2 Days 'Til Sundae (2 'Til Series Book 1)

by Heather Muzik

  “Cat? You there?” Georgia prodded.

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “Oh, I think it’s exactly what I think.”

  She knew there was no use attempting to evade. “Okay, so it’s exactly what you think,” she blurted out. What could Georgia really do about it anyway? It was already done. She was here. Out of arm’s reach.

  “Of course it is.”

  “It’s mine, Georgia. I have to at least try to get it.”

  “So you flew to Minnesota?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And did you find it?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well I found the woman who bought it… but she sold it,” Catherine admitted, her head dropping dejectedly though her friend wasn’t there to observe it.

  “So you’re on your way back now?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What did you do?” Georgia demanded.

  “I found out who bought it, and I am on my way to pay him a little visit.”

  “You’re kidding, right? What are you, the mob?”

  “Georgia, it’s my toy. Mine.”

  “So you’re a four-year-old now?”

  “Be fair.”

  “I am being fair. You sound like a spoiled brat.”

  “But it’s mine,” she pled again.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that argument before, but possession—”

  “Oh shut up,” Catherine cut her off. “I’ll be flying back tomorrow—no harm, no foul.”

  “Just what are you planning to do?”

  “Well, I think I have a bead on the guy.”

  “Are you going to bring the perp in?” Georgia snickered derisively.

  “I just wanted to make sure that someone knew where I was. Maybe I should have called someone else, though.”

  “Are you threatening me with Tara?”

  “Maybe,” she muttered.

  “Well tell me you’ve at least bought a gun,” Georgia asserted plainly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean, if you’re doing this whole madwoman thing you might as well go all the way. A gun would be a great addition to the character.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” Catherine warned.

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  CLICK.

  Catherine closed the phone, partly frustrated and partly warmed by her friend’s concern. And now that someone knew where she was, at least the authorities would know where to start looking when she went missing.

  -15-

  She pulled into the mouth of the driveway and stopped. The only sign of life was a forlorn mailbox at the edge of the road that looked like it had gone a few rounds in the ring with a baseball bat. It seemed that high school kids still had nothing better to do.

  Lightening her foot on the brake, she rolled slowly through an open metal gate, the kind people use to corral horses. It was attached to a rough-hewn split rail fence that stretched out in either direction. Outside the fence there were overgrown bushes and vines trying to weave their way into the trim cultivated space on the other side that had the essence of contained wildness—woods full of pruned trees and ground free of debris. The gravel and dirt drive wound ahead of her, sloping slowly downward to a clearing, and in the middle of that, a house. It was a perfect cape cod—sage green with darker sage trim and four dormers peeking out of its weathered cedar roof above the wide front porch. The backyard grass gradually gave way to meadow as the land stretched beyond the house. It almost took her breath away, as did the sight of a golden retriever coming at her car full force from the backyard, lips and ears flapping wildly in the breeze he created with his own speed.

  Catherine rolled to a stop where the drive wound in a circle up to the front step. She turned off the engine and got out, hoping the dog was as friendly as he looked, holding the door open behind her as an emergency escape hatch in case he wasn’t. The dog thought to hell with her plan, closing the door as he pushed her up against the car in his clumsy attempts to hug her with his ungainly paws. She ruffled his fur good-naturedly—past boyfriends and her own family had never been as excited to see her as this big lug. Not just man’s best friend, huh?

  She caught sight of the tag on his collar. “Hey, boy. Hey, Magnus,” she crooned, scratching him through his golden coat. He responded with licks and heaving breaths of delight. Then suddenly he was down and gone, and she looked around flustered with wonder.

  Catherine heard the lazy gait of footfalls on the porch before she saw him. As her eyes picked up his shadowed form she became transfixed. He descended the steps and came out from under the roof into the sunlight, where his golden hair shown like a halo around him and his eyes were so soft and familiar, sparkling with good humor. For some reason she had expected something much different when she had imagined this guy, picturing more of an ogre who would steal children’s toys, perhaps hideously deformed—which he most certainly was not. Nowhere near. She honed in on his lips when he spoke.

  “Hey there, sorry ‘bout Magnus. He gets excited around the ladies.” His voice was as smooth as room temperature butter.

  “No problem. I’m on his turf. He can greet me however he wants.” She hoped she didn’t sound as nervous as she felt. She rubbed her palms along the thighs of her jeans as secretively as possible, attempting to mop up the sweat that was suddenly inexplicably covering them.

  “Still, I try to teach him better than that—to be more of a gentleman. Unless of course you’re selling something, in which case he was supposed to maul you before you could even get one foot out of the door,” he chuckled, nodding toward her car.

  She laughed tightly, wondering how he would take to someone soliciting him to sell something to her instead.

  “So, how can I help you?” he asked.

  “Are you Joel Trager?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Oh, excuse me,” she said, caught off-guard. She held out what she hoped was a reasonably dry hand. “My name is Catherine—Catherine Hemmings.”

  He looked back at her expectantly, making no move to come closer or shake the hand she offered.

  She withdrew it and dropped her arm dumbly by her side. “I don’t mean to bother you on a beautiful afternoon like this.”

  “No bother,” he said, squinting at her through the bright light in a way that made it look like he was smirking, enjoying her discomfort.

  “I really just needed to speak with a gentleman by the name of Joel Trager, and I was pointed in this direction. If you aren’t him then I’ll—”

  “I might be Joel Trager,” he interrupted. “Depends on what you want.”

  She gave him a questioning glance.

  “You aren’t here to say that Joel Trager’s been up to no good, are you? That he fathered your love child in a one-night stand nine years ago… or that you gave him some dread disease without knowing it?”

  “No,” she practically guffawed with nervousness. “Why, does that happen often?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  His tone was hard to read—joke or not—so she couldn’t grasp on any kind of seemingly proper response, just stood there forfeiting her move.

  “You’re not trying to sell your environmental religion,” he warned, nodding toward the car.

  “Nothing like that.” She colored deeply, wishing at that moment that her car was just a little smaller so she could hide it behind her back.

  “Well then, Joel Trager at your service. What can I do you for?” he asked, hands in his pockets in an overt show of disregard for proper greeting techniques.

  She took a deep breath, realizing that everything else before this was actually the easy part. “You see, Joel—I mean Fynn—”

  “Excuse me?” he asked, his face going pale. “I thought we didn’t know each other.”

  “I was told you went by Fynn,” she said carefully, uncertain of the clouds that had suddenly come to mask his eyes.

&
nbsp; “You must have heard wrong. Or maybe you’re in the wrong place,” he said tightly.

  “If you’re Joel Trager then I have the right place.” She didn’t care about nicknames or anything so paltry. He said he was Joel Trager, so she just wanted to get this over with. “The reason I’m here… well, it’s a little strange.”

  He visibly settled himself and the clouds moved away, leaving only clear blue again. “I’m good with strange.” He gave her a slow once-over.

  Catherine covered herself instinctively, playing with the collar of her crisp white blouse, wishing she’d buttoned it one or even three more holes. Then her hand found her necklace and stayed there, protectively covering most of her chest and clutching the butterfly ring like it was an emergency ripcord. She was in unfamiliar territory—his territory—far enough away from anyone that her screams would not register, and this guy was good with strange? What the hell does that even mean? Warning bells and whistles and foghorns were going off inside her head, but she stood her ground and forced the decidedly unprovocative words that she had practiced on the drive over, “I am looking for a toy. It’s a small dollhouse in the shape of an ice cream sundae.”

  His eyes glittered with recognition, but he gave her no more.

  “You see, I was bidding on one of those sets on eBay and I got outbid by a woman with an antique store, Troves of Stuff and—”

  “She sent you to me,” he cut in.

  “Exactly,” she said, relieved to have gotten this far. She stared at him expectantly. He seemed like a smart enough guy; the rest shouldn’t even need to be said.

  He looked back at her blankly now, not budging an inch or offering an easy segue.

  Frustrated with his lack of interest in having a back-and-forth conversation, she said, “So I was wondering if you might be interested in selling it to me.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because I’m offering.”

  “Well, I know that things might work differently wherever you’re from,” he said disdainfully, “but here we tend to like to decide when we want to sell something…. You know, after we’re done with it.”

  She felt her face get hot with annoyance and frustration and embarrassment. She wasn’t some kind of alien from another planet, although New York was feeling kind of otherworldly right now.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Magnus and I have to get going so I would thank you to move along.”

  Her mouth was still frozen in shock as he turned to call Magnus, who obediently followed, and they disappeared behind the house. Within moments she heard a motorcycle rev to life, and they reappeared—him on the bike and Magnus sitting happily in the sidecar, both wearing black helmets. So aggravated by this point, she was unable to even find humor in the image.

  The nerve!

  -16-

  She reminded herself that her odds of succeeding at this had been somewhere around one in several hundred—make that several-hundred-and-one, since she never imagined the possibility of a complete brush-off with the finale being the man riding off on a motorcycle with his dog as copilot. She’d never even had the chance to dangle the cash out there--$100, $200, more if he only asked. A quick and tidy profit for him, no work at all.

  Catherine’s bewildered eyes wandered the slice of heaven that was Joel Trager’s place. Everything was perfect under the shocking blue sky, well-kept and flawlessly appointed, right down to the crisp rocking chairs on the front porch. It certainly didn’t look like the ramshackle home of a heartbroken widower she had imagined, and there wasn’t a single sign of anything childlike in residence to explain the little girl that he’d told that woman from the store about. She felt her anger rumbling deep inside.

  Or maybe that’s hunger in my stomach.

  Now what? She had no idea when or if this guy was coming back, but when he did she obviously needed a better pitch. He might have bullied her off her feet in round one, but she was going to demand a rematch. One thing was for sure, he didn’t deserve Caramellie, not with an attitude like that.

  She figured she should use this time wisely (something her third grade teacher had been a real stickler about) and get a meal; one that she actually ate. The lightheaded weakness she felt debunked the urban legend that calories could jump through the air to your hips if within sitting distance. Mel had set more than enough calories before her, and she obviously hadn’t had enough fuel-injected into her system through proximal caloric absorption (the scientific name for said legend) or the old-fashioned way. All things considered, her less-than-best performance a few minutes ago was understandable; stranger things had happened than blowing a business deal on an empty stomach—people had eaten their fellow human beings under similar circumstances. So this was serious. First eat. Then maybe she would have the mental capacity to come up with a better plan; something more effective than standing there with her mouth hanging open, drooling at his white teeth and tousled hair and the way his jeans—

  Snap out of it!

  Her mind went to the diner where tough-as-nails Mel would probably still be on shift, hampering her ability to eat yet another meal. There was the pizza parlor across the street… or the ice cream parlor, although a sundae right now would be a grim reminder of her failure. If she’d driven her own car here, she could most certainly have scrounged the seats for something edible—a granola bar or M&Ms or something else that had been temporarily forgotten in a crevice (her messy car was a direct rebellion against her mother with the added bonus of providing sustenance in a survival situation). But she was in a rental and it was clean of traces of food from prior drivers—though she certainly wasn’t that hungry by any means. No, she needed to find the fabled other side of town… the anonymous end where Wendy’s and Walmart, and probably Taco Bell and Arby’s, would welcome her with their decidedly disinterested charms. No one there would care who she was—stranger in a strange land, or new resident, or serial killer. She could blend in with the masses of Nekoyah, Minnesota and eat a meal free from the stares and whispers of true locals. Her efforts would be reenergized and then she could find her way back over here to have this out the rest of the way, nicely of course. Then back to Minneapolis and her waiting hotel room and a good night’s sleep for her flight out. Her only stress at that point, what to do with the balance of her week off once she was back in good old NYC.

  Catherine opened the car door. “And you certainly didn’t help my cause,” she muttered, giving it the evil eye as she got inside. She’d seen the smirk on Joel Trager’s face as he looked it over when he first entered her life. He liked motorcycles—obviously—and trucks, considering the two she’d seen in front of the garage—one ancient and rusted; one practically new. She drove up the winding driveway, watching his house disappear in the rearview mirror, wondering if Caramellie and her sundae house were inside—so close.

  The way back toward town was more scenic and interesting this time, and also quicker, without the unbecoming passenger of trepidation along for the ride. She no longer feared that Joel Trager was a weirdo; now she knew that he was just a crusty, gruff jerk.

  The seemingly inconsequential scenery along the road was like a breadcrumb trail—the bright royal blue mailbox; the old “Gulf” gas station sign perched in the front lawn of a rusty trailer; the dog tethered to a rope outside his freshly painted red doghouse; an emu farm; the cardboard sign with “Free Rabits” lettered in a childish hand. It was all so quaint and rural, and then suddenly she was coming over a rise and back into town. She hung a left that took her deeper into Nekoyah and farther from the Diner on the Main—site of her first embarrassment, where she was already probably becoming a legend: the Big City Bitch. A few miles later, after slipping back into an old residential area for a heartbeat, she rounded a bend into swarming life. Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Hardee’s came at her in quick succession, along with Home Depot and Walmart and Dunkin’ Donuts. Farther down she even glimpsed Kohl’s (her mother’s new favorite haunt) and a freestanding Jacques Penné (her moth
er’s old standby); facing each other like they were in a retail duel. She felt oddly at peace in this entirely new territory that offered all the trappings of her hometown.

  She pulled into Wendy’s and went inside, intent on the simple peace and joy of fast food that always tasted the same in any town. She ordered a cheeseburger and fries with a Frosty, reasoning it wasn’t quite ice cream so it didn’t fall under the same jurisdiction as the ice cream parlor that she was avoiding. She hoped this meal would galvanize her spirit and give her superhuman strength. Joel Trager was quick with a line and—God, he was just so completely maddening… and so unfairly and unbelievably good looking that it messed with her equilibrium.

  Her phone came to life in her purse—Quiet Riot.

  “Tara!” she exclaimed, her voice filled with excitement while her body was filled with dread.

  “You missed an absolutely wretched day!” Tara’s voice screamed back through the phone.

  You don’t know the half of it. But instead she hollered back, “Where are you?”

  “Subway. Listen, you sure you can’t rethink this vacation thing? There is a shitload of work to do and Lillian is a nightmare right now.”

  “Sorry, Tara… I can’t.” She looked around at the restaurant that could have been a Wendy’s anywhere but was indeed in Minnesota. Even if it were an emergency, she wouldn’t have been able to get back to New York in time for work the next morning. As far as she knew there were no red-eye flights between here and there. But this was just Tara having a little hissy fit about actually having to buckle down.

  “Then I’m out.”

  “What?” Catherine asked, startled. “You’re quitting?”

  “I’m taking vaca, baby. Sounds like you had the right idea, bitch. Let’s hit Vegas.”

  “Tara, I can’t go to Vegas,” she said incredulously.

  “You’ve got a week off and you probably spent the whole day lounging on your couch in your pj’s. Name one reason why you can’t go to Vegas.”