“Thirsty? Can I get you something?” I said.
“Nope. Gotta get back to the station toot sweet. Here we are.” Omar turned the laptop so we could both see the screen. Marion was curious enough to come around to the other side and observe too, from behind my shoulder. “There were twelve pictures total.”
“But the only ones of just me are when I’m at my kitchen sink and when I’m leaving my house, right?”
“Yes, the rest are of you and Mirabelle and Marion in the store.”
“But is that what they really are?” I said as I turned Omar’s laptop my direction.
“I think so,” he said.
I scrolled through the other nine pictures, and it was true that in some combination Mirabelle, Marion, and I were in them, but we weren’t necessarily the focal points. If we had been, then the photographer didn’t know how to take a very good picture. We were oddly off center and strangely angled, almost giving the pictures a fish-eye effect.
“Omar,” I began. “I can’t explain the three pictures of just me, but the others look like leather man was trying to take pictures of the inside of the store, not of us.”
“I don’t get what you mean.”
“Look at the shelves, the ones with the carved doors.” I pointed around the big room.
“Okay.”
“I think he was trying to get pictures of the doors,” I said.
“Why in the world would he do that?”
“I have no idea,” I said. But I did have a little bit of an idea; I just wasn’t ready to share it yet.
“That’s very interesting, Aunt Clare,” Marion said.
“Excuse me?” Omar said.
“You’re not from here, Omar, but you know this building used to be a mining company’s offices, right?” I said.
“Sure. You can still kind of see the company’s name above the front windows.”
“Right,” I said. “The shelves with the doors were put there by the mining company. Come on, let’s take a look around.”
Baskerville, who’d been at my ankles since I’d called Jodie, stayed proudly there as we began at the front of the store. Maybe the cat really had figured out something the rest of us were just catching on to. It didn’t seem likely, but Baskerville was Arial’s offspring, and she had unquestionably been the greatest cat ever.
“Look.” I pointed at the first carved door.
“It’s a mountain and a creek,” Omar said. “Lots of both of those around here.”
“Yes, but maybe it’s more,” I said.
“More than what?”
“Maybe the doors tell a story, a real one. Maybe the doors illustrate some important location.”
“Important how?” Omar asked.
“Well, that part I’m not sure of quite yet. But what if there’s something here that ties in with the latitude and longitude measurements from the key bars?”
Omar nodded a little as he looked more closely at the first carved door. “Okay, but where is all this? It could be anywhere.”
“Don’t know that yet either, but maybe we can figure it out.”
There seemed to be a connection—other than the fact that they were all outdoor, mountainous scenes—between the carvings on the doors. Perhaps there was some sort of theme carrying us from one to the next. But the connection wasn’t as clear as all that. The only color on any of the doors was the dark stained wood, but the scenes took place in the summer, or so we deduced. There was a general sense of bright sunny days with green grasses blowing in light breezes.
“No snow, but no evergreens or pines either,” Omar said.
“Right. Actually, no trees,” I added. “Maybe a valley, maybe the mountains are supposed to be more in the distance so we can’t see the trees? It’s difficult to know. They’re not abstract, but they just don’t have much dimension.”
“So why wouldn’t leather man just come in and take the pictures while standing in the store? People do that, right?” Omar said as we moved to the last door on the west wall.
“They do. I don’t know why he didn’t. Didn’t want to be obvious, maybe?” I said.
“What’s going on?” Chester said as he came in the front door without Ramona.
I greeted him by grabbing his hand and taking him back to Omar’s laptop. I showed him the pictures, leaving out the three of just me and explained my idea to him.
“I tell people stories all the time about these doors,” Chester said when I finished. “Usually I say something like trolls live among those mountains and they don’t like to be bothered, that these doors are a warning to all, but there’s something behind my made-up story. There was a legend that the mining company perpetuated about their mines that was similar to that. Silly and fun, but sort of scary too. It’s been so many years and I’ve torn the story apart so much that I don’t remember the original version. However, I always assumed these carvings were representations of locations where the mining company was going to mine or wanted to mine or maybe had already put a mine, and these were the ‘before’ pictures. Perhaps they’re tied to the mining company’s legend somehow. Darn it, I can’t remember the details.”
“Do we have locations of all their mines?” I asked.
“I don’t. I’m sure there are records somewhere though,” Chester said.
Omar and Marion had made their way down both walls when Omar stepped away from Marion and joined Chester and me at the counter. Marion continued to look at the last carving at the front of the store, her head cocked to one side and her finger tapping her lips. I thought she might recognize something, but I didn’t want to disturb her thoughts until they seemed to have fully solidified.
“I don’t know, Clare, Chester. I’ll have someone research the mine locations, but I’m just not sure it ties together.” Omar shrugged. “But sometimes you start looking and things appear and start to make sense, so I appreciate the ideas. Jodie will too. I need to get back to the station if that’s all.” Omar closed the laptop and gathered it from the counter.
I walked him out of the store and then stopped next to Marion when I came back in.
“Recognize it?” I said.
“There’s something about it,” she said. “I’ve never paid a bit of attention to these doors, Clare, but, yes, there’s something familiar about this one.”
“Just this one?” I said as I looked at the door. Actually, it was one of the least appealing scenes, with low peaks that were more like hills, and an uninteresting, cloudless sky.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“It’d be great if you could remember where you might have seen it.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“Clare!” Chester called from the back of the building. “Help me with this dagburn computer thing, please.”
I petted Baskerville’s head and told him he was amazing and then left him at the front of the store with Marion.
Chester wanted me to help him set up his very first e-mail address. We accomplished the task quickly, securing for him the moniker HotSkier1357, which made him smile cheerily before he shooed me out of my own office so he could send his first e-mail to Ramona. I didn’t mind being sent away. I had a dinner to prepare for, after all.
23
Marion was my date, and I decided she was the second best date I’d had this week, though always by far the best niece.
Even though she wanted to work late and catch up on her stationery orders, I knew Jimmy would bust an artery if he thought she was left in the store alone, so on the way out I told her to be at Little Blue approximately thirty minutes after I left to help me “prepare.” Chester would be leaving shortly thereafter to pick up Ramona.
She’d arrived on time and ready to help.
“Lasagna and salad?” Marion said as she joined me in the kitchen. “Yum.”
“I picked it up from To
ny’s.” Despite the repeat in dinner menus, Tony also made great lasagna. Picking it up on the way home made it a perfect choice for a dinner I hadn’t even thought about until earlier this morning.
Tony’s Italian Ristorante and Bistro was one of the better Italian restaurants in the entire state. Tony came to Star City directly from Ravello, Italy, a beautiful village on a hill next to the ocean, according to the pictures I found on the Internet. Tony was the blondest Italian I’d ever seen and had a way with anything pasta that made people close their eyes, lean their head back, and savor each and every bite. I’d heard people say they actually ate more slowly when they were at Tony’s, just so the meal could last longer.
“I love Tony’s,” Marion said. “What can I do to help?”
“Get the table set.” I nodded toward the dining room, where the window wall currently displayed a green mountainside and some white puffy clouds slipping slowly across a sharp blue sky. It was too bad I wasn’t a painter.
Two of us made the job of getting ready much easier. Besides, it was always good to have Marion around. She was a much less flippant teenage niece than teenage daughter. I remembered being her age, though, so I tried to persuade Jimmy to cut her a little slack regarding her tone sometimes. Jimmy wasn’t interested in parenting advice from his younger, childless sister. It was hard to blame him.
“I’ll get it!” Marion said gleefully when the familiar three-rap knock sounded from the front door.
“Marion, my dear,” Chester said. “Ramona, this is my stunning great-granddaughter, Marion Henry.”
“Oh, aren’t you lovely,” Ramona said as she pulled Marion into a friendly hug.
I knew Marion wasn’t into hugs, but she didn’t stiffen too much.
“Come on in,” I said. “I don’t mean to be abrupt, but dinner is ready. I picked it up from Tony’s, and I decided I could either keep it warm in the oven and risk doing something bad to it or we could just sit and eat.”
“I for one am as hungry as a pretty girl prepping for a pageant,” Ramona said. “Let’s eat.”
Dinner was easy and enjoyable. Ramona and Chester liked each other, a bunch it seemed. Ramona shared the story of her former husband’s disease and death and how much it had affected her. They’d spent forty years together, and when he died, she spent a whole year just crying. One day she woke up without tears so she packed up a few belongings from her Georgia home and took off to some place where she wouldn’t be reminded of her husband all the time. The two of them had never been west of the Mississippi, and the idea of skiing or snow was foreign. Ramona hoped her husband’s spirit was laughing at her choice of a house on the side of a mountain in an old ski town.
“Where I come from,” Ramona said at one point, “there’s a tendency for widows and widowers to live the rest of their lives alone after their spouse dies, never to date anyone again, but this handsome man made a couple dates too tempting.” She smiled at Chester.
“That’s a good thing,” I said.
Ramona looked at Marion and then at me. “I’m not going to try skiing, just so y’all know. It still seems ridiculous, up there on slidey things in the snow. No thanks.”
“What about snowboarding? I can teach you,” Marion said.
“Aren’t you the sweetest thing ever created, but no, I don’t think so. Thank you though,” Ramona said with a big flourish of her hand. “I would, however, like to ride up and down the thing on the big wires.”
“The lift?” I said.
“Yes, I believe that’s what it’s called.”
“We’ll have to take you up on one of them, or a tram. Those are enclosed and run during the summer too,” I said. “That would be fun.”
I looked at Chester. Never would I have imagined that he would become smitten with someone who had no interest in skiing, someone with red nail polish and soft but sweet perfume. But he was smitten. In a big way.
I had loved my grandmother, deeply in fact. Even though she’d died when I was young, she had been a huge influence on my life, teaching me compassion on a level that, though my family was full of pretty good people, no one else I’d since known had been gifted with.
But she would be fine with Chester finding happiness with someone new. I just knew she would.
As Ramona was showing Marion a diamond bracelet around her wrist, the doorbell rang.
“Excuse me,” I said as I stood.
The only person who ever stopped by my house was Jodie, but she usually called my cell phone first—it was currently in my bag, being ignored through dinner, and I hadn’t had a landline in a couple years.
I didn’t need to make it all the way to the front to know that the person on the porch was tall, with brown, unruly hair. I could see that much through the window at the top of the door.
I was suddenly anxious. Now was not a good time, but I didn’t want Seth to think I didn’t want to talk to him. In fact, I really wanted to talk to him.
I opened the door and immediately said, “I’m sorry.”
He said the same thing at the same time.
We both laughed and then smiled at each other in that goofy way that single people hate. I know, I can relate. I was single just a few days ago and still might be.
“Let me be ungentlemanly and go first,” Seth said, but he was stopped short by a rise of laughter from the dining room. “Oh, you have company.”
“I do,” I said. “Want to join us? There’s plenty.”
“No, no. I’ll talk to you later,” he said.
“Don’t be silly, young man, come inside,” Chester said from over my shoulder. “We’d love to have you join us.”
Seth smiled and blinked.
“Give us one second, Chester. I bet I can talk him into coming inside,” I said.
“Good. Please know you’re welcome,” Chester said before he turned and made his way back to the dining table.
“It’s me; Chester; his new girlfriend, Ramona; and my niece, Marion,” I said. “Please come in. There’s lasagna from Tony’s, and you’ll love it, even if it isn’t as good as yours. I’m sorry about the background report—see, I slipped that in there. Sneaky, huh?”
“Clare,” he said with a smile and a sigh. “I’m sorry I behaved like a child who needed to have a temper tantrum. I was caught off-guard, but you don’t know me, and your best friend is a police officer. I get it. And I would like to explain the stolen geode accusation to you—some day, but not right away, if that’s okay.”
“It’s very okay,” I said.
“Start over?” he said.
“Sure, if our first kiss can be like the last first kiss,” I said.
“I’m not sure I can duplicate. How about I try for even better?”
“Deal.” I opened the door a little wider.
Seth stepped inside and then stopped. We looked at each other a brief moment, but it wasn’t the right time for anything romantic. We shared a shrug of disappointment.
I closed the door. “Follow me.”
Chester had already grabbed another chair and a table setting. He was putting the fork in place just as we rounded the wall.
“Well, hello there,” Ramona said as all eyes turned toward Seth.
I introduced everyone, and we sat down as Seth filled his plate with lasagna and salad, and we were all entertained by Ramona’s stories about growing up in the Deep South.
“Why, that brother of mine picked us up in a garbage truck. It was his job, driving the truck and picking up the garbage. We climbed aboard and rode to the baseball game we were fixing to play, and we all stunk like garbage.”
“You played baseball, not softball?” Marion, the athlete of the family, said.
“I did. I loved baseball when I was a kid. I could hit and I could pitch, but no one was as good of a pitcher as Billy Bean Johnson. He could throw strikes like they were lightning
shooting right out of his glove, but that was only after he quit hitting everyone. It took a few hitters to let him get adjusted. He was”—she looked around the table, making sure we were all listening—“he was blind as a bat on a cloudy summer night.”
“Blind?” Chester said.
“As in, couldn’t see?” I said.
“Yes, he pitched based upon voice instructions. The catcher would guide him, and Billy Bean would strike almost everyone out. But the catcher would always let Billy hit a few kids first. It worked to our advantage.”
“Was this an organized league?” I said.
Ramona laughed. “No, nothing was organized back then. We all just played outside. Some of us played baseball; some of us played other things. Most of the girls didn’t play the way I played. They were more interested in pretty dresses and finding a husband. I just wanted to hit and throw baseballs. Funny thing is, that’s where I met my husband. We were sixteen and we both played. Met each other when I struck him out.” Ramona laughed. “It’s a good memory, and I became all girly shortly thereafter.”
“Sixteen?” Seth said. “That’s not little league. Throwing strikes and getting hits are harder.”
Ramona leaned over the table toward Seth sitting on the other side and said, “I was really good.”
“I bet you were,” he responded with a knowing smile.
“You played?” Ramona asked.
“I did, through college actually, but I wasn’t all that good. Well, nowadays good has to be great to get very far. I was a first baseman. I played all of high school but stayed in the dugout for most of college. Got some playing time my senior year.”
I tried to envision Seth as an athlete. He hadn’t struck me as physically awkward—nerdy maybe but not awkward.
“Batting average?” Ramona asked.
“Senior year was .333.”
“Very good.”
“Just okay compared to the others.”
Chester and I smiled across the table at each other. Not that we were worried or would have cared that much, but it was obvious that Seth and Ramona were going to get along just fine.
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