by Harper Lin
Granny’s Got a Gun
Harper Lin
Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
All Books by Harper Lin
A Note From Harper
About the Author
Untitled
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GRANNY’S GOT A GUN
Copyright © 2017 by Harper Lin.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.
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Chapter 1
I was at the weekly meeting of the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society, the closest thing to pass for entertainment in this sleepy little New England town. I found myself living here after I retired from the CIA.
I’m Barbara Gold. Age: 70. Height: five feet, five inches. Eyes: blue. Hair: gray. Weight: none of your business. Specialties: undercover surveillance, small arms, chemical weapons, Middle East and Latin American politics. Current status: retired widow and grandmother.
Addendum to current status: bored out of my skull.
Like my retirement, forced down my throat by the government three years before, the book selection for that month was not going down well.
Endless Beach was a classic romance novel from 1912 that had recently been reissued as part of a major publisher’s “Forgotten Female Authors” series. It should have remained forgotten.
An obvious Jane Austen knockoff, written in an era when a wee bit more physical contact was permitted (Kissing! Gasp!) but lingering Victorian morals ensured a tepid read, it came off as old fashioned even in a reading group in which the youngest member was sixty-five, reading glasses were universal, and wrinkles had long stopped being a source of worry. Despite the story being a snore, it had managed to enthrall most members of the reading group, although for different reasons.
The seven members sat around the coffee table in Lucien and Gretchen Rogers’s living room, a circle of gray hair, wrinkles, and persistent aches and pains. Gretchen’s prize-winning lemon cake sat on the table, with only one piece left.
I stared at the cake with annoyance. As usual, Gretchen had used some delicious icing to write her favorite line from that week’s reading assignment. This week it said: Like the sand on the beach, our love is renewed with every crashing wave. That corny line, which didn’t make all that much sense, epitomized both the novel and Gretchen. A bit corny, a bit nonsensical, so it came as no surprise that it stuck out to her, a beach-obsessed hopeless romantic.
She and her husband, Lucien, had both turned sixty-five that year, and while Lucien had settled into placid retirement, Gretchen was going through something of a late midlife crisis or a really late puberty. She dreamed of being whisked away by a handsome stranger to some gorgeous beach somewhere. Their house was adorned with photos of the Bahamas, the Seychelles, the Maldives, and other exotic locales, all taken by someone else. As far as I could tell, the couple had never been farther than Maine.
Gretchen, as usual, had cut the cake into eight pieces. Why she did this, I could never figure out, because that last slice of cake always ended up sitting on the plate for the rest of the meeting. No one ever took it. Not that anyone was watching their figures too closely at this late stage of life; it was simply that taking a second piece would be rude, and rudeness was something that just wasn’t done in Cheerville. You wouldn’t want to irritate anyone, after all.
But that extra piece irritated me almost more than I could bear. I hadn’t made it through a Cold War and several hot ones by being sloppy and wasteful, and leaving an extra piece no one had the gumption to eat was the epitome of sloppy and wasteful.
So I frowned at it again. The icing spelling out the words “crashing wave,” the only words left, seemed to mock me. In a few minutes, Lucien would clear the table and toss out the spare piece.
I had received the piece that read “renewed,” but Cheerville was doing anything but renewing me. In fact, I had developed a deep fear of fossilizing.
I wished the reading group had continued with Behind Open Curtains, this month’s first choice until everyone cracked the cover. It had been billed as “romantica,” a subgenre everyone thought was some new spin on romance. Nobody had bothered to Google it. If we had, we would have found out that it was an amalgamation of “romance” and “erotica.” Pearl, another member of our group, who at ninety-six years of age should have seen it all by now, had nearly had a coronary at the phrase “throbbing man root.”
“Throbbing” was a word often seen in Behind Open Curtains, as was “pulsating,” “yearning,” “moaning,” and “clenching.” There were even a few yelps and ululations. Just who the heck ululates in bed, anyhow? And there was so much fire symbolism in Behind Open Curtains that those curtains must have been made of asbestos.
I fully intended to finish reading that one. I needed to get to the bottom of this ululation business. Had I been doing it wrong all these years?
“Barbara?”
The voice sounded insistent, as if it had spoken my name before.
I looked up to see everyone staring at me. How long had they been saying my name? How long had I been thinking about that stupid slice of cake and strange bedroom noises? I was losing my edge, getting soft. When I still worked for the CIA, nothing ever went unnoticed around me.
“Yes?” I answered.
“What do you think about Victor’s betrayal? How could he leave his wife after twenty years?” asked Pauline, a plump woman of seventy-two with thick cat’s-eye glasses. The ache in Pauline’s voice told me that she’d felt that same betrayal in her own life, meaning the question was loaded and couldn’t be answered the way I would have liked.
Evon, Pauline’s best friend and a spinster ex-schoolteacher, reached over and pointed to my book. She had a bad habit of doing that, as if everyone was a slow pupil.
“The scene is on page seventy-one,” she said. “What do you think about it?”
Judging by the smiles on the faces of my fellow book club members, everyone loved Endless Beach. Even Lucien and Charles, the two men in our group, had enjoyed it, or at least pretended to. I didn’t. I especially didn’t like Marcella, the lead character. Marcella’s husband, Victor, had walked out on her after twenty years. This “betrayal” happened early in the novel and was the catalyst for Marcella coming out of her shell to find new and lasting love. The problem was that Victor was painted as the bad guy, a selfish cad, while the author put Marcella on a pedestal as the paragon of faithful wifehood.
But Marcella had no sense of adventure, no passion, no initiative. It wasn’t until Victor left for his own adventures in Paris that Marcella could even conceive of the idea of abandoning the comfort of her hometown and think of her dreams as anything more than just fantasies.
If I had been married to someone like that, I would have left in the first year, not stuck around for twenty. Not that my James had ever been boring. A bit too turned on by demolition operations, perhaps, but never boring. However, for this group, that was the wrong ans
wer.
I turned to the page, put on my reading glasses, and tried to hedge my bets.
“Well, Marcella had loved him unconditionally for twenty years, so to leave her just because he thinks he can be a painter in Paris is, um…”
“Maybe he was gay. That’s why they called it ‘Gay Paree,’ isn’t it?”
This was from Pearl, who sat slumped in an easy chair like a Gothic ruin.
“It’s Barbara’s turn, Pearl,” Gretchen told her, almost shouting so that Pearl’s ninety-six-year-old ears could hear her. Gretchen always hosted and had decided that this meant she was in charge.
I tried to think of a way to finish my sentence that would be a reasonable compromise between how I actually felt and something these small-town conservative senior citizens could accept.
But what could I say, that I had ditched my college boyfriend of three years right after graduation, the boyfriend who had gotten down on one knee and proposed marriage, because I’d preferred to join the CIA and hunt terrorists and narcotraffickers? The worst of it all was that I had actually said yes to him and then changed my mind and never regretted that, heartbreak or no heartbreak. Painting in Paris seemed tame compared to what I had done.
“He’s a quitter. A selfish jerk. Marriage is forever, and you have to stick with it through thick and thin.”
That came from Lucien Rogers, Gretchen’s husband, mumbled through the last bite of his slice of lemon cake. His response actually made me wince, and I hoped no one noticed.
Lucien was a bit dim, but nice—too nice, really. I could stand up and put him in a chokehold until he passed out, and he’d probably thank me, assuming I had done it out of the best intentions. The fantasy of doing just that briefly flickered through my mind. I had to give him credit, though. His being such a sweetheart did come in handy. As much as I hated to admit it, there were plenty of things I could no longer do, and more and more got added to the list every year.
When a tree had fallen and blocked my driveway after a snowstorm in my first week in Cheerville, Lucien had swung into action, chainsaw in hand. I knew how to use one as well, if not better, than Lucien, but I’d have had to cut that tree into pieces not much bigger than sawdust in order to move them without hurting my back.
Lucien didn’t even know me at the time. He had simply been driving past my house and saw the fallen tree. His chainsaw happened to be in his trunk. I got the sneaking suspicion that, once the snowstorm had finished, he had driven around the neighborhood looking for people who needed help. After he invited me to the reading group and I got to know him better, that suspicion turned into a near certainty.
This guy was remarkably fit for his age. He wasn’t hard on the eyes, either, so nobody objected to his patrolling the neighborhood offering to help out. Nobody female, anyway.
Lucien, obviously feeling pleased with himself by closing the conversation with such a sparkling insight into Endless Beach, started to clear the table, collecting plates and forks and the platter with the lone piece of lemon cake with its mournful phrase, “crashing wave,” on it before disappearing into the kitchen. I watched it go, knowing it was destined to be eaten by some undeserving rat in the town landfill.
That was a shame, because Gretchen’s cake really was delicious.
The chatter continued as the other members of the club freely spoke their minds on the tragedy of giving up on something you’ve been building for twenty years. Everyone agreed that Victor had acted like a cad.
“The author should have written a sequel in which Victor fails as a painter and drinks himself to death with absinthe,” Charles proclaimed, emphasizing his point by thumping his cane on the carpet. Charles was the local funeral director. For some reason, no one objected to his presence. While I had been dancing with death all of my professional career, most people liked keeping anything associated with the Grim Reaper at arm’s length.
I sighed and leaned back in my chair. They’d skipped my turn, but I didn’t mind at all because it let me off the hook. It was the end of another faintly amusing but really quite dull meeting of the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society. I had grown tired of Cheerville so quickly—tired of the people, tired of living alone, tired of the prosperous, straight-laced dreariness of it all.
I changed that prognosis immediately when Lucien fell dead in the kitchen.
Chapter 2
Lucien didn’t go out with a bang but with a thud—the unmistakable thud of a body hitting the floor. I had heard that thud many times before. In fact, I’d been responsible for that thud on a number of occasions. That thud, like so many identical thuds, was followed by a profound silence.
“Lucien?” his wife, Gretchen, called. More silence. “Lucien!”
Knowing something was seriously amiss, the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society sprang into action. Actually, “springing” into action wasn’t an option. Our springing days were over. Trying to rush into the kitchen would have most likely ended with all of us joining Lucien on the floor.
In reality, it was less of a spring and more of a grumbling, pained struggle to lift ourselves up, grab canes and walkers, and make our way carefully to the kitchen door. Pauline grabbed her walker. Charles grabbed his cane. I said a silent word of thanks that I still didn’t need either. Pearl stayed put because staying put was what she did best. Evon stayed behind with her, either out of concern for the group’s oldest member or out of fear of what might greet her in the kitchen.
Together, the rest of the Cheerville Active Readers’ Society carefully worked their way into the kitchen. At a certain age, you’ve seen your fair share of dead bodies. We were all at that age. I’d been at that age by thirty. The senior citizens around me had seen countless friends and family members laid peacefully in a wooden box. However, most were accustomed to seeing those familiar faces with hair combed, eyes shut, and makeup applied to hide graying skin. They saw their loved ones as they were best remembered—about to meet the good Lord dressed in their Sunday best.
That was not how Lucien looked. Instead, he looked much more like the bodies I’m used to.
Lucien lay flat out on the kitchen floor, a pool of blood slowly spreading from his head from where his skull had cracked against the linoleum. The dishes were scraped clean and neatly stacked in the sink, with the glasses set in a neat row on the counter next to it, ready for washing. Lucien had been an eager helper to the last.
Gretchen covered her mouth with her hand to hold in a shriek. Pauline’s hand wasn’t fast enough, and a scream, quite high pitched for such a large woman, jabbed my ears like a volley of pistol shots at a gunnery range when you’ve forgotten to put on your earmuffs. Charles grunted, meaning to speak but unable to form words. Despite dealing in death on a daily basis, his stomach hadn’t quite hardened, and the shock of seeing one of his friends stretched out on the floor must have hit him hard. I covered my mouth and looked appalled because that’s what they expected. No need to let them know that I’ve seen scenes like this before. In fact, I’ve seen much, much worse.
Even so, seeing someone I knew, and someone five years younger than me at that, suddenly dead was not how I wanted to spend my Sunday afternoon.
It was Pearl’s voice, calling in the warbling, scratchy ninety-six-year-old throat, that got the group moving again.
“What’s happening in there? Was that Pauline screamin’? Did Lucien wet his pants or something?”
As a matter of fact, he had. That’s what happens when you die: you lose control of your bodily functions. Not very glamorous. Hollywood tends to skip that little detail.
Pauline shuffled out of the kitchen to deal with Pearl, obviously more than happy to get out of sight of the gruesome scene. Gretchen rushed to her fallen husband, the tears flowing down her wrinkled cheeks. She said his name what seemed like a hundred times, but all the “Luciens!” in the world wouldn’t bring him back. Charles approached, checked Lucien for a pulse that he did not find, and put a calming hand on Gretchen’s back.
I hovered near the doorway, wondering about Pearl’s question. Just what did happen in here? At Lucien’s age, your chest can tighten up on you at any moment. Two heartbeats can be one away from your last at any given moment. That was the obvious explanation.
Lucien took good care of himself. He exercised regularly. I knew this because I’d enjoyed the view of him on his morning jog on many occasions. He ate well. I knew this, too, because Gretchen loved to cook and loved even more to brag about the health-conscious meals she prepared every day.
But heart attacks sometimes don’t care about how well you’ve lived. Sometimes they’re happy to take the healthy down into the dirt right alongside the fast food–gorging couch potatoes.
Sometimes, however, the most obvious explanation is not the correct one. I have never been one for obvious explanations.
I approached. Everything in the kitchen seemed in order. There was nothing on the counter other than a few kitchen appliances. I didn’t see any bloody knives or a rat scurrying away. I didn’t see any bees that might have stung him and caused an allergic reaction. The stove was electric, not gas. There were no threats in this kitchen.
Stepping around Gretchen, who still knelt, her face pressed against her dead husband’s shoulder as the undertaker tried to comfort her, I took a look at the body.
Lucien’s tongue and lips were swollen and stiff, not a common symptom of heart attack—more akin to an allergic food reaction. Lucien, however, had no food allergies. Again, I knew this because Gretchen loved to talk about their meals at every opportunity. His pupils were dilated. Most importantly, I noticed a buildup of thick saliva around his mouth.
Whatever was inside him, his body didn’t want it there and was building up saliva in order to empty his stomach’s contents. It was his stomach that was his problem, not his heart. The fall might have been what actually killed him or might have prompted a heart attack, but he was well on his way toward death before taking the plunge.
