Stamped Out

by Thayer, Terri

  Bonnie nodded again. She sat suddenly, her face crumpling. April caught her arm and eased her onto a bench under the coat hooks. April grabbed ice from the freezer and wrapped it in a paper towel. She knelt and put the ice on her mother’s burn. She brushed a hair away from her mother’s face and kissed her cheek. So soft. Just like she remembered as a kid. The softness and the smell of lilies of the valley.

  Bonnie took the paper towel away from her. “It’s fine. I’ve done worse to myself cooking.”

  Clive burst through the door. His boyish good looks were ravaged by worry and sleeplessness. His eyes were puffy, and his complexion paled under the fluorescent lights of the kitchen. He was wearing a pajama shirt tucked into his jeans, with his brown corduroy slippers on his feet.

  He took in the tableau in front of him and broke toward Bonnie. “You’re an hour and a half late. Are you okay?”

  Bonnie was startled to see him. “How did you get here?”

  Out of breath, Clive held on to his knees and panted. Mother and daughter exchanged an incredulous look over his bended body.

  He answered in short bursts. “I rode. The bike. Garage.”

  Bonnie turned to April. “Your old one,” she said, her eyes flashing at her daughter and mouth twitching in an effort not to laugh out loud. The picture of Clive riding her pink banana-seat bicycle with plastic streamers coming out of the handles was too much.

  “You know I can’t sleep without you there,” Clive said to the floor. Bonnie patted his back and grinned at her daughter and shrugged. She dumped the ice out of the towel.

  “Is everything all right?” Clive asked.

  “Just fine. Let’s go home,” Bonnie said.

  Bonnie grabbed April and pulled her daughter into her fiercely. She whispered into her neck, “We’re okay, you and I.”

  “Yes, we are,” April answered. And they were. She was her mother’s daughter, and she would not forget that anytime soon.

  “Get your father out of jail,” Bonnie said.

  April smiled, her mother’s priority shift surprising. She grinned. “All right. Come on, I’ll take you home.” She started back toward the Hazle Room for her keys.

  Bonnie said, “Hold on. I’ve got my car here.”

  April frowned. Her mother’s complexion had not regained its normally ruddy color. “I don’t think you should drive. You’re still shook up.”

  “I’ll drive,” Clive said. He pulled himself up to his full height.

  “I thought you didn’t have a license,” April said.

  “Doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how to operate a bloody car,” he said defiantly.

  Clive’s jaw was set and Bonnie’s eyes were twinkling. April admired his tenacity. He was going to do what he could to take care of his girl. She had to let him.

  April pulled Clive toward her by his lapels. He was so short, she had to bend to look him in the eye. “Okay, but be careful.”

  He nodded.

  “Watch out for cops,” April said. “Officer Yost is out to get our family, remember?”

  Bonnie shot April a look. She smiled broadly, her eyes wrinkling in the corners. Her arm shot out and grabbed her daughter. She slung her other arm around Clive’s neck. The three of them stood in an awkward hug.

  “Our family will be just fine,” Bonnie said.

  April found Rocky and Tammy in the Hazle Room. They were seated at a table. Rocky was comforting Tammy, who was crying softly. April pulled a chair over. She moved aside Rocky’s project.

  “Tell me.”

  “What?” Rocky said, stroking Tammy’s hair.

  “Everything,” April said. “You owe me that. Or I’ll call Yost and tell him Tammy kidnapped my mother.”

  Tammy wailed, and Rocky held her closer. She flashed daggers at April.

  “What does your brother have to do with all of this?”

  Rocky’s eyes flashed in surprise. That wasn’t what she’d been expecting. “Mitch? Nothing.”

  “But he lied. He was home that summer. He knew what happened that night.”

  “He didn’t lie for himself. He lied for me. He’s always trying to protect me.”

  April knew that Mitch would do that. She thought back to their conversation and realized she’d guessed he’d been hiding something, but it wasn’t anything to do with him. It was all about his sister.

  “That night changed a lot of lives,” April said. She’d thought it had been just hers, but it was far more than that. Rocky had been exiled to France, Tammy frightened into marrying Lyle, Piper a mother without a father for her baby, Frankie dead.

  Rocky sighed, and shifted so that Tammy was sitting on her own. Tammy buried her face in her hands. Rocky continued to stroke her, as though she was a nervous cat on its way to the vet. But Rocky remained silent.

  Rocky’s silence was frustrating. April moved her chair closer, knocking off Rocky’s work. She picked up the page. Images of the graduation party were visible. The Castle, the belt buckle. April realized Rocky was collaging images from that night.

  The hot dog with the line through it was gone. Instead there were three hot dogs that seemed to be in a progression with the letter following each one.

  April remembered Rocky’s fondness for rebus. The hot dog was Frankie. It was a picture of Frankie walking away from the party. Rocky was saying Frankie was alive the last time she saw him.

  The message was there in the collage. Tammy hit Frankie with the belt buckle, but he walked away. Rocky was reassuring her friend that she hadn’t killed him.

  April held up the collage. “Why do you have to convince Tammy she didn’t kill him? Why does she think she did?”

  Rocky turned her head away. “It was my fault. I was so full of hubris back then. I didn’t know what it meant to be the child of a rich family. I thought I was so powerful.”

  She stopped. Tammy breathed slowly, her body rigid with fear. “The party was getting out of control. Kids had left my party at Mirabella, and spilled into the woods, heading for the Castle. Before the roof went on, we’d been partying at the Castle. Climbing in and gathering there. My father had threatened me with boarding school if any more parties were there.”

  “Frankie had brought a lot of grass to sell. I grabbed his supply and told him to buzz off. Told him the cops were on their way. He wasn’t happy, but I threatened him. He backed off, angry, heading for the Castle. He was pissed.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Later, I found out that he caught Tammy on his way home. He attacked her because he was mad at me. I never said a word about it to anyone.”

  The anguish in Rocky’s voice was real. She’d been carrying around the grief of her friend’s rape all these years.

  April said, “But you took his pot off him, to get him to stop dealing.”

  “I wish I was that noble,” Rocky said. “I was just greedy. I knew I could run him off. My father was powerful enough that Frankie wouldn’t mess with me. I just wanted the dope. I would have been a big hit at college with that stash.”

  April felt the sadness between these two friends who had been locked in this guilt trip for the last fifteen years. Tammy racked with guilt because she hit a man and wondered how badly she injured him. Rocky with her own burden, knowing that she’d sent Frankie out into the woods to victimize Tammy. Neither of them knowing what had become of Frankie.

  “But Yost thinks that Frankie was shot,” April said.

  Rocky turned to Tammy. “I thought I’d seen him walking around later that night,” Rocky said. “He was a persistent little shit.”

  “I believe you now. And I forgive you. You didn’t make Frankie do what he did to me.”

  April left the table. She wondered if it was too late for Tammy to start over and have a complete life.

  The question remained. When did Frankie die? Ed said that he’d boarded up the Castle.

  Of course, when Ed said “he,” he meant Buchert Construction. Not him personally, his men. So who? The answers were back at the barn, in
the time cards.

  CHAPTER 17

  The sun was coming up; the trees were filled with singing birds. The sound was deafening and uplifting at the same time. April raced back to the barn.

  Whoever had been at the Castle the morning after Rocky’s party had killed Frankie.

  April pulled down the box marked “The Castle.” She grabbed the payroll file she’d been looking at earlier and then remembered the payroll ended on June 11, two days before the graduation party. Her eyes confirmed it, and her heart sank. She’d been so sure she’d find the answer here. She pounded her fists on her father’s desk in frustration.

  The job had ended in such chaos after that night, it looked as though no one got paid for boarding up the Castle. As April flipped through the file, an invoice fell to the floor and she bent to pick it up. The invoice was the one from the munitions company. Lyle had ordered the sticks of dynamite a month before the Castle blew up. But according to her father, they didn’t have the necessary permits even on that Wednesday morning. Why did Lyle order the explosives so early?

  April’s blood ran cold. There was only one answer. Because he knew there was a skeleton in the ruins of the building. He couldn’t risk the body being found. April’s mind raced. Lyle was always around. He’d been her father’s faithful employee for nearly twenty years. But why would he kill Frankie?

  Maybe George had been wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Frankie who was stealing. It had to be Lyle. Maybe Frankie had figured it out and confronted him, and Lyle shot him and dumped his body in the building. Was Lyle still stealing?

  She grabbed the file marked “Heights.” Mitch had seen Lyle taking the copper pipe off the Mirabella job. Lyle told her he’d moved it to the Heights. There was no invoice for it. And none in the Mirabella job. Lyle had control over the invoices. Unless Ed checked every bill from the supply list, pages and pages, he wouldn’t know that the material hadn’t gotten to the job it was intended for.

  Tammy’s purchases from Stamping Sisters, her golf membership—all spoke of someone living beyond her means. Or someone married to a person who was supplementing their income. By stealing. Lyle wouldn’t have to pilfer a lot, just enough to allow him to buy a new truck each year. Allow his wife to have all the stamping supplies she could ever want. Allow his wife to work a low-paying job.

  April needed coffee. Her brain was fuzzy from being up all night. She went into the kitchen, put water on to boil and spooned coffee into the press, and then stood in the galley kitchen, waiting.

  A sickening creak broke the silence. The barn door was being pulled open across its tracks. April turned. Lyle Trocadero was standing in the doorway, legs spread-eagled, one hand in his windbreaker pocket. Her heart leapt to her throat and she swallowed a gasp.

  “Lyle! Geez, you scared the life out of me,” April said. The barn was out of sight of the main road, out of the sight line of the houses nearby. No one would hear her if she screamed. She decided to treat him as though he belonged in the barn. At five in the morning. On a Saturday.

  She tried to sound casual. “I’m just about to make coffee. Join me?” she said. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

  Lyle watched her as she poured hot water into the French press. She tried to make sure her body language betrayed no nervousness. She couldn’t let on that she knew about him.

  “Tammy told me you’d gone home early from the stamping party. I thought maybe you needed help. Is everything okay with your dad?”

  April nodded. “As far as I know. I was just tired, that’s all.”

  He wandered over to the office. “Doing paperwork?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I just knocked over some stuff on my dad’s desk.”

  “Can’t mess up the system, can you?” His voice was light, but April saw him react when he saw the invoice for the copper pipe that was lying on top. She froze.

  “You’re pretty smart, aren’t you?” he said.

  She knew he knew, and she rushed to reassure him. “It can be our secret, Lyle. I don’t need to tell him or Vince. After all, Retro Reproductions is doing okay, right? The company isn’t hurt by a little skimming.”

  Lyle smiled his smarmy smile. “Exactly. It doesn’t cost them a cent, really. We just pass it on to the customer.”

  April knew how close her father’s margins were. Lyle’s stealing was keeping them close to bankruptcy. And giving Ed countless sleepless nights as he tried to figure out why his estimates always were wrong, why he could never bring a job in with more profit. She wondered about the toll it had taken on him.

  “So how do you know what you know, April?”

  She decided to flatter him. The barn was a big space, and so far there was lots of room between them. She wanted to keep it that way.

  “It was very difficult to figure out. In fact, I wasn’t at all sure until you just said that. You hid your tracks very well. Did you pay off one of the salesmen at the supply house? I’m not sure I know exactly how you did it.”

  April practically felt her eyelashes flutter. Her inner Scarlett O’Hara was closer to the surface than she liked to believe. But Lyle wasn’t going to enlighten her. His escapades were less interesting to him than she thought. He sat in Ed’s chair, putting his big feet up on the desk. Her blood boiled at this sign of disrespect for her father.

  She reached in her purse and took out her cell. His eyes narrowed. “No service in the barn,” she lied. She held the phone up so he could see it. She continued prattling. “God forbid we should ruin our pristine valley with cell towers. The good Methodists decided they didn’t want the tower spoiling their roofline.”

  Lyle leaned back. April heard the chair creek, wondering if it would hold under his weight. “I’m going to leave this burg soon. Florida is sounding better and better.”

  “That would be best. If you promise to quit Retro Reproductions, I won’t tell my dad about your stealing.”

  “So that’s that.” Lyle dropped his feet to the floor and stood. He covered the area between the office and the kitchen so quickly, so menacingly, she dropped the phone and it fell apart, battery skittering under the dishwasher.

  “Damn,” she muttered under her breath.

  April didn’t want to get caught in the kitchen. She walked toward him, struggling with each step, as though she were mired in quicksand. Her whole body rebelled against walking in his direction. But the door, escape, was behind him.

  He stopped at the end of the galley kitchen, arms outstretched, one on each side of the counter. She felt the entrapment deep in her gut, a wrenching so heartfelt, her knees buckled. His smile was feral, his eyes flashing with his powerful position.

  She used the stove to prop herself up, still trying to present a strong front.

  “Well, Lyle.” She tried to infuse her voice with normalcy, but she sounded weak and shaky to her ear. “I should be going to bed. It’s been a long night.”

  “Is that an invitation, April?”

  Her name in his mouth made her shudder.

  “Look, Lyle, you’ve covered your tracks. You killed Frankie because he wanted in on your scheme. I bet you killed George for the same reason. It makes sense. George figured out you were stealing. He needed money to pay for the nursing home. You’ve worked all these years to get where you are. Why should you share?”

  Lyle smirked.

  April had never felt such hatred before. She fought to keep her rage under control.

  The phone rang, shattering their illusion of civility. The answering machine picked up. “April, it’s Mitch.”

  April spoke up loudly, trying to drown out his voice. “He hates me, that guy. And the feeling is mutual. He’d love to put my father in jail for something he didn’t do.”

  Lyle moved in closer, putting his ear close to the machine. He pushed the volume button.

  Mitch’s voice rang out, clear in the wide open space of the barn, reverberating off the beams and coming right back down. “I heard about what happened at the stamping party. I know you�
�re up. I’ll be right over.”

  Lyle’s eyes brightened. He rubbed his hands together. “Oh yeah—a booty call? Man, I was born too late. Girls in my day did not respond to phone calls. I had to get married to get anyone to fuck me in the middle of the night.”

  “No, no,” April said, genuinely laughing off his suggestion. “Mitch just needs something I have of his aunt’s. He can’t stand me. And besides, I’m married.” She pointed to the finger where her wedding ring had resided until last week. The skin under the knuckle was still dented and pale. “I don’t know why he thinks I need help.”