A Dime a Dozen

by Mindy Starns Clark

  I changed into jeans and a light sweater before putting together a small basket of Laundry. According to Yahoo!, Greenbriar had two laundromats, so I texted myself the addresses of both, loaded the car with my dirty laundry, and headed down the mountain toward town.

  Once there, I easily found the first Laundromat, a tidy, art-deco-looking establishment with glass block walls and swing music playing loudly from a sound system. The place was empty except for an attendant, so I drove on and sought out the other one, which turned out to be a much more likely candidate for where Luisa probably spent her evenings, placed as it was between a Mexican restaurant and a little Spanish church. It was in a strip of shops near a row of run-down apartment houses, and each of the signs on the wall was printed once in English and once in Spanish. Several Mexican children were playing with an empty laundry cart in the parking lot.

  I parked in front and carried my laundry inside, spotting Luisa at a table with a mountain of clean clothes in front of her.

  “Hello again,” she said as she saw me. “Callie, is it?”

  “Yes. How’s it going?”

  “A little better,” she said softly, looking almost embarrassed. “I’ve had worse days, I suppose.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “I hate doing laundry alone.”

  “Ha,” she said tiredly. “Laundry is my life.”

  Knowing we would have a less self-conscious conversation if it seemed as though I were here for a reason, I set down my things and began to put my load into a washer. Before I got very far, Luisa spoke again.

  “Excuse me, but that washer tends to eat clothes,” she said.

  I looked at her, and she was gesturing toward another machine.

  “Try that one instead.”

  “Thank you,” I said effusively, moving my load to the other washer. “I hate when machines do that.”

  “It completely ruined a sweater of mine,” she said. “I think there is something wrong with the—what do you call it? The thing in the middle. The aggravator.”

  “The agitator?”

  “Yes. Agitator. It sucks things in underneath and gets them all tangled.”

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  I poured detergent into the machine, closed the lid, and put quarters in the slot.

  “You do laundry here a lot?” I asked as I slid in the tray and the machine kicked to life.

  “Every night,” she replied. “I can do yours too, anytime you want. Pickup and delivery included if you’re not too far out of town. Cash only.”

  It took me a minute to realize she was asking me for work.

  “Oh, sure, next time, definitely,” I said. “Tonight, I’ll do it myself. I don’t have anything else going on.”

  I offered to help her fold the clothes on the table in front of her, but she declined, so I took a seat along the wall. As I did, I realized her daughter was quietly coloring in a corner. That was too bad, because I had a feeling Luisa wouldn’t really want to talk about all of the vandalism in front of the child.

  “Is that your daughter?” I asked. “She’s adorable.”

  “Yes, that is Adriana.”

  “Don’t you have a son too?” I asked. “Where is he?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “He is fifteen,” she said, as if that answered my question. “I will not know where he is until he walks into the trailer at one minute before his curfew.”

  “Mommy caught Pepe smoking last month,” the little girl suddenly volunteered from the corner.

  “Adriana!” the mother scolded.

  “Well, he was! He got grounded for a week and everything!” I smiled at the little girl, a small beauty with straight black hair and big saucer eyes.

  “Smoking’s yucky, isn’t it?” I asked her.

  “I learned a song in school,” she said. “Wanna hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  She stood and began singing a ditty about “No no to smoking, no no to drugs,” complete with hand motions. The tune was catchy, the motions cute. When she was finished, I applauded and then asked about her school.

  “I go to school online!” she said proudly.

  “It is a special plan for migrant children,” Luisa added. She went on to explain that her children took part in a wonderful program that allowed them to keep up with their studies here in North Carolina, even though the credits they were earning applied to their home school in Texas.

  “Is that Go the Distance?” I asked.

  “Yes. My children are at Go the Distance Learning Center almost every day.”

  “So you really like it?” I asked, settling back in my chair.

  “Oh, yes. It is so hard during the picking season when the kids have to keep switching schools,” she said. “They used to lose a lot of credits, but now they do not, because no matter where we travel they are still basically going to the same school. We love it.”

  “Are there many students there?” I asked.

  “At this time of year, no,” Luisa said, her face clouding over. “My children are the only ones. I mean, technically, they should be back home at their own school by now. Mrs. Weatherby is letting them stay so she can test out the new curriculum.”

  “We can’t go home until our daddy comes back,” Adriana announced gravely.

  Luisa looked at me, the pain in her eyes still very fresh. I wondered what the children thought of their father’s disappearance, especially Pepe. A 15-year-old boy with an absentee father had to be a fairly confused creature. I wondered if there was any chance he had started today’s fire, perhaps with the same matches he’d used when smoking.

  “Hey, didn’t I see you with a coloring book?” I asked the little girl, hoping to distract her. “Why don’t you color a special picture just for me?”

  “Sure! Do you like horses or dogs?”

  “Hmm…I love them both. Why don’t you surprise me?”

  “Okay!”

  She ran to the corner and picked up her coloring book and began flipping through the pages, totally engrossed in her assignment.

  “So, Callie,” Luisa said, “tell me about yourself. Your husband is dead, no?”

  I jerked back as if struck.

  “Y-yes,” I stammered, startled by her bluntness.

  “Mrs. Webber, she misses him a lot. She talks about him to me.”

  “She does?”

  “She says he was very talented, even as a boy. When his brothers and sisters were still scribbling stick figures, he was drawing houses to scale.”

  I smiled.

  “That sounds like Bryan, yes. He studied to be an architect. He was very smart, very talented.”

  “Mrs. Webber talks about you, too. She says that when her son died, his beautiful wife ran away to the sea and lost herself inside of her pain.”

  I swallowed hard, thinking of those early days, wondering how Natalie had known to put it quite that way. Yes, I had been lost in the pain of it all. But eventually, I had found my way out. I was still finding my way out, a little more each day.

  “I’m sorry,” Luisa added softly. “I’m not trying to pry. But I know that pain. If I did not have two children I have to be strong for, I would be lost too.”

  I didn’t know how to reply, so I stood, peeked into my washer, closed the lid, and sat back down.

  “Mrs. Webber said your husband, he had a heart for the migrants.”

  “Yes, he did.” Eager to get off the subject of my late husband, I turned the conversation back to my informal interview. “He was especially interested in migrant housing. Have you ever used migrant housing programs, or have you always been in the trailer?”

  “No, we usually stay in the migrant family dorms. But when the season ended last year, I had nowhere to go, so Mr. Butch let me and the kids move into his trailer.”

  “Mr. Butch?”

  “Butch Hooper. He owns Hooper Construction. I do his laundry in exchange for rent.”

  “Sounds like a good arrangement.”


  “He is a nice man. Very kind to a woman like me.”

  I looked at the attractive Luisa, thinking that for some men, it wouldn’t be hard to be kind to a woman like her.

  “Does he know about the fire yet?” I asked softly, so Adriana wouldn’t overhear.

  Luisa nodded, glancing at her daughter and lowering her voice.

  “He has insurance, like Mr. Webber said. It is not a problem.”

  “So what are the dorms like?”

  “They are nice. Small, but warm and dry. And at least we could all be together as a family.”

  She went on to talk about the dorms for a while, and from there I moved the conversation to some of the other migrant services in the area.

  “Anyway,” she said finally, “I am all finished here now. It was nice talking to you. It helped to pass the time.”

  I was surprised to realize she had made it all the way through the laundry pile. Everything was neatly folded into baskets.

  Reluctant to see her go, I had no choice but to help carry the baskets to her car and load them into the back seat. There was still a vague stink bomb odor, though the window had now been replaced. I said goodbye to Adriana as she presented me with the picture she had colored just for me.

  “It’s got a horse and a dog!” she said happily, her wide smile warming my heart. Looking at her, I had a hard time believing that a loving father could walk away from a smile like that.

  Once they were gone, I was eager for my own load to finish so that I could get back to my house and go to bed. After I moved my clothes to the dryer, I left the load tumbling and walked over to the little Mexican restaurant next door, where I bought a bottled water.

  Then I returned to the Laundromat and drank it sitting in a hard plastic chair, watching my laundry tumble around and around through the little window in the dryer, wondering how it would feel to be all alone with no money, no home, two children, and an absentee husband.

  Fourteen

  After a good night’s sleep, I was awake bright and early the next morning. The sky was cloudless and clear, so I ate my breakfast out on the deck, enjoying the glow of the sunrise despite the early morning chill. Once it was fully light, I could see the lake at the bottom of the mountain, the view as pretty as a postcard from way up here.

  The seclusion of this house reminded me of my place on the Chesapeake. Nestled deep in the trees along the banks of the river, my Maryland home was my sanctuary, my favorite place to be alone, to commune with nature and with God. Of course, recognizing that I had allowed myself to become a little too secluded, in the last few months I had made an effort to get more involved at my church and to make more friends in the community. But the truth remained that nothing made me happier after a busy church social or a friendly lunch in town than to come back to the peace and quiet of my isolated little dwelling.

  This cabin had always offered the same sort of attraction, though not for me alone, but for me and Bryan together. We had bought it on a whim from an older couple the Webbers knew who were retiring and moving to Florida. They hadn’t wanted much for the place despite the incredible view, and Bryan’s practical architect’s nature knew a good deal when he saw one. Truthfully, Bryan had been more gung ho about buying the house than I had been, because it was far up from the lake and I really preferred to be closer to the water. Once we owned it, however, I quickly changed my mind. It was easy enough to drive down and have lake access from his parents’ house, and there was a lot to be said for getting off alone up here where no one bothered us and we were free to enjoy each other in the privacy of our mountaintop retreat.

  Thinking of those early times here together made me realize how much had happened to me since Bryan passed away. Sometimes, when I looked back, it seemed as though I’d led a different life then, as if I’d been a different person. And, in a way, I had been. I was much more innocent then, more trusting of what the future held in store. Not anymore. Now I knew that nothing was ever guaranteed, except maybe “till death do us part.”

  I cleared away my dishes and brought them inside, thinking that despite the pain I had gone through, how blessed I was that God had chosen to send someone else into my life now, someone also good and kind and smart and funny and handsome. When I compared Bryan with Tom, I could see they were such very different people, and yet there was something about them that was the same. A goodness. A decency. A way of treating me gently and respectfully. In high school, most of the girls I knew saw “love” in their boyfriends’ possessiveness or in the dramatics of their breakups and reunions.

  I had never been like that. To me, if you loved someone, there was no need for jealousy or drama, just simple decency. Arguments? They were necessary and unavoidable, of course, but they were meant for solving problems, not creating new ones. Bryan was the first boy I had ever met who seemed to think like me, who valued our getting along with each other and our having fun together above emotion and histrionics.

  Tom, of course, might be a different sort once we spent more time together, but thus far he and I had never had anything beyond petty disagreements, so I really didn’t know. Certainly, he possessed a passion, bubbling under the surface, that spoke volumes. As I thought about that passion, about the intensity of his gaze and the firmness of his hands on my back as he held me to him, I felt a delicious shiver run through me, like a stirring of something that had long been asleep. Knowing it was too soon to go there, too soon to think beyond the confines of our current relationship, I forced my mind onto the tasks at hand. I quickly dressed for the day, styled my hair, and put on my makeup. There was so much that needed to be accomplished, and I was glad to be getting an early start. As I walked to my car, I could hear someone whistling a tune to themselves nearby, and it reminded me that I wasn’t alone up here—and that there were probably a lot more houses now than there were when Bryan and I first bought the place. As I backed out of my driveway and onto the road, I spied the whistler in my rearview mirror: Walking down the road was an older man, tall and lanky with white hair and a gnarled old walking stick. I thought how lucky he was to have these gorgeous mountains for hiking.

  I drove down the mountain the shorter way, on the road that would come out by the lake. As the view appeared and disappeared among the trees, I reviewed the events of the previous day, rolling around in my mind the problem of the erased database at MORE. Perhaps I was grasping at straws, but I kept wondering if the database administrator, Ellen Mack, was being completely truthful about not having written down the passwords to the system. If I hadn’t seen this happen so many times in the past, I might not be so suspicious, but in my experience, serious breaches of security could often be traced back to one careless worker who scribbled down passwords and taped them to the inside of their drawer or something. With someone savvy like Ellen, the placement might be a little less obvious, but I still had a hunch they were hidden in her office somewhere. She may have been having her gallbladder taken out the night the hard drive was erased, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t played a part in this drama simply through carelessness.

  To that end, I had been hatching a plan all morning that would let me see whether that was the case here or not. When I reached a straight part of the road, I dug out my phone and dialed Ken Webber. It was early, but I knew someone would be awake since it was a school day and the boys were probably getting ready to go to the bus.

  Fortunately, Ken answered the phone sounding chipper, as usual.

  “Hey, it’s Callie,” I said. “You got a second?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “I have a question for you. If Dean wanted you to change the very tightest-level password on the MORE system, what would you need in order to do that?”

  “Just the passwords that are in place now. Those would let me in, then I could change whatever you want.”

  “Could you do it remotely?”

  “Sure. I’m set up for running diagnostics for them that way.”

  That was good news. I asked him if
he would be available to change the password in about an hour, and then I told him that I would call back. I also asked him not to say anything about this to anyone in the meantime.

  Once I reached the bottom of the mountain, I dialed the Webbers and was glad to find them still at home. Yes, Dean said, they had a camcorder I could borrow, and yes, if I needed the keys to get into MORE early, that was fine with them, just come on by.

  “What time does Ellen go to the office in the morning?” I asked.

  Dean wasn’t sure, but he thought she went in around 8:30 or 9:00, the same as everyone else. It was 7:45 right now, so I would have to hurry.

  After stopping by the Webbers’ house to get the keys and the camera, I let myself into the MORE building at exactly 7:57 a.m. Though the office wasn’t supposed to open until 8:30, there was always a chance of some early bird popping in and catching me.

  I set about my task as quickly as I could, first by going straight to the conference room, putting my stuff down, and getting the camcorder out of its case. I played with it for a moment, figuring out the controls, and then I gripped it and headed down the hallway to Ellen’s office. So far, so good, as I was still the only person in the building.

  First, I did a cursory search of all of the logical hiding places in her office—drawers, cabinets, even various files in her computer. As expected, I came up with nothing, so finally I turned my attentions to the camcorder.

  Placement was going to be an issue since the camera was so bulky, and I found myself wishing for one of the tiny pin cameras I kept in my investigation kit at home. Still, this didn’t need to be concealed for long. I peeked and poked around her office and finally found a spot sort of behind and beside the trash can, under a counter opposite her computer. I tucked the camera in there, turned it on and let it film for a minute, and then rewound and watched what I had done. The view cut off too low, but after fiddling a bit more I finally got the camera tilted correctly to film the entire desk area.