I stood up and headed back into the kitchen. Over my shoulder I said, ‘Bess, honey, the guy fell, or he jumped. Don’t try to make a mountain out of a molehill. The only point of interest here, other than for his wife and family, of course, is that your father and I were in that very parking garage only this morning.’
Bess jumped up. ‘Then you might have seen something!’
‘They only found him a little while ago, honey,’ Willis said. ‘We left the parking garage at around eleven this morning.’
‘So how often do the kitchen people go out that door? Hum? How long could he have lain there?’ Bess all but shouted.
‘I’m sure the police will look into that,’ Willis said.
I decided to ignore them and went back into the kitchen. Since losing thirty-five pounds, I’ve been learning to cook in a more healthy fashion. Tonight we were having broiled salmon with corn on the cob and a green salad. I knew my husband would go to the pantry and pile his plate with a couple of pieces of bread – wheat not white, there’s no white bread in the house! – but it was still better than having mashed potatoes or pasta. I know, I know, corn is a carb, but it’s still better than the alternatives.
‘It wasn’t on him,’ the smaller of the two men, Mr Smith, said into the phone.
‘Then where is it?’ the man on the other end of the phone, Mr Brown, demanded.
‘Mr Jones saw him throw a satchel into the back of a pickup truck. He got the license plate number.’
‘Give it to me!’ Mr Brown demanded.
Mr Smith grabbed Mr Jones’ arm and read the numbers off the palm of his hand to Mr Brown.
‘Stay put,’ Mr Brown said. ‘I’ll call you back with a location.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Mr Smith said and hung up.
‘What’s this?’ I asked Willis that night as we got ready for bed. He had finally brought our bags up from where he’d deposited them right next to the back door when we first came home. I was pointing at a black satchel that wasn’t mine and wasn’t his.
‘Isn’t that yours?’ he asked.
‘No, I only had the one bag,’ I said.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, bringing the satchel to my lap. ‘There’s no ID tag on the bag. Should we look inside?’
‘Cool!’ Willis said, always waiting for that pot of gold to show up. He sat down beside me. ‘Open it!’
I did. No form of ID inside either. Nothing but men’s clothes – a couple of T-shirts, a pair of jeans, and some underwear. And a Dopp kit. Opening the kit still didn’t give us an ID, or a pot of gold, just some Aqua Velva aftershave, an old electric razor, a can of Right Guard, some nail clippers, and all the stuff the Driscoll puts out in the bathroom for their patrons to use – little bars of soap, little bottles of shampoo, conditioner, body lotion, and hand lotion, all shoved in the corner.
‘OK, so this guy’s a thief, but that’s all I see,’ Willis said.
I could feel my face heating up as I defended him. ‘They put that stuff out there for you to use! So what if you use it at home or at the hotel? They want you to use it, for God’s sake!’
‘How much of that shit did you steal?’ my husband asked me with a grin.
‘That’s not the point,’ I said, and deflected further questioning with a question of my own. ‘You think any of this stuff will fit you? Anything in the Dopp kit you want?’
He pulled out one of the T-shirts. ‘If I weighed a hundred and fifty pounds maybe,’ he said, looking at the clothes. ‘Which I haven’t since I was in eighth grade.’
‘What about the Dopp kit?’
‘That razor’s older than I am, and you won’t let me wear Aqua Velva.’ He took out the can of Right Guard and shook it. He frowned. ‘I’m not so sure about using another man’s deodorant.’
‘Jeez, Willis, it’s not a roll-on.’
‘Naw.’ He stood up and took both the Aqua Velva and the Right Guard and put them in the bathroom trash can.
‘This Dopp kit is older than mine, but it’s real leather. It’s in pretty good shape,’ he said.
‘Are you going to keep it?’ I asked.
‘Should I?’ he asked.
‘Why not?’
‘Is it stealing?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Somehow this got in our truck and possession is nine-tenths of the law, right?’
‘Actually, that’s wrong,’ he said. ‘But we have no idea who to give it back to, so I guess we’re in the clear. And I like this leather. Really soft and aged. Classy.’
‘Did you just say “classy”?’ I said, raising my eyebrows.
‘No,’ he said, going back in the bathroom.
I put the clothes back in the satchel, zipped it up, and set it by the bed.
Willis came out of the bathroom. ‘What are going to do with that?’ he asked.
‘Take it to Goodwill in the morning,’ I said, turning off my bedside light.
‘Yeah, that’s best,’ he said. ‘I’m going to read for a while. That OK with you?’
‘No problem,’ I said, turning over and shutting my eyes. I may have been asleep before my eyes were actually shut, I was that tired.
The phone rang in Mr Smith’s hand. ‘Hello?’ he said.
‘There’s a place called Black Cat Ridge, right outside a town called Codderville, either side of the Colorado River, on the way to Houston. The truck is registered to a guy named Willis Pugh, lives at 4210 Sagebrush Trail in Black Cat Ridge. Get that satchel, find what I want and do it now.’
Before Mr Smith could say, ‘Yes, sir,’ Mr Brown had hung up. Mr Smith turned to Mr Jones. ‘Road trip,’ he said.
VERA’S STORY
MONDAY
It was six-thirty on Monday morning and I was standing around the parking lot of my church, waiting for the bus and my friend Gladys Cook to show up. She was to be my roommate. At least it wasn’t cold, I said to the woman standing next to me, who nodded her agreement.
Now, I’ve been a God-fearing, twice-on-Sunday Southern Baptist for most of my life, and I believe a preacher, especially a Baptist preacher, should be spouting fire and brimstone if his mouth is open. Scare those sinners half to death, I always say. Only way to get their attention.
But then our long-time preacher, Brother George, ups and retires and we wind up with Brother Joe Logan. I’m not sure if we’re being punished for something or not. Not only does he not preach fire and brimstone, he’s pretty damn close to being a liberal, if you ask me. And I’m sorta an authority on liberals in my church, seeing as how my son, Willis, married the queen of liberals, my daughter-in-law, E.J. That about says it all right there – won’t even go by her Christian name. She’d rather go by initials. I’ve tried calling her Eloise, her Christian name, but by the looks she gives me when I do that, I’ve always been afraid she’d keep my grandchildren away from me. Now that they’re all teenagers, I guess I don’t have to worry about that. Not that I see ’em much anymore.
But back to this new preacher. The most damning thing about him, of course, is that he’s a bachelor, which just isn’t right. I don’t think he’s one of them homosexuals you hear about all the time, but I do believe he’s got an evil eye for the ladies, and some of ’em aren’t quite old enough for him to be having even a good eye on, if you know what I mean.
Little Beth Simpson just about drools every time she looks at him, and she’s still in high school. And that Rachael Donley, that young, separated woman in choir, she’s all up in his business. And he don’t seem to mind it a bit. Did I mention she’s just separated? She’s not divorced. I think a Baptist preacher should be a married man, preferably with children – at least two. If we’re all for family values, then the preacher should be leading an example, right? Now, that’s just my opinion, but a bachelor Baptist preacher? Uh uh. That’s just wrong. And there’s a commandment against what him and Rachael Donley are thinking of doing – or have already done, but I’m not one to talk out of school.
At least that Donley woma
n is an alto, so I don’t have to stand near her in the choir loft because I’m a soprano. But myself and everybody else in the loft get to see the googly eyes the two share almost the entire service. I can hardly keep my mind on the sermon, thinking about the way the two of them were looking at each other. It’s downright disgusting.
Our former preacher, Brother George, was a good man, married with four children, and his wife was a perfect preacher’s wife. Not too pretty, not too thin, not too ugly either, and certainly not fat. Sister Edith was just a medium woman’s woman, who cooked and sewed, and did her own housework. And she started a quilting club while she was our church’s first lady. I belonged to that quilting club for nigh on twenty years, and then her and Brother George up and retired, and Brother Joe comes in and doesn’t even have a first lady. Well, it sure didn’t take long for the quilting club to disband. Heck, there were only three of us left, anyway. These younger women can’t get off their cell phones long enough to sit and have a chat without Tweeting or IM’ing, or texting, or whatever it is they’re doing!
We got a notice back in the summer, before Brother George and Sister Edith left for their retirement home in the Hill Country, that our choir had been chosen to perform at the Southern Baptist National Meeting in the fall in, of all places, Washington, D.C. I say of all places because, really, who could use a little Southern Baptist influence more than those politicians up there?
So here we were in the parking lot of the church, ready to board the bus for the trip to D.C., when we get word that my would-be roommate, Gladys, and Sister Sharon, our choir director, both got the flu, and that Brother Joe, our bachelor preacher, was gonna go in Sister Sharon’s stead, having directed the choir in his old church. Well, I can tell you one person who was happy about this chain of events, and that would be, of course, Rachael Donley. And a couple of the other younger women – all of them married. Let me just say that in thirty-three years of marriage, I never looked at another man. Ever. And that’s the gospel truth! These younger women, I swear to God, are all depraved! Even my own daughter-in-law likes to say how she’d do this or that with this or that actor, just because he looks good without his shirt on! I only know this because I occasionally stumble across her Facebook page – purely by accident.
If all this fal-de-ral with the preacher wasn’t bad enough, I was still reeling from saying goodbye to my grandson, Graham, who’d gone off to college over the weekend. Saying goodbye to the boy was hard – almost as hard as saying goodbye to his daddy twenty-something years ago when he went off to the same college.
If I wasn’t such a strong woman, I might cry.
MONDAY
I was in the kitchen doling out breakfast. It was a typical Monday morning, with the exception that my son was missing. The new school year hadn’t started yet in Black Cat Ridge, but the girls had junior orientation today. They needed to be at the school by nine o’clock, and it was now after eight.
Alicia was already downstairs, eating Fruit Loops and orange juice. A short while later, Bess was down.
‘Whatja eating?’ she asked Alicia, leaning over her shoulder to see. She made a face. ‘Do I have to have cereal?’ she asked me.
‘Of course not. Would you like me to fix you a bagel? I have cream cheese.’
‘Oh, yeah! That sounds good!’ Bess said, crawling up into one of the high stools by the bar that separated the kitchen from the family room.
‘Where’s Megan?’ I asked Bess.
‘In the bathroom. Still,’ Bess said. ‘She’s been in there forty-five minutes. I’m going to have to put my make-up on in the car. I barely got a chance to pee!’
‘Not at the table,’ I said.
Both girls giggled.
I sighed. ‘I didn’t mean don’t pee at the table, I meant—’
But then they were laughing out loud so I just gave up.
The girls finished, grabbed their backpacks full of back-to-school goodness (they’d be getting their assigned lockers today), and headed for the front door. ‘Call up to Megan, please,’ I asked.
Both girls started shouting up the stairs. ‘Meggggggan!’ Bess yelled. ‘We’re leeeeeeaving you!’
‘Megan! Come on! It’s time to go!’ yelled the more mature Alicia. It was hard to believe they were all sixteen.
I packed up the perishables and headed for the back door. Bess and Alicia were already out, heading to the minivan in the garage. I’d campaigned vigorously for a new vehicle last summer, thinking we wouldn’t need the minivan since Graham had a car and would take the girls anywhere they wanted to go. But then Willis reminded me that Graham would be going off to college in the fall and taking his car with him. I was in total denial at that stage. So we compromised. I’d received a very nice book check (I write romance novels and it’s getting pretty lucrative after twenty years), and we decided I could get my Audi R8 Spyder (a silver two-seater to die for) and keep the old but reliable minivan for the girls.
All three had taken driver’s ed during the spring so all three were eligible to drive. We’d have to draw straws every morning to see who drove, or make a schedule or something. But today I was taking them because I was on the refreshment committee for the orientation program. Two more years and no more of this high-school crap, I thought as I started up the car. Megan ran out the door and tried to jump in the shotgun seat but Alicia was already sitting there.
‘Hey! I called shotgun last night!’ Megan yelled.
‘You snooze, you lose!’ Alicia said and stuck her tongue out at Megan.
I was able to suppress my giggle as I handed a granola bar to Megan. I may be cruel, but I’m not mean.
Mr Smith and Mr Jones had been watching from across the street as Willis Pugh left his home in the pickup truck. They followed him back across the Colorado River, which Mr Smith assured Mr Jones was not the same Colorado River as the one in say, Colorado, and to an office building in the town of Codderville.
Pugh parked his truck, got out and walked into the building. He wasn’t carrying the satchel. As soon as he was inside the building, Mr Smith told Mr Jones to go get the satchel from the truck.
Mr Jones got out of the rental car, went up to the pickup truck and looked in the cargo space. There was nothing there. He tried the lid of the silver box that stretched the width of the truck. It was unlocked. Inside were jumper cables, a tool box, a plastic bottle of coolant, a plastic bottle of windshield-wiper juice, and several red rags they sell at auto parts stores. Mr Jones looked up and made eye contact with Mr Smith, then shook his head. Mr Smith waved him back to the rental car.
They said nothing as Mr Smith turned the car around and headed back to Black Cat Ridge.
‘Hey, Mom, what’s that?’ Alicia asked, pointing to the satchel sitting on the console between us.
I glanced down. ‘Oh, that. We found it in the back of the truck.’ I shrugged. ‘Somebody must have gotten confused and put it in the wrong truck. Unfortunately there’s no ID in it, so we can’t return it. I’m taking it to Goodwill later.’
‘Can I have it?’ Alicia said, eyeing the satchel. ‘It looks like one of those old-fashioned house-call doctor bags, ya know? That would be a really cool schoolbag, rather than a backpack like everybody else!’
‘I want it!’ Megan shouted from the next row of seats.
‘Why?’ I asked her, glancing at her face in the rearview mirror.
‘Because she does!’ Megan said, and stuck her tongue out at her sister.
‘You are so childish,’ Alicia said, arms across her chest and looking straight out of the window.
‘Yes, you may have the satchel,’ I told Alicia. ‘Just take the clothes out and put them on the floor, and I’ll take those to Goodwill later.’
‘Thanks!’ she said with a grin, and proceeded to transfer everything from her backpack into the satchel.
‘I think it looks stupid!’ Megan said.
‘Oh, Megan, give it up,’ Bess said.
‘Bite me,’ Megan said.
�
��Really?’ Bess said. ‘May I?’
‘Cut it out!’ I said as I pulled into the high-school parking lot. We got out of the minivan and headed into the school, Bess and Megan with their backpacks, Alicia with her satchel, and me with one hundred mini-muffins that I’d bought at the grocery store but put in a basket with every intention of saying they were homemade.
TWO
MONDAY
Mr Smith and Mr Jones watched from across the street as the woman, presumably Mrs Willis Pugh, and her three daughters got out of the minivan and went into the school.
‘That’s it!’ Mr Jones shouted.
‘Not so loud, stupid!’ Mr Smith said. ‘Where?’
‘The second girl!’ Mr Jones thrust his finger toward Alicia. ‘The one with the long brown hair. She’s got the satchel!’
‘OK, so we know they have it. Let’s just wait it out. School hasn’t started yet, right?’
Mr Jones shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Mr Smith got out his phone, looked up the school by the name carved into the white rock cornice of the building, and called the number listed. It took four rings, but a frustrated-sounding voice finally said, ‘BlackCatHighhowmayIhelpyouPleasehold.’
Mr Jones looked at Mr Smith. ‘Well?’
Mr Smith gave Mr Jones a disgusted look. ‘I’m on hold.’
‘Yes?’ came the frustrated voice.
‘Are you in session today?’ Mr Smith asked.
‘School starts Wednesday, sir.’
‘What time do they get out today?’ Mr Smith asked.
‘Orientation lasts approximately two and a half hours,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ Mr Smith said and hung up.
Gone in a Flash Page 2