Jason said, “Do you think the skunks will follow the trail like Hansel and Gretel?”
“Isn't that your plan?”
“Obviously,” he lied.
Hyacinth led him around to the front of the house again where the light made her eyes look limitless, like looking into a deep well. “We best not disturb them now by going in the back door. As soon as I fry the bacon, they'll probably make noises anyway. They always do.”
“Skunks like bacon?”
She led him through the porch, which was cleared of the boat toilets. “I would've assumed you knew that.”
Panic popped sweat beads onto his forehead. “Just confirming that with you. Bacon works with skunks. One of many things.” Why was he always scrambling to keep up with Hyacinth? He'd never had this problem with any woman before in his life.
“If you hadn't come with the marshmallows I would've put out some bacon grease tonight, though the bears really love bacon grease and I'm thinking they'll show up any day. They're out of their dens now with their little ones and ravenous.”
“Maybe we shouldn't fry the bacon. I could pick up the marshmallows from the ground. I'd hate to have bears scaring you.” While he put down the bag of groceries on her counter, Jason spied a mouse ducking under the stove.
Hyacinth was at the refrigerator, taking out the bacon. “The bacon's for Toad. He loves it. He works hard and deserves a treat. You and I are having pancakes.”
“Never had pancakes for dinner.”
“I make mattresses with fresh, stone-ground wheat flour from a nearby farm. What else is in your bag?” She grabbed it again and took out the chocolate candy bars and graham crackers. A red flush rumpled her face. “These aren't for the skunks, are they? You were going to make s'mores cookies for dessert. I'm so sorry.” Her stature withered in contrition.
“S'mores. Sounds like an ‘M’ word. You told me to work on M's.” Jason swept off his Stetson and bowed, enjoying his small moment of victory with Hyacinth. “I'll make chocolate-coated graham crackers instead.”
“I tend to take charge like that. It's why I moved up here from Madison.”
He set his hat down, then took off his coat and slung it over a chair back. “What did you do there?”
“As little as possible, if the other professors had their way.”
“I detect some rancor with academia?” Jason asked.
Hy handed him cardinal red crockery plates from the cupboard. “These are handmade by a friend of mine down in Cambridge who runs a pottery shop. I'm hoping we might start a business here with Moonstone pottery, made from our very own Moonstone mud.”
“Another M—Mud.”
“Hey, you're right.”
“But you're ducking my question. What was the problem with teaching?”
Hyacinth flipped a festive, rainbow-striped tablecloth over the table. “It was publish or perish.”
“And you were about to perish?”
“It's tough to find time to write a book about farm sustainability when you're also expected to teach three lecture classes with hundreds of students. I finally walked.”
“But you finished your book?”
Hyacinth set a fork at his plate, pulling into all of her height to face him eye to eye, just inches away. “Why finish? They're the ones who wanted me to finish it so the department's publishing record looked good. I don't have time for politics.”
“Skip the politics. Go back and fight for your rights and finish your book.”
“Just like that?” Her eyes stayed steady on him, their luminous quality gone.
“At least finish the book. I sense that it means a lot to you. You seem to have confidence and pride in everything else.”
“A poet and a psychoanalyst.” Hyacinth went to the refrigerator.
Jason had struck pay dirt. He'd found a vulnerability in Hyacinth. But how did not finishing a book make her a burglar? His sister would want answers.
He watched Hyacinth's long braid flip across her back with every saucy movement as she brought butter and other items out of the refrigerator. He said, “Sometimes we're like a tree, Hyacinth. We get wounded by people we respect or love, and instead of falling over, we go on. It's like we cover up the wound with a layer of bark. But the imperfection is still there. It still bugs us that we're not perfect.”
Hyacinth brushed past him to get to the stove. “I'm too smart to waste energy. I'm into sustainable energy, after all. I have to sustain myself.” She flipped a pancake.
“But if you don't finish your book, you'll have regrets. Regrets won't sustain you. Trust me. They only eat at your insides. It's best to take care of stuff like that.”
Hyacinth turned around so fast with the spatula in her hand that Jason took a big step back. It made her smile. “Sorry.” She lowered the spatula. “What regrets do you live with?”
Her eyes had that liquid lilac intensity again. “I regret that...”
Cripes, what could he tell her without compromising his case against her? He regretted getting into this mess, that's what he regretted. He pulled out a chair and sat down. “I regret that I got estranged from my parents for a while.”
“Are things patched up now?”
“I'm working on it. I see them at Christmas. Distance seems to help for now.”
She turned back to the pancakes, to Jason's relief. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“San Francisco,” he said, the truth.
“What went wrong with your parents?”
Jason got up to wash his hands. “I didn't follow their plan.”
“Ah. Killing bugs and shooing away skunks for a living wasn't what they'd hoped for?”
“Something like that.” His parents had no clue what he did, which didn't set well with them.
“And they want you to get married, settle down, and produce grandkids.”
“I guess so.” He dried his hands with a towel Hyacinth handed him from the rung on the stove door. “I don't know.” The admission left him feeling hollow. What did his parents want for him in life?
After flipping another pancake, Hyacinth said, “Maybe you should ask them. And tell them you're happy doing what you're doing. I see pride in your stance, too. In the way you wear your hat, the way you're dressed tonight. Seems like telling the truth is important to you. Seems like being polite and mannerly matters. You shaved for me.”
The room grew hot, as if Hell's fires were upon him. Jason wondered again if she suspected him. Once in a while he encountered genius criminals who loved to play mind games. They garnered his respect because they were unpredictable shape shifters—nice one minute, pulling a knife on you the next.
Jason switched the talk to food as they sat down to stone-ground wheat pancakes with canned peaches on top, with whipped cream that came from the goats’ milk. Jason ate like a kid again, complimenting Hyacinth several times. Mostly, he needed to sort out this game between him and Hyacinth. She'd gotten him to start opening up; that scared him because a professional never let that happen.
Across the table from him, Hyacinth's eyes were gray under the dim overhead light in her green kitchen. “What's the worst pest you had to deal with?”
“Rats,” he said, and that was the truth. “I've seen them big as poodles.”
Hyacinth's shoulders scrunched up to her ear lobes. “Where was that? Not near here, I hope.”
“No. In Guatemala. I was on vacation,” he lied.
“Besides the skunks, my worst pests are going to be deer. We're going to need a lot of high fencing...”
With her arms and hands as expressive as the branches on a tree in a spring wind, Hyacinth launched into her plan for a giant community garden for Moonstone.
Jason took a drink of sweet goat's milk. “You like being in charge, doing your own thing, and I sense you're good at it. You could run a college department. Ever think about doing that?”
Hyacinth added more peaches atop her pancake. “Would I like to be in charge of those old professors o
f mine? Yes. They weren't forward thinkers. Students deserve more.”
“My—” He almost said “sister.” “Not all profs are bad. I hear the deputy in Moonstone is married to a professor.”
“Lily Schuster Linden. I'm staying out of her way.”
“Why is that?” Alarm skyrocketed to life inside Jason.
“Let's just say that not everything I'm doing out here is kosher.”
He almost dropped the glass in his hand. Had she just confessed? “What are you doing?”
“Just things. You'd be bored by it all, I'm sure.” Hyacinth got up, then scraped their plates into an old ice cream pail used for a garbage bucket.
Jason saw a mouse tiptoe across the living room floor. Then another mouse hopped over that mouse in a leapfrog game that went into a frenzy that looked like it was heading toward ... nookie.
The sharp whine of the window crank brought Jason's attention back to Hyacinth. She had opened the small window over the sink. “We'll wait a minute for the bacon smell to get outdoors. The skunks should be coming out at any minute.”
“What about the bears?”
“They probably don't like skunks.”
With his coat back on, Jason stood behind her trying to see anything in the dark. When Hyacinth shivered in her sweatshirt, Jason put an arm around her before he could catch himself. She startled at his touch.
He moved off. “Sorry.”
Hyacinth gave him her trademark crooked smile while she donned her over-sized, insulated flannel shirt. “Don't be shy about being nice. Most men figure I can take care of myself and won't get close.”
“Maybe you scare them.”
“Because I'm tall.” She was buttoning her big shirt, her gaze intent on the buttons and not him.
“You're also smart, capable, focused, and pretty. You're perfect. That makes people uncomfortable, even jealous.”
Hyacinth's head popped up. “You're saying I'm off-putting because I'm pretty?”
“No. Yes. Sort of. To others. Not me.” He wished he had his whiskers back to hide behind. “You're attractive enough that it's hard for a man to be around you and just want to keep it to business.” His mouth went dry. “I mean other men. Those professors. I'll stick to business tonight. Don't worry about me.”
Hyacinth sputtered with laughter. “Now I almost want you to hit on me so I don't feel like a frump.”
Jason chuckled. He liked the way she could always relieve his nervous tension. “Let's go take care of your skunk.”
Jason followed her through the living room. A mouse peeked at him from behind a chair. It sat up, showing off its white belly fur. Jason almost pointed him out, then thought better of it. He wasn't sure he could catch the mouse, which would make him look further like a fool in front of Hyacinth. Had he really said she was pretty and perfect? He'd sounded like a high school boy. Sheesh.
With their coats on, Jason and Hyacinth huddled next to each other for warmth for a half hour on her back porch, listening and peeking outside into the yard with its meager moonlight. The back porch was an unheated, glass-enclosed answer to the front porch. It held an antique pump organ that had been left behind by the previous owners. Jason had set his Stetson on it. Hyacinth told him she planned to move the organ to the barn eventually.
He whispered, “Why? For organic eggs? Get it? Organ music, organ-ic eggs?”
She rolled her eyes at him, letting her look linger his way a little too long.
Jason's gaze dropped to her dewy lips, where the moonlight shimmered. A gentle knocking on the floor saved Jason from foolish things.
Hyacinth whispered, “The skunk.”
They watched out the window as a momma skunk and four baby skunks tumbled across the frosty ground. They gobbled up the marshmallows.
Hyacinth pecked Jason's cheek with a quick kiss. Her lips were cool and moist, her breath sweet as peaches from dinner. “Now we have to hurry and patch up the porch holes. You're a superhero.”
But disaster happened when Hyacinth sent Jason to a nearby woodpile for lumber to nail over the holes under the porch. The tart, putrid skunk smell exploded like a bomb around Jason.
“Ohhhhhh nooooo. Son of a...!” His eyes stung. He gagged. He stumbled.
Jason ran in the opposite direction toward the front of the house while the surprised mother skunk loped for the back porch, her babies tumbling through the hole after her.
Reeking of skunk, Jason stood in the middle of the gravel area between the house and barn, way past the gate. He bent over, hacking again and again to get the fumes out of his lungs.
He stripped off his coat and tossed it as far as he could in the dark.
The house door banged. Hyacinth appeared at the gate, silhouetted by the yellow light bulb behind her. She set down a bottle of dish soap and a towel on the ground then backed up. “At the corner of the barn,” she called out, “there's a faucet and short hose I let drip so it doesn't freeze. I'll try to find something for you to wear. You'll have to bury what you have on or light a match to it. Burn the towel, too.”
The door banged behind her while Jason stood in the middle of her driveway stripping himself naked in the frosty April night.
~—~—~—~ ~
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* * *
Chapter 4
Jason spent an excruciating fifteen minutes that felt like an hour in the freezing night next to Hyacinth's barn. He soaped, sprayed with ice water, soaped again and again. When he convinced himself he couldn't smell skunk, he toweled off and wrapped the towel around his middle.
Naked and shivering so hard he was levitating off the cold ground, Jason trotted past his stinky clothes tossed toward the ditch earlier. He hated losing his boots; they'd been a thirtieth birthday gift from his ranching buddies.
Trusting that Hyacinth had set out clothes near the gate, he flung his towel onto the skunky pile, then ran. He didn't have to care about Hyacinth seeing his family jewels; they'd retreated like a turtle into its shell during the ice bath.
Under the soft glow of the porch bulb, he found pink, fuzzy bunny slippers—which surprised him about Hyacinth—and loose-fitting, red flannel pajama bottoms and a red-and-white Wisconsin Badger's sweatshirt. Since she was his height, the clothes fit.
The porch door creaked open. Hyacinth held out his Stetson.
Jason hesitated. “Can you smell me?”
“A little.” She put down the tan hat and a travel mug on a porch step, then retreated behind the safety of the door's window glass.
Jason felt like a stray dog she was being kind to but didn't dare touch. He slapped on his Stetson and collected the cup. It warmed his frozen hand. He could smell cocoa.
“Hyacinth, I'm really sorry.” He was about to tell her the whole truth right there when she snorted from behind the door's glass.
Then the sound became muffled guffaws.
Jason looked down at himself dressed in her clothes and pink bunny slippers. He chuckled, too. What else could he do?
* * * *
The next day, past sun-up on Wednesday morning, after another shower and a heavy dose of aftershave slapped on his entire body, Jason's cell phone rang.
It was his sister. “Jason, it's horrible. Hyacinth may have killed Tootsie Winters. I need you to go over to the Winters’ place.”
Jason dropped his towel in shock. “It can't be her, Sis.” The taste of Hyacinth's pancakes and cocoa still lingered on his taste buds; he harbored the memory of her soft kiss on his cheek. She'd also called him her superhero.
Lily asked, “Did you stay with her all night?”
“No.” Jason had no intention of giving his sister the details.
Lily coughed into the phone. “Hyacinth called it in.”
“She confessed?” Cradling the phone against his shoulder, he pulled on boxers then jeans with quaking hands. “Are you sure about this? Where are you?”
“Home. With the flu, I think. Hyacinth called 911 saying Tootsie's dead. You know as
well as I do that the person who finds the victim is always at the top of the suspect list.”
Minutes later at seven a.m., Jason discovered Tootsie's driveway packed with cars, to his surprise and concern. He had to park his Jeep Cherokee out on the highway. Significant evidence had probably already been destroyed by all the trampling.
Jason made his way around the cars and puddles rimmed with ice. He cursed the cold weather for the umpteenth time. He wore his red nylon jogging jacket over a tan chamois shirt and t-shirt, not nearly enough for him in this climate. He tugged down his Stetson while scanning the place for anything unusual. Tootsie had a barn and large chicken coop off toward a copse of trees that bordered a marsh. He saw no tracks going off that way.
In the other direction, a black bicycle with a big basket front and back leaned against the trunk of a massive, bare oak tree in the front yard. He suspected the bike belonged to Hyacinth. How early had she arrived? Could she...?
Hyacinth's hearty, musical voice floated out from inside the house. Jason imagined her arms flapping about as she conducted whatever was going on in there. Loud women's chatter crescendoed as he stepped up to the half-open door of Tootsie's neat, yellow, two-story farmhouse. Jason listened from outside.
“She's dead. I knew this would happen to us someday.” That was Lily Bauer's voice.
“She's faking.” That was Hyacinth. “Come on, Tootsie. Wake up.”
“You killed her, Hy.”
“Good riddance. Isn't that what you all wanted?” Hyacinth asked.
Jason's whole body felt doused with ice water again.
“What about her husband, Bob? Where is he? Maybe he murdered her.” An unknown woman.
“Can you blame him?” Hyacinth spoke again. “You've always said he's never liked us Mavens.”
“Let's blame him. Lets us off the hook.” It was an older woman's frail voice that crackled like autumn leaves. “We should really get the heck out of Dodge before—”
Men Of Moonstone Series Page 16
