by Susie Gayle
Birnbaum is right about one thing; we did a stupid, dangerous thing. We thought we were being so clandestine with our secret meetings and pacts. But now, looking back, it’s easy to see that anyone who knows where to look could discover us pretty easily, like he did.
I don’t remember starting my car. I don’t remember pulling down the long driveway of Dalton Manor. In fact, everything is kind of foggy until my cell phone rings, jarring me from my trance.
“Will, where the heck are you?” Sammy asks.
“I, uh…” I glance around. “I’m downtown.”
“Great. Me, too. I’m about a block from the deli, across the street from the police station. Come meet me—”
“Sammy, stay where you are. I’ll come to you.”
“But the kid’s on the move—”
“Forget the kid!” I snap. “Just… stay there.”
“Okay, Will,” he says softly.
A few minutes later I pull over to the curb and join Sammy on the sidewalk. He frowns deeply.
“Jeez, Will. What’s up? You look like your grandmother just died.”
“Sammy, it was Birnbaum. He killed Rachel Stein to force a snap election and come out the hero.”
“Good god,” Sammy breathes. “We have to tell Patty.” He starts to step off the sidewalk, but I grab his arm.
“Wait. He knows about us. He knows everything. He might even have some kind of proof.”
Sammy’s eyes widen in shock. “So… he’s blackmailing us?”
“In a way, yeah.”
“Oh.” He runs his hands over his black hair. “What do we do now?”
“Sammy, I have no idea what to do here. I mean, I can’t keep quiet on something like this, but Sarah… Karen…”
“I know, Will. I know.” He sighs deeply and then lowers himself to the curb, sitting on the edge of it. I join him, both of us staring at the police station across the street.
Sammy glances up at the cloudless sky. “It’s a nice day out today.”
“It is. Looks like spring is finally coming.”
“Yeah.” He sniffs once and then says, “Listen, I think I have somewhere I need to be.”
“Right now?” I ask in disbelief. Where could he possibly need to be that’s more important than this?
“Yeah, right now. Sorry to run on you. Um… I’ll see you around though, okay?”
Oh.
“You don’t have to go.”
“Nah,” he says. “I do.”
“Well, if you’re sure… then yeah. See you around.”
He pats me twice on the back. “Take care of yourself, Will.”
“You too, Sammy.”
He stands, jogs across the street and, without looking back, disappears into the police station.
***
I don’t know how long I sit there. Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. Sammy doesn’t come out again.
Eventually I let Rowdy out of the backseat and the two of us walk back to the Pet Shop Stop, leaving my car on the street. Walking seems appropriate for some reason right now.
When I get back to the store, Sarah gives me a hug and then furrows her brow. “Where were you? Are you okay?”
“We’ll talk later.” Behind her, Rowdy bounds over to greet Dennis while Melinda watches us with a look of poorly disguised disgust. “You,” I say, pointing to her. “We have to talk.”
“Sure, Will,” she says sweetly. “Dennis, Sarah, will you excuse us?”
“No, they should hear this, too.” Melinda scowls at me, but I ignore her and continue. “You’re crazy if you don’t think I would pick Sarah. You could give me your silly ultimatum a thousand times, and I’d choose her every time.”
“Will, what are you talking about?” Sarah asks.
“Your mother gave me a choice,” I say, not taking my eyes off of Melinda. “She threatened to ruin me and the pet shop if I didn’t end our relationship so she could coerce you to move out of Seaview Rock.”
“Mom?” Sarah says inquisitively.
“Well, that’s just not true!” Melinda insists, her eyes wide and her lip quivering. “He hates me! He doesn’t want me to see you anymore!”
I scoff. “You can try to keep selling, but nobody here is buying. In fact, I thought of a convenient solution for all of this.” I turn to Sarah. “From this moment on, I’m giving you fifty percent ownership of the Pet Shop Stop.”
“Seriously?” she asks, incredulous.
“Seriously. Do you accept?”
“I… yeah. Yes! Of course.”
I turn back to Melinda. “There. You want to ruin me? You’d be ruining her, too.” I raise an eyebrow. “So what’s it going to be?”
Melinda shakes her head, her mouth open a little, glancing from me to Sarah. “You have to believe me, Sarah! He’s trying to turn my own children against me!”
“Oh, cut the crap, Ma,” Dennis speaks up suddenly. She whirls on him—and for just a moment, a flash of expressive anger betrays her. “We all know how spiteful you can be. This? This is a new low.”
“Denny…?”
“It’s Dennis, Mom. I haven’t liked being called Denny since I was eleven.” He rolls his eyes. “You want to know where I went yesterday when I disappeared and said I was in the comic book shop? I looked at an apartment here in Seaview Rock. Next month I turn twenty-five and I can get my license. I want to move here, and be closer to Sarah.”
“Aw, Dennis, that’s sweet.” Sarah smiles.
“No!” Melinda shouts. “What is wrong with you two? Don’t you see? This is not a good place. It’s not safe! People have been killed here!”
“That’s true,” Sarah admits. “But if you ever bothered to talk to me about it, you’d know that Will actually helped the police solve a bunch of those murders.”
“We both did,” I chime in.
“There’s no safer place for me to be than this pet shop,” she tells her mother, “and I’m not going anywhere. I believe Will. I trust Will. And I think you should leave.”
Melinda stiffens. “Fine. Take me back to the hotel, and—”
“No, Mom, I mean you should leave. Go home. You’re not welcome here anymore.” I could swear Sarah grows three inches as her resolve strengthens. Or maybe Melinda just shrinks a bit. “And you can call a cab.”
She turns to her son. “Denny? I mean, Dennis?”
He shakes his head. “Uh-uh. I’m staying.”
Her nostrils flare. Regardless of how critical and vindictive she might be, Melinda seems to know when she’s beaten. “Alright,” she says, her voice cold. “I see how it is. But don’t either of you come crawling back to me when you need something.” She straightens her back, holds her head high, and leaves the pet shop.
“Phew,” Sarah breathes a long sigh. “That was intense.”
“That was awesome,” Dennis says.
“Did you really mean that?” she asks me. “About making me part owner?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s a big step for you.”
“I know. Kind of scary.” To Dennis, I say, “Look, I know it’s not much, but we could probably give you some part-time work here in the pet shop until you get on your feet…”
“Thanks,” he says, scratching Rowdy under the chin. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that, but I actually do okay on my own. I’ve been working on a web comic for the last couple of years and it’s starting to get pretty popular. I think I can get by on it.”
“Oh. Okay.” To Sarah, I whisper, “What’s a web comic?”
“I don’t know, but I think it’s a good thing.”
“Cool.”
“But Will, what about… the other thing?” Sarah asks me.
I smile sadly. “I’m not sure yet, but I think that’s going to be over very soon.”
CHAPTER 18
* * *
Three Weeks Later
“And… done.” I wince as I click the mouse at the computer behind the counte
r.
“See? That wasn’t so hard,” Sarah tells me as she changes the bedding in the chinchilla cage.
“I guess not.” I stand and stretch. “Are you ready for your first meeting tonight, councilwoman?”
Sarah shakes her head. “Not even a little bit. I’m super nervous.”
Not to brag, but it was totally my idea for Sarah to throw her hat in the ring as a candidate for town council in the snap election. She was doubtful at first, but then she offered me an ultimatum of her own: She’d do it, if I finally did the thing I’d been talking about for months. So as of this moment and that mouse click, I am officially enrolled in summer classes to pursue my license as a private investigator in the state of Maine.
“I’m sure you’ll do great,” I tell her.
“And you’ll be there, right?” she asks.
“Eh, I guess so,” I joke; of course I’ll be there. Sarah’s first proposal as a councilwoman is to hire an outside firm to handle all the accounting, and to make the town’s treasury books public on Seaview Rock’s website. She’s already discussed it with the other two new council members, Mr. Casey and Holly, the owner of the Runside.
“Hey, good morning,” Sammy calls out as he enters the shop, holding a brown paper bag. “I brought bagels.”
“None for me, thanks,” Sarah says. “I’m too nervous to eat.”
He waves a hand in the air. “Don’t worry about it. You got this.”
Right, I guess I should explain what happened to Sammy-Boy and Ezekiel Birnbaum. When I left Sammy at the police station, he marched right up to Patty Mayhew and confessed everything. He told her about how he and Jerry Brahms blackmailed Savage and Stein, pushing them to make proposals. He also told her that it’s been him, and him alone, ever since Jerry’s death.
And finally, he told her that he had reason to believe Birnbaum killed Rachel Stein.
Ezekiel Birnbaum was wrong about one thing: that there was no proof. See, he didn’t entirely lie to Tom Savage; there really was a note that detailed the entire scandal, which Ezekiel kept in his desk at home as an insurance policy, and handwriting analysis showed that it was Birnbaum that wrote it.
Unfortunately, that’s not usually enough for most courts to consider as solid evidence. Fortunately, though, there was another way. Birnbaum blocked his number when he texted the instructions to Tom Savage, but apparently didn’t realize that blocked numbers can still be traced back to the sender with the right equipment. Presented with both, Birnbaum cracked like an egg and confessed.
“What is this?” Karen asks as she enters the Pet Shop Stop. “You guys having a party and you didn’t invite me? Ooh, bagels.” She rummages through the bag as she says, “We ought to be careful. Someone could be taking pictures of us right now.”
Naturally, Birnbaum’s reaction to being caught was to try to take us all down with him. He did have evidence, in the form of photographs that showed the four of us meeting, in the pet shop, with Savage and Stein a little more than a week prior. Apparently he’d followed them there and snapped the photos from his car.
That also happened to be the night that Patty Mayhew dropped in on us. The six of us had made up the story that we were looking for Savage’s escaped snake. Luckily, Petunia the rattlesnake was in Karen’s car at the time, so that was enough for Patty to go on, and she dismissed Birnbaum’s photos immediately.
“So, where are they sending you today, Sammy?” Karen asks, her mouth full of blueberry bagel.
“Today I’ll be down at the park,” he tells her with a smile, “cleaning and repainting playground equipment.”
The state had a heck of a time with Sammy’s case. Yeah, he was arrested—there was no way around that. But during his trial, his lawyer pointed out that on the most technical level, blackmail is defined as “obtaining money or property” via a threat, and Sammy could prove definitively that he never personally gained anything from the demands on Savage and Stein. The judge seemed to understand that Sammy had good intentions, and believed him when he said he had no idea about the reallocation of the town’s money (which Savage corroborated in court).
But he had still committed a crime, even if it was hard for them to define the specific crime he’d committed. Ultimately the judge sentenced Sammy to one thousand hours of community service within the limits of Seaview Rock, to be carried out over three years. In a nutshell, Sammy gets to do his revitalization efforts—but this time around, he gets to do them himself.
That might seem like a happy ending for Sammy-Boy, but the harsh truth is that his reputation in town is in shambles. There are still a lot of people angry at him. But he grins and bears it, and I’m sure that over time he can prove that he did it all out of love for Seaview Rock and its people.
Sarah stoops to pet Basket and reminds me, “Will, don’t forget that you promised to help Dennis move this weekend.”
“I didn’t forget. Looking forward to it.”
Sarah hasn’t heard from her mother since she left, despite trying to call her a few times, but Dennis tells us that she’s back to her usual self—with the notable exception that no one is able to mention me or Sarah around her without her flying off the handle and insisting we’re maniacs.
Just last week Dennis signed the lease for an apartment downtown, on the second floor over the deli, and this weekend I’ll be driving down to Scarborough to help him move his stuff. He even accepted my offer of putting in some hours at the pet shop now and then. I know we’ll need the extra help with me going back to school and Sarah having council duties.
“Alright, I have to get going,” Sammy announces. “Runside later?”
“Runside later.” I nod to him as he heads out the door.
“Yeah, I should get moving, too,” Karen says begrudgingly. “Uh, before I go… here.” She shoves something into my hand—a square of paper, folded in fourths.
“What’s this?” I ask her.
“It’s, uh, nothing much. It’s just… some stuff I wrote down. Sorry it took so long.” Her cheeks turn pink. “I’m taking this.” She waves the half-eaten blueberry bagel at me and hurries out the door.
Curious, I unfold the note and start reading Karen’s scrawling hand.
Dear Hi Will,
“Dear” sounded weird. Anyway, I’m not very good at this stuff, so read this and then burn it and let’s never, ever speak of it.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry for what I put you through when we were married, and after, too. I’m sorry for not understanding you and never really trying to, and then going about things in pretty much the worst way possible. I think I’ve changed. I think you’ve changed, too, and I’m really glad that I can call you a friend now.
I also think there’s always going to be a little bit of weirdness between us—some tension, you know—and for that, and all the other stuff I already said, I want you to know that I’m sorry.
Love always,
Karen
p.s. – Sarah is great. Really great. You’d best lock that girl down.
I chuckle a little to myself as I fold the paper and stick it in my pocket.
“What’s that?” Sarah asks.
I shrug. “Closure.”
She smiles inquisitively, but doesn’t ask anything else. “Okay.”
As she takes a bite of my bagel, I ask her, “Do you want to move in with me?”
She coughs as she nearly chokes. “Jeez, Will. We need to talk about your timing.”
“Sorry. But do you?”
She smiles. “Yeah.”
“Good.”
“You’re strange.” She gives me a hug and we stand that way for a while, until I hear the door swing open behind us.
“Morning, Will, Sarah,” Patty Mayhew says as she enters. “I just saw the other two usual suspects leaving, figured I’d pop in quick and see what trouble you’re getting into now.”
I swallow nervously. “What? No trouble.”
“Relax, Will, I’m messing
with you.” She grins. “Actually, I just want to run something by you real quick.”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“Well, we had a robbery at Miller’s last night. The store was closed, but the locks weren’t forced. Security cameras were disabled. Whoever it was cracked the safe and made off with a bunch of cash.”
“Hmm. You checked out the employees?”
Patty rolls her eyes. “Of course I did. Solid alibis, every one of them. I just, you know, thought you might think of something I didn’t.”
“Can I… take a look?”
“I guess so, if you want.”
“Sorry, Patty,” I say sheepishly, “but I wasn’t asking you.”
“Go ahead,” Sarah says with a pointed smile. “I’ll keep an eye on the shop.”
“Thanks, you’re the best.” I give her a quick kiss and follow Patty toward the door. “Come on, Rowdy!” The pup jumps up and bounds after us, happy to tag along for a new mystery.
THE END