Running on Empty

by Sandra Balzo

  'Phyllis, you watch your mouth now.'

  'What? I'm just talking about a dog. A female one.'

  AnnaLise raised her hand, about to explain that, technically, a 'dog' was the male canine, while 'bitch' was the female.

  But Phyllis shook her index finger. 'Not a word, AnnieLeez. You hear me?'

  Surrogate-daughter dropped her hand and shut her mouth.

  'I swear, Daisy,' Mama continued, 'if we had them thought balloons over our heads like in a cartoon, your daughter'd be correcting them, too.'

  Time to guide the squeaky wheel back on track. Unlike her mother, AnnaLise had nothing against idle gossip. In fact, it was the reporter's bread and butter. 'So you were saying Ema was... popular?'

  Mama snorted.

  'Enough,' Daisy commanded.

  AnnaLise's mother didn't 'command' often, but when she did, her daughter obeyed.

  Phyllis, on the other hand: 'And just why are you defending her, Daisy? It's not like you owe that woman anything... well, 'cepting a pint of blood or three.'

  Smiling at her own joke, Mama turned to AnnaLise. 'Your mother's just being overly sensitive like she gets. She was Eee-mah's best friend way back when, at least until Dickens Hart picked her to be a Tail.'

  'You were a Tail, Daisy?' AnnaLise teased. Despite the lodge's best public-relations efforts, the Fawns had quickly been dubbed Tails by the locals. Even as a kid, AnnaLise could've seen that coming.

  'You know perfectly well that I worked in the kitchen,' Daisy snapped. Then to Mama, 'And you know that when Ema was promoted, our paths just didn't cross much anymore.'

  'Probably on account of she was busy uncrossing other things. Like her legs.'

  Oh, boy. AnnaLise again caught the eye of the man she'd helped with the door what seemed like a year earlier. The sections of the newspaper he'd brought to his booth were annotated in red Flair and scattered across its tabletop. AnnaLise smiled sheepishly with a what-can-you-do shrug.

  Daisy was trying to shush Mama, all the good it did.

  'Our Eee-mah goes away,' Mama continued, 'and comes back with a baby and her story about a rich husband who died from this automobile accident they'd all three been in.'

  'You saw the scars for yourself back then, Phyllis.' Daisy seemed to want no further part of the discussion, throwing worried glances toward the subject of their conversation, still sitting with her son and Ichiro Katou.

  'What? That itty-bitty one up by her hairline? Sure didn't look new to me. And how about the child? Bobby came through this "devastating" crash just fine, supposedly because he was strapped into some kind of baby bucket.'

  From the corner of her eye, AnnaLise caught movement at the Bradenham booth. Mrs. B was leaving. Or maybe she'd overheard the conversation about her and was just getting up to sock Mama in the jaw.

  Before AnnaLise could throw herself into the breach, the restaurant door burst open and an unfamiliar voice bellowed over the chime, 'A body's just been pulled out of the lake!'

  Chapter Four

  'Huh,' Daisy Griggs said. 'A little early in the season, now, isn't it?'

  Mouth open, AnnaLise turned to her other mother.

  'Daisy's dead-on right, I'm afraid,' Phyllis said, rising. 'Classes don't start up to the university till Tuesday.'

  The University of the Mountain. Where kids drank too much, went to the water's edge to relieve themselves and tumbled into the lake. With luck, their friends dragged them out. The buddy system of drinking was much encouraged in Sutherton.

  Mama was peering out the front window toward the beach across the street. 'Usually be a week or two after that before somebody actually sees a floater going past.'

  'A... floater?' said the herald. A man of about thirty, with the tell-tale sunburn of a tourist, he was obviously perplexed by the lack of excitement his announcement had engendered. 'My God, a corpse just washed up on the beach. Shouldn't we do something?'

  'Like what?' Mama turned. 'Police chief's car is already kicking up gravel over there.'

  'And from what you yourself said, they don't need an ambulance,' Daisy contributed. She was paging through Mama's copy of The Kraft Cookbook. 'At least, not right away.'

  Mrs. B, who had made it as far as their table, looked shocked at the collective insensitivity. AnnaLise seconded the emotion. Her grandmother used to say that, getting older, 'you can finally say what you think. Other people don't like it, that's too damn bad'. But Grandma Kuchenbacher had been eighty. If Daisy was starting now, how would she be in another thirty years?

  Mrs. B might originally have intended to confront Mama and Daisy about their gossiping over Bobby's paternity, but if so, she wisely changed her mind. Skirting the tourist, she kept right on going.

  He followed her out, seeming relieved there was at least one person in the restaurant with a social conscience. AnnaLise could see him trailing, trying to point the way to the action. When Mrs. B ignored him and went in the opposite direction, he glanced back toward the restaurant.

  Mama waved. 'Y'all enjoy your vacation, now.'

  AnnaLise didn't need to see an eye-roll. Shaking his head, the visitor recrossed the street to the beach.

  'Ambulance chaser,' Mama muttered.

  Not giving Daisy an opportunity to point out, again, that there was no immediate need for an ambulance, AnnaLise stood. 'I'm going to see Chuck over there. Be right back.'

  Making her escape, she found Sutherton's chief of police leaning down, talking to the driver of a second patrol car through the window.

  Straightening, he saw AnnaLise. 'Hey, Lise — good to see you. Sorry I didn't return your call.'

  'No problem,' AnnaLise said. 'I just assumed you were getting an arrest warrant for my mother.'

  He gave her a quick kiss on the lips. 'Well, the possibility did bring you back to us.'

  Chuck Greystone's face combined the strong planes of his Cherokee grandfather with the auburn hair and green eyes of his Irish mother. It was a devastating combination. One that still could make AnnaLise's heart melt, despite the fact that she'd literally and figuratively moved on.

  She gestured toward the knot of people close to the water. 'College student?'

  'Nope, looks like Rance Smoaks. Though he's been chewed on some, so he's got some chunks missing.'

  Lovely, if not unusual in the High Country.

  Chuck's voice was neutral, despite the fact that he and Rance shared a long history. A long and bitter one, partly because Rance Smoaks was a son-of-a-bitch and partly because Chuck had replaced the man as Sutherton's chief of police.

  Rance's father, Roy, had preceded his son in the office. And Roy's father before him. The Smoaks family hadn't taken kindly to Chuck's breaking their line of ascent to the throne.

  'I have to tell Kathleen,' Chuck continued.

  Kathleen was Rance's wife. She had been a classmate of BobbyBradenham, which made her a year older than AnnaLise and fifteen years younger than Rance. Plenty young enough not to have seen past the police uniform to the mean drunk that lay beneath.

  'She'll be devastated,' AnnaLise said. And the new widow would be. Kathleen Smoaks was a good woman who had the misfortune of falling in love with a bad man. A shame — especially since AnnaLise knew Bobby had asked Kathleen to marry him just out of high school. If only she'd accepted, life could have been so different for both of them.

  Not that AnnaLise was exactly a poster child for wise choices.

  She gestured toward the blue tarpaulin that was being used to shield the body from onlookers. 'He was plastered as usual, I assume?'

  'Probably. We'll know more when the lab work comes back.' Chuck put his hat on, squared it over his forehead. 'You'd think people, at least our locals, would learn to stay away from the lake when they're drinking. Especially someone as experienced as Rance.'

  'Chief.' A voice rang out from the waterline. 'We got us an entrance wound.'

  'Damn it all.' Chuck swung away and then turned back to AnnaLise. 'I need to talk to you.' A glance toward
the tarpaulin. 'When we both have some time.'

  A chill ran up AnnaLise's spine. Something to do with Daisy? Maybe the idea of an arrest warrant was no far-fetched fantasy.

  'I'll be here through Labor Day,' she said. 'Is this...'

  But Chuck was already moving away. 'Good. If I don't see you tonight at Sal's, I'll call you tomorrow.'

  'OK, but...' AnnaLise realized she might as well be talking to the wind. All attention was focused on the body.

  AnnaLise turned toward Mama's, waiting for a white Mercedes-Benz to dawdle past, the driver rubbernecking the commotion on the beach.

  An 'entrance wound' meant that Rance Smoaks had been shot. During hunting season, accidental shootings weren't all that unusual. But deer season didn't commence until the day after Labor Day, meaning three days from now. And even then, only bow-and-arrow, not rifle, was permitted.

  A tap of the Mercedes' horn.

  'AnnaLise,' Mrs. B's voice called from the driver's window. 'Pay attention, please. I have been waving you on for eons.'

  An exaggeration, yes, but an explanation seemed in order to appease the woman. 'I'm sorry. I was thinking about this — ' she waved back at the beach vaguely, knowing she shouldn't name the victim until after the family had been notified — 'incident.'

  'Another drowning,' Mrs. B said, shaking her head. 'And, likely, another newspaper editorial tomorrow, calling for fencing off portions of the lake. Whatever happened to personal responsibility, I want to know.'

  'In this case, it doesn't appear to be the victim's fault. He was shot.'

  'Certainly not on purpose?' The way Ema Bradenham said it made it clear that such a thing wouldn't be tolerated in her tidy world.

  Which, of course, made AnnaLise want to muddy it up more. She moved closer to the car, confidingly. 'I don't see how it could possibly be an accident. After all, deer season doesn't start until Tuesday, and as for gun―'

  'Please,' Mrs. B interrupted with a shiver. 'I know they are held sacred up here, but firearms lost their fascination for me a very long time ago. When Bobby took up deer hunting last year, I was just filled with trepidation. The whole idea is just so... déclassé.'

  'My mother doesn't like hunting either,' AnnaLise said, seeking common, yet not too 'common', ground. 'My father's deer rifles are locked in a cabinet, and I don't think they've been touched since the day he died.'

  'Exactly where they belong. The thought of hunting one of those beautiful creatures to hang its poor head on a wall...' She shook her own head, as if words failed her.

  Apparently it had never occurred to Mrs. B that some people actually ate the venison to get some protein into the family's diet, a distinction that made a difference to AnnaLise.

  Another horn sounded and Mrs. B moved on with a dismissive flapping of her hand at the wrist.

  When AnnaLise re-entered Mama's, it was as if she hadn't left, except that the good-looking stranger in the booth was gone.

  'All I'm telling you,' Mama was saying to Daisy as AnnaLise took the bench across from them, 'is that AnnieLeez shouldn't be ruling Bobby Bradenham out as a husband.'

  'AnnieLeez' almost got back up. Instead, she took a couple of deep, cleansing yoga breaths. After all, she'd be there only two more days. A person could stand anything for forty-eight hours, right?

  'OK,' she said sternly, using her index finger to snake her cake plate back. 'Let's put an end to this here and now. Bobby and I are friends. There's no chemistry beyond that, never was, never will be.'

  She could see Bobby, still in conversation with Ichiro Katou. The two seemed to be filling out documents.

  'But there was with Chuck Greystone.' Mama said, with a sideways glance at Daisy.

  They giggled.

  Two days after today. Which meant more like sixty, sixty-five hours, not forty-eight.

  AnnaLise looked up at the clock on the wall. Its minute hand seemed to be crawling backwards.

  'Chuck and I are good friends, too.' AnnaLise felt like she was talking to middle-schoolers. 'In fact, I just saw him. Standing over the body.'

  AnnaLise expected the bald remark to turn the conversation, but apparently her love life — or their perception that she had none — was infinitely more fascinating to them.

  Mama was nodding. 'The Three Musketeers, that's what we called them. You remember, Daisy?'

  If it was intended as a memory test, AnnaLise's mother was about to earn a passing grade. 'AnnaLise, Chuck and Sheree Pepper. Sheree had such a crush on that boy. It reminded me of you, me and Tim. A triangle.'

  Timothy Griggs had been AnnaLise's father. From what Daisy had told her, Daisy, Phyllis and Tim had been the 'Three Musketeers' of their generation.

  'Phyllis, you always had a crush on Tim, and you know it,' Daisy continued as the front door chimed.

  Mama's turn to blush, but she was saved from answering when a wiry woman with cropped, nearly white-blonde hair swooped down on them.

  'Move over, girlfriend.' Joy Tamarack plopped herself on the bench. AnnaLise didn't bounce up like Daisy had when Mama sat down, probably because Joy, a physical trainer, weighed about a hundred pounds. And all muscle. She practically crushed AnnaLise's ribs with her hug.

  'I'm so glad to see you,' AnnaLise said when she'd regained her breath. 'But isn't this a little late in the year for the Frat Pack?'

  Joy and a dozen of her old college sorority sisters took over Sheree's Sutherton Inn annually for a weekend of, as Joy once put it, 'drinking, smoking and engaging in aural — that's a-u-r-a-l — sex. Meaning we just listen to each other lie about it.'

  'We pushed back the date, Annie-girl. Everyone's biological clocks went off, shall we say, belatedly yet simultaneously last year, so some of us needed to schedule around spouses and — ' she wrinkled her nose — 'babies.'

  Joy's expression made it clear that her own personal biological clock could go hang itself.

  'No new relationship?' AnnaLise asked. God knows she was asked often enough. It was only fair to reciprocate by torturing others.

  'Hell, no. Once was enough. More than enough.'

  Joy, mid-twenties at the time, had been wife number 3 of the legendary Dickens Hart. Less than a year later, she'd caught Hart helping himself to, in Joy's words, 'a little Tail.' As in one of the lodge's Fawns.

  Joy might have been young, but even then she was a shrewd businesswoman and had come out of the divorce in fine form. Since Hart had plenty of practice with prenups by that time, AnnaLise had always wondered if the 'little Tail' was under-aged, providing Joy with additional leverage during the property settlement phase.

  'Sal moved Frat Pack Night to this weekend just for you, I presume?'

  'Honey, we are the Frat Pack.' Joy stuck a cigarette in her mouth. 'You'll be there, right?' she mumbled around the cancer-stick while digging for a lighter.

  'Of course. I'm meeting Bobby for drinks at seven.'

  'Great.' Joy unearthed a psychedelic pink-and-green lighter and turned to AnnaLise's mother as she thumbed the wheel on it. 'Daisy-girl, I hear you―'

  Splat.

  'No smoking.' Mama set down AnnaLise's now empty milk glass and got up to tend the cash register.

  Joy surveyed the creamed lighter. 'Well, this is one collector's edition Bic that's never going to flick again.'

  'Probably for the best,' AnnaLise said. 'The seventies are dead, and you will be, too, if you don't stop smoking.'

  'Says the woman eating rum cake at ten a.m.'

  'With a healthy glass of milk,' AnnaLise pointed out. 'At least, until rather recently.'

  Joy sniffed, then wrinkled her nose again. 'Oh, my gawd. Is this whole milk? Warm whole milk?'

  'Warm, because I didn't drink it,' AnnaLise said defensively. 'Besides, I'm running again. I can splurge occasionally.'

  Though it sure as hell wouldn't be on a glass of milk. A slice of the German chocolate cake that Mama had mentioned came to mind.

  'I'm in training, too.' Joy pulled a thin paper napkin out of the dispenser
on the table and set her lighter on it. A dribble of milk leaked from where the flame should be.

  'But still smoking?'

  'Even a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.'

  'And a paroxysm of coughing.' She gave Joy a shove so she could slip out of the booth. 'I'll see you tonight, but now I want to drop in on our tenant. You coming, Daisy?'

  'Of course. You'll love what Tucker's done to the store,' Mother Griggs said as she followed.

  Mama just waved them past the cash register. Not that she needed to. Daisy had long ago given up trying to pay for her food at Mama's and, for AnnaLise, it would be like handing her mother a fiver for making coffee in the morning. The thought never even occurred to her. Which was why learning how to dine in other people's restaurants when she went away to school had been such an adventure. Happily, one that ended without jail time .

  Joy trailed mother and daughter, making AnnaLise wonder why her friend had entered in the first place. God forbid the woman should ever eat something.

  'I haven't been to Torch for a show,' Joy said, 'but I've heard good things about it.'

  'I'm really glad.' AnnaLise stepped out of Mama's and held the door for Daisy and Joy. 'The Stantons put a lot of money into retrofitting the old market into a nightclub.'

  'Starting any new business is expensive,' Joy said. 'And banks are pretty stodgy now about giving loans.'

  Joy's tone made it sound like she was speaking from personal experience. The last AnnaLise had heard, Joy — the smoker — was managing a fitness club somewhere in Indiana.

  'So how's your business going?'

  'Going?' Joy spread her hands wide. 'More like, going, going, gone.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Don't be.' Joy gave her a wink. 'I've got a can't-miss venture in the works.'

  'Are you going to tell us about it?' Daisy had been lagging behind, letting the friends talk, but apparently she wanted in on any news.

  'Not yet.' An enigmatic smile from Joy. 'But your little hometown here is involved.'