Buzz Off

by Hannah Reed

  Hunter and I hadn’t said much until now, although I was bursting with curiosity. “What’s new with Carrie Ann?” I finally asked. I couldn’t help myself. Call me nosy, but I really wanted to know what they were doing together. Back when Carrie Ann and I hung out in high school, Hunter hadn’t cared for her personality. Of course, times and people change. I still couldn’t see the two of them being close, though.

  Hunter laughed easy behind me. “Jealous?”

  “That’s the arrogant man I know so well,” I teased. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I was just wondering.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Hunter and I had spent some time together recently and I liked what I saw.

  He chuckled again, but didn’t answer my question.

  I pressed on. “I have to tell Carrie Ann she won’t be working for me anymore.” I kept a keen eye out for any sign of my kayak, first scanning the sides of the river in case the pint-sized troublemakers had pulled it ashore, then peering mid-stream in case they’d sunk it like last time. Those kids could have left it anywhere.

  “I wouldn’t fire her if I were you,” Hunter said.

  “I can’t handle any more of her erratic behavior. She’s an alcoholic.”

  “She needs a job, and she needs the stability you can provide her.”

  “Listen to you defending her.” I switched my paddle to the other side, dipped the blade while I watched ripples of wind glide across the water. All bird life had vanished from sight because of the incoming storm.

  “Would you reconsider your decision if I told you she’s going to AA meetings?” Hunter said.

  “Since when? She was drunk at the store yesterday.”

  “She just had her first one.”

  That surprised me. Carrie Ann had come a long way if she was ready to finally admit she had a drinking problem.

  Now that Hunter mentioned her newfound sobriety, I couldn’t remember seeing any beer bottles on their lunch table.

  “She didn’t say anything to me about AA,” I said. “Carrie Ann didn’t mention one word to me, and I’m family.”

  “Maybe she didn’t tell you because you’re family.”

  “I wouldn’t have told anybody else. She could have trusted me.”

  “Give her another chance?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” I stopped paddling and twisted around to look at Hunter. “Should we head back?” He looked up. So did I. The sky had darkened significantly since we’d set out.

  “I don’t hear thunder in the distance,” he said. “I’m not afraid of a little water. Unless you want to turn around?”

  I listened for rumbling. “I don’t hear anything, either.”

  “Then onward, Pocahontas.”

  It figured that soon after, the sky let loose. I could hear rain slapping at the treetops, driving through to the next layer of canopy before pounding into the water around the canoe like buckshot. We guided the canoe under as much cover as we could find along the wooded side of the shoreline, then met in the middle of the canoe to huddle under the windbreaker Hunter had had the foresight to bring along.

  In better weather, this was my favorite part of the Oconomowoc River, where it continued all the way to Loew Lake, which nestled in a valley within one of our state forests. I’d completed that scenic journey many times. From where we sat I could see the Ice Age Trail following the west side of the river.

  Before long, rain was falling in sheets and the windbreaker broke down as a working tarp. Hunter held the canoe in place with a firm grip on a thick maple branch, otherwise we would be spinning out of control in what I feared might develop into funnel weather.

  If the firehouse tornado siren went off, it meant we were in big trouble.

  I remembered fantasizing about an adventure similar to this when I watched Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner fight their way through a Colombian rain forest in Romancing the Stone. And again when I saw Six Days, Seven Nights, where Harrison Ford and Anne Heche crash-land on a deserted island. How she couldn’t adore him from the very beginning was beyond my comprehension.

  Recklessness and romance. That’s what I craved.

  Hunter had that same starlike male sexiness that Ford and Douglas had. But I didn’t look half as good as Kathleen or Anne did with mud all over and their hair plastered to their faces. Not to mention the cold. Suddenly, I was freezing to death in wet clothes that clamped onto my body like cling wrap. It didn’t feel good at all, and totally not sexy.

  “How are you doing?” Hunter asked, with water streaming down his face.

  “I need a hot shower.” I tried to keep the whimper out of my voice. My kayak could go fly a kite for all I cared.

  “You’ll have to settle for hot conversation instead,” Hunter said, still holding us in place with one hand clutching the branch. The other arm squeezed me closer to his body, where I got a really good view of his feet.

  They were tanned and toned and shiny wet from the rain, with wisps of man hair on each toe.

  I needed to redirect my thoughts before he tuned into them, an ability I’ve discovered that most men possess as long as it involved sexual context. “I wanted to thank you for trying to get Grace to agree to an autopsy,” I said, wiping mascara from my face. Movie stars never lost their makeup, even after a night between the sheets. So much for this particular fantasy.

  “Grace is a stubborn woman when she makes up her mind,” Hunter said.

  “Her sister-in-law said someone from the beekeepers association was picking up the honeybees tonight.”

  “Don’t you want them?”

  “Of course I do, but apparently Grace didn’t think I was the best choice. And the bees aren’t really mine, at least not legally. Manny owned them. Grace can do what she wants.”

  “Maybe she felt that if you had them, the bees would be too close to home for her. They’d be a constant reminder of the day she lost her husband.”

  I shivered as the wind gusted again, driving rain into my skin like pinpricks. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We’ll have the wind at our back. We can give it a try.” He pulled me closer, if that was even possible. “First, promise to give Carrie Ann another chance.”

  “What’s it to you?” I blurted out, pulling away enough to meet his eyes. “Why all the sudden concern?”

  “Because she came to me for help.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  He shrugged. “What do you say?” he pressed. “Give her another chance?”

  I couldn’t refuse those deep blue eyes. I sighed. “As long as she stays sober, comes in on time, and does her job. Yes, I’ll give her another chance. But you owe me.”

  “Thanks. Come on. Let’s go. The storm is passing.”

  Which was true. As quickly as the rain had started, it was ending. The clouds didn’t exactly part and the sun didn’t shine, but the end was in sight. If only the wind would die down. When Hunter pulled away from me, I tried to wring some of the water out of my halter top.

  The adventurous romantic fantasy I had envisioned was completely ruined.

  “Is that your kayak?” Hunter called out. I followed his gaze.

  “That’s it!”

  My kayak must have been lodged between clumps of cattails in the marsh, and the wind and torrential downpour had set it free. Designed for speed, it came at us fast with the wind gusting at its stern and vegetation streaming behind it like it had risen from a watery grave. We paddled like mad to intercept it before it crashed into the rocky bank on our side of the river or had a chance to change course and take off downstream ahead of us.

  We came within reaching distance. I dropped the paddle into the bow of the canoe and stretched out both hands to get a firm grip on the kayak.

  What I saw made me sit back down hard. I couldn’t form words. My mind couldn’t get past the image of the body sprawled faceup inside the kayak, hair knotted and plastered to her face, her red top drenched and splattered to her body like thick paint.

&nbs
p; “Dammit!” I heard behind me.

  Eight

  Hunter scrambled toward the front of the canoe, almost tipping us out into the river. I clutched both sides, lifting up and shifting my weight in the direction I thought would steady us, but my brain wasn’t working like it should.

  “Sit down,” Hunter shouted.

  Too late. The canoe flipped faster than my numb mind could register the action. Splashes and sputters later, we came up clinging to the canoe’s underside.

  Hunter had a few choice words for the situation, which I won’t bother repeating. Nor did I acknowledge the glare he shot my way before we managed to right the canoe and get back inside.

  By then the kayak had banged up alongside the riverbank, and we had to paddle over.

  “Who is it?” he asked, jumping out of the canoe and grabbing the kayak before it could move away. “Do you know?”

  I nodded, not that he was looking my way. “Her name is Faye Tilley.”

  I’d seen the dead woman on my ex-husband’s arm at our divorce trial, and most recently, making a spectacle in front of The Wild Clover. Faye was wearing the same jewelry she’d worn at the hearing—a butterfly barrette in her hair, and one of the dragonfly earrings was dangling from her right ear. The left one was missing.

  I stumbled out of the canoe onto solid ground and considered passing out. But that wouldn’t accomplish anything productive. Instead I sat down hard and watched Hunter spring into action. I made a mental bullet-point list of what happened next:

  • Hunter secured both the canoe and kayak, then used his cell phone, which had been inside his waterproof jacket, to call for assistance.

  • It took a lifetime for backup to arrive, some on land, some by water. The approximate location where we’d first seen the kayak was marked with a buoy.

  • The far shore area was marked in grids, and the search began for evidence.

  • Divers went down, hunting for weapons or other clues.

  • Jackson Davis, the M.E., and Johnny Jay, the police chief, both arrived. Hunter and I gave our statements, and Johnny Jay was too busy to torture me with verbal abuse, which was a huge relief.

  • Afterward, we couldn’t just leave Stu’s canoe in the middle of nowhere, so despite being soaking wet, we declined an offer of a ride back to town and went back in the canoe.

  The music from the library’s bluegrass band event wasn’t playing when we paddled into Moraine near Stu’s. A few bar patrons standing along the river watched us come in. Hunter jumped out of the canoe and ran for his truck and took off back to join the other professionals in their search for answers. My thoughts were a jumble. I couldn’t get poor Faye’s face out of my head.

  And Clay. He would have to be told. Did I have to be the one to tell him the horrible news?

  After securing the canoe, I stood on the shore—barefoot, wet, and wind-whipped. Where had my flip-flops gone? Oh, yes, I remembered—into the river when the canoe tipped.

  More people were beginning to gather at the river’s edge. Word was spreading. I had to get out of here before they heard that Clay’s ex-wife had found his girlfriend’s dead body in her kayak.

  It was true that I’d wished Clay Lane dead a bunch of times, sometimes even verbally in front of witnesses, but I’d never extended that sentiment to any of his conquests. I figured they would be punished enough when they figured out that Clay wasn’t what he seemed.

  A terrible idea flittered across my mind. What if Clay had killed her? Impossible. The man wasn’t capable of that kind of extreme emotion. Through our entire relationship, he’d never displayed passion for anything other than his own creature comforts. Good food and sex without borders, those were his most important needs.

  Someone wrapped a towel around my shoulders. My mom and grandmother appeared out of nowhere and rescued me from the crowd of spectators, guiding me to Grams’s Cadillac Fleetwood, refusing to let anyone interfere with our progress.

  I heard the band tuning back up.

  After I took a hot shower at home, Mom handed me a cup of steaming tea, settled me in a kitchen chair, put on her everyday scowl, and went to work on my confidence. “What were you thinking to get involved in something like this?”

  My defensive hackles went up. I forced them down.

  Being the oldest sucks. Personally, I’ve always suspected our mother/daughter conflict has everything to do with me being the firstborn female. I had a theory about relationships between mothers and oldest daughters. They couldn’t get along no matter how hard they tried. I’d seen it time and time again by observing other families. While Mom had a hot, poisonous tongue and spoke out before thinking about how harsh her comments were, most mother/daughter relationships were cooler and crisper. Sometimes I wished for a cold, restrained version of Mom.

  Since most of my immediate family lives within a ten-mile radius of each other, I really try to get along with them the best I can. But I seem to be the only one who has unresolved issues with Mom.

  Grams squeezed my arm to show support. She had her gray hair pulled up in her standard cute little bun with a new, fresh daisy tucked into it. Grams, at eighty, was an avid flower gardener, card player, and amateur photographer.

  “You didn’t kill that girl, did you?” Mom asked. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

  “Of course not. I just found her. That’s all there is to it.”

  “What must people think?” That’s my mom, she really focused on the important things in life.

  “Now, Helen,” Grams scolded my mother. “It’s your daughter we should be most concerned about, not the neighbors.”

  With a little coaxing from Grams, I told them what I knew, which was next to nothing other than that my kayak had gone missing and Clay had given me the impression this morning that Faye was with him, when all along she must’ve been lying dead in my kayak.

  “You’re still shaking,” Grams said when I tried to take a sip of my tea and my trembling hand gave me away. “I’ll get you a sweater.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Grams didn’t believe me about being fine. She went into my bedroom to find a cover-up. Her departure gave Mom another opportunity.

  “When are you going to stop causing problems for us?” she complained. “This is killing your grandmother. First, you marry the wrong man . . .”

  True. I had liked Clay more than I should have simply because my mother hadn’t.

  “Your personal life is spread over the entire town like a B movie . . .”

  Not my fault that Clay tried to sleep with every woman in town.

  “And poor Manny Chapman is killed by the same kind of bees you have, and I can look right out this window and see them all over the place. What do you have, a death wish?”

  Heavy sigh.

  “Now you’re linked to what might turn out to be murder, through some kind of sex triangle!”

  “Okay, that’s going too far,” I said. “I have a few bullet points for you. One, I have no control over Clay’s actions. Two, Manny’s death has hit me hard enough without you going through this big lecture, okay? Three, he was killed by wasps, not honeybees. Four, I’m not involved in any triangle. And five, I refuse to take responsibility for Clay’s bad behavior ever again.”

  “Not taking responsibility has been your problem all along.” Mom made a sour expression. Worry lines were permanently etched in her forehead. I knew that if I pointed them out to her, she’d blame those on me, too.

  Grams came out of my bedroom carrying a cardigan.

  “Mom’s ready to leave,” I said to her, taking the sweater and putting it on. But my goose bumps and shivers weren’t from coldness. Extra layers wouldn’t help bring back Manny or Faye. “Thanks for rescuing me at the river.”

  Grams beamed. “You’re welcome, sweetie. Take care of yourself. If you don’t want to be alone, you can come stay with us for a while.”

  “I’ll remember that.” No, thanks! Eating poisonous mushrooms would be less painful than s
taying with my mother.

  “I’ll drive,” Mom said to Grams at the door, picking up an ongoing conversation that they carried from one scene to another. You’d think she’d have given up by now.

  “I’m perfectly capable, Helen.” Grams refused to give up the driver’s seat, which annoyed my mom no end. The Cadillac Fleetwood was Grams’s pride and joy. It had been the height of luxury in the mid-nineties, she took great care with it, and she never, ever allowed anyone else to drive it.

  Mom gave me an eye-roll and grimace that implied we were on the same side. It said, Look what I have to put up with.

  Grams is third-generation Morainian, Mom is fourth, making me fifth, and our family one of the oldest in town. The old cemetery, next to The Wild Clover, is filled with names from both sides, since my father came from this area, too. If you’ve been in Moraine as long as we have and you’re from Grams’s generation, you get automatic acceptance in the old guard’s eyes. They watch out for each other and know more of the goings-on than they’d ever admit.

  My cousin Carrie Ann came up the sidewalk as Grams and Mom were leaving.

  “How are you doing, Carrie Ann?” Mom said, rather stiffly. Carrie Ann was my dad’s sister Marla’s daughter. Mom had never gotten along with Aunt Marla and she didn’t have any use for my cousin or her hard ways, but she was bound by her manners.

  “Pretty good,” Carrie Ann said. “Thanks for asking.”

  We watched them drive away at a max of ten miles per hour with a jerky stop at the Main Street crossing.

  “I’m ready to chew off my left arm,” Carrie Ann said. I noticed she had a hunk of gum in her mouth. She was a visual gum chewer, rolling it around while she talked. I couldn’t help staring at it. “I quit smoking this morning and it’s killing me. This nicotine gum is the only thing saving my sanity.” She pulled a piece out of her pocket, peeled off the foil and popped it in her mouth right along with the old one.