Down the Rabbit Hole

by F J messina

  She also pulled on the beige cloche hat that she, a big Downton Abbey fan, had just purchased at a cute little shop on West Main Street, Feather Your Nest. It’s a place where you could spend hours poking through all the antique and period clothing and items they had. The hat just seemed to call out to Sonia, and she really didn’t care that Jet kept teasing her, saying the hat looked like a bell sitting on top of her head.

  Sonia walked down the long, white, wooden staircase running along the side of the brick building that housed her office. At the bottom of the steps, she stepped around the corner of the building and pushed open the door of one of her favorite places in the world, Magee’s. It was a bakery that had been an icon in town since the 1950s. Brick interior walls, open ceiling, hardwood floor, the environment was warm and welcoming. As she entered, she was greeted by the most wonderful smells.

  Hildy, the same thin-faced, grey-haired woman who was always there in the morning, looked up at Sonia from behind the counter. “Morning.” A sweet woman, she’d had some problems with Sonia’s name, Lexington not having much of an Italian community from which she could learn proper pronunciations. It had helped when Sonia had said, gently, “Sewn-ia Vitalay, with an accent on the “tah” and a long “a” sound at the end.” Hildy asked the same question she asked almost every day. “Coffee and an almond croissant?”

  “As usual,” Sonia replied, glad for the sense of familiarity that came from seeing the same folks in the same place every morning. Sonia grabbed her croissant, wrapped tightly in a white paper bag with the Magee’s logo on it. Then she headed toward the coffee bar next to the large picture windows at the front of the building. As she stirred in a packet of raw sugar, she looked out across the street, staring at the brown-brick building that housed the central offices of the school district that served Lexington, Kentucky.

  Her coffee sweetened appropriately, Sonia swallowed a bit of frustration, tightened up her coat, and walked back out into the brisk morning. She knew that having the BCI offices over a bakery was pretty cool. She also knew that having to access those offices via an outdoor stairway was another thing entirely. This was especially true since this set of stairs went straight up to the second story without a turn-around landing. Fortunately, the steps at her carriage house apartment above a garage on Central Avenue were a bit shorter. Sonia looked up to the top of the steps. Steps at work. Steps at home. She sighed, laughing at herself. Sonia, the little girl with calves like The Hulk.

  Sonia climbed the stairway, turned the ancient knob, pushed the heavy door open and stepped in. Given the outdoor staircase and limited heat─Jet was constantly complaining that it was colder than a witch’s whatever in there─Sonia wondered for the millionth time why they had ever rented the place. Of course, cheap rent and being right there on East Main Street were key, especially since Magee’s was a big deal in Lexington. Also, it didn’t hurt that being over Magee’s─Sonia took a deep breath─her office always smelled like Christmas cookies.

  Sonia walked through the BCI space ruminating on the cases before her, an attempt by a sixty-four-year-old man to locate an old girlfriend, the Dylan case, a new client that Jet would be meeting with this afternoon, and now the Teresa Torres case. Had she been wearing heels, as some of her clients did─not that she was going to go up and down those darn steps ten times a day in heels─their sound would have reverberated off the wooden floor and bare brick walls as she walked. The raw wood ceiling only made the sounds more intense.

  Trying to organize some sort of work plan in her mind, Sonia stepped to the window and took in the familiar view across East Main. The school district’s central office, a building from which she had recently been exiled, loomed slightly to the left; the only other commercial buildings she could see from that window were a small restaurant and an old white house. The restaurant, it seemed, kept changing hands, and therefore names, at least once a year. First, it was Cajun food, The Crazy Cajun; then French food, L’Escargot; then All-American food, Beef & ‘Taters; and then Cajun food again. Sonia chuckled. Coming soon: Entrails On Main.

  The old white house had been turned into office space for three or four professional businesses. It seemed to Sonia that at least one of the units was always empty, but that the lawyer and the accountant who had established residency had been there quite a while. Finally, and this was the kicker for Sonia, the fourth space was occupied by Semper Fi Investigations. It made Sonia crazy that the only other PI firm in town was right across the street, and seemingly quite a bit busier than BCI. She shrugged. That’s just part of starting a new business.

  Pulling herself back to her work, Sonia turned and sat down at her desk. It would take her an hour or so to transfer files to her new laptop. After that, she would spend the rest of the day searching the internet for any details that would flesh out her report on the sixty-four-year-old’s long-lost love. She’d located the woman living in Phoenix. However, before she got the old guy’s hopes up, she wanted to know, for sure, if the woman was married or single. She thought it might also be a good idea to check the woman’s legal history. No use sending him out to Phoenix only to find that her home was a cell in the county or state prison system. Medical records, of course, were off limits. Nonetheless, Sonia was determined that by the end of the day, the end of the week, she was going to be able to put a report and some photographs taken off the woman’s social network postings into a nice crisp envelope and send them to the old guy. She would also include an invoice. BCI needed the cash flow.

  3

  Monday morning, after getting her coffee and pastry at Magee’s, Sonia climbed the stairs and discovered the door unlocked. She stopped, took a breath, then entered. She found Jet sitting in her office, speaking with a male client. Sonia guessed it was Clay McCormick.

  Jet looked up at Sonia in brief recognition and smiled, her long blonde hair setting off her pretty, blue-eyed face. Sonia was just a bit jealous of Jet’s Scandinavian looks and that perpetual ponytail which Jet had learned to whip around for effect at times. At five-foot-six and athletic, Jet was the same age as Sonia, but about two inches taller. Whereas Jet was lean, Sonia was more shapely. As she moved to her own space, Sonia could hear Jet speaking to Clay McCormick and was pretty sure Jet was really turning on the charm.

  In the past, Sonia had been told that she, like most folks in the mid-west, had little or no recognizable accent. She was also well aware that Jet, like most central-Kentucky millennials, had worked hard to eliminate any southern accent from their everyday speech. Nonetheless, Jet had told Sonia that slipping into the southern dialects that had teased her ears in her youth came to her naturally. As naturally as “slidin’ out of its skin comes to those damn cottonmouths that were all over my granddaddy’s farm.”

  The girls had divided the former attic into three rooms, using wood and glass walls. Clients entered at the back and stepped into a large waiting room. It was a nice area, and they were planning on decorating it in an equine motif. The size of the room, however, made that a pretty expensive undertaking. So far, other than a leather couch, there was little evidence of what was to come.

  The front area had been divided into two offices, Sonia’s to the left, Jet’s to the right, each with a window onto East Main. The wooden floors and open ceiling continued in each of their spaces. The large glass sections of the wall offered privacy for any discussions, yet, because they could still see each other, Sonia and Jet felt less vulnerable when they were in their office with men they didn’t know. On the wall of each office hung a picture of Sonia and Jet at a shooting range and copies of their licenses to carry concealed weapons. Those were meant to convey a certain, “Listen, fella. I’m carrying a gun and I know how to use it,” message.

  Sonia slipped off her pea coat and sat at her desk. Friday afternoon, Sonia had asked Jet to tell her about McCormick, their newest client. Jet had said that he owned a large restaurant in town and good-sized pieces of top quality meats and fish were disappearing from the restaurant’s ref
rigerator. This would be good work for BCI since the rate they could charge would be much higher than the “Snap & Burn” work─snap the photo, burn their asses─they did for jilted spouses and lovers. On the other hand, this would entail setting up video surveillance and hours of reviewing images before the culprit was caught.

  Sonia tapped her Cross pen, a thin, silver, “fine writing instrument,” on her desk. It was pretty old school, but her parents had given it to her as a graduation gift from college, and it sometimes gave her heart a warm tickle when she used it.

  Since coming to Lexington, Sonia had found that the Mexican-American community had become a vibrant and positive element in the fabric of the city’s daily life, many of the first to arrive finding work on the horse farms that surrounded the city and gave it its unique character. Ms. Torres had told Sonia that was where she would find the cheating “puto,” Mr. Torres, no relation. Marcos was a farm hand on Dahlia Farm, a small horse farm out on Pisgah Pike.

  Sonia had done a little digging with her new computer and found that Dahlia Farm was managed by Steve Hollings and owned by John Abbott Hensley, a very successful attorney in Cincinnati. Given that his business was located across the river in Ohio, she guessed Hensley was also very much an absentee owner. Sonia assumed that, as so often happens, the successful business that allowed him to own the farm rarely afforded him the opportunity to enjoy it. She guessed he only came to the farm a few times each year.

  Having grown up in Cincinnati proper herself, Sonia loved the idea that in order to observe Marcos she would have to go out into the beautiful horse farm country that was only minutes from downtown. Yet, this also created some serious problems. First, farm hands don’t exactly clock in at ten in the morning, as Sonia had gotten used to doing. These farm hands were probably showing up at five. Second, it wasn’t like she could just park her car outside Marcos’ place of employment and sit there unnoticed. Surveillance of his arrival and departure from work was going to be one pain in the butt.

  Ms. Torres had said Marcos, “came home from work smelling like he’d been with another woman a few times a week.” As best as she could guess, Sonia figured that Marcos was either slipping out at lunch to meet with this “puta,” or stopping on the way home. After all, work schedules for farm hands were less than regular. He could easily leave at three in the afternoon, stop in for a little personal liaison, and tell Teresa he had gotten off a little before four. Which, Sonia knew, could be true, in a manner of speaking.

  As she ruminated on how she would observe Marcos, Sonia turned and looked out the window onto East Main. It was another sunny day, quite a bit warmer than the days before had been. It was a perfect day to take a ride out to Dahlia farm and check things out. As she stood to slip on her coat, however, she couldn’t help but look at the white house across the street and the sign that read Semper Fi Investigations. She wondered how Brad Dunham, “Mr. Semper Fi Investigations,” would handle the Marcos Torres surveillance problem.

  Sonia walked out of her office and down the steps. She got into her car, turned left on East Main, and within minutes was on the road that took her past iconic Calumet Farm, perhaps the world’s most famous horse farm. It had produced eight Kentucky Derby winners─two Triple Crown winners. She passed Blue Grass Airport and historic Keeneland Racetrack, known by jockeys, breeders, trainers, and racing fans alike, as one of the most beautiful horse racing venues in the country. Finally, she drove a few more miles and reached another local landmark, an odd replica of a European castle that was now being used for special events. The castle was such an unusual sight that Sonia, like many other first-time visitors to the Bluegrass, had Googled, “Lexington Castle,” soon after she had first seen the stone walls and high turrets.

  At that corner, Sonia turned right onto Pisgah Pike and was almost immediately surrounded by horse farms. She struggled to keep her eyes on the narrow road, rather than let them drift to the beautiful, white, wooden fences and lush green fields.

  Sonia slowed as she passed Dahlia Farm on her left. A long gravel driveway left the road and created a straight path onto the property, a good-sized barn on its right, an old but well-kept house on its left. There was no visible activity that she could see, but she assumed that was not so unusual for a horse farm. According to what she knew about horse farms─and that wasn’t much─there were busy times in the mornings and late afternoons. Some days there were important things to do in between. Other days there were some lulls in the activity. Sonia hoped she wasn’t missing something important, but she was pretty sure that driving past a horse farm and not seeing any human activity was sort of par for the course.

  About a quarter-mile past the farm, Sonia stopped and made a difficult U-turn on the narrow road. She drove past the farm a second time, going even more slowly and taking in as much information as she could. Before taking the turn at the castle and heading back into town, Sonia pulled to the side of the road and spoke a few notes into her phone:

  Teresa Torres case, Monday, March 21, first impressions:

  One: Farm is as small as I had expected. Little activity.

  Two: Farm must be doing well, or at least be well funded. House, barns, and fences all in excellent repair.

  Three: Electronic gear on top of house indicates that the farm is well connected to twenty-first-century communications.

  Sonia tapped out of the MEMO section of the phone and started to put it back into her purse. Something else struck her. She made one more note.

  Four: Surprised to see five pickup trucks parked in the farm’s small lot. One must belong to the farm manager. Seems like each of the farm hands also has his own truck.

  That seemed a little unusual to Sonia. She would have assumed that many farm hands would be more likely to share a ride to work. Then she added another item.

  Five: Each of those trucks is pretty darn new and in good condition. The farm must be paying its employees well.

  As she drove back to her office, still not sure how she was going to keep an eye on Marcos Torres, Sonia mindlessly tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. Is that little farm really doing that well? I’ll bet there are some financial filings I might be able to get my hands on.

  4

  Sonia arrived back at Magee’s and walked into the bakery. She had seen Jet’s car in the parking lot, so she sent Jet a voice text: I’M DOWNSTAIRS GETTING LUNCH. WANT SOMETHING?

  Within a few moments, she got a reply: NO TKS. COVERED

  Sonia decided on her ‘personal’ sandwich, one she had invented, and let her mind and eyes wander as she waited in line to order. She couldn’t help but notice the guy at the counter. He was six-foot-three or four and must have weighed at least two-twenty-five, and it was clearly all muscle. He was wearing some sort of military boots, a pair of pretty tight jeans, and a puke-green tee shirt. Surprisingly, he wasn’t wearing a coat. Sonia didn’t recognize him, but whoever he was, he seemed to be quiet, the kind of guy who kept to himself. A small smile crept across Sonia’s face. Hmmm. Now there’s a delicious-looking lunchtime treat. Sonia was well-aware that the elementary school nuns had curbed her tongue, but not her appetite. She was, after all, Italian.

  Hildy handed him his order and he turned around. What Sonia noticed first were bright blue eyes, set in a rugged face. His hair was cropped very short and his hairline was beginning to recede just a tiny bit. The next thing she noticed was the anchor and globe insignia of the United States Marines on his tee shirt, book-ended by some serious biceps. Not that Sonia cared, but this guy was pretty hot. As he walked toward the door, carrying a white Magee’s bag, Julie, one of the owners, popped out from behind the counter.

  “Goodbye, Brad” she called in a bit of a singsong voice. It was completely obvious she also thought this Brad guy was pretty sexy.

  Sonia smiled and chuckled to herself. Then it hit her. Holy moly. That’s Brad Dunham, Mr. Semper Fi himself. Whoa, no wonder most of the women who want a PI go to see him instead of us. But Sonia knew that looks weren
’t all Mr. Semper Fi had going for him. No one runs a business in a small city without developing some sort of reputation and Brad Dunham’s reputation was that of a hard-ass. Maybe it was because he was on a military pension and didn’t really need the money, but Sonia had heard that he often turned down work because he didn’t like, or didn’t believe, the client. He’d also been known to get a little physical with some of the people he’d been hired to investigate─and come to think of it, with some of the people who had hired him. Brad Dunham might be eye candy, but Sonia was quite certain that he was clearly not her type. Too much muscle. Probably not nearly enough brain. She would just leave him to Julie. After all, Julie was a friend.

  A few minutes later, Sonia had climbed those stairs again and walked into their offices, lunch in hand. Instead of going to her own workspace, she went directly to Jet’s and plopped herself down in the padded red chair across from Jet’s desk. She took her sandwich out of its white paper bag. “I’ve got a problem.”

  Jet looked up from her work. “And that is?”

  Sonia didn’t like asking for help, but she dove in nonetheless. “I’ve got to figure out a way to watch the comings and goings of one Marcos Torres who just happens to work on a horse farm.” She shook her head. “I can’t exactly park on the road across the street from the farm and go unnoticed. I might as well put out a black and yellow sign that says, ‘Private Investigation Under Way. For More Information, call Bluegrass Confidential Investigations.’ ”

  Jet smiled and her pretty blue eyes sparkled. Sonia returned the smile─they were on the same wavelength. Sonia unwrapped her avocado and peanut butter sandwich, a combination which had brought a grimace to Hildy’s face the first time Sonia had placed that special order. But now, like today, Sonia could count on a little extra avocado and a wink whenever she ordered it.