Hester pinkened as she glanced around them. A few tables away, a pair of high-school boys with chemistry texts spread across a table had stopped munching biscotti and were unabashedly eavesdropping.
Karen paused just long enough to peer out the window, where a fine mist had started falling a few minutes earlier. As she watched, it mixed with an occasional drifting ice pellet.
“Anyway, my agent tells me, the big bookstores have been getting pressure from morality groups across the country – a big letter-writing campaign,” Karen said bitterly. “All started by Sara Duffy and her jackbooted book burners here in Oregon, this supposed bastion of progressive thinking!”
Hester’s embarrassment turned to anger.
“You’re joking! Karen, I had no idea they had that kind of influence. I thought – well, they were just some local kooks.”
“Yeah, well, people thought that of a weird Austrian with a wimpy little mustache under his nose, at first, until huge crowds started shouting ‘Heil’ at him,” Karen said, absently fingering her cameo. The tip of her cigarette glowed brightly as she sucked in a lungful of the acrid smoke, sifting it out through clenched teeth before she spoke again.
“I’m fighting the changes. I’m not giving in. And I’ll win that battle, you just watch me. But this is the absolute worst time this could be happening.”
She frowned, waving the cigarette. “The last book, actually, didn’t do as well as it should have. I’m not sure the book banners weren’t making themselves felt already. And now there’s some sort of balloon payment coming due on the house construction loan – I made the mistake of letting Steve handle the financing. And what with the likely delays on the book advance because of this nonsense, I just don’t know what’s going to happen. I admit, we’ve been living pretty fat. The private school for the girls doesn’t come cheap, and – ” She cast a glance outside to the big BMW parked at the curb. “Well, I haven’t exactly been denying myself. I’m afraid we don’t have much of what you might call a safety net if the checks stop rolling in.”
Hester swallowed a gulp of the strong coffee, then cleared her throat. “Well, not to pry, but I have no idea how it works when you’re self-employed. How have you handled investments for retirement and that sort of thing? Do you have some sort of mutual fund or something?”
Karen snorted. “Ha! That’s a good one. Let me put it this way, Hest. If I hocked this cheap wig I’m wearing and added in my savings and retirement plan, I’d have almost enough to get fries with my Big Mac.”
“Oh.” Hester pursed her lips. “Dear. Well, Karen, listen, if I can help out – Goodness knows I’m not going to be spending my savings on any fancy vacations anytime soon. If I took two weeks off, it would give the library board the perfect excuse to park the bookmobile and crow about how nobody ever missed it.” She paused in thought, then added, as if to herself, “Of course, if my patrons were able to drive to library-board meetings to complain, they wouldn’t be using the bookmobile in the first place...”
“Oh, Hester, no.” Karen shook her head vigorously. “Thank you, that’s so kind, and I do appreciate the offer. But really, I wasn’t asking. We’ll muddle through. Somehow. But please, don’t spread this around, I mean about Teri June. Steve still has his pride. His mother still thinks he’s been paying the bills all this time. Somehow, well – I’d like to preserve that illusion.”
Pondering all she’d heard, Hester let her eyes wander across the coffee shop’s thinning crowd, then gasped when she glimpsed her own watch. “Oh my stars, the time. I’m going to be dead in the morning if I don’t get to bed.”
The pair started scooting chairs out and stacking their dirty cups. Consternation clouded Hester’s features. Suddenly, she stopped Karen and spoke in a concerned voice only her friend could hear.
“Really, why do you stay with him, if things are that hard? For the girls?”
Karen bit her cheek and looked out at what was now a swirl of tiny snowflakes. “Yes, that,” she replied slowly. “And for the sweet things he does, like breakfast in bed every Saturday for 14 years.” A small smile. “Blueberry pancakes.” She stared vacantly into the night for a moment, then gave a little grin.
“And you know, he doesn’t have a whole lot to do, so he runs through Forest Park, every day, 10 miles. He’s got thighs like Carl Lewis. We still have fantastic nights,” she said salaciously. “Funny, but failure at business doesn’t seem to bother him that way.” Then her face clouded. “At least, it never did before.”
Hester’s laugh died on her lips. With a hand on the shoulder of her newly complex friend, Hester pushed Karen toward the door. “Come on, Teri June,” she said in Karen’s ear. “Better get you home before you need a cold shower.”
Chapter Twelve
Out on the edge of the Sandy River, it was a quiet night. For once, the snow had bypassed this part of the county. A cold moon reflected dimly off silvery frost coating sedges that grew thickly near a small, moss-covered house trailer. A great horned owl hooted, followed by the slow creak of hinges as the trailer’s door opened. A rectangle of light parted the darkness.
Leaning against her aluminum doorjamb and peering out, Ethel Pimala rattled a can opener against an empty dog-food can. Her breath billowed in a white cloud outside the door.
“Lilly-Pilly! Your nummers-nummers supper is served! It’s your favorite – Kidney-Liver Kasserole!”
From beyond the thorny, winter-bare limbs of her rose garden came the jingle of tags as Pim’s 18-year-old cockapoo, Queen Liliuokalani, scuffled through thick brush near the shallow river’s edge.
The gray-bearded little dog, its back arched slightly with the stiffness of age, appeared out of the blackberry brambles and hobbled one step at a time up onto the cinder-brick stoop and into Pim’s modest home.
“There you are, sweetheart. Now eat up, us old gals need our vigs and vitamins!” Pim beamed as her only companion gummed a few bites of the brown mush that filled a gleaming china bowl. Then with an audible “uff,” the dog plopped down on a red velvet cushion in front of a wood stove. Cheery flames leapt behind a tiny, smoke-smudged glass door. In the glow, Queen Liliuokalani proceeded to tug with her two remaining front teeth at burrs tangled in her matted fur.
Pim watched her with a look of pity, then crooned softly. “Oh, sweetie, we’ll get you going to the poodle parlor again before too long, I promise. Maybe next month.”
The bookmobile driver sank into a tattered black La-Z-Boy, a bright orange-and-yellow afghan hiding the cracked vinyl. Again picking up her checkbook and a plastic pocket-calculator, she groaned. Paying bills had become an unpleasant monthly guessing game, with Pim trying to guess which bills she could put off until next month without getting more of those annoying phone calls asking for “just $20 to keep your account in good standing.”
“How one old woman and a puny little dog can cost so much I just can’t fathom,” she muttered, reaching down to scratch around the dog’s ears. “If only we didn’t insist on luxuries like eating, eh, Lilly-Pilly?”
It wasn’t as if Pim wasn’t thrifty. Every Sunday she clipped coupons. Every Tuesday she shopped the grocery ads. She didn’t drive a new car. But she’d ended up with a whopping bill last fall for a new transmission for her dented old Gremlin. And the mandatory insurance just kept going up, even though she’d never had an accident in her life. Then there was health insurance and property taxes – she could go on and on about property taxes. On top of it all, the flood in December cost her $2,000. She thought she’d never get the mud cleaned out of her house. And now came the letter about flood insurance!
“That’s right, twist the knife!” Pim hollered, her voice echoing through her metal-sided home. She reached for a half-empty bottle of Tums from a shelf next to the recliner. Queen Liliuokalani looked up with cataract-clouded, liquid-chocolate eyes. The old dog whimpered.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Pim leaned back in the recliner and rubbed her eyes.
She was so young a
nd hopeful when she’d gotten off the plane from Hawaii all those years ago. She was to continue a proud Pimala family tradition, begun when a Hilo cousin won a Rotary scholarship to Portland State University. Ethel would be the fifth Pimala to study at PSU. Her cousins were scattered around Portland and making good livings as boilermakers at the shipyards or unloading chip barges at the pulp mills. Hawaiians had worked in this region ever since the Hudson’s Bay Company brought them as laborers for the fur-trade at Fort Vancouver, now a national historic site just across the Columbia River.
But for Ethel, it seemed her college days were the beginning of a struggle to make ends meet. When a college grant program dried up the same autumn of her uncle’s sugar cane failure back in Hilo, Pim’s hopes for higher education wilted, too.
Look for a job with the government, urged her family, which had learned the benefits of public employment as Hawaii moved toward statehood. Good benefits, regular raises, strong unions. Her teenage days driving cane trucks helped her land the bookmobile job.
“So much for the government gravy train, eh, Lilly-Pilly?” said Pim, opening her eyes and patting for the little dog to jump onto her lap.
The cockapoo struggled to its feet and Pim scooped the dog up and kissed her nose, dry and cracking with age. Pim’s eyes strayed to a gilt-framed photo perched on the shelf next to the antacids.
“And Prince Charming there was a big help, wasn’t he?” Pim lapsed into baby talk as she rubbed the dog’s pink belly.
The photo showed a happy and smiling young Pim overflowing a flowered one-piece bathing suit, a hibiscus in her hair, her arm around a handsome, well-muscled fireplug of a man in Speedos. His blond flat-top glinted in the hot sun. It was their honeymoon. They’d scraped together enough to visit her family on the Big Island, but they couldn’t afford any of the fancy new hotels springing up on the Kona Coast. So they stayed with a cousin in the ranch country near Waimea and drove each day down to lovely Hapuna, the island’s best white-sand beach.
Larry Kozloszewski was a longshoreman. He still worked over at the Port of Vancouver, north across the Columbia from Portland. Their 10-year marriage was stormy. When he drank, he had an ugly temper. Pim threw him out the day he broke her jaw.
After the divorce, she’d dropped his name and taken back her own, back in the days when few women did that sort of thing. None of her relatives could ever pronounce “Kozloszewski” anyway.
He left Pim with no kids, but with custody of their dream castle: a rust-stained, single-wide trailer on 10 acres of riverfront dotted with cottonwoods and crowded with deer, rabbits and great blue herons. He’d also left her the mortgage.
Paying the bills had never been easy. But Pim loved her country hideaway. Every August, she held a riverfront luau – tiki torches and the whole works – for co-workers from the bookmobile barn. She’d roasted a pig in a buried oven one year, but the sound of sand grating on tooth enamel had put a damper on conversation for the rest of the party. Now, she stuck with hamburgers on her well-used Smokey Joe grill.
Pim’s biggest frustration: She’d never gotten the library promotions she’d counted on. A little extra money in the paycheck would have helped a lot in keeping up her place, might even have allowed her to replace her old trailer with a handsome new double-wide.
But they’d only ever thought of her as a driver. While the library union had seen to it that Pim got token pay hikes over the years, she’d never convinced her bosses that she could handle a job as a desk clerk, or maybe even as one of those telephone reference people who answer all sorts of wacky questions that come over the phone.
“I don’t know why, Lilly-Pilly. Mummy’s always been pretty good at coming up with answers when we watch ‘Wheel,’ now hasn’t she?” Pim crooned as she continued to reminisce. She frowned at the thought.
She knew why she hadn’t gone anywhere in her job. It was that old white-bread Miss Boston-bluenose, Sara Duffy. The old biddy wouldn’t give her a promotion because Pim wasn’t as white as the driven snow, because Pim wasn’t just like that old bat who’d never stepped foot into a ray of sunshine in her life. Even after she left the library, Pim was certain, Duffy had influenced her cronies that Pim could never go beyond grinding gears.
As always, the subject put Pim in a somber mood. Reaching to the shelf below the Tums, she picked up a chipped cut-glass decanter she’d brought home from the bargain table at K mart – it was, in fact, a blue-light special. She held it to her eye to see the glass edges turn the stove’s flames to dancing rainbows. Tipping the decanter over a scuffed and stained plastic tumbler, Pim poured herself a glass of supermarket sherry – she called it her one “crutch.” She sipped as she glared into the dying flames of the wood stove.
“Well, I guess old Duffy finally got what she deserved, didn’t she? And I hope she likes the heat where she’s gone to.”
From the chair arm, Pim picked up a remote-control unit and punched a button. Atop the rattly Frigidaire across the room, a portable television came to life.
“...and Vanna is turning over the last consonant, only vowels remain. Players, you have five seconds to identify this saying!”
“BY HOOK OR BY CROOK!” Pim crowed. She beamed down at the sleeping cockapoo and slapped the chair arm. “See, Lilly-Pilly, what did I tell you? Is Mummy good, or what?”
As if she’d been pinched, the little dog suddenly jerked awake, looking toward the door with alarm. “What – ” Pim started to ask, when a crash of crumpling metal cut her off. The trailer seemed to rock as if in an earthquake. She struggled in panic to lower her chair’s footrest, but the recliner jammed. Sherry spilled into the matted fur of the pathetic cockapoo trying to scramble for safety.
The trailer’s door flew open with a bang, shattering the glass in a china closet and toppling a collection of hand-painted pineapple salt-and-pepper shakers. A husky figure in a baseball cap and blue jumpsuit leapt into the room, waving a large pistol. “Police!” he bellowed. “Freeze!”
Chapter Thirteen
All night, Hester’s mind had sorted through the strange events of the previous day. Bingle T. had stalked out of the bedroom in disgust at her tossing and turning. Punching down her pillow for the umpteenth time, Hester felt like a contestant in one of those dreadful TV wrestling shows. She watched the glowing red numerals on her bedside clock change from “3:59” to “4:00.”
When next she opened her eyes, the numerals read “8:23.” Hell! She’d forgotten to set the alarm!
Oregon’s fickle weather had changed again overnight, and Hester ducked out of a cold drizzle as she pushed open the library’s staff door 33 minutes later. Her hair had that too-wavy, unshampooed look that even a good brushing couldn’t hide. She was still functioning on only the front inch of her brain as she furiously punched the “4” button inside Grand Central’s tiny back-stacks elevator.
As always when she was in a mad dash to check in upstairs for her day’s assignment, the ancient Otis – a rickety cousin to Grand Central’s persnickety public elevator – paused an extra few beats before finally deciding to once more make the slow ascent. One last time before its cogs and pulleys freeze up for eternity, Hester thought.
“Auuugh!” she screeched through her teeth when the compartment jerked to a stop with a loud “ca-chunk” at the second floor.
Staring fixedly down at the scuffed black-and-white linoleum, she squeezed to the back corner of the tiny, airless compartment to make room as the doors opened. In pushed three young library pages, their arms loaded with books and magazines.
Hester’s temples throbbed as she found herself staring at the back of a head of magenta-streaked, over-moussed hair. A few inches from Hester’s nose waggled an ear pierced with a row of seven gold earrings, which climbed almost to the top of the thin cartilage. Patchouli fumes filled the elevator.
Hester squeezed her eyes and moaned softly. A pale, striking blond wearing a black turtleneck over crinkled black leggings and clunky Doc Martens punched “3.” The pages
were caught up in a loud, gossipy conversation. A few moments passed before their words pierced the fog shrouding Hester’s sleep-deprived mind.
“...and the cops went out to her trailer last night and put her in handcuffs and everything. My aunt who works at the Justice Center said they’ve found all sorts of evidence. It sounds like she really did it!” said the booted beauty.
“What amazes me is that she was so dumb as to leave the body on the bookmobile! I mean, DUH!” This from the pierced ear.
The third page, a painfully thin, goateed young man of about 19 with jet-black hair to his waist and a single emerald stud piercing his nose, spoke in a high, nasal voice. “It’s all karma, you know. Duffy tried to control people’s minds, and the pendulum of world consciousness just swung back and restored the balance. It’s very Zen. Old Ethel will be a counterculture hero in this town, just wait and see.”
With another “ca-chunk,” the elevator stopped and the trio shuffled out, leaving Hester to ride the remaining one story in stunned silence. She was spending a lot of her time in stunned silence these days.
* * *
“Pim, orange coveralls just don’t suit you,” Hester said three hours later, trying to be glib and lighthearted. “I should have brought a green marker and we could have at least drawn a palm tree on the pocket or something.”
The jail’s visiting room was cast in a cold winter light from a six-inch-wide floor-to-ceiling window pimpled with raindrops. The pouches under Pim’s eyes were purple and puffy. She was in a sour mood after her night in the modern Portland Justice Center. Its fancy name didn’t change the fact that she’d spent a night in “chokey,” as Pim called it.
“Hest, this is just outrageous. They came right at bedtime. They didn’t give me any warning or anything. And they put Lilly Pilly in the pound. Promise me you’ll find her and make sure she’s OK. If they hurt that little dog, I’ll sue them for a billion dollars!”
Her voice sounded tinny and strained over the closed-circuit telephone, the only way visitors and inmates could communicate through thick glass that separated them. Hester wished she could reach through the barrier, pat Pim on the head and say “There, there.”
Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) Page 7