by Dale Mayer
“I’m sure she was,” Doreen said. “One of the hardest things about getting old must be watching all your friends die before you.”
“Very true,” Penny said. As they walked up to Penny’s house a good half hour later, Penny motioned and said, “If you want to come in for a few minutes, I can look for that list.”
Doreen brightened. She’d been looking for an excuse as it was, since she had never been invited inside anyone’s house in town other than Nan’s retirement home and then Doreen’s murderous neighbor Della’s house. Doreen nodded and said, “Sure. Thank you very much.” Together, the five of them trooped into Penny’s home.
Chapter 2
Sunday Afternoon …
Inside Penny’s house, Doreen looked around. It was stuffed with pretty floral-patterned couches, large floral paintings and, yes, … floral rugs. It was also pristine. “You haven’t started packing, have you?”
“It’s not like I’ve sold my house yet,” Penny said in a dry tone.
As Doreen looked at Penny’s big living room, it wasn’t really cluttered, but it was overstuffed with mementos. “If you got a staging crew or a Realtor in here,” she said, “I’m pretty sure they’ll insist on all the pictures coming off the walls, all the stuff being moved off the countertops, hauling out the big hutches you’ve got. Realtors can be quite brutal.”
Penny’s jaw dropped. “You know what? I was thinking about bringing in a stager to see what they’d charge me. But it sounds like you know a lot about it.”
“Not necessarily,” Doreen said, “but I’ve watched lots of those shows on TV. And my husband did a lot of buying and selling.”
“Right,” Penny said.
Doreen could almost see that, in Penny’s mind, those disqualifiers just raised Doreen’s status several notches. Doreen didn’t understand how that worked because, of course, people should be doing their own investigation and research on this type of thing before deciding. Besides, in Doreen’s mind, she should be demoted, not promoted, for her husband’s activities. “Have you picked out a Realtor?”
“Absolutely. I’m going with Simi Jeron,” Penny said. “I’ve known that family for thirty years or more.”
“Oh, good,” she said, “that should make it easier. Ask her about staging and decluttering when she’s here.”
“She’s already been here once, but we haven’t signed any paperwork yet.”
“That’s when the boom will get lowered,” Doreen said, chuckling.
“I hope not,” Penny said, walking into her kitchen, approaching a large cupboard and opening it up. She took out a small notebook sitting on top of the box of vitamin bottles, brought it to the kitchen table, and sat down, flipping through the pages. “Ah, here it is,” she said, “a page just for Nan.” She held it up and then read from it. “Vitamin D, ginkgo, B12, and I’m not sure what this other one says.”
“Do you mind if I take a look?” Doreen asked, holding out her hand. Penny handed over the notebook. As Doreen looked at it, she said, “I’m not sure what that is either. May I get a copy of this?”
“We’ll photocopy both sides.”
While Penny made copies, the animals, although curious about the inside of a new place, didn’t appear bothered. Mugs wandered; Goliath dug on the rug, his tail twitching; and Thaddeus sat quietly on her shoulder, and that worried her the most. He seemed to be huddling awfully close. She reached up and murmured to him. He leaned into her touch.
“Thanks,” Doreen said as she accepted the sheets from Penny. Doreen gave the list a casual glance, wondering if Nan would even listen to her. Maybe if Doreen found the right time to speak with her grandmother. Still, she pocketed the list and followed Penny back to the kitchen, where Penny tucked the book back into the vitamins corner.
“Must’ve been nice that George was so interested in health,” Doreen said.
“A lot of good it did him,” Penny said bitterly, and she winced. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I guess you’re angry he died, huh?”
“Isn’t that the stupidest thing?” Penny said. “Even after a year, I still look around our house, and I get mad at him. We had all these plans for retirement, all these things we would do now that he wasn’t working anymore, and here he up and dies on me.”
“Can’t you do those things on your own?”
“I could,” Penny said, “but I don’t really want to. They were things we would do together. They were our plans.”
“Versus your plans?”
Penny froze for a moment and slowly nodded. “Very insightful.” She glanced at her watch and said, “Oh, my goodness. I have to run to meet someone.”
“Oh, of course. Sorry,” Doreen said. “We’ll get out of your hair and let you get on then.” Goliath had taken up a seat in the middle of George’s big recliner. Doreen scooped him into her arms, and, with Thaddeus still on her shoulder, Mugs trotted behind them. “It was a nice visit,” she said, “and I’m glad I had good news for you in the end. Now your life can get back to normal.”
As Doreen stepped down the front steps, Penny said, “Once again, thank you. I will definitely sleep better now.”
With a half wave, Doreen watched as Penny, her purse in hand, got into her vehicle, reversed out of her driveway, and headed down the street. Though Doreen knew she should leave too, she stopped on Penny’s driveway. She really shouldn’t do what she was thinking of doing. But it was pretty damn hard to talk herself out of it. With a shrug, she decided it would worry away at her, so she might as well put her mind to rest.
She put Goliath down and headed into Penny’s backyard, where Johnny had had his favorite place to sit. Doreen didn’t know why Penny’s echinacea bed was bugging her, but she thought she’d read somewhere how echinacea was used in all kinds of medicine. It certainly wasn’t—as far as she knew—a killer, but anything could be a killer if you took too much of it.
Doreen made a quick trip through Penny’s backyard, mentally jotting down what was here—marigolds, lilies, calla lilies, black-eyed Susans. None were flowering yet. Daisies were with buds … This would be a lively garden when summer hit. She really appreciated the wide variety, even a few straggling tulips. She stopped and stared at them and shook her head. “Why are you guys drooping over like that?”
She stopped to study the short stalks of an echinacea clump reaching for the sky. They wouldn’t bloom for another month or two, and this bed was far too crowded for them to do well. Then belladonna and foxglove had mingled in the patch too. Drat. She was hoping some of these plants wouldn’t be found here. So was their presence that bad? She couldn’t tell. But, since the same poisonous plants lived in Nan’s garden, … possibly Nan and George had shared a love of poisonous plants as well as antiques?
Glancing around, Doreen noted how little shade the echinacea plants would probably get during the daylight hours backed up against the fence as they were, which wouldn’t help their growth. As she dropped down in front of the massive green patch—at least three feet across with dozens of plants in here—she frowned, realizing their roots would be completely twisted together. Echinacea plants loved company, particularly its own family, but, at some point, they would fight and hate each other—just like every other family unit could do.
Too-close confines caused too-much strife.
She checked the ground around the roots, unable to help herself, and realized they were also very dry. The ground was poor here, with many rocks noticeable in the soil. Even garbage. She pulled out a small piece of plastic from the edge and tossed it aside. Echinacea could survive in crappy soil. A lot of plants could survive. But the intention of a garden was not to have them survive—it was to have the flowers thrive. And again, as she glanced around the backyard, she thought what had once been Penny’s pride and joy was probably just a constant source of work and bad memories now. As Doreen walked past the echinacea, she thought she saw something else burrowed in the center of one of the plants. But, from the park side o
f the fence, just then, a man asked, “Hey, what are you doing back there?”
She popped out of Penny’s backyard gate guiltily, leaving the gate open for her animals, and plastered a bright smile on her face. “I walked home with Penny,” she said, “but she had to take off. I just wanted to get a quick look at her garden. She has done so well here,” she said, injecting a bright warmth to her voice.
The man looked at her suspiciously.
She looked him over, from the top of his six-foot frame to his dirty sneakers, and held out her hand. “I’m Doreen Montgomery, and who are you?”
Reluctantly he shook her hand. “I’m Steve.”
“Steve?”
His frown deepened. “Just Steve.”
She nodded and said, “Well, if you see Penny, and you want to tell her that I was in her backyard, that’s fine,” she said. “She knows I’m a crazy gardener too. I was checking out her echinacea.”
“Echinacea?” he asked doubtfully, looking at the green splotch against the fence.
“Echinacea,” she said firmly. “We were talking about mine at my house earlier.”
At that, his face seemed to settle, and his shoulders sagged as if with relief.
“Not to worry,” she said. “I’m not a thief. I’m the one who helped solved Johnny’s disappearance.”
At that, awareness came into Steve’s eyes. Of course Mugs’s slow approach, his head lowered and moving from side to side like a pissed-off bull, drew more attention to Doreen. So did the orange streak that raced between Steve’s legs, and he grinned. “Now I know who you are.”
Thaddeus, not to be outdone, squawked, “No you don’t. No you don’t.”
“Yeah, sorry about them,” Doreen said. She gave Steve a quick finger wave. “And now I’ll head home before my critters decide they like Penny’s garden better than mine.”
Steve watched as she and her animals ambled toward the creek. “Why are you walking along the creek?” he asked, calling behind her.
“Because I love it,” she said. “It’s my favorite place to walk.”
He shrugged and said, “Nothing but dirty water down there. It’s full of ducks and all kinds of waterfowl.”
“Hopefully I’ll see some today.”
“You won’t catch me walking through the water that’s their toilet.” And, with that, he headed off.
She walked a few more steps and turned to look back. He strode away, not having explained his presence at Penny’s property. Doreen frowned and thought about that, then sent Penny a text. Stopped to take a quick look at your echinacea plants. A stranger named Steve came up and didn’t seem terribly friendly. Wasn’t sure what he was doing in the park behind your place. Just a heads-up. And she left it at that.
“Come on, Goliath, Mugs …” Thaddeus squawked as he waddled toward her, but then Mugs came racing forward with Goliath on his heels, and, in a surprisingly quick move, Thaddeus jumped on Mugs, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Giddyup, Mugs. Giddyup, Mugs.”
Doreen just shook her head with a loving smirk on her face. My family.
By the time Doreen had reached her little bridge that would lead to her backyard, Thaddeus had long given up riding Mugs, subsequently walking. But now he was tucked into the crook of her neck, swaying with her every step. She crossed the bridge as her phone beeped with a return text. He’s a lovely neighbor, but he doesn’t like strangers. That echinacea is doing terribly. As are some of my more specialized plants. Suggestions?
Doreen grinned. Perfect entrance to find out more. Absolutely. Maybe we’ll have tea another day and check it out.
Anytime.
Chapter 3
Sunday Late Afternoon …
Back at her place, Mack drove up as she stood on the front step. Corporal Mack Moreau, the most interesting man in town and the most infuriating. He followed the legal line, even when she wanted him to bend it just an itsy-bitsy bit. Still, she had to admire him for that stance.
He did know right from wrong, and that was more than her devious ex had understood. As Mack walked toward her house, he lifted the small bag he carried.
“Did you bring everything we need? Because I’m starving.”
“You’re always starving,” he said, striding forward to the kitchen. “I’ll get started. You can make coffee.”
Obligingly, she was happy to do that as she finally had confidence in her ability to make a good cup of coffee. As she watched Mack, he first washed his hands, and then he took the cold pasta from the fridge. “What’s in the bag?”
“Artichokes,” he said with a smirk. “As ordered.”
She gasped in delight and watched as he popped the top off the jar and pulled out four of the oddest-looking things she’d ever seen. Her smile fell away. “I don’t know what those are.”
He stopped, looked at her in surprise. “Artichokes?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing here,” she said delicately. “Because the artichokes I know look like a pine cone.”
He chuckled. “Absolutely, whole artichokes do look like that. These are artichoke hearts.” He said, “Surely they didn’t put the artichoke leaves into your pasta.”
She frowned and said, “I don’t know. What do the leaves look like?”
“Pine cone petals,” he said bluntly. “Could you eat them? Or did you scrape them through your teeth?”
She shook her head. “No, I ate them as part of the dish.”
“Then what they gave you were the artichoke hearts.”
“Oh,” she said, and, then in a small voice, she asked, “Why do pine cones have hearts?”
He looked at her, and she watched his mouth work as he tried to hold back his mirth. She glared at him, her hands on her hips, and warned, “Don’t you dare.”
But it was too much. He sagged into the nearby chair, his arms wrapped on his chest, and then, like a balloon that had been blown up too tight, he howled with laughter. She stomped toward him and swung her arm back, but he leveled a look at her and said, “Don’t you even think about it.”
She snorted and stepped back and said, “How did you know?”
When he saw the glass of water in her hand, he just stared at it. “You wouldn’t really have dumped that on me, would you?”
She just watched him with the same level look, and he chuckled again. “I don’t know if pine cones have hearts or not. Artichokes do,” he said. “Next time, if I think about it, I will bring a whole artichoke, and we will dissect it.”
“Okay,” she said, happy with that. “You’d have made a good teacher, you know that?”
“It was my second career choice,” he said, “so thank you.”
“The public school system lost out when you went into the legal side of things.”
“Let’s hope I’ve caused more damage to the criminal world,” he said, “than I would have caused to those young vulnerable minds.”
She thought she knew what he meant but wouldn’t worry about it. Because, all of a sudden, she saw a piece of artichoke that looked almost like what she was used to. She picked it up and delicately put it between her lips, tasting it. And then she beamed. “Oh, my goodness, this is it.” And she ate the whole thing. He cut several more and moved them off to the side. She picked up one that had more leaves than the soft-heart part. She asked, “Can you eat all of this?”
He nodded. But she could see which part was the soft heart and which was the start of the inside leaves. She ate that one too, and, after it was all gone, she said happily, “That’s divine.”
“Can’t say I’ve had much of them myself to know,” he said, popping one into his mouth, but he nodded. “So let’s start with the pasta.” He pointed at the leftover spaghetti noodles. “Now we can leave them whole.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “They’re stiff and cold and will be impossible to eat like this.” She shook her head. “That’s not the way the chefs made their pasta salad.”
Mack grabbed a bowl, po
ured some olive oil in, and rubbed the noodles and the oil together with his hands. Almost instantly they separated into nice wobbly noodles. “Now,” he said, “you can chop them, or you can use scissors.”
“Ah,” she cried out, “I have the perfect tool.” And she reached into one of the kitchen drawers and pulled out a large pair of shears. He looked at her in surprise, and she said, “Hold up the noodles.”
So he held up one clump of pasta lengthwise, his fists holding opposite ends, and she snipped the pasta in between his hands so that the noodles were now in thirds. He nodded and said, “That works perfectly.” With the cut noodles in another bowl, he added Italian dressing. She watched in amazement as he then added a splotch of mustard. When he had it all mixed up together, she delicately dabbed the end of her baby finger into the salad and tasted it. She beamed. “How can you just do that?”
He chuckled. “Lots of trial and error.”
“Maybe lots of trial,” she said, “but I highly doubt there was much error.”
“You’d be surprised,” he said.
With enough noodles cut for the two of them for dinner, he tossed the artichokes in on top, brought out three Roma tomatoes, cut them into bite-size pieces, and added them. He opened a can of black olives, drained it, then added half the can while Doreen watched in fascination as a meal so similar to what she used to love was created in front of her. When he brought out the feta, and she saw a solid block, she cried out in surprise.
He looked over at her. “And how does your feta normally come?”
“In perfect little squares,” she said, frowning. “But that one is huge.”
He nodded. “Do you have a flipper?”
She brought him a metal spatula. He looked at it and said, “Perfect.” He cut a slice off the block, then cut that piece into small cubes. She smiled with delight. “You know what? If I had any idea that this is all the chefs at my husband’s place used to do,” she said, “then we were paying them way too much.”
Mack gave a shout of laughter at that. “I don’t know about that,” he said, “because they were obviously very good at what they did, or your husband wouldn’t have kept them around.”