“So we know this is the right spot,” I said, toeing a few of them up into a clump and then kicking them.
“Don’t do that!” Todd said. “That’s as nasty as the hairball.”
“Is there any point looking for footprints?” I said. “Seeing if someone hid in those shrubs over there then ran this way?”
“Ants,” Todd said. “Roly-polys. And no-see-ums too. What kind of God creates insects so tiny they can be called no-see-ums and then gives them teeth to bite you?”
He was walking away from the weedy path and the distant bushes even as he spoke and it was pointless to try and stop him. I could see that reflexive shrugging gesture he makes to flick imaginary beasties off him and I knew the way he was moving, stamping like an ogre in a fairytale, was mean to squash the seething creatures under his feet before they could jump up past his shoes and start climbing. He didn’t stop until he was at the summit of the foot bridge, high up in the windy November air where no insect would make the effort to come and stage an attack.
I gave him a fierce hug and a smackeroo on the cheekbone.
“What’s that for?” he demanded, unconvincingly.
“I love you,” I said. And I loved California too. Imagine saying that in Dundee to a pal you’d met nine months previously! Sober, I mean. You’d get carted off for an overnight evaluation. Todd nodded distractedly but he was looking out over the rooftops of Cuento, eyes narrowed like Clint Eastwood when the cheroot smoke’s bothering him.
“Cutty sark over there,” he said, pointing westwards. “Horse’s tail here. Tam in the slough over there.” He waved a hand to the south side of town. “That can’t be everything.”
“What are you thinking?”
“There’s something missing,” said Todd. “Nearly half the poem, for a start. All the drinking in the pub before the journey begins.”
“Seventy-two bottles of Blue Moon that Tam was wrapped round?” I said. “That’s plenty booze, isn’t it?”
“I dunno,” Todd said. “It went on and on and on and on about the pub on market day and the camaraderie. If we’re right that the poem’s the thing, what about all that?”
“But are we?” I said. “Are we right? That detective that came out had a point maybe. The minidress on the fake burial mound is weird, but Halloween is Weird Central round here. The pony tail … you saw Kimberly, Todd. She’s just the sort of girl that lesser mortals get obsessed by. And when I suggested it, she lost her mind. Like she knew I was right. And the hat’s the only thing about that poor dead guy that’s got the slightest connection.”
“Dead Guy again, eh?” Todd said. “Not Tam anymore?”
“Not if it’s going to lead us astray,” I said. “I think the ring’s the thing.”
“Okay, Fr—” said Todd.
“Don’t call me Fr—” I cut in.
“—odo,” we said in chorus.
“Snap, jinx, I own you,” Todd added. “I thought Frodo was okay.”
“I changed my mind. And I think you’ll find I own you. And if I own you, I demand that you drive me to the SPCA Thrift Store. Their notice board is bound to have cat groomer business cards, eh no?”
“As you wish,” said Todd. “I kinda love that place but it’s too sad to go alone, Roger would rather die, and it’s not Kathi-compliant. Let’s go.”
I kinda love the place too. Where else does one go to find Sesame Street spatula sets and platform flip-flops under the same roof? Today, of course, the Thrift was only just hauling itself back together after Halloween, packing away the unsold fangs and neck-bolts and still trying to offload the polyester wedding dresses and zoot suits by slashing the price to the bone. I had a bit of a rub on a fake bloodstain on one of the wedding dresses. It didn’t flake like the blood on the cutty sark. Maybe this was the good stuff.
Despite the mess on the shop floor, I managed to snag a pair of floral flannel granny nightgowns that looked just the ticket for winter nights at Creek House.
“What’s with the Mother Hubbards?” Todd said. He was leafing through a stack of framed paintings.
“What’s a Mother Hubbard?” I said.
“Are you going to use the fabric to make pillow covers?” Todd’s voice was stern.
“No, I’m going to wear them.”
“God help us,” Todd said. “Oh!” He had found a picture of a little girl with a kitten on her shoulder. “Hold this while I see if they’ve got the others,” he said.
“Are you buying this for the frame?” I said.
“Who cares about the frame, Lexy! This is one of the Northern Paper Mills toilet paper babies. There are twelve and I’ve only got five of them.” He gasped and drew another picture out of the pile. “Oh my God! It’s the orange-haired hatless boy. I can’t believe it.”
“Me neither,” I said. “At least when I curl up in bed in my tartan flannel there’s nobody there to see me. If you put that on your wall, you’ll never live it down.”
“Roger loves them too,” Todd said.
“No,” I told him. “Roger loves you. Oh, how Roger loves you, to give you a free hand with decoration.”
“Really?” said Todd. “My taste? You’re going after my taste? Did you ever think, Lexy, that if you didn’t curl up in plaid flannel, you wouldn’t be doing it alone?”
I put his stupid ugly print down on the floor before it gave me diabetes and flounced off to pay for my nighties. He was right. I knew he was right. I was thirty-two and hadn’t ruled out kids, but I hadn’t had a date since the spring when I found Bran and Brandeee going at it like porn stars and left him. And even though I was proud of myself for how psychologically healthy I’d been, cutting bait immediately and moving on, I knew I’d only taken the first step. The easy one. I knew I had to take the next step some time. The hard one.
And speaking of psychological health, if I was honest, I’d been avoiding speaking to my mum for two months because I knew she’d raise the subject and I wouldn’t be able to argue. She’d regaled me with her take on the situation when I rang her up on her birthday and I was still recovering.
“I had to carry quite a big bouquet when I married your dad, Lexy, but I must say it stopped me shilly-shallying.”
“Mum?” I said. “Are you telling me you were pregnant at your wedding?”
“Sick as a dog,” she said. “Waste of a honeymoon.”
“You never told me.”
“I’m telling you now. I’m not getting any younger, Lexy. Nor your dad neither and we didn’t want you to get a shock when you’re clearing out the house.”
She was right too. It was better to find out I was the shotgun at the wedding while she was still here to be judged, without me feeling mean. And she was right about Bran too. It was a pity I’d been so scrupulous about contraception while I was with him. His personality, morals, and dress sense left a lot to be desired, but his genes were second to none.
I looked down at my nighties while I was shuffling forward in the queue to pay for them and I let myself wonder if Todd was right too. Then I sniffed and stuck my chin in the air. Men get laid all the time in flannel pyjamas. I was sticking it to the patriarchy buying these. It’s like I used to tell my ex-boyfriend when he bought me another birthday, Christmas, Valentine’s, or anniversary present made of satin ribbon and marabou. Any day he wore a G-string, I’d wear a G-string. And the same went for corsets.
Remembering chucking all those unworn sets of sleazy underwear in the bin when he dumped me cheered me up again, and I smiled a laidback smile at the shop assistant over the head of the old man in front of me who was taking his sweet time counting out the right money. He had tipped his change onto the counter and was searching for one last quarter in the heap of nickels and dimes.
He was stirring it round with a gnarled index finger. The other three fingers were tucked into a fist. And that threw the blue and yellow ston
e on his ring into relief so the light shone through it. I leaned forward. He’d found a quarter. He pushed it over the counter and then spread his hand on top of the pile of coins to scoop them up.
It was! It was the same ring. Gold and lumpy with letters and numbers set all around in crude engraving and that same stone in the middle. How the hell had he got it? How could I even begin to ask him? I couldn’t ask him. He might be dangerous. But if I managed to get a picture to show to Mike, maybe this case would break at last.
I manhandled my phone out of my pocket and doinked the buttons like a starving pigeon, but here’s the thing about fishing out the right money to pay for goods in a shop with a no-return policy. There’s no waiting for a receipt or change. The old man in front was done. He turned on his heel and stumped out of the shop.
“I’ll be back,” I said to the assistant, dropping my nighties on the counter. I swerved back to where Todd was still feverishly looking for more bogging pictures, grabbed the two out of his hands, jammed them back into the pile and dragged him, protesting, out into the carpark.
“I’ve seen the ring,” I said. “A man—Oh where is he? Look, over there! That man. He’s wearing the ring.”
“For real?” said Todd. “You’re sure?”
“I was hypnotised into being sure,” I reminded him. “Shit, he’s getting in a car. Sir! Si-ir?”
The old man, one leg in his Saturn and one still on the ground, twisted to see if I was talking to him.
“Sir,” I said, galloping to his side, “sorry to bother you but—”
Todd overtook me and got there first. “We need to ask you something,” he said.
The man looked expectantly between Todd and me. He was holding onto the inside of the door with his right hand, hiding the ring completely. Todd looked at me. I shrugged.
We could ask him, but if he was mixed up in the murder, asking him wasn’t such a great idea. And we could just grab him, but if he wasn’t mixed up in the murder, if he was just a frail old gentleman, that didn’t seem like a winning plan either.
“We kind of wanted what you bought in there,” I said. “I laid it down for a minute and I think you picked it up.”
“Fair and square,” the old man said. “Wunt no reserved ticket on it.”
“Oh no, no, no, no,” said Todd. “We’re not complaining. We were just hoping you might be willing to sell it to us.”
“Sell it?” the man said. He looked into his car towards the passenger seat. I squinted but couldn’t see anything.
“Sell it,” I said firmly. “We’ll give you double what you just paid.”
“Twenty dollars,” he said.
“You never just paid ten dollars in quarters!” I said.
“I paid twenty dollars,” the old man said. “You owe me forty.”
“Wow,” said Todd under his breath, but at least he was getting his wallet out. I would have but I wanted to make sure and snap a clear picture of the ring while the old man was handing over his forty dollars’ worth of mystery item. Which he now was. He reached into the car and lifted a tattered paperback biography of Ronald Reagan with its 50¢ price sticker plain as day on the jacket.
“Well worth it,” said the old man.
“I’m not complaining,” said Todd. “This transaction is completely aboveboard. There’s no book-sales embargo on this parking lot, is there?”
I had no idea what he was on about, but it pissed the old man off for sure. He poked his finger at Todd’s chest, the same finger he’d used to sort out his change, meaning that I got some great close-ups of the ring while he was at it. “You read that book, sonny, and you’ll see the country I love,” he said. “Not this wasteland.” He lifted his chin at the neat thrift-store car park, the kindergarten across the road, and the back fence enclosing the timber and gravel section of the DIY place. As wastelands go, it was pretty spiffy. Then he got into his car and slammed the door.
“I hope those pics worked out,” Todd said. “Because I forgot to look at the goddam ring!”
“Feast your eyes,” I said, starfishing the best shot into an even better one and handing the phone to Todd.
He starred down at it. “You’re kidding,” he said.
“What? It’s the same ring.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. You misunderstand me. Lexy, this is a class ring from Beteo County Senior High School. Half the old geezers in Cuento probably wear one.”
“BCSHS!” I said. “Not BC545! And what about the bubbles? The three bubbles at the bottom.” I grabbed the phone back from him and peered at the picture. “Five three,” I said. “It’s a number!”
“Of course it’s a bloody number,” said Todd. “It’s a bloody class ring. The top part is the name of the school and the bottom part is the graduating year.”
“Don’t say bloody,” I told him. “You sound daft.”
“It’s a freaking class ring!” Todd said, very loud.
“Better,” I said. “How was I supposed to know it was a class ring? We don’t do class rings. We haven’t got class rings, lockers, drivers’ ed, proms—wait, they might have proms now—valedictorians, letter jackets.”
“Nobody has letter jackets anymore,” Todd said.
“Home room, homecoming, home schools—”
“I just spent forty dollars on nothing,” Todd said. “You owe me twenty.”
“Nothing?” I said. “What are you talking about? Can you really not see what this means? Guess what else we don’t have that you’ve got, Todd. What else have you lot got that us poor deprived Brits have to stagger along without?”
“Guns?”
“At school,” I reminded him.
“Guns? Sorry. Mouth guards?”
“In the library,” I hinted. But he was stumped. “Yearbooks! If Tam came by that ring honestly, he’ll be in the Beteo County Senior High School Yearbook for us to ID!”
“Ah, but what year?” said Todd.
“Three bubbles,” I reminded him. “Six eight, sixty-eight. I just didn’t notice the straight bit.”
“Sonofabitch!” Todd shouted, but not in a celebratory way. He jabbed his finger at the door of the thrift where someone was edging out, her arms full of square things that looked exactly the size and shape of Northern Paper Mills toilet paper baby prints. It was hard to tell since she had wrapped them in flannel nighties to carry them home.
Nine
If I’d known I’d be putting in so much busybody time, I would have cleared my schedule. As it was, I went back to the Last Ditch to start chipping away at the hang-ups and melt-downs of another day’s worth of affluent navel-gazers with the library trip waiting as a treat at the end, like a biscuit placed just beyond the nose of a dog while you brush it. I had no idea how groomers played it with cats. Flynn and Florian were far from feral and weren’t yet fully grown, but they’d just smack the brush away with their claws out, snaffle the treat, and then climb the curtains to get away.
“Your eleven, your noon, and your three are booked in with me afterwards,” Todd said, as we drove home. “Kathi’s out at your eleven o’clock now, decluttering.”
I said nothing. For nearly thirty seconds I managed to say nothing at all, then the words shot out around my clenched teeth anyway. “Booked in for what?”
“Huh,” said Todd. “You’ve never sounded like Sean Connery before, Lexy. But you sounded way like him then. Say some more.”
This time I said nothing and stuck to it.
Todd sighed, then started counting off on his fingers and talking in a sing-song voice: “Basic wardrobe advice for Marcie at noon. A bit of bitch training for Helen at one, and a massage for Ron at four.”
“You’re massaging that Ron guy with the—” I said, before I remembered that my clients’ difficulties were confidential.
“I know!” said Todd, wiggling his eyebrows. “Who’da thunk
it?”
“Also,” I said. “Bitch training?”
“Oh yeah,” said Todd. “All that woman needs is a few put-downs to get Mommy Dearest off her back and she’ll be sailing into the sunset on her honeymoon.”
Helen was a twenty-five-year-old medical receptionist who had cancelled her wedding twice already and was beginning to check the refund dates on flowers and chair skirts for her third one. All to the same guy, let me say. I had met her twice and covered commitment versus contingency, contentment versus happiness, and the end of the patriarchy. She hadn’t mentioned her mum.
“Right,” I said as we parked at the Last Ditch. “Well, I think I’ll nip up to the Skweek and finish sewing that zip in. I’ve got twenty minutes.”
“We’re like a 1970s Coke ad,” said Todd, heading towards his room. “Go us.”
Finding Noleen behind the counter of the launderette seemed like more evidence of the general love-in. But one look at her face told me she thought the same as I did regarding the Last Ditch turning commune.
“There’s a sign on the door of my office sending check-ins up here,” she said. “No way to stop them moving on to La Quinta instead, though, if they don’t want to climb the stairs. And all so Kathi can go stick Q-tips in a stranger’s keyholes and pretend it’s for them. It’s for her. She’s getting worse, Lexy.”
“I’m no happier about it than you are,” I said. “And I’m sorry to hear Kathi’s having a dip.”
“I do my best with her,” Noleen said. “Keep her spirits up. Keep her outlook sunny.”
I knew my expression was growing fixed, but thankfully Noleen was staring at the floor while she shook her head in sorrow like a basset hound. She loved Kathi. I’m sure she did, but she was no cheerleader. This very day, she was wearing a t-shirt bearing the legend We’re all going to die across the chest. It wasn’t a set-up for a cute punchline; there was nothing written on the back. That was the whole message and it was one of Noleen’s favourites. She had it in four colours.
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