Operation Bonnet

by Kimberly Stuart

  “Absolutely, no, I do not.” He shook his head. “Mr. Tank said he wrote the plans for me to make.”

  I rolled my eyes, disgusted by his honesty, so typical of people around here. “That’s cool,” I said by way of good-bye. I returned to my counter, hearing Tank enunciate his plan to Amos as they left through the back door.

  2

  Where the Heart Is

  It’s not that I didn’t like honesty. Honesty has its place. It was just bad for business, and I’m not talking about golf. I worked at the course to help out Tank because I liked him and he’d acted as a surrogate father during the years Pop was working the tar out of his real-estate business. When summers ended my work at the golf course, I helped out at Casper’s apple orchard, giving kids tours, making them try apple cider, asking them over and over not to bite into the apples before they paid for them. Even at home, I was on the clock, so to speak. Nona and I were permanent house sitters for Mother and Pop while they were away, which, with a sprawler of seven thousand square feet, was pretty much a full-time job without health benefits.

  So I kept plenty busy. Add on to that the responsibilities of being the town luminary, and you had the ingredients many could use to cook up perfectly fulfilled lives. I had to sigh when I thought this, though, because I was made for something greater. Something full of intrigue, suspicion, and intellectual, mind-bending danger.

  I was made to be a private investigator.

  The trouble was, people in Casper were like that Amish kid. Just when you thought they were up to something interesting, they turned out to be lifeless as corpses, and not even the violently murdered kind. Honest, hard-working, boring—in short, a PI’s worst nightmare. Of course, with only twenty-five thousand people in town, my chances for a bustling practice were already limited. Cleveland would be better. There were far more people there (2,088,291 by last count of the U.S. Census Bureau), and more people meant more crime. More crime meant a need for PI Nellie Augusta Lourdes Monroe, all four names on the business card, thank you very much. I was just waiting for the right time, for extenuating circumstances to clear up, and then I’d be on the first bus to Cleveland.

  Actually, I’d drive. But the bus sounded much more definitive. There was a certain poetry there, as I’d think Mrs. Potts would agree.

  In the meantime, I honed my skills. The eye-slitting was one technique I’d come to appreciate through Jack Knight, from StraightTalkWithSergeantJack.com. Jack, America’s Foremost Private Investigation Expert, was a retired cop and PI, and though he hadn’t given his specific whereabouts, I was certain he was from New York City. That kind of sophisticated criminal insight couldn’t have been nurtured in the Midwest. Jack was turning out to be much more helpful than any of my college courses had been to date. After forcing myself to complete the general education requirements, I’d practically skipped into my first day of electives last semester. Finally, a real criminal science course—that first one titled “Intro to Crime.” Well, let me just encourage you to never take that class. I flew through the paltry textbooks by the end of the first week and sat, dumbfounded, while the professor droned on for three weeks about the Supreme Court decision of Miranda v. Arizona. A few times, I tried guiding the class to a more interesting and relevant discussion. For example, I asked Professor Whitley (or Professor Nitwit, as I came to call him privately) to describe his most dangerous stakeout. Or if he had any comments about the constitutional conflict with phone surveillance. Or if he’d ever had to use a weapon on a perp. For each of these interactions, Prof. Nitwit had the same response: “Oh, now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves! There will be plenty of time for that in the upper-level courses.”

  If Nitwit had ever actually handled a weapon, I would shave my head and dance the samba. I was pretty positive he was never even a cop. Campus security, nothing more, and I’d put money on it.

  So to make up for the disappointment of formal education, this was to be the summer of independent study. I had found Jack’s site and picked up some good resources from Amazon, the most promising of which was titled Becoming a PI: Everything You Need to Know but Won’t Hear in a Classroom. And the third, most important component: I would need to test my capabilities, even in the crime-barren land of Casper.

  This eye-slitting technique, for example, had sounded a bit juvenile when I first read about it, but despite my skepticism, I could already sense the difference in those to whom it was directed. I’d come dangerously close to getting my mailman to confess to mail fraud the day before, and he wasn’t the only one shaken by the eyes. Maybe not that Amish kid, but those Amish were a little off anyway.

  Another technique imperative to the successful PI, according to Jack, was the ability to sift through the subtleties and read body language. This was what came to mind when a middle-aged couple came into the clubhouse that first morning of the season.

  “Whew, is it gonna be a cooker!” The man slid a crisp white ball cap off his head and fanned his receding hairline. Body language assessment: uncomfortably warm, likely due to the weather and not to a fever.

  “Boy, I’ll say,” chirped the wife, around fifty, short, medium build, showing evidence of recent Botox. Her eyes were fairly animated, but her cheeks didn’t seem to move much. Assessment: suffering the effects of wealth and the pressure to remain young. Prime candidate for “cougar” activity; that is, preying on a younger man who fulfills her need to be viewed as attractive. Textbook, really.

  Her eyes lit on me. She made all the motions of lowering her voice—leaning in, winking, and looking over a Nancy Reagan–sized shoulder—but spoke in an entirely normal volume. “Dear, can you point me toward the little girls’ room?”

  Is there anything as irritating as a grown woman referring to herself as a little girl? I nodded toward the back of the pro shop, keeping an eye on the husband to watch for a similar irritation. Nothing. He seemed oblivious, creasing and recreasing a dollar bill to feed into our vending machine. Amos the Amish boy walked past the screen door, laden down with a shoulder-load of two-by-fours.

  “I’m going to the restroom,” the woman said to her husband, all the syrup gone from her voice. The shift in tone and posture perked my PI ears right up, and I pretended to organize receipts while I listened in. “Stick with the diet soda, Frank,” she said and actually poked his belly. “And don’t drive off without me again.”

  He sniffed.

  Now, this could be my first case of the summer, I thought as she power walked to the bathroom. I watched the husband, finally successful at feeding the dollar into the machine. He sucked down a regular Dr. Pepper with the force of an anteater. Tension, definitely. Repression, possibly. He hadn’t even looked in my direction, but that said much more about my hair than his marriage. She said he’d left her alone before, which meant he could have been meeting someone on the sly. Or he was merely trying to escape her belly-poking clutches. All in all, a very real possibility of discontent that could translate into a need for my services. I wrote down my cell number and was ready to slip it to the woman when she returned to the front and threw her arms around the man’s neck.

  “I’m sorry I told you to drink diet,” she said into his collar.

  “And I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” he said into hers.

  They kissed, waved good-bye, and walked off, hand in hand, to their air-conditioned Lincoln Town Car and uneventful, happy marriage.

  And the problem was, this was so typical. It was as if the people of Casper had forgotten to read the news. Fifty percent of marital unions everywhere else in the nation crumbled in divorce. In Casper, the rate was something like 23, which was nothing but infuriating to a person in my line of work.

  People have to be unhappier in Cleveland, I thought as I turned on the ceiling fans. Misery couldn’t be only the stuff of fairy tales.

  “Nona! I’m coming up!”

  We had this
understanding that I needed to announce myself as I ascended the stairs to the third floor, a converted attic with dormered ceilings, wide windows, and wood floors. The attic was Nona’s, and she had free reign and roam. Nona had become quite fond of nakedness, and while I appreciated that this was her right as a woman of eighty-some years, I didn’t really want to see the groceries, wrinkly as they may have been.

  “Hello, dear girl,” she said as she opened the door at the top of the stairs. She was fully clothed in a splattered paint shirt and jeans rolled up into big cuffs. “How was work?”

  I slumped into the hug she offered. “Life-draining.”

  “Oh, Nellie,” she said, pulling back from her hug. “You’re such a smart girl. Why don’t you get a job that uses all your brilliance?”

  I smiled. “Thanks for thinking I’m brilliant. Sure you’re not just saying that because we’re blood related? Kind of?”

  Nona walked over to the bow of floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side of the room. She waved me to her and said, “Come look at my new one.”

  The canvas was large, nearly the size of Nona herself, and splashed with vibrant pools of color. Effusive circles of cherry red giggled from the painting, playing with smaller circles of white, all kinds of green, blue, a touch of black.

  “I like it,” I said, and I did.

  “Me too. I want to work in more yellow, but overall, it makes me happy.” She cocked her head, and I watched her bright eyes search the painting inch by inch. I knew, after many years of watching, many hours in this room, that she was not chiding herself internally for not having made something better. Nona wasn’t into self-punishment. She once told me that she’d done enough of that during the first forty years of her life to last her forever and then some.

  “Why do you paint, Nona?” I plopped down on the worn orange suede armchair she kept by the window for me. “Here you are, in your waning youth, slaving away over a blank canvas when you could be playing bridge or bingo or pinochle. Why do you do it?”

  I’d asked so many times before, but I needed to hear her answer, particularly after another mind-crippling day at the golf course.

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and picked up a brush. “I do not appreciate the suggestion that I should play bingo. At the very least, I should be able to play Twister. At my age, I’m entitled to a bit of fun. But to answer your question”—she dabbed a big splotch of yellow as she spoke—“I paint first to honor the God who paints the sunsets and oceans and human hearts. And second, I paint so I don’t get cranky like so many of the old people in this world.”

  My Nona really should have been a writer. She had a way with description that few master—certainly none of those writers who get their little paperbacks into airport kiosks. Painting oceans and human hearts? Better than Hallmark!

  “A new kid started at work today,” I said, twirling fringe from a throw pillow between my fingers. “He’s Amish. Or he used to be. Isn’t it once Amish, always Amish?”

  “Oh, no, dear. If he’s left his home, I’m afraid he’s been cut off from his church, maybe even from his family.” She put down her brush. “Kool-Aid?”

  “No, thanks.” Nona drank tea for years but decided recently she couldn’t stand the stuff, so she’d taken up Kool-Aid instead. Sometimes she went through the whole day with bluish teeth and a bright purple tongue. If Mother was home, it drove her insane, a gratifying by-product.

  “I knew an Amish girl once. Her name was Rachel, and she had the loveliest high cheekbones.” Nona came to sit across from me. She looked out the windows and sipped her drink. The late afternoon sun fell gently on her tendriled white hair, gathered as always in a messy bun at the back of her head. “I’ve often wondered what happened to her.”

  We sat in silence. I always thought it insufferably rude to interrupt an elderly person in the middle of a memory. There were quite a few files up there, if you know what I mean. Eighty-two years of living meant a lot of photos to flip through before you got to the right one. After a minute or so, she shook her head. “That girl was so sad. She told me once that leaving the Amish was the hardest thing she’d ever done but that staying would have wiped all the life out of her.” She crossed her ankles delicately, a reminder of many years in polite society. “I was newly and painfully married at the time, so I understood exactly what she meant.”

  We sat as the sun dipped below the tree line and left behind it a baptism of orange, magenta, and farther up, indigo. The clouds had thinned out to long wisps of combed cotton, gathering stripes of sunset color and showing them off as they changed. After a cluster of quiet minutes, Nona startled in her chair and turned her gaze to me. “Nellie, forgive me! I have been so busy with my own thoughts I didn’t see you there! How was your day, sweetheart? I want to hear all about it.”

  I smiled at her and felt my heart become full and heavy in my chest. I stood and kissed her on her forehead. “My day was great. Thank you for asking.”

  She smiled up at me, her eyes sparkling and clear. “Can you stay for some Kool-Aid? I want to show you what I’ve been working on.”

  “Not now,” I said, walking to the door. “I’m afraid I’m too tired. But soon, Nona. I’ll be back really soon.”

  So you see, I couldn’t go to Cleveland. Not on a bus or in a car, or on a boat or in a plane or any other way endorsed by Dr. Seuss. My Nona needed me, and I would be the scourge of humanity if I abandoned her. Scourge, from the Latin corrigia, meaning to whip: an instrument of punishment, cause of great affliction. No one a girl with four names, even a girl with her sights set on another life, could stand to be.

  3

  Tools of the Trade

  I woke the next morning to the sound of wild turkeys hurling their fat, feathered bodies against the side of the house. I needed to squint at my CSI alarm clock for a full thirty seconds before making a plan to follow the airborne turkey noise to its origin. I kicked off the covers and padded over to my window. Kneeling on the window bench, I let my head rest on the cool glass. Down below, I saw the source of the flinging fowl sound: Mrs. H., our housekeeper and general drill sergeant for twenty-five years, stood neck deep in the hydrangea bushes, beating the tar out of a rug she’d hung over the porch rail. Mrs. H had to be nearing sixty, but she gripped a broom like a racket in the hands of that mannish tennis pro, Martina Complicated-Eastern-European-Name. I watched her without her knowledge, feeling just a big smug about being able to see her flap her arms and squat. Not the most flattering of poses for a woman who once told me a woman’s dignity and a clean pair of underwear were all she needed in the world.

  Despite her sketchy advice, Mrs. H. could take some credit for pushing me into the private investigating line of work. During the years I was growing up, she doubled as a nanny, monitoring me and my activities with the severity of a middle-school lunch lady. In between moments of bossing me around, Mrs. H. had a penchant for reading detective novels. After lunch each day, she’d clear and clean the dishes, set the kitchen right, and then sit down, with a long sigh, to read. Normal humans might have found a straight-backed wooden kitchen chair a strange choice for pleasure reading, but Mrs. H. was not a normal human. Mrs. H. thrived on discomfort, both personal and inflicted. There she’d sit, spine straight as a yogi’s, reading Sue Grafton or Patricia Cornwell and pursing her lips in concentration. I once heard her gasp and looked over to see her clutching her heart. When she caught my eye, she said, “I knew he was the murderer.” She shook her head, adding, “Never trust a man with an eye patch,” by way of romantic counsel. I was probably twelve years old at the time. Watching Mrs. H., a normally unflappable personality, getting all riled up about justice and espionage and truth made me start wondering about the pull of a mystery to the human condition.

  I turned away from the window and felt a small surge of gratitude toward her, all of which vanished when she threw open my door thirty
minutes later.

  “Nellie Monroe, what in God’s earth are you doing?” She wrinkled her nose but still managed to look down it at me.

  I let myself fall to the floor out of my handstand. “It would be really great if you would knock. Before entering. Now that I’m an adult.”

  “Pish posh,” she said, picking up clothes off the floor and snapping them in the air. “Don’t try to change the subject. For what good reason were you standing on your head?” Her cotton work dress buttoned all the way up, from a midcalf hem to just beneath her plump face. She tsked at the Coke stain on a pair of shorts, her neatly made-up face wrinkling at the moral failures all around her.

  I sighed. “A headstand helps me focus. Changes the flow of blood in the body, restarts the old computer.” I pointed to my head, which was sneakily buried underneath an eruption of morning hair.

  Mrs. H. muttered to herself, rump in the air, as she straightened the shoes at the bottom of my closet.

  “Hmm? What’s that?” I said. I was allowed so few pleasures in my life. I worked at a par-three golf course with a man who shouted; I lived with my aging-though-beloved grandmother who routinely forgot to wear a bra; and I hadn’t been kissed by a boy since senior prom, a moment that, I found out later, had involved the exchange of money. So can you cut me some slack if I liked to bait the woman who made me listen to Yanni every morning before school?

  “Pardon me, Mrs. H. Did you have something to say to me?” I deliberately dropped one of the shirts she’d just folded to the floor.

  “Oh, for the love of Peter, Paul, and Mary, Nellie! Must you create more work for me?” Mrs. H. buried her face in a pair of shoes she’d retrieved from the floor, then recoiled when she smelled them. She paused and pulled her spine up to her full height of five feet. “After you are finished doing your headstands and being generally disagreeable, you might take a moment to call That Friend of Yours. He’s phoned four times in the last hour and is making it difficult to get anything done around here.”