by Diane Kelly
“What’s all that?” Zane asked, standing in front of the dresser, his eyes roaming over the items we’d spread there.
“It’s your new wardrobe.” Savannah and I grabbed Zane, who wiggled and giggled while we dressed him up in the clothes. By the time we’d finished with him, Savannah and I were giggling ourselves.
Braden walked in to see what all the fuss was about, took one look at his baby brother in the lace bra, and did an about-face, marching out of the room.
While Savannah freed Zane from the bra in which he’d somehow hopelessly tangled himself, I perused the paperwork that came with the merchandise. Both receipts indicated the purchases had been paid for by a credit card issued in the name of Zane Nichols. The last four digits of the card number were listed as 7653. I looked over at Zane. “You got a credit card, kiddo?”
“Do I got a whattie what?”
Savannah ruffled his hair. “You are a whattie what.” She took the papers from my hand and looked them over, her face scrunching up in concern. “What’s going on, Marnie?”
“Looks like an identity theft situation to me.” I’d heard through law enforcement sources that identity thieves sometimes preyed on children. With no negative credit records and nobody checking their credit histories on a regular basis, kids made easy targets. “I’ll see if I can get some information on the credit card application and any other purchases. Maybe that’ll shed some light on the situation.”
If this was an identity theft situation, who was behind it? Could it be those teenage girls who’d been eyeing Eric at the Parker house? They had been petite, so the clothes would likely be their size, but I had a hard time believing girls so young would know how to pull off a stunt like this. Then again, maybe the younger generation would know how to use technology to their advantage. Or maybe whoever had been partying in Parker’s shed was behind this. But despite having stopped by several times, neither I nor any of the other officers had caught anyone there. Besides, smoking pot and teen sex was one thing, identity theft was another.
I made a mental note to bounce my thoughts off Trey later, see if he had any ideas. With his technological know-how, maybe he could help me figure this thing out.
Savannah and I packed the items carefully back into the boxes to be returned to the store. Whoever ordered the stuff had girlie-girl taste, and no way could Savannah or I ever fit our watermelons into a 32A. I hadn’t worn a bra that small since I was eight years old.
Savannah glanced at her watch. “We need to get going.” She picked a round decorative pillow off the bed and hurled it at the closed bathroom door. They are called throw pillows, after all. “Craig, get your butt out here. The wedding starts in twenty minutes.”
Craig came out of the bathroom wearing a white dress shirt with a striped tie, dress socks, and a saggy pair of underpants.
I whistled. “Ooh, baby.”
He turned around and shook his butt at me in a pathetic imitation of a Chippendale’s dancer. I pulled his pants off the headboard where they were draped and held them out to him. “Who’s getting married?”
Craig took the pants from me and slid one leg, then the other into his pants. “My cousin.”
“Didn’t your cousin get married last summer?”
“That was another cousin.”
Craig came from one of the largest families in the county. He’d been related in one way or another to a quarter of the kids in our graduating class. He’d had to check with his parents before asking a girl out to make sure they weren’t related.
“Trey’s coming over to babysit with me,” I told them.
“Good,” Craig said. “With these boys you’ll need reinforcements.”
Savannah tossed me a roll of wedding wrap, a roll of scotch tape, and a box of Corningware embossed with a grapevine motif. “I forgot to get a bow. Oh, well.”
I set about wrapping the box for her while she added a final coat of lipstick and slid her feet into a pair of low-heeled pumps. When I finished, I handed her the wrapped box and picked up Zane from the bed.
Savannah and Craig rushed to the door. I followed, carrying Zane piggyback style.
“There’s leftover meatloaf in the fridge,” Savannah called over her shoulder as they stepped outside.
“Yucky!” Zane hollered after his mother.
“That goes for me, too,” I said. “Yuck.” If her meatloaf was as bad as I remembered on the first go-round, it would be twice as bad re-warmed.
Savannah walked to their pickup, stopping at the truck’s door. “Order a pizza then.”
“Hooray!” Zane let go of me to throw a hand in the air.
Just after Savannah and Craig backed out in their pickup, Trey pulled into the driveway in Glick’s tank truck, a garbage bag duct-taped over the broken passenger window. My eyes met Trey’s through the windshield and my insides turned to pudding. I’d never met a guy who had quite this effect on me, and I had only three more days with him. Waah.
He climbed out of the truck, walked up, and planted a big, loud kiss on me, making lots of slurping sounds for Zane’s benefit.
“Eww!” shrieked Zane, pushing off me until I put him down. Still shrieking, he ran off into the house.
Trey pulled me to him for a real kiss this time. Warm and wild, no slurping. Just the way I like it.
Trey had brought an old Nintendo 64 gaming system and erector set from his closet at his parent’s house. We spent the afternoon goofing off with the boys, playing Space Invaders, Star Fox, and Mario Party. The games and graphics seemed archaic and simplistic compared to the modern gaming systems, but the boys had a blast. While Braden and Dylan played each other on Trey’s vintage system, he sorted through the stack of games they had for their own gaming console.
Braden glanced over at him. “I wanted to get Felony Frenzy, but Mom wouldn’t let us. She said Marnie would have a cow.”
Felony Frenzy was perverse, offensive, and horrifically brutal, allowing the players to steal at will, torture innocent victims, and kill cops in a variety of horrifically disturbing ways. It was rated M for Mature, but it might as well be for Monster.
I corrected Braden. “I wouldn’t have had a cow, I would’ve had an entire herd of cows. War games are one thing, but you boys don’t need to be playing something that sick and twisted. Nobody does.”
Trey glanced my way. “Studies show that violent video games don’t make people more violent, you know.”
“That’s not the point!” I snapped. “The point is that gratuitous street violence should never be presented as light entertainment. It’s anything but.”
“Uh-oh,” Zane said. “You made Marnie mad.”
Trey cut a sideways glance my way. “That’s okay. I can make her happy again later.”
“Gross,” Braden said, the only one old enough to understand the innuendo.
Trey and I shared a laugh, our minor disagreement immediately forgotten.
When they tired of the games, Trey and the boys designed and built a crane that actually functioned and could lift a rock-hard week-old glazed donut Zane found under the couch.
I applauded their success. “I’m impressed.”
I was indeed impressed, and by more than Trey’s mechanical abilities. He was great with the boys, answering their endless stream of questions, explaining how the various pieces functioned, giving them a mini engineering lesson. He didn’t even get angry when Braden accidentally broke one of the pieces.
While the boys built more contraptions, I washed, dried, and folded Lucas’s laundry, including his bedding. Hopefully, the guy would come home from rehab clean and sober. He might as well come home to a clean house and clean clothes, too.
I phoned in a pizza order, and we ate dinner on paper plates at the backyard picnic table, partly because it was a beautiful fall evening, partly so I could simply hose off the mess when the boys were finished.
After Trey polished off his first slice, I plopped another piece of deep-dish on his plate. “Can I pick your brain a
bout something?”
“Pick away.” He scarfed down the pizza while I detailed the recent events. “The first package was sent to a little girl named Logan Mott and—”
“I know Logan,” Zane interrupted with his mouth full of half-chewed cheese pizza. “She’s in my class at school.”
“That’s nice, sugar,” I said, “but it’s bad manners to interrupt, okay?”
“Okay.”
I turned my attention back to Trey. “Then I found a credit card bill in the Parkers’ mailbox addressed to a little girl named Taylor Heidenheimer—”
Zane interrupted again. “She’s in my class at school, too.”
I pointed a finger at him. “What did I ask you just a minute ago?”
He cocked his head and looked up in thought. “Not to ‘rupt you?”
“Exactly. So why did you do it again?”
“’Cause I’m a kid and I don’t listen good.” He gave me a big grin coated in pizza sauce.
Who could get mad at such a cute face? I chucked him affectionately on the chin.
Trey finished chewing and sat back in his chair. “The identity thief could be someone who has access to the kids’ records, like someone who works at a pediatrician’s office or children’s dentist.”
“But they’d need the kid’s social security numbers to open credit card accounts. I don’t think a doctor’s or dentist’s office would have that information. Not for the kids, anyway. They’d probably just have the parents’ social security numbers since they’re the ones responsible for the bills.”
“True.” He looked up in thought for a moment, then looked back at me. “Someone may have gone phishing.”
“Fishing?”
“Phishing,” he repeated. “Spelled with a PH. It means using the internet to get information from people. Sometimes identity thieves phish for information by sending bogus e-mails to people. They pretend to be a bank or the IRS or a creditor, and they ask for social security numbers, account numbers, stuff like that.”
“But kids in kindergarten don’t have e-mail accounts.”
“Maybe the identity thief contacted the parents for the information. They could have pretended to be from the doctor’s office or social services. Maybe they said they needed the information for insurance purposes.”
“It’s certainly possible.”
Zane cut into our conversation again. “Taylor pulled Logan’s hair at recess on Friday and made her cry. But I gave Logan cuts in line for the slide and that made her happy again.”
I ran a hand down his back. “That was sweet of you, honey.”
At eight-thirty, I wrangled the boys into bed. I read the younger two a couple of bedtime stories, listened to their prayers, and tucked them in with a big noisy kiss on the forehead. Afterward, Trey and I engaged in a wrangling session of our own on the couch. But we kept our kisses quiet so we wouldn’t wake the boys.
The day have given me a glimpse of what life could be with Trey, if only he were staying. My heart ached with a sense of loss at what would never be. Why does love have to be so complicated?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT
Savannah and Craig arrived home at nine-thirty. Craig’s tie was off, his shirt was buttoned wrong, and Savannah’s dress was wrinkled.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You did it in the pickup, didn’t you?”
“Hell, yeah,” Craig admitted shamelessly. “Hard to get any when you’ve got a kid climbing into your bed every night.”
Savannah gave me a hug. “Thanks so much for babysitting, Marn.”
“Happy to do it.”
Trey and I headed out to the driveway, Trey carrying Lucas’s now-clean laundry. Trey dropped the bag on the floor of the tank truck, then gestured at Craig’s pickup. “What say you and me go for it, too?”
I glanced at Savannah’s next-door neighbor, who was rolling a trash can out to the curb, and shook my head.
“Aw, come on. Anyone sees the truck rocking, they’ll assume it’s Savannah and Craig.”
“No. Not here.”
“But somewhere.” Trey’s face became serious as he turned to me and grabbed my hand, entwining his fingers with mine. “We’ve only got two more days together, Marnie.”
I looked into Trey’s eyes. There was desire there, sure, but there was something else, something more. Trey wanted to make a physical connection, but it was clear he felt our emotional connection, too. And, like me, he seemed to sense the connection was about to be lost, like a cell phone signal in a tunnel, and that we needed to make the most of what little time we had left.
Trey raised my hand to his mouth, gently kissing my knuckles, then slipping a finger into his warm, wet mouth, sending a zing of desire to every erogenous zone on my body with his signature foreplay move. He gave my finger a flick with his tongue and offered me a grin that said he knew the effect he had on me. This guy was just as adept at the game of love as he was at video games.
“Dad’s home, so we can’t go to my house,” I thought out loud. Lucas Glick’s place was out of the question. I’d seen his mattress. It was stained and concave in the center. No thanks. An idea came to me a second later and I snapped my fingers. “I know just the place.”
We climbed into the truck and Trey started the engine. “Where to?”
“The station. Bernie doesn’t come in until ten. I’ll let the evening dispatcher off early.”
Trey raced to the station, exceeding the speed limit by at least fifteen miles per hour the entire way, but with Roddy on duty, he wasn’t likely to be caught. Roddy was probably sitting in the parking lot of the Grab-N-Go, eating potato chips and reading the latest issue of Sports Illustrated while pretending to be doing surveillance.
We pulled into the DQHQ and parked under the carport. I hopped down from the truck and Trey followed me inside. Linda sat at the counter, clipping coupons from a stack of women’s magazines.
I introduced Trey to Linda. “Trey’s a computer whiz. He’s going to take a look at the system.”
“I am?”
I shot Trey a look that said shut-up-and-play-along, then turned back to Linda. “It’s going to take an hour or two for him to get the computers up and running. Since I’ll be stuck here anyway, I’d be glad to cover the phones if you want to head out early.”
“Will I still get paid?”
“Of course.”
Linda smirked. She clearly realized I was desperate to find a place with some privacy, but she had the sense to benefit from my lack of options and was willing to let me get on with a conjugal visit in the freezer cell. “Thanks, Captain.” She grabbed her coupons, stuffed them into her oversized purse, and was out the door in a heartbeat.
I stepped up to the glass as the door swung shut and turned the deadbolt, locking myself and Trey inside. I shut off all the lights but a small desk lamp on the service counter next to the phone and grabbed a fresh set of sheets and a blanket from the cabinet.
