Your Alibi

by Annie Dean

  Nope.

  "I'm back,” he told his boss’ voice mail. “And I'll be in the office tomorrow. I've got a great story for you."

  The air conditioning had kicked in cool while he took care of business. Shutting off the vents, he rolled down the windows and breathed in the springtime. The air smelled different here, a little heavier, more humidity from the river, and just tinged with carbon from vehicle exhaust.

  "Well, well,” said a familiar voice.

  Carole Crenshaw. Why in the world would she be in long-term parking? Didn't she say she'd just accepted a six-month contract job here? For a moment he felt put upon, but he mustered up a polite smile. His mama had raised him right.

  "Hello again, Ms. Crenshaw."

  Despite his best efforts, his face must've shown something because she explained, “I had to go back to San Diego to tidy up some loose ends, sublet my apartment, that kind of thing. I'm working outside Williamsburg."

  For the life of him he couldn't remember what she did. “Welcome back then."

  Maybe she'd expected something out of her overtures, and he'd disappointed her because she no longer looked so pleased to see him. “Well, good luck,” she said coolly, and got into the cute little red Honda in the next space.

  Finally he put the truck in gear and paid for his parking on the way out. Trees greened up the road as they hadn't out in Doghouse Junction, and he got on the 64, mentally pacing himself by exits: Wrights Corner, Barhamsville, Toano, Skimino. Pretty soon he came to the one that should've meant he was nearly home and pulled off to the side of the road.

  It was time for new beginnings.

  No more Cami or Addie or Carole Crenshaw. Maybe he was done with women entirely. He'd decorate his new apartment with beer cans, neon and stolen road signs. Never pick up his underwear again.

  He put the cell to his ear. “Miss Walker?” he asked, after a moment, ignoring the live coal frying inside his chest. “Do you still have that loft to rent?"

  Chapter Thirty

  "You must be crazy,” Lorene said. “Tell me again."

  Addie sighed. It had been two weeks since Sean left and it didn't seem like Lorene had let up since. And okay, maybe she missed him, but it wasn't like he'd been around so long that she'd gotten used to having him around. Life had returned to its usual rhythm with sporadic alibi calls and early baking.

  "The story doesn't change, you know. He said he'd be back, it wasn't over between us, and I made him understand it was a holiday fling. No big deal."

  "No, I just keep hoping you'll come to your senses and call him.” Her friend wagged the paring knife at her before she went back to peeling apples for the crisp Addie was making. “What holiday were you celebrating? April Fool's Day?"

  Knowing the other woman meant well, she forced a smile. “We're limited to one happy ending around here. More hearts and flowers and people will start hurling."

  Obviously thinking about Manu for a minute, she said, somewhat smugly, “We are pretty cute, aren't we?"

  "Disgustingly so. He's nuts about you.” She was glad about that; truly she was. “He needs a woman to manage him. That's partly why he was so lost when Mel died. He loved her, of course, but it was more than that. It left him feeling rootless. Useless. Now he's got you to boss him around and he couldn't be happier."

  "I heard that.” Manu carried a bag of into the kitchen and set it on the counter. He'd gone for cinnamon and brown sugar when Addie complained that her supplies had gone stale. The man took his apple crisp seriously. “I have something to show to you."

  Pulling a bottle out of a plain paper sack, he presented it to Addie like it was an award. She took a closer look at it. “A and M Masterful Meat Marinade,” she read. The label was elegantly designed in black and gold, good for beef, chicken or pork.

  "You like it?"

  Lorene had stopped peeling apples and was watching for her reaction every bit as intently as her man. It took a minute, and then she figured it out. Her smile came like sunrise over the mountain, and she felt her eyes brimming.

  "It's ours."

  "Yeah.” Manu still looked hesitant. “You told me to come up with an idea. You like to cook, I like to grill, so it's a natural, right? We turn this place into a restaurant more than an inn, though people can still rent rooms if they want. We'll get more local business that way if people know they can come out here to get a nice meal."

  Propping himself against the counter, he watched her for a reaction and she gave him a nod to let him know she wanted him to go on. So he did. “There's no place in Doghouse Junction to eat except the bar. We could put tables on the terrace. If the restaurant takes off, we might need to do some remodeling, combine the lounge and the dining room into one big space.” He'd clearly given this a lot of thought. “As a sideline, we sell our sauces and marinades. Lorene has already agreed to stock them at the Kwik-Stop and she's calling the local supermarkets for us. To start we make them and bottle them all by hand, here in our kitchen."

  At that, Addie looked around, seeing the room as if for the first time: butcher-block table, built-in booth beside the terrace doors, dried palm fronds, spice racks and pans hanging overhead. She remembered how pleased her mother was with the green marble tiles and the matching countertops. The appliances were seven years old now, but well maintained. Could this kitchen survive another business venture? Could she? There was no question she'd rather cook than provide alibis but would the money come as quick?

  As she hesitated, Manu murmured, “You promised."

  True.

  "All right,” she said finally. “We'll give it a go. But I'm not shutting down the other business until we're sure we can make a living at this."

  "I'll help with marketing.” Lorene joined her man at the counter, standing no higher than his shoulder, smiling when he wrapped a meaty arm about her. “The Kwik-Stop is more or less self-maintaining, so I can take the time to get you some orders. If you let me use your computer, I can work up some flyers for the restaurant too."

  "Don't go overboard,” Addie warned. “I can't imagine how long it'll take to make enough of that marinade to bottle and sell. And what licenses do we need? Is there a difference between the food preparation permit for the bed and breakfast...?” Which might well be expired, she realized.

  "If you're going to serve wine, you'll need a liquor license,” Lorene told her.

  Well, she'd known that much already. Mentally she tried to calculate how long it had been since she filed the paperwork for the Grail, but she came up empty. She'd have to check the records.

  "Are we zoned to run a restaurant out here?” Addie glanced at Manu, wondering whether he'd researched all this.

  "In the same way truck stops are,” he answered. “Even though this isn't a mass transit route I think we can slip through the system that way."

  "You're five miles from the Kwik-Stop,” Lorene said thoughtfully. “And I'm on the San Diego haul, I researched it before I built the place. Most of my drivers would detour that far for a good meal, I bet, they're always telling me how they get tired of fast food and crappy truck stop fare."

  They all had the same thought but Addie voiced it. “We can't possibly cater to truck drivers with the parking we've got out front."

  Manu appeared to consider the problem. “How much of the surrounding land do we own?"

  Hearing him say ‘we’ sparked a smile, and Addie headed for the office out front. “Lorene, could you finish up the crisp? I need to do some digging in the files."

  "I'd rather dig in the files,” the other woman muttered.

  She stopped in the arch that led out of the kitchen toward the foyer and the stairwell. “Well, have at it. I'd rather cook."

  "You're serious?” Lorene laid down her paring knife.

  "Absolutely. Everything's alphabetized. If you can't find what we're looking for, call me.” She glanced at Manu. “You going or staying?"

  He picked up the knife and went to work on the apples in answer while Lorene went
to dig around in the deeds and records. They worked for a while in silence as she considered the idea. As with any business venture it contained a certain amount of risk, but she suspected the startup costs would be significant by her standards.

  Money from the alibi business trickled in steadily enough to keep them afloat and make regular payments on her credit cards but it didn't generate investment level income by any means. So where would they get the money?

  Four days later, the answer came from an unexpected source.

  "Fifty thousand, Pop?” Addie stared at the check, feeling like she ought to pinch someone for a reality check.

  Lem Buckley didn't invent stuff that Exxon wanted to manufacture. He exploded toilets and spent his days mourning the loss her mother and sister. The man inhaled brownies at a prodigious rate and gazed at his remaining family through his spectacles with unseeing eyes. He certainly didn't drive to Texas and back under his own steam.

  "No shit!” Lorene exclaimed, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. “Er, sorry, Mr. Buckley."

  "Quite all right.” Her dad was glowing; there was no other word for it. “That's more or less what I said. That's what they paid me for the patent on Dropfire, and according to the contracts, we'll get a percent when it goes into mass production. They want to run more tests, of course, assure themselves it's not a fluke. But they'll get there.” He sounded uncommonly self-assured. “We're going to make serious money from this. Someday."

  So she said the only thing she could. “I'm proud of you."

  Still gangly, goofy like an aging stork, Lem hugged her tight and he smelled like he always had, vaguely of oil and chemicals and hot metal. But it was comforting. While Addie fixed dinner, Manu and Lorene filled Lem in on their business plan.

  Her dad didn't know what she'd been doing to make money for the last year and the other three had agreed it was best he didn't. He'd just blame himself for failing to take care of things properly, and he was just now starting to stand tall like he had before Maria died. Nobody wanted to see him back down in the basement for fourteen hours a day again, unless he had an idea for something else that really worked, because what started as a hobby had turned into an obsession.

  "I think it sounds like a great idea,” Lem said. “And it'd be nice to have people out here again. Your mom would've loved that."

  "Yeah,” Addie said softly. “She would."

  Weeks passed in a flurry of filling out forms and buying supplies. She managed the alibi business, but it slacked off as spring blossomed. People probably felt like they had less to escape from when the weather turned nice. Outside her garden glowed with purple and green, though the distant hills shone gold with sere shrubs and grasses.

  As spring lengthened toward summer, she was busy, but happy. Or she should have been. If she felt the niggling sense of something missing, she told herself it would go away in time. The ache lodged firmly beneath her sternum would surely dissipate soon, and when she closed her eyes at night, she'd stop seeing Sean's stricken face.

  Around the first of June, Ben Fuller came out to tell her that Eddie had been sentenced to eighteen months. Apparently, there had been some outstanding warrants that weighed the judge's decision. She smiled because she knew he could have called with the info—there was no reason for him to drive all this way.

  Like he knew she knew, he fidgeted for a moment on the corredor, hat in hand. “So you're almost open for business,” he observed.

  Addie nodded, proud of the newly expanded gravel lot and the remodel job one of her cousins had done on the dining room. Relatives in Maria's old address book had come out of the woodwork to help them get this thing off the ground, and she found herself awed all over again. A talent for building ran in the family, so they'd been inundated with offers from people who could do plaster and plumbing, whatever else.

  They all said more or less the same thing: “Maria took us in when nobody else would, and she never asked for a thing, so this is the least we can do for her now."

  Addie had never been able to ask for help, but Manu and Lorene could. And she was learning that her mother's family hadn't deserted her when she needed them most; they just hadn't known what she needed or how to offer it. And like Manu had said, that was her fault.

  In a very real way, this place stood as a monument to her mother's grace and generosity, so she couldn't feel any regret at all over the path she'd chosen to preserve it. But it was time for something else, a business where everyone would share the load. Soon they'd find out how well that idea worked.

  Now and again, she wondered how Sean was doing. He'd promised to send her a copy of the article when it ran, but she hadn't heard from him. A few times, she'd considered buying a subscription to the Sharpeville Post, just so she could read his articles, but Manu would see the paper, and he'd tell Lorene, and then she'd never get any peace about why she hadn't called him.

  Ben broke into her thoughts when he cleared his throat. “Where do you go when you do that? Half the time I feel like you're not even here with me."

  I'm not, she thought. When she went away like that, she was standing in a pine forest, looking up at the greenery of a different mountain range. The air would smell more verdant, but there wouldn't be the scent of cactus, grape hyacinth and purple coneflower wafting from the garden.

  "I'm just tired,” she said aloud. “But I was thinking about everything we've done, everything left to do before the fourth of July opening. We're kicking the place off right with a BBQ, all the beer and beef you can hold for ten dollars a head."

  He whistled. “That's a hell of a deal. Whole town might turn out for that."

  "I'm a little afraid of that."

  "Are you afraid of this?” The deputy bent, cupped her face in his hand, and surprised her with an exceptionally well-turned kiss.

  When he lifted his head, there was no doubt in her mind that Ben Fuller was one of the best kissers in the county, and she'd done a significant amount of independent testing. She gazed up at him as if seeing him for the first time. Sure, he was thin but he carried a wiry strength along with it. His narrow face could be charming when he smiled; he had good teeth and eyes that gleamed like a lazy low-country river.

  Her pulse should've been pounding like tribal drums, ready to drag him upstairs and have a little fun. Her vibrator probably had cobwebs on it, as she hadn't touched it in months, but her hormones had kicked into low ebb. Addie told herself she'd get past it; she was just tired from running day after day, trying to get the business off the ground.

  "No,” she said quietly. “I'm not afraid of that."

  Sex was one thing she did exceptionally well. All the sticky emotional stuff that came after made her cut and run, though. She was the original good-time girl, after all. Or she used to be.

  He studied her for a moment and then he sighed, jamming his hat back on his head. “It's never going to happen for us, is it?"

  She wondered why he sounded so bitter, but she couldn't lie to him. “I don't think so, Ben. I just don't feel like that about you."

  His eyes said she'd felt that way about pretty much everyone else. “I've been crazy about you since we were fifteen, you know. You were always so wild. Sweet and funny too, but never unkind. Other people made jokes, but I'd speak up. Said you were just free-spirited, not loose. I thought if I was patient enough..."

  "You were too patient.” She shrugged. “I'm not sure what I want now, but I know it's not what I've had before."

  Ben went on as if she hadn't spoken. “I wanted to be the one placed to catch you when you got tired of living like that. I thought if I timed it right, you'd eventually give me a try and see that I can make you happy."

  "Nobody can make me happy but me,” she told him, surprised to find it was true.

  Addie didn't watch him drive away.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  After the staff meeting, Sean strode out into the hall, gazed up at the perforated tile ceiling and muttered, “Why me?"

  He'd been d
oing that regularly for several weeks now, but this time his boss overheard him. “My office,” Carter said in his neutral voice. “Right now."

  Great.

  "Couple things.” The other man sank into the leather executive chair that was the only expensive item in a small, cluttered office. Being editor-in-chief of a small-town paper didn't lend itself to airy corner offices with a view of the river.

  "Of course."

  He had work to do, not that the she-devil currently auditing the paper had been letting him get anything accomplished. Good thing he'd come from vacation with a story ready to go—and Carter had liked it—because that woman hadn't let him get a lick of writing done since. With a muffled sigh, Sean subsided in the vinyl chair on the other side of the desk, his gaze touching on award plaques and various memorabilia without really seeing it.

  "First, we're getting a lot of response letters on the series you wrote about the alibi service. Half of them are shocked and condemning, the anonymous others claim they used the service and it worked out great."

  "Excellent.” He made the reply, knowing his lack of enthusiasm was going to get him chewed out, even if he hadn't been in trouble before being called in here.

  Slim and well-dressed, Carter was the most elegant thing Sharpeville had seen since Bed, Bath and Beyond opened up an outlet. His ties always coordinated with socks and shirt, and he even gelled his hair, which led a lot of the newsies to mutter that he was gay. The fact that he didn't date so far as anyone could tell and refused all fix-up attempts just damned him further, so far as staff was concerned, but maybe he just didn't want to deal with the hassle; maybe he was coming off a bad relationship himself. Sean could sympathize on both counts.

  "Second thing, I think it's time for us to talk, seriously, about what's going on with you and..."

  "Nothing!” he bit out, knowing he sounded defensive. “She's got it in for me, I'm telling you."

  Carter didn't try to dispute the obvious. “Clearly she does. She's been looking at your paperwork for two weeks solid now, but if you'd charged anything questionable she would have found it by now. That she's still looking tells me she has a gripe with you. What I want to know is: will there be fallout that I need to worry about?"