Val Fremden Mystery Box Set 3

by Margaret Lashley

  “I’m sure,” I said, not absolutely, totally, one-hundred percent convinced. But then again, would I ever be?

  Tom grabbed me up in a bear hug and kissed me on the nose.

  “Well, in that case,” he said, “you decide what stays and goes. I don’t care what you get rid of, Val, as long as you keep me...and I get to keep you.”

  “Great,” I said, wriggling in Tom’s boa-constrictor squeeze. “Then could you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  “Help me move that old chair of yours to the curb.”

  Tom let loose of his hug. I nearly tumbled to the floor. His face switched to unreadable cop mode.

  “Which chair?” he asked.

  I pointed to the hideous Barcalounger sitting in the middle of my living room. It had been festering there like the world’s ugliest toadstool since Tom had dragged it into the house along with the rest of his stuff.

  My nose crinkled at the mere sight of it. The horrid thing was upholstered in that detestable, brown-plaid fabric that seemed, like flypaper, to lure men by the millions to the demise of their homes’ décor...and their love lives. One look at that fabric was enough to extinguish a woman’s libido from twenty paces.

  I stared at the tattered, mustard-brown flaps covering the armrests. They were, sadly, the chair’s most redeeming feature.

  “That one,” I said, and pointed to the ugliest five-hundred-pound gorilla that ever dared enter a room.

  Tom crossed his arms.

  “Look, Val. You can get rid of everything else I own – but not my chair.”

  My lips puckered until they nearly met my nose.

  “Why?” I whined. “What’s so great about that old hunk of junk? We can get you a brand new one...one with a cup holder...and massage action. You know, like Winky’s got.”

  Tom shook his head like a spoiled child. “No.”

  “But why?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “What reason? Did your mom give birth to you in it?”

  Tom shot me some side-eye. “No. But you’re on the right track. I want to keep it for sentimental reasons.”

  “Tom, don’t you realize that upholstery’s been banned in eighty nations?”

  Tom’s usually calm, sea-green eyes began to gather clouds. His shouldered stiffened.

  “Listen, Val. I don’t ask you to give up your weird stuff.”

  Say what?

  I crossed my arms, mirroring his defiant stance. “What weird stuff?”

  “Well...those figurines on the mantle, for one. And all the other ones you collect, just so you can smash them with your so-called, ‘Hammer of Justice.’”

  My ears burned. “For your information, the figurines on the mantle are family. The others are...therapeutic.”

  “Therapeutic?” Tom snorted.

  “Yes. They provide...stress relief.”

  Tom stifled a smirk. “I see. Well, how about a little trade, then?”

  “A trade?”

  “You give up your figurines and I’ll give up the chair.”

  “Tom!”

  “That’s my offer. Take it or leave it.”

  My mind whirled like a tornado in the trailer park of love.

  What had I been thinking? Why had I let Tom move in? Relationships involved compromise. I was absolutely rotten at it.... Give up my figurines? No way! Good thing I hadn’t sold all his stuff yet. And some of Tom’s moving boxes were still in the garage. But then again, next time there was a spider in the bathtub....

  Oh, crap on a cracker!

  “Deal,” I said. “So, help me move the chair out of here.”

  Tom held a palm up like a traffic cop.

  “Not so fast, missy. First you have to prove you’ve given them up.”

  “Prove it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you can’t smash a single figurine for, let’s say...a month.”

  “A whole month?”

  If I’d have been chewing gum, I’d have swallowed it.

  “That’s how long it takes to form a new habit,” Tom said, then shot me a smug smile. “Last that long without hammering a Hummel and I promise I’ll have my chair hauled away.”

  I stared at the hideous chair, then thought about my stash of figurines secreted away in the bedroom closet. It wasn’t fair! At least I had the decency to keep my dirty little secrets out of view!

  I pouted like a pre-teen who’d just lost her Malibu Barbie to the rich girl who already had two Dream Houses and a Ken doll in a tuxedo.

  “Okay,” I grumbled.

  Tom smiled in a way that made me feel as if I’d already lost the bet.

  What a jerk!

  “It’s settled then,” he said, and raised his beer bottle.

  I raised my bottle toward his. But I didn’t hear the clink as they met. My mind was too occupied with other thoughts.

  Oh, it’s settled all right, Mr. Foreman. Bring it on! Pucker up, because you can kiss that rotten old lump of a chair goodbye!

  Chapter Six

  I barely had time to finish my cappuccino this morning. Breakfast was a gobbled-down slice of toast with a slap-dash smear of peanut butter, finished off with a hasty peck on the lips from Tom.

  “You ready for battle?” he asked as I scurried past him in the kitchen on my way to the garage.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be. Wish me luck!”

  He shot me a thumbs up as I opened the garage door. I nearly swooned. Even at the eye-wateringly early hour of 7:15 a.m., the garage was already heating up like the backseat at a drive-in movie. I hit the button for the door opener. As the double doors grunted and groaned their way toward the ceiling, a hot, humid breeze wafted in and instantly melted last night’s mascara.

  No doubt about it, it was going to be a scorcher.

  But there was no time to worry about glamour. I was under the gun. I grabbed the folding table against the wall and dragged it down the driveway to the sidewalk. Sweat trickled down my back as I fumbled with its metal legs. Three unfolded easily. The last one stuck halfway down and refused to budge another inch.

  Great. Just what I need!

  I tugged at the stubborn leg until I grunted from the effort. My hands began to tremble.

  Hurry up, Val! There’s no time to waste!

  “Stupid table!”

  I reared back and kicked the ornery leg. It squealed and popped into place like an out-of-socket hip bone.

  “Aha!” I cheered, and flipped the table upright. I checked my cellphone. It was 7:23.

  My gut flopped with panic.

  Crap! Nancy Meyers will have my hide!

  Nancy Meyers lived directly across the street from me. As the self-appointed Neighborhood Yard Sale Captain, Nancy ran the annual event with military precision. According to the strict regulations spelled out in her Yard Sale Code of Conduct pamphlet, in order to qualify to participate in the event, my table had to be stocked and ready for her inspection no later than 7:45 a.m.

  Crap! I just wasted eight full minutes setting up the table!

  Nancy Meyers was a neighborhood legend well before I moved to Bahia Shores. Since she’d arrived from the motherland, she’d made it her business to know everyone else’s business. A control freak could only aspire to such greatness.

  From the neighborhood yard sale to lawn maintenance to dog poop compliance, Nancy wielded her dictatorial hand over every move her neighbors made, gathering her intel by peering at us through binoculars from her living room window.

  Over the years, Nancy’s anal-retentive antics had earned her a few nicknames. People of a certain age called her Mrs. Kravitz’ crazy cousin. Others, Bristol-Butt Meyers. But my favorite moniker for her was the Knick-Knack Nazi.

  Middle-aged and with a sphincter tight enough to poop diamonds, Nancy was purportedly married to a guy named Ralph. I’d never seen him, personally. No one had. Rumor had it she kept him chained up in a cage in their basement. But I knew that wa
s preposterous. Florida’s water table was too shallow to allow for a basement.

  On the advice of seasoned residents, I’d made it a point to keep my distance from Nancy. She was definitely someone I didn’t want to cross. Even though I didn’t care much for her arbitrary, nit-picking deadline, I followed along for two reasons.

  For one, it got me out of doing the breakfast dishes. Secondly, and much more importantly, the 7:45 a.m. “curfew” enabled me to get first crack at the merchandise my neighbors were hawking before the general public swooped in at eight o’clock.

  Like the old saying goes, “The early bird gets the worm.” But then again, worms weren’t exactly what I was after.

  As I walked down the drive, I mopped the sweat dripping from my brow with the green tablecloth in my hand. I flung the waterlogged square of material over the folding table. Across the street, a stout, blonde woman in a military-green shift-dress gave me a disapproving look. I fiddled with the tablecloth until it was centered, tidy, and Nancy’s lips unsnarled.

  Another glance down at my cellphone told me I had nineteen minutes to haul out any junk I wanted to sell. I turned to head back into the garage to gather up my yard sale stuff. As I did, I took a peek down the street at the rest of the homes lining Bimini Circle.

  I gasped.

  In front of nearly every house, folding tables laden with junk lined the sidewalks and spilled out into the grass...and my neighbors were already going through them!

  Nooooo!

  I abandoned my empty table and sprinted over to my neighbor Jake’s place. To my surprise, his table looked more like a trade-show booth than a yard sale jumble. Lined up in neat rows were various dog-training paraphernalia, along with cards and mugs and flyers advertising his dog-psychology business, You’re In Charge.

  Jake the ape-man wasn’t around, so I scrambled over to the neighbor to his left...and then the neighbor after that one.

  I should have known better.

  I was only three tables in, and already I’d seen at least a half-dozen sappy figurines, including two sad-eyed hound dogs, two goofy golfers, a chubby pizza baker and a woefully mislabeled “World’s Greatest Dad.”

  Everywhere I looked, insipid figurines stared back at me, begging to be put out of their misery by my Hammer of Justice.

  My upper lip twitched. Rabid, unquenched desire surged through my veins. Overwhelmed by temptation, I felt as frustrated as a kleptomaniac with no thumbs.

  What was I thinking? Why on Earth had I made that stupid deal with Tom? Why?!?

  As if to pour salt in my psychological wounds, staring back at me from the table in front of me was another atrocity of the ceramic kind. It was a planter in the shape of a sad-sack clown. A thumb-sized cactus stuck strategically from the front of its drooping pants.

  The fingernails on my hammer hand dug into my palm.

  I’m at a freaking plaster-of-Paris buffet...with duct tape across my mouth!

  “Val Fremden!”

  The high-pitched, nasal voice behind me made my back arch like a startled cat.

  I whirled around.

  Three doors down, across the street from my house, a pair of binoculars were trained on me. Knick Knack Nancy waved with the clipboard in her hand.

  “Are you ready?” she yelled and poked the clipboard in the direction of my house. “It’s 7:37!”

  “No, ma’am!” I hollered back like a wayward soldier. “But I’ll get right to it!”

  I gave the pornographic cactus man one last dirty look and made a beeline for my garage.

  MY HANDS TREMBLED AS I lined up Tom’s old potato peeler alongside Tom’s old Mr. Coffee machine and Tom’s old stereo speakers.

  Across the street, Nancy was standing at attention in front of her own table of junk, ticking off items on her clipboard. I supposed she must have been giving herself an inspection.

  It wouldn’t have surprised me.

  But I had to hand it to her. Nancy had thrown me a morsel of kindness. For some reason, she’d left the inspection of my table for last. Either she was giving me more time, or she was saving me for dessert after making a meal out of the rest of the neighbors.

  I looked up from placing Tom’s old wooden spoons next to Tom’s old football. Nancy was marching across the street toward me, tapping a pen on her clipboard. It was 7:44 a.m., on the dot.

  My hour of reckoning was at hand.

  I gulped and scrambled for the last box on the ground beside me. One of Nancy’s cardinal yard-sale rules read that if an item wasn’t on the sale table at the time of her inspection, it could not, under any circumstances, be added later.

  I hoisted up the last box of junk beside my table just as the Knick Knack Nazi’s heels touched my driveway. I hastily dumped its contents onto the table. Out tumbled an assortment of crap, including an old hairbrush, a chipped coffee cup, and an object I’d never seen before.

  As if on cue, the purple, bullet-shaped apparatus rolled to the front of the table and saluted Nancy’s navel as she arrived.

  Nancy glanced disdainfully at the item and cleared her throat.

  “Regulations ban the sale of...ahem...personal items, Fremden. I suggest you put that ‘thing’ back where it came from.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  My face grew as red-hot as a baboon’s behind. I grabbed the blasted ‘thing’ off the table. Tom must have put it there as another one of his stupid jokes of late. Then my mind squirmed to a less pleasant thought.

  OMG! Maybe the thing belonged to an old girlfriend of his!

  I tossed the six-inch purple bullet back into the empty box and contemplated where Tom could stick his “personal item.”

  “It won’t happen again, Nancy,” I said.

  “See that it doesn’t.”

  Nancy frowned at her clipboard, then sighed. “Okay. I guess you’re good to go.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Nancy turned on her heels and headed back toward her house. “But you’re on thin ice, Fremden,” she shot as she walked away. “I’ll have my eye on you.”

  I saluted Nancy behind her back, then carried the box back inside the garage. I thought about Tom and his practical joke. It deserved an elaborate payback. But I didn’t have time at the moment to cook up a scheme. So, I decided to let sleeping vibrators lie.

  For now.

  Chapter Seven

  It was 7:56 a.m. and I was ready for duty as a full-fledged, Nancy-Meyers-certified participant of the Annual Bahia Shores Yard Sale and Bake-Off.

  Let the festivities begin.

  I stood at attention behind my table laden with Tom’s used household wares. Across the street, Nancy herself gave me a quick nod of approval. As I nodded back, something on the Knick-Knack Nazi’s table caught my eye.

  I did a double-take. Then a triple.

  I still couldn’t believe my eyes.

  It was...impossible!

  I grabbed Tom’s old bifocals off the table and gave the object a fourth look. Either I was hallucinating from the heat, or someone needed to be imprisoned for crimes against humanity.

  Either way, I was at my wits’ end.

  I glanced down the street. A hoard of shoppers was assembling, bulging like a pregnant termite queen’s belly against the rope cordoning off the street. No one could gain access to the sale until the Knick Knack Nazi had given her official approval.

  Seizing my narrow window of opportunity, I abandoned my post, went AWOL, and made a mad dash across the street.

  The closer I got to Nancy’s yard sale table, the more I realized it hadn’t been a mirage brought on by sudden figurine withdrawal. Not even my imagination was that twisted.

  I blinked back my astonishment. There, tucked between an old toaster and a stack of curling paperbacks, was the most hideous thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

  From the depths of some deviant’s rotten mind had come the tacky figurine to beat all tacky figurines.

  My mouth went slack with shock and awe as I stared at the eight-inch
high, life-like statuette of a morbidly obese, shirtless man. The barrel-bellied guy was perched on a toilet, his pudgy hands gripping either side of the seat.

  His stomach hung over his privates and covered his legs almost to his knees. A pair of red-and-white polka-dotted boxers were wadded in a heap at his ankles. Tiny beads of sweat trailed down his shiny, bald head, past a jowly face with squinting eyes and a grimacing mouth.

  The inscription on the base below his bare feet was the icing on the crap-cake.

  “I hope everything works its way out for you.”

  My upper lip twitched involuntarily. My fingers began to fidget. I swallowed the twin pools of drool that had accumulated on either side of my tongue. My seething mind was blank, save for one lone, throbbing thought:

  Doo-Doo Daddy must die.

  “How much for the figurine?” I asked Nancy, then coughed nervously.

  Nancy looked up from her clipboard. “Against regulations. No resales, Fremden. Get back to your post!”

  A twinge of something akin to hysteria shot through me. “Re...resales?” I stuttered.

  Nancy looked down her piggish nose at me. “Haven’t you read the guidelines? You can’t buy something from me, then sell it again at your table.”

  “I...I wasn’t planning on reselling it.”

  Nancy eyed me dubiously. Her snout crinkled.

  “You weren’t?”

  “No, ma’am. What gave you that idea?”

  “I figured...well...I mean, what on Earth would you want....” Nancy glanced up the street toward the gathering crowd, then back at me. “Listen, Val. I know times are tough, but really!”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to say anything, but rumor has it you quit your job and...well...you could use the money.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Nancy shrugged defensively. “I dunno. The grapevine, I guess.”

  “Really? Who’s swinging from it?”

  Nancy scowled. “Listen, it’s against regulations to –”

  “Just gimme a hint,” I said, cutting her off. “Was it a Tarzan or a Jane?”