by Mary Bowers
Like a robot I took the money, and he turned and left the shop, pushing his stepmother out the door ahead of him.
I was still gaping at the front door when I heard Myrtle speaking behind me.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “By tomorrow she won’t remember. But she sure is a mean drunk.”
By the time I turned around she had already walked back behind the curtains.
I found a chair and sat down.
We finished up around six. Myrtle had gone ahead to their house on Palmetto Street to get some dinner together for them.
“Anyway,” Florence said as we were closing up, “it’ll be nice to have a hot meal on the table when Wicked and I get home, instead of the usual can of cat food for him and can of tuna for me.”
“Atta girl,” I said, putting my arm around her. “Look on the bright side. You two will work it out. Listen, Flo, I wanted to ask you about last night. If you’re not ready to talk about it, just tell me. It’s okay. But now that you’ve had some time to think about it, was there anything familiar about that guy who came in here last night? Anything at all?”
She paused and gave it some thought. “I don’t know. When you get to be my age, everybody seems like a kid. Jack Peterson looks about twelve to me, and he’s a cop!”
“I know the feeling. What I mean is, did he seem paunchy, did he smell like beer – anything?”
“He was kind of skinny. And he was taller than me, but most people are, I’m afraid.”
“A lot taller than you?”
“No. About the same height as that young man Sheena brings in sometimes. The one with the truck who helped you with Vesta’s things? Him.”
I stared at her. “Was it him?”
“Oh heavens no! It couldn’t have been. He’s Sheena’s young man.”
She laughed it off and started off on her walk home. I collected the goddess, got both of us into the Escape, then stared at the steering wheel for a while.
Chapter 18
Coming into my house and releasing the goddess, I thought about dear old Homer. Coming-home time is the best time to have a dog, and that’s when I missed him the most. It had been a long time since I’d been treated to the wild abandon of a dog overwhelmed by the fact that you – the most awesome person in the world! – have come home to him at last! Even if you had just gone down the driveway to get the mail.
The goddess merely gave me a deep stare with emerald eyes, probably registering a protest against being transported like dry goods, and stalked off into the kitchen to be fed.
I did cater to Her Majesty, putting a can of my best cat food into a bowl for her, but my own dinner was going to have to wait. She let me go without appearing to care, but the moment I was outside the house and walking toward Orphans, the green of the tangled jungle around my house began to glow, and the peach mist of the sunset melted into eerie light that reminded me of the greenish skies in the Midwest when a tornado was coming.
I had seen Sheena’s car parked at the shelter as I’d pulled into my garage, and much as I wanted my own dinner, I decided that would have to wait until I had seen her. If I ate first, she might leave.
I found Sheena leaning over the front desk, with Angie getting ready to leave and Stacey standing by, ready to take over. Stacey had her backpack slung over one shoulder; her homework would be in it, and she’d settle down and get to work on it as soon as Angie left and the doors were locked.
Seeing me come in, Angie called, “Bummer! We’re losing Sheena.”
I stopped in my tracks.
“What’s all this?” I said to Sheena. “After all these years? What’s up?”
“Doctor’s orders. I just hate it, but I’ve got somebody else to think of now, and Doc Fleming says I shouldn’t spend so much time in a kennel.”
“Why the hell not?” I demanded. It came out more strongly than I’d meant it to, just from my surprise.
She smiled. “I’m pregnant. I guess pregnant ladies aren’t supposed to be around cats.”
“Oh, Sheena!” I said. “Congratulations. You’re going to be a wonderful mother.”
“I’m sure gonna try,” she said, swelling with joy at the thought of it.
“Is that true?” Angie said, coming up to us as she was heading out the door. “About cats being dangerous to pregnant women?”
“It’s not the cats. It’s the litter box,” I said. “She’s definitely not cleaning the litter boxes anymore.”
“Doc said I was risking toxic something.”
“Toxoplasmosis,” I said automatically.
“Then it’s real?” Sheena said. “Well, don’t worry, Taylor. I’ll come back after the baby is born. And in the meantime, me and Kevin can still go pick up stuff and do errands.”
I paused, trying to think of other jobs Sheena could do. I hated the thought of losing her. “Look, Sheena, would you like to have a part-time job with us instead of volunteering? I know Florence could use some help over at Girlfriend’s. I couldn’t give you more than fifteen or twenty hours a week. We do have a litter box for Wicked at the store, but it’s out back and you don’t need to go there or ever clean it.”
She fizzed up like a soda pop and gave me a hug. “Oh, Taylor, you’re the best! Of course I’d love working with Florence.”
“And Myrtle?” I added darkly. “You know, Diana Huntington fired her, and she’s helping out at Girlfriend’s now.”
“I can handle Myrtle,” Sheena (who as far as I knew had never met her) said confidently.
Hmmm. Maybe she could act as a buffer between the sisters. Anyway, I wanted to give Sheena a job. I knew she needed the extra income, and darn it, it was my organization. Sheena was a good worker, and I knew how to take care of things when people didn’t get along. I hoped.
“Great,” I said aloud. “You’re hired. I’ll call you in the next couple of days, after I get a chance to talk to Florence and we can work out a schedule.”
“Thanks you thank you thank you! Oh! There’s Dusty and Kevin. Dusty’s truck is in the shop, and he’s been borrowing Kevin’s. I’m driving Kevin home in my car so Dusty can go out tonight. He doesn’t have a girlfriend,” she said, as if that were very sad. “He wants to go up to The Oasis and see who’s there. They got a band he likes, and the waitresses are cute, and a man’s dead in the water without a truck around here.”
“Nice of Kevin to lend him his,” I said absently.
She ran out the door, leaving me face-to-face with Tropical Breeze’s biggest and baddest gossip. I knew exactly what Angie was thinking, and I didn’t want to hear it. But I couldn’t help thinking it myself.
I looked out through the glass front door and saw Sheena standing by the truck, talking to the men inside. Then Kevin got out, let his gaze wander over to me, made a limp little wave, got into the driver’s side of Sheena’s car and drove away.
For once, Angie didn’t get down and dirty, possibly because of the look on my face.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Kevin on Saturday. I hate to say it, but I probably paid more attention to his truck – that godsend to every charitable organization that takes things in for resale. I didn’t know much about him, but maybe Angie did.
“Just what is it that Kevin does?” I asked her. “Does he have a job?”
“He’s in construction. That’s where he met ol’ Dusty. They work together. His hours seem pretty flexible.”
“Is he happy about the baby?”
She shrugged. “Sheena says so. He never comes in, so I don’t talk to him much.”
We said good night to one another and she left. Then I turned to Stacey, told her to call so I could walk her home, locked up and left.
This had all come out of left field, and I walked across the yard to my house with my head down, deep in thought. I couldn’t very well question Sheena about the possibility that the father of her child was a burglar, but somehow that didn’t worry me so much now. The man who’d tried to rob Girlfriend’s could’ve been anybody; it proba
bly wasn’t Kevin, and even if it was, nobody had gotten hurt. Too late I remembered that our burglar would’ve had a few scratches around his head from Wicked’s claws. Startled by Sheena’s news, I hadn’t looked for scratches on Kevin, but I made my mind up I was going to.
Back at my house, I set my purse down on the kitchen counter and found myself being lasered by luminous eyes. Basket was up on top of the kitchen cabinets glaring at me. She liked high places, I guessed. Maybe it approximated her view of the living world while she was floating around in her goddess state or something.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told her. “I saw the green sunset. You know about everything I saw and everything that was said. And one of these days,” I said, giving her back the same look she was giving me, “you’re going to have to start putting things together. I’m allowing myself to be hijacked, but it’s wearing me out. This can’t go on forever.”
It was true. I was beginning to feel myself sliding, living only partly in the real world, while a larger and larger percentage of myself was looking away into a world long dead. My attention was slipping, as if I only had so much to give, and the cat-goddess was taking more and more of it for herself.
I looked at her and began to feel drowsy. She looked back at me, unblinking, unemotional, unchanging.
“Help me find the answer,” I whispered. “Soon.”
Her angular head lifted, almost in anger, and her eyes sharpened and brightened. For the first time I heard her voice in my head outside of a dream.
“Truth comes as it comes,” she told me. “You will wait for it. I have chosen the path, and more must come to pass before the end.”
Chapter 19
She had frightened me badly. On top of that, I woke up to the realization that Vesta had been dead exactly a week, and though I knew much more than I had when she had come to me that strange morning, I was frustrated that I hadn’t been able to do more. Now the goddess was telling me that more would “come to pass.” I guess that got to me. I tried to wall myself off for a while. Get back to normal.
I needed to do laundry. I needed to go grocery shopping. In a nutshell, life goes on.
While I was folding clean clothes on the bed and putting them away, I shouted to Bernie Horning on my speaker phone about the wonders of Vesta’s things at Girlfriend’s. She was doing a follow-up, front-page article for us, so the metaphorical hat I was wearing was half salesman, half domestic diva.
I made a point of mentioning that there were no treasures from anybody’s tomb sitting on a shelf at Girlfriend’s. I mentioned the break-in on Sunday, and how misguided the would-be burglar had been, because there was nothing, repeat nothing in Girlfriend’s worth stealing. If you wanted to come in and buy something, we’d make you a good deal: Resale shop value on merchandise is usually about 15% of retail, sometimes less, so come on in and get a gently worn fashion tee for a couple of bucks, but for heaven’s sake, don’t come in and steal it! We are a charity after all.
Good old Bernie was recording the interview, and would probably print it word for word.
After we were done with that, we chatted about the rash of break-ins around town.
“Guy’s a real amateur,” Bernie said, like a jaded cop. “As far as Jack knows, he hasn’t managed to get anything of greater value than an old CD or two out of the glove box of an unlocked car.”
“Sounds like our cat burglar is just a kid. Or kids. Hopefully he’ll change his ways and quit before he gets caught.”
Bernie made a skeptical sniff. “We can hope. But chances are the little thug is just getting started.”
“Okay, then let’s hope he gets caught before he goes on to bigger and better things. Listen, Bernie, I gotta go. I need to get over to the hardware store, then Publix, and I also need to check in at Girlfriend’s at some point in the day.”
“Oh, yeah,” Bernie said wisely. She knows everything. “I wasn’t surprised to hear that Myrtle was fired, but I was surprised that you’d let her help out at the shop.”
“Letting had nothing to do with it,” I told her. I hung up and got a move on.
Our hardware store is about a mile outside of downtown. Pappy Rousseaux had opened the place back before the debutante days of Vesta Cadbury Huntington. His granddaughter Ruthie was running the store now and had kept the original name: “Hardware Store.” It’s a good old slice of Americana, the kind that sells hammers and nails, but not designer-chic bathroom makeovers.
It was a rainy morning – unusual, because our normal summer coastal weather pattern brought us rain mostly in the late afternoon. Sometimes it rains at night, but rarely first thing in the morning. It was coming down pretty steadily outside, drumming on the roof of the building and dimming the outside world. I like to shop when it’s raining; the stores are usually empty and the quiet interiors seem like private havens.
“Hey, Tay,” Ruthie said as I walked in. “I heard you got some new kittens. What you need is in the back aisle. You know the place.”
“Yep. Thanks.” I grabbed a cart and headed down an aisle, a flappy, out-of-sync wheel of the cart slapping time with the raindrops. It felt good to be the only customer in the store.
I was after the ten-dollar baby gates. They’re not the sturdiest I’ve ever seen, but they do the trick. When we have furry babies running around at Orphans, we section off some of the office space to contain them. Also, I’d probably end up with some of the other staples of the shelter: hooks and nails, buckets, and bales of paper towels. I visualized the back rooms at Orphans and tried to make a mental list of any other stuff we might need.
The store felt empty of other customers. That’s my only excuse. I wasn’t even looking when I barreled into a man who was standing at the end-cap across from the baby gates.
“Graeme! I’m so sorry!” I’d hit him in the hip, but wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t done any damage to critical soft tissue. “Did I hurt you?”
“Of course not,” Graeme Huntington said, but I knew I’d at least knocked a little wind out of him.
I was mortified beyond knowing how to apologize without becoming a nuisance. “Are you sure? I really have to be more careful, but I was trying to think of everything we need –“
He laughed and tried to reassure me. “The animals use much hardware?” he joked.
“If only! No, we humans still have to do the repair work, and we’ve got some new kittens. Once they start to bounce around we’re going to need playpens,” I explained, beginning to stack baby gates into my cart.
“I’m glad you explained,” he said. “Otherwise I would’ve wondered why you suddenly needed stuff for babies – the human kind.”
We laughed, and I felt better about nearly unmanning him. He went his way and I went mine, me across the back of the store and him up the next aisle.
Ten minutes later I had a cartful of gates, bundles and boxes, and I headed over to the clearance racks at the back corner. You never know what you might find that you can’t live without. My back was to the entire store, and that’s when I heard Tina. I couldn’t actually see her, but her pitchy voice was unmistakable.
Apparently my theory about rain-shopping is faulty; lots of folks do it. Oh, well. I kept my back to the store because quite frankly the last person I wanted to see just then was Tina Armstrong.
Like a cougar sniffing out prey, she had apparently found Graeme, because I heard her shriek of recognition, followed by a pleasant baritone rumble from Graeme. I could only hope Graeme, like me, had been doing ramming speed with his cart at the time, but with Tina you never knew: she might have enjoyed a good whack from Graeme.
I skulked around, trying to get away without being seen, but I had to go slowly to keep the flappy wheel of my cart from squeaking and giving me away. Now that the cart was loaded, it was harder to handle.
I was not eavesdropping. It was a strategic retreat. But I couldn’t help but catch a word or two as I eased my wobbly cart along down the aisle next to the one where they had stopped to
talk. They seemed to have something to talk about, and that surprised me a little. I knew that the social set they belonged to was chummy in a boozy-kissy-face way, but I didn’t think Graeme and Tina were friends, mostly because Tina and Diana were enemies.
What I heard of the texture and tenor of their conversation confirmed my impression: they weren’t friends. In fact, they were arguing about something, and Tina was getting loud.
Okay, now I was eavesdropping. Just a skosh.
I cranked my ears open and angled my head, and when Ruthie appeared at the head of the aisle I was in, we both put our fingers to our lips in the universal “Shhhh!” sign. Ruthie was eavesdropping too, apparently.
But it was too late to get the gist of things. Graeme lowered his voice to the kind of whisper that’s as loud as full-voice and said, “Just stop! All right? He’s my son, for god’s sake!”
There was more low, urgent conversation, then Tina said, “It’s not about the money!”
“Of course it’s about the money!”
“I’ve been talking to Michael –“
“You what?” he hissed at her, and Ruthie and I both leaned our heads in their direction, but I for one couldn’t make out any more of what they said. I looked at Ruthie, and she shrugged, shaking her head.
Then they broke it up and I got the cart moving again – slowly – and got the heck out of the aisle before either one of them could turn the corner and catch me.
As I checked out, I whispered to Ruthie, “Did you get it? What were they fighting about?”
She swiped my card, looking as innocent as she could because Graeme had just lined up right behind me.
“I’m sorry, we don’t carry that here,” she said, as if we’d been talking about something else.
