“Her time is coming, and speaking as the owner of a hundred new stretch marks thanks to the small human I’ve been incubating, possibly sooner than she realizes.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “You’re a good friend, but you don’t have to say that for my benefit. I’m okay.”
“Sure you are. I know you and what you went through with that man. This can’t be easy.”
“Doesn’t matter.” I wrapped my arm around Fozzie, who had jumped back up to curl next to me. “All that is ancient history.”
“Chris leaving you high and dry a couple of years ago is ancient history?”
“Twenty-two months.” But who was counting?
“A whole twenty-two months. Definitely plenty of time for you to get over it, and all this happy news about your replacement should roll off you like water off a duck’s back.”
My eyes blurred with tears as I held Fozzie close. “You betcha.”
“What does Steve say about all this?”
“Not much.”
“You haven’t talked to him about it, have you?”
What was I supposed to say to my other best friend who had made it very clear over the years that we wouldn’t be having any heart-to-heart discussions about our feelings?
I wiped my eyes. “It hasn’t exactly come up in conversation.”
“Char, you need to talk to him.”
“I will.” Maybe.
“Really talk to him, as in have an honest conversation about how you feel about all this.”
“Uh-huh.”
“In the meantime, you know you can talk to me. Day or night, because until Junior decides to make his grand debut, I won’t be sleeping.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that, but don’t worry about me. I really am okay. It’s just been a crappy little week.”
“But it’s only Wednesday. There’s still plenty of time for this week to improve,” Rox said at the same time that Fozzie released a noxious dog fart.
“That could happen.” But it clearly wasn’t going to start happening tonight.
Chapter Nine
I SPENT THE majority of the next morning on a bumpy single-lane county road so that I could deliver a subpoena to a stinky rural route address nineteen miles west of Clatska. The chicken farmer who would be called as a witness to a felony robbery case involving his son wasn’t any happier to see me than I had been to park downwind of his coops.
The stench and the guy’s surly attitude did the headache I’d woken up with no favors. But once I could breathe easier in the sanctity of my ex’s old Jaguar XJ6, I could almost forgive Chris for not replacing the shock absorbers before he begrudgingly handed over the keys to fast-track me out of his life.
“Almost,” I grumbled, my teeth rattling when I joined the short procession of slow-moving vehicles following a yellow hulk of a tractor bouncing toward the turnout marked ahead.
That turnout couldn’t come soon enough. Because we were almost out of coffee at the office, and I needed to pick up some speed and arrive with reinforcements or I could expect an even bigger headache in the form of a bunch of caffeine-deprived attorneys who could make that chicken farmer’s attitude look like chicken feed.
The guy in the four-by-four pickup two vehicles in front of me must have also been in a hurry, because he hit the gas when he swerved wide around the tractor, kicking up dust as it slowed next to a baling wire fence.
Same with the white SUV that followed the four-by-four’s lead, giving the tractor a wide berth.
I and the big blue full-sized pickup that had been riding my bumper ever since the tractor first came into view followed suit. Only I didn’t have the clearance of the SUV and after seeing its left rear tire bounce in and out of a crater in the road, I straightened to avoid it and my right front tire dropped into its twin with a violent thunk that jerked me into the steering wheel.
“You’re okay, we’re okay,” I muttered like a prayer while my body shuddered with the reality that we were far from okay. Because if I had thought the Jag had been a bumpy ride before I slammed into that pothole, the shimmy shake it was now doing kept me in a white-knuckled grip for the remaining twenty-seven-mile drive back to town.
I didn’t want to risk doing any more damage than I’d already done, so I headed straight for Bassett Motor Works, my shaky car’s home away from home. There I called to ask my grandmother to pick me up while my mechanic buddy, George Bassett Jr., circled the Jag.
“Well?” I asked after I disconnected, stepping into Georgie’s shadow as he stared down at what was starting to look to me like a flat tire. “What’s the damage?”
He grimaced. “You’re not gonna like this.”
I already didn’t like it. “Just tell me.”
The six-foot-six redhead pointed at the fancy rim my ex had paid top dollar for back when we were in culinary school—the bent fancy rim. “I know you don’t know much about cars, but this is supposed to be round.”
I gave him a dirty look. “That much I do know. Is that why the Jag’s vibrating like one of those coin-operated massage chairs at the airport? It wants to pull to the left now, too.”
“It’s not helping, but that sounds like she needs an alignment. New tires, too. These are pretty much bald.”
I heaved a sigh, since I had been hoping for another paycheck before I had to spring for a set of new tires. “How much is all this gonna cost?”
Georgie shrugged a meaty shoulder. “Depends.”
“On what else you find?” Because he always managed to find something else wrong with the aging minx I’d been driving.
“That too, but mainly it depends on the replacement cost of the rim. High-end ones like you got tend to be pricey.”
Given the recent example of my ex’s showy five-carat taste, I could almost hear the cha-ching of a cash register. “Of course they do.”
“But all total, with your family and friends discount, I don’t think this’ll run you more than a thousand bucks.”
A thousand-dollar pothole? This week just kept getting better and better.
* * *
“What happened?” Gram asked, rolling down her window after she parked her SUV next to my car.
“I had a little run-in with a pothole out in farm country. The pothole won.”
She frowned at my almost flat tire. “Maybe this should serve as a lesson. That highfalutin car doesn’t belong out in farm country.”
Maybe not, but until I could afford something more reliable for delivering subpoenas to chicken farmers, it was my only option. “Well, it won’t be going anywhere for a few days, so would it be a terrible imposition if I borrowed your car?”
“Not at all. I don’t have any plans until mahjong tomorrow, and I can get Sylvia to pick me up.”
“Great. I’ll get what I need out of my car.”
While Gram climbed out of her SUV, I retrieved the white banker box from my backseat so that I could complete my delivery mission later today.
Gram clucked her tongue. “I thought you were going to drop that off on your way home last night.”
“It got late and—”
“It got late because you took it home to snoop through all those files, didn’t you?”
“Uh …”
“I thought I raised you better than that,” she said, popping open the rear hatch.
Avoiding the disappointment in her eyes, I slid the box into the rear cargo area. “I just wanted to see—”
“I don’t care.” She banged the hatch door shut as if to drive her point home. “It’s bad enough that I went through all that stuff. The violation of Naomi’s personal information didn’t need to be compounded.”
“I doubt that she’d consider it much of a violation if the contents of that box could shed some light on the weird way she died,” I said to Gram’s back as she marched to the passenger side door.
She shot me a glance after I slid onto the driver’s seat. “No one in your
office thinks that was anything beyond an unfortunate incident, do they?”
No one but me, and I had yet to be entirely convinced. “Nope.”
Gram hugged her amber cardigan sweater tight to her chest as if the two minutes away from the heater that she had cranked to eighty had chilled her to the bone.
Blankly staring past the chain link fence, she vented a breath like a pressure cooker releasing some steam. “So, did it?”
“What?”
“Did anything in that box shed any light? Because the only thing of interest I found was the fact that Naomi had planned to sell her house.”
I figured the dwindling balance I had noticed on a few of those bank statements might have prompted the decision to sell. “Same,” I said, taking a left out of the auto repair parking lot to take Gram home. “She never mentioned listing the house to you or the other ladies?”
Gram shook her head. “Never. And I’m pretty sure someone would have asked her about it if a for-sale sign had ever been posted.”
“I wonder what changed her mind.” Because unless her financial situation had changed in the last couple of years, Naomi Easley’s funeral could have consumed the last of her savings.
“I think I may know,” Gram said when I turned right on 5th Street.
“What was it?”
“Not a what, a who.”
“Okay, then who?”
“I’ll introduce you when we get there.”
“Now?” I was already late getting back to the office. “I thought I was taking you home.”
“Do you want to find out the answer or not?”
What difference did a few more minutes make on the Patsy wrath-o-meter? “Where to?”
Gram waved me on past the turn for her house. “Keep going up the hill toward the park. We’re returning that box.”
* * *
Five minutes later, I was huffing and puffing, schlepping that banker box up to the creaky wooden porch of an oversized Victorian dollhouse in need of a fresh coat of paint.
“This doesn’t pertain to us so I rang the bell,” Gram said, pointing to the handwritten NO SOLICITING sign affixed to the brass doorbell fixture with duct tape.
While we waited I rested the box on my hip and looked around. “Are you sure someone’s living here?” Because by the height of the weeds in the overgrown patches of yellowing grass, the front lawn hadn’t been mowed in months.
“She’s here.” Gram edged closer to the door painted in the same shade of royal blue as the trim around the windows. “I can hear a TV. Maybe it’s drowning out the doorbell.” She rang again, and then rapped several times with an oxidized door knocker that could double as a horseshoe.
An annoyed-looking round face appeared at the leaded glass window to the left of the door.
Gram gave her a friendly wave, and a second later the door opened a few inches.
“Hello,” the woman in her mid-fifties said, her dark, wary gaze ricocheting between my grandmother and me as she shielded her body with the heavy door.
“Hi, Robin.” Gram motioned for me to come closer. “I don’t know if you remember my granddaughter, Charmaine.”
Robin nodded, shifting her focus to the box at my hip. “Are you selling something? Because I really don’t—”
“Goodness, no,” Gram said with a gentle lilt in her tone as if she were speaking with a child. “We’re returning some items of your mother’s that got mixed in with the garden club stuff that came home with me the other day.”
“Oh.” The door opened a little wider, revealing a doughy, pear-shaped woman wearing mismatched baggy sweats who still wouldn’t look either of us in the eye.
I had expected that she would have swung the door open so that I could carry the box in to the nearest table, but instead the only move Naomi Easley’s daughter made was to narrow her eyes. “Like what?”
Since Gram’s gentle approach wasn’t getting us anywhere, and my flabby biceps were screaming for relief, I set the box down between us and removed the lid. “You can see for yourself. There are some office supplies, a bunch of old records that you might want for tax purposes—”
“My brother does her taxes. It should go to him.”
“Oh, but it’s not all tax stuff,” Gram said. “Dear, I don’t know what your plans are for keeping the house, but you might want to—”
“I am keeping the house.” Robin clutched the door as if we had come to steal it from her. “That was prearranged.”
Prearranged? That wasn’t the word I’d use to describe what was left to me in my mother’s will.
“Okay, but someday if you decide that it’s too much for you, and you’re ready to downsize …” Gram pointed at the box. “There’s some information in there that you might find very helpful.”
“I don’t want any of that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have something on the stove,” Robin muttered, shrinking back into the house like a mole craving the safety of its hidey-hole.
My grandmother and I exchanged glances as the blue door unceremoniously clicked shut in our faces.
“Well, I sure am glad that we rushed over here with this box.” That was giving me my upper-body workout for the day.
“Hmpf. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised at how she acted.”
Hoisting the banker box back to my side, I followed Gram down the steps from the porch. “I assume that has something to do with your ‘who’ comment on the way over here.”
She nodded but didn’t elaborate until we got into the car. “Naomi never went into any detail about her daughter’s problem other than to suggest that it was a good solution for her to remain in the house for a while.” Gram turned to me. “That’s pretty much the line she used at a garden club meeting shortly after moving into her condo.”
That would have been a couple of years ago, around the same time that Naomi entered into a sales agreement with a real estate agent. So the lady either changed her mind about selling the house, or as my grandmother had suggested, Robin changed her mother’s mind for her.
Gram collapsed back into the passenger seat. “I guess I’m going to have to call Gordon to see if he’ll pick up his mother’s stuff.”
“That’s the brother who did her taxes?”
“Lives up north somewhere, but he comes to town periodically to help with things. Or at least he used to, when Naomi was still with us.”
“I’ll give him a call,” I said, starting the ignition. “Maybe I could meet him somewhere.” Where no one in an official capacity would see me talking to Naomi Easley’s son in a most unofficial capacity.
Chapter Ten
“TOOK YOU LONG enough,” Patsy grumbled when I stopped at her desk to hand in my subpoena delivery paperwork.
“I had some car trouble.” I figured the less said about it and any subsequent side trips the better, and held up the Red Apple Market sack in my hands. “But I picked up the coffee we needed.” Along with the tuna sandwich that I had eaten in the car on the way here.
Patsy aimed her pointy chin at me, condescension dripping from her thinning lips. “Then perhaps you’d like to go make some.”
And not stick around for her to saddle me with some sort of crappy assignment as my penance for today’s misadventures? Gladly.
I slipped the receipt and change for the coffee on her desk, and made my escape to the break room before she changed her mind.
Ten minutes later, I discovered that Patsy had arranged for me to serve a stint in the copy room penalty box. By the height of the files under the note that she’d left on my desk, my confinement would be a lengthy one. Oh joy. But I didn’t intend to serve my sentence before I spoke to Gordon Easley.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to his mother’s file with his contact information. That left me no other option but to crawl through some less than reliable listings that I found on the internet, but since several of them included Naomi’s name as well as Robin’s, I called the phone numb
er they had in common.
The business-like woman who answered told me that she could take a message for Gordon.
“Okay, but let me just verify that Gordon is the son of the late Naomi Easley,” I said to avoid wasting time leaving a message for the wrong guy.
“What’s this about?”
I couldn’t blame the woman for the suspicious tone that had lowered her voice almost a full octave.
“It’s a long story, but my name is Charmaine Digby, and I’m in possession of some of Mrs. Easley’s things that I’d like to return to a member of her family.”
“Where are you?”
“Port Merritt.”
“Gordon’s sister lives there. You should return them to her.”
“I tried. She wouldn’t take them.”
The woman breathed out a heavy sigh. “I swear. Why she can’t do the simplest things to help out is beyond me.”
Clearly there was quite a bit of water under this family bridge.
“I’m Gordon’s wife. We were planning on going over to Port Townsend this Saturday, so—”
“What a small world. So am I.” At least I would be if we could hook up. “I’d be happy to meet you somewhere.”
“We were going to do a little antiquing and then catch a matinee.”
After she provided the movie time and place, we agreed to meet in the parking lot a half hour before the coming attractions would start to roll.
“That should give us plenty of time to go in and find a good seat. Actually,” she added, “I don’t think it’s going to be very crowded. The reviews haven’t been that great, but I still want to see it.”
That gave me a bad feeling about one particular movie that would be coming out tomorrow. “Which one is that?”
“Loving Lucian.”
I was afraid she was going to say that.
“I’m sort of dragging my husband to it to give him a couple hours of R and R. I’ll probably never hear the end of it if the movie’s as bad as the two-star review I read made it out to be.”
“Hopefully, it was just that one bad review.” For all our sakes.
Crazy, Stupid, Dead Page 5