Death by Deep Dish Pie

by Sharon Short

  None of this would be of much comfort to Trudy. She’d trusted me with her beloved pet ferret. Now the ferret was dead. Poor kid. She’d be heartbroken—and blame me.

  I was just about to open my mouth and holler all of this at Owen, when he sniffled. Then he started gently stroking Slinky. My heart melted again. Owen—whatever else I might learn to be true about him—was a softy. And I liked that about him.

  He looked up, startled. “Josie—Slinky’s breathing! Come here—feel.”

  I looked down at Slinky for a moment, then stroked her tummy. Sure enough, Slinky was breathing—shallowly. But breathing. I stroked her again. Her little whiskers twitched.

  “She seems to like being stroked,” Owen said. “But she still looks pretty sick to me.”

  “But there are no vets open on Sunday . . .”

  “There’s a vet clinic up in Masonville with weekend hours,” Owen said. “I heard one of my students talking about it—asthmatic cat. Let me drive you and Slinky there, Josie. Then we’ll talk.”

  Ten minutes later, we were on the road, Owen driving his old blue Saab, me in the front seat with Slinky on my lap. I kept stroking her and, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, singing in a low murmur, “Rock-a-bye-baby,” except I used the words my mama had used.

  I didn’t even know until after Mama was long gone that the second verse of the song is supposed to go, “when the bough breaks the cradle will fall and down will come baby cradle and all.” I guess that was too violent for her, although she never said. I just remember her singing, in her cigarette -and-whisky-raspy voice, “Rock-a-bye-baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, when the birds sing, my baby will sleep, happy in dreamland, never to weep.”

  So that’s what I sang now as I stroked Slinky, who lay panting on the blue towel on my lap, while Owen drove up State Route 23. Slinky’s cage was in the backseat.

  We’d hurried to get on the road. I kept stroking Slinky while Owen ran up to my apartment, put the apparently poisoned pies in my fridge, grabbed the towel, and looked up the address to the vet clinic up in Masonville. He’d called to tell them we were coming—and why—and Dr. Rachelle Hartzler said she’d keep the clinic, which was about to close, open just for us.

  Now—even with Owen driving too fast on the state route, and Slinky panting pitifully in my lap, and Alan dying, and Owen hiding something he was scared to tell me, and Cletus missing, and Trudy running away, and muscles aching that I hadn’t before known I had from trying to help Sally on a project that seemed impossible—even with all of that, it felt peaceful, somehow, to just stroke Slinky and sing to her my mama’s version of Rock-a-bye-baby.

  Looking back, I reckon it was just a little pocket of calm before things got a whole lot worse. Of course, at the time, I didn’t see how things could get worse.

  I should have known better.

  Things can always get worse.

  Owen slowed down a bit as we came upon the outskirts of Masonville and the rolling countryside abruptly gave way to the first signs of a modern-day American mecca: a Ford car dealership, a Bob Evans, a McDonald’s, a Blockbuster video, a Big Sam’s Warehouse.

  Normally, I’d have started salivating at the thought of a supersized order of fries. Sandy’s fries are better, of course, but I couldn’t resist the conditioned American response that somehow I was missing out if I didn’t get fries that tasted the same everywhere. Global fries. And we sure didn’t have a McDonald’s or Blockbuster or any other such amenities in Paradise.

  But that afternoon, I instead anxiously looked for Prosperity Plaza on Main Street—the strip mall with the All Pets Clinic. I yelped “here it is!” just as Owen made a sharp left turn into the plaza.

  Once we got inside, Dr. Rachelle Hartzler talked to us briefly before taking Slinky back to an examining room. A petite woman in a white lab coat, Dr. Hartzler also had short, spiky blond hair. On her it looked perky—even a little sassy—maybe because of her dangly silver and pink-stone earrings, a look I liked. I decided to tell myself that my similar do had the same effect on my appearance.

  Then Owen and I sat in the overly air-conditioned waiting area of the All Pets Clinic, perched on pale blue vinyl chairs, leafing through magazines about cats, dogs, gerbils, fish, birds, and, yes, ferrets. After scanning an article on “What Your Parrot’s Silence Means—10 Tips For Getting Your Bird Talking Again,” I got up once to pace restlessly in front of a huge fish tank, but after a few moments, I started remembering my sole childhood pet—the goldfish that I just knew had suicidally launched itself out of its tank in a fit of fishy despair. At the bottom of the vet’s fish tank were a little plastic wrecked ship and a tiny plastic scuba diver. Maybe the tank decor made the fish happy. Maybe, somewhere in fishy heaven, my own childhood goldfish was swimming blissfully around just such a display, thrilled to be eternally released from my obvious incompetence at pet tending.

  In the here and now, the sound of the water gurgling through the filter made me need to pee. I took a quick break in the bathroom—briefly noting the cute puppy and kitty prints, in cheery but stark contrast to my image in the mirror. My face was drawn, my eyes darkly circled. Too bad I hadn’t thought to ask Owen to grab my purse when he was up in my apartment. I could at least have dabbed on some Faintly Rose lip gloss (a new shade from Joy Jean cosmetics). It might have made me look a little more appealing to Owen.

  Did I still want to look appealing to Owen, knowing that sooner or later I was going to learn something from him that I was surely not going to like?

  Yes. Yes, I did.

  So I splashed some water on my face, patted dry with a towel, rubbed on some lilac-scented lotion from the bottle by the sink. Nothing much to do about my hair—except tell myself if it was good enough for Dr. Hartzler, it was good enough for me. I made a mental note to invest in some dangly earrings to replace the little silver button-style ones I usually wore.

  When I left the bathroom I saw that Owen was preoccupied with Dr. Hartzler in the waiting room.

  I rushed over. “It is possible Slinky’s been poisoned,” Dr. Hartzler was saying, as she wiped her hands on a white towel. “The general symptoms suggest that prognosis. Has she been around anything poisonous?”

  Owen glanced at me. I said, “What kind of poison? I mean, she did get loose in my laundromat, but I don’t think she got into any soap or bleach or anything.” I wasn’t about to go into my Breitenstrater-poisoned-pie theory unless I had to. For one thing, I wasn’t sure that either pie really had been poisoned—or what the poison would be.

  Dr. Hartzler turned to me. “Do you have any rodent poisons out, say in your stockroom?”

  “Does Slinky act like she’s eaten something like that?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Oh my. Would it take much of something like that to hurt or even kill a human?”

  Dr. Hartzler lifted her left eyebrow at me.

  “Or, I mean, a ferret.”

  “Actually,” Dr. Hartzler said, “it depends on the ferret—or the person—and on the strength of the poison used, but, no, it doesn’t necessarily take much rodent poison. Is it a possibility that she got into a poison like that?”

  I glanced at Owen. He gave a little shrug. I looked back at Dr. Hartzler. “It’s possible.”

  Dr. Hartzler nodded, made a note on her clipboard. “We’ll monitor her closely, keep her hydrated, run a few blood tests.” She looked back up at me. “The other possibility is that she simply ate too much of something she shouldn’t have and she has a blockage. Her abdomen does feel distended to me. Does it to you?”

  I shrugged again. I wasn’t sure how ferret abdomens were supposed to feel. I’d only held Slinky that day, except for the one time I’d held her in place atop my head.

  “I can run some more tests to check on that, too,” Dr. Hartzler said. “If that’s the case, and whatever she’s eaten doesn’t come up—or out—naturally, I may have to recommend having her stomach pumped.”

&nbs
p; Unwanted images of just how one might pump a ferret’s stomach flitted through my head.

  “So we’re looking at either poisoning here—or overeating.”

  Dr. Hartzler nodded. “You know how ferrets are. They’ll eat just about anything—if they’re not carefully watched.”

  Was I just being overly sensitive? Or was there some implied criticism? In any case, I decided to ignore it. “All right. Do what you can for her. Er—by the way—how much is this, um, going to cost me?”

  The ferret-stomach-pumping imagery hadn’t gotten to me—but Dr. Hartzler’s answer almost did me in.

  “Could be around three hundred dollars—depending.”

  I’m so proud of myself. Sure, I swayed a little—but I didn’t faint.

  Owen and I stepped out of All Pets Clinic’s front door, then abruptly stopped, stymied by the sudden shock of vibrantly hot, shimmering air. We each gulped squelching, humid mouthfuls of late-June heat, then slowly exhaled, adjusting. It was just after 5 P.M., but this was Midwestern summer heat. It wouldn’t lighten its grasp until past nightfall.

  I started to step off the walk and cross the parking lot to Owen’s car, but Owen put a hand on my arm. “Do you know what’s at the other end of this strip mall?”

  “Family Dollar Store? Combo check-cashing franchise and lottery-ticket dealer?” I suggested. I knew the real answer, of course, but somehow, even after all his help with Slinky, I was mad at Owen for touching my arm so tenderly—so possessively—when there was something he had to tell me that he was keeping back. And I was mad at myself for not wanting to know what he had to tell me, for instead wanting him to keep on touching me—even in this late June sauna.

  Owen looked hurt. “You don’t remember? Suzy Fu’s Chinese Buffet?”

  Owen had taken me to the buffet on our first outside-of-Paradise date. We’d dined on all-we-could-eat of cashew chicken and kung pao pork and hot and sour soup—plus pudding parfait, salad, and lasagna. The restaurant was pretty, too, with a big mural of a Chinese countryside scene on the back wall—a little bumpy because it was painted over cinder block, but still lovely. Enough to let me pretend I’d really traveled somewhere.

  Now, I shrugged. “Sure, I remember.”

  Owen smiled at me. “Wouldn’t you like to go there again?”

  I needed to get back to Paradise to tell Chief Worthy about this latest development of Slinky’s possible poisoning . . . not that I thought he’d take me seriously, but still, I felt obliged . . . and to help Sally with the theatre . . . and to see if anyone had heard from Cletus or Trudy. But the thought of all those activities just made me weary.

  And I knew I couldn’t put off talking with Owen forever.

  And I really like Suzy Fu’s Chinese Buffet. So I smiled back and said, “Sure.”

  “I’m not really from Seattle. And my parents aren’t dead. And I’m not an only child,” Owen said.

  We were in a booth against the muraled wall at Suzy Fu’s Chinese Buffet, my left elbow by a little bridge being crossed by a man with a knapsack on a stick held over his shoulder. When we’d been here before, and sat in this booth, I had thought of the little man as hurrying toward some important event or meeting, his stride swift and purposeful. But maybe, I thought now, the little man was running away from something.

  I’d just finished up two egg rolls and helpings of veggie lo mein and kung pao pork, and was eagerly anticipating my dessert—a bowl of chocolate-pudding-whipped-cream parfait. Fortune cookies just don’t cut it as dessert. Suzy Fu (if there really was a Suzy Fu) was wise to realize this, and made chocolate-pudding parfait a centerpiece of the dessert portion of the buffet, with Jell-O salads and coconut macaroons also prominently featured.

  “I grew up on a farm in Iowa. My parents are still alive and well. And I’m the oldest of two boys,” Owen went on in a low voice. He’d only had a few bites of chicken cashew and rice, and had skipped the parfait altogether.

  I eyed my parfait, not wanting to look at Owen. So far what he’d said wasn’t so bad. Maybe the rest of it—and the reason for his lying—would be just as easy to accept. I could eat my parfait in peace. We could drive back to Paradise and make out on my couch. Chief Worthy and Sally could wait.

  Owen went on. “It was easier to just make up a story that got me off the hook from explaining how things were for me growing up . . . how those things made me make some terrible choices later . . .”

  “Nothing makes a person make a choice,” I said. “You make your own choices.”

  Owen looked up at me. “I know that now, but—” He paused, shook his head. “My brother Luke and I weren’t particularly athletic, growing up, in a town where that mattered for boys. So we got teased a lot—in particular by this kid, Linden Oates.”

  I stared at Owen. “You lied to me about your past—where you’re from—because you’re embarrassed you were teased by a bully?” I snorted at that, dipped into my chocolate-pudding parfait, then said, “Who wasn’t?”

  Owen sighed. “I wish that were it, Josie. I left all of that behind me—at least I thought I did—when I won an academic scholarship and went to college in Kansas City.” He stopped, staring off.

  Then, suddenly, Owen looked back at me in a way that made me drop my spoon back to my plate. I wiped my mouth, nervously, on my paper napkin, and waited.

  “I fell in love, Josie. Or at least I thought I did. Her name was Tori. She got pregnant, so we got married. We have a son, Zachariah. He’s twelve now.”

  “I see. Well.” I had to stop, take a sip of water to clear my suddenly choking throat. “That happens. I mean, I’d love to meet Zachariah—or do you call him Zack?—anyway—”

  Owen put his hand over mine. “Josie, stop. Let me finish, okay? I lived in Kansas City until eight years ago. I’d just gotten divorced when I learned that my older brother, Luke, had lung cancer—he’d smoked since he was twelve—and was dying. I went home to see him.

  “It was the first night I was back and I went to the bar in town. My father—we never really got along—was giving me a hard time about my divorce, calling me a disappointment, and I just had to get away. I drank too much, I admit it. Then Linden Oates came in.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “And started picking on you.”

  ”I wish that were all. That I could have ignored. The fact is, Luke had spent several years on the road with The Outsiders. They were an alternative rock band that had a few years of success. Luke got into drugs, all kinds of wild things, then pulled his act together and went back home to Iowa and got a quiet little job selling insurance, got married, had a nice little family, made a nice living in town. Everyone knew about his wild past, but everyone was willing not to talk about it.”

  The folks in Owen’s small hometown in Iowa sounded just like the folks in Paradise, I thought.

  “Except Linden,” Owen went on. “He said Luke probably wasn’t sick from lung cancer, that we were just covering for him, that Luke was probably back to doing drugs and he deserved to die anyway for all the sins he’d committed.

  “Linden kept going on and on about it . . . and all my anger at him in the past . . . and my anger over my divorce, and over the way my father was acting, and over what Linden was saying . . . it just welled up in me.”

  I sucked in a deep breath, not wanting to hear what came next, knowing I had to.

  “I hit him, Josie. That would have probably been it, but then he pulled a switchblade on me, and came at me.”

  Owen put his head to his hands. “I could have gotten away from him, maybe subdued him with help from the other guys there. But instead, I hit him again. And again. And then he cracked his head against the bar and went down.”

  Owen looked up at me, directly, and I looked directly back in his blue eyes as he said, “So that’s what I’ve been trying to hide from you, Josie. Eight years ago, I killed a man. Then spent seven years in jail for manslaughter.”

  10

  The irony was not lost on me: an hour and a half after my
boyfriend Owen confessed to having killed a man, I was in jail.

  Not because I’d in turn whacked Owen for having kept from me his real past. . . although I’d felt like it. Not because of what he’d confessed. It didn’t bother me that he’d been married, had a kid, gotten divorced.

  And while of course I wasn’t glad to learn he’d unintentionally killed someone, what bothered me even more was that he’d never talked to me about any of this.

  Okay, I couldn’t rightly expect him to introduce himself, “Hi, I’m Owen Collins. I have a kid, I’m divorced, I’ve killed a guy, and would you like to go to dinner?”

  But we’d been going out for about nine months by then. You’d think at least one of the topics—divorce, kid, manslaughter—might have come up.

  What gnawed at me was wondering just how long he’d have gone on not telling me about any of the above. If I hadn’t overheard his slip in his conversation at Stillwater, would he have ever talked to me about his past?

  On our long, silent ride home, those questions, and plenty more, rolled through my head, but I didn’t ask them. I didn’t dare. I was too angry, too fearful that instead of questions, I’d shout accusations—as in how dare you not trust me, when I’ve trusted you? I’d even trusted him to get close to my cousin Guy.

  As Owen drove, I just stared out the window, taking in the rolling countryside, blind to its beauty, my stomach a great big lo-mein, pudding-parfait, shock-and-anxiety knot.

  When we got to my laundromat, Owen followed me up the exterior staircase to my apartment, where we swapped just a few words about the pies in my fridge. Owen said he’d package and mail them to his friends in Kansas City.

  I didn’t ask any of the questions I would normally ask—such as how he would package the pies, and how he would ship them, and details of what he’d ask them. But I also resisted the temptation to ask if he was sure he really had friends in Kansas City—or if he’d made them up, too.

  After he left—none of the usual hugging—I called information for the Breitenstraters’ home phone number. I thought I should at least let Geri know about Slinky and Trudy’s note. The number was unlisted. The fact didn’t surprise me. I made a note on my mental to-do list to see Geri in the morning to tell her in person about Trudy and Slinky.