by Ann Charles
“The building is still intact?”
“Yes, it houses the Candy Corral.”
“The one owned by Ms. Wolff’s buddy, Zuckerman?”
“One and the same. We need to pay her a visit.” He took the book from me. “You in the mood for some chocolate?”
“Only every time I take a breath.” I’d thought about visiting Zuckerman to ask her a few questions a week or so ago but then had gotten distracted with enjoying a regular life. It was time to follow through on that idea and find some more answers about the whole Ms. Wolff fiasco and why she’d had my son’s picture stuck in the frame of her bedroom dresser mirror.
My cellphone rang in my purse. I pulled it out. It was Mona, my favorite coworker and real estate idol. Had she heard me through the wall? Maybe I had another new client next door waiting for me. “I need to take this.”
Doc nodded and stepped back, giving me space.
“Hi, Mona. What’s going on?”
“I have an urgent message for you.”
“From Layne?” My son tended to call with false emergencies involving the need for supplies for his latest chemistry experiment or archaeological dig in Aunt Zoe’s backyard.
“No. Eddie Mudder.”
“Eddie Mudder?” I repeated, snagging Doc’s attention. “What did he want?”
Why would the remaining owner of the local funeral parlor want to talk to me all of a sudden? We hadn’t spoken since that horrible night back in August.
“He said he needs to talk to you about something extremely urgent.”
Was I unknowingly on the verge of death and he wanted to get a jump on planning my funeral? “Okay, I’ll swing by the funeral parlor after I finish up the Carhart house paperwork today.”
Doc shook his head at me, showing his feelings on that plan of action.
“Eddie explicitly stated he does not want you to come to the funeral parlor. He made that very clear and left a phone number for you to call tonight at ten.”
“That seems a little odd.”
“Well, Eddie wouldn’t really fit in with Beaver Cleaver’s family.”
True, but he’d be a shoo in for the Addams Family with his resemblance to Lurch. “Thanks for letting me know, Mona. I’ll be over there shortly. I’m just looking at something next door at Doc’s.”
“I hope it’s something that makes you smile.”
There was something in her tone that made me think she said that for a reason other than wanting me to be a happy camper. “Why do you say that?”
“Jerry phoned in earlier from the conference down in Rapid. He’s calling an emergency huddle for tomorrow morning. We all need to be at Bighorn Billy’s at nine sharp.”
“Super duper,” I said without smiling. My boss’s huddles usually revolved around new marketing ideas, such as the catastrophic one that landed me on a huge-ass billboard off Interstate 90 coated in bright red lipstick and wrapped in a pink silk suit—his version of a sexy Realtor. I was of the opinion I looked like a vampire-poodle dipped in Pepto-Bismol. “I’ll be over there shortly.”
“Tell Doc ‘hello’ for me.”
“Will do.” I hung up and proceeded to spew everything that Mona had just told me in one long breath, including her ‘hello.’
“Wow,” he said when I had finished. “You were starting to turn blue there at the end.”
“Why does Eddie want to talk to me all of a sudden? Do you think it’s about George and what happened? Does he know about the bottle of mead I stole? Does he think I had a hand in messing up his family business?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to be there tonight when you call.”
That flipped my frown upside down. “You’re coming over after we get Harvey all settled in at Cooper’s?”
“If that’s okay with you and your aunt.”
“Of course. We can talk about this some more.” I tapped the book he still held. “And if you’re a good boy, maybe I’ll let you take a peek at my fur-lined underwear.”
He laced his fingers through mine and lifted my hand to his lips. “Yabba dabba do, Boots.”
Chapter Three
Monday, October 22nd
Meanwhile, back at Bighorn Billy’s …
Ray Underhill planted his stupid ass across the table from me at Bighorn Billy’s. The fake-tanned cretin stared at me with nothing but contempt. And here I’d thought spending yesterday morning with a faceless corpse and two prickly detectives had sucked.
I sneered at him.
He sneered back.
Where was Harvey’s heirloom wired-trigger shotgun when I needed it?
Jerry Russo, the owner of Calamity Jane Realty, dropped into the seat between Ray and me, breaking up our Mexican standoff. With his hair still damp and his cologne overpowering the smells of breakfast happiness that wafted out from the kitchen, I guessed Jerry had come straight from the Deadwood Rec Center.
While I preferred to start my day slamming the sleep button and then hitting the coffee pot, Jerry preferred his slamming and hitting done on the basketball court. In his younger years, he had played ball professionally until he’d hurt his shoulder. That was when he had married into the real estate business. His marriage had ended long ago, but his love of real estate sales had stayed true. Unfortunately, so had his lust for marketing.
Jerry waved our waiter over. “Have you guys ordered yet?”
Mona, looking stunning in her pink mohair sweater, peered at him over her rhinestone-rimmed reading glasses. “Only coffee.”
“And some vitamin C,” said Ben Underhill, holding up his glass of orange juice.
Poor Ben had the horrible lifelong affliction of being Ray’s nephew. I liked Ben even though our friendship had gotten off to a rocky start thanks to a creepy blind date and his uncle doing his damnedest to get me fired. Ray had been dead set on Ben taking my place at Calamity Jane’s, and for a while I’d been sweating daily about losing my job to him. In the end, Jerry had decided to keep me on board and hire Ben, too, creating what he called his “five-man realty dream team.”
Luckily for Ben, he came packaged with testicles and a love of basketball. He and Jerry had hit it off from the start thanks to Jerry’s matching package. My package, on the other hand, did not include balls of any sort, period. While Doc might be happy about that fact, when it came to fitting in at work, a pair surely would have come in handy.
The five of us took turns placing our orders, starting with me. While I waited for everyone else to finish, I tapped my foot along with Johnny Cash, who was singing through the overhead speakers about walking the line. The Man in Black’s words fit my life at the moment, considering the monumental efforts I was making lately to keep my job, protect my kids from their sperm-donor of a father, and not end up in jail again.
Oh, and to avoid my Aunt Zoe.
I loved my aunt dearly, but she insisted on trying to tell me more about how I had come from a long line of killers and what that meant for my future. Thankfully Aunt Zoe was leaving today for an important glass art conference she went to every year down in Denver and not returning home until next weekend. That gave me a week of reprieve from dodging her and her warnings about the destiny that was waiting for me. As far as I was concerned, the destiny she was referring to could take a number and go to the back of the line … or just go away. I had no problem being destiny-less. Getting my kids to adulthood in one piece would be enough of a challenge.
Jerry clapped his big, basketball-sized hands together, jerking me out of my reverie. “Okay, let’s get this ball into play. Ben, we’ll start with you. Share with the team what’s in your playbook today.”
Jerry spoke in Sport-uguese. Luckily for me, I’d played ball back in high school eons ago, so I could translate with only a few fouls.
Ben dug in, telling about the one pending sale he had and the various pipeline possibilities. Ray followed with more of a long-winded gloat than a status report. Mona came next, her pendings still plentiful even in the cooling market. I
brought up the rear, fast forwarding over my lack of any potential buyers for Jeff Wymonds’ house and Cooper’s place, skipping Harvey’s ranch and the dead guy mess entirely, and wrapping up with the final paperwork to be signed yet for the Carhart deal.
“What about the rental for Rex Conner?” Jerry asked.
The sound of that sonuvabitch’s name was all it took to make a red haze coat my vision and a wildfire race through my lungs. I closed my lips, swallowing down the ball of fire that threatened to spew forth and sizzle the blond eyebrows right off Jerry’s rock-hewn face.
“Have you found a rental that comes close to fitting his needs?” Jerry dumped a sugar into his coffee, unaware that I was sitting there struggling not to morph into Tolkien’s Smaug.
Sure, I’d found the perfect rental for Rex the-piece-of-shit Connor. It was an ice hut on a lovely frozen lake in Siberia. No wait! Russia’s frozen tundra was not far enough away for the man who had fathered my twins and then left before they were even the size of jelly beans. Maybe one of Saturn’s moons would do.
“Not yet,” I answered.
“Surely there has to be something out there that would make him happy.”
Surely there was, but I refused to give it to the dickhead. Rex wanted me to pretend to be his wife. He’d even tried to blackmail me into the role earlier this month. He wanted my kids to play along as well, creating the instant family he needed to get the highfalutin job promotion he was trying to land up in Lead at the old Homestake Mine turned scientific research lab.
The biological father of my children was one big bowl of rat bastard stew, and I kicked myself daily for ever letting him seduce me into bed way back when. However, I loved the two children for whom he had donated his sperm during a two-for-one special deal—the same two children who had no idea that Rex was their father. Nor did they know that their dad was back in town trying to mess with my world in order to get some stupid promotion.
To make this Rex matter even stickier, my boss and coworkers had no clue of Rex’s role in my life. Mona knew I had some issues with him, but none of them had an inkling that he was my twins’ real father, and it needed to stay that way for the kids’ protection.
I swallowed the coconut-sized lump made up of fury and disgust pulsing in my throat and somehow managed to put a smile on my lips and aim it at Jerry. “Mr. Connor is very picky. I’m still looking for that perfect rental he can call home for as long as he needs it.”
Or until I killed him.
Maybe I could still broker real estate deals from prison? Now that might make for a fun-filled reality TV show.
“Let me know if you need help with taking care of that client,” Ben offered, his smile kind yet knowing. He and Mona had walked in right after a rather tense physical moment between Doc, Rex, and me. They’d both agreed to zip their lips about witnessing anything and had stayed true to their word so far.
“That’s some great teamwork, Ben,” Jerry said. “You all are doing a bang-up job on the sales boards.”
Thank you, I mouthed to Ben as the waiter appeared. He nodded back, and took the plate of food the waiter handed him.
Jerry dug in along with the rest of us, talking to us in between bites. “The reason I called this huddle today is to fill you in on how things are going to play out with the Paranormal Realty camera crew.”
My gut clenched. Ever since Jerry’s not-so-genius marketing idea to have a reality television crew come to town and do several Paranormal Realty shows on the haunted locations throughout Deadwood and Lead, I’d been walking around feeling like a thunder cloud of doom was waiting to downpour all over my head.
“Mona is going to play dispatcher back at the office while the filming is being done.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and focused on Mona. “Red, you’re going to need to be my assistant coach, covering incoming calls for whoever is working with the camera crew each day, as well as offering help from home base with any issues that may pop up while they’re on location.”
She agreed but with a small frown. What was with that frown? Did she know something the rest of us didn’t?
My esophagus tightened, putting a squeeze on the bacon I’d just sent down the pipe. I sipped from my glass of water, sending down reinforcements to push everything along.
“Ben and Violet,” Jerry’s gaze swung back and forth between us. “You two will be our point guards. You’ll be representing Calamity Jane Realty on camera, making us look good. You’ll take turns being with the camera crew every other day during filming.”
I looked over at Ben, who was nodding with a smile. He seemed genuinely pleased that he was going to be on televisions throughout South Dakota and beyond, showing supposedly haunted houses. Had someone spiked his orange juice? If so, I wanted some spiked juice, too.
I gulped down a cry of alarm. The idea of speaking in front of a camera every other day made my hives break out in a sweat.
Jerry moved on, oblivious to my outward signs of discomfort as usual. Mona had me locked in her sights, though, and judging from her worried expression, she could read me like a radiation hazard sign.
“My man, Ray, here is going to run our defense.” When I just stared at Jerry while the warning alarms blared inside of my skull, he added, “In other words, he’ll be going with Ben and Violet during the days they are going to be on camera, making sure all goes smoothly.”
There it was—the mushroom cloud of doom.
“Why?” was all I could get out.
“Because I realize that by having this TV crew here and cameras rolling, there is the potential for us to not be at the top of our game. None of us at this table want Calamity Jane Realty to become a laughingstock on national television. Ray’s job will be to make sure you two look good in front of the camera at all times.”
I’d rather be drawn and quartered than spend full days with Ray while a camera followed us around. I chanced a glance at Ray and ran into his molar-grinding smirk.
“Violet and Ray,” Jerry seemed to pick up on the spiky vibes flowing back and forth between us, “I know that you two have some compatibility issues you need to work through.”
Compatibility issues? Had Jerry been taking Human Resources classes on the side? Did my wanting to sock Ray in the nose every time I saw his fat orangutan face fit under the column of Compatibility Issues?
“I expect you to be able to put your differences aside and show good sportsmanship in front of the camera crew. We don’t need this to turn into some reality TV soap opera. Can I count on you to do your best for the team on this?”
“Of course,” Ray answered Johnny-on-the-spot. I was surprised he’d heard Jerry’s question what with his head jammed so far up our boss’s ass.
Jerry turned to me. “How about you, Violet?”
“I won’t let you down,” I said and meant it. I’d try my best. And if Ray ended up buried alive in a grave down in South America, I’d try my best to have an ironclad alibi.
The rest of the meeting slogged past while I forced food down the hatch. Jerry focused on some new regulations for Realtors that were being considered by the state ruling committee and what the Deadwood Historic Preservation Committee had been up to lately when it came to selling historic buildings.
The rest of the day moved along in fast motion around me while I stared unseeingly at my computer and chewed on my knuckles about Ray, TV cameras, haunted houses, and everything that could go wrong when adding me to that mix. The list of possibilities was amazingly long when I wrote them all down on paper as a means of therapeutic release. They wadded up incredibly easily, though.
At some point during the afternoon, Doc called and we discussed his coming to dinner tonight. Before he hung up, he asked if I’d tried to reach Eddie Mudder again. Eddie von Lurch, as I’d renamed him, had not answered last night when I called at ten o’clock precisely. Nor had he answered at ten-thirty, ten-forty-five, or eleven. I’d given up then and forgotten all about calling back today thanks to Jerry’s bomb about Ray’s new
reign of terror.
When I pulled into Aunt Zoe’s drive, I was surprised to see her truck still sitting there. I looked at the time on my cellphone—half past five. Wasn’t she supposed to have left earlier this afternoon for Denver? Hadn’t she planned to drive down there with a friend?
Harvey’s pickup was there, too, which I’d expected since I’d asked him to get the kids from school and watch them until I made it home from work.
I shivered all of the way up the sidewalk to the front porch. The nights were below freezing regularly now up here in the hills, most days only warming up enough to melt the frost for a few hours. The smell of wood smoke mixed with the pine trees made me want to cozy up in front of the fire tonight with Doc. It was a romantic fantasy, probably spurred from something I’d seen on an erection pill-popping commercial. Reality would undoubtedly be much different thanks to my two kids and the misadventures that came with them.
The house smelled like baking pork when I walked through the door. By the time I reached my Aunt Zoe’s kitchen, I was salivating like the big bad wolf. My two little piglets were pounding around overhead, their homework spread out on the table.
Harvey stood in front of the stove, wearing one of Aunt Zoe’s Betty Boop aprons while stirring something in a saucepan. He looked over at me, his gaze homing in on my face. “Somethin’ go sour on the cob at work?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“You look mad enough to argue with a fence post.”
That pretty much summed it up, but I didn’t feel like whining to Harvey about the can of worms Jerry had dumped over my head today. “Is Aunt Zoe still here?” I deflected, hanging my purse on the back of a kitchen chair.
He pointed the wooden spoon he was using at the ceiling. “She’s fillin’ up her saddle bags for her big shindig.”
I leaned over the saucepan, breathing in a fruity smell. I’d expected BBQ sauce, not something orange colored and sweet. I reached out to stick my finger in it and see what it tasted like.
Harvey smacked away my hand. “Don’t even think about it, girl.”
