I fell asleep at the kitchen table after four sips of coffee and making the mistake of setting my head down just for a minute. My phone sat beside me. I’d tried to call him twice with no luck. Next thing I knew, Willie growled, and there was a sudden rush of thuds up the stairs.
My head swung up when Sam came in the door. Willie put his head back down.
He smiled. “Sorry I missed the party.” I rose from the table and fell into his arms as if I hadn’t seen him in years. It took about four seconds for my four troubles to melt. Heels over head felt like a beautiful and dangerous place to be.
Sam pulled back and told me, “Nice dress.”
“Where were you?”
“Fayetteville,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “Had some business there. Ended up being a complete waste of time.” Sam was tired and irritated. He sat down at the table, and I poured him what was left of the coffee.
“What kind of business?”
Sam yawned. “Um, nothing important.” My cocked eyebrow urged him to tell me anyway, but he shifted in his seat. “I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe another time? I’d rather hear about the party. Williams called me. You okay?”
I thought about what I’d overheard in the ladies’ room and wondered if I should start there first. But, I didn’t. Nothing will turn a man’s heart away quicker than a woman who nags him about every little thing, my mother once told me, much to my father’s amusement.
“They didn’t find her,” he told me once I’d explained the long story. “No missing persons reports, no women matching the description at any hospitals or urgent care offices in fifty miles, and no other emergency calls in Tipee. Maybe it wasn’t a medical emergency-”
My face crunched. “You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I do,” he said, cutting me a funny look, “but she could’ve been faking.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
He huffed. “Why does anyone do anything? Most of what I see, I don’t get. People hurting other people or themselves. It’s rarely reasonable. Just is. God works mysteriously. Devil does, too. She could’ve just been some whack-job who saw an opportunity to freak you out and steal your shoes.”
“My fifteen dollar Walmart pleather pumps? Doubtful.”
“You could have been targeted.”
“No, whatever this was,” I said, “it wasn’t about me. She didn’t know me, and she couldn’t have been faking. Her heart was racing. She seized and shook. If that was an act, then she deserves an Oscar.”
Sam gave me a tired smile, soft and easy. “Well, you’ve done everything you can do.”
“Yeah, everything I can do to insist that everyone in this town thinks I’m a lunatic.”
“I don’t.”
I smirked. “You’re just blinded by love.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right, but what is it they say? Ignorance is bliss?”
“Did you know that Thomas Gray, one of the Graveyard Poets, coined that phrase in 1742? It’s in his poem called Ode On a Distant Prospect of Eton College where he writes ‘where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise’,” I sputtered out.
Sam yawned, and said, “So, it’s smart to be dumb?”
“Pretty much,” I agreed. “So, it’s probably dumb of me to ask, but who is Backwoods Buddy?”
The name made Sam laugh as he rubbed his eyes. “Why are you asking about him?”
I shrugged. “Overheard some officers mention him.”
“Backwoods Buddy is a truck driver, who shows up in Tipee every few months to shack up with his girlfriend over in the Breakers. This guy looks like a countrified, redneck Albert Einstein – all bushy haired but bald up top – but many sandwiches short of a picnic in the intelligence department,” Sam explained. “Last week, Williams and I responded to a domestic disturbance call at the girlfriend’s cottage. Buddy had his truck parked in the cul-de-sac, and was raising Cain about his lost load. ‘I dun lost my load!’ he kept yelling. Meanwhile, the girlfriend was carrying on about how dumb he is, parking that truck across the whole road and not keeping it locked up properly. Buddy broke the padlock on the back door on the way to Tipee and didn’t bother replacing it. Moron wasn’t too worried about getting his load stolen-”
“People say men have a one-track mind,” I grinned. “He just wanted to see his girlfriend.”
“Guess so. So anyway, he’s freaking out about how his boss is going to kill him. Takes him a good twenty minutes to get up the nerve to make the phone call, you know, because he has to make up a good story about where he is. Finally, he tells his boss that he stopped at an I-95 rest stop and his load got stolen, a better story than the truth, that he was two hours off the interstate on a booty call. Come to find out, he never had a load.”
“What do you mean?”
Sam shrugged. “The dummy was sent to pick up a load, not drop one off. His boss told him his truck was empty. I wish you could’ve seen him, scratching his head, checking and rechecking his logs, and the girlfriend calling him a ‘plum idiot’. Hilarious.”
I pinched my lips together. The story would have been amusing if Sam’s coworkers hadn’t compared me to him. I cringed.
“You okay?” he asked, eyes on my face. I nodded. “Is there anything I can do? Make you breakfast? Rub your head? Shoot someone?” He chuckled, but since he had shot someone for me before, I could only smirk.
“You don’t have to take care of me,” I sighed.
He played with my fingers. “But, I like taking care of you.”
Sam treated me like a bubble that had landed in his hand. Any wrong move, and I’d pop and be gone forever. I’m not sure why. Maybe he felt that way about any person he loved because his parents had abandoned him, traded him to his aunt and uncle for money to feed their drug habits. Maybe it was because he’d almost already lost me a couple of times. Or maybe it was because I’m me and I’m needy and delicate and oftentimes most people don’t know quite how to handle me.
Moments like these, I felt handled.
Though I’d learned a great deal about Sam Teague over the last 46-63 days, there were two distinct areas of his life that had remained mysterious. Sam could spout story after story about his childhood (post-adoption), his teenage years, time as a police officer and all those in between days. But not one anecdote about his war-life or even a mention of his married-life. Those lives were sealed away, like boxes in an attic. And they didn’t seem to impact the rest of him, completely compartmentalized. To look inside, I’d have to open those lives up, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. So, I didn’t press – not about his before-lives or his present one – maybe because I felt he was like a bubble in my hand, too.
The numbers in my head swirled into a murky stew. My eyes drooped into my coffee. Futilely, I wished the hour wasn’t what it was because instead of crawling into bed and drifting off to much-needed sleep, I had to go to work.
Chapter Nine
Decorator Crab
The decorator crab forces an odd friendship in the ocean. It snips pieces of sponges and decorates itself with them as a means of camouflage. The sponges are okay with this arrangement, as they have to hitchhike on something in order to filter feed, but the crab reaps the most benefits. Blanketed by its new buddies, the crab can hide from the dangerous world around it.
When I considered the good relationships I’d formed since I’d arrived in Tipee (just a handful of allies, but exactly what I needed), I felt like a decorator crab – snipping my way to friends and often hiding beneath them.
“Tell him I’m not here,” I whispered, hiding behind Beach Read’s thick wood counter. Henry loomed above me on his bar stool as usual, peering out from his Dollar Store reading glasses and alternating between the pages before him and the entrance to the store.
The door chimes rang out. I scrunched closer to myself, fetal position, hoping Willie wouldn’t give me away.
“Hello, Mr. Bellows,” Clark greeted. “Looking for Delilah.”
>
Henry sighed. “Alas, she has gone out.” Clark instructed Henry to tell me to call him, and then dashed back into the late summer heat. When my Uncle Clark, owner and editor of The Tipee Island Gazette, came calling, it meant a story and I couldn’t handle another wave of negative attention. Clark had been habitual about chronicling my miseries, when all I wanted to do was hide them.
I’d spent the morning banging my head against an empty cash register, frustrated and tired, while images of the redheaded woman plagued me. I kept replaying the night in my head, convinced, at first, that it had all been as I had reported to the police. But, the more the images floated in my mind, the more elusive they became. The memories that had been so sharp and clear were becoming fuzzy. I was nervous, embarrassed, and uncertain.
“I saw her, smelled her, felt her shaking in my arms,” I continued on with my story while Henry’s eyes were glued to The Old Man and the Sea, “she had to be real.”
“Then she was.” His eyes didn’t leave the page.
“Then where is she?” I asked. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted,” he recited, his voice deep. “One need not be a House – The brain has corridors – surpassing material place.”
Henry had become the Poet Laureate of my life, as well as my unofficial business partner. When I first met him, he was a homeless squatter who scared the poo out of me one night when he tried to get into my apartment (it used to be vacant). Now, he lives here, in the local interest section at Beach Read, on my air mattress and he helps me run the store. He says little, unless he’s reciting something, he’s a skilled orator, a good listener, and a gluttonous reader. His voice is the type that belongs on TV narrating incredible nature shows or on the stage, spouting Shakespeare. If not for his incredible story-telling skills, we would have zero business except for the occasional wandering tourist.
I huffed at the lines from Emily Dickinson, and decided, “So, I could have imagined it.”
“Possible, but unlikely. Your shoes didn’t just walk away,” Henry finished. “As in everything, you should trust yourself.”
The door’s chimes rang to life. I froze afraid to turn around.
“Delilah, you gotta see this,” Mike Ancellotti called.
With a relieved smile, I chased him outside. We circled the building. Climbing the stairs behind the store, I asked, “What is it? Is it funny?”
“You’ll see,” he teased. He wore his white, double-breasted chef’s shirt, dark jeans, and Timberlands. Mike owns the Crab Shack, a fine dining restaurant on the corner of Starfish Drive and Atlantic Avenue, facing the boardwalk, beach, and the Tipee Island Fishing Pier. Mike and I had tried one date that ended with one kiss when I first came back to Tipee, but the verdict was we were better off as friends. He was one of my few allies, though Sam liked to insinuate that Mike was after more than just a friendly discount on books.
Once on the roof, we dashed to the right, front corner of the building. We pulled out our stowed away binoculars.
“Okay, what am I looking for?” I asked. From his restaurant windows, Mike and his employees see a wide variety of interesting people. Since he included me on the discoveries, we’d come up to the roof to see a three-hundred pound woman in a polka-dot bikini, an eighty-year-old man wearing a hot pink Speedo, and a guy that looked like Santa Claus in a red track suit.
“Hope he didn’t wander off,” Mike said, peering through the binoculars. “Ah, there he is! Look on the boardwalk to the left, just past the Family Arcade.” I did as he instructed and quickly spied the subject.
“Oh, my gosh!” I giggled. “He’s a work of art, isn’t he?”
Mike laughed. “Tattoo man.”
I ogled the forty-something-year-old curiously. Shaved bald, his entire body, what I could see, was covered in a patchwork of tattoos. There was even something stretching across his forehead, though I couldn’t make out what it was.
“Are those biker shorts?” I asked. He donned tight teal shorts.
Mike laughed. “We think so. No one wanted to get close enough to find out. We were able to make out a snake. It goes all the way up his back and around his neck. The fangs reach up his face.”
I shivered. “Snakes creep me out, even ink ones.”
“You got any tattoos?” Mike questioned. I eyed the tattooed man as he disappeared around the corner. I set my binoculars down next to Mike’s.
I shook my head. “No. You?”
“Na,” he replied.
“I think they’re sexy,” I admitted, thinking especially of Sam’s. “In Ancient Egypt, women had tattoos, not the men. You can still see the ink on their mummified bodies. It’s definitely more of a masculine trend now. If I were braver, I’d probably have one, something small, simple.”
Mike grinned. “Anytime you want to go to Tipee Tattoo, just let me know,” he motioned to Coral Avenue, the street that paralleled mine. “I’ll treat.”
I chuckled and rolled my eyes. “Can’t even walk to the beach, let alone go under a needle.”
He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” I sighed. “I better get back downstairs.”
“How are things going?” he asked as we walked toward the stairs.
I huffed. “Business is bad for me, Mike.”
“Season’s almost over,” he noted.
“I know.”
“Tourists are gone or are leaving,” he reasoned. “Gotta develop your base and that means giving the residents of Tipee a reason to come to your store regularly. What can you give them, Delilah?” We stopped at the top of the stairs.
“Books,” I answered simply.
“Amazon can give them books, more books, cheaper books, and they don’t even have to get out of their pajamas,” he countered. “What can you give them, Delilah?” he asked again, this time pointing gently. His soft, brown eyes twinkled under the bright August sun. I smiled.
“I don’t know,” I admitted with a shrug.
“You gotta start thinking like tattoo guy,” Mike told me, grinning.
I tilted my head curiously. “Should I cover my body in tattoos?”
“No, but tattoo guy uses every piece of himself to get his message across,” Mike explained. I thought of the decorator crab, covering its body with its spongy friends, a much more comforting idea.
Voices coming from the alleyway interrupted our discussion. We both rushed down the steps and around the corner. Aunt Clara strolled along the dirt and gravel alley, holding a clipboard, pointing up at the building. She’d brought her posse – Lionel Waters, Marla Britt, Moira Kelley, and Jeff Travers.
My Aunt Clara makes Lady Macbeth look like Mother Teresa. With my other two aunts, Charlotte and Candy, Clara had previously organized a string of attempts to boot me out, starting the day I arrived in Tipee. She’d crossed both family lines and legal ones, without regret except that her plans were thwarted when Great Uncle Joe found out. And even though I’d indirectly saved her daughter’s life, she continued undaunted on her mission to chase me and all my Beach Read dreams out of town, simply because she wanted to turn Beach Read into an extension of her own store, Top to Bottom: A Hat and Shoe Boutique.
“There you are,” she cooed. “How silly of me to think you’d be working. We’re here for the inspection.”
“And, like I said, maybe next week,” I returned.
“Don’t worry,” Jeff Travers interjected. “You don’t have to babysit us. We’re just taking a look around the store and exterior, making some notes. No big deal.”
My eyebrow crooked up my forehead. The group continued their business, ignoring Mike and me. “No big deal,” I repeated. “Not a big deal to them, but big dollars for me.”
Mike patted my back, and said, “Maybe they’re all bully and no bite.” He smiled. I smirked, but I knew that Clara’s intention was to insist upon the biggest bite she could muster, one that would send me packing. I wanted to hide.
But, h
iding wasn’t an option. Mike fled back to his store and the clip-boarders went about their business, just as Uncle Clark’s Range Rover pulled into the alley. Busted.
“You can run, but you can’t hide,” Clark chuckled as he exited the vehicle. I slumped. “I need to ask you about last night.”
“Oh, you mean about how Delilah single-handedly ruined a wonderful party?” Clara cooed. “She’s good at ruinin’ things.”
Clark put his hand around my shoulder, and suggested, “Let’s go upstairs. Have some coffee.” He motioned up toward my apartment, and I agreed, deciding somehow that Clark was the lesser of two evils at the moment.
“I was surprised you weren’t at the party, Clark,” I noted.
“Me? At a Kayne party?” he shot back with a laugh. “That’ll never happen.”
“Why not?”
“Kayne wasn’t too happy about a story I ran last year,” Clark told me. “I pretty much raked him over the coals about the David Love lawsuit.”
“Oh, the man who lost his wife?”
“She went in for an out-patient back surgery, and they lost her on the table,” Clark returned. “The cause of death was related to the anesthetics – clearly hospital error. David Love was in line to receive a huge settlement in civil court, but at the last minute, Kayne duped him into signing a meager settlement.”
“Wouldn’t it be in Kayne’s best interest to get as much as he could?” I asked. “I mean, don’t lawyers work on commission?”
“That’s why it didn’t make sense. I was sure that the hospital held something over Lucius Kayne, and my gut told me it had something to do with his wife’s death. I reported the evidence I had, but could never find a smoking gun. No one would talk at Shawsburg.”
“Well, that explains why David Love was so angry,” I returned as we reached the top of the stairs. “Surprised he would even show up at a party like that.”
Clark smirked. “David Love likes to torture himself.” And Clark likes to torture me, I thought. His questions stirred the party back to life in my head, from my overindulgence of jumbo shrimp to the melodies of the orchestra to the woman shaking in my arms.
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