by Tawna Fenske
“They don’t. I’m driving heavy equipment.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, punctuated only by her noisy breathing and the occasional grunt. When Gretchen spoke, her voice was winded. “I’m sorry, I’m doing ab crunches right now so I didn’t hear you. It sounded like you said you’re driving heavy equipment.”
“I am. A compactor, actually.”
“Wow,” she said, her breathing suddenly back to normal. “That’s, um – that’s something.”
“It is,” I agreed, bristling a little at the idea of being judged by a woman who carried fake handbags and made social calls during her workout. “So anyway,” I continued, “I wanted to catch up with you in the next week or so, maybe get together for a drink or dinner or something.”
“I can’t do it next week,” she huffed again, her voice fading in and out a little and sounding strained. Pushups? Biceps curls? “I’ll be eliminating.”
“Eliminating?”
“No alcohol, wheat, gluten, meat, dairy, corn, sugar, caffeine, soy, nightshade vegetables—”
“What can you have?”
“Carrots,” she grunted. “Seltzer water.”
“I can’t think of a bar that serves that.”
Gretchen huffed a few more times, dropping the phone once. Then the breathing stopped, replaced by a peculiar series of beeps and then the thunk of heavy footsteps. Treadmill?
“God, I’d love to see you though,” Gretchen panted. “It’s been ages since I went out with friends. I’ve been doing this cleanse that gives me terrible gas, and of course I had that unexpected downtime after my last colonic irrigation, and then there’s the triathlon I’ve been training for. It just seems like I never get out with any of my work friends anymore. But I need to focus on my health, you know?”
“You could, um, have people over,” I suggested, a little disturbed at the thought of a dinner party at Gretchen’s house.
“Can’t. I’ve been doing this feng shui to the whole house, so the place is a disaster. My dining room table is in the bathroom right now, and I’m trying out my bed in the living room.”
“I see,” I said, not particularly wanting to.
“You wouldn’t believe how many bags of stuff I cleared out of my closet last night,” she continued, her breathing growing more labored. “I’m tackling the kitchen next, but I’m so not looking forward to cleaning out all those random moldy takeout containers that have been in there since—”
“Mold?” I asked, perking up a little. “You have mold?”
“Of course I have mold,” she panted, her footsteps pounding in the background. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, JJ. I mean, this is the Pacific Northwest—”
“No, that’s not it. It’s just – have you heard about that new deadly mold that’s been going around?”
“Deadly mold?” she gasped. I heard some beeping in the background, and the footsteps suddenly halted. “Are you serious, there’s a deadly mold?”
“Not to worry,” I told her, smiling a little at my own ingenuity. “I know just the person to help you out. Shall I bring him by tomorrow afternoon?”
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Collin was seated stiffly in my passenger seat, looking like a very attractive, disgruntled British hostage.
“So let me get this straight,” he said, once I had explained the situation with Gretchen. ”You believe your friend has Cryptococcus gattii in her refrigerator?” He eyed me skeptically.
“No,” I told him. “Of course not. But this woman is a health nut, and since I wanted to find a way to weasel into her schedule sometime in the next year, this sounded like a good cover.”
“A good cover,” Collin mused aloud. “That sounds intriguing.”
I scowled as I hit my blinker with more force than necessary and made a sharp right hand turn. “We’re not doing this again, are we?”
“Doing what?”
“That thing where you try to get to the bottom of my top-secret identity as a landfill spy while I try to refrain from hitting you over the head with my handbag.”
“You could always use pepper spray. I hear that’s rather popular.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I thought I’d left behind the sort of petty office environment where everyone knows everyone else’s business and comments on everyone else’s love life.”
“Who said anything about your love life?”
I felt my cheeks grow pink as I fumbled for a response. “I wasn’t saying I had a love life, or that Pete would be a part of it even if I did, or that—”
“Doesn’t our chap Pete have a girlfriend?” Collin’s voice was smugly cheerful.
I shut my mouth and tried hard to keep my eyes on the road. Of course, hitting a power pole might be preferable to having this conversation.
“I’m only being shirty with you,” Collin said, his tone good-natured. “It’s certainly none of my business, is it?”
“Isn’t it?” I retorted, being a little shirty myself. Whatever the hell that meant. “We both seem to be pretty up in each other’s business lately, don’t we?”
Collin sighed. He was so quiet for a moment that I thought maybe I’d offended him.
“I got another report with some dodgy numbers today,” he said at last, all humor erased from his voice. “There’s definitely someone fooling about our landfill gas program, or with those reports, or with – well, I’m not entirely certain. But I’m getting close to figuring it out.”
“Well when you do, I’m sure I’ll be exonerated.”
Collin was quiet for a moment, thinking. “Look, it’s just that the number of carbon credits we’ve sold and the dollar amount we get for that doesn’t seem to match up with what I’m seeing in the reports. Something’s getting bodged up along the way. I just don’t know where.”
“I don’t even know what a carbon credit is,” I told him.
Collin scratched at a speck of something on my dashboard, not meeting my eyes. “Our flare stations burn landfill gas, which is half methane and half carbon dioxide,” he said with exaggerated patience. “By keeping that methane out of the atmosphere, we earn something called carbon credits, which are sold on the Chicago Climate Exchange.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases. There’s quite a bit of money in it, actually.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m pretty sure if I were really a spy, I’d already know. Don’t you think?”
Collin said nothing. I decided to let the subject drop, since we were almost to Gretchen’s house. I had just finished parking in her driveway when Collin reached over and touched my arm.
I jerked the parking brake and looked up at him. He was studying me with an intensity that made me shiver.
“I know there’s some sort of insider in the department,” he said quietly, his voice holding an edge I hadn’t heard before. “I haven’t put all the pieces together, but I’m getting close. I have other suspicions as well, but things are quite different with you.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that if it’s not you, if one of my other suspicions is correct, I’ll certainly be angry. But if it is you – if you’ve deliberately gotten close to me for the sole purpose of obtaining information—”
He stopped short, not willing to finish the sentence. I swallowed hard, not sure what had been coming. A threat? A declaration of emotion?
We stared at each other, our eyes locked in mutual challenge.
Then Collin leaned toward me, lacing his fingers in my hair. I went to him eagerly, our lips meeting somewhere over the gearshift.
He kissed me hard, possessively, with a hunger I didn’t realize existed in the geeky, surly guy I’d known for the last week.
I wanted to feel more of him against my body. I angled toward him, hitting the gearshift with my knee, bumping the steering wheel with my shoulder.
The blast of the horn startled me back to
reality.
I pulled away and sat back in my seat, breathing hard, fighting to refocus. Collin’s pupils were dilated, his breathing ragged. He looked like a man on the brink of tossing me into the backseat and having his way with me.
I felt like a woman who wouldn’t mind at all.
But this wasn’t the time or place.
I reached for the door handle, trying to ignore the way my hand was shaking. “Just so you know, I have better things to do with my time than spy on you, Collin,” I said, my voice wavering a little. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to harass a colleague about a handbag.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
By the time Collin caught up to me on Gretchen’s doorstep, I was already ringing the doorbell. There was a whole lot of barking and the sound of a small object being hurled against the door over and over again. I stepped back a little as Gretchen’s voice shouted over the clatter of yapping.
“Come in!” Gretchen yelled from inside. “Door’s open!”
I twisted the knob and pushed my way inside, only to have a yappy little dust-mop of a dog come barreling at me like an overgrown hamster on crack.
It hurled itself at my legs, smacking its tiny skull against my shin. The dog yelped and rolled backwards, coming to rest on its shaggy gray rump. It stood there with a dazed expression, then did one of those full-body shakes and hurled itself at my legs again.
I looked around for Gretchen, wondering if she was in the kitchen with the turkey baster cleansing something I was better off not knowing about. I spotted her in the corner, contorted into an upside-down backbend over the top of a giant tomato-red ball. Her face was nearly the same shade, while the rest of her body was encased in metallic purple spandex. She looked like a large exotic insect preparing to molt.
The little dog threw himself against my legs again, smacking its skull on my shin. He yelped and tumbled away.
“Prince! No!” Gretchen shouted from upside down. “I’m sorry, JJ, I’m in the middle of my Kegel routine or I’d come help you out, but I’ve got two hundred more pelvic squeezes to go and—”
“Kegels?” Collin said, looking intrigued.
Gretchen lifted one hand off the floor and extended it toward him, wobbling a little on her ball.
“Gretchen McVeigh, pleased to meet you,” she said.
Collin frowned down at her hand for a moment, but finally stooped and gave it a pleasant shake. “Er, Collin Langshire, lovely to make your acquaintance.”
“So you’re the moldologist?” Gretchen asked, peering up at him with obvious interest. Or maybe lust. “Moldographer? Moldinthropist?”
“Certainly,” he said, looking at me for confirmation.
“Great,” Gretchen panted, her face contorting a little with pelvic exertion. “That’s just great. JJ probably told you, I’m pretty serious about my health.”
“Of course.”
“Well, the kitchen’s right down that hall and around the corner.”
“Er, right. Very well,” he said, glancing at me again. “I’ll just trot off that way and have a look.”
“Thank you, Collin,” I called as he began to head down the hall with Prince on his heels. “Yell if you need any help with that.”
He turned back and smiled at me over his shoulder.
I felt my spleen do a back-flip.
“Yes,” he said. “I certainly may need your assistance. Mold inspection is seldom a one-person job.”
I felt my face heat up, as I looked back at Gretchen. Her cheeks looked like roasted beefsteak tomatoes on the verge of bursting.
“Um, is it good for you to stay upside down so long?” I asked, peering at her. “Aren’t you afraid your head might explode or something?”
“No, no, it’s all very healthy,” she breathed, her brows knitting together in concentration. “Balances the blood, improves circulation. See, the blood pools in my brain, and then the pelvic squeezes bring it right back to my—”
“Nice place you’ve got here,” I said, looking around. “Great, uh, feng shui.”
“Sorry all the chairs are full. I had no other place to put my starters for my wheatgrass garden.”
“It’s okay, I’ll stand,” I said, glancing back down as she shifted her weight on the ball. “Uh, how many more Kegels do you have to do?”
“One hundred twenty, one hundred nineteen, one hundred eighteen, one hundred seventeen—”
“Great,” I said, trying not to stare. “So how’s work?”
“Same as always,” she said. “The medical director got caught selling used medical equipment on Craigslist, but he convinced the CEO he was doing it as a charitable effort for the hospital’s foundation. He just got a promotion. The secretary is still refusing to shave her armpits until they get free trade certified organic coffee in the deli. And Mindy is still – well, you know Mindy. Office politics as usual. I’m sure it’s the same at the county.”
“Absolutely,” I agreed. “Can’t say I miss it much.”
“Don’t you?” she asked, peering up at me. “I mean, really. You worked so hard and you really were good at your job.”
“Nope,” I said, a little surprised at the certainty in my voice. “I don’t miss it a bit.”
“Huh,” Gretchen said, clearly trying to wrap her brain around the notion of deriving career satisfaction from any position without full-time administrative support. Or maybe she was just straining extra hard with the last dozen Kegels. It was tough to tell.
In the kitchen, I could hear Collin rummaging through the fridge. Something metal hit the floor, and I considered offering him a hand. Or any other body part that might strike his fancy.
At my feet, Gretchen frowned. Or smiled, actually, I realized as I tilted my head to the side.
“You going to sit up soon?”
“Soon,” she agreed. “So that Collin sure is dishy!”
“Shh!”
“Are you shagging him?”
“Gretchen!”
“What? You don’t like shagging? I know other British words for sex. I’m very multicultural. Banging, humping, bonking, how’s your father—”
“How fast would this ball deflate if I stabbed it with my car keys?”
Gretchen laughed and sat up. I watched as the blood drained from her face, her skin tone moving through a palate of colors that went from vermillion to burgundy to ruby and then just a mottled pink. When her cheeks had returned to the hue of Elmer’s Glue, she swayed a little on her ball and looked up at me.
“Could you hand me that bottle?”
“Sure,” I said, giving it a little sniff as I passed it along. “What’s in it?”
“Lime juice, maple syrup, water, cayenne pepper.”
“Ugh.”
“Master Cleanse,” she declared, taking a sip.
“No shit.”
“Actually—”
“So Gretchen, it’s good to see you again. You’re looking really – fit.”
She smiled again. “What gives, JJ? You seemed pretty eager to get together but since we don’t even work in the same field anymore, I know it’s not for networking. Are you wanting back in the business? Looking for a reference? Just wanting to keep your contacts fresh?”
I took a step back, a little surprised at Gretchen’s candor. Then again, Mindy had probably given me a false sense of confidence in my interrogation skills. Dealing with a sober subject apparently required more finesse.
“Well, I was genuinely concerned about your mold—” I began.
“Right, right,” she said, waving a hand. “I get it. What else?”
I sighed and leaned back against the wall. “A friend of mine has gone missing. And I have a reason to suspect it might be tied to someone who’s making fake designer handbags locally.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know if you remember, but my sister’s a designer. I take it sort of personally. Besides that, counterfeit luxury goods are tied to all sorts of bad things like child labor and human trafficking and terror
ist activities and—”
“What does this have to do with me?”
I sighed again. “I saw Mindy the other night, and she mentioned that maybe—”
“That bitch!” Gretchen shrieked, bouncing up off her ball and landing on her feet. Her face had returned to the same shade it had been upside down, and she looked a little rabid. I tried to take a step back and bumped against the wall.
“I’ll kill her!” Gretchen snarled, shaking her bottle of Master Cleanse goo and slopping it on the floor. “That lousy little slut! She put the mustard in my bag on purpose, didn’t she?”
“Um, what?”
“I knew it. I just knew it!”
“Gretchen, wait—”
“Stay out of this, JJ,” she said, snatching her phone off the table. “This is between me and that little skank I work with. Once I’m done telling everyone she’s been blowing the CFO, she’ll never work in this town again.”
“Please, just hold on a minute. This is about my friend Macy’s safety, not about you being pissed at Mindy or—”
Gretchen scowled at me. “What did Mindy tell you?”
I bit my lip, wishing the floor would swallow me up. Gretchen’s nostrils flared, and she looked like she was going to hurl the cell phone at me. I caught a movement from the corner of my eye and saw Collin coming down the hall.
Maybe it was the male urge to protect me.
Maybe it was the male urge to see a catfight.
Whichever it was, I had never been so grateful to see him.
“Everything ducky here, ladies?” he asked, cheerfully gripping an expensive-looking bottle of organic salad dressing.
Gretchen frowned down at the dressing. “Is that contaminated with the deadly mold?”
“Well, I really can’t be certain without the analysis. I’ll need to take it back to my laboratory, of course, run a thorough battery of tests, probably send it out to an independent lab for additional review—”
“Oh,” Gretchen said, looking alarmed. “Well, sure. Is that — is that testing expensive?”
“Quite,” Collin said. “Of course, I can sometimes be compelled to assist someone who is a good friend of JJ here. Are you a good friend of JJ?”