Killer Tied

by Lesley A. Diehl

  “You’ve had a number of visitors today,” he said.

  “Potential clients,” Grandy interjected.

  “I don’t think so. I think they are troublemakers. I’d be careful.”

  Without another word, he began walking away. Grandy and I looked at each other, and both of us shrugged. When we turned our heads to watch him walk off, he was gone.

  “What the hell?” said Grandy. “Where did he go?”

  “It’s as if he’s still hiding out in the swamps. He seems to appear and disappear without warning.”

  Grandy and I walked the short distance to the consignment shop in silence, both of us spooked by Mr. Egret’s peculiar behavior.

  She opened the door to the shop and ushered me in. “That’s what I mean. The guy is strange.”

  “Who’s strange?” asked Shelley, the young woman who did the tailoring for our shop. Shelley had lost her mother over a year ago and had come to work for us shortly after. She was attending a fashion institute in West Palm at night and working here a few days a week. Madeleine and I both thought Shelley might become a partner in the business one day. With my taking on the PI apprenticeship, we needed to lay out some concrete plans with Shelley, but we were waiting until she got her degree and was in a better position to consider her future. For all I knew, she wanted to leave the area. Her mother’s murder and a love relationship that didn’t work out may have convinced her that the memories here were too unpleasant for her to stay put.

  Grandy and I both avoided answering her question. Shelley returned to the backroom where she did her tailoring and then brought out two of the items she was working on. The gal was a whiz at alterations.

  “What do you think?” she asked, holding up the dresses.

  Grandy and I both expressed our admiration. I wanted the best for Shelley and would support any decision she made about her future, but I also knew it would be hard to replace her if she decided to leave.

  “I see we’re down in inventory again,” I said. “It’s difficult keeping merchandise for both this store and our store on wheels, and we’ve been moving clothes into the RV on the weekends when we take it to the flea market on the coast and then moving them back here early Monday morning.”

  The three of us talked shop, discussing when we should go to West Palm for more inventory and who should make the trip.

  Before moving into this location, we’d operated solely out of an RV we’d converted into a shop on wheels. Now, with Madeleine’s family responsibilities, both shops, and my work with Crusty, we were struggling to keep everything going. Grandy helped out when she could, but I knew she and her husband Max were eager to get back to Key Largo to run their charter boat business for casual fishermen. Max was recovering from a heart attack and had turned the business over to another captain while making it clear that the arrangement wasn’t forever.

  “I need salt air, not swamps,” Max had declared, although he enjoyed fishing the Big Lake for speck, catfish and bass in his time here.

  We heard rapping on the glass door. It was Madeleine with her twins. “A little help,” she called through the door.

  I held the door open while Grandy helped move the baby stroller over the threshold. Both twins were sleeping.

  “I thought I’d take the babies out for some fresh air. It’s such a nice day. Did I see Sammy’s father walking across the parking lot? Was he here?”

  “Yes and no,” said Grandy. “Other than to deliver an ominous warning about several of Eve’s potential clients, he went on his way. That’s just fine with me.”

  I gave Grandy a warning look.

  Madeleine looked puzzled for a moment, but her attention was distracted by Eve, her daughter, who awakened with a gurgle that erupted into a loud cry.

  “Just as in-your-face as her namesake,” said Madeleine.

  “And the boy is so good,” said Grandy, looking with affection at both children. David, the other twin, was named for his father, and was the kind of baby parents dream of having. He slept through the night and rarely cried. His good behavior was offset by his sister’s fussing.

  “Why don’t you hold her, Eve? I’ll get her bottle.” Madeleine handed the wriggling, bawling baby to me.

  Everyone wanted me to hold babies, especially Madeleine’s babies. Oh, I got it. They thought having three sons wasn’t enough. After all, my boys were children when Sammy and I adopted them. Grandy and Madeleine thought I needed to mother a tiny, helpless baby, but I knew the motherhood gene had passed me by. Eve continued to cry in my arms, her usual response to me, quieting only when Grandy took her and gave her the bottle. Baby David continued to sleep, undisturbed by his sister’s yelling.

  “I think you should wake him up and feed him, too, so he can put on some weight to catch up with his big bruiser of a sister,” I said.

  “He’ll grow,” said Grandy.

  “I hope so. Who would want to try out for basketball and find his sister played center for the women’s team while he was the water boy?” I saw the look of hurt in Madeleine’s eyes. “Sorry. I was joking, honey.”

  “I know, and I was worried at first, too, but David is growing faster than she is. He’s longer now, and she’s chunkier.” Madeleine took Eve from Grandy, burped her, and put her back in the stroller. “Say, I passed by the beauty salon at the end of the mall just now and saw the oddest thing. There was a young woman there who had just gotten her hair dyed blonde, and she looked like you, Eve. Your doppelganger.”

  Chapter 3

  I felt a wave of anger envelope me, powerful enough that it threatened to knock me off my feet.

  “Is there something wrong, Eve?” asked Grandy.

  I shook my head and slammed out the door, running down the sidewalk in front of the mall. I pushed through the doors of the hair salon. A stylist was finishing a cut and applying gel to a customer’s hair, coaxing it into spikes identical to my own.

  “Who the hell are you?” I said to the young woman in the chair.

  “Do you like it?” she asked, holding up a mirror to admire the back of her new do.

  “Of course I like it. It’s my hairdo.”

  “Now it’s mine, too,” she said, that irritating saccharine smile still plastered on her face.

  “The two of you look enough alike to be sisters,” the stylist said.

  “No we don’t,” I insisted.

  “But we are sisters. I told you that.”

  “Finish up here. We need to talk.”

  She paid her bill, and I grabbed her by the arm and propelled her out of the shop and down the street to the consignment shop.

  “You’re hurting my arm,” she complained.

  “And you’re annoying me with your silly story.” I shoved her through the doorway. There was a collective sharp intake of breath as Grandy, Madeleine, and Shelley stared at her.

  “Because you’re family, I won’t have to introduce you. You must know everyone here.” Sarcasm fairly dripped from my voice.

  She kept up the idiot smile and held out her hand to Grandy. “You’re my grandmother. I wanted to tell you when we met earlier, but I chickened out.”

  “I don’t remember …. Yes, I do. But you looked so different. You reminded me of Eve when was she was younger, before she got her spiky blonde do.”

  “Grandy!” I said. “Just because she’s got my hairdo doesn’t mean a thing. Anyone can do that.” I stopped talking because Grandy approached the woman and scrutinized her.

  “I can’t believe my eyes,” Grandy said. There was a look of surprise on her face and something else. Was it fear?

  “She told me the oddest story when she came into Crusty’s. She said she was my sister. Now, isn’t that just the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard?”

  Grandy seemed to recover her composure. “That’s impossible. Eve’s mother has been dead since Eve was nine years old and that’s long after you were born, my dear. What are you trying to pull?”

  The smile slipped from her face, and her eye
s filled with tears. “My father told me not to come here. He said you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Of course we don’t believe you, because it’s a lie. You’d have to be much older for Eve’s parents to be your parents as well,” Grandy said. Her voice was tense and angry, but her eyes remained round with worry.

  Through her sobs, the young woman repeated what she had told me earlier. “Our fathers are different.”

  “Now you’re accusing my dead daughter of being unfaithful to her dead husband. You’re delusional, girl.” Grandy was working herself up to a real mad, and when she got into that state, it was better to get out of her line of fire.

  The young woman looked at each of us and saw that our initial shock had been replaced by full-fledged anger.

  “I should never have come here.” She turned and ran out the door.

  “What’s happening, Eve?” asked Madeleine.

  “I wish I knew. Do you?” I asked Grandy.

  “Of course not. It must be someone who heard about your involvement in solving crimes around here and thought she could wriggle her way into your good graces by making herself up to look like you.” Grandy smiled. “Kind of like a rock groupie, only she’s a crazy crime groupie. Forget about it.” Grandy began rearranging clothes on the rounds, but I caught a glimpse of her face before she turned her back. Her brow was furrowed in worry. Did Grandy know something she wasn’t telling me?

  At Grandfather Egret’s that night, the family gathered around the table to eat his famous rabbit stew. Only Grandfather and I knew the secret to his stew: it wasn’t rabbit at all. It was made from chicken.

  “Rabbits used to be plentiful around here,” Grandfather had told me, “but the recent invasion of Burmese pythons into our swamps has wiped out the populations of rabbits, raccoons, and other small mammals.”

  “So I was right when I said your stew tasted like chicken,” I said one night when I was helping him put the dish together.

  He made a shushing sound with his finger to his mouth, and we laughed. Chicken in the stew was fine with me. I didn’t like the idea of bunnies with their little pink noses and cute tails appearing as stew on my plate.

  Tonight Sammy and my sons surrounded their grandfather and begged him to tell them more about his life in the swamps. To the boys, the idea was exotic, and anyone who could survive such a life was a hero.

  Our youngest, now almost six, had been an unhappy, anxious boy when he came to us, and who could blame him? His mother had died of cancer, and not long after, his father had been killed. The boys had adjusted well to having Sammy and me as their parents and Grandfather Egret as their great-grandfather. The return of Sammy’s father to our family was another source of joy to them. Maybe Grandy was right about his being an odd duck, but none of his distancing behavior showed itself when it came to his grandsons. It seemed as if he couldn’t get enough of their company. He might treat me with suspicion, but he was loving and kind to them. Perhaps because of his own self-imposed isolation, he seemed to understand how much they needed to be enveloped in love and acceptance and to have people they could count on to support them through their grief over the loss of their biological parents. Sammy and I were grateful to have yet another person around to love the boys.

  Grandfather Egret served a spiced pudding for dessert; then we shooed the boys off to bed. They had school the next morning, and supper had been late. We took our coffees and sat in chairs in front of the large fireplace.

  “Dad told me you had some odd visitors today at the store,” said Sammy, returning from the bedroom where he’d tucked the boys into their sleeping bags. Grandfather’s house was small with only one bedroom, which had been Sammy’s growing up. Whenever the boys got to do a sleepover at Grandfather’s, they spread their sleeping bags in Sammy’s room. Sammy’s father used the single bed in the bedroom while Grandfather slept where he always had—on a small cot he set up each night near the fire in the main room of the house. The boys, Sammy, and I were still living at my place, but we had plans to build a house on the property near Grandfather’s, adjacent to the airboat business Sammy and Grandfather ran.

  I had hoped to tell Sammy about the young woman and the man who came to Crusty’s while I was cleaning the office. Now his father had beat me to the punch line, and I was resentful. The news was mine to tell. Not his. Or was I overreacting?

  “Just some loonies who wandered into Crusty’s looking for a PI. That’s all.” It wasn’t the truth, but I didn’t want to air my worries with anyone but Sammy.

  “You are wrong. They mean you harm. Even I could see that,” said Sammy’s father.

  Sammy looked at me, one eyebrow raised in curiosity. “Is that true. Eve? What did they say?”

  I sighed. Now that Sammy and Grandfather had half the story, I decided to tell them the rest. “The woman said she was my sister. She looks like me. But of course, that’s impossible.”

  “And the man?” asked Sammy.

  “He was a lot older. He said his daughter was missing. He didn’t make a lot of sense, but it sounded as if she’d left home up North and headed down here looking for her mother. He seemed to believe the woman was dead, but his story was disjointed, and he fled before I could make sense of it.”

  Grandfather puffed on his pipe, then laid it on the floor beside his rocking chair. “Did he hire you to look for her?”

  “No. He just ran out of the door and disappeared. I didn’t know what to think of either of them. And Grandy seemed a little upset by the young woman and by ….”

  “Yes?” said Sammy’s father.

  “Nothing.” I could hardly tell him her concern included his odd behavior.

  “I saw the young woman,” said Sammy’s father, “and him. I think she’s his daughter.”

  “Really! Did they see each other?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “The last thing you need for my grandsons is some crazy relatives in their lives. It’s unsettling and not good for them. Keep them away from my grandsons or I’ll ….”

  Grandfather raised his gaze from the flames in the fire. “What will you do?”

  Sammy’s father shook his head. “The boys don’t need disruption from this woman’s family. That’s all.”

  “I’m sure they’re not, uh, she’s not, my family.” I couldn’t keep a note of defensiveness from my voice. How could he think I didn’t know what the boys needed?

  His gave me a hard, challenging look, but then dropped his gaze and said, “Of course.”

  Sammy slipped his arm around me. “Do you think she’s trying to pull something?”

  “Probably, but what?” I leaned in to his embrace.

  We dropped the topic for the evening, but I could tell everyone was thinking about the woman’s strange story. Was she some kind of a threat to me? Or was she just a lost soul latching on to me as some kind of an idol as Grandy had suggested? I wanted to meet her again and get the real story. This time I wouldn’t let her go so easily.

  “It’s time we got home,” Sammy said. “I’ll be back early tomorrow to drive the boys to school, and we can take the airboat out together and see how you like the business, Dad.”

  Sammy was still working David Wilson’s game reserve part-time, and if his father took to the airboat business, he could run it along with Sammy. Though Grandfather Egret still sold tickets, he no longer ran the boat. When the winter visitors flooded into the area, the business got busier, so the family was considering running a second boat.

  Sammy and I waved good night and headed for the truck. As Sammy started the engine, he said, “You should have told me about your unusual visitors, Eve. I worry about you.”

  “When did I have time to tell you before your father announced it to all of us and then made it sound as if I were to blame?” I felt my face heat up.

  “What is it with you and my father? He’s only interested in our welfare, you know.”

  “Maybe your welfare and that of the boys, but not mine,” I shot back. I was sure he c
ould hear the edge in my voice.

  “You need to understand what he’s experiencing. He thought he’d lost his family, and now he has it back. He’s protective. That’s all.” Sammy’s words were clipped, and now he sounded as defensive as I had.

  “He chose to spend thirty years in the swamp. His family didn’t abandon him.” I should have left it alone. Sammy and I were having our first fight, and it was over family. I was on thin ice here.

  There was a knock on the passenger side of the truck. I jumped and looked into the face of Sammy’s father. Although the window was rolled down, I hadn’t heard him approach. I guess that was good for tracking animals in the swamp, but it came off as sneaky when you did it with humans.

  “I’m taking the boys on a camping expedition into the swamps this weekend. I forget to tell you.”

  That little announcement added fuel to the fire of the argument Sammy and I had begun in the truck. I felt he should have cleared it with us before making those plans, but Sammy was thrilled he was taking the boys on a swamp adventure. By the time we got back to my house, we weren’t speaking. We always said, “I love you” before we fell asleep, but tonight it sounded forced on both our parts.

  Sammy had left to pick up the boys by the time I awoke the next morning.

  I had two items on my to-do list for the day. First I needed to find Sammy and apologize for not being more understanding of his father’s difficulties in adjusting to life out of the swamps. Second, I had to find that young woman who said she was my sister. I needed to lay my anxiety to rest. I had more important issues to deal with in my life than a silly, delusional woman.