by Annie Knox
“Oh, Rena.”
“I was lucky, I guess, because the judge stayed the sentence, so I was released after the plea hearing. By then, Sherry had gone back to Merryville, so I ended up selling plasma to make the money for a bus ticket home.”
I shook my head. “I can’t believe she dragged you into something so crazy.”
She shrugged and let her gaze drift away from mine. “Home was really bad. Dad had lost his job and gone completely off the rails. Somehow I’d decided to fight fire with drunken fire, so I was drinking a lot, too. I didn’t have a job or any hope of a future. Sherry was like my anchor. She made me feel good about myself when everything else in my life was complete crap.”
“Still. You were always such a good judge of character. I can’t believe you didn’t see what she was really like.”
Rena didn’t move, but there was a new and sudden tension in her posture. “Love is blind,” she said, her lips barely moving to form the words.
“Love?” I blurted the question, the word sounding unnaturally loud and shrill.
She flinched, but didn’t answer.
“What do you mean, ‘love’?” My mouth was moving faster than my brain, and the instant the words were out I wanted to suck them back in.
“I loved her. Or I thought I did.” She raised her head to look me in the eyes, her own pooled with unshed tears. “I’m gay.”
“Oh.”
She snorted a surprised laugh. “‘Oh’? That’s the best you can do? I’m coming out to you after nearly thirty years of friendship, and I get an ‘oh’?”
I rolled my eyes. “Cut me some slack. This is pretty big news.”
Her impish smile faded. “Are you mad?”
“A little.”
“Oh.”
I reached out to grab her hand. She tried to snatch it back, but I held firm. “Dork. I’m not mad that you’re gay. I’m mad that you’re just now telling me.”
“Guess we didn’t share everything about our love lives,” she said pointedly, a not so subtle reminder that she’d learned about Sean’s declaration of love from Sean and not from me.
“Fair enough,” I said. “But I’m entitled to a little surprise here. I mean, what about all those horrible boys you dated? Like Buster Knowlin. Why on earth would you go out with a sleazebag like Buster Knowlin if you didn’t even like guys?”
She laughed abruptly. “God, I’d forgotten all about Third-Base Buster. I nearly broke his arm when he tried to put the moves on me.”
“Third-Base Buster,” I snorted.
“I wasn’t really interested in any guys. I guess I figured if I sampled enough, eventually one would strike my fancy. But it never happened. I never felt that soul-deep tug until I met Sherry Harper.”
She laughed again, only a hint of bitterness there. “And she pinned me with a felony and abandoned me miles from home. I can really pick ’em.”
“She wasn’t all bad,” I said. “She sure did love that guinea pig of hers.”
Rena and I fell silent, staring at each other in sudden horror.
“Dear heavens,” I muttered. “Where’s Gandhi?”
CHAPTER
Eight
Rena and I crawled around the alley on our hands and jammie-covered knees, dodging snowflakes the size of silver dollars and searching for that guinea pig for nearly an hour. While we inched across the bricks, Packer pranced and danced around the alley, snuffling his nose into the occasional crack or crevice, doing what dogs do in the crazy, scatterbrained way dogs do it. The snow falling was the heavy, wet kind that clung to your hair and eyelashes and then melted in icy trickles down your back. By morning it would be nothing but a layer of slush on the sidewalks, gone in the afternoon sun, but that night it was an absolute nuisance. To add to our misery, every few minutes the alleyway would suddenly go dark, and one of us would have to stand up and wave our arms to trip the motion sensors on the security lights.
All our crazy jumping up and down and searching did no good at all.
In the end, Packer found Gandhi’s baby sling between a stack of pallets and the back wall of Xander’s Spin Doctor, but the pig himself was in the wind.
My heart broke to think of poor little Gandhi trying to make his way in the fast-approaching Minnesota winter, trying to stand his ground against the occasional raccoon that made its way into town in search of food during the lean months. I only hoped his Andean ancestors had given him the genes to withstand the cold. Or the good sense to come out of hiding when the going got tough.
Rena, exhausted and totally depressed—and apparently not processing the significance of the sling itself—said good night and trudged back up to my apartment.
“I’ll be right behind you,” I said.
But before I followed her, I clambered over the pallets to carefully extricate the baby sling and bring it into the shop.
My rational mind knew I should hand the sling over to the police immediately, but my emotions were all a jumble. While we’d put most of the hurt behind us, I was still smarting a bit from the tiff I’d had with Rena earlier, still reeling at the notion there had been this part of her life that was closed to me, and still harboring a little annoyance that in her hour of need she’d called on Sean to help her. Granted, he was the one with the law degree, but still . . . I wanted to be the great friend who saved the day. Dizzy Izzy to the rescue!
If I’m being brutally honest, I was also afraid that Rena had gotten a text from Sherry that night, and I didn’t want to be the one who turned damning evidence over to the authorities. If I handed them the sling containing Sherry’s phone and Rena’s number was on the call list, I’d feel like a traitor.
So despite that still, small voice saying, “Call nine-one-one,” I carefully reached into the slightly funky baby sling and started pulling out its contents, laying them out on the red folk-art table in the barkery. There was the usual guinea pig detritus (chewed tissues, dried nubs of carrot, some commercial guinea pig bedding) and the usual person stuff (a few packets of soy sauce from La Ming’s, three gnawed tubes of lip balm, and a scrap of cellophane-backed yellow paper with some Chinese characters picked out in a deep red). I guessed that the last was from a bag of that awful ginseng Sherry made me eat. Poor, poor Gandhi.
But there were also a few items that struck me as particularly interesting: one of the bright green paper plates we’d used to serve snacks at the grand opening event that evening; a crumpled receipt for two dinners at the Mission (a prix fixe locavore restaurant in nearby Lac du Chien); a dog-eared book that appeared to be about wetlands conservation; and a half-chewed napkin from the Silent Woman, the name of the bar and its trademark headless female form in silhouette against a stark white background.
What I didn’t find was even more interesting. I didn’t find Sherry’s phone.
• • •
“Do you want the bad news or the worse news?” Rena asked as I poured us coffee to help fuel the postparty cleaning binge we were about to undertake on only three hours’ sleep.
Packer, lying limp across his dog bed, opened his mouth in a huge and vocal yawn, followed by a wet little snort.
I jerked my thumb in his direction. “What he said.” I huffed, something between a sigh and a laugh. “Seriously, after last night, I don’t think I can take the worse news. Let’s stick with plain old bad.”
“Val seems to have picked some pockets. I found a necklace, an earring, and a wallet in her hammock.”
“Dang it. I already returned one wallet last night. She’s such a devious creature.”
Rena shrugged. “She likes pretty things. Can you blame her?”
I handed Rena her mug of coffee, pale with cream and thick with sugar. Jinx, lured by the siren scent of dairy, leapt down from her spot on top of the armoire, rattling the glass front of the display cabinet when her impressive weight hit the oak floor. She insinuated herself into Rena’s lap and nosed into her mug. Rena pushed away the coffee and twisted Jinx around so they were nose to nose.
“Why can’t you seem to remember that you’re lactose intolerant? No dairy for you, big girl.”
I sipped my own coffee—black as the midnight sky—and then took a look at the loot Rena handed over. The necklace was Taffy’s, one her sister, Jolly, had made her for Christmas last year, and I knew she’d be missing it soon. Thankfully, the tea shop was just down the street, and I could return it to her the minute she opened for business.
The earring was actually mine, one I’d lost weeks ago during the renovation. I made a mental note to give Val a bit of chicken jerky as a thank-you for finding it for me.
The wallet was black, a fine-grained leather trifold wallet like the kind my dad carried in the back pocket of his pants. I flipped it open, but it didn’t have a special pocket for a driver’s license, so I had no choice but to start digging through the bits of paper stuffed into the card holders.
I found the ID quickly, tucked behind a well-loved customer loyalty card for Harmon’s Donuts, one of my favorite treats from my days in Madison. It appeared Hal Olson was only one punch away from a free dozen. Lucky guy.
“Holy cats,” I muttered. “Of all the people Val could have picked on, it had to be one of the richest, most powerful men in town with one of the witchiest wives.”
“Sorry,” Rena said. “You want me to return it?”
I gave her a quick once-over. Her hair was standing straight up, and she was wearing a pair of my old overalls rolled up to the knees, one of Ingrid’s plaid shirts, candy-striped knee socks, and her Doc Martens. She looked like an extra from an eighties music video. I couldn’t see her getting into the Olson’s gated community, much less past their front door.
“No, that’s okay. I’ll do it. And what’s the worse news?”
Rena held up an envelope. “You got mail! A notice from the zoning board that there’s been a complaint about the use of this location as a business. Apparently the neighborhood is zoned residential, and all the other businesses have zoning variances.”
Originally, the area that is now downtown Merryville was nothing but houses—big summer retreats for Chicago and Minneapolis businessmen and their big Midwestern families—with a courthouse smack in the middle. Now, the giant houses on two long blocks of Oak and Maple had been turned into shops and offices. This new shopping district was bordered by Alder Street to the north, the courthouse (across Oak from the Spin Doctor and the Grateful Grape) to the east, Thornapple Avenue to the south, and Dakota Park (across Maple from Trendy Tails and Taffy’s Happy Leaf Tea Shoppe) to the west.
“Are you kidding me? Ingrid ran the Gift Haus here for decades. No one ever complained about her needing a variance.”
“Yeah, well, now someone’s in a tizzy about it. And,” she continued, “if I had to guess, I’d say that one”—she pointed in the general direction of the Greene Brigade, the rare book and military memorabilia store run by Richard Greene—“is the one who’s stirring up trouble.”
I sighed. I knew Richard was annoyed that there would be all manner of animals traipsing in and out of my store, and worried about the noise disturbing the dusty hush of his business, but to pick an actual legal battle? It was just too much.
Rena suddenly chuckled. “Good thing I now have a lawyer on retainer,” she said. “I’ll get Sean to look into it.”
Normally I would have balked at the thought of turning to Sean for help, but under the circumstances I would take what I could get.
“Great. You call Sean, and I’ll go return all of Val’s ill-gotten booty.”
• • •
Pris and Hal Olson lived in Quail Run, hands down the spendiest neighborhood in Merryville. The houses all dated to the mid-1980s, when sleepy Merryville transformed, seemingly overnight, from a getaway for hunters and suburban families with fifth-wheel campers into a weekend retreat for wealthy refugees from Chicago and Minneapolis . . . sort of the Hamptons of the Midwest.
The Olson house was a formal French Provincial mansion of peach-colored stucco with a steep hipped roof and hedges trimmed into tall spirals on either side of the towering front door. The overnight snowfall had clung to every bare branch of the majestic oaks in the front yard and limned the exquisite architectural details, giving the house the look of a fairy-tale castle.
As befitted a house of its grandeur, the doorbell chimed the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth, the deep gonging resonating through the heavy oak door.
Hal answered the door in his work “uniform.” As the owner of the largest RV park in all of Minnesota and the Dakotas, Hal Olson spent most days in a golf shirt (today, a manly hunter green) tucked into a pair of wrinkle-resistant khaki pants, with a pair of loafers that perfectly matched his belt and a leather bomber jacket for walking the lot in cold weather—business casual with the emphasis on the casual, the perfect look to appeal to sportsmen and retirees while still maintaining the upper hand with them.
His expression was frazzled, like he had someplace he’d rather be, something he’d rather be doing, but he quickly manufactured a smile for me.
“Izzy! This is sure a surprise. Come on in.”
I hesitated a beat, because really I just needed to hand Hal his wallet back, but part of me was curious to see the inside of the palatial house.
I stepped into the travertine-tiled foyer, careful to keep my slushy shoes from touching the spendy-looking Oriental carpet. The interior of Prissy’s house was as cold and determinedly neutral as she herself was: a model home decor ranging from white to ecru to a muted beige with a few burgundy accent pieces all straight out of an interior design catalog.
The bottom steps of one side of the iron-railed double staircase were littered with yard signs and posters: OLSON FOR MAYOR, GOOD FOR GROWTH.
“I see the rumors are true,” I said.
He looked startled for an instant, then laughed as he followed my line of sight. “Oh, yes indeed. I just filed the paperwork yesterday, so it’s official: I’ll be on the ballot next April. Hope I can count on your vote.”
“‘Good for growth’?” I hedged.
“My platform’s based on economic development. Over the years, the tourist industry has grown, but the town has been passive, just let it happen. We need to take charge, live up to our potential. We need to make the most of our assets.”
“Which assets?” While the new business owner side of me liked the idea of bringing more people to Merryville, another part of me liked our sleepy little town just the way it was.
“We’ve got a booming business district, your own little store included,” Hal said with a patronizing smile. “We should capitalize on that. We need to host a festival of some sort, maybe work on bringing in events. And we need to make the most of our beautiful surroundings, including the lake.”
“Hal? Who’s there?” Prissy’s voice drifted down from the second floor to fill the vaulted-ceilinged space.
“Izzy!” Hal boomed. “Izzy McHale.”
I heard a faint gasp and the rustle of her scurrying through an unseen hall, but by the time she reached the landing above the foyer she was calm, even reserved. She wore a fine-gauge twin set of the palest lilac with perfectly pressed gray wool trousers, and her hair was upswept in a flawless French twist. Incongruously, she held a garden trowel in one hand. Once again, Kiki lay draped over her shoulder.
“Izzy dear, we read in this morning’s Gazette that you had quite an eventful night last night.”
“Yes,” I muttered, feeling a little sick just thinking about it. “It was pretty horrible.”
“Have they figured out how she died? I mean she was just so tragically young.”
“No. It looked like maybe she had a seizure or a stroke or something. But I bet they won’t know more for a while.”
“Her family must be devastated,” Pris said as she completed her descent to the foyer. “I’ll have to call on Virginia later today.”
“I didn’t know you were friends with Virginia Harper.” They seemed an unlikely pair, the pageant princess and the hippi
e-turned-businesswoman.
Pris gestured with her trowel. “Garden club. We’re meeting to plant bulbs outside the courthouse later this morning. We really should have done this a couple of weeks ago, so I’m not sure they’ll take. But I doubt Virginia will join us under the circumstances.”
Hal raised a finger as though he were going to interject, but just as Pris turned to face him, Kiki got a look at me.
The cat screamed.
Startled, Pris dropped the animal. I expected the cat to tear out of the room, to run and hide, but instead she stood her ground. She angled her body to the side, hunched up her back, and puffed up all her fur to make herself look bigger. With her ears flat against her head, she licked her lips and emitted this strange sound somewhere between a cluck and a meow, a sound that cycled up and down the register like a siren.
Pris looked from me to the cat and then back to me.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen her behave this way. She’s usually just the sweetest cat.”
I glanced at Hal and caught him rolling his eyes. His expression, the scratch on the back of his hand, and the bandage on his finger all suggested that Kiki wasn’t “just the sweetest cat” around Hal, either.
“I’m so sorry, Pris. I usually get along just fine with animals.” Other than that nightmare incident with my friend’s peeing dog, I really did get along with animals. “Maybe Kiki smells Packer on my clothes?”
“That must be it,” Hal said. “Pris is always saying we can’t have a dog because it would upset Kiki’s delicate constitution.”
“Now, Hal . . .” Pris began.
A rhythmic horping sound cut her off. We all directed our attention to Kiki, who had dropped into a crouch and was convulsing slowly as she tried to cough up something.
“Oh dear,” Pris said.
“Not on the damn rug,” Hal grumbled.
They both stepped toward the cat as though they might somehow intervene, but I’d witnessed enough cats upchucking to know that there was no way to halt the process once it had begun. With one final heave and a loud whluck, Kiki expelled a small mound of kibble and a red string.
