by Judy Clemens
Death was right. Her ribs ached, her face throbbed, and she was more than ready for a soft bed. She was ashamed. One night on the road and she was ready to give up. If only her Hapkido master could see her now. He would wonder, quite rightly, where his star black belt’s backbone had gone.
“If there’s a spot for me, I guess it might be nice to stay. Unless you think Armstrong’s not worth getting to know.”
Vern came around the counter, striding through Death. He shivered and glanced at the refrigerator, making sure he’d shut the door. He sat across from Casey, his back to the ladies. “It’s home, I suppose. I’ve been here all my life, except for one summer in Portland, when I went up for a business class. Met my wife, Dottie, there.”
So, no wonder he hadn’t reciprocated the behavior of the flirty old woman. He already had someone. This was a small town—did the other woman not know he was married? Or did she just not care?
Vern grimaced. “Not sure Dottie would say this place was as good as any, but she came here when we were first together. We planned to go somewhere else when we were financially stable, but then my dad died and I had to take over the store.” His eyes got a faraway look, but snapped back into focus after a few seconds. “So, this is where we stayed. She grew up as a city girl, which forced her to make adjustments. Lots of them. People here haven’t been exactly…receptive.” He half-glanced over his shoulder, as if remembering the old ladies behind him. “Want to meet her?”
“Uh…” Casey glanced at Death, who was now sitting with the two old women, listening to their conversation as if an active participant. Death wore a black tailored suit with a white blouse, black heels, and a red sash. Casey was sure she could recognize yet another character from a movie if she cared enough. In fact, Death had conjured up a good resemblance to Meryl Streep.
The women swiveled toward Casey at the exact same time, saw her looking at them, and immediately turned back toward each other. Death gave Casey a wide-eyed, “Did you see that?” look.
“We live next door,” Vern said.
“What?”
“You can meet my wife. We live beside the store.”
“Oh. Right. Of course.” Why he was so determined she meet his wife, she had no idea, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she had anyplace else to go, and if it made him happy for some reason, and maybe led her toward a place to sleep…
“Give me one minute.” He untied his apron and hung it on a hook. “I’ll see if Roger can stay a little longer.”
Vern hustled toward the front of the store and Casey meandered to the nearest wall, where shelves of local homemade products filled the country-style wooden shelves. She picked up a carved cow to look at the price and immediately put it back, not wanting to pay more than seemed wise for something she really didn’t want.
“So this is interesting,” Death said.
“These knickknacks?” Casey winced, realizing she’d spoken out loud. She coughed to cover it.
“Of course not. Don’t be daft. The lunchers over there. Seems they’re no fans of Vern’s wife.”
Casey checked out the women, who were getting up to leave.
“The one in the flowered…whatever that is,” Death said, “she doesn’t understand how Vern can still believe it’s okay that he ever brought her to this town. His wife, she means. Apparently something is making her angry all over again. Not Vern’s wife, the old woman.”
Casey looked a question, since she couldn’t actually ask it.
“No, I don’t know what Vern’s wife ever did to old Flower Pants, except you saw how she behaved when Vern entered the room. She’s obviously harboring a crush on the old guy. Who knows how long that’s been going on? The other woman, the one in the shade of orange no person with her chalky complexion should ever wear, agrees that Dottie, or even Vern, never showed any remorse, but that it has been a long time since ‘Dottie drove poor Edmund to his death,’ as well as ‘that whole thing with Marianne.’ Although ‘that whole thing’—whatever it is—seems like yesterday, and the whole town still feels it.”
Casey frowned.
“Right. You’re wondering, as am I, why, if it’s been such a long time, they’re still obsessing over it.”
The women looped their purses over their arms, glanced once more at Casey, and slowly made their way out the door. They left their dirty plates, napkins, and empty coffee mugs on the table, even though a trash can and a dish tub sat by the front door.
“Nice,” Death said.
Casey waited until they’d gone, then stacked the dishes. She was setting them in the dish tub when Vern returned.
“All right.” He glanced at the now-empty table. A flash of annoyance crossed his face, but it was gone in a moment. “Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”
“I didn’t mind.”
He studied her before heading toward the door. “Roger says he’s got a couple more minutes. Enough for you to meet Dottie.”
Casey wasn’t sure she really wanted to meet Dottie, but she was kind of stuck in the town for the time being, and she didn’t want to antagonize the first person she’d met in Armstrong who’d actually been nice to her.
She followed Vern out into the sunshine.
Chapter Nine
Stepping into Vern’s ranch-style home reminded Casey of visiting her grandmother’s house, but not in a good way. Rather than the comforting smells of Snickerdoodles and her grandma’s lilac hand cream, it was like stepping back into a time that had stalled during an especially ugly, dark, unfashionable period.
Worn gold carpeting, grayed upholstery with large orange and yellow flowers, and heavy curtains filled the front room with gloom and such a sense of despair that Casey turned to walk right back out. She stopped when the room flooded with light as Vern swept aside one of the drapes. He skirted the room opening them all, revealing the drab but clean interior. Not as haunting as Casey had first imagined, but still depressing. And the smell… What was that?
“Dottie?” Vern indicated for Casey to hang on a second, and disappeared into the next room.
As she waited, Casey took a closer look at her surroundings. Vern and his wife had obviously cared about decoration at one time, but now the artwork was faded, the lampshades outdated, and the only knickknacks were those often associated with the elderly. Hummel figurines, China plates featuring U.S. presidents, and those abridged Readers Digest books with the gold lettering. The furniture, while aged, had at one time been stylish. Now it just seemed tired.
Strangest of all, Casey saw no photographs. So either Vern and his wife had no family, or they didn’t like them enough to display their pictures. The whole atmosphere felt…sad. It was like Sorrow itself hung over the house, suffocating. Dampening.
Mumbled voices drifted into the room, then the shuffle of feet. Vern reappeared with a woman. Other than her age, she was the opposite of the two women from the store. Her narrow, makeup free face was framed by thin gray hair, and her clothes were what Casey expected from what she’d seen of the house. Black slacks, a fitted white blouse, and pearl earrings. Classy at one time, now left behind. Her shoulders were hunched, and the gray under her skin a tad alarming.
So that’s what Casey had smelled. Sickness.
“Yikes. Looks like she’s going to need me before too long. Like that Roger guy. Although seeing her puts him farther down the list.” Death hovered beside Casey, dressed in a starched white nurse’s uniform, complete with cap and hair swooped up like devil’s horns.
“Nurse Ratched,” Casey whispered. “Really?”
“Oh, is Cuckoo’s Nest too dark? How about this?” The outfit changed to a brown vest and wide-brimmed hat. Death gave a “What do you think?” gesture, arms spread. “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman? Dottie definitely could use someone with internal medicine knowledge.”
Casey shook her head.
Vern led his wife to
the sofa, where she perched on the edge of the cushion, her age-spotted hands clasped on her knees. Vern gestured for Casey to take a chair catty-corner to them. Casey eased onto the puffy cushion, doing her best to both breathe through her rib pain and act like it wasn’t happening.
This is Casey,” Vern said, “a young woman traveling around the country. She came to get a hamburger today.”
Not quite how it happened, but that was okay.
Dottie turned watery eyes toward Casey. Her gaze caught on Casey’s damaged face, and something shifted in her expression. “Where did you come from?”
Casey assumed she meant literally, rather than philosophically, but with someone as sick as she it could easily be the other way around.
“Colorado.”
“Denver?”
“No, a small ski town. Well, bigger than this one.”
“And what do you think of Armstrong?”
Casey spoke carefully. “The scenery is very beautiful.” From what Vern had implied, Dottie wasn’t crazy about the place. Even so, Casey shouldn’t diss Dottie’s acquired home. Besides, Armstrong wasn’t the worst place Casey had ever been.
“The mountains.” Dottie nodded. “Some people think having them around forgives anything we throw at life. Or what life throws at us.”
“You don’t?”
Dottie kneaded enlarged knuckles. “I don’t think mountains, or those contained within their view, have the ability to forgive anything at all.”
“Speaking of dark…” Death muttered.
Vern spoke too cheerfully. “So, do you think you’ll stick around for a while? Or a few days?”
Something in his voice spoke of desperation, and Casey’s stomach twisted. She’d gotten off the train for a reason the morning before, although she couldn’t remember what it was—
“Crying baby,” Death reminded her.
—and she didn’t feel like hopping onto another hay wagon, not when her phone’s map gave her no hope of finding anything other than another small town in the near vicinity.
“I suppose I’ll stay the night,” she finally said. “Is there a motel or bed and breakfast in town?”
“Not really,” Vern said. “Closest thing would be two towns over, where there’s a drive-in motel. Only B and B is twenty miles away and sits upwind from a hog farm, so they have trouble keeping business.” He grunted, not unlike one of those pigs, and Death let out a high giggle. “Other than that, you’d have to go to Boise, and that’s a good twenty miles.”
Casey didn’t feel like traveling twenty miles, even if Vern offered to drive her. “Do you think one of the town’s churches would mind if I borrowed a pew?”
Vern and Dottie shared a long look before Vern offered Casey a small—secretive?—smile. “We have an empty apartment, actually. Well, more of a room. Shall I show you?”
Casey felt apprehensive about the way the invitation unfolded so easily. But Vern had been kind, and Dottie friendly, even if the two old ladies didn’t like her. Casey glanced at Death to get a reaction, but Death had gone. Stupid Death. Never around when she needed help.
She forced a smile. “Sure. That would be nice.”
Vern patted Dottie’s leg and led Casey to a door through the kitchen. “I’m sorry, but there’s no outside entrance to the basement. There’s a fire escape window in case of emergency, but you’ll have to come in through one of our doors.”
Casey shuddered. Her flight from Colorado hadn’t happened because she couldn’t spend another hour alone. Quite the opposite, in fact. She yearned to be on her own, out in the open with only nature to keep her company. But with her injuries, and her worry that the idiot guys from Beltmore might catch up to her, she couldn’t help but think this opportunity to lie low in an actual house might be a gift from the universe. She didn’t want to turn it down just because she felt a tad claustrophobic.
Casey gritted her teeth and held her arm against her side as she followed Vern down the steep staircase. Fortunately, he took his time, as if he were afraid of losing his balance. At least if Casey stayed she wouldn’t have to worry about him surprising her. Once she heard him coming she could be out the fire escape window and halfway down the street before he hit the bottom of the steps—even with her ribs restricting her movement.
They ended up in the basement, which was finished with drywall on one half, and simple gray concrete blocks on the other. On the far side, past shelves of dusty canned goods, a pile of sleeping bags, and an old exercise bike doubling as a storage rack, Vern opened a door into a brightly painted bedroom. Casey could see a square of it over Vern’s shoulder as he hesitated in the doorway. His back went stiff, and he gripped the doorway like he was having trouble standing. Casey was about to ask if he was okay when he gestured her forward.
A queen-sized bed covered with a handmade quilt filled a good portion of the room accompanied by a dresser, which matched the headboard. A soft chair sat in a rectangular “L” offshoot at the corner straight ahead, with an oversized pink stuffed puppy resting on the seat cushion. A large, three-sided window acted as a fire escape and let in a good amount of light. Two more small windows sat along the top of the outside wall, so the room didn’t feel as much like an underground cell as Casey had been expecting.
In the far corner, close to the chair in the “L,” a mobile hung from a metal arm. It was the kind of thing usually suspended above a crib. Omar’s had airplanes. This was Noah’s Ark. Two lions, two parrots, two monkeys…
The L with the chair and mobile was accented with a wallpaper border of calliope horses, all beautiful and soft and feminine. The border stopped before the main part of the room. The front wall of the L held a full-length mirror, a Homecoming ribbon draped diagonally over the top. On a shelf above the chair sat a diploma from Boise State University, a dried bouquet of flowers with a white ribbon, and a photo of a young mother and baby boy. What was this place? They didn’t have any pictures upstairs, but here they had a shrine?
She looked away before Vern felt he had to explain. The whole thing was a little bit creepy.
The bedroom door, she was quick to note, had a slide lock on the inside, as well as a doorknob push button. One checkmark in the I-guess-I-could-sleep-here column. Another was that the room was as far opposite of the upstairs living space as possible, which made her wonder again why they had this beautiful unused room while they lived in drabness.
“It’s simple,” Vern said, “but comfortable. There’s a small closet over here.”
“I don’t have much.”
“True.” He glanced at her backpack, then looked away quickly, as if not wanting to show too much interest. Sort of like her and the weird corner of stuff. “There’s a bathroom outside here that would be all yours.”
He showed her a pleasant space painted light blue, with a shower and a head-height window. This door had only the kind of lock where you twist the doorknob, but that was better than nothing.
“The whole basement would be yours. We never come down here except to clean, and if you’re here, you could take care of that. It’s too much trouble getting down the stairs.” He paused. “So. What do you say?”
“How much would you charge?”
“How long are you staying?” It was said as a challenge.
“I don’t know. I was thinking a night or two—to let my face heal.”
It looked like he wanted to ask about that, since she’d brought it up, but he refrained and glanced toward the stairs. “Would you like a job?”
The smell of Dottie’s illness stuck to the inside of Casey’s nose. “Part of the reason I left home was the stress from seeing my mother aging. I’m not really cut out for caregiving.”
In fact, if it weren’t for feeling a little desperate about a place to stay, she would never have let herself get dragged into a home with another sickly elderly woman.
“Oh no
. I’m not asking for help with Dottie. Whatever I can’t do for her she can do herself. I was thinking of the store. You looked like a natural cleaning up that table today, and you did it without asking.”
Casey remembered the faded Help Wanted sign in the store window. “Anybody can clean up a table.”
“Maybe. But they don’t.” A flash of something—sorrow? Anger?—lit his eyes, and Casey felt a fresh wave of uncertainty. Did the town’s resentment of his wife cut so deeply no one even wanted to work at the store? Or was it the idea of people’s general laziness that seemed to annoy him?
“Anyway, there are lots of things to do other than clean tables. You could run the cash register, stock shelves…” He grinned. “Grill burgers.”
Did Casey want to stay in Armstrong, Idaho? If she didn’t, where would she go? The town itself seemed as good a place as any, although she couldn’t quite rid herself of niggling doubt.
Or growing curiosity about this man and his story.
“If you take the job you can have the room for free. Plus, I’ll pay you an hourly wage.”
It seemed a little too good to be true. Casey could envision unwelcome things in her future—running errands for Dottie, doing chores around the house, being bored out of her mind. But again, what would she be doing if she continued down the road? She could leave whenever she was ready. And that niggling doubt? It was probably an aversion to staying in one place too long. She would stick it out a day or two, and if the feeling remained, keep heading west.
“All right. We can try it.”
Vern’s shoulders slumped, and the worry lines on his forehead relaxed. “You can start tomorrow, bright and early. Unless you’re a late night person?”
“I can do either. And I may as well begin today.”
He smiled. “Great. Why don’t you get settled, then come on over?”
Casey tossed her bag onto her new bed. The painkillers were finally kicking in. “I’m settled. Why don’t we see how fast I can learn?”
