by Laurie Cass
“Face,” he gasped out between what I now understood to be a completely fake cough. “Her.”
I patted him on the back. “Wow, Max, that’s quite a cough. Maybe I should call the nurse. She’ll probably take you back to your room and you’ll miss Reading Hour, though.”
Max gave one final guttural cough. “I’m feeling much better, thank you,” he said, glaring at me. “How about you, Doris?” he asked the woman to whom he’d been pointing. “How are you feeling today?”
Doris, white-haired and thin, with a crocheted blanket across her wheelchaired lap, frowned. “How could I be anything but awful? I’m in here, aren’t I? Imprisoned by my ungrateful children who are far too busy to stop in and see their mother.”
During my visits to the facility, I often crossed paths with other visitors and it was easy to fall into conversation with folks you saw more than once, so I happened to know that Doris’s two sons came by weekly and her daughter stopped in two or three times a week. Plus, Doris had multiple medical issues that made home care difficult, and, her youngest son had said, “This was what Mom wanted. Didn’t want to be a burden on any of us, she said. And now . . .” He’d shrugged.
Max waggled his eyebrows at me and tapped the corner of his mouth. I looked at Doris and, now that she’d stopped talking, saw what he meant. The down-curved lines she’d made in her face when talking were still there when she wasn’t. Her face had indeed frozen that way.
Shaking my head, I settled myself into a chair and pulled the current book out of my backpack; Karen Thompson Walker’s The Dreamers. We had a few minutes to go before it was time to start reading, and people were still trickling into the room. Some walked with the aid of canes or walkers, some pushed their own wheelchairs, and some were pushed by CNAs. The chatter grew in volume, but most of it involved food and medications until I heard someone say, “Did everyone hear about that woman who was murdered?”
I looked up quickly. The speaker was Clella, a woman in her mid-eighties, who’d had a decades-long career as Chilson’s postmistress. Sadly, I’d never known the post office under her control, but I’d heard a story about the diminutive Clella facing down a giant of a man who shouted that if he didn’t get the package that was supposed to be delivered that day, he’d hurt someone. In the end, she had reduced him to apologetic tears.
“What woman?” the man rolling in the door asked. Lowell, the CNA steering the wheelchair, parked the man next to Clella and came around to lock the brakes and flip up the foot plates. I’d met Lowell a few months earlier and had fallen in love with his last name of Kokotovich. He’d laughed at my delight and said it wasn’t so much fun when learning how to spell it at age five.
“Summer folk,” Clella said. “Her family had a place up here since God was in short pants. Used to have mail come general delivery, back in the days when people did that.”
“What was the name?” he asked.
I almost said it, but Clella was talking again. “Her family name was Rodriguez, but she married a man named . . . oh, let me think.” Clella drummed her polished fingernails on her wheelchair’s arm.
“Well, where was she from?”
“Detroit area,” Clella said absently, the pink fingernails continuing to tap out a rhythm. “She was a high school teacher, school name is the same as the town, starts with an M. Macomb, Madison Heights, Melvindale, Milan, Milford . . .”
I smiled at her alphabetic recitation. A woman after my own heart.
“Monroe!” she announced. “Nicole. From Monroe. Don’t remember her married name, though.”
Lowell, who had started to stand, froze in place. “Price,” he said. “Her last name is Price.”
Everyone turned to look at him. He flushed. “I used to live there. A long time ago.” He gave a brief nod and hurried out.
I watched him go. A long time ago, he’d said. But Lowell was in his mid-twenties, so how long ago could it have been? And how long had Nicole been in Monroe? Though Monroe was a big city by Up North standards, it was a small town for downstate. Was there a connection between Lowell and Nicole?
It certainly seemed as if there could be.
And it was up to me to find out.
Chapter 14
Kate stared at me. “You want to do what?”
I kept my smile affixed to my face. Maybe if I kept it up, I’d look like Clella when I was in my mid-eighties, and not Doris. “I want us to make supper together. And it’ll be something that doesn’t smell much, so you won’t get a headache.”
“But you don’t cook. Not really.”
My smile became a tad rigid. “Just because I don’t, doesn’t mean I can’t.” At least in theory. “Anyone with a fifth grade education should be able to follow a recipe.” I flourished the small pile of printouts I’d made at the library during lunchtime, five cents a page into petty cash, thank you. “Pick one. Any ingredient we don’t have, we can walk over to the grocery store and buy. It’s Friday night, after all. We can make cooking our entertainment for the evening.”
“It’s not like it’s a real Friday,” Kate said, rolling her eyes. “I have to work at the toy store tomorrow morning, you know.”
I had not known. How could I have? For me to know what was going on in her life would have required that she talk to me. “Then I promise we won’t make anything that will take longer than ten hours.”
Kate sighed. “You’re going to make me do this, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely,” I said brightly. Or as brightly as I could through teeth that were starting to clench tight. “It’ll be fun.”
“Fun?” Kate’s eyes narrowed. “How?”
I had no idea. But then inspiration struck. Though my niece didn’t listen to me, she did listen to pretty much everyone else. “Kristen says there’s nothing in the entire world better than cooking a good meal.”
“Yeah? She really says that?” Kate glanced at the houseboat’s kitchen-like area.
“Here.” I held out my phone. “Go ahead. Ask her.”
Kate ignored my phone and, instead, took the stack of recipes. This relieved me mightily, because what Kristen had actually said was, “There’s nothing better than coming up with a new recipe that my peeps are willing to shell out thirty bucks a pop to eat.” She might have given me a pass on the translation, but now I had a chance to prep her for the question. And if I told her approval would result in Minnie Hamilton cooking a full dinner from start to finish, she would probably have paid admission to attend.
“Some of these don’t look too horrible,” Kate said. “Can I pick?”
“Absolutely,” I said rashly, which was why we ended up in the grocery store, filling a cart with a multitude of items to make shrimp pad Thai, a recipe that happened to be on the same page as the far simpler shrimp stir fry, the dish I’d had my eye on when I’d hit the Print button.
After I’d handed over my credit card for an amount that was more expensive than going out would have been and we’d hauled everything back to the houseboat, we read over the recipe and I divvied up tasks. Kate on the sauce, me on the slicing and dicing.
But after she’d watched me almost slice my fingertips off, she forced a switch.
“Have you ever used a knife in your life?” she demanded.
“Sure,” I said, carefully dividing oil into two tiny dishes usually reserved for Eddie’s morning milk. “It’s just that I’m often thinking about something else, and that something else is almost always a lot more interesting than cutting pretty much anything.”
“I can’t believe you have a master’s,” she muttered.
Clearly she had not yet learned that advanced degrees were an inaccurate indicator of life success, but that was something she’d have to figure out for herself.
When I was in the middle of spooning out rice vinegar, I felt Kate shoot me a quick glance. “Have you talked to Deputy Wolverson a
bout what I was saying the other day?”
“About . . . ?” Since my thoughts had been focused on what Rafe had been murmuring into my ear the previous evening, I blinked at her question.
She paused, mid-chop. “You’ve forgotten about it, haven’t you?”
“Of course not,” I said automatically as I tried to remember what she was so sure I couldn’t remember. A bit wildly, I looked around for a clue. Eddie, who was trying to wedge himself into the tiny crack between the dining bench and the wall, was no help. “It’s just I, um, haven’t had time.”
“Really?” The knife dropped onto the counter and she put her hands on her hips. “It was days ago you said you’d talk to Deputy Wolverson about my theory, that maybe Mrs. Price’s husband and Mr. Stuhler’s wife were having an affair, and they killed their spouses so they could be together without paying for a divorce.”
Ah. That. “Yes, but—”
“But what?” She was almost yelling now. “You were never going to tell him, were you? You don’t take me seriously. You never have and you never will.” She lurched away from my outstretched hand. “Leave me alone, okay? Just leave me alone.” She ran out the door, bobbing the houseboat as she jumped off.
I hurried after her, keeping her in sight as she ran down the length of the dock and took a hard right, and then another right a few yards later.
Sighing, I slowed. She was headed to Louisa and Ted Axford’s. I watched as she climbed aboard the sleek boat and lingered until I heard Louisa’s calm and reassuring voice.
“Now what?” I asked Eddie as I returned to the houseboat.
“Mrr,” he said. And he said it in a very critical way. Before I’d taken up residence with a cat, I hadn’t understood how judgmental they could be.
“Thanks so much.” I sighed. “I know I screwed up. You don’t have to beat me over the head with it.” I flopped on top of Kate’s sleeping bag. Then squirmed around a bit. “You know what? This is actually very comfortable. No wonder she likes sleeping on this.”
“Mrr.”
“Well, sure, you knew that a long time ago, didn’t you? And you were just waiting for me to acknowledge the combined wisdom of an Eddie and a seventeen-year-old.” The yellow eyes swiveled my way and I quickly added, “Sorry, that came out a little snarky, didn’t it? I apologize. I should never doubt your capabilities.”
His little kitty shoulders went up and down in a sigh, looking for all the world like an aggrieved parent who knew their offspring was lying through their teeth.
In the name of distraction, I said, “But you never answered my question. What do I do now? Is she going to talk to me anytime soon? And by ‘soon,’ what I mean is within the next decade?”
Eddie, who had been sitting on the dashboard, jumped to the floor and stalked past me.
“Okay, you’re right. What I should do is what I told her I’d do: talk to Ash about her theory that Fawn Stuhler and Dominic Price had a thing going and killed their spouses to clear the way for mutual eternal bliss. After their reception of my one-killer theory, I doubt they’ll welcome anything like that.” But I’d have to talk to them eventually, since I’d promised.
Sliding down, getting close to horizontal, I tried to consider Kate’s theory as realistic. I’d never met Fawn, but Rex had been in his late forties, so odds were reasonably good that Fawn was roughly the same age. Nicole had turned forty last winter—I remembered her talking about the surprise party her husband had given her—so Dominic was probably about that, too.
“Not that you have to be the same age to fall in love with each other,” I told Eddie. “There are lots of couples out there who are years and years apart in age.”
I started counting on my fingers. Donna’s husband hadn’t retired since he was holding out for maximum social security benefits, so he had to be at least five years younger. And I was pretty sure Uncle Everett, Aunt Frances’s first husband, had been significantly older.
“Okay, that’s only two couples, but I’m sure I could come up with more if—” I stopped, frowning. Underneath me there were sounds of a cat getting into something he shouldn’t. “Eddie, what are you doing?”
The unexplained noise continued unabated.
I slid over the edge of the bench seat and oozed onto the floor. “Please don’t tell me you’ve crawled into Kate’s luggage again,” I said, peering underneath the lowered table. “You know she hates it when you get your white hairs on her black T-shirts and your black hairs on her white T-shirts.”
A single piece of popcorn rolled out and came to a rest next to my right knee.
“Nice.” I wondered how long it had been there and decided not to think about it. “You could have eaten that and saved—”
A second piece of popcorn rolled out and stopped by my left knee. “Double nice. Thanks for your commentary on my housekeeping—”
“Mrr!”
“I said thank you. What more do you want?”
“MRR!” Eddie crawled out from the darkness, gave me a Look, and stalked off.
“Some days,” I said, watching his tail end, “it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.”
“Mrr.”
* * *
* * *
When Kate eventually returned, I was sitting on a front deck chaise, reading, with Eddie flopped across my legs. She stepped aboard, muttered an apology for leaving without telling me where she was going, and slunk inside.
“Not sure that counts as talking,” I said to Eddie. “What do you think?”
He purred, which was the exact response I’d hoped for.
I’d been texting Louisa on and off since Kate had fled for the Axfords’ greener pastures and the fun of playing with a toddler, and when Louisa had asked if I wanted Kate to apologize, I’d responded: In a perfect world, sure. But though Chilson may be paradise, it’s not perfect.
Louisa: Shouldn’t we be trying to make the world more perfect?
I’d returned with: But who gets to decide the definition of perfection? Not sure I want that job and an emoji of a yellow face sticking its tongue out.
After sitting a few minutes longer, I picked up Eddie and my book—because it was way too dark to read, even for me—and headed inside. As I passed Kate, who’d already brushed her teeth, changed into pajamas, slid into her sleeping bag, and started up a video game on her tablet, I said, “See you in the morning.”
She made a grunt-like noise in return, and I went to bed with a calm heart. She might not be talking-talking to me, but I wasn’t getting the silent treatment.
“What do you think about that?” I whispered to Eddie, who was curled up between my right hip and the outer wall.
Once again, his only answer was a purr.
* * *
* * *
The next morning, Rafe and I had arranged to meet for breakfast at the Round Table. We hadn’t shared our Friday night because he and some buddies had tickets to a concert at the flat-out gorgeous Great Lakes Center for the Arts, and I wasn’t invited.
He looked at me over the coffee Sabrina had just poured. “You could have gone, you know.”
I hesitated, then reached out for the cream. It was definitely a cream kind of day. Then again, if I could justify the calories, most days were cream kinds of days. “Really? Me and all of your stinky guy friends, hanging out before at Knot Just a Bar, going to hear some band whose music I’ve never cared for, and then going back to Knot Just a Bar afterward to talk about how great the music was?”
“You’d have fit right in,” he said, toasting me with his mug.
It probably would have been fun, if I’d brought along earplugs. His friends were good guys, and they were always willing to expand their circle to include anyone who laughed at their jokes. Still, I liked that the two of us had slightly different sets of friends. I figured it was probably good for our relationship. That is, if the article I’d
read in the women’s magazine at the beauty salon last time I was getting my hair cut had any truth behind it.
“How did it go with Kate last night?” he asked.
Grimacing, I said, “Not now, please. I don’t want to ruin my breakfast.”
“That bad?”
“It wasn’t good.”
We sat there, sipping coffee while we waited for our food, and as the caffeine started to work its happy way into my body, my outlook started to improve. “But it ended up okay. And on my way out this morning, I said, ‘Have a good day,’ and she said, ‘You too,’ so I’m going to count that as a win.”
“Speaking of wins . . .”
Rafe let the sentence trail off, and I took the bait. “What did you win?” I asked, looking around. “Don’t see any big stuffed animals.” I craned my head and neck around to see out the window. “A car? Did you win that Lamborghini I see sitting out there?” Not that I could recognize a Lamborghini from any kind of ghini, but that wasn’t the point.
“Better. And just so you know, I was very clever about this.” He beamed.
“Given,” I said, nodding.
“It’s about Dominic Price.”
My coffee cup stopped halfway up. “Nicole’s husband?”
“The very one.”
“What did you learn?” I put the cup down. “Is it something I should tell the sheriff’s office? Who did you learn it from?”
Rafe crossed his arms and glared at me. “Are you going to let me tell the story or not?”
“Is there time?” I flipped my phone over and thumbed the Home button to wake it up. Rafe Stories were rated by his friends by the number of beers they consumed while he talked. Amounts ranged from one short draft beer for the shortest tale to three tall beers for the stupendously long but immensely entertaining Appendix Story. “Okay, I don’t have anything going until tonight. I should be good.”
He frowned. “I could have sworn it was my turn to be the funny one.”
