Val Fremden Mystery Box Set 3

by Margaret Lashley

  ...and neither did I.

  As I pushed the pin into the soft cork, the odor emanating from my armpit nearly knocked me over. Before I asphyxiated myself, I switched off my computer, peeled off my stinky t-shirt, and headed for the shower.

  I WAS PULLING A FRESH shirt on over my head when a glint from the bedroom window caught my eye. It was the late afternoon sun ricocheting off a beer can twirling from a piece of fishing line.

  The can was part of the ridiculous “redneck dreamcatcher” Goober had surreptitiously gifted me right before he took off for parts unknown. Tom had found it in Maggie’s backseat when I returned from Lake Wales, and had hung the abomination on the curtain rod above our bed as a joke.

  But it didn’t seem that funny anymore.

  I stared at the crude creation. It looked like something an unlucky angler might catch if he went fishing in a trash bin late at night...outside a strip club.

  Goober’s “redneck dreamcatcher” was nothing more than a wire clothes hanger that’d been bent into a misshapen circle. A pair of women’s neon-pink, thong underwear had been stretched across the wire circle like a pimp-inspired Mercedes logo. A trio of empty tin cans swung from the bottom of the hanger on fishing line. Namely, two Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans and a Skoal chewing tobacco tin.

  I shook my head at the monstrosity.

  Whoever’d come up with that lousy idea obviously didn’t have a clue about...

  Wait a minute! Clue. Maybe the dreamcatcher held the clue on how to “catch” Goober!

  Like a naughty child, I climbed up on the bed and jumped up and down on it until I could reach the wire hanger and knock it free from the curtain rod. On the third try, I dislodged it and the dreamcatcher tumbled on the bed at my feet. I knelt beside it and shook each beer can and the tobacco tin. Nothing rattled around inside any of the empty cans. That left only one last place to look.

  Crap. I was going to have to touch those nasty panties.

  I winced, and cautiously flipped the tag up on the thong underwear. Clinging to the backside of the label was a little circular sticker that read, “INSP 13.”

  I let go of the tag. My heart sunk. Not just for me, but for poor “Inspector 13.” Whoever he or she was, I wouldn’t want to trade places with them for anything in the world.

  Checking the so-called “quality” of cheap thong panties for a living?

  Poor sap.

  If it weren’t for bad luck, they’d have no luck at all.

  Chapter Four

  “You ready to go?” Laverne asked over the phone.

  “Sure. Meet you out front.”

  I inched my feet into some sandals and headed for the front door.

  It felt good to be getting out of the house.

  Ever since I’d left my job at Griffith & Maas and launched my work-at-home writing career, my social life had shrunk to near molecular level. I figured there were probably amoebas out there somewhere having more fun than me.

  Without the regular work lunches I used to have with my boss and friend Milly, my weekly calendar had been reduced to the occasional chat with Laverne over the fence, grocery shopping, and a Thursday-night class called Mystery Writing for Fun and Profit.

  As a fledgling novelist, aka masochist and self-inflicted shut-in, the weekly writing workshop had become my new professional touchstone. That didn’t sound too bad until one found out the workshop was just a two-bit continuing education course attended by a three middle-aged wannabees.

  Four, if you counted the instructor.

  So far, the fun part of the class hadn’t shown up yet. I hoped the profit part would...and soon.

  In fact, I was banking on it.

  Writing had become my sole source of income. And to date, it had earned me exactly diddly squat.

  It had been Laverne who’d turned me on to the writer’s workshop at St. Pete College last month. She’d been taking a baking class there. As fate would have it, her class met the same day and time as the writing workshop. So, she’d been hitching a ride with me.

  Over the past few weeks, the whole thing had blossomed into a mutually beneficial arrangement. Laverne got a free ride to class. In return, when we got back home, I got to practice my free-throw by tossing her noxious baked goods into the trash bin in my garage.

  I liked to think I was getting a little exercise, and saving lives at the same time.

  “THANKS FOR THE LIFT,” Laverne said as she unfolded her long legs from the floorboard of Maggie’s passenger seat and clonked her high heels onto the asphalt parking lot. “See you after class.”

  I watched the skinny old woman toddle away on sparkly, six-inch heels toward her classroom, then I grabbed my folder and notebook and headed to my writing group.

  As I walked into class, I couldn’t help but notice the olive-drab color on the walls blended naturally with the sour expressions of the two other students, Victoria and Clarice. The duo of dowdy dames stared at me blankly, without so much as a nod “hello.”

  Our instructor, Angela Langsbury, a scrawny old woman with skin as blue-white and translucent as skim milk, grabbed a No. 2 pencil from a cup on her desk.

  “Well, Ms. Fremden, how does it feel?” Langsbury asked. She sat on the front of her desk and listed slightly to the left, as if at any given moment she might collapse onto the floor.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  Langsbury began to absently poke the pencil into her matted gray hair.

  “How does it feel to have your first published story?” she asked.

  Employing the pencil like a small, yellow spear, Lansbury jabbed it around inside her helmet-shaped coiffure, which had been rendered stiff as coconut fiber from repeated, liberal applications of Aquanet. She employed the hurricane-strength hairspray before, during, and after each class. Every time I entered the room, the pungent cloud of hair lacquer stung my eyes, burned my throat, and coated my lungs.

  “Published?” I coughed. “What do you mean?”

  I watched in morbid fascination as Langsbury’s stabbing pencil dislodged a cascade of dandruff. It rained down over her shoulders like her own personal snowstorm, and freckled the sleeves of her battleship-gray jacket.

  “Yes, published,” she said.

  I took a seat. Langsbury put down the pencil, grabbed a newspaper from her desk, leaned forward, and jabbed a boney finger at an article she’d circled with a red marker.

  “This is you, isn’t it?”

  I tore my eyes away from the blizzard of dead scalp cells, bit my lower lip, and allowed myself a proud grin. Printed in the newspaper, right next to a picture of a watermelon carved into the shape of a piglet, was The Fiction Fables column...with my name at the top!

  “You saw my article,” I said.

  “Of course,” Langsbury replied. “Why keep it a secret? Or should I say, a mystery?”

  I had my reasons. The main one being the backstory was too... well...complicated and embarrassing to explain.

  A little over two weeks ago, I’d run off to Polk County for a “writer’s retreat” at a trailer park called Shell Hammock. The trip had provided inspiration galore...but it had also gone, shall we say, a tad awry.

  Long story short, after arresting me and confiscating my computer for incriminating evidence, the Polk County Chief of Police had been impressed with the story he’d found on my hard drive – The Snickerdoodle Murders – especially when he’d discovered it was a work of fiction, and not the sick machinations of a psychopath’s maudlin memoire.

  Chief Collins had shown my story to the editor of The Polk County Poker. With my permission, The Snickerdoodle Murders had run in yesterday’s lifestyle section. Being as the paper was published in another county, I didn’t think anyone in St. Pete would ever see it.

  I’d been mistaken.

  “So, how does it feel, Ms. Marple?” Langsbury quipped.

  “Feel?”

  “Hello? Yes, feel. How does it feel to be published for the first time?”

  “Oh.” I sat
back in my chair. “Well...to be honest, I feel kind of exhilarated.”

  I sighed as I struggled to define my mixed emotions.

  “But I also feel kind of exposed. You know? Like I’ve just run down a crowded street naked...with my hair on fire.”

  Langsbury laughed. “Then it feels as it should.”

  The old woman rested her rear-end on the top of her desk, looked up at the ceiling dreamily, and sighed.

  “Being published is like making love, class,” she said. “The first time is always the most memorable, but certainly not the best you’ll ever have.”

  Someone coughed, shattering Langsbury’s philosophical moment.

  Langsbury angled her helmet head at us, her scrawled-on eyebrows crooked into a sharp triangles. Her intense, beady eyes locked onto their target and her mouth fired.

  “Unless, of course, you were dumb enough to go and marry your high-school sweetheart.”

  Victoria, a frumpy gal with dark glasses and the face of a frustrated librarian, choked on the sip of water she’d just slugged from a bottle.

  I glanced over at Langsbury. She was studying Victoria like a lab specimen, one side of her mouth curled slightly upward. Suddenly, the old woman’s head jerked left. She faced me head on with an oddly menacing look that made me squirm in my seat.

  “Too bad my star pupil won’t be going to the writer’s retreat with us next weekend.”

  Clarice, the only other student in the class, sniffed through her thin, pinched nose. I looked over just in time to catch the remains of the dirty look she’d shot my way.

  “I have...uh...other commitments,” I said.

  It was a lie, of course. I wasn’t about to pay eighteen-hundred bucks to play Murder She Wrote with a geriatric plagued with debilitating dandruff, a bookish goody-two-shoes, and a snobby, humorless twit.

  “So, what do you have for me this week, Ms. super star?” Langsbury asked.

  “Uh...a story about a woman who retires to Florida,” I said. “To live out, you know, the best years of her life.”

  I handed Langsbury my manuscript. She looked down at it and sighed.

  “Golden Years?” she grumbled. “What a butt-load of fiction that is.”

  CLASS LET OUT EARLY, and I got bored waiting for Laverne to show up. To pass the time, I put the top down on Maggie and looked up at the stars from the beautiful ambiance often afforded by inner-city parking lots.

  The late-July night was as warm and humid as a sauna. But the sky was unusually clear. I tried to focus on the twinkling lights blinking on and off in the stratosphere, but I kept getting distracted.

  Nearer by was a sideshow that was hard to ignore.

  In front of me, buzzing around within the yellow haze emanating from the street lamp overhead, was a thick, swirling mass of nocturnal insects.

  It’s true. Everyone on the planet is partying more than me....

  I leaned back in Maggie’s driver’s seat and tried to imagine myself as part of the “in” insect crowd circling the light.

  Were the bugs having a rave? If so, was that mole cricket the host?

  Were they all drunk on nectar? Why else would they swarm around in a giant vortex of fellow flying invertebrates? And why this lamppost? Was it the latest cool nightclub? Were they dancing? Was that huge, fuzzy moth buzzing around the perimeter a bouncer?

  “What’cha doin’ honey?” Laverne asked from the darkness.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  “Uh...watching the local fauna,” I replied.

  “Honey, that’s not very ladylike.”

  My brow furrowed for a second, then I let it go along with the need to understand Laverne’s thought processes...or lack thereof.

  “Sorry,” I said as Laverne climbed into the car like a huge grasshopper covered in glitter. A weird feeling shot through me, as if my earlier thoughts of disco-dancing bugs had conjured Laverne into reality.

  “How was class?” I asked

  She laughed. “No fist-fight tonight, so we’re making progress.”

  Laverne reached for her seatbelt, then froze. She stuck a hand underneath her rear-end and pulled out the newspaper I’d absent-mindedly left on the seat.

  “What’s this?” she asked, and held up the article in The Polk County Poker.

  “Oh.” I felt my cheeks flush. “It’s just a little story I wrote.”

  I snatched the article away. I didn’t want Laverne to know her mortiferous cookies had been the inspiration for my tale of murder and mayhem.

  Laverne reached a long, thin, insectoid arm over and snatched the paper back.

  “This is you, honey!” she said, as if I hadn’t realized it. “Why, you should be proud!”

  She studied the paper a moment and read aloud, “The Snickerdoodle Murders.”

  She looked at me funny. Like a confused beetle.

  “I thought you said you were gonna call your story The Snicker Bar Murders.”

  “I thought about it,” I backpedaled. “But then, you know, everybody loves snickerdoodles!”

  Laverne beamed at me. Her dentures shone white in the dark like an albino corncob under a black light. Or maybe a grinning praying mantis.

  “You know, you’re right, sugar,” she said. “Everybody does love my snickerdoodles. You know what? You’ve got me to thinking. I’m gonna make a double batch for the yard sale on Saturday!”

  “Oh, goodie,” I said and turned the key in the ignition. “I bet they turn out to be the talk of the neighborhood.”

  Chapter Five

  I stared at the plastic potato peeler in my hand.

  “To peel or not to peel?” I mused aloud.

  The green-handled device was one of a pair we owned, now that Tom’s stuff had invaded...

  Be nice, Val!

  ...correction, had been added to – the household.

  A wave of claustrophobia washed over me. Tom’s clutter was closing in on me like a two-headed monster.

  I sucked in a deep breath and tried to look on the bright side. At least when it came to big-ticket items, Tom and I didn’t have any duplicates. As part of the move-in agreement, Tom’s bed had been relegated to the dumpster – along with whatever “memories” it held in its foam. Since I’d just gotten a new couch, his old sofa had gone to live with one of his newly divorced cop buddies.

  Still, I was riddled with an unnamable apprehension. So many little things had snuck past my watchful eye...like the potato peeler I now held in my hand.

  Like stowaways hidden in the recesses of Tom’s moving boxes, they’d begun to appear in drawers and on shelves and countertops – like mice, silverfish and other uninvited household pests.

  The kitchen had proven to be the worst. With the addition of Tom’s stuff, we now had double of nearly every cooking gizmo and gadget ever invented by Ronco, Shark Tank and the Home Shopping Network.

  Tomorrow’s yard sale would be the perfect time to get rid of the redundancies. I mean, who needed two potato peelers – or egg scramblers, for that matter?

  But then again, if things didn’t work out....

  I bit my lip and put Tom’s potato peeler back in the drawer, just in case.

  Stop it Val!

  You can’t keep on living with one foot on a bright future with Tom – and the other on the rotten banana peel of a relationship fated for the skids....

  I sighed, clenched my jaw and set both feet firmly into the future with Tom. I fished the potato peeler back out of the drawer and put it in the jumbled pile of other gadgets I’d heaped onto the kitchen counter.

  It was the right thing to do. Still, the effort made me wince.

  I HEARD THE FRONT DOORKNOB jiggle, then the door open.

  “Val! I’m home!”

  “I’m in here, Tom.”

  Tom poked his handsome face into the kitchen, shot me a boyish grin, then swooped in and cornered me by the fridge for a kiss.

  “Happy start to the weekend,” I said.

  “It will be...when you move
out of the way and let me get a beer.”

  Tom reached around me and opened the fridge. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or the honeymoon was finally over.

  “Har har,” I said. “Another joke, I hope.”

  Tom kissed me. “You’ll always be cuter than the St. Pauly’s girl.”

  I eyed him suspiciously. “So, what’s up with you, Tom? Have you been taking ‘funny cop’ classes?”

  Tom grinned. “Hey. You’ve got your secrets. I’ve got mine.” He grabbed a beer from the fridge. “You want one?”

  “Sure.”

  Tom handed me the beer already in his hand and took out another, then perused the pile of gadgets littering the kitchen counter.

  “Yumm!” he hummed. “Looks like you’re getting ready to cook up a storm.”

  I took a draw on my beer. “Uh...not exactly.”

  Tom’s grin collapsed.

  “Aww, crap,” he said. His expression when serious and he locked his eyes on mine. “Is there something you want to tell me, Val? Come on. You don’t want me to move out, do you?”

  “What? No! I’m just gathering things up...you know...for the yard sale tomorrow.”

  Tom’s face went slack with relief.

  “Good,” he said, and blew out a breath. He smiled at me for a second, then his eyebrows crashed together in the middle of his forehead. He looked down at the pile of gadgets on the countertop.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “This is all my stuff!”

  I feigned innocence. “Is it? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Come on, Val. That’s hardly fair.”

  “Well, we don’t need double of everything anymore. And your stuff is...uh...older.”

  Tom eyed me for a moment, then a smile broke out on his face big enough to dimple his cheeks.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to keep a spare, Val? You know...just in case things don’t work out?”

  Dang. Sometimes it was downright scary how well that man knew me.