Murder Between the Covers

by Maddie Cochere

  I felt giddy with happiness. Glenn was perfect in every way. There wasn’t anything about him that bothered or disappointed me. I tore the paper from the gift and lifted the lid on a new pair of fuzzy orange slippers. The ones I had just thrown away were rodents compared to these soft, puffy beauties.

  I slipped them on. They fit perfectly. I expected nothing less from Glenn. I stood to thank him with a kiss.

  He pulled my robe open and slipped his hands under my t-shirt. “Let’s see what you look like in just the slippers.”

  I laughed and pushed him away. “No. The flea market’s already open, and we need to get moving.”

  “Tonight,” he said. “You can model the slippers tonight.”

  His ornery smile and cute dimple nearly changed my mind, but I really didn’t want to disappoint Mama. He set a small plate with one egg, one strip of bacon, and a half slice of dry toast in front of me. “There’s going to be so much food at the flea market, I thought we’d eat light this morning.”

  “Why do I smell Italian?” I asked.

  He snapped his fingers and turned back to the stove. In another instant, he had a large pan of rigatoni and sausage out of the oven and set on trivets on the counter.

  “I told Estelle I’d bring it. She can sell it or serve it to family.”

  “I’d rather have that for breakfast.”

  He laughed. “Hurry up and eat. We’ll save time if we shower together.”

  I wolfed down my food.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Grandmama, the toilet’s overflowed again!”

  Keith stood outside the men’s room to deliver the news at the top of his lungs. Hank rushed past Glenn and me and yelled to Mama, “I’m on it.”

  I was surprised by the number of people who had come to the grand opening. The flea market was packed. Snow had continued to fall all night, and although it was beautiful outside, there was at least six inches on the ground. Plows were still running on side streets, and people were hard at work clearing drives and digging out cars.

  Glenn and I made our way to the back of the building where Mama had put Pepper and Kelly in charge of running the snack bar. As we walked down one of the aisles, I was amazed by how well she and Roger had recreated the look and feel of the original flea market. Of course, everything was now new and clean, but the layout and many of the details were the same, right down to the wood plank floors. I was proud of them for what they had accomplished.

  “I tried to save you a slice of blueberry pie,” Pepper said, “but Mama sold the last one about fifteen minutes ago. Jackie’s pies have been in high demand.”

  Glenn slid the pan of rigatoni across the counter to her. “It’s still pretty hot, so don’t touch the bottom. You might want to keep it in the oven on warm.”

  Kelly grabbed the pan by the handles. “I’ll take care of it,” she said and whisked the food away.

  “How are you two feeling this morning?” Pepper asked softly. “Jackie told me what happened.”

  Glenn and I looked at each other and smiled. He slipped his arm around my waist. “We’re doing great. Jo was amazing yesterday. She saved my life.”

  “I can’t believe what happened to both of you,” she said and reached across the counter to touch Glenn’s arm. “To think you were in the next room when we were looking at the maps.” She stopped talking, closed her eyes, and shook her head. When she opened them again, they were filled with tears. “I’m glad you’re both safe. Mama doesn’t know anything about any of it, and she thinks the mayor stood her up today. He was supposed to be here for a ribbon cutting.”

  “He’s in our jail right now,” Glenn said. “He won’t be cutting any ribbons anytime soon unless it’s for craft time when he gets to a maximum security prison this time.”

  A man and woman walked up to the counter. Kelly was assisting other customers, so it was up to Pepper to take their order.

  “We’ll talk to you in a little bit,” I said to her. “I want to find Mama and say hello.”

  Mama was easy to find. She was helping Roger in his space. He had twice as much room than he did in the old building.

  Glenn gave Mama a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Everything looks great, Estelle. You and Roger outdid yourselves, and it smells wonderful in here – like Christmas. How’d you do that?”

  Roger stepped up and said, “The tree is real, and we made cinnamon ornaments to hang on it, so you got your pine and cinnamon giving you that Christmas feeling.”

  The decorated tree in the middle of the room was huge. Hundreds of multi-colored twinkle lights gave it a more-than-festive look.

  Mama reached under one of the tables and held up two cans of air freshener behind Roger’s back. One was pine; the other was cinnamon. Glenn struggled to hold back laughter.

  “How did you manage to pipe in Christmas music?” I asked.

  “That was all Parker,” Roger said. “That man sure knows his way around the electric stuff.” He pointed to speakers at different locations in the ceiling. We put a cd in the boom box in the office, and it plays out here. We got speakers on both floors.”

  I took a quick look at the wares on Roger’s tables. I couldn’t believe he had some of my childhood toys on display. I thought I had rescued them all from his clutches. However, it didn’t bother me today, and I hoped he was able to sell them.

  He left us and rushed to the end of the table. “Hey, you break it, you bought it,” he said to a woman holding a glass decanter.”

  I smiled at Glenn. It felt wonderful to be back in a place that had given me so many good memories – even if it was only a facsimile.

  I noticed Mama staring at me. “What?” I asked. “Do I have dirt on my face? Something in my teeth?”

  She slipped between two tables and stepped out of Roger’s space. She walked up to me, put her arms around me, hugged me tight, and didn’t let go. I was shocked. She hadn’t hugged me like this since I was a child. I looked at Glenn and sort of shrugged my shoulders before putting my arms around her to return the hug.

  She pulled back a bit and put one hand on the side of my face. I knew then she had found out about yesterday.

  “Merry Christmas, Jo,” she said. “I love you.”

  Mama was never this emotional with me. She liked playing the fool and entertaining everyone, but she was unusually sincere at this moment.

  I hugged her again and said, “I love you, too, Mama.”

  She finally released me and gave Glenn the same treatment.

  “Ok, enough of this mushy stuff,” she said. “You two go do some shopping and don’t forget to buy your lunch at the snack bar.”

  “What can we do to help?” Glenn asked.

  “There’s nothing to do,” she said. “As long as Hank has that crapper under control, we’re in good shape.”

  “We’ll check on him,” I said.

  We had to pass the snack bar to reach the restrooms. I felt a pang of nostalgia when I saw Arnie sitting at his old spot on the stool at the end of the counter. I slid onto the stool beside him.

  “I miss working out of the flea market,” I said. “What do you say we shut down the office and move back here?”

  He furrowed his brow and looked at me as if I was crazy. “Not a chance. Your mother might be hugging you now, but she’ll have you pulling your hair out in less than a month.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. He was spot on with that prediction.

  Glenn asked Pepper for a cup of coffee before looking over at Arnie. “Have you heard anything from your guy at the FBI?”

  “Yeah, what’s going on?” I asked. “Are they still blaming me for messing everything up?”

  “On the contrary,” he said. “Don’t be surprised when someone higher up than Agent Roberts thanks you both for your service.”

  Glenn and I exchanged surprised glances.

  “Really? Why?” Glenn asked.

  “I supposed their number one suspect being killed in your house is a factor.”

  “I t
hought they’d be mad their number one suspect could no longer lead them to whoever was behind the illegal IDs at the laundromat,” I said.

  “But he did,” Arnie said. “The Escalade was parked down the street from your house. Rorski got a warrant to search it. Everything the FBI was hoping to find in the laundromat yesterday was stuffed in the back of the car. Geoff Marina’s cell phone gave up some names and numbers, and I suspect they’ll put this one to bed in a matter of days.”

  Jackie materialized beside Arnie with three pie boxes in her hands. Kelly was quick to take them from her.

  “They’re all apple,” Jackie told her. “Cut a slice for each of us, and we all want coffee. It’s on me.”

  Arnie and Glenn thanked her. I couldn’t stop smiling. I couldn’t get over how much I’d missed sitting at the flea market counter, talking shop, and eating Jackie’s pies.”

  “I assume you’re talking about yesterday,” she said. “Where’d you leave off?”

  “Arnie just filled us in on the search of the Escalade,” I said. “The laundromat case is put to rest.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Agent Roberts is a jerk. The FBI hit us with a gag order until tomorrow. They didn’t want any of yesterday’s events printed today, because it would tip off the other players in the ID scheme, and with the mayor being involved, we couldn’t print anything about who he really is and that he’s a felon to boot.”

  Her frustration was clear in her voice.

  “How did Bubba and that Marina character get together in the first place?” Glenn asked.

  Arnie answered. “He’s not a Bubba. Never was. His name’s Francis Bradley Bonebrake. Everyone knew him as Bradley, and he’s not from Indiana. He’s a Cleveland native. Before he went to prison, he and Marina ran any number of scams together, but once Bradley was out, they hooked up with a larger outfit and got into the fake ID and credit card game. Marina set up shop in Akron, but Bradley had other reasons for wanting to settle and set up shop in Buxley.”

  “The gold,” Jackie said, picking up the story. “He’s pretty much confessed to everything at this point,” she said. “Scott Eberley and Bradley Bonebrake were cellmates for a while. After Scott’s aunt came to the prison to ask him about the map to the gold, he contacted Bradley and told him he’d cut him in if he found the map. Unfortunately for her, Meredith Duncan realized why the mayor seemed so familiar. She was going to hire Jo to find out for certain, but when she confronted the mayor that morning, he couldn’t have her blowing his cover, so he killed her and tried to stage it as an accident.”

  Glenn reached over to grasp my hand and squeeze it. “You were right all along when you said he wasn’t who he appeared to be.”

  “There never was any gold,” Arnie said. “Lives lost over a rumor is a sad thing.”

  Jackie smiled and gave me a wink. Pepper brought our pie slices and set them in front of us. Kelly was right behind her with the coffee.

  When Kelly walked away, Pepper asked, “Well, did we decide? Are we telling Mama the gold is buried under here or not?”

  My mouth fell open. Glenn chuckled beside me.

  “Pepper!” I said incredulously. “You weren’t supposed to mention that in front of anyone.”

  Glenn and Arnie spoke at the same time.

  “You already told me,” Glenn said.

  “There’s no gold,” Arnie said.

  “Arnie’s right,” Jackie said. “There’s no gold.”

  “What do you mean there’s no gold?” Pepper asked. “We all saw the map. It’s buried under here.”

  “What map?” Arnie asked.

  Jackie pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her purse and handed it to Arnie.

  “Did any of you go by the bakery this morning?” she asked.

  “I did,” Arnie said. “It’s closed with a for sale sign on the door.”

  “Get out!” Pepper said. “Crump and Crumpets is closed? Who shut him down?”

  “No one shut him down,” Jackie said. “Walt’s in the Cayman Islands with his father and mother and most of his relatives.”

  Glenn understood what she was telling us right away. “His family found the gold, didn’t they?”

  Arnie finished scanning Jackie’s article that would run in the paper tomorrow. “Hot damn,” he said under his breath. “I never believed it existed.”

  “The flea market was in the Crump family for over seventy years,” Jackie said. “It didn’t originally have a basement. I remembered reading a newspaper article telling how Walt’s father had the basement dug out in the late fifties as the official fallout shelter for the town. It was all dug by hand, and Walt’s father was in on the digging every day.

  When I asked Walt about it, he said his father found the gold. He was a little sketchy on the details, or he didn’t want to tell me and implicate anyone, but from that day forward, his father sold the gold, one bar at a time, over several years to foreign buyers and had the money deposited in several banks in the Cayman Islands. He waited almost ten years to move his family, but Walt stayed behind. He liked it here and wanted to stay to run the flea market.”

  Arnie shook his head. “That’s how that bastard took a vacation to the Islands every year. His folks were there paying for him. I knew he wasn’t making that kind of dough running a flea.”

  “But why did he close up shop and leave so fast?” I asked. “Was it a crime that his family found the money and kept it?”

  “I don’t know,” Jackie said. “But Walt doesn’t know either. When I told him I was going to break the story of the map and where the gold was, he told me what his father had done. He didn’t want a mob descending on your mother’s new building and tearing it down. He said it was a good time to leave with winter coming on anyway.”

  Arnie stood from his stool. “This town is nuts,” he said and walked away.

  “Toilet!” Keith yelled at the top of his lungs.

  “Come on,” Glenn said. “We were supposed to give Hank a hand.”

  We made our way to the men’s room. Nancy was mopping water from the floor. Hank seemed frazzled.

  “I’ve plunged enough for a lifetime,” he said. “Whatever is clogging that toilet isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Roger did it,” Keith said. “He probably left a log in there.”

  Hank reached out and grabbed him by the ear. “Don’t let your mother hear you talking like that, or she’ll make you stick your hand in there to get it out.”

  Keith’s eyes bugged. He clapped a hand over his mouth.

  Glenn took the mop from Nancy. “Do you have some dish soap?”

  She opened a door across from the men’s room to reveal a supply closet. She grabbed a bottle of dishwashing liquid and handed it to him. He put a few good squeezes of the soap in the toilet before plunging the mop in.

  Keith howled with laughter and yelled, “Glenn’s washing crap!”

  Mama came up behind us. “Who’s washing crap?”

  “No one,” I said. “Glenn’s taking care of your clog.”

  “I didn’t clog it,” she said. “Roger did. I’ve never seen a man clog a toilet so much. ”

  Keith looked at Hank and asked indignantly, “Aren’t you going to pull her ear? She’s saying bad stuff, too.”

  Hank tried to look stern but ended up laughing. Mama and Keith were two peas from the same pod. It was never going to change.

  Glenn flushed the toilet and the water went down with a loud whoosh. He handed the mop to Keith. “There you go. Give your grandmama a hand and finish cleaning up in here.” He took me by the hand and said, “Let’s go see what’s upstairs.”

  By the time we had checked out the vendors on the second floor, and made a more thorough sweep of the first floor, I had almost all of my Christmas shopping done. Glenn took my purchases out to the truck. I waited for him on the front steps.

  When he came back, we stood and gazed out onto the winter scene before us.

  “Nancy has her wish,” I said. “This is her first Chris
tmas with Hank, and she wanted a white Christmas.”

  “It’s our first Christmas in our house,” Glenn said.

  “It’s not my house,” I said. “I live with you.”

  He looked surprised. “Is that how you feel? You just live with me?”

  I looked at my engagement ring. We hadn’t mentioned marriage since the night he put the ring on my finger.

  “Well, no. I know we’re more than just living together, but I am living in your house.”

  He put his arms around me and pulled me close. “We can fix that pretty quick, you know.” His eyes were tender. “Let’s set a date, Jo. Let’s get married. I want you to be my wife, and I want my house to be your house.”

  There wasn’t any reason to tell him no. I couldn’t love him any more than I already did, and I wanted to marry him. I looked into his eyes and said, “Ok.”

  His smile was huge. “Really? You’re sure?” He hugged me harder than Mama had done earlier and said, “This is great.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “But Nancy and Hank are getting married in June, so June or before is out. I don’t want to spoil anything for them.”

  He looked up at the snowfall and said, “I always thought a Christmas wedding would be pretty.” He stepped back, turned his palms upward, raised his eyebrows, and asked with a big smile and his charming dimple, “Christmas next year?”

  He made me weak in the knees. I nodded my head.

  He grabbed my hand and opened the door. “Come on. Let’s go tell your family and see if there’s any rigatoni left. I’m starving.”

  We walked through the door in time to hear Keith yell, “The toilet’s overflowed in the women’s restroom.”

  Mama yelled back, “Wasn’t me.”

  Glenn and I looked at each and burst into laughter. He headed for the supply closet and a mop. Our news could wait a while. For now, I was content knowing that at this time next year, I would be Mrs. Glenn Wheeler.

  I hoped it would be a white Christmas.

  ###

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