by Diane Kelly
I aimed the car for a nursery. There, Brigit and I made our way up and down the rows. My feet came to a stop in front of a display of vivid yellow mums in terra-cotta pots. I knelt down next to my partner. “What do you think of these?”
Brigit wagged her tail. She might be color-blind, but she still had good taste.
I chose two of the biggest mums and put them in my cart. We continued on to the pansies. The nursery offered yellow, white, orange, light purple, and deep purple varieties. Which would look best? The bungalow-style house Brigit and I shared with Frankie and her fluffy calico cat Zoe was mauve with ivory trim and a blue door. The deep purple pansies would complement the exterior paint as well as the potted mums, which I planned to set on either side of the front door. “Let’s go with these,” I said to Brigit, earning me a smile from an elderly woman looking at the snapdragons on the next row. Maybe it was odd for me to talk to Brigit, but even though we didn’t speak the same language we found plenty of ways to communicate, me in my way and she in hers. Working and living together 24/7 gave us a strong bond. She was my partner, my roommate, and best friend, and sometimes I nearly forgot she wasn’t human.
I loaded a full tray of the purple pansies in my cart and had just begun to step away when I turned back around and wrangled a tray of the yellow pansies into my cart, too. As we waited in line at the checkout, Brigit sniffed the stuffed decorative scarecrows lined up along a row of hay bales. She glanced up at the one directly in front of us and let out a loud bark. Woof!
“You want a scarecrow?” I asked her.
Again she wagged her tail and looked up at me expectantly. More than likely she planned to have some fun pulling the stuffed man apart, but how could anyone resist her big, brown eyes?
“Okay, girl,” I told her. “He’s all yours.”
The scarecrow went into my cart, too.
We checked out and returned to my car. The mums took up the floorboard, while the pansies were crammed in what little space there was behind the seats. The scarecrow rode along between us like a redneck crash-test dummy, staring out the windshield, scaring no one with that goofy smile on his face.
Frankie opened the front door as I was unpacking the car in the driveway. My roommate was tall and trim but tough, a roller derby queen who dyed her blond hair bright blue. “Need a hand?” she called.
“Sure.”
She came over and relieved me of the flat of pansies in my arms. I turned around to get the scarecrow, but Brigit had already grabbed his arm between her teeth and was dragging him out of the car and along the driveway. She pulled him up the stairs and onto the porch, where she dropped him. I retrieved the mums, took them onto the porch, and positioned one on each side of the door. Picking up the prone scarecrow, I carried him to the flower bed and shoved the bottom of the pointed stake on which he was mounted into the ground.
“I’ll get a hammer,” Frankie said, aiming for the garage.
I followed her and rounded up a trowel. While she hammered the scarecrow’s support post deeper into the ground, I dug holes in the soil around his feet. Frankie and I knelt in the flower bed together and planted the pansies. As we worked, we discussed the abandoned baby.
“There was some stitching on the blanket that looked like a symbol of some sort. It looked like a peace sign, but it was hard to be sure.”
She looked up from the flowers she’d just planted. “You think it was a wish for the baby? That she would have a peaceful life?”
“Could be. But my gut tells me it’s a clue. The blanket was meticulously made, but the word and symbol looked messy. Like they’d been sewn in a hurry.”
“Maybe they were sewn by someone else.”
“I hadn’t considered that.” Still, it was possible that whoever had sewn the words in the blanket had purchased it somewhere, maybe in anticipation of keeping the baby. Maybe the decision to give her up had not been planned in advance, but had been a sudden and hasty one, forced upon the baby’s parents somehow. My mind reeled. Ugh.
When we finished, we stood and stepped back.
Frankie pronounced the fall flowers and scarecrow “Festive.”
“We should get some pumpkins, too,” I suggested. A few pumpkins situated at the scarecrow’s feet would look cute.
“I’ll add them to the grocery list,” Frankie said.
Frankie used to work at a grocery store and had done the bulk of our grocery shopping there. When Seth had suggested she try firefighting, she’d jumped at the opportunity and given up her job stocking shelves to become a firefighter. Nevertheless, she continued to shop for our groceries, visiting with her former coworkers at the store between loading the cart with her potato chips and sodas and my soy yogurt. In return, I took primary responsibility for maintaining the lawn. Given that the bulk of the yard work involved scooping up Brigit’s poop, it was only fair.
Frankie stepped onto the porch to go back inside, but turned around at the door. “We need to buy some Halloween candy, too. What kind should I get?”
“How about little boxes of raisins?”
She scoffed. “You want kids to egg our house?”
She had a point. Kids weren’t likely to be happy with dried fruit when they were expecting refined sugar and chocolate and red dye number 3.
Rather than waiting for me to make another suggestion, she made an executive decision. “I’ll see what’s on sale.” With that, she went back inside.
Now that we were finished here, I loaded Brigit back in the car to drive to the house Seth shared with his mother and grandfather. Seth’s grandfather, Ollie, could be a royal jackass, but I was able to ignore his barbs, at least for the most part. According to Seth’s grandmother, who’d died when Seth was young, Ollie had been a much different, much happier man before serving as a tank mechanic in Vietnam. Seth, too, had served in the army. Ordnance detail. He’d spent several years in Afghanistan disabling improvised explosive devices. The things he’d learned about explosives made him a perfect fit for the city’s bomb squad. Other things he’d learned in Afghanistan would be much better forgotten, but it was unlikely he’d ever be able to fully set those hard lessons aside.
I drove under the Interstate 35 overpass and, a few minutes later, pulled up in front of the house in the Morningside neighborhood. The Rutledge place looked like the before picture in a magazine article on home remodeling. The house comprised a mishmash of building materials ranging from gray wood siding to the chipped orange brick that walled in what had once been the garage. The shingles on the roof were likewise mismatched, some gray, some black. Seth performed the required maintenance, but little else. Not because he was lazy, but because he lacked inspiration. It had been a long time since the house had felt like a home, and the place could really benefit from some TLC.
That’s where I came in.
How many years had it been since flowers had graced the small bed underneath the living room window? My guess was no flowers had bloomed there since Seth’s grandmother had passed. “It’s about time, isn’t it?” I asked Brigit.
She wagged her tail in agreement.
I climbed out of my car. After letting Brigit out into the yard, I retrieved the flowers and the trowel and aimed for the flower bed. I knelt down, slid my hands into my cotton gardening gloves, and aimed my trowel at the dirt to dig my first hole. The blade ricocheted off the hard-packed soil, giving me a painful zing in the wrist.
“Sheesh!” I told my partner, who was sniffing around the bed. “The ground is hard as concrete.”
I jabbed the pointed end of the trowel at the dirt several more times, but barely managed to loosen a dust speck. This wasn’t going to work. Luckily for me, Brigit enjoyed digging. In fact, she was already pawing at the bare dirt. While I normally chastised her for digging up the grass, in this case her skills could prove useful. “Go to it, girl.”
Brigit scratched and scratched at the dirt, eventually breaking through the dry surface and unearthing the darker, moister ground underneath. Once she�
��d dug deep enough, I gently nudged her aside and began planting the pansies while she tore up a fresh spot a foot or so over. “Good girl!”
We were nearly done when the screen door banged open. Ollie stepped out onto the porch. “What in the Sam Hill are you doing out here?”
I used the trowel to gesture to the flowers. “Surprising you.”
“I don’t like surprises!” he snapped. “Got more than enough of them in ’Nam.”
“But this is a good surprise.”
He harrumphed. “You should’ve asked my permission before you come trespassing all over my property.”
Ornery old coot. “I didn’t ask because you would have said no.”
“Damn right I would have! Those flowers are going to need water and fertilizer. Who’s got time for that?”
Ollie spent all day in front of the television. He had plenty of time to water and feed the flowers. But no sense pointing that out to him, he’d only get angrier. Instead, I stuck the last of the flowers in the ground, tamped the dirt down around them, and stood. I stepped back to admire them. “They look nice, don’t they?”
Ollie grunted and waved a dismissive hand, stepping back inside and letting the screen door swing closed behind him with a loud SLAP!
What a party pooper. Would he ever come around? I wondered what, if anything, could reach him, bring him out of the sour mood he’d been in for decades. I looked down at Brigit and it hit me. Friends. Ollie had recently mentioned some old army buddies he hadn’t seen in years.
Maybe it was time for a reunion.
NINE
GETTING GRUBBY
Brigit
Digging in the dirt was so much fun!
Brigit loved the feel of the moist soil between her paws, the aroma of raw earth. And when she’d uncovered that wriggling grub, he was a delicious bonus. Why Megan had made that high-pitched squeal and said “Ew!” was beyond her. Brigit guessed maybe Megan had never eaten a grub. She should try one sometime. She’d probably like it.
TEN
FATHER KNOWS BEST
The Father
Sunday evenings were quiet at the compound. Good thing his house in the back corner was set apart from the communal bunkhouses and the small love shack he allowed the married couples to use for their scheduled weekly conjugal visits. He didn’t want anyone to hear the moaning and groaning and squeals of pleasure emanating from the fifty-five-inch television mounted on his bedroom wall. Peace, love, and harmony were the primary tenets of their sect. But of the three, it was the “love” that the Father liked best. Sure, it was a sin for others to watch people fornicate on TV. But how could he preach about the sins of the flesh if he didn’t see what all the fuss was about? For him, watching this show wasn’t debauchery. It was research.
Even though he realized the actresses on his screen were embellishing things for their audience, it made no difference. Real or not, his cock was hard as a rock.
Knock-knock-knock.
He muttered some choice words to himself. Who the hell can that be?
He grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. Standing, he pushed down on his groin, willing his erection to disappear. The last thing he needed was one of his flock noting the tent in his robe. The people who lived here believed he was pure at heart, above all earthly desires. What a bunch of idiots.
But they were his idiots.
He walked out of his bedroom, making sure to close the door behind him. Though the rest of the compound had no access to the Internet or television, it was only right that their leader kept a pulse on the outside world, right? And keep a pulse he did. Hell, his dick throbbed so hard it was a wonder it didn’t explode.
“Coming!” he called. Or at least he would have been if whoever was at the door hadn’t interrupted his evening’s entertainment.
He passed through his small kitchen and into his living room, stopping at the door to peek out the peephole. Standing on the porch of his modest frame home was a lanky woman with stringy gray hair, a beaklike nose, and dark peach fuzz at each corner of her upper lips, forming furry quotation marks around her mouth.
Margaret.
Ugh.
At least he didn’t have to worry about his boner any longer. If anyone could make a man soft in an instant, it was her. Ironic, because she was most certainly a virgin, and virgins generally had a special sort of sexual appeal. Doubly ironic because she served as the compound’s midwife, delivering the babies other women had conceived, though Margaret would likely never bear a child herself. None of the men in the compound had expressed any interest in marrying and bedding her whatsoever.
The Father took a breath, worked up a smile, and opened the door. “Hello, Sister Margaret. What takes you away from your time of rest and personal reflection, and brings you to my door this evening?”
Her expression sheepish, she performed a curtsy in her loose-fitting, homemade dress before looking up at him. “So sorry to bother you, Father Emmanuel. I was wondering about Sister Juliette. She wasn’t at the service this morning. I stopped by the infirmary to check on her, but she wasn’t there. Is she all right?”
“So kind of you to think of others, as always.” You damn busybody. He offered a placating smile. “Sister Juliette asked to have some time alone in a private place. She needs a chance to grieve and to seek God’s forgiveness for her sins. You understand, of course.”
She bowed her head. “Yes, Father.”
Good thing he’d had some time to think things through on the drive home from the fire station Friday night, come up with some reasonable explanations. Dropping off the baby had been an impulsive move, something quite unusual for him. But when Juliette had refused to let him touch the newborn child, she’d pushed him too far. He reigned over this dominion, and it was high time the obstinate little bitch accepted that fact.
Margaret’s mouth began to open again, but the Father was already tired of her and her questions. He raised a palm to stop her. “No need to worry, Sister Margaret. Sister Juliette will be back with the flock very soon.”
She nodded, but tears rimmed her eyes. “It’s just so heartbreaking about the baby.”
“Heartbreaking, indeed. But Sister Juliette is barely twenty and unmarried. The father did not step up to claim the child as his own or offer any type of support—”
“A sin in itself!” she cried. “Perhaps he should be called to account.”
It took everything in him not to shove the woman backward down the steps to his door. He stared at her intently. “Surely you are not forgetting that God calls upon us to forgive, Sister Margaret.”
He let his words hang in the air for a moment, and she responded by hanging her head.
“You speak the truth,” she said in a voice barely louder than a whisper.
“My point,” the Father said, “is that the circumstances would have been less than ideal. The baby’s father might have insisted on visitation, or even sued for custody. What might it have done to Juliette’s child if she were taken outside our walls? The last thing any of us need is someone from the outside meddling in the life we’ve worked so hard to build here. We must trust that God knows best. We must respect His will. To do otherwise would be prideful.”
This ugly bitch can’t argue with that, can she?
Before she had a chance to try, he said, “Thank you for coming by, Sister Margaret. Please tell Sister Abigail that I have some time for her now. She mentioned she’d like me to join her in prayer.”
They’d join all right, but it wouldn’t be in prayer. Unlike Margaret, Abigail was one sister he enjoyed seeing down on her knees.
ELEVEN
UNPLANNED GARAGE SALE
Megan
I was back on the day shift the following Monday. Before heading out in the cruiser, I spent a few minutes searching the Web at the station, looking to see if anyone in the area had put a Steve Nash bobble-head up for sale on eBay or another site. Nothing came up. No listings for the brand and model of computer that had been stolen fr
om the Lexus, either. Dang. I’d known it was a long shot. Still, it would be nice to actually solve a burglary case now and then.
“C’mon, girl,” I said to Brigit, who’d flopped down at my feet to take a nap. “Time to get to work.”
She lumbered to her feet and followed me out the door to our cruiser so we could set out on patrol.
Though the calendar had turned to October, it seemed someone forgot to tell Mother Nature. By nine in the morning the temperature was already in the upper seventies and was forecast to climb into the nineties by midday. Though the air conditioner was turned up, Brigit panted softly in her enclosure behind me as we cruised up and down the streets of our division.
Dispatch came over the radio. “Got a report of a burglary at a residence on Eighth Avenue near Berry. Who can respond?”
I snatched my microphone from the dash and pushed the button. “This is Officer Luz. Brigit and I can take it.”
The dispatcher gave me the address and I aimed the cruiser south. In minutes, we pulled up to the older residence. The place was a single-story ranch with dark brown wood siding, a narrow porch, and a single-car garage. A Kia Soul in a vivid lime green sat in the driveway. The front door appeared intact and none of the windows were broken, giving no obvious signs of forced entry. But perhaps the thief had entered through the back. Brigit and I had recently handled a stalking case that started with a broken bedroom window and ended in horrific violence. The things people do to each other. My body shuddered at the recollection. I shook my head to shake away the thought.
As I rolled down the windows for Brigit, the front door of the house swung open and a thin, thirtyish woman stepped out. She wore sandals, skinny jeans, and a loose bohemian blouse, along with impeccably applied makeup. Her lips were somehow both glossy and natural, her cheeks had a dewy glow, and her lashes appeared to be at least two inches long. Her blondish hair was swept back and held in place by a trio of small claw clips.