by Hearn, Shari
“Okay.” Froggy hooked her arm inside mine and we left the kitchen and drifted down the hall of the administration building, passing Starlight’s office.
“Hi, Fortune,” Gertie called out. I glanced inside and saw her going through Starlight’s file folders, wearing her coffee cups nightie, similar to the one I took from her drawer last night, except the coffee cups moved around on the fabric, and several cups had steam wafting from them.
Ida Belle sat at Starlight’s desk, taking swigs of cough syrup and laughing at the e-mails left on the screen. “Why would anyone leave something personal open on her computer?” she asked.
“Good question,” I said.
Gertie held up the info cards from the folder. “Millie doesn’t have an info card.”
“Oh my,” Froggy said. “Why would anyone take her card?”
“Good question,” Gertie said. “Have a cup of coffee.”
Froggy reached into Gertie’s pajamas and pulled out one of the steaming cups of coffee and took a sip. She pointed to something on the desk. “Would you look at that. The pictures change.”
I picked up the digital frame, displaying picture after picture dissolving into one another.
“See anyone you know?” Froggy asked between sips of her coffee.
I shook my head. “I’ve never met anyone in these pictures.”
A whistled tune pulled me from the office and into the hallway, leading me to the entryway, where a woman crouched on her hands and knees, bleaching the wood floors.
She stopped whistling and glowered up at me. “There are consequences, you know.”
“Who are you?” I asked. The digital frame I’d been holding slipped to the floor and copies of the photos spilled out.
* * * * *
I bolted up in bed, my heart racing. Muted sunlight trickled in through the windows. Snoring? I pulled my gaze to my left and saw another bed. Someone was asleep in it. It took a few moments for me to clear the cobwebs from my brain and remember Gertie and I were sharing a cabin. The dream came back to me, the image of the digital frame playing out in my head.
Hopping out of bed, I raced to the bureau where Gertie had set the frame. Photos continued to dissolve into one another. The people in them changed from one picture to the next, except for one woman. A woman I’d never met. Using Gertie’s bedside reading glasses in lieu of a magnifying glass, however, it became crystal clear.
“Gertie,” I whispered, moving her shoulders slightly. Her snoring stopped, but her eyes remained closed. “Gertie,” I said louder, shaking her.
Gertie flew up in bed, reaching toward her bedside stand. She grabbed her reading glasses case and pointed the case toward me. It took her a moment to realize who I was.
She relaxed, though still breathing heavily. “Don’t you know better than to sneak up on me like that?”
“Yeah, you could have shot me with your eyeglass case.”
She stared at the case in her hand and put it back on her bedside table. After about a minute of waiting for her heavy breathing to subside, she spoke. “Damn. I was having this dream I won the lottery.” She smiled, recalling it. “They’d just given me one of those giant checks and I was at Walter’s trying to cash it.”
“Yeah, I had a dream too. I think there’s more to this place than a crooked judge.”
I held out the frame and gave her the reading glasses. “Keep looking at the photos.”
She put on her glasses and watched as one of the photos displayed for about thirty seconds before dissolving into another. After the third dissolve she said, “There’s the judge. Standing with a camp counselor in front of a cabin.”
“Yeah, that’s Starlight.”
She examined it again. “No she’s not.” The photo dissolved and the same woman appeared in another picture. “There she is again. That’s not Starlight.”
“Then why does it say Amanda Hilliard on her shirt? That was the name Starlight used when she introduced herself to us. And look, in quotes, under her name on the shirt, it says ‘Starlight.’”
Gertie squinted at it. “Your eyes are younger than mine. I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Your glasses were like magnifiers to me. Trust me, every photo I saw of this woman her shirt said the same thing.” I took the frame from her. “We were so focused on finding dirt on the judge, that we didn’t notice what was staring us in the face. There are no photos of the woman we know calling herself Starlight. I remember thinking the first time we saw her that her shirt was one size too large for her. It fits the woman in this photo perfectly.”
“So what you’re saying is…”
“The woman who says she’s Starlight, isn’t.”
“What does that even mean?” Gertie asked. “To us, I mean? Maybe she’s a friend of Starlight and she’s taking over her duties.”
“Sure, it could all be innocent, but let’s look at a couple of other things. The computer. All these windows were open on her computer. A company file, her e-mail with a personal message she was in the middle of typing.”
“She got distracted by something.”
I nodded. “But why didn’t she go back and close everything out?”
“Maybe our bus distracted her.”
“She gave us an hour to go unpack. Why didn’t she close everything out during that time?”
Gertie’s eyes grew larger. “Maybe that wasn’t a wine stain she cleaned with the bleach. You’re thinking the camp counselor is a fake and killed the real one? What are the odds we would be sentenced here the same time someone killed the camp counselor and took her place?” She shrugged. “Who am I kidding? We always seem to attract dead bodies.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, and she sure changed her demeanor after she caught us raiding the kitchen last night.”
Gertie nodded. “She did seem a little riled. I thought she was going to squeeze the life out of our cell phones.” Gertie’s hand shot up to her mouth. “She has my purse. My gun.”
I nodded. “We don’t know if we’re right, but there’s something here that doesn’t add up. And I keep wondering why Millie didn’t have a card. Was someone trying to erase the fact she was even here?”
“It could have been misplaced.”
“Or someone took it.”
“You mean, someone like her ex-husband?”
I nodded. “What if he wants to get rid of her and hired this Jenny woman to do it?”
“Pretty farfetched,” Gertie said.
“Maybe so. But something’s not right and we need to know what we’re dealing with.”
Gertie nodded. “Damn straight.”
We quickly changed into shorts and shirts and hatched a plan to go snoop around Starlight’s cabin to see if we could determine what happened to the real camp counselor. It was early, a little after 5:30, and we hoped the woman claiming to be Starlight was still asleep.
We quietly left the cabin and took the back route to the administration building. The camp covered a large area of land, with the guest cabins on one side of the forested grounds, and the counselor’s cabin on the other. The administration building stood smack in the middle. We passed it and continued on.
Two SUVs were parked on the gravel to the left of Starlight’s cabin. An older green model with Georgia plates and a newer blue one with Louisiana plates.
“You keep watch. I’ll go check the car to see whose name is on the registration.”
Gertie nodded and handed me a set of auto jigglers, used to pick a lock on a car, in case I needed them. I had to hand it to her, she had the most interesting toiletry kit.
With Gertie safely hidden behind an azalea bush, I padded to the blue SUV and tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked. I opened it and slipped inside, closing the door quietly behind me. Lying across the seat, I opened the glove compartment and pulled out the SUV manual and found the Louisiana registration, which listed Amanda Hilliard as the owner. Something else caught my eye in the glove compartment. A photo strip, the kind you get from a
photo booth popular at weddings and other events. The same woman from the pictures on the digital frame smiled up at me in the strip, dressed to the nines and wearing prop teardrop glasses, her arm around a cute guy in a suit sporting a prop top hat on his head.
I put everything back in the glove box and slid out of the SUV, quietly closing the door behind me. I tiptoed to the other SUV, the green one. I lucked out as it too was unlocked. Fast-food bags littered the floor of the front seat. Several road maps stuck out of the inside door pockets. The glove compartment was locked, so I had to use one of the auto jigglers to gain entry. Once it popped open, I found Georgia registration papers issued to a Jenny Franklin of Augusta.
Once safely behind the azalea bush, I shared with Gertie the information I had gleaned from the vehicles.
“So we need to know who Jenny Franklin is.”
I nodded. “We could bust into her cabin, but she could be armed. On the other hand, we could be wrong about this and if we do something drastic we could be written up and have to go before the judge. A corrupt judge.”
Gertie shook her head. “The registration says Jenny Franklin. The shirt says Amanda Hilliard, aka Starlight. The photos on the digital frame all show only one woman wearing that shirt. And it’s not the gal who’s teaching our classes. The one who’s wearing a shirt one size too large. The photo strip in the car shows the girl on the digital frame. Again, not the one teaching our class. We’re not wrong.”
I nodded. “There were also a bunch of fast-food containers in Jenny’s car.”
“Like she’s been eating on the run?”
“Yep.”
“If we had our phones we could call Ida Belle and have her call Myrtle at the sheriff’s station. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jenny was wanted for something.”
“There’s a phone in Starlight’s office.”
Starlight’s cabin door opened and Starlight, or, we now suspected, Jenny, stepped out into the early-morning sun, dressed in workout clothes of shorts and a sleeveless top. Gertie and I crouched lower behind the foliage and watched her lean against Starlight’s blue SUV, performing a few hamstring stretches.
Her phone rang and she reached in her shorts pocket and pulled it out, checked who was calling, and answered it. “Hey, you’re up early.”
She waited for the response, then said, “I’m headed to the office now, but I doubt I’ll see anything unusual. I caught them stealing food, not going through anything.” Another pause. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Why don’t we stick to the plan?” One more pause. “Fine. I’ll call you from the office.” She cursed and stuck the phone back in her pocket and took off running on the main path toward the administration building.
“So much for us using the phone back at the office,” Gertie said.
“Luckily our phones were the only ones she took.”
“Millie?”
“Millie.”
Walking the path back to the cabins, Gertie and I strategized how best to obtain Millie’s phone. It was still early so Millie might not even be awake. Though, as Gertie pointed out, sometimes older people were early risers. Something I knew quite well as my sleep had been disturbed many times by Gertie and Ida Belle banging on my front door. If Millie was asleep we could try to break in her cabin and steal it from her.
“Or we just wake her and ask for it.”
“She’s such a marshmallow,” Gertie said. “If she thinks something’s wrong she might get all nervous and act suspicious in front of Jenny and blow our whole operation.”
“Let me handle it then.”
It took us just a few minutes to make it to Millie’s cabin. We crept up to the side and I placed my ear against the wooden structure.
“I hear some activity,” I whispered to Gertie.
“Is it Millie or a roommate?”
“She has the cabin to herself.”
Gertie crinkled her nose. “How did she rate her own room?”
I shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t want to throw some sweet old woman to the wolves.”
“I’m a sweet old woman,” she said, folding her arms.
“You were dressed like Ma Barker on steroids. Sweet wasn’t what you were going for.”
“Point taken,” she said, unfolding her arms. “You get her phone. I’ll meet you back at our cabin.”
I climbed the steps of Millie’s cabin and knocked on her door.
“Who is it?” Millie called out.
“It’s me. Fortune.”
Seconds later the door opened. Millie wore Capris and T-shirt, her hair in curlers. “What a pleasant surprise seeing you this morning, Fortune,” she said. “What can I do for you, dear?”
I explained that Starlight had taken our phones from us the night before, and asked if I could borrow hers. “My cat. Merlin. I remembered he has a vet’s appointment today. I need to call and tell the pet sitter to take him in.”
“Poor kitty,” she said, holding her hand to her chest. “Of course you can borrow my phone. I will need it back, however.”
She excused herself and moments later came back to the door and handed me a phone.
“Thanks. I owe you.”
“Say ‘meow’ to your furry friend for me.”
I nodded, then joined Gertie back at our cabin. Ida Belle had been in the middle of her first cup of coffee for the day when we called. I enabled speakerphone and asked her to contact Myrtle for information on Jenny.
“That name sounds familiar,” Ida Belle said. I heard her rummaging through some papers. “Oh, yeah, I saw her name on the list of women who’ve gone through the anger management training. Actually, twice.”
“Tell Myrtle to look up Jenny’s driver’s license and describe what she looks like. We think she’s posing as the real camp counselor.”
“Posing? What do you mean? What the hell’s going on there?”
“We’re not sure. We don’t want to jump to conclusions, but things aren’t making sense. There could be more here than corruption of a judge.”
Ida Belle sighed into the phone. “We’re shit magnets, aren’t we?”
“Preach,” Gertie said.
“Today’s Myrtle’s early day,” Ida Belle said. “She should be in the sheriff’s office in ten minutes. I’ll have her get right on it and call you back on this number.”
Ten minutes seemed an eternity. Gertie grabbed a deck of cards from her dresser drawer, sat on her bed and began shuffling.
“Jenny’s up to no good. I can feel it. Which means we need my gun from my purse in her locked cabinet.”
“Or we could have Ida Belle call the local sheriff to come out.”
Gertie shook her head. “That would be the sheriff out of Frog Town. The whole department there has a bad reputation of acting like storm troopers. That could make Jenny panic and maybe shoot someone or take someone hostage.”
I knew she was right. Gertie and I were expert shots. If something went down, it’d help if one of us had a weapon and subdued Jenny before she hurt one of the campers. “If Ida Belle calls back with bad news, we’ll need Jenny to leave the office so we can go there and break in her cabinet.”
Gertie dealt the cards on the bedspread. “Five card draw. Best out of five hands. The winner takes the administration office while the loser creates a diversion.”
Five hands later I won. Gertie and I stared at the cards I laid down: two black aces and two black eights, with a kicker card of the Queen of clubs. Otherwise known as the “Dead Man’s Hand,” after the hand Wild Bill Hickok held moments before a gunslinger came from behind and shot him in the head.
“Shit magnets is putting it mildly,” Gertie said.
Chapter Seven
Gertie and I were still staring at the Dead Man’s Hand when Millie’s phone rang, causing us to jump. I answered it.
Ida Belle didn’t even say hello. “Twenty-nine. Five-foot-seven, blonde hair, blue eyes.”
“That’s her.”
Ida Belle continued. “She and her mom were invo
lved in a bar brawl a few months back. Her mom pleaded guilty and is serving a six-month sentence for aggravated assault. Jenny got off on a technicality. She’s had a few brushes with the law, though. Comes from a family of repeat offenders.” I could hear what sounded like the jangle of keys. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”
“Okay. Park down the road and make yourself invisible. We’re going to try to get Gertie’s gun from the office cabinet.”
“No. Stay put. I’ve got a gun. Wait for me.”
“What if she gets the drop on you?” Gertie asked. “Or what if she has an accomplice? Best if Fortune and I have some firepower.”
“I’ll call the police for backup.”
Gertie leaned in toward the phone. “It’s the Frog Town Sheriff’s Department.”
Ida Belle groaned. “Sheriff Overkill.”
“Yep,” Gertie said. “If she hurt this Starlight, she won’t hesitate to harm someone else. We can’t risk his men spooking her.”
“I’m with Gertie. We’re on the inside and we’re both expert shots. We can get the drop on her without raising any suspicions. If we need to, we can call the police for backup. I mean, if we’re right about her. We could be dead wrong. There could be a legitimate reason Jenny took Starlight’s place.”
“Something tells me you’re not wrong,” Ida Belle said. “I’ll be there in twenty and make myself invisible. Be careful. Also, tell Gertie to wear her glasses.”
Gertie rolled her eyes and flipped a bird at the phone.
“Is she making faces or giving me the bird?” Ida Belle asked.
“Both. I’ll make her put on her glasses,” I said before ending the call. I plucked Gertie’s glasses from the bedside table and handed them to her.
“They make me look like a geek.”
“Better geeky than dead.”
* * * * *
Gertie knocked on Millie’s cabin door. “It’s Gertie and Fortune, Millie. We have your phone,” she said in a loud whisper.
“Be right there.”
Gertie and I decided beforehand to tell Millie as little as possible about our suspicions regarding Starlight because we didn’t want her to freak out.