by Ed Lynskey
Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root Kidney, Liver, and Bladder Cure (turquoise) in her right palm and the Lydia Pinkham’s Herbal Tablets (amethyst) in her left palm vied for her attention. Between ingesting the doses of Dr. Kilmer and Lydia, you’d probably own a panacea to enjoy life for as long as the biblical Methuselah had.
Isabel didn’t remember either Dr. Kilmer or Lydia Pinkham mentioned by their tough as shoe leather grandmother, Mrs. Ida Matilda Trumbo. More than likely she didn’t place a high premium on the elixirs and relied on her old faithfuls: castor oil and bromide salts. Money had been tight, and she probably viewed the patent medicines as a frivolous novelty they couldn’t afford to buy.
“What pirate treasures did you dig up there?” asked Alma.
Isabel brandished the pair of glass bottles. “Doc Kilmer or Ms. Lydia Pinkham. Take your pick of poison.”
“Swamp root. Yuk.”
“Have you tried it?”
“No, but I have an aversion to all swamp-related products.”
“They’re a colorful part of our town history. The pharmacist on Main Street back in Grandma Ida’s day probably peddled the patent medicines for their alcoholic content.”
“Well, Louise gets touchy with anything to do about her innards. Besides there might be glass breakage sustained during the shipment to her house.”
“You told me before coming in you wanted to find an original gift. Well, Dr. Kilmer and Lydia Pinkham are as original as it gets in here.”
“I referred to a cute knickknack or clever tchotchke Louise might set out on the mantel or credenza. Would you display even an empty glass bottle of Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root with the family photos and ivory bookends?”
Isabel had a bland shrug. “He’d spark conversation. There’s no denying that.”
Alma scrunched up her nose. “Isabel, you’re just being a nincompoop about this, aren’t you?”
“I’m not either. Ring up Sammi Jo and ask for her opinion that we both value.”
“Sammi Jo is at work, and we shan’t bother her with our trivial disputes.”
“Then give Phyllis a quick ring. She’s not too busy.”
Alma started to dial on her cell phone when she froze her fingers. “Of course, kooky Phyllis will go along with you. She’ll squeal over how patent medicines are a hoot. If the drugstore still sold them, she’d be the first in line to stock up her medicine cabinet.”
Isabel smiled. “If you’re that dead-set against Dr. Kilmer and Lydia, I’ll also pass on them.”
“Thanks. Let’s get out before I begin feeling like I belong in here with a price tag attached to my big toe.”
“You’d fetch a better price than Uncle Jimbo’s wares,” said Isabel. Her returning the patent medicine bottles to the shelf conjured up the image of Ray Burl surveying the shotguns set out for sale in the new annex at the hardware store.
“Alma, since we’re backtracking, Matthiessen’s Hardware should be our next stop. I’d like to re-question Blaine and see how his previous answers measure up to those he gives us now.”
“You’ve got Ray Burl’s shotgun on the brain,” said Alma. “We’ve ruled it out for not having anything to do with his murder.”
“It was closer to we set it aside temporarily, but we’re in town, so just go along with me if just for grins and giggles.”
Alma nodded, giving a resigned sigh but no grin or giggle. “We sure are getting in our daily exercise today.”
“Always a positive gain,” said Isabel. “I’ll have even more exercise waiting at home when Petey Samson greets us.”
“Count me in on going, too,” said Alma. “I’m a little curious as to where you both go for so long every time you leave the house.”
“Sometimes we stop off at the corner billiards parlor, down our shots of tequila, and hustle a few games with the regular pool sharks,” said Isabel, spoofing a tough guy’s speech.
“Then how come I didn’t get invited?” said Alma. “I can shoot a sensational stick of eight-ball.”
“Let’s go,” said Isabel. “Just walk softly on your gumshoes and don’t wake up Uncle Jimbo. I can hear him now snoozing behind the counter.”
***
Sammi Jo was at work in the office of the self-storage facility erected in the past year, driven by the population growth spurt with the new subdivisions. Within its corporate limits, Quiet Anchorage thrived as a bastion of small town charm, but the hydra of sprawl, ingesting even the old Trumbo farm, threatened to squash the charm. On the other hand, the young townies like Sammi Jo and Tabitha were tenacious about protecting the town charm they held dear to their hearts. Quiet Anchorage might not succumb to a dismal future and wither away like a ghost town. It was still out in the dark country far away enough from the city’s light pollution to catch the meteor showers putting on their shows.
Since her laptop with an internet hookup was turned on, she checked her emails, but she opened nothing exciting. Then she googled Mo or Maureen Garner (née Lionheart), but no worthwhile hits came up. Mo’s vanishing act all those years ago had been complete if Google couldn’t find her. The cell phone by the laptop shrilled.
“Wilbur and his brood took off for Cape Hatteras,” said Sammi after their exchanged greetings. “I’m stuck here to hold down the fort. Not that there’s a whole lot going on right now. August must be the slow time here like everywhere else.”
Wilbur Hathaway, her good, ole boy of a boss, would be gone on his end of the summer vacation for over the next two weeks.
“Shout hallelujah, kick back, and enjoy your time with no boss around,” said Tabitha. “Consider it as your own vacation.”
Sammi Jo laughed. “How’s Eddy treating you at the deli?”
“Eddy, I like. He’s fair and honest as the day is long. He pays me a decent wage. He’s also pretty flexible on my work times. What more could you want from a boss?”
“Benefits would be nice.”
“Always. Maybe if I can talk him into swinging me a forty-hour weekly schedule, I’ll bring up the issue of benefits.”
“Husband material? That would solve your problem there.”
“He’s a hottie, and I sometimes dream of crawling through his bedroom window.”
“I’m not Dr. Ruth, but that strikes me as a full-fledged case of love, or lust, to me.”
“Before I forget it, tell Phyllis I bought her a new feather duster. I think she’ll like it even more.”
“Thanks. Phyllis has been laid up in bed for the past day with a bad headache from a sinus infection.”
“I hope she gets better soon.” Tabitha felt led to segue from feather dusters to death. “Sammi Jo, dear, I’m terribly sorry again about what happened to your dad. I’m just a phone call away if I can do anything for you.”
“Thanks, Tabitha. I’ll be sure to keep you in mind.”
“Has Sheriff Fox made any progress?”
“I haven’t gotten a peep from our lawman over the last couple of days, and I’d like to keep it that way, let me tell you.”
“You can’t be serious that he thinks you had anything to do with your dad’s…”
“That’s exactly what I mean. He always looks for the easiest way out. Believe me, I know firsthand how his brain operates.”
“Oh snap, there goes Eddy bellowing like an angry bull moose at me to get my little fanny back up front.”
“All right, I’ll let you go to work. Thanks for calling.”
“Talk to you real soon,” said Tabitha. “Bye, honey.”
Sammi Jo deactivated her cell phone. Quitting time at five o’clock felt a long hour and a half away. A suffering moan escaped her lips as she gave the column of manila folders on the nearest corner of her desk the stink eye. They went to the customers who were delinquent for three months or longer on their locker rentals. More than half of the lockers rented on month-to-month leases. Her assigned task was to sift through the pile and prioritize them, according to whom she evaluated would cough up their fees the quickest.
All the deadbeats and freeloaders were long shots. She felt the ominous dread Wilbur would get the bright idea to instruct her next to do collections. She’d work the phone and “convince” the customers in arrears to make good on their debts. She had an ornery side, but her using it to try and squeeze blood from these turnips was expecting a lot. Too much, really. Since she liked to eat better than Ramen noodles on her dinner plate every night and to pay Eustis her rent on time, she’d swallow her dignity and do what she was told. But she didn’t have to be happy about it.
Chapter 30
Sammi Jo ranged up from the office chair, ambled over the carpet she’d vacuumed minutes ago, and shoved her way through the glass door. Late afternoon brought the longer shadows, but the air felt only a few degrees cooler. Slouching on the concrete stoop, she let her eyes gravitate to the security gate with its key pad and chain-link perimeter fence to safeguard the renters’ can’t-live-without treasures.
She’d counted a whopping three customers tooling into the self-storage facility all day. Yeah, their business was booming. She decided to triple the number and call it nine customers when Wilbur phoned in and asked her for a status report. Keeping the boss pumped up and happy made her white lie permissible.
The self-storage industry, according to Wilbur who had a good reason to do his homework, began in Fort Lauderdale by the Collum family during the late 1950s. The industry was as American as jazz, baseball, and barbecue were, and Sammi Jo had smiled through Wilbur’s history lesson. All she cared was her paycheck when deposited cleared at her bank, and she didn’t get socked with the bank charge for his frozen account.
She turned around, shoved back into the stuffy office, and flumped down in the chair at the desk. She dragged over the column of manila folders. Her sore heart wasn’t into it. She wetted her thumb and riffled through the column, checking the folders’ tabs identifying the delinquent customers’ names. Most of them she didn’t recognize.
The newcomers moving into the area comprised Wilbur’s largest customer base. Quiet Anchorage’s old timers were shrewd to never part with their hard-earned money to store a rat’s nest of junk inside a rental locker. They’d either auction off the junk, or they’d chuck it into the landfill on the other side of Warrenton.
“Whoa, hold the phone, Sammi Jo,” she said. “What’s this little bombshell I’ve unearthed?”
She pinched the manila folder and plucked it out of the column. She stared down at the folder’s tab. Written in blocky letters was the name GARNER, RAY BURL.
She tapped the manila folder on her thumb knuckle while she delved into her recent past. Her father had never mentioned he’d rented a locker to stash his belongings. That was odd, considering he’d known she worked at the facility. What big secret did he keep from her? Or had he just been the same old close-mouthed dad?
Her pulse ramped up its throbbing excitement. She felt enthralled over how she’d stumbled upon what the Trumbo sisters liked to call the key clue. Sammi Jo’s temptation was to grab her cell phone and spill the beans to them. On reconsideration, she held off. Suppose Ray Burl had just crammed the locker full of the cardboard boxes of his unfinished wood projects?
The key clue became another letdown. She bit her knotted lip, mulling it over. She took out a lock pick kit—she didn’t want to reveal its origins—to undo the padlock any customer used to secure their locker. She darted from the office, pacing off to go track down Ray Burl’s locker number she’d picked off his manila folder.
Security cameras mounted on poles aimed down each aisle between the rows of storage lockers. The aisle widths between the lockers permitted the customers enough room to maneuver their vehicles up to their lockers for loading and unloading their possessions.
Ray Burl’s unit sat near the front of the third row. She turned off the security camera so as not to record her act of nosiness and jimmied open the padlock he’d installed.
“Piece of cake,” she muttered.
She hoisted up his locker’s door like one does to open the garage door. She flipped on the light switch, hesitant to inspect the locker’s contents. She placed her hands on her hips, giving a slow nod, but no smile accompanied it.
“Well, well,” she said to nobody in particular. “I’ve found the window into perhaps the clandestine side of my father’s life.”
He’d squirreled away the usual men paraphernalia she found cached when she went to vacate a default locker. She’d retain the decent swag to be put up for bids and sold at the public auctions Wilbur held in order to recoup their losses. The steel weightlifting set of the bench, weights, and bar were odd. Ray Burl had never pumped iron. Also throwing her was seeing the used motorcycle—a Kawasaki 600 cc—parked on its kickstand in the center of the locker.
She drew in a breath to sniff, and only the typical musty air like from old newspapers pervading the lockers filled her nose. Did he drain the gasoline from the Kawasaki’s fuel tank per the lease terms he’d signed? She doubted it. Few customers thought of doing it, and the lockers blew up in smoke and flames.
Wilbur and she had yet experienced no locker fires or explosions. Any day now, she expected to smell the smoke or cringe at hearing the kaboom. That would be the last straw. She’d update her résumé and go knock on other employers’ doors again. Such pyrotechnics were only good in the dudes’ action movies.
Her father storing his stuff in here perplexed her. She wondered if he’d guarded the other facets of his life. He’d been a cards-kept-close-to-the-vest man, and perhaps the personality trait gave him the cover to carry out certain other activities undetected. Thinking the worst things about him dismayed her. He’d been a stand-up guy.
Steeled by her newfound resolve, she marched into the dimmer locker space. The Kawasaki indicated where a portion of Ray Burl’s money had gone. The Kawasaki carried a dead inspection sticker and, its license plates had also expired. He’d probably intended to use it for an off-road dirt bike. Why his sudden interest in the dirt bike sport?
Well, she mused, guys and motorcycles went together like horses and carriages.
She stopped at the column of stacked cardboard boxes marked with a Florida grapefruit growers’ logo. She tilted her head while sizing up the cardboard boxes. Busting her bottom lifting the filled boxes wasn’t in her job description, and Wilbur wasn’t here to lend her a hand. Investing in or renting a forklift was getting to be a more desperate need.
He’d resisted for as long as she didn’t balk at their doing the heavy lifting by hand. She wasn’t built like a muscle-bound stevedore and decided he was in for a few jarring surprises after he returned all relaxed and full of wisecracks. His “girl Friday” (she’d corrected his first usage of the slur) was going on strike for better working conditions like getting a forklift.
She noticed Ray Burl had left a larger-than-usual space of a crack between the cardboard boxes and locker wall. She stepped around the column and craned her head forward to eyeball in the narrow gap left behind there. She gasped, no words spoken out loud, at what she observed.
She reached her hands into the narrow gap and grabbed the long, heavy artifact. It was a 12-gauge shotgun, a Mossberg pump model, she read from the inscription stamped on its steel barrel. She figured she’d laid her hands on the shotgun Corina had seen Ray Burl take from the hardware store. Just what that added up to eluded Sammi Jo.
Repulsed by holding the shotgun, she returned it to its original hiding place when she noticed something else. A new hacksaw still in its shrink wrap packaging lay on the concrete floor.
She recalled Isabel’s remark on how gun owners used hacksaws to crop off their shotguns, and Sammi Jo wondered if Ray Burl had intended to create a defensive weapon from the shotgun. Perhaps he’d felt threatened. She didn’t know.
Further speculation seemed pointless. She exited and resecured the locker. She had a phone call to make. The ladies were, she gleaned, at last getting somewhere. The new adrenaline release she fel
t convinced her now was the right time for them to make the final push.
Chapter 31
Isabel and Alma’s return trip to chat with the lackadaisical Blaine at the hardware store proved uneventful since he’d closed up for the day. They were out walking Petey Samson, or it was more like he walked them by tugging on the leash Isabel grasped doubled over in her fist. He’d been waiting for them, the leash clutched in his teeth and blocking the doorway when they arrived home. His tail thumped on the floor like Alma did while tapping her toe in impatience.
Isabel pealed out a jovial laugh, but Alma suspected Isabel had taught Petey Samson the latest trick. She was teaching him a lot of questionable habits.
This suspicion was verified when Alma saw Isabel slip Petey Samson a doggie treat taken from the baggie kept in her pocketbook. He was getting more spoiled rotten by the day. At least this time Isabel didn’t play hide-and-seek with him, concealing herself by standing in the bathtub and counting off to ten. Petey Samson trotted into the bathroom and barked at his finding her. He also earned another treat to wolf down.
“Oh, holy mackerel, Isabel,” Alma said in mock disgust. “You’re just ruining him more than he already is.”
“Don’t get so out of sorts,” said Isabel. “Next time I’ll let you be the one who hides from Petey Sampson.”
“That’s more like it,” Alma had said.
As a cooling summer breeze blew, they trooped by Mrs. Black’s white picket fence with a cluster of red-orange tiger lilies and lavender peonies blooming off-season this late in August. Mrs. Black was the oldest still living Quiet Anchorage townie. She refused to acknowledge her true age, but she did allow three digits wasn’t all that far away from it.
Entering her distinctive timber-framed house was like stepping into the nineteenth century. Though she relented to use indoor plumbing, she outlawed turning on the electric lights. The soft glow of the kerosene lantern soothed her old, irascible nerves. She ruled as the grand dame at the Senior Folks’ Center. As far as Isabel and Alma were concerned, she could keep the tiara until its diamonds fell out. Neither of them had any desire to wear it any time soon.
