“Is everything okay, Davis?”
July, so cute, so smart, and part of our family in many ways, was sharp too.
I chose my words carefully. “I think so.”
“You think so?”
Bex and Quinn were all over her. Tugging and pulling her to the elevator.
(Mommy who?)
“I do.”
I did not.
I couldn’t even hint at my predicament. And a Sunday predicament at that, which never happened. Thus July’s suspicion all wasn’t well. Sunday was Baylor’s one day off. Baylor, as in Bellissimo Spy Team Baylor, took up all the slack Fantasy and I left when we semi-retired to spend more time with our families. Baylor was the other half of July, and why she lived at the Bellissimo. Because he did. When Baylor wasn’t working and July wasn’t with my girls, they were glued together. July’s New Orleans parents thought she lived with us. (She was twenty-eight; he was twenty-nine.) A secret I didn’t think we’d have to keep much longer. I saw a ring in July’s future. And I saw trouble from Baylor in my future if I even hinted at the trouble I was in. To let on to July would be to let on to Baylor. Everyone in our world had finely tuned radars.
“Everything’s fine,” I lied. It would be. It had to be. “I don’t know how long I’ll need you today. It could be several hours.”
“You know where we’ll be if you need us.”
And there went my girls.
I braced myself for my third chore. Vree.
I found her in my living room, perched on the edge of a deep swivel chair, staring out the glass wall at the city of Biloxi. She was spilling out of a sleeveless floral top over denim capris. Her long blonde hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her posture was ramrod straight, her hands balled into fists on her thighs, and she smelled like apple pie. I sat directly in her sights.
“Davis.”
She said my name on a relieved sigh, so happy to have someone to talk to. (At.)
“Vree.”
“Did you sleep? I didn’t. I was awake most of the night. I mean, I’m so used to Gooch snoring. He’s like an engine running, you know? White noise? The kind that keeps you asleep? I called him twice to ask him to put his phone on speaker, then lay it on my side of the bed, then I was going to put mine on speaker and lay it on his side of the bed, you know what I mean? The side of the bed that would be his if he was here? And thank goodness he’s not? I called twice and he didn’t answer either time. I got his voicemail and it said, ‘Vreeland is out of town. Don’t be bothering me.’ Which I didn’t appreciate one little bit, especially since I couldn’t sleep. But I thought, well, maybe it’s a good thing, because I’d probably end up telling him what his witchy aunt was up to, and we’re not supposed to tell, or else. So I didn’t get ten winks. You know those sound machines that have crickets chirping and ocean waves? They should add another song. Gooch snoring. I couldn’t sleep because it was too quiet, and I couldn’t sleep for worrying about Bubbles and Meredith. And you! I was worried about you! I mean, this has got to be killing you, Davis! I feel like I know what Bubbles is doing, because I’m channeling her with my brain. And I think she’s either curled up on Mer’s lap or she’s found a hidey hole somewhere in the camper, like a tucked-away comfy place, and she’s dreaming puppy dreams. As smart as Bubbles is, she still doesn’t really know what’s going on. I mean, she knows she’s not with her mommy, but she doesn’t know know, you know? I was awake wondering what Bubbly was doing wondering if you were awake wondering what Meredith was doing. And Meredith isn’t a Westie, she’s a person! My bestie best person! This is awful! This is the worst! This is a nightmare!”
Vree got in a full workout in with her Good Morning, Davis speech. I could’ve been wearing noise-blocking earmuffs and still picked up the gist of it, because she’d acted out every thought. Every time she’d said the word “sleep” she’d feigned nodding off. “Ocean” was accompanied with hula girl waves. When she’d said “Gooch” she made burly arms and took on a split-second caveman persona. When she said she was channeling Bubblegum with her brain, she rolled her eyes back in her head and pressed fingertips to her forehead. It was draining. And Vree’s way of coping, the non-stop noise and action. She stayed so busy narrating her life she almost didn’t give herself time to live it. She certainly didn’t give herself time to think. I wondered again what it was she didn’t want to think about.
“Vree, is Meredith sick?”
Her arms shot out, her eyes darted right and left, then she said, “Wait just a minute. What?”
“Is Meredith sick? Has she said anything? Have you noticed anything? Has she complained about anything? Headaches? Weight loss? Do her pinkie fingers hurt?”
“Davis.” Vree glanced at the slim gold watch on her wrist. “It’s so early. I mean, really, truly, shouldn’t we be talking about going to Houston or robbing the casino or not killing Bootsy or finding a dog for me to show so I can win the money? All the things we talked about yesterday? All the halfway plans we made to get them back? Shouldn’t we be talking about the other half of those plans? Why are you asking me about Meredith’s pinkie fingers?”
I didn’t answer. I sat there patiently. I’d decided to take a different approach with Vree that day in my efforts to elicit information. Instead of stop-signing her, I’d wait her out.
It didn’t take long.
About two seconds.
“Sick? Like the flu? We had flu shots,” she said. “We didn’t get them from that idiot Urleen. Do you know Dr. Urleen? Leverette Urleen? He took Dr. Kizzy’s place at Pine Apple a Day when Kizzy retired? You know how everyone thought Kizzy was crazy? Wait ’til you meet Urleen. Have you met Urleen? Sure, you’ve met Urleen. So, you know Urleen, and he’s why we went to Greenville for our flu shots, because for all we knew, he might accidentally shoot us with straight-up Ebola. We had the salad bar at Ruby Tuesday after. Ruby Tuesday has the only salad bar left in the world that has pickled red beets. I love pickled red beets. Meredith, not so much, but she’s had her flu shot for sure. And it’s, like, spring. No one has the flu in the spring. Well, wait. Maybe some people have the flu in the spring. I mean, it’s not like I’m the flu patrol. I do keep an ear to the ground, you know, I keep up, but that doesn’t mean I understand the flu, or flu shots, for that matter, because, and you can tell me if I’m wrong, don’t they make the shots from old flu? You can’t get the old flu. You can only get the new flu. So what good does a shot of old flu do?”
I sat quietly.
“No,” Vree said. “Meredith’s not sick. She’s not sick at all.”
There had to be more.
“We had bloodwork done.”
(More.)
“Who had bloodwork done, Vree?”
“Everyone. Everyone in Pine Apple. Even people from Yellow Bluff and Oak Hill. And we did go to Dingbat Urleen’s office to get stuck for blood, when we didn’t go for flu shots, because it wasn’t Urleen doing the shooting or the sticking. It was Jenna Ray. You remember Jenna Ray? Kizzy’s old nurse? All we did was stop by Urleen’s for Jenna Ray to draw our blood. Because Jenna Ray isn’t off her rocker like Urleen is. I don’t think she’s really a nurse either, but you know Jenna Ray, she’ll do in a pinch. She’s put two hundred stitches in Gooch, at least, and two thousand in his brothers. She sets bones and pops backs, and she even delivered a breech calf—did you hear about that?—so we all think of Jenna Ray as a nurse, and you know, no one minded her taking their blood.”
An odd energy buzzed behind my eyes. “Vree?”
“Hmmm?”
“Why did everyone in town have blood drawn?”
“Gully’s brother.”
She said it so matter-of-factly. As if it had nothing to do with anything.
“He’s sick,” Vree said. “You know Gully’s brother? Greene? Jesus Water Greene? Who Bootsy works for? He has a blood disease. Long name. I couldn’t come
up with it if you paid me. He needs a blood donor. Like, I mean, someone whose blood works with his. Preacher Gully’s blood wasn’t a match, even though they’re brothers, same mother, same father, go figure? Bootsy was second in line, because she’s sweet on him—you knew that, right? Not Preacher Gully, but Brother Gully. But you knew that.”
(I did not know that. I most certainly did not.)
“Hers wasn’t a match either,” Vree said. “I guess not, since she has witch blood. Her blood wouldn’t match anything but another witch’s blood, right? They’re the oddest couple in the whole wide world, Bootsy and Greene, especially since he’s sick. He only has, like, half of the blood going to his brain that’s supposed to be going there, so his eyes roll around, because of his blood disease, his skin has this green glow, like alien green, which, in a way, is funny, like Greene is green? You know? And then there’s Bootsy, in her witch clothes. They’re scary looking together.”
I forced breath into my body. Then out.
“Davis?”
I stared out the window when I said, “Could you not have told me this yesterday when it was the very thing we were talking about?”
“Told you what? What were we talking about? Which time?”
“When I asked you repeatedly what the connection was between Bootsy and Gully, did you not think to mention they were a couple?”
“For one thing, Davis, you kept holding up stop signs. And for another thing, you asked me about Bootsy and Preacher Gully, Davis. Not Brother Gully.”
I stood.
“Where are you going?”
“Give me a minute.”
I took a walk, cooled off, pulled myself together. I poured us both a cup of coffee, and when I was sure I was past the point of throttling her, which wouldn’t help a bit, I sat back down and passed her a cup. “Let’s start where we stopped,” I said. “Gully’s brother is sick.”
“Yes.” She blew across the top of her coffee. “Sick sick. Bad.”
“Tell me about it, Vree.”
Her favorite words.
“He’s sick with a blood disease. And worse, he doesn’t have insurance. I don’t think they pay attention to details at Jesus Water. I hope they pay their taxes. Surely they pay taxes. I mean, it’s Uncle Sam, you know? And you’d think Jesus would be watching out after them. I just thought of something, Davis! They must not be drinking the Jesus Water! Otherwise, how could this happen? They’re not drinking the water! You can’t get the blessings out of the bottles if you don’t drink them! Or maybe they are, and they think drinking Jesus Water takes the place of paying taxes. Which is ridiculous. I’d like to see them try to talk the IRS into that. Truth is, Davis, I don’t know if they pay taxes or not, but I tell you one thing I know for sure they don’t pay, and that’s insurance. And how I know they don’t is because Gully’s brother doesn’t have any. Not a lick. So the first problem is finding someone who has Greene’s blood—”
That was where I could hear my own blood rushing through my temples.
“—or I should say a match for Greene’s blood. And then the next problem is how are they going to pay for it? Because it’s like, a million dollars—”
That was where I broke out in a sweat.
“—and if they ever find those two things, the blood and the money, then, they have to find a hospital to do it. To, I mean, move the blood out of the match person and into Greene. It’s supposedly as expensive as a bone-marrow transplant, and I guess not many doctors do it. For sure, that crazy Urleen doesn’t.”
That was where a cool tear I didn’t know was coming slid down my hot cheek.
“So, I think, there are like four hospitals who can do what Gully’s brother needs done. Maybe fourteen or forty. None in Alabama, no doubt. It’s a mess. I mean it, Gully’s brother is in a bad way.”
My mind raced around my little sister’s incredible heart.
Vree scratched her neck.
Finally, she asked, “What was the question?”
It took me a beat to find my voice. “Why did everyone have blood drawn?”
“Oh, I answered that. To find a match for Gully’s brother. Next question.”
My mouth was so dry, my body on fire, my heart in my throat. I barely got it out. “Did they?”
“Did they what?”
“Find a match?”
“Yes.”
I could see it coming. First, in her eyes.
“One.”
Then her face.
“Meredith.”
With my sister’s name, every muscle in Vree’s body walked off the job.
I caught her as she tipped forward, out cold.
I eased her to the floor.
I collapsed beside her, knowing it was a very good thing I’d let my husband go to Nashville and that my girls were safe with July. Because I truly might have to rob the casino.
EIGHT
Ten quiet minutes passed after Vree came to. We were side by side on the sofa, her sipping a Coke with one hand and holding a cold cloth to her forehead with the other, the two of us staring out the glass wall in silence, when the doorbell rang. My heavy heart and I didn’t get up to see who it was—I didn’t care unless it was Meredith—until my phone buzzed with a text. The caller ID said No Hair and the message was LET ME IN.
No Hair’s real name was Jeremy Covey. My boss, and one of the first people I met when I came to work at the Bellissimo five years ago. He’s the head of security, the size of a minivan, a true friend, and shiny bald.
The doorbell rang again, and again and again, until another text landed on the screen of my phone. If you don’t let me in, I’ll let myself in. I don’t have all day.
I dragged my feet through the living room, down the hall, and around the foyer to the front door. I opened it, and there stood No Hair, holding the bunched knot of two ends of a Bellissimo hotel bath towel fashioned into a sling. Protruding from the bath towel sling were the front and back ends of what might be the ugliest dog I’d ever seen in my life. It might not have been a dog. It might have been a weasel. Or an armadillo. It was an animal, for sure, and if by any chance it had any dog DNA, it might have been chihuahua. Maybe ten percent chihuahua, forty percent polecat, fifty percent baby dragon. It wasn’t big, maybe ten or twelve pounds, had a severe underbite, inordinately long stick legs, all dangling from the towel sling, one small black eye, and one large yellow eye. The yellow eye stuck out. As in protruded. Its ears were larger than its head, and set at odd angles from each other, with one where it was supposed to be on top of its head, and the other misplaced, more on the side of its head. The animal was missing large patches of hair in some places, and others, like directly above the bulging yellow eye, sprouted thick white tufts. One back leg was completely bald. And purple. Whatever it was, it had purple skin. That was just what I could see. There was more of it in the towel.
I was ten feet away and I could smell it.
I couldn’t identify the smell right away, because it was such an assault, it defied immediate recognition. I didn’t know if I smelled garlic, swamp, or Doritos. Maybe all of the above. I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth, while No Hair held his towel sling package as far away from his body as he could. Which was way too close.
With a low ominous growl, deep in its throat, the dog trained the yellow eye on me. Then all its legs got going in the air, as if it were trying to race my way. The dog wanted to eat me.
No Hair, towel sling first, stepped into my home with it.
I plastered myself against the wall.
Then, with no warning whatsoever, the towel started dripping. The dog was leaking. All over my travertine floor and No Hair’s shoes. A vast amount of fluid. A fountain. At least a gallon. It went on and on. That whole time, the dog, head tipped back, eyes closed, audibly sighed, as in, “Ahhhh.”
I was too stunned to speak, move, and I certain
ly didn’t dare breathe.
No Hair looked at the ceiling and shook his head.
The dog finished its business from several feet off the ground.
No Hair said, “This, Davis, is Princess.”
“So? Get it out! Look what it did to my floor!”
“Your floor? How about my shoes? These are Ferragamos, Davis, and I just broke them in.”
The dog tipped its head back, which was to say its inordinately large ears disappeared for a second, and I swear to you, it laughed.
Its tongue was black.
Which was when, to my horror, I remembered.
I was expecting a Princess. I’d made the Bellissimo pet friendly, and a pet named Princess was checking in today. This couldn’t possibly be her. Yet here we were: me, No Hair, and a creature named Princess. “Vree!” I yelled over my shoulder. “Get in here!”
No Hair was swinging the Princess sling like a pendulum. At me. “Take it.”
I was slowly creeping away, willing to creep through my house, out a window, over the safety ledge, and down twenty-nine stories in a free fall, because I didn’t want it. I crept all the way into Vree, who took one look at No Hair and the creature in the towel sling, then said, “What in the world?”
I didn’t know if she was talking about No Hair, who made an intimidating first impression, because he’s size XXXL, or the dog, or the lake on my travertine floor. Probably the dog. If it even was a dog. It had raccoon paws, as in opposable thumbs.
“Take this dog, Davis,” No Hair said. “Do something with it, or I’ll march it straight to your room and land it in the middle of your bed.”
The towel was still dripping.
Vree tried to help. She took a brave step forward, and in a singsong voice, said, “Hey, there, good little…thing.” She eased a hand in the dog’s direction, and the dog spit on her. From several feet away. It reared its head back, hissed, and spit on her. Vree jerked back and we huddled, then started a slow retreating dance around my circular foyer. No Hair took one step forward with the dog for every two steps we took back. We were doing our best to put space between us and them. I wasn’t about to take it from him, which would mean holding it. I couldn’t believe No Hair was still holding it. He was going to need to burn his clothes, then boil himself.
Double Dog Dare Page 7
