Crime Times Two

by Julie Howard

  Jamie’s mouth rounded in horror. Tears glistened in her eyes and Meredith knew she wasn’t handling the situation well as a mother. “What about Grendel? Is she going to die out there?”

  The fact was, she had no idea how an adult rabbit would survive an Idaho winter in their shed. This was a question for Honey, who raised chickens in her large barn. “Big rabbits have lots of fur…” she started in a soothing voice.

  A wail from Atticus interrupted her and she turned from Jamie to her son to see his hand stuck in a narrow jar. She spent the next ten minutes trying to get his chubby hand out of the too-small opening, wondering how it had gotten there in the first place, and finally rubbing hand cream along his arm and slipping it out. He sobbed and whimpered through it all and then five minutes afterward was chortling happily and working puzzles with Jamie.

  Every once in a while, Jamie would flash a glare Meredith’s way, letting her know giving away the baby bunnies was not an option. She slumped back on the couch, emotionally exhausted, as her kids played. Baby rabbits were the least of her worries.

  ****

  Her car chugged to life the next morning, coughing once or twice as though in protest, and then growled to a start with its usual puff of angry exhaust. Jamie coughed along with the car each day, mimicking the vehicle’s rough start-up and then cheering when the engine turned over. Meredith laughed at this routine, but it was a weak laugh, knowing one day the car would continue to cough and chug sickly without starting.

  Their first stop was to meet the school bus just outside the grocery store, where Jamie hopped aboard three times a week, riding with two other kindergartners, three second-graders and a fourth-grader from Hay City. From there, she headed to the hardware store with Atticus to work her four-hour shift. The store owner, Crusty Connery, with a mountain man beard and surfer-dude ponytail, was easy-going about Atticus being with her at work. Now at eighteen months, her toddler was walking everywhere and there was nowhere less childproof than a hardware store. Somehow, from some remote and magical corner of the store, Crusty had produced a playpen for Atticus. When she was distracted with the rare customer, she was able to put Atticus there without worries he would be eating nails or opening lethal packages of ice melt.

  There was relatively little for her to do since customers were few and far between. Because the hardware store doubled as the post office, with Crusty serving as the county postmaster, Meredith sometimes oversaw the mail delivery, distributing letters and bills in mailboxes customers kept at the store. Even when she took the time to peruse the return addresses and speculate what was inside each envelope, the chore took less than fifteen minutes.

  Her first day at work, she’d tried to rearrange items into a more logical assortment, putting men’s socks near hats and wind chimes near gardening items, but her boss had been horrified.

  “Those ceramic snails have been there for years, and I know exactly where they are,” he protested, his bushy eyebrows twitching from side to side.

  She pointed at the stack of tires, none matching each other, rising to the ceiling. “They’ve been here for years because no one can see them behind those car tires. Now there’s a chance someone will buy them.”

  Crusty stamped a foot, one of his giant size fourteen feet, causing years’ old dust to rise from under the wooden floorboards. “If someone wants to buy one of my snails, they have to really want one,” he explained, his voice rising. “They have to ask for one. They can’t just walk in, see one and decide on that particular moment they want it.”

  She stared at him. The man’s reasoning made no sense. “That’s how people buy things all the time.” Even as she said these words, she was left feeling she was in the wrong, but not knowing why. “Customers see something and then decide they want it. That’s exactly how things are done, how stores make money.”

  “I’ve been doing just fine here the way things are.”

  He gave her a dissatisfied stare making Meredith think he was reconsidering hiring her. She needed this minimum-wage part-time job and so she promised to stack the ceramic snails back where she’d found them, tucked away behind the stack of tires, and also not to do any more rearranging of the store.

  As far as she was concerned, hiding goods from customers was a terrible idea. Crusty couldn’t net much from his hardware store, judging by the number of people coming in. During her first week of work, she counted five customers, with total sales of a little over two hundred dollars. After he paid her wages, plus all the other costs of her employment, he had to be losing money. She hoped he did better with his bar, which shared a wall with the hardware store.

  The bar seemed busy enough, with customers filing in as soon as the doors opened each morning. Rumbles of laughter and the sound of clinking glasses seeped through the wall through the morning and afternoon, regardless of what time she was in the store. She figured perhaps since Crusty no longer had to deal with hardware store customers, he was able to sell more in the bar. Certainly, he was now free in the mornings to carry on his lusty affair with Honey, the details of which she tried not to listen to.

  Since she was forbidden from rearranging the mish-mash of goods, and her boss frowned on much cleaning being done—explaining fingerprints in the dust let him know what customers had touched—there was plenty of time to study and take care of Atticus. Sometimes they even went for short walks behind the building, keeping an eye on the hardware store door for any arriving customers.

  On the day after Jacob’s death, Atticus was down for a nap in the portable pen while Meredith had her head buried in her book, trying to understand the concept of absolute zero. She’d slept uneasily, waking from dreams about Brian. In one, he was chasing her down a foggy street. She ran and ran, waking just as his raspy breath sounded at her shoulder. In another, he sat next to her, complaining matter-of-factly how his wife wanted to kill him.

  She struggled to concentrate on the chemistry book in front of her. Absolute zero made no sense at all. To her, zero had always been absolute enough. Shouldn’t zero always mean zero? What was the point of having a temperature scale where zero was just another number?

  A quiet footfall broke her concentration. She glanced up and gasped.

  A man, unshaven with a scruffy auburn beard, was at the counter eying her in an unpleasant manner. He wore blue jeans and an untucked blue plaid shirt. She recognized him instantly even though she hadn’t seen him in months, and then only once. That time, he’d been on a snowmobile in front of her house with another man, both dressed in camouflage, shotguns strapped to their vehicles. He hadn’t talked then, just glowered at her in an uncomfortable, searing manner. Brian was there then, and he’d sent her and Jamie into the house. With her out of hearing, she watched through a window as he spoke with this man and his friend in a way indicating they knew each other, although he denied it later.

  “I didn’t hear you come in.” she stuttered, stumbling off her stool. “You surprised me.”

  Shoulders hunched, he said nothing, hands buried in the pockets of his jacket. The surly attitude was the same as before, except this time she was alone in facing him. She wondered if Crusty was busy on the other side of the wall and whether he could hear what was going on in the hardware store. “Can I help you?”

  She took a slight step back toward the wall, thinking she could knock against it if needed. Hopefully, that would make Crusty come over to see what was going on.

  The man took a deep breath, not taking his gaze off her. Meredith glanced over at Atticus, sleeping the deep sleep of babies and she knew the walls would have to come tumbling down before he would wake up.

  Why didn’t this guy say anything?

  “Do you want something from me?” she challenged, standing tall as she could in her worn tennis shoes and tried to keep her breath even. Isn’t that what you should do when confronted by a bear? Stand tall and make yourself appear big and challenging?

  He shifted on his feet as though deciding something. She figured he was there
to rob the store, an easy mark except it must be clear she recognized him. With the wall behind her, there was nowhere for her to go. He had her trapped. For the first time in her life, she wished she had a gun. Why, oh why didn’t she have a gun? If she survived this situation, she was going to buy a gun or learn a martial art.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. “You know about Gemma?”

  Gemma.

  The name hit her like a slap, making her knees buckle. This was the last thing she expected him to say. She thought he was going to rob her or…something.

  She shook her head quickly, as a much a rejection of the name as it was an answer to his question.

  He spoke a little louder. “You do. I know you do.”

  She shook her head again. “I don’t know her.”

  “She knew your dead husband.” His voice was bitter, sad, and angry, all at the same time. The tone indicated there was a history between this man and Gemma, perhaps with Brian. Her intuition that Brian had known the two men on snowmobiles was correct after all.

  “I don’t know anything about all that. Just…just…” She stopped. Why would she tell him anything? She didn’t know him at all, not even his name. “I don’t know you either,” she finished firmly.

  “Barker,” he said. “Egan Barker. Gemma was my girl before she met your husband. Before he took her away. With his city talk and promises.”

  A headache settled right between her eyes. Now that she knew why he was there, her breath came easier. But she was the last person on earth who would keep track of Gemma. No wonder he gave Brian and her the stink-eye when they first met. He’d been jealous and angry. He must have been outraged they’d moved to Hay City, into Gemma’s old family house. What did Egan think of me that day, Brian’s fool of a wife?

  “I’m sorry.” She stopped, biting her lip, and wished she hadn’t apologized. Nothing that happened was her fault, and certainly not because Brian had seduced this man’s girlfriend. “I don’t know where Gemma is, where she lives, anything about her. Maybe you should talk to her grandmother. Honey.”

  His shoulders slumped; his Adam’s apple worked below his beard. He appeared far too young to be of interest to a girl with lofty aspirations like Gemma. At first, the beard made him appear much older and more gruff, but overgrown whiskers couldn’t hide the boyish pain in his expression. The pain of losing his first love to an older, more sophisticated man. “I’ve tried. She doesn’t like me much.”

  Meredith couldn’t help but wonder about Gemma and Egan, what their past was and why Honey didn’t like him. Had they been dating when Brian arrived in her life? Could Egan possibly be worse than Brian, an abusive, married man?

  “I’m the last person Gemma would talk to,” she said in a gentler tone, finding herself feeling a little sorry for him. Like her, he’d gotten shunted aside by someone else. “I can’t help you.”

  He swiveled and strode toward the door, work boots thumping heavily. His wet shoe prints tracked across the floor and she wondered if Crusty would be upset if she at least mopped them up. Egan turned toward her just before he left. His mouth twitched downward and his eyes were narrowed. “I bet you know more than you let on,” he snarled. “I’ve heard about you.”

  The door banged shut behind him and she glanced over at Atticus, who slept on and on. The tension from the encounter with Gemma’s old boyfriend ebbed away. She took a deep breath, released it slowly and then repeated, intoning her mantra, “One day at a time” over and over.

  A burst of laughter permeated through the wall and the world seemed steady again. Needing to move, she mopped up the muddy footprints, then paced through the aisles, giving herself the chore of learning the many and varied items carried in the hardware store. Cans of extra hot chili, bear spray, cast-iron pots, twin bed sheets, rain ponchos, pick axes, hand warmers, bird seed. All these items and more were stacked to the ceiling and three deep on the shelves. Every time she walked through, the store’s aisles appeared to have changed and more items materialized. Sometimes she suspected her boss of slipping new items onto the shelves at night, packing more and more into the already overstuffed room. The activity and stroll around the aisles calmed her.

  Atticus stood in the playpen, watching her when she returned to the front of the store. She held up a potty training seat she’d discovered on aisle three. “Hey kiddo. Guess what?”

  She gave the encounter one more thought before she gave her son her full attention. Egan’s relationship with Gemma would have been more than a year ago and he was still pursuing the girl. If he hadn’t given up on Gemma yet, it was unlikely he would now. What did he mean when he said he’d heard about her? In Hay City, everyone was in everyone else’s business.

  Meredith had a feeling the surly young man was going to create a few more complications in her life.

  Chapter Seven

  No word about a murder filtered down from the mountain that day. Meredith was unsure how long an autopsy took and she hadn’t thought to ask. Would it be a day or a week before results were known? She was certain Curtis would let her know one way or the other; he knew she was involved and waited to hear.

  “I need a Halloween costume,” Jamie announced when Meredith picked her up from school. “I’m going to be a lion.”

  Meredith’s heart sank. Halloween. She’d totally forgotten about the holiday, but there it was, just two days away. When they were in California the previous year, they put an old shirt of Brian’s on her, with one of his baseball caps, and pretended she was a man. They went door-to-door in their apartment building, where most people didn’t answer their knock. Afterward she let Jamie keep just a couple of wrapped candies from their next-door neighbor. You never knew what strangers might drop in a child’s bag.

  She hoped they might skip things this year. “There’s nowhere to trick or treat here. I’m not sure they celebrate that holiday in Idaho.”

  “They do,” Jamie informed her in a serious tone. “I have to have my costume tomorrow for school. Mrs. Beebee…the princi-pess…says we’re having a parade and a party. Karin’s going to be an elephant.”

  This left only hours to figure out a costume. Something simple, she thought. Something she could whip up with existing materials at home. “How about being a ghost?”

  She remembered the once or twice she had trick-or-treated wearing an old flowered sheet draped over her head. The basic costume was quick, cheap, and then could be recycled into dust rags afterward.

  Jamie remained firm. “I’m going to be a lion. All the other moms are making costumes. You need to make mine.”

  Meredith’s heart sank even lower. Making a lion costume was far beyond her skills. There was only one solution. As ever, its name was Honey.

  ****

  Honey licked a thread before she squinted and poked the strand through the needle’s eye. “It’s so easy. Sew easy. Get it?” She tittered at her own joke.

  “I’m grateful,” Meredith said. “I’m the worst mom in the history of the known universe.”

  Her friend rolled her eyes. “We all think that at the time. You’re doing the best you can. And your kids are doing great, too.”

  Honey threw the door open when they arrived, a wide smile on her face. Upon hearing their quandary, she immediately beckoned them down a hallway to her tidy guest room where a sewing machine sat, ready to go, on a desk. She rummaged in the closet, pulling out stacks of fabric scraps of all colors and sizes. They settled on a combination of light and dark yellows for the body, with dark yellow yarn for the tail and mane. Within minutes, the older woman put Jamie to work, giving her instructions on looping and cutting the yarn.

  As Meredith watched the woman’s efficient movements, she was again thankful for her friendship. Honey seemed to be a stand-alone fixture in the world. Over the past months, Meredith had learned about her abominable first marriage to Shorty Harris, the man who murdered Brian. Her granddaughter, Gemma, had an affair with Brian and now had a baby from the relatio
nship. This was enough of a link for Meredith and her children to be quasi-adopted as part of her own family. There was nothing the woman wouldn’t do for family and she’d latched on tight to Meredith and her children.

  She knew little about Honey’s children, except one was from her brief first marriage to Shorty. “Where are your kids?” she asked, realizing she didn’t even know where her friend’s five adult children lived.

  “All over the place. One ran off to Australia. Two are on the East Coast somewhere, another in Florida. The closest one’s in Utah but she doesn’t come to visit much.”

  The tone was light, but her voice wavered slightly as she spoke. Her children had ended up settling far from Idaho. It was impossible to ask about grandchildren. One of them was Gemma, the young woman who returned to Hay City and met Brian, prompting a string of calamitous events and changing their lives forever.

  “And you?” Honey asked. “How’s the class and the homework going?”

  Meredith glanced at Jamie, knowing ‘homework’ referred to Curtis. It was challenging to talk about him in front of Jamie and Atticus. The subject would lead to her worries about supplanting Brian as her children’s father, her nervousness about not being ready for a new relationship, her guilt over Brian. These were topics she couldn’t discuss in front of her kids.

  She drew out the next word slowly. “Okay. Difficult subject matter.”

  “Hmmm. Sounds like you need to invest a little more time in the project. You don’t want to see this opportunity slip by.” The sewing machine hummed and stitched. At times, Honey wrapped fabric around Jamie, barking directions like a general on where to set pins.

  The older woman chatted nonstop, clearly enjoying the project and the company. “How was Twin Lakes? You were a doll to ride up with our sheriff. Jamie, dear, give me your arm; no, the other one…Curtis must have enjoyed having you alone to himself for a while. Jamie, let’s have the other arm now. Meredith, hold those seams together for me a moment…I bet you enjoyed the drive, too. The two of you make a good team.”