Beeline to Trouble

by Hannah Reed

  “Dangerous water, Lori? Why, do you see yourself as a shark?” I had a completely different animal in mind—a leech or wood tick or piranha—something that feeds on humans.

  Lori was still griping. “I lost a qualified renter and a six-month lease because of him.”

  “Too bad you’re so snotty. Otherwise, Hunter might have used you as his real estate agent and you’d be sharing in the proceeds.” Which wasn’t true. Hunter would have handled the sale himself regardless.

  “The Hell’s Angels might want to rent next door to you,” Lori said with a whole lot of implied demon of her own.

  “The Hell’s Angels would be a refreshing change after your last tenant.”

  We went back and forth like that for a while until I tired of it. Then she dropped a few cartons of eggs on the floor (a mistake? really?) and stomped out.

  “I wish that woman would shop someplace else,” Carrie Ann muttered.

  “Wouldn’t that be great.” I took a moment for wishful thinking, then said, “You and I should hang out soon. It’s been a while.”

  “True, but I’m pretty busy,” my cousin said, looking content. “Gunnar and I are doing really well.”

  “Just don’t completely forget about your girlfriends.”

  With Hunter working long hours, Patti gone, my sister and I having a disagreement over gloves, and Carrie Ann spending all her free time with her ex-husband Gunnar and her kids, I was feeling a little lonely. Even Milly hadn’t been around nearly as much since she was hanging out at Holly’s house, enjoying her new friendship with Effie and whipping up scrumptious delectables.

  I don’t go around announcing it, but not too long ago I didn’t have time for girlfriends. All my energy and effort went into The Wild Clover. I was the only full-time employee and worked morning, noon, and night. Since the store’s success, I actually have more free time. Not more money, since now I have to pay staff wages and all kinds of employee and employer taxes, but time is finally on my side.

  So I want to enjoy my girlfriends, even if two of them—Holly and Carrie Ann—are relatives and one of them—Patti—is a psycho.

  They add spice to my life, which could turn into too much routine without them. Heck, I would actually appreciate more interaction with some of the problem people in my life.

  Like my mother. But she’d abandoned her efforts to reform me in favor of a man’s company. And Johnny Jay was preoccupied with other things. He hadn’t been around yet today. At the moment, the closest living and breathing thing I had for companionship was Lori Spandle. How pathetic is that?

  I went back to restocking, straightening up, and helping Carrie Ann when the line got too long.

  When we had a gap in business, I left Carrie Ann at the counter reading a gossip magazine and I took the slow sales time to return a stack of library books, enjoying the short walk down Main Street under my umbrella. I was directly outside the library, ready to climb the steps to the door to make small talk with the director and her librarian daughter, when I spotted Holly and Max’s truck coming my way. Holly didn’t usually drive it, but maybe she didn’t want to take her Jag back out in the rain.

  Anyway, that was my first thought.

  More likely, it was Chance out and about. I’d like to have a chat with him. He always was an interesting diversion, and maybe he and Effie had noticed something worthwhile to help with the murder investigation.

  As the truck approached, windshield wipers slapping, rain beating down harder, puddles splashing out under its tires, I caught a glimpse of the person behind the wheel. It wasn’t Chance, but I’d been on the right track—it was Effie driving.

  I pushed the library books into the outside return box and stepped quickly to the curb to flag down the truck, thinking we could have a cup of coffee together, catch up on all the excitement at Holly’s house.

  Except right when I put my arm up to wave her over, I saw someone sitting in the passenger’s seat—Chance?—suddenly duck down out of sight before I got a really good chance to identify him or her.

  What the heck?

  That certainly wasn’t normal behavior.

  Effie pretended not to see me on the curb, but there was no way she could have missed me. She stared straight ahead, and the truck kept going. The passenger’s seat remained empty. The truck disappeared out of sight.

  I was in motion, trotting back to the store for my own wheels, running around to the back parking lot, and blowing out in the same direction Effie had taken, toward my sister’s house.

  Only I couldn’t find the truck. After checking for it at the carriage house, I made several passes through town, and ended up back at the store without ever locating it.

  Where had Effie gone?

  And who had been her secret passenger?

  Twenty-six

  “I can’t believe you actually compared me to Patti,” I said first thing when Holly answered her phone. “She’s over the top and isn’t sensitive to other people’s feelings at all. I’m working to protect us, to protect you.”

  “Sometimes you just have to let things be,” my sister said. “Respect my decisions. But I take back what I said. Patti is way worse.”

  Oh, okay, at least I’m semi-normal. Right now, at this very moment, I wasn’t appreciating my sister’s reading-people’s-minds skill nearly as much as in the recent past. She should stick to relationship advice and leave the rest of me alone.

  “Is Effie having an affair?” I said, blurting out the real reason for my call, leaning way back on the chair in my office, pretty pleased with my assessment of the ducking passenger mystery.

  Holly said, “What gave you that goofy idea?”

  I told her what I’d seen. The truck, Effie, someone ducking down.

  “You could have imagined it.”

  “No, it really happened.”

  “With the rain and how dark the day has been, you can’t be certain.”

  “Yes I can,” I said with conviction. Then thought, maybe I had imagined it . . . but no, if Effie wasn’t hiding someone, she would have acknowledged me on the curb. The woman had been obviously ignoring me.

  Holly, the amateur therapist, kept going, “Let’s work this out, shall we? Was the passenger male or female?”

  “Couldn’t tell.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Not sure.”

  “What do you know?”

  “That I saw somebody slink down in the seat. Is Effie back home? Is the truck there?”

  “Let me check . . . Yup, the truck is here.”

  “Is Chance around?”

  “Someplace. Last I saw him, he was working on the dock.”

  “Do me a favor, go over and look in their windows. If her passenger is inside her home, she’s probably not having an affair.”

  “You want me to look in the window of the carriage house? It’s above the garage. How am I going to do that?”

  “A ladder.”

  “I’m calling Mom and telling her you’re acting weird.”

  “That’s not very professional of you. If you want to pursue psychology and help people, you can’t go tattling to their family.”

  “I am your family.”

  “Never mind. Forget I called.” I disconnected and stood up, making a firm decision. I had to find Patti. She was my one and only partner in crime. That’s all there was to it. I grabbed my umbrella and headed out.

  First I looked in the vacant house next door to mine, which was my first guess. The house had a lot of possibility as a hideout. Even before Lori changed the lock to one of those Realtor ones, I’d jimmied a window so it would open easily for any future entry needs. Nobody lived there, and it was on the very end of our dead end. Patti could come and go easily without being seen. She wouldn’t have to pay for lodging, which would have been a big deal to her. Patti didn’t like to spend her money, preferring to mooch as much as she could. Anyway, that house? That’s where I would have been if I were Patti.

  After slipping inside through
the window and searching each room, however, I came up empty. No sign that she’d been there at all.

  Next stop, her own house. She could be faking us out, letting us think she was gone while she hid out inside, waiting for some action. But her house was locked up tight, making me wonder how Bruno had managed to get in without breaking anything. Did he pick the lock? Or had she set him up, left it open so he wouldn’t see her wiring his car? That second option (baiting him) was Patti’s style.

  I stopped to think things over.

  When Harry Bruno came onto the scene, Patti had had him under surveillance pretty darn quick for someone who was supposedly out of town. And she’d been ready with all her equipment. Where was she finding the room to stash explosives?

  I walked down to the Oconomowoc River, where raindrops plopped into the churning water. My windbreaker hood protected me and my flip-flopped feet didn’t mind getting wet.

  Nothing appeared out of place. No camouflaged tent was pitched on the far side of the river, and I didn’t see any human-sized animal holes to burrow into, either.

  Standing on the riverbank, I sighed in discouragement, turned, looked up over the roof of my house, saw the last of dark clouds passing overhead.

  Suddenly, I had the weirdest, oddball thought. Could P.P. Patti Dwyre be inside my house?

  It was perfectly Patti.

  If she were here, she’d be in the attic, surely. I went inside, climbed the stairs to the second floor, then took the steps which led to the attic.

  It wasn’t a place I visited often, even though it’s not a dark, tiny crawl space, but rather encompasses the entire full length and width of the house. Half of the space had pine flooring, but the other half was unfinished, still with exposed insulation. Besides a few cobwebs, the attic held several boxes of my childhood treasures, old rugs, or furniture that had seen better days but I couldn’t bring myself to throw away.

  I opened the door. The enormous room was illuminated by several small windows on each of the four sides. Not much available light, since it was so overcast today, but enough for me to see P.P. Patti sound asleep on an air mattress. And not one, but three backpacks flung on the floor beside her.

  For an “I Spy” character, it sure did take me a long time to wake Patti up. If I’d been her mobster ex-husband or one of his flunkies, she’d be dead before she knew what hit her.

  “Get up, Sleeping Beauty,” I said when I finally had her attention.

  “Shoot,” she said, unpleasantly surprised to see me.

  I wish I’d had a gun to shoot her with. Not anything lethal. A BB gun would give her a good sting, and make me feel a whole lot better. “Comfy?” I wanted to know.

  “Could be better.” She sat up. “Now that you know about my hideout, can I go sleep in your spare bedroom?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “How helpful you decide to be. Come on downstairs, I’ll make you a sandwich.”

  We sat at my kitchen table, drinking herbal tea and chomping on tuna salad sandwiches while I tried to get Patti to admit the truth. She insisted she’d been out of town during all the excitement outside her house. Yet she made one comment inconsistent with that. She said, “You’re better off not knowing everything. The last thing I want is to drag you into my problems.”

  “Since when?” I wanted to know.

  “Harry will be back,” Patti said, ignoring my question, “and he’ll be prepared next time. Men are so dense, you almost have to hit them over the head with a brick to get their attention.”

  Or in this case, a bomb? “But how far will he go?” I asked.

  “Not as far as I will.”

  That I believed.

  “I’m trying to pin Nova’s murder where it belongs, on one of the flavorists,” I said. “They are lying about their whereabouts, I’m sure of it.” Patti had crept upstairs during cocktail hour at Holly’s house, so I said, “Have you heard anything about Camilla and Gil that might help me? Did you find anything?”

  She shook her head. “I went through their rooms during the dinner, but I didn’t have much time.”

  “Want another crack at it?” I said.

  Patti shook her head again. “Harry’s my focus right now. Haven’t you noticed that I sort of have my hands full with my own problems?”

  “If you solve Nova’s murder, you’ll get an exclusive and the Distorter will have to give your job back.”

  “The Reporter.” Patti really hated when I called it the Distorter, but if the name fits . . . “Besides, I have to be alive to collect a paycheck,” she pointed out.

  “I really need my life back the way it was before,” I said, putting a Patti-like whine in my voice. That method usually worked for her, so I thought I’d try it. “Hunter and I need more together time to grow our relationship. What he and I need is a vacation far away. If I help you with your ex-husband, will you help me straighten out my issues?”

  Patti gave me a not-very-interested shrug, so I rushed on.

  “Besides,” I said, slam-dunking, “the town is on orange alert. We’re all on the lookout for Harry already. See, I’m on it. Together, we’ll run him out of town.”

  Patti smiled, and I knew she was about to reverse her position. “You’re my best friend, so I guess. Though we did this before, remember, and you weren’t much help to me that time. But if you offer that spare room . . .”

  “It’s yours.”

  Then I remembered Hunter, and how he and I live together now, and how I hadn’t talked it over with him first. Getting into the groove of togetherness wasn’t the easiest thing. I thought about reneging on the bedroom offer, but then I’d have to endure a whole bunch of sneering from Patti about how needy I am, and how I let a man lead me around.

  “Okay,” Patti said. “I’ll search Camilla and Gil’s rooms, and this time I’ll be thorough.”

  “But how will you make sure they aren’t in those rooms?” I asked. “What if you’re caught?”

  “No problem,” Patti said. “I’m like the Invisible Woman.”

  Sure, I thought, and I’m Catwoman.

  Twenty-seven

  Back at the store for the afternoon, I found time to call Hunter.

  “I ran into Patti,” I said, faking nonchalance.

  “Really? Where?”

  “Uh . . . just around. Anyway, she’s afraid to go home just yet and wonders if she can stay with us for a few days.”

  Hunter groaned.

  “Only for a day or two.” Was that pleading in my voice? I took a deep breath. “She says she feels more protected with us, you being a cop and all.”

  I had to lay it on thick. I’d already promised her, but if Hunter thought he had the ball in his court, that he was all big and macho (which he is), and the decision was totally up to him, everybody could go home happy.

  “And Patti is our neighbor,” I continued. “We have to help her.”

  “Since when did you become so neighborly?”

  Since now, was the real truth. Frankly, Patti hadn’t exactly been the friendly block-party type earlier.

  “According to my sources, Harry Bruno was definitely in town,” Hunter said. “Apparently he’s the closest thing to next-of-kin that Nova Campbell had. He insists, though, that he went back to Chicago, that somebody stole his car and dumped it on Willow Street.”

  “Oh, sure, right. That’s likely.”

  “Dwyre should take a permanent vacation to Timbuktu.”

  “You want her to run away?”

  “He’s trouble, she’s trouble. I’m positive Patti was behind that explosion. Johnny Jay thinks so, too. And he wants to question her. I’m not hiding the woman or protecting her from the chief.”

  “Isn’t there anything she can do to convince you? It’s only for a few days.”

  Hunter sighed. “She’ll have to answer the chief’s questions first and to his satisfaction, before she stays with us. And there is absolutely no room for negotiation.”

  So Patti was ju
st another perp to my cop boyfriend. He always wants to play by the rules. Go figure.

  In the end, Hunter approved her for a two-day stay as long as she contacted Johnny Jay immediately and cooperated with him. I pledged to take responsibility for her actions—now I knew how it felt to co-sign for a minor. Scary. I’d have to figure out a way to keep Patti on a short leash.

  Next my man said, “You haven’t asked a single question about the murder investigation. You didn’t even follow up with questions when I mentioned Harry Bruno. Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m fine. I just know you’re busy, and not really involved in those issues anymore, and we should stick to talking about us, personal stuff only. Let Johnny Jay handle the problems.”

  “That’s a new twist.”

  “I’m complicated,” I said. With that remark I must have opened up one of Hunter’s sex neurons because the next part of our conversation was extremely private, for our ears only. Then he said before signing off, “I have to work late tonight. I’ll drop Ben at the house. Take him out to do his business when you get home, okay?”

  After disconnecting, I went online and searched Google for images of Patti’s ex-husband, which I should have done in the first place. Photos popped up right away and they confirmed that it was in fact Harry Bruno I’d met face-to-face. He hadn’t sent a henchman, or whatever they call their employees, to do his dirty work. Harry had planned to handle Patti all by himself. But that was before his pricey car went up in flames. Patti was right, he’d be more prepared next time.

  I thought about how many folks move to small towns to get away from the crowding and crime of cities. And here my little burg was with an unsolved murder and a Chicago mobster with a vendetta, both at the same time. Talk about drama!

  The last thing I did on the computer was download and print out several copies of Harry Bruno’s photograph.

  Before my workday was done, I manned—or womaned—the register. A herd of kids came in to buy old-fashioned candy. Local residents also popped in for papers or beer or quick meal items, and we caught up with births and weddings and all the other stuff that makes living in a small town so worthwhile.