“Oh, there she is.” I give her a pat. “Where WERE you?”
Richie glares at me.
“Packing up for your trip?” I say.
“That’s right,” he tells me.
“Going by, it looked like you were taking photographs off the walls.”
“Susie does that all the time. She likes to rearrange them.”
“Who’s there?” Susie comes to the door. “What were you doing looking in our window?”
“I wasn’t.”
“I saw you.”
“She was looking for her dog,” Richie tells his wife. Dreamer looks up at me. I take a deep breath.
“I think you’re lying,” I tell Richie.
He looks at me.
“I think you DO have a phony investment firm. I think you’re taking all these retired people’s money and running.” This revs me up. I’m getting mad now.
“Listen,” Richie says. “I can see that you’re upset. Let me show you what the firm is doing real quick, and I think your fears will be allayed.” He’s really a very smooth talker. Who calls themselves “the firm?” Allayed? Who says that? Still, I can see why some people would give him their money.
“Come on in,” he says.
“Don’t let her in,” Susie says.
“It’s okay Susie,” Richie says.
“But we don’t allow dogs in our home,” Susie says.
“Stay,” I tell Dreamer and leave her on the porch. I know Miss Tilney will keep an eye on her. I follow Richie inside. It is a miniature version of Dick and Gladys’ house. It feels like déjà vu, just a little smaller.
He goes to his desk. He gets a bunch of papers and a file out. He tells me, “Sit down and make yourself at home.” I sit down at a kitchen table with dolphin legs.
And then I don’t remember what happens next. But I know now that Susie hit me on the head with a pot, because when I wake up, I’m duct taped to their kitchen chair. There’s a sock stuffed in my mouth and it’s not a clean sock. It tastes awful—like Richie played eighteen holes of golf in it. Yuck, I think. The room is kind of swimmy and my head is killing me. I think I might throw up.
Richie and Susie are standing in front of me with their suitcases. “Should I hit her again?” Susie asks.
“You shouldn’t have hit her the first time.”
“By the time someone finds you, we’ll be long gone,” Susie tells me.
“Shhf,” I say.
I get a bad feeling they’re not going to Disney world. “C’mon Richie,” Susie says. They trundle over to the door. Both have two large suitcases.
“Hhlll,” I say. “Hhlll.” But to no avail. They go out the door. I hear voices. I squirm in my chair. They really taped me in. I can barely feel my hands and feet. Then I hear a scream and a thump. There’s a flop sound. Next minute, Miss Tilney and Joe and Dreamer are at the door. “Hlpt!” I say.
Miss Tilney finds some scissors in a drawer and starts snipping the tape. Joe works on the tape on my mouth. Dreamer licks my hands. Miss Tilney says, “I wonder where the cops are. Good thing Joe answered his phone.”
“Good thing Squirt leant you the scorpion gun,” he tells her.
“Orp?” I say. I have to get this sock out of my mouth. It’s awful.
Miss Tilney frees my hands. She says, “That’s right. Squirt had to go home. Her wuss of a husband picked her up. He was hungry. He said he needed his dinner. Squirt was so mad, I thought she was going to smack him. But she didn’t. She got in the car.”
“Pffft.” Miss Tilney dismisses her with a wave of her arm. “Some women…” She goes over to the window and peeks out. “She wouldn’t lend me her stun gun so I hit Susie with the scorpion gun, and Joe whacked Richie on the head with my oar. They’re both out cold on the stoop.”
“Orp?” I try to say again.
I hear sirens just as the tape is off my mouth. I spit out the sock. My tongue feels like leather. When the cops come in, I tell them, “They tied me up. They hit me on the head with a pot.”
“Looks more like an omelet pan,” Joe says, pointing to it on the counter.
Detective Johansen comes in along with the ambulance medics. “Everyone here okay?” he asks. We nod. He does a double take when he sees Miss Tilney in her ant outfit. She’s bouncing around on her toes in her black high-top sneakers.
He talks briefly to the two cops, and the ambulance takes Susie and Richie away. “You should go to the hospital, too, and get a scan done of your head,” he tells me.
“Where were you?” I ask. “I called you.”
“We were going to get them at the airport,” the detective says all official-like.
“Oh,” I say.
Joe sits down suddenly. He’s white and shaky. The detective gets one of Susie’s white throws off her couch and wraps it around Joe’s shoulders. “It’s the shock,” he tells Joe. “Did you ever knock somebody out before?”
“No,” Joe says.
“Take some deep breaths.”
Miss Tilney tells him, “Pop one of those heart pills you have.”
Joe fumbles in his shirt pocket and slides a little pill under his tongue. The detective glares at me. “What?” I say. “I told them to stay home.”
“We were waiting outside for you cops to show up,” Miss Tilney says. “But you weren’t there, and they were making a break for it. What were we supposed to do?”
“They didn’t get far,” Joe says, “Thanks mostly to your dog.” Joe reaches out and pats Dreamer. “She blocked their way on the sidewalk, almost tripped them so that Miss Tilney had enough time to scorpion gun Susie. I wouldn’t have hit Richie, but he started to run. I didn’t have time to think.”
He still looks pale but less shaky. “You hit him like a champ.” Miss Tilney pats Joe’s shoulder.
“Scorpion gun?” the detective asks as he gets Joe a glass of water.
“It’s Zoltan’s,” Miss Tilney says.
I roll my eyes.
“It’s a dart gun,” Joe says. The scorpion’s tail comes out of the back of the gun and it whips up and shoots a Nerf dart.”
“You knocked out Susie with a Nerf dart?” the detective asks Miss Tilney.
“I got her right in the forehead.”
“It was a good shot,” Joe adds.
“It knocked her out?” the detective asks again. He can’t get over it.
“Well, she fell over,” Joe says.
“I think she thought I shot her for real. I think she fainted,” Miss Tilney says. “It’s still suctioned to her forehead.”
“It has good suction,” Joe says.
“You have to lick the dart, that’s the key,” Miss Tilney says.
“You licked the dart?” Joe asks.
I sigh.
“I wanted the stun gun,” Miss Tilney says, “but Squirt wouldn’t give that up.”
“She was worried you’d hurt yourself,” Joe says.
“I think she just doesn’t have a permit for it,” Miss Tilney decides. The detective clears his throat. Then he takes our statements. He says we’ll have to come down to the station to sign them tomorrow. Then the detective drives us home. “You should really go to the ER,” he tells me again.
“I tried to tell you what was happening.”
“I know,” he says.
My father comes out of my trailer and helps me out of the car.
“I heard it on the scanner. I came right over.”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“I told you to let the cops handle it,” he tells me.
“Right,” I say and walk to the trailer. “Thank you,” I tell the detective looking back. He waves. I open the door. My mother’s there.
“Oh no,” she says looking at me.
“Is my head dented in?” I ask.
“Oh,” she says and gives me a hug. I tell her the whole story. My father comes in mid-way through the front door.
“The detective said they had plane reservations for the Cayman Islands,” he tells me.
“I wonder how Susie’s reunion is going to go in Disney without her there,” I say. Why do I care about things like this?
My mother makes some tea. My father closes the door, but keeps standing by it. He looks like he doesn’t know whether to stay or to go.
“You need your rest,” he says. He looks at me. He kind of meets my eyes and nods. Then he leaves. My mother follows him.
Chapter 54
I have a headache in the morning, but I’m alive. I keep looking at my phone. There haven’t been any more texts from Johnny. Should I call him? What would I say? The fact is, there’s just no time to even think about him with all this stuff going on.
Joe and Miss Tilney come over at 10:00 and we head down to the station to sign our statements. Miss Tilney’s cheeks still look a little dark, but she’s got pink rouge on top of that, so she looks cheery. Joe seems stronger. Both of them look better than me. Detective Johansen is there. “Are you all okay?” he asks as we troop in.
We nod. Miss Tilney says, “Couldn’t be better.”
She’s so chipper, she’s making my head pound.
“Where are Richie and Susie?” I ask.
“We’re holding them,” he tells me.
“I don’t think they killed Ernie, do you?”
“No,” he says, “although Susie has an LPGA swing with an omelet pan.”
“Fred saw Ernie alive after Richie talked with him.”
He takes out his little notebook. “I’ll go talk to Fred.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No, thank you,” he says. “Rest,” he tells me, then he shuts the notebook. He sounds just like my father.
When I get home, I head right over to Fred and Feather’s house. Rest, be damned. I try to hurry, but it’s mid-day hot, and my head is muzzy. The detective’s car is there.
I knock on the door. Nobody answers. The windows are cranked open. I hear a radio playing inside the trailer. Tony Bennet is singing, “You Can’t Lose a Broken Heart.” I cup my hands to the screen and look inside. The white pillows are aligned on the white couch. Grapes are arranged in a glass bowl on the kitchen island.
I turn the knob just to test it. The door swings open easily. “Hello?” I call. Nothing. A white fluffy cat with a flat face looks up at me from a wing chair. He blinks his yellow eyes, yawns and snuggles back into himself. I take this as permission to come in.
My heart is beating fast. I walk in a couple steps but leave the door open so I can duck back out. My flip-flops thuck on the plush beige carpet. It’s the kind of carpet that when you step, you make a footprint. “I hate carpeting like this,” I say aloud, just to make myself feel better. I’ve never broken into anyone’s house before.
Fruit flies are hovering around the green grapes which are going brown around the edges. Everything else in the place is white or glass. It’s like I’m walking into a very stern cloud.
“Nice kitty,” I tell the cat as I edge past it. I peek out the window to see if they’re coming back. Where ARE they?
I hurry down the hall into the master bedroom. I figure I’m in, I might as well take a look. More white. Matching twin beds with a glass end table between , a glass lamp, the kind that you’re supposed to fill with shells or something, but it’s empty. Two dressers. I open the top drawer of one. Fred’s white socks. I go to the other one. First drawer, underwear. There’s a silky pink teddy and a fish-net leopard print thong, and red and black metallic polka dot panties. Much more exotic than mine. My eyebrows go up. Who woulda thought? Next drawer, bingo! Five or six belts all coiled up. I rustle through them. And lo and behold, there’s a cow hair one. I hold it up by the buckle and let it uncurl. Brown and white. I hear crunching footsteps outside and voices.
“What the…,” I hear Fred say.
I stuff the belt in the back of my pants and pull my blouse down over it.
Should I crawl under the bed? I run out to the living room. I look around. I pick up the cat. Fred and Feather and the detective walk in.
“Hi,” I tell them. “Your door must’ve blown open and your cat ran out. I didn’t know if he was an outside cat or not, so I brought him back in.”
The cat leaps out of my arms and saunters over to his food dish, swishing his tail.
“It’s a HER,” Feather tells me. “She’s deaf, so we keep her inside.”
“Why was the door open?” Fred asks me.
I shrug.
“How could the door be open?” he asks me.
I know he thinks I’m lying, but I’m sticking to my story, such as it is.
“Did YOU leave the door open, Feather?” he accuses her.
The cop is staring at me.
Feather is swaying. She’s already drunk and it’s not even noon. She’s drunk in the way steady drinkers just get more lost looking as the day progresses.
“Did you want something?” Feather asks me.
“I was hoping you found that belt for Miss Tilney,” I say.
“I gave that away to the Almost New shop,” she tells me. Her eyes look suddenly sharp. It’s like she’s looking out of a very small clear patch in a fogged up window.
“Oh, I thought you might have just misplaced it,” I say.
“Nope,” she says.
Fred folds his arms on his chest.
I walk out with the detective. “What WERE you doing in there?” he asks me as we approach his car.
“The cat,” I say.
He glares at me.
“Where did you go with them?” I ask.
“The maintenance shed. I wanted Fred to show me what happened when he visited Ernie.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much.”
“So, you think Fred did it?”
He doesn’t answer me.
I go home and sit on my cardboard chair in my trailer. I couldn’t give the belt to the detective. I know he would have arrested me. And the belt couldn’t be entered as evidence if I stole it. Well, I did steal it. I take it out and look at it. It’s brown and white, all right. There are a couple speckles on it. Could that be blood or is it just the color of the cow? I don’t know what to do with it.
I call my father. I tell him what I did.
“What?” he says. If steam could come out of a cell phone, my trailer would be a sauna. “Didn’t I tell you…,” he says. He stops. Then he hangs up on me.
I guess I’m on my own.
I look up. Feather is looking at me through the window of my door. She opens the door and comes in halfway. She’s got a little gun in her hand.
Dreamer growls low in her throat and stands up.
“Don’t shoot my dog,” I tell Feather.
“I like animals,” Feather tells me.
“Sit,” I tell Dreamer as sternly as I can. Dreamer sits, but her whole body is rumbling. Funny, the things you think of when you’re going to die. All I can think of is protecting my dog and the absurdity of being killed by somebody named Feather. Fate, when it’s staring you in the face, makes very little sense.
“Give me the belt,” she tells me. She seems very sober now and very dangerous. The gun she’s pointing at me is steady as can be.
“It has blood on it,” I tell her stalling for time, trying to think. “Why didn’t you throw it away?”
“It was my mother’s,” she explains. “I didn’t really think about it ‘til Miss Tilney started asking around.”
I shake my head. I can’t believe how calm and normal she seems, except for the pointing-a-gun-at-me thing.
“Why didn’t you wash it?”
“It’s dry clean only.”
“But why didn’t you dry clean it?” I ask.
“I’m on a budget,” she says. “Fred cut off my bank account. He said I was spending too much. He said because the economy is bad, we have to go on a no-frills budget. I have to ask him for money from now on for every little thing, and tell him what I’m going to spend it on. I have to itemize,” she explains. “It’s Fred’s f
ault.”
“So you must not have had the money to pay Ernie…,” I guess.
“Every Wednesday during Wheel of Fortune, I met him at the maintenance shed. Fred always takes a nap during that show, so I can sneak away. How was I supposed to get the money now?” she asks me.
“Was Ernie going to give Fred the tape?”
“Ernie never listened to me. He was bending down picking up the little pieces of grass inside the cab of the mower. Each little blade. I wanted him to stop and listen to me. Fred says you should look someone in the eye when they’re speaking to you. Fred says it’s rude not to,” she tells me.
I shake my head, kind of a yes, kind of a no. Dreamer is still growling, I’m trying to look around and figure out something to do, but I can’t think of anything. “I hate to tell you, but you’re surrounded,” I warn her. It would be nice if she WAS surrounded, but there’s only little trailers lined up around us.
Feather smiles at me sadly. I don’t know why, but this makes me REALLY scared.
Feather says, “I banged the golf club on the ground, but Ernie wouldn’t look up. I just swung it so he’d look up. He was being rude. But he stood up right into it, and it hit him. All I wanted was for him to listen. I told him I couldn’t get the money,” she explains earnestly.
“Okay,” I say.
“It hit him,” she tells me. “Shouldn’t that make it an accident?” she asks me, as if she’s truly confused about this.
Just then I hear footsteps behind Feather. “No,” a voice yells. Feather wheels around. Dreamer and I launch ourselves at her simultaneously. We all careen into each other and we tumble backwards down the steps. “Ow,” I hear, “Shit.” I’m dizzy falling, and it feels like a lot of sharp angles and bones crunching and heavy body parts all at once.
The gun goes off like a little bomb. Way too close to my head. I see it spurt out of Feather’s hand. I see it land underneath my car. I try crawling toward it, but I’m trapped under bodies. Dreamer’s got Feather’s pants clenched in her jaws and she’s shaking her head, and Feather’s flipping around like a big chew toy. My face is mashed into the ground sideways. I can’t breathe. There’s a rush of grunting and yelling and screaming and growling. Then it gets really still and quiet.
I turn my face, and I can see the detective’s shoes, then his legs, then his body, then his face and he doesn’t look happy at all. He’s got a gun pointed at the pile of us. “Up,” he says.
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