Dial M for Mousse

by Laura Bradford

  “About that hypochondriac?” A series of chest-puffing, hand-flicking, head-shaking movements gave way to a lowering of his stubbled chin and, finally, a whisper. “Serenity Lane wouldn’t be the same without her, Winnie Girl. I might forget all the reasons I’ve been a bachelor all these years if she wasn’t around to remind me with nearly every word out of her big mouth.”

  Winnie’s laughter was cut short by the genuine concern etched across every feature of her friend’s face. “She’s fine, Mr. Nelson. Really. She’s just covering a library board meeting for one of her coworkers. I told her I’d bring her home a slice of pizza and a piece of that tiramisu she keeps hoping will be good but never is.”

  “That’s because her skull is so dang thick.” He took another sip of his water and then leaned his upper body across the top of the table. “You’re not gonna tell her I was asking about her, are you?”

  “Would it be so awful for Bridget to know you don’t hate her?”

  “Yes!”

  She considered putting up an argument but knew it was futile. Besides, if Mr. Nelson and Bridget quit arguing, half (okay, maybe 99 percent) of her daily entertainment would cease to exist. In the end she gave him the nod he was seeking. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “I knew I could count on you, Winnie Girl.” He patted the top of her hand and then retracted his to summon Katrina, his favorite twenty-something waitress, over to the table.

  “Hiya, Mr. Nelson . . . Winnie.” Katrina cheeked her wad of gum on the right side of her mouth and wiggled her fingers at Mr. Nelson as if he were a six-month-old child. He, of course, responded in kind (with a side order of drool to boot) before she looked back at Winnie. “Where’s Ms. O’Keefe this evening?”

  “Working.”

  “When I’m that old, I plan on living out the rest of my days on a beach somewhere in the middle of Tennessee,” Katrina said, working her gum toward her left cheek. “Anyways, you want your usual? Large pie with just cheese on one side and sausage and pepperoni on the other?”

  Mr. Nelson met Winnie’s eye and guided it back to the leggy brunette with his enamored grin (and not-so-sly once-over). “She’s purty and smart, ain’t she, Winnie Girl?”

  She resisted the urge to groan and, instead, added an order of garlic knots before Katrina bounced off in the direction of the kitchen.

  When he was sure she was out of sight (and he made triple sure), he leaned forward again, dropping his voice to his version of a whisper (translation: full voice). “When she comes back, should I tell her there’re no beaches in Tennessee?”

  “Nah. It’s her dream, not yours.” Winnie wrapped her fingers around her water glass and released a long sigh, the last of the day’s busyness exiting her neck and shoulders once and for all. “I can’t even begin to tell you how good it feels to just sit here . . . with you . . . and not have to worry about anything except whether we should save a garlic knot for Bridget.”

  “She don’t need to know we got knots.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You say that like you doubt me,” he groused.

  “No, I say that like one who knows your secret-keeping ability. Or lack thereof.”

  He waved her words away with a weathered hand and then lifted his water glass into the air between them. “If you can keep a secret about what I asked earlier, then I can keep a secret about your garlic knots. Heck, I keep secrets all the time.”

  She felt her eyebrow arch and confirmed it in the reflection of the silver napkin holder at her elbow. “About what?”

  Swiping his hand across his mouth, Mr. Nelson looked left toward the sidewalk, right toward Katrina and the tray of soda glasses she was readying for transport to another table, and finally back to Winnie as he attempted (and failed) another whisper. “I know you were keeping time with someone other than your professor last night.”

  “I—I—”

  “Now, don’t you worry none, Winnie Girl, I didn’t say nothing to anyone.”

  A glance around the dining area confirmed the sensation of a half-dozen or more sets of eyes being trained on their table. She swallowed. Hard.

  “Except maybe Cornelia . . . and Harold . . . and—” He stopped, tapped his chin in thought, and then nodded. “My barber, Lenny. But that’s it.”

  “You are a locked vault, Mr. Nelson. A. Locked. Vault.”

  The age spots on his cheeks elongated with his smile. “See? I can keep secrets.”

  This time when she sighed, it had absolutely nothing to do with releasing the day’s tension. “For the record, I wasn’t keeping time with anyone. I simply stopped out at the lake to clear my head after my last delivery of the day and ended up talking to that guy Renee was telling us about over the weekend—you know, the one who taught Ty how to skip rocks.”

  “The hand flapper?” Mr. Nelson asked.

  She gave into the giggle spawned by the visual accompaniment to the man’s verbal assessment. “Mime, actually, but yes. Him.”

  His eyes widened before narrowing in on Winnie. “Does Renee know you’re keeping time with him?”

  Groaning, she dropped her head onto the table.

  “Does she?” he asked again.

  Lifting only her eyes, she peeked up at her dinner companion. “I wasn’t keeping time with the mime, Mr. Nelson. Not in the way it sounds like you’re implying . . . and likely implied to Cornelia, Harold, and your barber when you weren’t saying nothing to anyone, of course.”

  He straightened up in his seat. “You’re a poet and you didn’t even know it, Winnie Girl.” A wink followed. “See what I did there? I said you’re a poet . . . and you didn’t even know it.”

  “Clever, Mr. Nelson.” She pulled her head up off the table, bracing her cheeks with her hands. “The mime was sitting by the lake when Lovey and I pulled up. Lovey, being Lovey, had to make his acquaintance. I tried to get her to leave him alone and, well, since she hates me she didn’t listen. So I passed the time by chatting with him. I chatted, he answered with his hands. When I asked him if he knew Sally Dearfield prior to arriving at Silver Lake Artists’ Retreat, he pretended he had to leave and he did.”

  Take that to your barber . . .

  They both leaned back from their perspective spots at the table when Katrina reappeared with their garlic knots, a side of sauce, and a pair of plates. Bypassing the whole plate routine, Winnie plucked a knot from the basket and popped it in her mouth, releasing a moan of pleasure in the process. “Oh. Wow. Good.”

  Mr. Nelson smiled up at Katrina. “I think we’re good for now, sweetheart.”

  Winnie added a nod on the end of the man’s sentence and then reached for a second knot. “You’d think I didn’t eat all day with as hungry as I am at this exact . . .” A familiar face near the now-manned hostess stand distracted her from her thought and had her scrambling for a name to match. Annie—no, Gabby, no . . . “Abby!” she whispered across her third knot. “Abby Thompson! The puppeteer!”

  “Puppet what?” Mr. Nelson volleyed back, sans anything resembling a whisper.

  Uh-oh.

  Before she could wave him off, though, Abby turned in their direction, giving them a bird’s-eye view of the exact moment Winnie’s identity registered in the woman’s brain. Suddenly, any hint of a smile that had accompanied her into the restaurant was gone, in its place a tangible discomfort.

  Hmmm . . .

  Casting what she hoped was a nonverbal warning to her housemate, Winnie followed it up with a whispered, “Behave,” and waved the woman over to their table. Any possibility the puppeteer would decline the gesture or pretend it hadn’t been seen was eliminated when the hostess led her to the table behind theirs.

  “Abby, right?” Winnie abandoned her latest knot to her still-stacked plate and swiveled her body toward the aisle.

  “That’s right.” Abby’s gaze swept across the table
to take in Mr. Nelson before settling somewhere just above Winnie’s head. “You’re the baker.”

  “I am.” Desperate to put the woman at ease, she pointed across the table. “Mr. Nelson, this is Abby Thompson. She’s a puppeteer who’s traveled the country with a suitcase of puppets.”

  Mr. Nelson stuck out his hand, waited for Abby to reciprocate, and then lifted her fingers to his lips for a kiss. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Thompson.”

  “I, um . . . thank you. You, too, Mr. Nelson.”

  “You can call me Parker.” With obvious reluctance, he released Abby’s hand and jerked his chin at Winnie. “Been telling this one the same thing since the day she moved in upstairs, but she doesn’t listen. Keeps calling me Mr. Nelson like I’m some sort of old fart.”

  Winnie’s laugh mingled with Abby’s for a moment and she let it. When it played itself out, she rescued her abandoned knot and took a bite. “Good thing Bridget isn’t here tonight, Mr. Nelson, because she wouldn’t have let that comment go unchecked.”

  Then, turning her focus back on Abby, she added, “Bridget is our next-door neighbor. She’s eighty and she refuses to cut Mr. Nelson slack about anything.”

  “If I sneeze too loudly, she yells at me. If I don’t warn her about the whoopee cushion I stuck under her seat before she sits down, she yells at me. If I blink wrong, she yells at me.” Mr. Nelson rolled his index finger above the table. “Nag, nag, nag.”

  Slowly but surely, the discomfort that had been so obvious on Abby’s face when she spotted Winnie began to dissipate, thanks to Mr. Nelson’s histrionics.

  “Fortunately for me,” he continued, “I can tune her out with a flip of a dial.” He tapped the hearing aid in his left ear and grinned. “Now all I need is a pair of window shades for my eyes . . . that way I don’t have to see her mouth moving, neither.”

  Abby laughed again, prompting Winnie to have to resist the very real urge to lean across the table and plant a kiss on her housemate’s cheek. Instead, she offered Abby the last garlic knot in the basket and silently celebrated when it was declined.

  “Mr. Nelson, here, is retired navy. Twenty-five years, actually,” Winnie said as he, too, declined the last knot. When Abby didn’t react, Winnie helped herself to the leftover and continued, widening her conversational net to include the man now nodding his head with pride. “Abby visited your former naval station over the holidays. To entertain the sailors with her puppets and her marionettes. She’s quite gifted at what she does.”

  Abby’s left eyebrow hitched, but before she could speak, Mr. Nelson jumped back into the conversation, his interest piqued. “You were at the Charleston naval base?”

  “I—I was.” Abby pinned Winnie with a curious eye. “How did you know that?”

  “I read it.”

  The beginnings of a smile inched the corners of her mouth upward until the pride Abby felt was on full display. “So someone other than my mother actually caught that mention of me in Performers’ Weekly, huh?”

  “Performers’ Weekly? Really? Wow, that must have been pretty pinch-worthy . . .”

  Abby drew back, her smile still in place. “I take it you read about it somewhere else?”

  “On the Charlton School of the Arts’ website. When I clicked on your picture.”

  “Y-you’re familiar with Charlton?” Abby asked, her smile fading.

  “I wasn’t until last night. Bridget, the woman we were just telling you about, came across it while writing Sally Dearfield’s obituary.”

  Like a lamp that was suddenly powered off, Abby’s face drained of all color, prompting Winnie to slide out of the booth and onto her feet as the woman turned and made haste toward the door. “Abby? Are you okay?”

  Chapter 13

  Night had fallen across Serenity Lane, taking with it the buzz of hedge clippers, the whir of Harold Jenkins’s motorized scooter, the jingle of Con-Man’s leash as Cornelia walked her beloved sheltie from one end of the road to the other, and the near-constant exchange of greetings delivered over porch rails. Judging by the darkened first-floor windows Winnie could see from her rocking chair, she guessed the vast majority of her neighbors had retired to their bedrooms for the night.

  She’d thought about it off and on all day—the notion of escaping to bed with a paperback in one hand and a bowl of popcorn in the other. But after the interesting turn of events at dinner, she knew there was no way she could settle her brain down enough to read, let alone sleep.

  “I’m telling you, Bridget, the key to what happened to Sally is that school.” She scooped a handful of popcorn from the bowl Mr. Nelson gave her and then passed it across to the woman seated in the next rocking chair. “I can feel it in my bones.”

  A burst of exhaled air off to her immediate right was followed by the sound of Mr. Nelson’s hand smacking his forehead. “Ah, Winnie Girl, did you have to go and get her started on all of that?”

  “What are you talking about, Mr.—”

  “I wish that’s all my bones were doing right now, dear. If it was, I could sleep without interruption and move without pain. But, alas”—Bridget sighed dramatically—“it’s not to be.”

  Mr. Nelson shook his head at Winnie. “Now, look what you went and did to a perfectly good night . . .”

  Taking advantage of Bridget’s ongoing ailment list, Winnie peeked at Mr. Nelson, readied her silent apology, and then swallowed it as his hands flew upward to the collar of his button-down shirt and began desperately patting the area around the top button.

  “Mr. Nelson? Are you—”

  “Popcorn? I didn’t know there’d be popcorn!”

  Dread propelled her out of her rocking chair and over to the steps as her friend and employee stepped onto the porch, an unusual aura clinging to the woman’s sneaker-clad body.

  Sneakers?

  “Renee, what’s wrong?”

  “What makes you think something is wrong?” Renee crossed in front of Bridget’s rocking chair and dropped onto Winnie’s.

  “You mean aside from the fact that it’s nine thirty on a Wednesday and you’re wearing . . .” She paused, swallowed, and continued, her voice shaky. “Sneakers?”

  Mr. Nelson leaned forward, pulling his gaze off Renee’s bosom just long enough to inspect her feet. Bridget, too, took in the spectacle while Renee waved away Winnie’s concern.

  “I’m being practical.”

  “Practical?” Winnie echoed. “You?”

  Renee helped herself to a handful of popcorn from the bowl Bridget offered and popped one, two, three pieces into her mouth, chewing each one much like a squirrel nibbled on acorns. “I live a mile away, Winnie. That’s two miles round trip. I’d be brought up on shoe-abuse charges if I tried to make that trip in any of my stilettos.”

  “Wait.” Winnie craned her neck around the porch upright and did a mental inventory of the driveway (just the Dessert Squad) and the street (nothing). “You walked?”

  Renee popped two more pieces of popcorn into her mouth and nodded. “I figured it would be good exercise.”

  “Walking around the block after dinner is good exercise, Renee. You just walked a mile . . . in the dark.”

  “I didn’t eat dinner.”

  “You didn’t eat . . . ?” The words trailed away as Renee’s shrug, coupled with the downward cast of her eyes, filled in the blanks. “I have some leftover pizza in the house if you’d like some.”

  Even with the limited light, there was no mistaking the way Renee’s eyes lit up or the way the rocking chair pitched forward as she stood. “Carry on. I’ll be back in a few.”

  When she was gone, Mr. Nelson motioned Winnie over to his chair. “While she’s gone, would you go inside my place, Winnie Girl, and bring me the tan-colored box that’s on the bottom shelf of my television cabinet?”

  “Sure thing, Mr. Nelson.”

  She fol
lowed the jet stream left in Renee’s pizza-seeking wake but turned left into Mr. Nelson’s place rather than heading up the stairs to her own. It took less than a minute to find the requested item and carry it back to the porch, where it was snatched from her hands by a clearly desperate man.

  Flipping the lid open, he pointed down at the plethora of clip-on bow ties inside. “Which one, Winnie Girl?”

  “Mr. Nelson, you don’t need a bow tie,” she protested, mid-laugh. “It’s almost bedtime. Consider it your version of Renee’s sneakers.”

  He extracted a purple and white polka-dot tie and held it against his striped shirt. “How about this?”

  “No, I think—”

  “Winnie, this smells and looks positively divine.” Renee’s sneakers smacked against the stairs and sent Mr. Nelson’s bow tie–holding hand up to his collar.

  Snap went the tie.

  Thump went the box.

  The screen door smacked against the exterior wall and Renee emerged, pizza in one hand, a diet soda in the other. Lovey, obviously awoken from her windowsill slumber, was at her feet. “So what’s shaking on Serenity Lane this evening?”

  Mr. Nelson tossed his shoulders back and made a show of looking down at his collar.

  Before Winnie could even complete her eye roll, Bridget lolled her head against the back of her rocking chair and murmured something under her breath. For the most part, the eighty-year-old’s rant was unintelligible, but an occasional word (like pathetic and brainless) was pretty clear.

  If Renee noticed, she didn’t let on. Instead, she made her way back to Winnie’s chair, stopping to acknowledge Mr. Nelson’s bow tie as she did.

  Mr. Nelson, in turn, puffed out his chest with pride.

  Oh brother . . .

  “Anything exciting?” Renee added once she, and her pizza, were settled.

  Winnie lowered herself to the top step and rested her back against the closest upright. “Mr. Nelson and I ran into Abby Thompson at Luigi’s this evening.”