The Derby Girl

by Tamara Morgan

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Panic settled in, so firmly she ignored the most recent buzzing of her phone. “What are you not telling me?”

  Tony cleared his throat and rifled around in his briefcase, pulling out an envelope of papers all the more ominous for its thin size. “There have been cases—similar ones—in which the heirs to an estate have been able to gain power of attorney for an ailing relative, even against her wishes. Between your grandmother’s hoarding tendencies, her pattern of erratic behavior and the recent accident...” He trailed off, sharing a knowing look with Janice.

  “She tripped on a table.” Gretchen felt perilously near tears. “It was dark. It could have happened to anyone.”

  “Be that as it may,” he said, clearly unbelieving, “it’s not a bad idea to start making inquiries into the state of her affairs. As you indicated, the house is in bad condition. A fire trap—and I’m quoting you now. Is that really the best place for her? Couldn’t your inheritance be best put to use making sure she’s cared for by capable hands?”

  Those ominous words weren’t enough for Janice. With a dramatic arch to her brows, she added, “And where’s the money, Gretchen? Why is Gran living in a hovel if she’s sitting on millions of dollars? Why are there no financial records of it any time after 1995?”

  Gretchen stood on shaky legs, looking around the room with a combination of incredulity and outrage. “You guys are bluffing. You can’t do anything. Even if she is rich, you don’t have a right to her money without her permission.”

  “That’s not strictly true,” Tony interrupted. “I know of a few medical experts who might be able to use the hoarding and the psychological imbalance as signs of dementia—”

  “No.” Gretchen put her hands over her ears, literally willing the words away. “This isn’t real. You guys couldn’t possibly stoop that low. She’s my family. She’s all I have.”

  Pauline pulled her hands away from her ears. “Sweetie, you have us too.”

  “When?” she whispered. “When have I had you guys?” When had she ever mattered to any of them other than as a means to an end?

  Tony tried to hand her the papers, but Gretchen refused to touch them, afraid of spontaneous combustion and voodoo magic and the cold, hard fear that they might contain some kernel of the truth. “No. I’m not participating in this. I refuse—”

  “Just see what you can find out, okay?” Mary interrupted. “That’s all we’re asking.”

  “Is it?” she asked dangerously.

  Janice rose just as dangerously to face her. “You might think you’re hot stuff, what with your fancy doctor boyfriend and Gran on your side, but things can change like that.” She snapped her fingers as if to demonstrate. “Sure, there’s affection now, but what happens when you continue being a good-for-nothing college dropout in your forties? How attractive do you honestly think your devil-may-care attitude and sagging tattoos will be then?”

  Unable to respond without bursting into tears, Gretchen put her hands up as if warding them off. Pauline, at least, had the decency to avoid eye contact, her mouth a self-directed frown.

  Gretchen backed out of the room slowly, hands still raised, heart pounding. This was what it must feel like to be a wild animal that had been backed into a corner—feral, dangerous. She could have happily whipped out her claws and shown them all what she thought about their fancy lawyer and medical experts.

  Gran’s life was none of their business. Gran’s money was none of their business.

  And Gretchen’s relationship with Jared was definitely none of their business.

  Her phone buzzed again, and she used it as a reason to make her escape. Once again, she was greeted by Jared’s light words.

  If you keep ignoring me, I’m going to assume you’re near death and need mouth-to-mouth. I can’t promise I won’t use tongue.

  ...Seriously, though. We need to talk. Call when you can?

  Bless him. Bless him and his timely intervention. Bless him and the raggedy, delicious distraction he provided from the mess of her life.

  With a shaky laugh and a hasty exit, Gretchen was struck by the thought that the tables had definitely turned over the past twenty-four hours. So much for Jared’s insistence that he was more dark than light, the storm in the face of her calm.

  Now she was the explosives and he was defusing her.

  And like all the miraculous changes he wrought on the world, the cocky bastard didn’t even know it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Gretchen should have known the kitchen hole was a red herring.

  The plastic crinkled loudly as she put the papers back in their underground cavern, and even though Gran was still out on her errand with Freddy despite the lateness of the hour, Gretchen’s pulse leaped and she glanced quickly over the room. That was the sound of guilt—of a heartbeat under the floorboards, a cat boarded up in a wall.

  You’re doing this for her, Gretchen told herself firmly. She wasn’t going to touch the money or give anything over to her sisters. This was information gathering. Research.

  She slumped on the floor and debated her next move. As it turned out, the papers in the floorboard cubby were nothing more than the deed to the house and the manuals to the washer and dryer—things normal people would shove in a junk drawer or an overstuffed desk. Granted, Gran had a tendency to hold on to possessions longer than most, but that was usually things. Furniture and jewelry and paintings. Not instruction manuals.

  Unless Gran had planted them there hoping Gretchen would find them, there was no earthly reason why they should be so carefully protected.

  Wait a minute.

  Gretchen sprang to her feet and looked around the kitchen, where two vintage sixties breakfast tables stood end to end, surrounded by a mismatch of equally dated vinyl chairs. Only by the grace of persistence and threats of health code violations had Gretchen managed to keep the rest of the kitchen clear. She drummed her fingers absentmindedly on one of the tables, considering the likelihood that the washer and dryer paperwork was meant for her.

  Certain the moonlight twinkling on the counters was some kind of mind trick, and that the cover of night made her more foolish than usual, Gretchen moved to the room off the kitchen, which housed an old farmhouse-style sink with an accordion washboard, perilously tall stacks of boxes of laundry soap that had long since passed the expiration date, as well as the more modern appliances manufactured by Kenmore.

  Her heart sank. It would take hours to go through all those boxes—not to mention the cupboards above the washer and dryer or, if Gran really wanted to screw with her, lifting up every floorboard in the place and searching in the crawlspace below.

  When she’d bought the washer and dryer—from her own pocket, thank you very much, yet another reason it was absurd to think Gran was a gazillionaire—she’d tried to throw the manuals away. No one ever needed the stupid things, and most of the information was online these days. But Gran had snatched them out of her hand and muttered something about keeping them where they couldn’t get wet.

  At the time, it hadn’t made any sense, since water damage had always been one of the few things they didn’t worry too much about in this house.

  Gretchen got on her hands and knees and peered behind the largest stack of boxes. Dust filtered through her nose and caused her to sneeze, and for one perilous moment, she thought the whole stack was going to come crashing down. Fortunately, a slight wobble was the worst of it, and Gretchen pushed farther into the corner. An old lead faucet poked out of the wall, attached to a well that had never, in all her years of living here, offered any water.

  As she had no flashlight, she felt along the panel of the wall, shaking off cobwebs and who knew what else as her fingers moved. She was just about to give up when her pinky brushed against a scrap of paper.

  No way. She felt ar
ound the edges, and sure enough, it was a piece of paper taped to the wall. Scooting as close as she could, she managed to pull it off, the action accompanied by the dry crackling of aged adhesive coming loose.

  Her back against the wall, still slumped on the planked floor, Gretchen perused the single page, which was blank save for a small, skeleton-like key taped to the center. It would have been asking too much for it to include a bank statement or directions to a train station locker. Oh, no. That would require Gran to make things easy on her.

  There was no question in her mind now that this was what Gran wanted her to do. No one else would know what the washer and dryer manuals meant, or even that they were anything but junk. This was her task, yet another condition of her affection—sitting here untouched for God knew how long.

  Stupid Gran. Stupid Janice for getting her started on this hunt in the first place.

  And Stupid Gretchen for playing along. One of these days, she’d realize that doing what other people wanted her to do only led to trouble.

  Until that time...

  She palmed the key. Until that time, she really wanted to know what Gran was hiding.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand what the big emergency is.” Caitlyn dropped a canvas bag that ordered them all to Keep Calm and Call the Jam onto Gretchen’s bed. It was a tiny bag. Infinitesimal.

  “I told you to bring options.” Gretchen pounced on it, extracting the items with a groan. “Your brother’s band T-shirt and ratty old leg warmers are not options.”

  “You said to bring my most badass clothes that would fit you. Unless you’ve grown six inches overnight, that, my dear, is the sum total of it.”

  She held up the band T-shirt—honestly, calling themselves the Daily Llamas, even ironically, was a bit much—and held it up to her chest. No way was that going to cut it. It didn’t even have strategically placed rips. “You work in a playhouse. Surely you’ve got some spare bits and pieces lying around.”

  “I think maybe a Dickensian top hat would be taking things too far, sweetie. What is this about?”

  Gretchen sighed and turned to face her closet. What once contained a treasure trove of possibility was now a wasteland of sensible knitwear. “Jared invited me over for dinner.”

  “Oooh, Jared. Oooh, dinner.”

  “It’s all very nice to sit there and make sarcastic noises, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to wear. He’s seen most of my derby stuff. And I can hardly wear the catsuit again.”

  “What’s wrong with what you have on?”

  Gretchen looked down at herself with a laugh. As she’d spent the better part of the morning wading through the dust of the unused upstairs bedrooms for an armoire that would fit the mysterious skeleton key, she’d opted for a faded jean romper that looked like it belonged on a five-year-old and had her hair pulled back in a red bandana.

  “Please. I look like Rosie the Riveter.”

  Caitlyn cocked her head. “Omigod. You totally do.” She flexed her bicep in an emulation of the famous poster. “You can do it!”

  “I can’t do it—that’s the problem. I can’t keep up. Do you have any idea how exhausting this is?” Gretchen shut her closet with a bang. She didn’t want to spend her whole day scouring ancient furniture for hidden panels. She didn’t want to have to put on a costume to go on a date. For once, it would have been pretty damn grand for someone to go out of their way to make her life a little easier.

  “They’re just clothes.”

  Gretchen glared at her. “They’re a statement. I need to look hot but not cheap, dark but not demented, dangerous but not toxic.”

  “You don’t need to do anything.”

  “Don’t patronize me.” She’d already gone over this in her head a thousand times. It was impossible to dress the part to catch a man, catch the man, and then pull a quick one-eighty in the opposite direction. She needed to ease into it. “Jared doesn’t want the unhinged, worried wreck of a woman who spent the day searching through her grandmother’s hoard for imaginary treasure. He wants the sultry roller derby girl who makes no demands. Except, you know, sexy ones. Sexy demands are always in style.”

  “Or,” Caitlyn drawled, placing steepled fingers to her lips in an exaggerated gesture, “and I’m just throwing this out there—you could go as yourself and not give a damn what he wants or doesn’t want.”

  “I told you already. He confessed his deep, dark secret. I finally understand what he wants with me.” She forced a smile. “It’s not my ladylike charms, Caitlyn. It’s my lack of them.”

  “I can’t understand why him being a cheating scumbag requires you to pretend to be someone you’re not.”

  Gretchen’s head hurt. She ripped off the bandana and glared at it, as if that square foot of fabric was the cause of all her woes. “He’s not a scumbag.”

  “He’s close.”

  “He’s saved how many people in his life? And all as some kind of perverse self-inflicted punishment for a mistake he made a decade ago?” Gretchen shook her head, unmoved. “That’s not something a bad person does. I know bad people. I’m related to them.”

  “There’s another group you should tell to go to hell.”

  “Can you please just not question my life choices right now?” Her voice cracked. “I’m doing the best I can.”

  Caitlyn sprang from the bed and wrapped her arms around Gretchen. “I only do it because I love you. And you know I’m right. Scumbag or not—and the jury’s still out on that one—Jared is eventually going to find out you’re a soft-hearted ball of mush who cares too much and takes too little. It’s inevitable. And probably for the best. Did you get any closer to the secret Gran treasure, by the way?”

  “No.” Gretchen’s voice was muffled by the hard press of Caitlyn’s arm. Her friend was suffocation-level strong. “And don’t ask what I uncovered up there. Three dead things. I won’t tell you what kind.”

  “That’s really gross.”

  “Well, they were all members of the insect family, so it could have been worse. And one of the rooms looked better than I remember—I must have cleared some of the boxes away without knowing it. I might try to turn it into an exercise room for Gran.”

  “That’s just so you don’t have to watch her and Freddy doing squats together.”

  Gretchen laughed and shook herself off, grateful for the distraction of her friend’s common sense. “So you’re really not going to help me with this outfit emergency?”

  “Nope. I don’t care how big of a scalpel he carries in his pants—you’re awesome just the way you are. And if he can’t figure that out, then infidelity is the least of his sins.”

  “I did not compare his package to a scalpel.”

  “You said it was a mighty instrument. And I’ve seen what that man can do in the operating room.”

  Context. It had made sense in context, she promised. “Oh, stop smirking at me, would you? And hand me one of those leg warmers.”

  Caitlyn tossed the item over the top of the bed. “What good is just one of them going to be?”

  Gretchen examined herself in the mirror with a grin. “If I stretch really hard, I think I might be able to turn it into a tube top.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I love what you’ve done with the place.” Gretchen trailed her hand over Jared’s kitchen counter, empty for as far as it extended along the wall. There wasn’t even a toaster to break up the long line of granite. How did a person live without a toaster? “Uh, how long have you lived here?”

  Only Jared’s backside was visible where he bent to get something out of his refrigerator. Encased in a tight pair of jeans and leading down to bare feet, that backside was doing strange things to her equilibrium. This whole thing was doing strange things to her equilibrium, actually. Jared, fetching her things. Jared, being ho
mey and cute. Jared, inviting her to his sad, empty shell of a house.

  It was almost as though this was an olive branch, an invitation to something more. See? he seemed to be saying. We don’t need student-teacher fantasies and seedy bar sex. We can bond in the suburbs too.

  He rose and handed her a beer, jolting her back to awareness. “I don’t know...three months? Three and a half? I bought the place after I knew for sure I was going to stay, so not very long.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.” Gretchen hopped up onto the counter and carefully angled her legs to avoid flashing him. Caitlyn had won the battle of the leg warmer, but in the process of wresting it from her hands, she’d knocked a box of clothes marked for Goodwill on the floor. Gretchen couldn’t imagine why she’d been planning on getting rid of this skirt. Hand-sewn cut-off miniskirts made from old jeans were the height of motorcycle chic.

  “Ask me what?”

  “About what made you decide to stay. No offense, but now that I know you a little better, the whole Pleasant Park scenario doesn’t seem your style. White picket fences. Buying Girl Scout cookies. That’s what cheerful, well-adjusted people do.”

  He studied her for a moment before answering, his deliberateness filled with such a palpable sense of dejection she wished she could yank the words back. “People are always saying that to me. Where, exactly, do I belong? Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Anywhere you want,” she said honestly. Money, looks, talent, that serious intensity she couldn’t resist no matter how hard she tried...there was no barrier strong enough to hold this man back. “This isn’t the sort of place someone works his whole life toward. Look around you. You have two chairs and an umbrella stand in your living room. And that’s all. I’m almost scared to see the rest of the house.”

  “It’s worse upstairs.”

  “Please tell me you at least have a bed.”