Daphne sat down on the couch and put her arm around Celia.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be,” she sighed. “You deserve better, sweetie. You deserve someone who will love you and cherish you and treat you like a queen.”
Celia laid her head on Daphne’s shoulder.
“Right now I’d just settle for getting my car back and getting my stuff out of his house. I don’t even care about my clothes so much. I can get new ones, I guess. But I want my paintings and quilts and photo albums. Pat texted me in the middle of the night. He said he changed the locks on all the doors.”
“Celia,” I said, “when you loaned him the money, I don’t suppose you made him sign anything saying how and when he’d pay you back, did you?”
She shook her head. I’d expected as much. Celia was far too innocent and trusting; she really believed that Pat would use the money to fix his car and then pay her back when he had a job.
“Well,” I said, “unless Pat suddenly grows a conscience . . .”
“Hmph!” barked Rinda, making clear her opinion on the chances of that happening.
“. . . I doubt you’ll ever see that money again. He’ll probably claim you gave it to him as a gift. But he can’t keep your car and he can’t prevent you from getting your stuff.”
I picked my cell up off the coffee table. “Let me call Peter. I’m sure he’ll know what kind of paperwork we’ll need to fill out to get a judge to force Pat to give back Celia’s car and let her collect her possessions.”
“Paperwork? A judge?” Rinda shook her head in disgust. “Isn’t it just like you to go running off in search of a lawyer and begging the government for help instead of taking matters into your own hands? I say we just drive over there, bang on the door, and tell Pat he’d better open up.”
“And if he won’t?” I asked.
Rinda sniffed and scowled, considering the question. “Then we’ll just cross that bridge when we come to it. Maybe he’ll let us in and maybe he won’t. But if he does, it’ll be a lot cheaper and faster than dragging Pat into court. Anyway, we don’t lose anything by trying.”
“Rinda’s right,” Daphne said, “ ‘The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.’ ”
Rinda put a hand on her hip. “Now, isn’t that what I just said?”
Daphne patted Celia on the arm and then stood up. “C’mon, girls. Let’s drive over there and try to reason with him.”
“And if that doesn’t work,” Rinda said brightly, as if the idea had just come to her, “we can try snipping the electrical connection to the house so it’ll get so cold and dark that he has to come out and talk to us.” She slipped her arms into her coat. “I’ve got a pair of wire cutters in the glove box.”
Rinda marched out the front door with Celia in tow. Daphne and I brought up the rear.
I whispered to Daphne out of the side of my mouth, “She’s just kidding, right? About the wire cutters?”
Daphne shrugged. “Could be. With Rinda, you never can tell. ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce.’ ”
Thankfully, we didn’t have to resort to Rinda’s wire cutters.
When we knocked on the door, Pat peeked out through the curtains, but wouldn’t open the door. Fortunately, I’d been quietly texting Peter during the drive to Pat’s house, telling him what was going on, and he arrived on the scene about the time Rinda was rifling through her glove box.
He knocked on the door but, like us, got no answer. Raising his voice loudly enough for Pat to hear, he told Pat that if he didn’t open the door, give Celia her car keys, and let her collect her things, he was going to take Celia to the police station and help her press charges against him.
“For what?” Pat shouted back.
“Auto theft and attempted murder.”
“Attempted murder! I never laid a hand on her!” His words were slurred, not a lot, but enough so I knew he’d been drinking.
“You shoved her out of her own car and left her by the side of the road, miles from the nearest house and inadequately dressed in subfreezing temperatures. If we hadn’t come along when we did, she might have frozen to death,” Peter said calmly. “In all fairness, I probably wouldn’t be able to make an attempted murder charge stick, but I’m pretty sure we could get a conviction for attempted manslaughter. Either way, it’s going to cause you a lot of problems and some time as a guest of the state.”
“Are you crazy? We had a fight is all! It’s not a crime to have a fight with your girlfriend. And I didn’t shove her out of the car! She yelled at me to stop the car and then jumped out on her own! I told her to get back in, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“That’s not what Celia says,” Peter said, leaning casually against the door. “So I guess it’d be your word against hers, but, Pat? I gotta tell you, Celia is going to be a much more believable and sympathetic witness than you.”
Pat started to curse a blue streak. When we heard a big thwap sound followed by more cursing, Celia shook her head and explained. “He punched the wall with his fist. He does that when he’s mad.”
After the cussing died down a little, Peter said, “But, you know, we really don’t have to go through any of that. If you’ll just open the door and let Celia get her car keys and anything else that belongs to her, everybody can go on with their day and leave the police out of it. Whaddaya say, chief?”
For about a minute, nothing happened. We just stood there and waited, our breathing creating clouds of vapor in the air. But then we heard the sound of a key being turned in a lock and Pat opened the door. There was black stubble on his face and he was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the night previous, but he didn’t seem quite as burly or as menacing as before. His eyes were red—not bloodshot, but red on the rims, as if he’d been crying.
Without looking her in the eye, Pat put a set of car keys in Celia’s hand and stood aside so we could file past. I could smell liquor on his breath.
In the end, what might have been a potentially dangerous drama was played out in relative calm. Pat sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, not saying anything to anybody, while the rest of us, with Peter standing guard, helped Celia pack her things and carry them to the cars.
It was too much for one vehicle, so we loaded the clothes, books, cosmetics, and whatnot into Celia’s trunk and the art supplies and paintings into Rinda’s van. After a quick discussion in the driveway, it was decided that Celia would move in with me for a while.
“Are you sure?” she asked when I made the offer. “I mean, you don’t really know me that well.”
“You were one of my sister’s best friends,” I said. “What else do I need to know? Alice was an excellent judge of character.”
“I’d love to have you stay with us,” Daphne said, “but with me and the girls . . . we just don’t have any extra beds.”
Rinda didn’t say anything, neither offering to let Celia stay with her nor giving an explanation as to why she couldn’t. That surprised me a little. I know that Rinda loves Celia like another daughter. So does Daphne. They’re both very protective of her, which is good. Celia is a doll, but a little naïve; she could use a little protecting.
“I really don’t mind,” I said. “In fact, I’ll be happy for the company. And it would be a help to have somebody stay in the house and take care of the cats after I go back to Washington.”
“I can pay you,” Celia said stoutly. “Eight hundred a month, just like I did Pat.”
I waved off her proposal. “No. You can help with the groceries, but that’s it. You need to save up money for a rental deposit. You’re welcome to stay for a few months, but you’ll need to find a new place after I sell to Mr. Glazier.”
“It’s so sad to think of you leaving and selling Alice’s cottage,” Celia said.
“I know. But it just doesn’t make any sense for me to hold on to it anymore. And like I told you before, the cottage will still be there. Mr. Glazier promised that he’ll leave the exterior walls of the cottage
intact. It’s pretty amazing that he was willing to agree to that.”
Celia bobbed her head, conceding my point. “But it won’t be the same.”
“Nothing ever is,” Daphne said. “You can’t help things changing.”
“I know,” Celia said with a pout. “Doesn’t that suck?”
We finished just in time for Peter to get to the ice rink. His tiny players had a game that afternoon.
“Want to come along?” he asked, rolling down the window of the truck so we could talk. “We’re playing a team from Sturgeon Bay. I hear they’ve got a six-year-old on the squad who’s nearly four feet tall. Should be quite a battle.”
I whistled low, mirroring his tongue-in-cheek tone. “Wow. Hate to miss that. But I should really go back to the house and help Celia settle in. You understand.”
“Sure, sure,” Peter said. His grin disappeared so quickly that I had the feeling he also understood what I wasn’t saying, at least some of it.
I’d texted him only because I was worried about what might happen. If Rinda broke out her wire cutters, somehow, I knew Peter would come up with a way to defuse a potentially explosive situation. It was kind of an emergency. But I needed to keep a little distance between me and him. His clipped tone of voice told me that he understood that. But what he didn’t get was that I wasn’t withdrawing because I wasn’t attracted to him; quite the opposite. I’d lain awake half the night thinking about him. And that kiss.
For a couple of days, at least until the memory of that spectacular, passionate, brain-numbing kiss and the feeling of giddy surrender that flooded my body when he’d picked me up in his arms faded a little, I needed to stay away from Peter Swenson. But as I looked into his gorgeous, soulful brown eyes, I realized that a couple of days might not be enough.
Peter turned the key in the ignition and the truck came to life.
“Thanks so much,” I said. “This could have gotten ugly if you hadn’t been here.”
“No problem,” he said, refusing to meet my gaze. He rolled up the window, shifted into gear, and drove off.
“See you later!” I called, lifting my arm high.
I’m pretty sure he heard me, but he didn’t wave back.
Chapter 33
With all the cargo, there was space for only two passengers in each vehicle, so Daphne drove back to the cottage with Celia and I got into Rinda’s van. Celia drove right off, but as we were starting to back out of the driveway, Rinda hit the brake and then put the van into park.
“Hang on a minute,” she said, switching off the ignition and opening the door. “There’s something I need to say to Pat.”
My pulse started to race. Heaven only knew what Rinda might say to Pat. Or how he might react.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
She didn’t answer, just grabbed her purse off the floorboard and hopped out.
“I won’t be long,” she said.
I watched her stride up to the door like a woman on a mission; the square set of her shoulders and every step she took spoke of determination. I shouldn’t have let Peter leave until the rest of us did. He’d have known what to say or do to ward off a confrontation between Rinda and Pat. But I knew she wouldn’t listen to me.
I sat in the passenger seat, watching anxiously as Rinda hammered on the door, hoping that Pat would refuse to open it. But he did open it and Rinda went inside. The door closed and I sat there, waiting.
Fifteen minutes later, about the time I was thinking I should knock on the door myself to make sure that everything was all right, Rinda came outside. She climbed in the van, backed out of the driveway, and headed down Birch Street without saying a word.
The suspense was killing me.
“Well? What took you so long? What were you doing in there?”
“Talking to Pat,” Rinda said calmly, her eyes glued to the road. “And giving him tracts.”
“Tracts?”
“Uh-huh. One from my church and the other from Alcoholics Anonymous. They meet in my church every Monday and Thursday.”
She started humming a little tune as she drove, a snippet of some hymn, as if she had suddenly gotten into a very good mood.
I sat there for a moment, trying to make sense of it. Only a couple of hours before, Rinda had been masterminding a plan to lay siege to Pat’s house and, on the drive over, had voiced a few other creative ideas on how her wire cutters might be used to inflict a few further lessons on that “no-good, worthless fornicator.” And now she wanted to invite him to church? I didn’t get it.
“So . . . did he read them?”
“No. Mostly he sat there feeling sorry for himself and blubbering about Celia. He’s not ready to read them yet. But someday he might be. He said I could leave them on the table and that’s a start. And he let me give him my phone number too.”
My eyes went wide. “You gave him your phone number? Why?”
“Because someday he is going to be ready. And when that day comes, I told him I’d be his AA sponsor.”
Rinda went back to humming and driving and I just sat there for a second, trying to digest this information and to make sense of the walking bundle of contradictions that was Rinda Charles, ultimately deciding that it couldn’t be done and I’d just have to accept her as she was.
“That was really nice of you,” I said, but Rinda shrugged off the compliment.
“No. I’m just doing unto others what somebody else already did for me. That’s all. But you know what is nice?” She turned her head so she could see my face. “You watching out for our Celia. Taking her into your home.”
Now it was my turn to wave off words of praise. “Oh, that’s not anything. I don’t mind. I like Celia.”
Rinda turned her gaze forward again. “So do I. I would have asked her to come live with Lloyd and me, but . . .” She sighed.
“What is it?” She dismissed my question with a wave of her hand. “Come on. I can tell that something is bothering you.”
“Nothing. It just wouldn’t be a good time to have somebody move in with us. I’m going to have to put our house up for sale.”
Since the night when Daphne showed up at my door with the remainder of the FOA in tow, we’d gathered together a few more times for “quilt-ins,” as Rinda termed them. In that time I’d learned a lot about quilting and even more about my fellow quilters. Quilting, I’d noticed, loosened tongues even faster than liquor did. However, conversation among quilters tends to be a lot less rambling and make a lot more sense than conversations among your average group of barflies.
It won’t leave you with dry mouth or a headache the next morning either. But that’s another issue.
The point is, though our time together was short, I’d already learned a lot about the FOA. I knew all about Celia’s unhappy childhood that kept her looking for love in all the wrong places. I learned more about Daphne’s history and her struggles trying to raise four girls on her own. I’d learned about Rinda too.
I knew that Lloyd, her husband of thirty-one years, had been in the Marines when they met and that Rinda had started drinking during his long and lonely deployments. Eventually, Lloyd gave her an ultimatum and Rinda started going to AA. Lloyd retired from the military and they decided to move to Door County because they thought life in the country would offer fewer temptations and a lower cost of living. They’d invested their life savings so Lloyd could open his own HVAC business and worked hard to finally purchase their own home, a three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow with a garage and a peekaboo view of the bay. Rinda loved that house and often pointed to it as evidence that if people would just work a little harder and solve their own problems, they could “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
And now she was going to sell? Something must be really wrong.
“Lloyd hasn’t been feeling very good,” she admitted. “We went to the doctor and it turns out that his kidneys are failing. Eventually, he’s going to have to have a kidney replacement, assuming we can find a compatible
donor. Everything is all right for the moment; the doctor said that he can go at least a year and maybe a few before he’ll need a replacement, but he just can’t keep working like he has been. It’s such physical work and he gets tired so easily. Looks like he’s going to have to retire early, sell the business.
“At first, I wasn’t too worried, at least not about that part. With what he can get for the business, plus his military pension and my job, I figured we’d be able to get by. But I just found out that someone is buying the Save-A-Bunch. The new owners are going to put in a lot of those automated checkout counters. They won’t need so many cashiers. Since I was the last one hired . . .”
“You’ll be the first one fired. Oh, Rinda. I’m so sorry.”
“Me too. We’ll make it somehow or other,” she said, her brave-sounding words a sharp contrast to the worried expression on her face.
“But you know how it is around here. Most of the retail work is seasonal, and that’s all I know how to do. I’ll find another job in the spring. But in the meantime, we’ve got to tighten our belts. The house is our biggest expense. We just can’t afford to keep it.”
I told her again how sorry I was. What else was there to say?
“You know something else that really gets to me?” she asked, and then answered her own question. “The people buying the market aren’t even from here. It’s some investment group out of California. And yet, they’re just going to waltz into town, tear down the old store, and build a new one. I love the old building. It’s been Nilson’s Bay’s only grocery store since 1922. It has history! And character! But this thing they want to build . . .” Rinda shook her head and curled her lip.
“It’s like something you’d see in a strip mall in Mendocino—because it is. It looks exactly like all the other stores in that chain. Fake adobe on the exterior. Adobe! In Wisconsin!”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “That won’t fit in with the rest of downtown. And you’re sure they’re going to tear the old store down completely?”
The Second Sister Page 25
