video of his wife and the tarot master? And how could he have gotten into the tarot master’s house to take it?”
“My head hurts,” I say.
“That’s why we have to go talk to the tarot guy,” Squirt says. “This makes no sense.”
“But he won’t talk to us. We trashed his house. You shot him.”
“I Nerfed him,” Squirt says. “I know he’ll talk to us.”
I go along, even though I know he’s going to slam the door in our face. He tries, but Squirt inserts her foot into the dooway.
I say, “We saw the video. Did the cops question you yet?”
“Ob course.”
“Can we come in?” Squirt asks.
“No,” he says.
Squirt says, “I looked you up on Megan’s List last night. You have quite a background with women. I’m sure your neighbors and clients would be interested.”
He grimaces. “What do you want?”
“Just a couple questions about your mirrors.”
“My mirrors?”
“I believe one of them is a one way, see through glass. Is that correct?”
He nods.
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