Bad Neighbors

by Maia Chance

“Yeah. Do you know her?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Doesn’t she look amazing? Of course, she’ll do anything to look younger.” Portia’s voice lapsed into a hush-hush, gossipy register. “She’ll do anything to feel young again, too, and I mean a-ny-thing.”

  “Anything? Like drink kefir?”

  Silence.

  “Wear SPF one hundred?”

  No answer.

  “Do that thing where Japanese fish nibble the dead skin off your feet?”

  “Why are you so curious about Alexa?”

  “I’m not,” I lied. “I just want to know the secret of staying young.”

  “Okay, well, maybe I should’ve said, she would do … anyone.”

  Wait. What? My eyes struggled to open underneath the cotton pads. I gave up. “Are you saying—?”

  “I don’t talk about my clients,” Portia said in a prim voice. “That’s the very first thing they teach you at beauty school: never talk about your clients.”

  “Right,” I said. “Makes sense.” A pause. “But…?”

  “Well … since you know her…” Dramatic pause. “Alexa is having an affair.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “She told me so herself. She said it makes her feel young again. Hooking up in back seats, sneaking around, all the stuff she used to do back in high school. I guess she was one naughty girl. She said she was superpopular, cheer captain and all that, but now she’s just stuck working at the orchard. I don’t blame her for looking for thrills.”

  “Um … do you know who she’s having the affair with?”

  “No.”

  “What about her husband?” I asked. “Randy. Does he know about this?”

  “Of course not! Omigosh, he would be so mad. He has the worst temper ever—not violent or anything, but she says sometimes he just snaps. Anyhoo, like I said, I don’t really talk about my clients.” Portia wiped the pumpkin peel off my face, put on mist and serum and lotion and SPF, and then said, “Okay, I’m all done with your facial.” She got to her feet.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But what about my brows?” I wasn’t going to admit it aloud, but I had started to get pretty psyched about having movie-star eyebrows.

  “Oh, Karen does all the brow waxes,” Portia said. “She’s amazing at brows.”

  “Karen?” I said weakly.

  “Yeah! I’ll just go and get her.”

  “But—” I fell silent. Portia was gone.

  Chapter 14

  I lay there on the spa table, weighing the pros and cons of having my brows waxed by Karen.

  Pros: I could try to make nice with her about spying on her text messages, or at least try to convince her that my motives had been good. (Unlikely.) Also, she was purportedly talented at shaping eyebrows.

  Cons: Hot wax. On my face.

  Karen came in, all fakey smiles and generic small talk. She wasn’t going to mention the Incident in Her Office.

  Fine by me.

  “Ding-dong Sally,” she said, when she rolled her seat over and switched the white-hot torture chamber light on over my face. “We haven’t had our brows done in a while, have we?”

  I assumed “we” meant me.

  “Not for a little while,” I said. I think the last time had been before my college graduation, over six years before. Long enough for a complete reforestation. Heck, long enough for old growth.

  Karen smeared hot wax in the space between my eyebrows.

  “Wow,” I said nervously, “that’s not as hot as I thought it would be.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t burn you,” Karen said tightly. “Not with you being the Peeper Prize liaison, and the Lake Club Masquerade being tomorrow and—is this true?—you being Gourd Queen on Saturday?”

  “Um,” was all I said. Elaine Cruz had yet to call me back, and I didn’t feel like explaining to Karen, who was exuding electric aggression, that I was planning on backing out of the parade.

  The warm wax actually felt relaxing, and the ripping part wasn’t as unpleasant as it could’ve been, and before I knew it, Karen chirped, “Okay! All done! Mason will take care of you up front.” She got up and left.

  I struggled upright, drank a glass of cucumber water, and found my way back to the women’s changing room, where I got dressed. A few minutes later, I emerged into the front waiting area, carrying the hot-pink leather bag Aunt Effie had loaned me since my shoulder bag had been stolen.

  By a killer.

  I actually kinda liked the hot-pink bag, although it probably had cost as much as a used car and made the rest of me look slightly slobby by comparison.

  I spotted Myron and Lo reading magazines and looking fresh and relaxed.

  “Hi,” I said, sitting down beside Lo. “How was the massage?”

  “Oh, honey.” Lo shook her head, hand over her mouth. “Oh, no.”

  “What?” I touched my cheek. Had the pumpkin peel turned me into beet slaw?

  “Your skin looks wonderful,” Lo said, “but…”

  Myron looked up from his Popular Mechanics. “It’s your eyebrows, kid. They’re kinda…”

  “Sparse,” Lo said.

  Myron said, “I was gonna say cockeyed, but yeah, they’re sparse, too.”

  I ran to a mirror on the wall. At first, I didn’t even recognize myself because so much of my eyebrows had been removed. It was like seeing your house after the furniture has been hauled away.

  “Omigod,” I choked out.

  It would’ve been one thing if Karen had botched both eyebrows in the same way. But they were two different lengths, and the left one was thicker on the inner corner, like a caterpillar head. They were both razor thin—like, Greta Garbo thin—and arched. “I look like a freak!”

  “Hel-lo,” Effie called, breezing into the waiting room.

  I spun around.

  Effie stopped short. “Oh, diddle, Agnes. What have you done?”

  “I didn’t do it! It was Karen.”

  “Oh, dear. Well, there is no fixing those—”

  “What do you mean?”

  “—but you should ask for a full refund. It’s odd, because I heard Karen did the best brows in town.”

  I lowered my voice to a hot whisper. “Don’t you see what’s going on here? Karen butchered my eyebrows on purpose. As revenge.”

  “Is there some kind of problem?” Mason the receptionist asked, walking in and settling himself at his desk.

  I turned to Mason.

  His jaw went slack. “Oh.”

  “I need to speak with Karen,” I said, trying to sound calm but fully aware of the way my voice shook.

  “Karen? She just left.”

  “I didn’t see her.”

  “She always parks out back.”

  I jogged into the spa’s inner sanctum, passing the relaxation room and the stairs, and burst out a rear door into the alleyway.

  A black SUV was just turning at the end of the alley. It disappeared.

  Argh!

  I turned and stormed back into the spa.

  Mason refunded my fifteen dollars for the bad brows, but that hardly seemed like appropriate compensation for having to go around for six weeks looking like I’d been attacked by a Weedwacker.

  “Here,” Effie said. “Wear these.” She passed me her ginormous lemur sunglasses, which went with the hot-pink bag but not the rest of my overall look. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw in the mirror that the sunglasses hid the place where my eyebrows once had been.

  *

  We took the gaggle to the Cup ’n’ Clatter for lunch. Sadly, no amount of biscuits and gravy could distract me from my bad eyebrows. It seemed as if people were staring at them in horrified fascination. Maybe I was just being paranoid.

  “Honey, you’re never gonna fit into your Gourd Queen gown if you keep at those biscuits,” Lo said.

  I got it. She was being motherly, in a circa-1963 way. Still, I snapped, “Maybe that’s the point.”

  Effie said, “She’ll fit into it just fine. The worst
-case scenario is she wears a few pairs of Spanx.”

  “I’m not wearing Spanx! I wore them once and my left leg almost got gangrene.”

  “She’s exaggerating,” Effie said to Lo. “She only got pins and needles.”

  “There will be no Gourd Queen gown,” I said, “because I’m not accepting the title.”

  This fell on deaf ears, apparently.

  “Well, I’m just saying that you’ll be up there on that float for all the men in town to see,” Lo said, “and you want to look your best. It could be your last chance. We’ll have to draw on some new eyebrows for you. I have a Mary Kay brow definer pencil in my makeup kit back at the inn.”

  I resisted the urge to bang my forehead on the tabletop.

  *

  After lunch, Chester took the gaggle out to one of the wineries for a tasting and Effie and I went to the hardware store.

  “We need to talk to Scootch,” I said to Effie as we walked up and down the aisles of lumber out back. “We need to ask him about this meeting at the garage between Mikey and Randy on Sunday. That could be the key to everything.” I peered at a cryptic lumber label. “What kind of wood do you use to build a subfloor?”

  “Scootch is probably at school right now,” Effie said, “and what’s more, we can’t very well corner and interrogate a teenage boy. That could have serious legal ramifications.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. Why don’t we confront Karen, then?”

  “After what she did to your brows?”

  “Because of what she did to my brows. I’m mad enough to cage fight her! And anyway, we never asked about her alibi on Sunday.”

  “I don’t think this will go over well.”

  “I don’t care.” I spotted a hardware store employee and waved.

  Twenty minutes later, we had four huge sheets of plywood, a roll of moisture barrier, a roll of crack-suppression membrane, an electric radiant heating kit with wire grids, and tubes of construction adhesive crammed onto the folded-down rear seats of the Dustbuster. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with all that stuff, but that’s what cousins and YouTube are for.

  Next, Effie and I drove to Karen’s house.

  No cars in the driveway. When we rang the doorbell, no one answered.

  As we were driving away, though, a curtain twitched in an upstairs window.

  Creepy.

  *

  The gaggle came home from the winery thoroughly drunk, and after trying out the antique billiards table Boyd had delivered the day before, they all went up to bed.

  I hauled the rotted floorboards from the attic to the rent-a-dumpster, took a shower, and turned in early. I hadn’t heard from Otis, of course, since we were “taking a break.” I refused to even think about that. All the not-thinking made my stomach hurt.

  Out of sheer curiosity—I swear—on my smartphone I looked up the university in Seattle where my friend Charlotte was attending graduate school. The campus was gorgeous, and Seattle, ringed by blue water, green fir trees, and snowcapped mountains, looked like some magical realm, as far from upstate New York as could be.

  Then I went to the anthropology department’s web page. Yep. All of the materials I’d used to apply to Naneda University’s program the previous year would still work. Applying would be easy-peasy. To heck with Otis not really being mine, and the inn not really being mine, and Naneda being, well, Naneda. I could just … go.

  I lay there in my bed under the eaves for a long time, listening to the mice chewing inside the ceiling, staring at my heap of cardboard boxes and wondering if I would ever find the right time and place to unpack them.

  *

  The next morning, Chester helped me unload the floor-building supplies from the back of the Dustbuster.

  “I’ll cut the subfloor pieces for you,” he said, “but you’ll have to help me carry them up to the attic later, okay?”

  “Sure. Thanks.” Power-saw usage wasn’t in my skillset, but Chester was a pretty good carpenter. He’d worked as a set-builder for a Shakespeare company during summers in college.

  “I still can’t believe you’re undertaking this project in the middle of everything else that’s going on,” he said.

  “Me neither.”

  The gaggle had Riesling hangovers, so we didn’t leave the inn until lunchtime. Aunt Effie and I took them back to the Cup ’n’ Clatter, since they all had expressed a desire for greasy, carby dishes.

  While we were eating, the Peeper Prize Judge Hugh Simonian came in and was seated at a table by himself. He ordered dish after dish, taking only a bite or two of each and tapping at a computer tablet as he did so.

  I loved the Cup ’n’ Clatter with a passion. Seeing someone just—just judge it in cold blood, made indignation surge in my heart. But that was silly. Judges gotta judge.

  After lunch, we walked down the street to Lauren’s shop, Retro Rags, to search for things to wear at the Lake Club Harvest Masquerade that evening. Everyone wanted to go (even, weirdly, Hank), and tickets would be available for purchase at the door.

  “Everyone stay far, far away from those Headless Horseman masks they’re peddling,” I said as we passed Harries Stationery. “They give me the creeps.”

  “Hi!” Lauren said when we poured into her small shop. She put down a doorstop-sized novel with a sorcerer on the cover. “How can I help you?”

  “Oh, we’re just browsing,” Lo said. “Myron, just look at this blue blazer! I haven’t seen lapels that big since our wedding day.”

  “Goodness me,” Dorothea said, “wouldn’t that look handsome on Hank.” She blushed a little.

  “Who, me?” Hank said, confused.

  While the gaggle and Effie browsed, I went over to Lauren at the counter.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth. “What happened to your eyebrows?”

  “There are consequences to poking your nose in other people’s business.”

  “Meaning?”

  I took a deep breath and spilled. It took a solid five minutes, and I didn’t even mention the part about Otis and me taking a break, or how I was toying with the idea of applying to grad school in Seattle. That stuff was too sensitive to share. Also, I knew Lauren would be upset about the possibility of me moving away.

  “I don’t get why you feel like you have to find the murderer, Agnes,” Lauren said when I’d finished. “Everyone knows Otis wouldn’t kill someone. The police will figure that out soon enough.”

  “What if they don’t?” My voice was shriller than I would’ve liked. “What if they arrest him? And anyway, what’s wrong with helping someone you care about? Because that’s all I was trying to do! Help—”

  “Otis is crazy about you Agnes. You don’t have to make some grand gesture to prove anything to him.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Crazy about me.”

  Lauren snorted. “Are you blind? No. Never mind. Don’t answer that. You are blind.”

  How could I say aloud, even to my best friend, that I couldn’t understand what Otis saw in me? He was just about perfect. He was kind, ridiculously handsome, with a great body, smarts, and an easy self-confidence. Next to him, I felt … flawed. Dumpy. Angsty.

  I felt as if no one could understand why he’d want to be with me.

  Over the past weeks, our new relationship had felt like a fragile, enchanted bubble. I had made sure not to get too comfortable, because if I got comfortable, settled in, made myself at home, it would hurt that much more when the bubble inevitably popped.

  “All I’m saying,” Lauren said, “is that maybe your sleuthing is … overkill. I mean, someone dunked you in a barrel of water? You could’ve been killed.”

  “The police said it was a mugging.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “See?” I threw my hands wide. “They’re getting it wrong!”

  “I guess I see your point. Well, if I were you, I would keep trying to talk to Karen Brown. Anyone who would savage someone’s eyebrows like
that is not thinking straight, plus, that text about her son going with Uncle Mikey to meet Randy at the garage? Completely fishy. Oh, and I’d also make sure Alexa and Delilah’s joint alibi holds water.”

  “Yeah, that’s definitely something I need to look into.”

  Lauren nodded. “Alexa seems nice enough, but she’s not exactly a stable person, you know? And Delilah … even though she looks and acts like some kind of cute Japanese anime character, something about her bugs me. Anyway, are you still going to the Lake Club Masquerade tonight?”

  “Yeah. And I know Aunt Effie roped you into being in the bachelorette auction.”

  “Nothing like selling yourself off like livestock.”

  “It’s not selling yourself. Just your time.”

  “Maybe Jake will come. I’d give him all my time for free.”

  Chapter 15

  The gaggle decided to keep shopping downtown while Effie and I ran some errands. We had an appointment with another architect who had a proposal for the Stagecoach Inn renovation, and then we needed to go shopping for odds and ends. We planned to pick the gaggle up at four o’clock at Fountain Square and bring them back to the inn.

  While Effie and I were making our way to the place we’d parked the Dustbuster, I caught sight of Belinda Prentiss through the big plate-glass windows of Lakeside Fitness. Behind a row of furiously pedaling, ellipting, and treadmilling citizens, she was talking to a guy at a desk.

  “Psst,” I said. “Aunt Effie.” I tipped my head in Belinda’s direction. “Belinda Prentiss at the gym.”

  “So?”

  “Strong hands? Dragging corpses? Holding people’s heads underwater in bobbing-for-apples barrels?”

  “No. Really? Doesn’t she look like she’d stick to exercising with those rubber fitness balls? You know, the ones that make people look like they’re doing Sea World tricks?”

  “Let’s go and see.”

  “Fine.”

  Inside, pop music blasted tinnily over grinding cardio equipment. Belinda was just disappearing into the women’s locker room at the back, so I stopped. I said to Effie, “I do not want to confront her back there. What do we do? Loiter until she comes out?”

  “Let’s ask questions,” Effie said.

  A guy was approaching us, with muscles so bulky and taut it looked as if he were trapped inside a beefcake suit. “Can I help you?” he asked in a surprisingly high-pitched voice.