by ACF Bookens
I spent most of the night tucked into a chair in the corner of the yard watching. I’d had a lot of people time this week, and it was nice to just observe and sit back. Daniel, always a little reserved in crowds himself, sat beside me, getting me more wine or cheese as I needed it and then dressing a sausage just the way I liked it when Dad declared them ready.
Mom moved through the crowd with a grace I could never muster. She spoke with everyone, and sometimes, I could hear her explaining their decision to move to town. Mart and Cate both gave me surreptitious glances of mock horror when she told them, but I tried to allay their concerns with a hearty thumbs up and a genuine smile.
I watched Rocky and Marcus flirt casually – a hand on her back as he passed, a quick wink when she caught his eye. I wondered if they’d do a mother introduction and thought about facilitating that until I saw that Josie and Phoebe had taken up their own corner and were laughing to beat the band. Looked like things were great.
Stephen and Walter pulled up chairs by Daniel and me after we had all eaten and told us that their offer – just below asking – had been accepted in minutes, and because both they and the sellers were eager to close, they’d be moving in three weeks. “We’re flying out Monday to put our house on the market, but our agent has already had two private offers at full asking. It’s going to be fun to watch a bidding war.” Stephen had a disturbingly gleeful expression as he talked about the delight of getting more money out of everyone, and I was glad to see that Walter was more interested in finding the right people for their gorgeous house. “Money matters, of course,” he said, “but people matter more.” Stephen patted his husband’s knee as if to say, “Sure. Sure,” and I laughed.
About eleven, I could feel the activity of the last few days catching up to me. I kept nodding off in my chair, so I asked Daniel if he wanted to join me and the dogs for a quick walk around the block. He nodded, and I said, “Let me just tell my mom.” I didn’t want her looking for me and worrying.
She gave me an all-too-knowing smile and winked as Daniel opened the back gate, and we slipped onto the street beside our house. “My mom really likes you,” I said as we rounded the corner and headed toward the river.
“I like her, too. Especially now that it seems things are better between you two.” He paused then said, “They are better, right?”
I smiled. “Yes, better. Not perfect. That’s going to take some time. But better. Definitely better.” We walked a few steps, and then I said, “But you handled her, well, her and I, very well. I always need to know you’re on my side, but I also need you to love my mom.”
“I can love people and still know they do crappy things. And I will always, always be on your side. Always.” He bent down and kissed me on the cheek.
I felt tears welling again and decided I needed to lighten the mood. “You met Sidecar, right?”
“You mean the dog that looks freakishly like Benji? Yep, I met him. Does your mother really intend to make that dog ride around with her on a scooter?”
“Yes, I do believe she does. But if that’s happening, you better believe I’m taking advantage of that for some advertising. I’ll get an ad for the shop to put on Sidecar’s, er, sidecar, and offer people five percent off their purchase if they can tell me where they spotted that pair.”
Daniel guffawed. “That is perfect, Harvey, and you know, I think your mother might love that idea.”
“I think she just might.” I whistled. “What in the world is happening?”
Just then, I heard a car engine coming toward us and stepped instinctively away from the road, pulling Mayhem with me. Daniel always walked on the roadside of the sidewalk, a tiny bit of chivalry that made me feel safe. As the car got closer, the lights got brighter, and all the sudden, Daniel shoved hard away from the road with his body, dragging Taco behind him like an anchor.
The silver pick-up missed us by inches.
I sat up on the sidewalk and dug my phone quickly out of my pocket and commanded the operating system to call Sheriff Tucker. We were only on the backside of our block, so he was there in seconds. “That way.” I pointed up the street. “He turned left at the next block.”
The sheriff had his phone out already. “Harriet, tell everyone to be on the look-out for a silver pick-up.” He looked down at Daniel.
“A 73 Chevy C-10 with dual exhaust.”
I looked at Daniel as the sheriff relayed the make and model. “You got all that so quickly?”
He rubbed his left shoulder where he’d slammed into the pavement. “It’s just instinctual. I see a vehicle, and I automatically ID the kind it is. You do the same with books, right? Someone mentions a title, and you immediately think of the author.”
“Yeah, I guess so. But wow, Daniel, thank you.” I helped him off the pavement and checked on the dogs. Mayhem was fine, a little scared but fine. Taco, however, wouldn’t get up. Daniel tugged his leash and nothing. I knelt down beside the Basset, afraid that he might have gotten hit . . . only to see his tail wagging. He’d gotten an extra chance to lie down, and he’d taken it. “Taco, you are ridiculous,” I groaned as I hefted his giant body off the ground.
We all walked back to the house, where everyone was waiting for us after having seen the sheriff sprint out the back gate. I told everyone what had happened and watched all the color fade out of my mom’s face.
“We’re okay, Mom.”
She pulled me to her and then grabbed Daniel with her other arm. “This has to end,” she whispered to me. “Tomorrow, you and I go sleuthing.”
* * *
The next morning I woke with a start to find my mother standing over me. That alone was a surprise, but when my eyes finally focused and I saw that she was dressed completely in black with a knit cap on her perfectly styled hair, I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep and pretend this was a dream.
No such luck. Mom was up and ready to “look for clues” as she said, and I had to really restrain myself from saying, “Get a clue, Mom.” Instead, I sat up, forced a smile, and said, “Okay, give me a minute to get dressed.”
My hope was that when I came out in my usual jeans and a blouse, she’d take the hint and adjust her outfit, but no such luck. When it was time for us to go – an hour earlier than usual for our apparent “sleuthing escapade” – she was still dressed like a diamond thief from a 1940s classic film.
I decided I needed to pick my battles, and since I was already breaking my word to the sheriff, Daniel, and Mart in order to get a little mother-daughter bonding time in, I wasn’t sure that my mother’s sleuthing attire was the best use of my energy. I needed to reserve my strength to talk her out of this expedition at all.
Mom wanted to drive, insisting we’d need a getaway car that wasn’t as easily recognizable as my bumper-stickered Subaru. As I climbed into the passenger seat to try and explain why I couldn’t go sleuthing with her, I was trying to find the right words. I gazed out the window down the street to gather my thoughts when the silver pick-up that had been stalking us pulled out from the curb just up my street. They had been watching us.
I shivered, decided to not scare my mom with the news, and convinced myself that Mom was right – this had to stop – all in the time it took Mom to back out of my driveway. This person was determined to terrify me, and I was determined that they would not. Mom and I were going sleuthing.
I pointed up in the direction the truck had just gone and told Mom to head that way. “I have an idea,” I said.
“Ooh, this is so fun,” she squealed as she, quite literally, peeled out in her Volvo station wagon. Despite my brief desire for vigilante justice, I was regretting my decision to go along with this escapade by the time we reached the edge of town. I found myself kind of hoping that Marcus would call in sick so I’d have an excuse to go into the store and, thus, avoid hurting my mom’s feelings and breaking my promise – again – to my friends.. Alas, from his texts about setting up a new front table display for a National Mental Health Awareness
month, Marcus seemed to be quite well and managing the store just fine without me.
As we cruised south on 33, Mom asked me again about clues, and I said with a fair amount of exasperation in my voice, “This isn’t the Pink Panther, Mom. We probably aren’t going to find a torn receipt or a misplaced hair to lead us to the killer.”
She rolled her eyes as she punched the gas and left the town limits. “Of course not. When Jessica Fletcher solves a murder, it’s always about a confrontation. We’re going to find out who is stalking you and give them a good talking to.”
I started giggling at the idea of my mother, in her current attire, confronting a potential murderer. She’d lecture them into a confession. I could see it – her finger in front of their face, her precise pronunciation and discussion of morals, her appeal to their human dignity – and the vision absolutely cracked me up. I couldn’t stop laughing, and I doubled over in the passenger seat as my stomach ached.
Mom asked, “What is so funny?” and that set me off even harder. Eventually, I had to roll down the window and gulp in cool air just to get my breath.
“Harvey, really, what is going on? We are trying to figure out who is threatening you, and you are over there cackling like a witch at her cauldron.”
I almost let my mind slide back to a vision of my mother in her black stocking cap with her reading glasses around her neck, but I stopped myself before I got going again. I took a few deep breaths and said, “Mom, we’re not confronting anyone. In fact, I’m not even sure what we’re doing.”
Mom looked at me out of the corner of her eye and then put on her turn signal and pulled off the road. “Well, you pointed this way, so I thought we were coming here again.”
I looked ahead of us to see the gates of the Harris farm. “What?! No. I was just—“ Again, omitting the truth was getting me in trouble. “I told us to go this way because I saw that silver pick-up back at the house, and it headed this direction.”
“What?! That truck was at your house again. The nerve.” She paused and squinted through the driveway. “Good instincts because isn’t that it pulling into that shed thing.”
I peered through the bars on the massive gate, and sure enough, that Chevy C-10 was just sliding into the wagon shed beside the house. “I’ll be—“
“Harvey Beckett, watch your language.” My mother could lie her way out of every parking ticket, weasel a bargain out of an unexpecting sales person, and convince the stodgiest millionaire to donate to the children’s hospital, but she could not tolerate swearing. It was crass and uncultured, in her opinion. In fact, her staunch position on this issue was so engrained in me that I almost never swore simply because I hadn’t practiced enough when I was young. The words always felt forced, performative, when I said them.
“I was going to say, ‘gobsmacked,’ Mom,” I lied. It had felt like an appropriate time for a mild swear, but this was a battle for another day.
“We have to go see who was driving.” Mom was out the door and through the gate before I could even answer.
“Mom,” I whisper-shouted, but it did no good. She was off and slinking her way along a culvert beside the driveway. Blind goats could see her from the other side of the highway in her outfit, but she seemed to be having fun . . . and I figured if we were quiet enough we might just be able to get the license plate off the truck and give it to Sheriff Tucker. I winced as I remembered I’d promised him, just the day before, that I’d text him if I even saw the truck again.
We eased our way along the driveway until we were just a few hundred feet from the shed. “This way,” I hissed and pointed into the field of winter wheat. “We can sneak around the back, just in case whoever it is went in the house or is in one of the other buildings. No windows on this side.” The wheat came up to our waists and was scratchy. The smell reminded me of a box of cereal, and I suddenly realized I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I was seriously craving Honey Nut Cheerios.
Mom dropped to her hands and knees, and I stopped to watch her crawl through the field. I had never in my life seen my mother crawl, not even to pick up toys or rescue something from under the sofa. So this was a sight, and I had to resist the urge to take a picture for blackmail purposes later.
I was not about to crawl, so I just bent at the waist to keep low, and we made our way around the small garage-sized building to the far side. There, we plastered ourselves against the back wall and took a breath.
“I’m going to go in. You stay here,” I said directly in my mother’s ear.
She swatted me away. “No way. We do this together.” She had this glint in her eye that made me think she might say something about a mother-daughter duo, so I got moving.
I peered in the window around the far side of the barn and saw the truck inside. I couldn’t make out the license plate, so I crept to the front of the building and made sure no one was nearby.
I didn’t see anyone, so I waved Mom around, and we slid open the old, swinging door and slipped inside. The windows were really grimy, so all the light was a little dim. But I got down close and copied down the license plate number from the antique tag. Mom snapped a photo, too, which, I had to admit, was a pretty smart idea, and texted it to Dad with a note that said, “I’ll explain later. Just keep this handy.”
We slid back out the front door and around to the side closest to the road. The jog across the small strip of lawn to the wheat field was easy, and I was feeling pretty confident when we got back into the wheat. I thought it was probably our best bet to stay partially under cover, even though Mom’s black outfit probably made it look like a small bear was in the wheat field. I’m not sure my red poppy blouse was much better. But at least we weren’t out in the wide open.
About halfway back to the road, I thought I heard an engine and assumed it was a tractor trailer going back out on 33. We kept walking, but soon it became clear that the sound was getting louder and much, much closer. A few more feet, and we saw it – a huge tractor coming our way through the field.
At first, I thought that they must have just been planning to get up the wheat today. I didn’t know much about farming, but I remembered what Dad had said about this field being ready to harvest so it made sense that a tractor would be in the field . . . until I realized the machine was cutting right through the middle of the wheat, and even I knew that made no sense. Someone harvesting would be moving through the field systematically. This tractor was aiming right for us.
Mom looked at me, and I saw not the slightest flicker of fear. Instead, board chair Sharon came to life and took my hand. “Run!” she said, and we took off as fast as we could. For a brief moment, I felt like I was in one of those horror movies where the unidentified thing is chasing the helpless victims through a field and was grateful at least I knew it was a tractor. But then, it hit me that it was gaining on us.
Mom tugged my arm hard, leading us to the driveway. I picked up speed, and she did, too, and just before the combine’s blades reached our legs, we hit the driveway and broke into a dead sprint for the gate, about twenty feet away. We would have reached it, too, if I hadn’t made the classic chase-scene mistake. I looked back, and when I did, I tripped. Mom came back to help me up, and the last thing I saw was a pair of work boots jump out of the tractor cab.
11
I woke up with a blazing headache and groaned. Immediately, I felt a hand on my forehead. “Thank goodness, Harvey. You gave me quite the scare.”
“Mom? You’re okay?” I tried to sit up but the flash of pain from my forehead sent me back down to the floor.
“Of course I’m okay. He didn’t hit me in the head with a shovel.”
“I got hit with a shovel? I don’t remember that.” I reached up and felt the knot at the back of my head.
“You wouldn’t, I expect.” She laid her cool hands on my neck. “Just lie still. Here, put your head in my lap.” She slid her thigh up under my head, and I turned so that my cheek rested against her leg.
“Where are we?” I asked as I t
ried to look around from where I was lying.
“That building where he put the truck.” I could just make out its outline in front of me. “He brought us here. Told me if I didn’t cooperate he’d do more than clobber you.”
“Who, Mom?”
“I don’t know. Some fellow with a beard. Guess when he didn’t get us with the combine, he thought maybe kidnapping was better after all.”
My head hurt so badly that I couldn’t think very well, but something wiggled around by my jaw. “You said a beard?”
“Yeah, kind of long. Youngish guy, maybe thirties. Clearly knew his way around here because he took us right in and put some kind of bar on the door. I’ve been trying to get out for thirty minutes.”
I tried to get my eyes to focus. “I was out for thirty minutes. Wait, how do you know that?”
She held up her phone. “No signal though.”
I took a long, deep breath. “Homer.”
“What?” Mom leaned down over me. “What did you say?”
“It was Homer. The caretaker here. He’s the one.”
She let out a long breath and then rubbed my cheek. “Don’t think about that now. We just need to find a way to get out of here.”
I wasn’t thankful for this situation, but if you had to be suffering from a concussion on a dirt floor while being held hostage, it was kind of nice to have your mom around. I said a silent word of gratitude for that tiny gift and put her hand over mine on my cheek.
My head hurt too badly for me to sit up, so I tried to feel around me with my left hand. Just dirt.
I looked around a little. “I saw some old pieces of chain,” my mother said. “Old hoe heads, I think. Nothing very useful as a weapon though.”
I marveled for just a moment that my mother could identify a gardening implement and then tried to ponder other things. “Obviously, you tried the door.”
