by Alexie Aaron
“They think they’re kids, probably rich ones, with nothing to do at night. They’ve been pelting the area with balls of paint, each night getting more venturous. Tonight, Tom got a call from the highway department. Evidently the kids were firing at trucks leaving Millie’s Pie and Gas.”
“I don’t know where that is,” Cid admitted.
“South east of Sentinel Woods,” Mia said, tracing a pattern in the dotted Formica table top.
“That’s where I almost ran over someone running across the road,” Cid said.
“Could be the vandals. Would you mind talking to Tom?” Susan asked, handing him the phone. “He’s number two on my speed dial.”
A curious Mia asked, “Who’s on number one?”
“My bookie.”
The men looked at her amazed.
“Well, a girl’s got to make a buck.” She winked at Mia.
Mia was privy to the bookie’s identity. This infamous bookie of Susan’s was also the clerk at the Ace Hardware in town, Deb Bookers. She and Susan had been friends since they were in grade school. The two had held season tickets to Soldiers Field since they were able to afford the first set and had steadily worked their way to the forty yard line. They were such loyal fans that they went to the out of town games when they were within a day’s travel. It wasn’t the cold that housed Susan in the blue and orange sweats, it was pride.
Ted put the steaming hot coffee down in front of her, warning her of the temperature.
Cid walked into the hall to have a quiet conversation. Maggie followed him, sniffing at his shoes and deciding that a loose shoe string was game for a good chew.
Susan took a sip of Ted’s coffee and then took a sip of the percolated brew. “It’s hard to say since this has more than coffee in it,” she acknowledged. “Mia, I’m sorry, but I think Ted’s right to call foul. This is better.”
“Fair enough, now to the subject of me not being humble…”
“Pass,” Susan said. She downed the last of her coffee and got up. “I’m not sure how to get out of the hollow alive. Could one of you explain it to me again?”
“I’m headed to the Sheriff’s Station,” Cid said from the doorway. “Just follow me until things get familiar,” he suggested.
“Yes, sir,” Susan said and gathered her belongings.
Ted walked them out of the house. Mia picked up the cups and set them in the sink. Maggie growled behind her. She whirled around. “What’s the matter, girl?”
The dog continued to growl with her gaze fixed on the window where a large moth was beating itself against the glass to get in.
Mia scooped up the puppy and lifted her to the window so she could see more clearly, explaining, “It’s just a moth attracted to the light. It won’t hurt you.”
Maggie licked the window, leaving a drippy smudge.
“That’s going to be hard to explain.” Mia put down the dog and went in search of some window cleaner under the sink. Maggie growled and barked again. Mia stood up, looked at the window and screamed.
Ted ran from the front of the house, missing treading on Maggie’s tail by an angel’s breath.
“What is it?”
Mia pointed to the window, speechless. “The biggest hairiest spider I’ve ever seen! It just dropped down and grabbed a moth out of thin air.”
Ted knew all too well that Mia had no love for the web spinners. He suspected a crawl space full of spiders had been the last straw in her and Burt’s relationship. He didn’t tease her; he just held her tenderly.
“Teddy Bear will protect you,” he cooed. “It’s on the outside. What’s on the glass? Is that dog drool?”
“Yep.”
“Gee, I look at the situation two ways. One, we could be adults and clean the window and straighten the kitchen. Or two, Cid’s headed into town. Murphy’s probably checking out his trees on the hillside. We can have very noisy sex…”
Mia wasted no time with her answer. She started pulling at Ted’s shirt, ripping off the buttons in the process.
Maggie chased the bouncing white shell buttons around the kitchen, oblivious to what Ted was doing to Mia on the counter.
~
Tom greeted Cid with a handshake as he entered the office area of the building. Cid looked around, impressed by the tidiness of the small station. He followed Tom to a desk and sat down in front of it.
“You said you saw a group of kids on the road near Sentinel Woods?”
“No. What I thought I saw was a squad of soldiers dressed in camouflage uniforms run across the road. You made the leap that they were the kids you were looking for,” Cid corrected.
Tom nodded. “I know it’s late, but would you mind driving out with me to show me where you saw the squad?”
“Stop for coffee first, and I’m your man.”
“You PEEPs are so compliant now. It wasn’t like that in the beginning,” Tom said, standing up. “I thought we’d have to lock the lot of them up when they first came to town.”
“Before my time, deputy,” Cid said, following him out. “I came and brought with me a semblance of civility and class.”
“That’s what you call getting kidnapped and lost in the woods?” Tom teased.
“Well, one must make an entrance,” Cid replied.
~
Deb Booker smiled down at the text she just received from her best friend, Susan, who was checking in that she had made it home safe from the hollow. Deb was on the closing shift of the hardware store tonight. Normally she was on afternoons where she managed a trio of high school kids from the co-op program. The store provided employment for those students interested in learning a trade, in this case retail. With a few exceptions, Deb enjoyed guiding the youths in the joys of hardware, customer service, and how to budget their time between work and school. Hopefully, this would translate from work to home where the participants perhaps would understand that when you left your workplace, you had to leave it behind you. Deb had been doing this for thirty-five years. She held the salary of an assistant manager but never referred to herself that way. To her friends and family, she was a clerk and happy to be one.
Tonight she was covering for the night manager who was down with the flu. She had encouraged one of her co-ops, Rory, to take on some extra hours to help her with refilling the paint chip dispenser. Rory Kline was a quiet, respectful junior in high school who had bounced back from a serious football injury that left him unable to play this year. Deb, a tried and true fan of the sport, pitied the boy who had pinned his hopes on a professional career.
“Rory, I think you’ve got an eye for color,” she said, observing his work. “Most of my co-ops jam the new colors wherever they find a space. But you’ve completely floored me by using your eye and your noggin.”
Rory blushed. “Just doing my job,” he said.
Deb patted him on the back. “You’ll be getting a good report from me. When you’re finished, you can clock out. Do you have a ride home?”
“My ma said to call her and she’d come by,” he replied.
Deb nodded and went to check on the Myer twins, whom she suspected were out back smoking instead of clearing the parking lot of trash.
Rory leaned against the building waiting for his mother to arrive. He wasn’t looking forward to going home. It wasn’t that the Kline household wasn’t a pleasant place to hang out, but for him it was lonely. His mother’s home business of transcribing doctor’s notes from micro-recordings kept her busy in the den all night. Rory’s dad was in Afghanistan serving out a third tour of duty. Normally, Rory would hang around his two friends from football, but ever since his injury, they had grown apart. The boys had practice and socialized mostly with the other members of the team, leaving Rory to drift between other groups of kids, looking for a new place to fit in.
Once you were in high school, finding new friends was difficult. Rory had never been interested in online gaming, nor could the family afford more than the one computer. His mother needed the computer for her busi
ness. He wasn’t smart enough to hang with the scholarship kids, besides many of them still thought of him as a jock. This left him out on the fringes of the established cliques, where he wasn’t ignored exactly, but he wasn’t accepted either.
Lights from a large vehicle assaulted Rory. He shaded his eyes and identified the vintage Hummer H2 as the vehicle Blair and Keith Summerfield drove to school. They were from the north side of Bear Lake, a gated community with its summer home mansions taking up most of the prime real estate along the north shore of the large freshwater lake. This was normally the summer abode for the dot com billionaire’s family, but the recent request for the Summerfield boys to seek another educational facility by the fourth and last private school in the Chicago area had made the vacation home the primary residence for the teens and their housekeeper. Mother and Father would stay in town, keeping a watch on their boys via daily email reports and the occasional phone conversation.
Rory had seen them in the halls flanked by other rich kids. They acted like they owned the small community school. If tax dollars spent was any indication, they probably did.
Keith slid out of the passenger side of the H2. He walked towards the entrance and stopped when he saw Rory. “Hey, hardware man, do they sell paintball pellets inside?”
“Nah, closest place is the Walmart on Route 59,” he said. “But if you want quality stuff, try the Gander Mountain in Geneva.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem, that’s what I’m here for, helpful hardware man that I am,” Rory said.
Keith nodded and got back in the Hummer. They backed out and left the parking lot, rolling over parking stops just because they could.
Rory’s mom had a near collision with the vehicle but managed to maneuver around the monster in time. She pulled up and waited for her son. Rory watched the tail lights of the H2 fade away before he got in the car. He didn’t want the Summerfield boys to see him traveling in his mother’s Chevrolet Spark.
“Did you see that gas guzzler?” his mother asked. “There ought to be a law against them,” she said, hoping to illicit a conversation between her and her son.
Rory just grunted.
“How was work?”
“Alright.”
“Are you hungry? We can stop at the sub shop…”
“How about Taco Bell?” Rory interrupted.
“Fine, but if you get a stomachache, don’t come crying to me,” she said and pulled out of the space.
Rory didn’t want Taco Bell, but a meal at the sub shop with his mother was too embarrassing to deal with right now. He thought he may have scored some points with Keith and didn’t want to undo it with the mommy’s boy tag. A drive-thru meal eaten in the privacy of his house with his mother was one thing, dining in public was another.
His mother was talking about something or another. Rory wasn’t paying attention. His mind was on paintball.
Chapter Twenty
“Any activity?” Burt asked Denny Seaver.
“No it’s been quiet,” he reported. “Do you think we’ll be in for more pranks?”
“We don’t feel this is the case. But if you experience anything paranormal, please call us right away. We’re only an hour away,” Burt assured him.
They concluded the phone call with niceties. Burt put the portable phone down on the desk and pulled up the file on the investigation.
“I take it they were pleased,” Cid said over his shoulder.
Burt turned around and looked at him. “I think that the way things went at the school reunion gave the neighbors a sense of closure.”
“Mia’s not sure it’s over.”
“I’m not either, but until something happens, if something happens, we have to let this one go and move on to other cases.”
Cid nodded. “What’s next on the agenda?”
“The wedding,” Burt said. “I’m trying to follow up on leads to the mysterious B&B, but so far nothing’s panned out.”
“Do you want us to go ahead and produce the Rosemont as a separate haunt? We could include some of the gala footage,” he suggested.
“I’m worried about getting permission from all the hoity-toity participants. Let’s cut some of the research footage in. Audrey will have to come in and do a voiceover once you have it completed, but that should get us an hour show.”
Cid nodded and began to set up for the film editing. Ted was out in the truck taking inventory, a job normally reserved for the low man on the totem pole. Ted however, had a unique filing system that he didn’t want Cid messing with.
Mia decided to take Maggie Mae for a walk. The two of them set out towards the lowland part of the property so they wouldn’t disturb Murphy.
“This here used to be a pond years ago,” Mia explained to the dog who seemed to hang on her every word. “But when they built the dam, the water dried up. Beware, it still has a tiny spring that exerts itself enough to give you a good soaker if you step in that area.” Mia crouched down and pointed the area out to Maggie.
They walked slowly, Mia allowing Maggie enough lead to investigate without getting herself into trouble. Once the dog was trained, she would allow her off the lead, but until Maggie knew the difference between road and meadow, Mia would keep her on a leash.
“I’m having this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach,” she admitted to the dog. “I think it has something to do with stopping in Sentinel Woods the other night.”
Maggie looked up at Mia and pondered what the human was babbling about. But since it didn’t have the word bacon or suppertime in it, she lost interest quickly.
Murphy followed Mia at a discrete distance. He didn’t want to intrude on her time with the small dog, but he sensed that Mia was unsettled. He knew better than to press her for answers. She would come to him if she needed his counsel; otherwise it was best if he stayed out of it.
~
Lunchtime was the worst. True, Rory only had to be subjected to lunch at the high school cafeteria two days a week, the other three he spent at the hardware store. But Tuesdays and Thursdays were his day for computer science and life skills classes. His mother allowed him the luxury of buying his meal on these days. He appreciated not having to carry a brown paper sack full of what his mom considered to be healthy food. Finding a place to eat his purchased meal was difficult, considering that each clique seemed to have their own table no matter the amount of participants.
“Hardware Man!”
Rory spun around to see Keith Summerfield waving him over to their table.
He walked slowly over, very aware that most of the other kids had stopped eating and gossiping with their friends in order to watch what was an expected verbal assault of the solitary teen by the rich kids.
“Thanks for the assist on the pellets,” Keith said sliding over, making room for Rory.
Rory put his tray down and climbed over the bench and sat down. The students resumed their previous conversations, disappointed that there would be no show to fuel their discussions later.
“Did you get what you needed?” Rory asked, pushing his spaghetti around the plate. He didn’t want to eat it in front of the boys. They were twirling theirs into a large spoon with grace that Rory assumed you had to be born with.
“Nah, they didn’t have the selection. My brother ordered what we needed on the net, and it’s being shipped overnight. Do you paintball?”
“Haven’t been for a while,” he answered.
“You any good?” Keith continued his interrogation.
“I’m alright. My dad taught me some things.”
“You’re dad’s a solider?” Blair asked.
“He’s in Afghanistan,” Rory said, leaving out that his dad was a paperwork jockey in a supply unit.
“Cool. I bet he taught you how to properly flank a target,” Keith said.
Rory just nodded, only faintly aware what flank meant.
“Keith’s not bad, but because of his bonus balls, we tend to run out of paint,” Blair complained.
“It’s best to conserve your paint,” Rory said lamely, hoping no one would call him on it.
“Words to live by, Hardware Man,” Keith said.
“What are you doing this weekend?” Blair asked.
“I’ve got the leaves to clear out of the side yard, but aside from that I’m free.”
“You don’t have to be helpful Hardware Man?” Keith asked.
“No, I only do that to get out of school during the week,” Rory lied.
“Give the infant your phone number. We’re paintballing Saturday. I take it you have your own equipment?”
“Some cheap stuff, but it gets the job done,” Rory lied again.
“We’ll call you and tell you where we’re meeting up. Wear something warm and bring some food. It’s going to be long day,” Blair instructed.
“Will do.”
Blair got up and the others followed his lead. Soon the table was empty except for Rory and his ice cold spaghetti. He mentally added up his two bank accounts and weighed the cost of a paintball gun. He only had a day to get the weapon, dirty it up, and figure out how to use it. He’d call in sick tomorrow after his mother left on her rounds to pick up her work. Rory smiled to himself before he pushed a forkful of the sauced noodles in his mouth. While he slurped up the strays, he thought he may have found a group to hang with finally.
~
Mia breezed into the store, bringing with her the fresh autumn air. Deb turned around and smiled, recognizing her.
“Well, if it isn’t the proud owner of the most delightful puppy.”
Mia lifted an eyebrow. “The delightful puppy has chewed up a sofa cushion and has earned herself jail time. Ted’s building a Maggie-proof barrier,” she informed the smiling clerk. “He sent me for some long springs…”
Deb nodded. “Aisle four, next to the screen door parts,” she informed her. “Let me ring Mr. Darby’s purchases up first, and I’ll show you.”
Mia, sensing the woman wanted to talk with her, decided to loiter around the front of the store studying the autumn displays of fertilizers. Deb had always been kind to Mia even when she was persona non grata with the other women in the town. Deb always made a point of putting an arm around her, showing the other women you couldn’t catch what Mia had. She and Tom’s mother Susan had made life in Big Bear Lake more tolerable for the sensitive.
