Sticky Fingers

by Nancy Martin

  And I missed it.

  I closed the drawer and found myself thinking about Flynn. For some reason, being with him didn’t feel the same as the sex I should be avoiding.

  I tried to shake off that thought by pouring some water into a bowl for Rooney. I left his kibble around the yard to keep him moving on his nightly patrol. Then I drove up to Aunt Loretta’s house.

  More Dooce songs on the CD. I sang along, but my heart wasn’t in it. Sometimes I liked to roll down all the windows and scream the song lyrics while blasting along the highways. But tonight, I didn’t feel like it. Instead, I hit all the lights right, so it was only a few minutes before I parked the truck in the alley behind Loretta’s house.

  Loretta’s car was gone, I noticed. She had probably taken Sister Bob over to the Meals on Wheels planning meeting at St. Dominic’s.

  I found Sage just where I needed her: alone, in her room, on her bed with her laptop humming on her knees. She was listening to music through earbuds, bobbing to the beat. She’d pulled her hair into goofy pigtails. I liked seeing her this way—happy, occupied, no boyfriend in sight. She was wearing flannels and a tank top with the name of her basketball team emblazoned on the front. She smelled of bubblegum.

  When she looked up and saw me in the doorway, her face hardened.

  Then instantly changed.

  “Mom! OhmyGod, what happened to your lip?” She pulled out her earbuds and scrambled off the bed. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I bumped it at work. Nothing serious.”

  “You need ice!”

  “I got some in the kitchen.” I held up a paper towel wrapped around a couple of ice cubes from Loretta’s freezer.

  “Here, let me help.”

  Carefully, she took the ice from me and used the wet paper to daub at my lower lip. I held still. With my tongue, I checked to see if the tooth Mitchell had loosened still felt wobbly. But it was fine now—probably held in place by swelling, but that was a good thing. Sage frowned in concentration.

  I felt a softening in my chest. It was amazing that I could have a screaming fight with Sage one night, and she could welcome me home without so much as a cross word the next. She was a good kid that way. Didn’t hold a grudge for long.

  I said, “You should become a doctor.”

  She smiled reluctantly. “I hate the way hospitals smell. Remember the time I broke my finger playing in the city tournament? I threw up in the emergency room.”

  “Not because of the smell. You were in pain. And upset.”

  “I was not.” She argued without heat, still concentrating on the examination of my wound. “I don’t think you need any stitches, but this looks very sore.”

  “I’ll live. Did you get any supper yet?”

  “We had pasta fagioli and salad. There are leftovers in the fridge for you.” Sage smiled. Her face was a thing of beauty—perfect cheeks, expressive dark eyes that reflected everything that’s young and full of promise. But she flicked a teasing glance up at me. “Loretta said to tell you to stay out of the cookies in the freezer.”

  “Too late.” In my other hand, I already had a handful of frozen treats cradled in a square of paper towel.

  She grinned and accepted a cream-filled horn made by Irene Stossel’s mother. Sage popped it into her mouth. “I love them frozen. They last longer this way.”

  I handed over the rest of the cookies, sprawled onto her bed, and held the sopping ice cube to my lip. “Loretta will never miss them.”

  “Are you kidding? She keeps a tally on a Post-it note.”

  “Good thing I threw away her Post-it note.”

  Sage climbed onto the bed and sat cross-legged beside me, just the way we had when she was little. Around us, her collection of well-loved stuffed animals sat crowded against her textbooks, her computer, and a tangle of electronic charger cords. She took an inventory of the cookies in her hand. “I better not get blamed.”

  “Blame Zack. He’s always around.”

  Sage sucked on her cream horn, eyeing me warily. “Are you going to go ballistic again? About Zack?”

  “You could do worse than Zack.” I threw the ice cube into her trash can and picked out a frozen pecan sandy from her lap.

  Here was my opening—a chance to talk to Sage about all the stuff Flynn was so worried about, including Mr. Squishy.

  But her cell phone began chirping on the bed. Sage didn’t move to answer it. But her gaze landed on the phone, then cut to me.

  “You ignoring somebody?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s just Brian again, making sure I’m okay.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “How are the college applications coming? Is that what you’re working on here?” I waved my cookie at the nest of papers on the bed.

  “Not at the moment.” She avoided my eye. “They’re coming along, though.”

  “You sent any yet?”

  “Applications take time. There are lots of questions to fill in. Essays to write. I have to collect recommendations from teachers too, and that takes forever.”

  “You need any help?”

  Her cell phone stopped chirping, and she shook her head. “It’s all stuff I have to do myself, really. I’ve been busy. You know—with homework and stuff. Don’t worry. I’ll get ’em done.”

  Most of the time, I let Sage pretty much do whatever she liked. If something looked like it might get out of hand, I trusted Aunt Loretta to play the heavy. Loretta was much more attuned to the subtle signs of looming disaster. Me, I tended to notice the bad stuff only when it blew up in my face.

  I knew I should be asking Sage about why she was avoiding her college applications. Why she wasn’t talking to me about Mr. Squashy. Why she hadn’t thrown Zack out of her life completely.

  But I couldn’t do it. The moment felt too good just then—too sweet to be ruined by a lot of squabbling about stuff that seemed very far removed from that warmly cluttered room.

  As if enjoying the same lull of peace between us, Sage said, “I’m sorry I got so manic last time you were here. About Kiley, I mean.”

  “I probably deserved it.” I popped the cookie into my mouth. “Sorry about the yelling.”

  She nodded her acceptance of my apology. Simple as that. “Kiley told her mom everything, by the way. This afternoon.”

  “Wow, I thought I heard a nuclear explosion today.”

  “It wasn’t that bad. I mean, it was pretty awful, don’t get me wrong. Her mom went insane.”

  “Did they call the police? About Gino Martinelli?”

  “I don’t know the details. Kiley only had time to text me, real fast, in between shrieking sessions.” With a sidelong glance at me, she said, “I guess it was pretty icky that she was sleeping with a guy old enough to be her father.”

  “Super icky.”

  Shaking her head, my beautiful daughter said, “Kiley can be impulsive. She has no judgment.”

  “It wasn’t her fault, Sage. Gino was the adult. He was a predator, simple as that. She has to take a little responsibility for being susceptible, maybe, but he’s the criminal, the one who deserves to be punished.”

  “But for him to get punished, Kiley has to go through a lot of hell. Police, doctors, lawyers, the whole bit. Her mother wants to sweep it under the rug so nobody else finds out.”

  “Everybody’s going to find out anyway. If they go to the police, they get to control whose side of the story gets told. And Gino gets what’s coming to him.”

  Sage sighed. “I dunno. It’s all pretty awful.”

  “Have another cookie.”

  She took one. I did, too. Sage smiled at me, and my heart did a loopdeeloop. Having a kid has its moments.

  Her cell phone went off again, and she sighed with impatience.

  “Go ahead and answer,” I said. “I’ll step outside, if you want.”

  “No need for that.” She snatched up her phone and flipped it open. “Yes?” she snapped. “Brian, I’m still here in my room, so chill, okay? I’m w
ith my mom.… Yes, my mom. You want to talk to her?… I didn’t think so. Stop calling and go to bed, will you?”

  She clicked the phone shut.

  “Problem?” I asked.

  “He just wants to know where I am,” she said, instantly serene again. “It’s no big deal. But it gets a little annoying sometimes.”

  I could have asked her more, but instead I reached out and tugged on one of her pigtails. “I need some information. You mind doing a little Googling for me?”

  She sat up straighter and pulled her computer into her lap. “Sure. What do you want to know?”

  “A woman got killed last night. A person I knew from high school, in fact. Turns out, she was married to two men at the same time. And had two kids, one with each husband.”

  Sage’s eyes opened with surprise. “How’d she pull that off?”

  “It must have been tricky. I mean, she had a lot of secrets to keep straight. And how do you keep track of what goes on with two kids? I’ve got half my brain designated to knowing when your next basketball game is.”

  “Do you?” Sage seemed surprised.

  “Have I missed a game yet?”

  “No, but—I guess you’re right. How’d she keep everything straight?”

  “She was a smart lady. Smarter than I am, that’s for sure.”

  “What do you mean?” A suspicious frown. “Why do you want to know about her, Mom?”

  I’d prepared my answer for this question during the drive over. Smoothly, I said, “I was doing some business with her just before she was killed.”

  “You mean you were there when it happened? Were you in danger?”

  “No, nothing like that. She died after I met with her. I wonder if there’s something I could have done that might have kept her from getting killed.”

  Sage smiled gently. “That’s a nice thought, Mom, but you can’t be everywhere at once. Just be thankful you weren’t hurt.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  Sage was back on her computer. “What’s her name?”

  “Clarice Crabtree. One husband is Mitch Mitchell. The other is Eckelstine—Richard, I think.”

  Sage went to work, happily rattling her computer keys and munching the last of the cookies at the same time.

  “Here’s a little info about Mitch Mitchell,” she reported after a couple of minutes of muttering at her computer screen. “Looks like he owned a company called Cultural Excavations. Cool! See this? He dug up stuff at archaeological sites. Here’s his picture on one of those little bulldozers at that place in New Mexico where they find Native American artifacts.”

  I looked at the photo, now several years old, judging by Mitchell’s current hairline. “He might get a bad sunburn with his shirt off like that.”

  Sage laughed. “You think he’s selling more than his bulldozer, much?”

  Mr. Beefcake had posed himself in a dramatic setting with his abs highlighted by the sunset. I began to understand what Clarice Crabtree might find so appealing about Mitchell. I felt pretty sure she wasn’t wearing thong underwear for the mollusk man. “What else do you see?”

  “Some pictures in Siberia where they found all those woolly mammoths in the permafrost. Pretty cool, right? They pulled whole animals right out of the ice—hardly any damage after thousands of years.”

  “Yeah, cool, but what about the people?”

  Sage continued to type on her keyboard. She frowned some more. “Funny thing. The stuff about Mitchell kinda dies out, like maybe he’s not in business anymore. The last picture of him actually digging stuff was years ago. But there’s a lot of information here about his daughter. Sugar Mitchell. See? She’s an ice-skater.”

  Sage spun the screen so I could see photos of Mitchell’s daughter Sugar in her spangled skating outfits at various ages. Sugar twirling on the ice as a toddler. Sugar skating with one leg up in the air like a Rockette. Sugar accepting a trophy as a teenager, triumphantly smiling into the camera. And another trophy. And another and another.

  “She’s cute,” I said.

  Sage gave me a horrified look. “You’ve got to be kidding! Mom, in some of these old pictures she looks like one of those five-year-old sexpot beauty queens. Lipstick at that age? It’s just creepy.”

  “Her outfit is cute.”

  “She looks like a hooker! Who puts a push-up bra on a kid?”

  “How old do you think she is?”

  “In this picture? Maybe ten. Now she’s—what? Fifteen? But she’s really successful.” Sage pointed at the screen. “Look, here’s a newspaper article about her.”

  We both bent over the laptop and read a piece about Sugar being a big ice-skating champion, maybe heading to the Olympics someday. In the background of Sugar’s photo, we could see Mitch Mitchell, smiling proudly. No sign of Clarice, though.

  “Huh,” I said, skimming the gushy article. “Looks like Sugar’s been on the road more than she’s been at home. Her dad travels with her. That’s one way not to notice your wife’s married to somebody else.”

  “Let’s look up the other husband.” Sage tapped her keys again. “What’s his name?”

  “Eckelstine. Richard.”

  The information about Richard Eckelstine started with a family tree.

  “His family was real important a long time ago,” Sage said. “His great-grandfather invented some kind of iron-processing thingie. I bet they had buckets of money. See this mansion? It belonged to them, like, a hundred years ago. Now it’s an apartment building. And here? Looks like they gave a lot of money to a museum once.”

  We found some incomprehensible articles Richard himself had written about snails. Lots and lots of articles about snails. Apparently, he hadn’t shared his wife’s interest in digging up dead animals.

  “Mostly, he does research,” Sage said. “Oh, wait, here’s a picture of him at a charity ball. With Clarice, I guess?”

  “Yeah, that’s her.”

  I peered at the screen. Richard Eckelstine wore a stiff tuxedo, and Clarice was gussied up in a long gown with earrings the size of hotel chandeliers. The photo had been a candid shot, I could see, from a couple of years ago. The photographer caught them entering a ballroom with tall flower arrangements on either side of the doorway. Clarice looked like she was going to a funeral, not a party. Her husband gave the camera a feeble smile.

  On a hunch, I said, “Try looking up their son. He goes by Richie. Maybe he’s an ice-skater, too?”

  I waited while Sage glared intently at her screen. She had always been a cute kid, but lately Sage was growing into her nose and her long limbs. No wonder all the boys were taking notice of her. By the time she graduated from high school in the spring, she was going to be a knockout.

  I just hoped she planned on being a knockout in college, not working at some ice-cream stand and taking cell phone calls from slacker boyfriends.

  Sage chewed her lower lip. “Nope, no ice-skating for Richie. I see his name in a kids skateboarding competition a couple of years ago, but that’s it. Whoa!” Sage sat back from the computer. “Get this. Looks like Richie Eckelstine has been arrested.”

  “For what?”

  “Can’t tell. Juvenile records are sealed.”

  If Richie Eckelstine had lived in my neighborhood, at least two hundred people would know what he’d been charged with, the result of his court appearance, the name of his probation officer, and what color socks he wore on Wednesdays.

  “Let me check Facebook,” Sage said. “Maybe I can learn something.”

  Facebook checking involved going through the steps of being “friended,” which sometimes took a while, so I finished off the cookies and put my head on Sage’s pillow. She typed and clicked, and I closed my eyes.

  Sage’s room had been mine up until she was born. I hadn’t spent much time in it when I was a teenager. Mostly, it was a place to crash when I wasn’t out running around. I’d painted the room pink before Sage was born, though, and the two of us had shared it until she started first grade.
I kept her in a crib in the corner at first; then we shared the double bed.

  Gradually, though, I’d moved my life out of the house. As Sage grew into a person who needed a parent, Loretta took over more and more of the daily routine of child rearing. I checked in most nights and helped her with her algebra, her geometry, and finally trigonometry. But Loretta was the grown-up in Sage’s daily life. Maybe that had been a bad thing for me to do.

  The more Sage had watched me, though, the more I’d felt like I was doing everything wrong.

  Tonight it felt nice to be back in the room we’d shared. Cozy. Uncomplicated.

  Fleetingly, I wondered if Clarice had been a good mother. Did she tuck her kids into bed every night? Check their report cards? Make special sandwiches? Set a good example? How had she pulled it all off?

  I woke up in the morning when Sage hit her alarm and rolled out of bed for school.

  While she bustled around the room, she told me what she learned about Richie Eckelstine.

  “He got arrested for graffiti.” Sage wriggled into a pair of black leggings and pulled a short dress over her head. “He did a couple thousand dollars of damage at his school and got caught when his friends turned him in.”

  I yawned. “Nice friends.”

  “Graffiti might look cool, Mom, but it’s the first sign of neighborhoods going to pot, not to mention expensive to clean up. After the school incident, the police figured out he was responsible for spraying paint all over a bunch of businesses. Even some university buildings. He was in big trouble. His parents agreed to pay damages, though.”

  I sat up and pushed away a throw blanket that somebody had tucked around me during the night. “How did you learn of all this? Facebook?”

  Sage grabbed a couple of shirts out of her closet and held them up against herself, looking in the mirror to check her reflection. She gave me a grin in her mirror. “I have my methods.”

  “You’re a genius.” I stretched in the bed. “Can I give you a lift to school?”

  “No, thanks. I like walking. It clears my head. Gets me ready for the academic challenges of the day.”