Undertaking Irene

by Pamela Burford

  His derisive snort said, Like that would ever happen. Well, at least it was a response.

  “What you found was my latest work order,” I said. “It told you where Irene’s brooch was and precisely when I’d be going to Ahearn’s to retrieve it.”

  “Irene’s brooch, huh?” He gave me a flat stare. “You believe everything that malignant old bitch told you?”

  So much for not speaking ill of the dead. “Colette O’Rourke’s brooch then,” I said. “If it matters so much which deceased old woman you stole it from. Have you sold it yet?”

  Martin exchanged good-nights with the hipster couple, now heading for the exit. “You’ve been doing Irene’s dirty work for a long time, Jane. She paid pretty well from what I’ve seen.”

  “Because if you haven’t gotten rid of it yet,” I said, “there’s something you need to consider. Just hear me out.”

  “And you have other clients too, right?” he asked. “You know, I’ve been thinking of trying my hand at that—doing sick things to dead people. You make a decent living at it?”

  I sighed in exasperation. “Okay, for the record, I do not do sick things. I provide a valuable service to griev—”

  “Is that what you call loading my grandmother’s ashes into shotgun shells and giving them to a hunter during turkey season? A valuable service?”

  “Wait, what?” I shook my head. “Your grandmother? Your grandmother was…?”

  “Anne McAuliffe. The woman whose husband Irene stole.”

  I knew Irene was Arthur’s second wife, but I’d never heard anything about her stealing him away from the first Mrs. McAuliffe. I’d always assumed he was a divorced man when they’d met nearly thirty years before.

  That thing with the shotgun shells had been my first assignment from Irene way back when. Well, my first assignment that didn’t have anything to do with dog-sitting or the pet cemetery. But it was for a close friend of hers, she’d told me, an avid hunter who’d requested that particular disposal of his cremated remains. People ask for all kinds of weird stuff. I once arranged for a ceramic artist to incorporate the ashes of a client’s deceased boyfriend into a lifelike dildo. The client provided the artist with a plaster cast of the real thing to use as a model, and reported that she was more than satisfied with the finished product. Or to be more precise, that she was satisfied multiple times in quick succession.

  “Okay, so you came across that work order, too,” I said, “when you broke in to Irene’s home. But trust me, that was someone else in those shotgun shells. It had nothing to do with your grandmother. I don’t know where you got that idea.”

  “From Irene herself. She taunted me with it when I saw her Tuesday. Grandma loathed firearms and hunting. She was an anti-gun activist. That’s the last thing she would have wanted her remains used for, and Irene knew it.”

  Something squeezed in my chest. “You’re lying. How would Irene even have had access to your grandmother’s ashes? Anne was already divorced from Arthur when she died.”

  “Of a broken heart.” His jaw tightened. “Not a year after he left her for that conniving bitch.”

  I was surprised to hear the big, bad black sheep use such a quaint term. Broken heart, that is, not conniving bitch. I was fairly certain Anne McAuliffe’s death certificate said nothing about a broken heart, but I kept that to myself.

  “Grandpa never stopped loving her,” he added, “and after she died, he realized what a colossal mistake he’d made.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He told me. I was eighteen, nineteen. He died a year or two later.” He didn’t repeat, of a broken heart, but the implication was clear.

  “He was devastated by her death,” Martin said. “When he asked my dad and my uncles if he could keep her ashes, they didn’t have the heart to say no. He hid them from Irene, but she found them after he died.” He leaned over the bar toward me. I managed not to flinch. “And that’s where you come in. Irene paid you seventy-five bucks to desecrate my grandmother’s remains. Must have seemed like a lot of bread at the time.”

  I took a deep, calming breath. I shook my head, but it was a hollow gesture. I knew Irene a lot better now than I had twenty-two years earlier when I was a gullible teenager. I found it all too easy to imagine her doing that to her husband’s first wife. But lying to me to engage my cooperation? That, I didn’t want to believe.

  A pair of pretty twenty-somethings entered the place and made a beeline for the bar. They trilled greetings to “Marty” and leaned over the bar to bestow cheek kisses and give him a good long look down their plunging necklines.

  “The usual?” he asked. They giggled, which apparently meant yes. He produced a couple of margarita glasses, salted the rims, and began dispensing ingredients into a blender, including a measured pour of cheap well tequila, so bite me, Barbies.

  One of the girls noticed Sexy Beast. “Omigod, how cute!” she squealed. “What is it?”

  “A poodle,” I said.

  She giggled again. “No, really, what is it?”

  “It’s a rare Mongolian chinchilla.” Martin raised his voice to be heard over the whirring blender. “They mate them with wire-haired guinea pigs to get just that kind of matted fur. Then they skin them to line billionaires’ underpants.”

  “No! Omigod,” the second girl said. “I’m, like, so against fur. You’re not going to skin him, are you?” she asked me.

  “I rescued this one from the fur breeder,” I said. There are times when ’tis noblest, or at least easiest, to tread the path of least resistance. “He gets to spend his days eating kibble and playing fetch.”

  “Almost like a dog!” Her friend showed her perfect dimples. “Can I pet it? Does it bite?”

  I assured her my chinchi-pig was tame. He accepted their adoration and responded with strokes of his long tongue. More giggles.

  Martin wiped the bar top and admired the view as the two turned and carried their frozen green concoctions to a table, where they immediately snagged the attention of the goateed one and his cohorts.

  “I have to admit,” I said, “I’m surprised to hear you talk about your grandparents with such affection. Irene told me you wanted nothing to do with your family.”

  His flat, hard stare made my breath catch. “Most of them wanted nothing to do with me, the bastard son of a married deacon.”

  “You father is Arthur and Anne’s middle son, yes?”

  He gave a curt nod. “Hugh McAuliffe. My mom was an exotic dancer he was screwing on the side. I mean, could I be any more of a cliché? To everyone but Grandma and Grandpa, once they found out I even existed. I was eleven then.”

  My eyes widened. “Your father kept you a secret for eleven years? From his own family?”

  Martin lifted the calling card I’d dropped on the bar. He turned it in his fingers, something close to an actual smile on his face. “These were a gift from Grandma McAuliffe when I was fourteen or fifteen. She’d been telling me about the old traditions, how a proper gentleman would never have stopped by someone’s house without leaving his card. She thought it’d be fun for me to have some of my own.”

  Martin’s tender expression told me that Grandma McAuliffe’s unspoken message hadn’t been wasted on him: You are a gentleman and have every right to hold your head high. I got a sense of how devastating her death must have been for him.

  “What the hell is that thing doing in here?” The gruff voice belonged to a portly middle-aged man now joining Martin behind the bar. The owner of the place, by all appearances. “You know better than that,” he told Martin. “No pets.”

  Before I could respond, Martin said, “That’s not a pet, Tommy, it’s a service animal—like a Seeing Eye dog. It keeps her calm when the psychotic hallucinations start to take over.”

  I struggled to keep from rolling my eyes. First the chinchi-pig, now this. For his part, Tommy frowned with the effort of processing this information. His nervous gaze flicked between me and my “service animal” as if he expecte
d me to start bouncing off the walls at any moment. “I dunno…”

  Martin shrugged. “Nothing we can do about it, man. It’s the law. You can’t keep it out.”

  Tommy poured himself a bourbon on the rocks and retreated to his office, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

  I bribed SB with another peanut to get him back into the tote. “Okay, so here it is,” I said. “I’m hoping you haven’t sold the brooch yet because I want you to consider doing the right thing.”

  Martin looked at me steadily. “Which is…?”

  “Giving it to its rightful owner. Patrick O’Rourke. Colette’s son.”

  “What a coincidence,” he said. “I had a similar conversation with Irene on Tuesday evening. I told her she should do the right thing and return the mermaid to her rightful owner. I didn’t know then that she’d sold her to the O’Rourke woman.”

  “She didn’t sell her. Colette won her in a poker game.” Now he had me calling the thing her.

  “Seriously?” He shook his head. “Crazy old bats. Irene didn’t tell me that. She let me believe she still had her.”

  “Who do you think the rightful owner is?” I asked.

  “I’m tired of this conversation.” He picked up my glass of tequila and tossed it back.

  “Oh, I know.” I tapped my head as if just now figuring it out. “That brooch is a McAuliffe family heirloom, so it should go to a McAuliffe, right? You have any particular McAuliffe in mind?” I picked up Martin’s calling card from the bar top where he’d dropped it and tucked it into my jeans pocket. “The police take a dim view of burglary.”

  He raised his hands as if to show how empty they were. “Burglars take things.”

  “Breaking and entering, then.”

  “Irene invited me into her living room and served me a beer. I assume I left a few fingerprints, as invited guests tend to do.” He shrugged. “We had a conversation and I left.”

  And returned hours later in the middle of the night armed with gloves, lock-picking tools, and the skills of a seasoned thief.

  “How about the fact that you stole a valuable piece of jewelry from a dead woman lying in her casket,” I hissed, careful to keep my volume low. “Right in front of her family.”

  “Only because you didn’t steal it first.” He tucked the handset of the bar phone against his ear and touched the keypad. “Sure, what the hell, let’s call the cops. It’ll be fun. We can tell them all about the mermaid, sort of a he-said-she-said. The he-said part will include the long and colorful work history of a certain local Death Diva.”

  Remember when I said that everything I do is legal but that sometimes there’s a sort of gray area? Well, has this ever happened to you, that you’ll be looking at something dark gray, like pants or something, and you’ll be wondering hey, are these pants really gray, ’cause they look kinda black, and you just can’t tell, and you’ll turn the pants this way and that and carry them to the window and squint at them real hard and you still can’t tell? But it doesn’t really matter because no one’s going to get hurt even if it turns out they’re kinda sorta black?

  Well, I’ve worn a few, you know, pairs of pants like that. And my conscience is clear and all, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to invite the whole damn Crystal Harbor Police Department to paw through my wardrobe.

  This also explained why Martin had felt free to leave his calling card as a kind of gotcha! for Irene. He knew she couldn’t report him for swiping the brooch from Colette’s casket without turning a spotlight on her own plan to do the very same thing.

  He might have won this round, but I couldn’t stand for this smug bastard to get the last word.

  Oh, stop it, you know what I meant by bastard.

  I leaned across the bar, got right in his face. “You’re full of it with that ‘rightful owner’ crap, Padre. You stole that brooch because you could, and you’re going to sell it if you haven’t already, and you’re going to keep every penny for yourself. I know about you.”

  “I thought all you knew about me was what kind of beer I drink.”

  “If you have any sense of decency, you’ll turn that brooch over to Patrick,” I said. “Something like that could really make a difference for him and his family.”

  “Don’t worry about Patrick O’Rourke. He’s going to be fine, mermaid or no mermaid.”

  “I’m sure telling yourself that helps to soothe your conscience, if you have one.” I slid off the barstool and settled SB’s tote against my hip. “Thanks for the drink and have a crappy life.”

  6

  Kids. You know?

  I ADMIT IT, I always get a little thrill when I pass Janey’s Place and see my name up there on the apple green awning. Even now, almost twenty years after Dom opened the original store—which just happened to be the one I now found myself standing in front of—and seventeen years after our divorce, the words Janey’s Place with their cheerful chalkboard font, separated by a tilted cross section of an apple, makes a little something inside me glow with secret pleasure.

  My ex’s flagship store was located in the busiest section of the busiest commercial block in downtown Crystal Harbor. It was a quaint, high-end shopping strip, with a pottery gallery on one side of Janey’s Place and UnderStatements, a high-end lingerie boutique, on the other. The morning was chilly and overcast, and as I entered the welcome warmth of the store, I inhaled the homey scents of hot soup and fresh greens and fruit. I hadn’t been there since the previous summer, but it was always a comforting place to walk into.

  The interior of the store was decorated in a pale palette, predominantly light beige and more of the signature apple green, with blond-wood and chrome accents. The food-service counter and cold case ran along the left, with a colorful wall menu offering a selection of healthful salads, sandwiches, soups, vegetable juices, and smoothies. Most people ordered takeout, but a handful of wood-and-chrome tables were arranged in front of the big picture windows overlooking Main Street. An older woman sat at one of the tables, sipping a Kermit-colored smoothie and reading Mother Jones.

  The remainder of the large space was a natural-foods grocery store. One whole wall was taken up with clear plastic self-serve hoppers filled with all manner of organic nuts, seeds, dried fruits, rice, beans, oats, granolas, and fair-trade coffees. The shelves were packed with every variety of nutritional supplement, protein powder, alternative baking mix, whole-grain cereal, organic snack and convenience food, healthful cooking ingredient, and bottled juice your little heart could desire. Well, maybe your little heart, but not mine. The place might be named after me, but my taste in vittles runs more along the lines of pizza, ice cream, and McAnything. I give the folks who shop at Janey’s Place credit, I really do, but please.

  I’d timed my visit for late morning when I knew business would be slow—too late for the breakfast-smoothie crowd and too early for the lunch-salad stalwarts. I’d scheduled a job in New Jersey that would gobble up the rest of the day and probably the whole evening as well, so I’d left Sexy Beast in the care of my mom and dad, with exhaustive written instructions and a carload of supplies. I could only imagine new parents experienced the same temporary insanity when leaving a newborn with the sitter.

  And before you think, how sad, she’s at Janey’s Place to see her ex, who has long since moved on—and on and oh yeah, on some more—let me just tell you I did not come here looking for Dom. This isn’t where he works anyway. He runs his health-food empire from offices on the other side of town. He does, however, pop into his flagship store on a regular basis, so I half expected to see him behind the counter, throwing together a vegan panino with hummus, avocado, and all manner of life-giving rabbit food. He likes to take breaks from the big-business side of things to serve the customers and get back to his roots and remember why he opened this store in the first place and so on and so forth.

  Which always sounds to me like a load of horse poo, but hey, Dom is a nice guy. Everyone says so. All his ex-wives, for example, think he’s swell. I�
��m sure he’s never late with a child-support payment, although I personally can’t attest to that.

  And for the record, Dom isn’t the only one who’s moved on. I date. I just haven’t found anyone who comes up to my standards. Okay, my “impossibly high” standards if you listen to my gal pals, who claim I’m pining for my ex-husband and that until his exact clone miraculously drops into my bed, I’ll remain a lonely and emotionally needy ex-wife. What do they know?

  Anyway, I was there to see Patrick O’Rourke. Imagine my surprise when I phoned his home that morning only to have his wife, Barbara, inform me he was back at work that day—as manager of this very store. Dom had never mentioned hiring him, not that he kept me informed of business matters.

  But it wasn’t Patrick I spied behind the counter. It was Fuzzy Slippers, his daughter, diligently pretending to wipe down the food-prep area. Today she wore an apple green Janey’s Place tee-shirt tied at the midriff over skintight orange leggings and high-heeled animal-print ankle boots. She probably thought she looked like a million bucks in the outfit. Unfortunately it was more like a million and change, the excess taking the form of a muffin over her waistband and cottage cheese below. Her lank, highlighted hair was pulled back in a ponytail for hygiene’s sake.

  The girl looked up and noticed me. After a moment I saw recognition dawn, though she made no effort to appear welcoming. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. “What can I get you?” she asked.

  I smiled for both of us. “I’m Jane Delaney. We kind of met Wednesday evening at your grandmother’s wake. We didn’t really get to speak then. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  She excavated her ear canal and examined her finger.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t get your name the other night,” I said.

  It took her a few seconds to realize I was waiting for a response.

  “Cheyenne,” she said.

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “What can I get you?”

  “I really just came in to speak with your dad, Cheyenne,” I said. “Is he around?”