by Dana Mentink
It seemed important to his colleagues to buy him lunch on his birthday, so he plastered a smile on his face and allowed himself to be shanghaied. Besides, it gave them a chance to skip town for a few hours after the parade took place. Yolo, the newest officer, was left to maintain a police presence at the precinct.
The place smelled like wet carpet and stale cologne. Jack nursed a club soda, not only because they technically were still on duty, but because he’d long ago decided that drinking and raising toddlers did not complement each other. Mary Dirisi was trying to teach fellow officer Nathan Katz how to throw darts. Nate’s throws wound up rattling to the floor, or they got stuck in the plant next to the men’s room door. Jack wondered how anyone with that kind of aim passed the qualifications on the police firing range. Nevertheless, although Nathan couldn’t throw a dart worth a hoot, he was one of the few people Jack would trust with his life.
Jack’s thoughts strayed to the toe. The lab could contribute nothing more than to confirm that yes, it was indeed a toe from an adult male human, and it had been severed within the past two days. So far no one hobbled forward to claim it, and the rest of the body formerly attached to the toe had not been found, either. It was weird, but in Finny, weird was not uncommon. As a matter of fact, since the festival had begun to attract people from everywhere, weird was getting positively commonplace.
Jack had spent the morning listening to Alva Hernandez spouting a tale about a bunch of murderous proctologists. Alva was convinced there was some sort of plot brewing at the top of Finny’s Nose. The last time he filed a report with the Finny police, it had to do with the Loch Ness monster, which he was dead sure had holed up in Tookie Newsome’s trout pond for the winter.
In the name of community outreach, Jack had driven upslope with Alva and examined the area. There was nothing much to find, only a few bits of wire on a grassy plateau bordered by an army of cedar and sycamore trees. Nothing much, but something did bother the detective about it. It didn’t seem like the doings of the local kids looking for a place to make trouble. Something about Alva’s story felt foreign, alien to the seaside town.
His thoughts wandered back to the present. With his back to the wall, he noticed a small woman a couple of tables over, sipping a glass of water. She was interesting— short dark hair, the tiniest hands he had ever seen, a dreamy look on her freckled face. She was not beautiful in the magazine-cover sense, too strong a chin, too round a face. Her sandal bobbed up and down over her crossed knee, as if she was tired of waiting for someone. A man in cowboy clothes sauntered up to her.
“Come on, Jack. Relax already. This is supposed to be a celebration, remember?” Mary plopped down next to him with a plate of steaming nachos. “I’ve given up on this idiot.” She gestured to an approaching Nate. “He’s the worst dart player on the planet.”
Nate huffed into his mustache. “Yeah, well, I play a mean game of Candyland.”
As the father of five girls, including five-year-old triplets, Nathan Katz was a man of infinite patience and an absolute whiz at dressing Barbie dolls, tiny stiletto heels and all.
“You’ve got to start beefing up your testosterone. You spend too much time surrounded by women,” Mary said. She flipped her braid over her shoulder for emphasis.
“It’s true,” Nate agreed. “I’m pretty sure even our goldfish is a female. It’s got kind of girly flippers.”
“Goldfish don’t have flippers,” she said as she reached for a gooey nacho.
“Spoken like someone who needs a pet in their life.”
“I’m considering getting one.”
“I hear spider monkeys like strong female compan- ionship,” Nate said. A slug of melted cheese dropped onto his shirtfront.
“I was thinking more along the lines of canine, you toad.”
Jack listened to their banter with one ear and simultaneously eavesdropped on the conversation at another table. The cowboy was making himself friendly.
“Actually, I’m waiting for someone, but thanks anyway,” the small woman said, putting down her glass.
The guy, complete with pointy boots and enor- mous belt buckle, laid a smooth hand on her table. The creases in his plaid shirt labeled him more familiar with department stores than the wide-open range.
“You’re much too good-looking to be left alone here,” he breathed. “Some guy doesn’t know what he’s doin’ leaving you by yourself.”
“Thanks for the attention, really, but I am not interested in company. Why don’t you go find another ‘gal’ to talk to, okay?” She smiled as she said the words.
“Awww, you don’t really mean that, darling.”
Jack put down his club soda and pushed out his chair a fraction. Mary and Nate grew quiet as they picked up on his tension.
The cowboy grabbed hold of her slender wrist. “Come on, honey, I’ll show you how to loosen up.” He pulled her out of her chair and yanked her to his chest.
By the time Jack and the others made it to their feet, the woman had kneed the drunken man in the groin, whacked the back of his head as he bent over in pain, and shoved him to the ground. Then she stood with a sandal planted firmly above his collar, her little painted toenails bright against the man’s sweaty neck.
Bending down close to his face, she said calmly, “The next time a woman says no, maybe you should consider the possibility that she really means it.” She picked up her purse, dropped a few bills on the table, and walked out of the bar.
Jack, Nate, and Mary stood in openmouthed astonishment.
“Man,” Nate said.
“Man, oh man,” Mary echoed.
Jack’s legs seemed to work of their own accord. He was on his way to the door, following the woman, when his pager began to vibrate. Checking the screen, he muttered under his breath and took out his cell phone.
After a minute he said, “We’ve gotta go. Problem at the festival. Thanks for the birthday lunch, guys. Time to get back to work.”
They paid the check and headed out the door as the humiliated cowboy slunk back to his buddies.
Out in the parking lot, there was no sign of her in the swirling fog.
Chapter Four
If Cootchie was born under an unlucky star, it certainly didn’t show on the surface.
She was a wild-haired, button-nosed preschooler, with chubby legs constantly engaged in a gallop. She would have been born into a privileged life if her wealthy grandfather had accepted her paternity. She should have been the object of adoration of her maternal grandmother if the woman hadn’t abandoned her own child decades before. As it was, she was the daughter of a man who had been murdered before she showed up on a sonogram, the child of a mother prone to speaking in fortune cookie vernacular.
It was still a subject of wonder to Ruth that she had ever become part of this odd woman’s life. She finally concluded that it was due to a stark vulnerability both women experienced at the same time, the murder of Dimple’s lover, and Ruth’s complete loss of identity and purpose after her beloved husband’s death.
That and the murderer running rampant in Finny. Somehow, out of the chaos, God brought them together.
And now the chaos had returned, or so it seemed. Ruth’s muscles ached from the wild sprint to the crash site the previous day. Poor, poor Ed. She felt queasy just thinking about the way his life abruptly ended. She had not slept well, tossing and turning, even after Monk prepared her a middle-of-the-night cup of tea.
The early morning was cold, heavy with fog. Cootchie twirled madly in Ruth’s backyard, hands up in the air as the gulls circled around her and stabbed orange beaks into her pockets, looking for goldfish crackers. “Whee! Whee!” she squealed.
Somewhere in mid-twirl, one of the gulls suc- ceeded in knocking the girl over, causing her to scrape her knee. She put her chubby fists to her eyes and whimpered. Ruth shooed the birds away and sat down with Cootchie on the porch steps.
“Did those mean birds knock you over, Cootchie? Let Nana Ruth see that scrape.” She fou
nd the knee free from blood and gave her a hug, relishing her sweet- smelling hair and the chubby arms around her neck. The child’s cheeks were cold from the morning chill.
She flashed back to the day Cootchie was born. It had been a frantic drive to Eden Hospital in the middle of the night; at the hospital, Dimple was stuck in a nonproductive labor that lasted three days. By the time the baby was finally coaxed into the world, poor Dimple was mentally and physically depleted. A chipper nurse handed the new mother a form to fill out for the birth certificate. Ruth could still see the nurse’s frown as she handed it back to Dimple after scanning the paper.
“Are you sure the name is, er, spelled correctly and everything? That’s just the way you want it?” the nurse had asked.
Dimple nodded wearily and fell asleep.
It wasn’t until several hours later that baby Cootchie was returned to her mother’s room and Ruth learned the infant’s name.
“Dimple, uh, is Cootchie a family name?”
“No, it just came to me,” Dimple said before falling asleep again.
Ruth joggled the baby for an hour, walking her in circles around the room, before she noticed the package of Cootchie Coo diapers on the counter at the foot of Dimple’s bed.
It’s a good thing they weren’t Poopy Poo diapers.
She pulled her mind away from the fond memories. The girl was asleep with her first two fingers jammed into her mouth. Her hair collected in wild, sweaty spirals the color of a rusty nail.
Could anything be more soothing than holding a sleeping child? Ruth could vaguely remember rocking her only son when he was an infant. Bryce had been a crabby infant, colicky, the doctors said; but he’d put up with her tentative mothering skills just fine. As he grew, his independent personality was a source of confusion to her. Most of the memories from his early school years were of him pushing her away, rejecting her affection, physical and otherwise. She did not understand why their relationship was so distant, why it had always been that way. At this point, she was pretty sure she never would.
“He needs to go his own way,” Phillip had said many times. “Some people are like that.”
Bryce had finally landed in Chicago and now lived a separate life, married to Roslyn, with no children. Except for the obligatory phone call on her birthday, she never heard from him. Bryce had revered his father, but even at Phillip’s funeral he was unable to express his feelings of loss to her. They stayed safe, discussing practical matters and the weather until he flew back home after the memorial service.
Cootchie stirred and blinked her eyes. “Where’s Papa Monk?”
“He’s at work, sweet pea. We’ll see him later.” She wished he was home. They had stayed up late into the night discussing the disaster. The police said it was a flare gun that took the balloon down, and Ed along with it.
She still had the images burned into her retinas: a haggard-faced Candace collapsed on the ground, Bing bent over her. The whole scene replayed itself in her mind.
She recalled Alva watching the proceedings with a puff of blue cotton candy clutched in his fist, and a wide-eyed Hugh arriving posthaste to the crash site with a host of other festivalgoers.
Then there was an infiltration of police and fire personnel that seemed to drift in and out of focus. They were focused intently on their individual duties, unaffected by the horror around them. Jack Denny talked into a radio as Nathan and Mary staked an area around the gore with yellow tape.
Jack had spoken to his officers in a low tone. “Check out the insurance situation—beneficiaries and such.”
Monk materialized next to Ruth and wrapped her in a massive hug. “Are you okay? I heard a horrendous bang, so I locked up the store and came running.” He looked into her eyes. “Is that a body over there? What happened? Are you hurt, honey?”
“No.” The worry in his gray eyes filled her heart. She leaned her head for a moment into his garlic- scented embrace. Her words trickled out, faltering, uncertain. “There was a flash of something across the sky. A shot of some sort, and then the balloon caught fire and just sort of dissolved. They tried to get it down, but they couldn’t do it in time. Ed Honeysill, he—fell out of the basket.” She watched the paramedics load Candace up in the ambulance. “He’s dead, I’m pretty sure. I can’t believe it. It happened in a blink.”
His embrace tightened. “What a thing for you to see. I never should have let you out the door this morning.” He rested his cheek on the top of her head.
Bing approached then, his muscular arms folded against his broad chest. “It was a flare gun.”
“How do you know?” Monk asked.
“I know a flare when I see it,” he snapped. “It was fired at pretty close range, too. Maybe a couple hundred feet, I’d say.” Bing shook his head. “That’s an eight- thousand-dollar balloon. Just look at it.”
“Yes,” Monk said, “and a pretty big inconvenience to the passengers, not to mention the witnesses.”
Bing looked at him sharply. “I almost lost one of my guys, too. He landed on the jump house. Just sprained an ankle and didn’t flatten any kids in the process.”
Jack had joined them at that point. “Mr. Mitchell, we’re going to need to talk to you about what happened. Would you mind giving some information to Officer Katz over there?”
Bing strode off.
“Are you two doing all right?” Jack asked. When they nodded, he added, “I’m afraid this means a trip down to the office, Ruth. Can I schedule you for an interview tomorrow, maybe?” His brown eyes were soft.
She nodded.
Nathan walked up with two plastic bags in his rubber-gloved hands. “That’s all we’ve got.”
One bag held a bulky gun with a wide barrel and the other a twisted metal eyeglass frame.
Jack asked Monk to escort Ruth home.
Tucked into Monk’s strong arm, she had made her way downslope. As they walked, a thought froze in her brain. If the flare was indeed fired at close range, then someone in Finny’s swirling fog was a murderer.
And he was close.
Very close.
The thought made her shiver once again.
Now, as Ruth sat on the porch step trying to puzzle out who would have wanted to kill Ed Honeysill, Cootchie awakened and interrupted her reverie.
“Go park? With Paul?”
“We can go to the park, honey, but Mr. Denny said Paul has to go to the doctor today. Maybe we can play with him tomorrow. We can go for a little while before I take you home. Can you help me feed the worms first?”
Ruth took a minute to slide the solar panels off the eight-foot-long concrete beds, ignoring the ache in her left calf. Phillip had come up with the vermiculture idea, figuring it would be a unique business venture and a good supplement to the birds’ diet of protein pellets and whatever they could lay their beaks on. He’d finished constructing the beds and ordered a starter supply of worms before he came across the fact that worms need to be kept in a cozy sixty-to-seventy- degree range. Hence the construction of the solar panels, which served not only to keep the worms happy but to keep the birds out. Worms were pretty easygoing critters unless the temperature got too hot. Only once did Ruth have to worry about the wigglers overheating. The weather in Finny topped one hundred about as often as Comet Hale-Bopp whizzed overhead.
Cootchie held the box of litmus strips while Ruth did a quick reading and found the pH to be a healthy 7.1. She shoveled a modest quantity of bird manure onto the top of the beds, and the child danced along beside her sprinkling the top with shredded paper.
She replaced the solar panels and grabbed her travel kit. The cameras and extra film it used to contain had given way to boxes of organic carrot juice, edamame, and toddler-sized overalls. She laughed to herself. “What a difference a year makes.”
Beams of light made ghostly patches of sun and shadow but did nothing to dispel the chill from their fingers and toes as they walked. It was a gentle downhill trudge from Ruth’s cottage to the park in the center of to
wn. The sun was trying to burrow its way through the fog when they arrived. Along the way, they were treated to the sight of rolling seas of yellow mustard flower and patches of spiky artichokes that grew wild along the walking trail. Ruth was once again grateful for the rippled foothills that formed an uneven border almost completely around the rear of the mountain called Finny’s Nose. They were just too topographically uncooperative to allow for much building development in the shadow of the nose.
She could hear the faraway strains of festival music. Finny Park was a small grassy area plopped without much planning or forethought in the town square. Blowing on her hands to warm them, she led Cootchie to the steps of a rickety slide. The girl climbed to the top of the steps and shouted, “Mara!” pointing to a spot behind Ruth.
It was indeed Martha, the escape artist bird, hobbling up behind her, quick in spite of the missing wing. “How do you do that?” Ruth muttered.
Martha had been given to Ruth’s husband with a plastic six-pack ring embedded in her neck feathers, which had no doubt made her easy prey for the cat that maimed her. Phillip surmised that she had gotten tangled up in it as a very young bird and it began to slowly strangle her as she grew, leaving her, if not brain damaged, then certainly with a heavy dose of goofiness. It was theoretically possible that Martha could fly if she had the gumption to try. In her five years with Ruth, she never had.
Martha darted around the bench, attempting to rifle through the travel kit, when Hugh Lemmon approached carrying a cardboard box. The shy, gangly man nodded his head in a hello; then in mid-nod, he tripped over the leg of the park bench. He caught himself, but not before the contents of the box tumbled to the ground.
“Are you okay, Hugh?”
His eyes widened in alarm as Martha scuttled around, chasing the rolling black objects.
