The day was off to a rough start.
Francine trudged downstairs and found Charlie eating his daily helping of cereal in the kitchen. She ruffled his hair. “Morning, Bubba.”
“Morning, Aunt Francine.”
The phone rang.
Charlie perked up. “Ooh, can I answer it?”
“It’s okay, I got it,” Francine said. “Hello?”
“Francine!” Ellie’s voice crackled through on a terrible connection.
“Hey! How’s the trip? It’s your Mom,” she added in a whisper to Charlie.
“Great! Paris is beau…never wanna leave. Miss…so much! How’s everything going?”
“So far so good. Plenty of veggies at every meal.” Francine winked, and Charlie signaled locked lips.
“And?” Ellie said leadingly. “How are you doing?”
“Good. Mostly good.”
She wanted to tell Ellie that Laura Jean was a saint, Del was a creep, and her self-therapy had been derailed by a gone-nowhere romantic prospect and a suspiciously slaughtered farm animal. But Charlie didn’t need to hear all that while he browsed the back of his cereal box.
“Francine?…I’m losing you…”
“Ellie?” Less and less of Ellie’s voice made it over the Atlantic, and Francine finally gave up. “The house is on fire. I crashed the car. Charlie’s smoking much more crack than usual.”
“You’re garbling hon…hate Parisian phones! We…soon…love...”
The valiantly struggling connection died.
“What’s crack?” Charlie immediately asked.
“Nothing. Forget I said that. Go ahead, go do your thing.”
Charlie raced out the back door and the phone rang again.
“Ellie? Can you hear me?”
“Francine?” The voice on the other end of the line was crystal clear, and definitely not Ellie’s.
The breath in Francine’s chest grew stale. “Ben?”
“Hi. I stopped by the salon today, and the girls said you were visiting your sister. I still had her number, so I thought I’d call.”
Francine had lost the power of speech. She put a hand on the counter to steady herself.
“I hope it’s okay that I called,” Ben said.
“How are you?” Francine spouted finally.
“Good, real good. Things at work are busy, but everything else is going great. A lot of people still ask about you.”
“That’s great,” she forced. “Tell everyone I say hello.”
“I will, I will. I, uh…I don’t know if you heard, but I’m engaged.”
“Yeah, I heard.” Francine gave a short laugh. “Congrats.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks. Um, how’s everything with you?”
“Just visiting my sister right now. But you already knew that. Enjoying a little vacation, y’know? I’ll be back in San Francisco soon. Everything else is…the same.”
Francine tried to think of something, anything, to say. She felt like a debt of a person, completely devoid of experience and identity. What could she offer up against “engaged”? What had she done in the time since she and Ben had parted, except degrade?
“I, um…” Ben faltered again. “Katie’s pregnant.”
And there it was: the final prong in the engaged-married-baby trident pushed neatly into the soft of Francine’s heart.
“That’s really neat,” she managed, much too casually for her words to be believable. “I actually have to go, though. Thanks for calling.”
“I wanted to ask—”
But Francine had already hung up, gripping the counter even tighter as the room funhouse-mirrored on her.
Why? Why would he call to tell her that? To keep her from hearing it from someone else? To gloat? Had he sniffed the coastal air that day and decided that somewhere, two thousand miles away, his ex-wife was doing just a little too well for his liking?
She’d moved to San Francisco for cosmetology school, and had been looking forward to an exciting new adventure in an exciting new city. And it had been fun, part of the time. But eventually she began to feel lonely, and lost.
Then she met someone. A California native with a bright smile who came in for haircuts a little more often than necessary. He had a solid job in finance, putting together money for new high rises. Construction was booming in San Francisco, which was great news for him and his co-workers. They were nice enough, she supposed, though they only ever called her “the hairdresser,” even after the wedding. Maybe because Ben never corrected them. But she tried to grin and bear it, because the next step of their relationship was the one she’d been looking forward to most.
Francine had never been baby crazy, exactly. They’d always talked about having kids “someday,” and that had been fine. But it soon became clear that Ben’s “someday” was much more indefinite than hers, some undefined future point they never reached before the marriage crumbled and revealed two very different people.
But now his “someday” had come. He was going to have a baby. But not with Francine.
And where was she? Trying to solve a pet murder. Being felt up by geriatric gearheads and suffering the cold stares of a mail-order bride she’d never even met.
Francine could feel the emotional venom building inside of her. She wasn’t going to run crying into Laura Jean’s bathroom again or play phone tag with Ellie, but she had to do something. The answer was obvious.
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
Ajax ran over and flopped onto his back at Francine’s feet as she walked up the driveway.
“Hello, hello!” She scratched the dog’s belly. “Oh, and I guess hi to you too, Roland.”
“Good afternoon, Francine.” Roland jabbed his shovel into one of the many piles of mulch that had been dumped around his tidy cottage. “Everything all right?”
“Yep, just out for a walk.”
A cheek-packed squirrel, completely ignored by Ajax, scampered past Francine’s feet and up a nearby oak.
“The squirrels are going crazy for this stuff. What is it?”
“I pay a local nut company to dump their leftover pecan shells on my lawn, then I spread them out as mulch. Some nuts are inevitably missed in the shelling process, and so it is a major holiday on the woodland creature calendar. I find the work very freeing, though I wish I’d not scheduled it for the days following Down South Punch.”
“Oh yeah, I had some of that stuff. Maybe we should both stick to beer next time.”
“I’ve never cared for the taste. Normally a strong drink causes me no ill, though on occasion I’ll have a sip too many.”
“Yikes,” Francine sympathized. “I’d like to go all my days without knowing what a hangover feels like in my eighties. It may surprise you to learn I’ve overdone it on one or two occasions myself.”
“Nonsense. A lady always drinks exactly as much as she intends. It falls to her company to adjust accordingly.”
“Everything you say could be embroidered on a pillow, I swear.”
Roland smiled as a squirrel scampered up and stole a pecan from his shovel. “Usually there are quite a few more of our little friends here. Something’s thinned them out this summer.”
“I doubt it’s canine intimidation,” Francine said, as the furry bandits continued their raid around a sleeping Ajax. “Want a hand with the mulch?”
Roland tsked. “I don’t intend to have a woman do my labors.”
“The twenty-first century is damn near here, Roland. We’re gonna have to get that attitude right. How about I shovel, you spread?”
“Yes, boss.” He handed her the shovel.
Francine began to heave mulch from the pile Roland had been working on and was surprised at how quickly she was out of breath. Too many cigarettes lately.
“Did you have to talk with the Chief yesterday?” she asked. “About Brownie?”
“Indeed I did. The poor beast.”
“Looked like she went quick, at least.”
Roland winced. “Let us not add weight to ou
r task with any unnecessary, heavy conversation. Tell me, dear. How is your heart?”
“You think that’s a lighter topic? Well. Other than running from the barbeque in tears, I’d say I’m pretty stable.”
“I admit, I witnessed your urgent departure. Was it our bad apple who antagonized you further?”
“Lori?”
“Magdalena.”
“Oh. No, she was fine at the barbeque. It was just a classic ghosts-of-my-romantic-past kind of thing. My ex is getting married soon. I just found out he’s having a baby too.”
“I see.” Roland nodded solemnly. “Troubling, no doubt. Though if a darkness in your past grows yet darker, of what concern should it be to you now?”
“Come on, it’s not that easy to just drop the past. I’d down a cement mixer of green olives if it meant getting Ben’s ghost out of my head, but part of living seems to be collecting lots of stuff you wish you’d never seen or said or gone through.” She flung a load of mulch on a row of cornflowers with a little too much force.
“And yet we demand of ourselves that we remain bright and positive,” Roland said. “Whatever wisdom you believe I can give, it will be only words. Easy for me to say, difficult for you to do.”
“I know I’m taking a long time with this, but I wish people would just admit that some injuries make you weaker, and some failures don’t come with a baked-in lesson.”
Roland stopped working and indicated for Francine to do the same, then inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. “Let us abandon the theoretical for the moment. Breathe, listen, and feel.”
Francine followed his lead and closed her eyes. As her breathing slowed, she felt the wet heat on her skin, heard the summer drone of bullfrogs and the liquid grind of bike chains. The children of Hawthorn Woods were in the full flow of midsummer, thinking neither too far forward, nor too far back.
She enjoyed a long exhale and opened her eyes, thinking much more clearly than before. “I thought I’d maybe met someone interesting. I was excited. That hasn’t happened in a long time.”
“But it is not meant to be?”
“He lied to me.” She stirred the mulch with her shovel tip. “That was Ben’s favorite hobby, so I guess you could say it’s a sore spot for me. I just thought it would be nice to underestimate someone for once.”
“Mmm.” Roland leaned pensively on his rake.
“I don’t do manual labor for ‘mmm,’ Roland,” Francine teased.
“Cars travel at high speeds, in completely opposite directions, separated only by a few inches of yellow paint. Roads intersect and we pass through, trusting others will stop based on the hue of a light. I do not drive myself, but perhaps there lies the lesson.”
“Meaning?”
“We live perilously, within small margins of error, and somehow still survive. The way we accomplish this is with understanding.”
Francine felt slightly irked he hadn’t unquestionably taken her side. “You’re saying I should just let the lie go?”
“Perhaps it is the case that this ‘lie’ is nothing more than a simple confusion. It would be a tragedy for a misunderstanding to disallow what might otherwise be.”
“See, though, it’s all about honesty for me. If he’d lie about something that’s not important, you can be damn sure he’ll lie about something that is. Secrets have weight. That’s why people write tell-all autobiographies and murderers secretly want to get caught.”
Roland looked at her strangely.
“Surely your new interest is guilty of nothing as heinous as murder.”
“I don’t think Bruno killed anyone. I’m just saying, truth is patient and there when you need it. And you always do.”
“So.” Roland smiled and went back to raking. “It is Mr. Bruno who’s caught your attention?”
“You met him?”
“Very briefly, on the day of his arrival. I said hello while I was walking Ajax. I found him to be odd, but pleasant.”
“He is. Both of those things. I don’t know, maybe I’m way too sensitive about it all.” She carried a load of mulch to the base of a spruce tree and stopped to catch her breath.
“Perhaps a period of silent work, in consideration of the heat,” Roland suggested. “I must warn you, however, on our next meeting I will endeavor to pull at larger thorns.”
“I have thorns?”
“You are still wounded. But take comfort in the fact that wounds can have tremendous value.”
“Hell of a way to be rich,” Francine grumbled.
They worked in silence, occasionally stopping to watch the question marks of squirrel tails sailing the grasses around a snoring Ajax. Soon all the spruce trees and flower beds were uniformly dressed with pecan mulch. Roland brought out big glasses of iced tea which they wasted no time in drinking as they admired their work. After promising she’d come back soon to complain about her love life again, Francine headed home, feeling physically exhausted but mentally uplifted.
Wanting to avoid any chance of running into Del, she took the long way back and didn’t stop until her feet reached the penny-brown stain at the bottom of Magdalena’s driveway.
Someone had tried to wash the blood away, but the dark shape and its sour, metallic odor remained. It seemed part of that night wasn’t ready to leave just yet.
Francine looked up and saw Bruno watching her through a window of his green house. Should she go talk to him? Should she—
A dark shadow raced across the stain as Magdalena rushed into Francine and punched her on her right ear.
“You stay away!” Magdalena screamed. “Stay away, slut!”
Francine shielded her face, seeing only flashes of pixie cut as the flurry of punches continued.
“Hey. Hey!” Bruno’s voice grew louder as he ran over and sliced an arm between the women. One of Magdalena’s wild fists popped Bruno on the nose and she backed off in surprise, breathing heavily.
“Stay away from my husband! Understand, slut? Stay away or get hurt!” She stormed back up the driveway and slammed her front door.
“Jesus. What the hell was that?” Bruno put a hand on Francine’s shoulder to steady her. “Are you okay?”
“She’s nuts! She thinks I’m trying to steal her husband or something. I’m sure he’s quite happy with his purchase!” Francine yelled up the driveway.
The adrenaline brought on by the attack subsided, and she remembered she didn’t like Bruno. The thought seemed to
occur to him at the same moment, and he quickly pulled his hand away from her shoulder.
“How…how are you?” he asked.
Francine’s cheerfulness from her latest Roland meeting had been completely punched away. “Hmm, how am I? Well, let’s see. In the last twenty-four hours I had my tit grabbed, I got a call from my ex just so he could tell me how amazing his life is, and I just got punched in the ear, which I now know is a very painful fucking place to get punched.”
She was beginning to walk away when a piece of relevant Roland Gerber advice glittered in her mind.
It would be a tragedy for a misunderstanding to disallow what might otherwise be.
She stopped and turned.
“Okay, Bruno. This is a moment you won’t get back. Here and now is your last chance. Why’d you lie to me about who you are? And don’t tell me I’m making it all up. Don’t make me think I’m crazy.”
Bruno wiped blood from his nose. “I want to tell you. I just…”
“Then tell me. I liked you, Bruno. I thought we—”
“Is it too early for a drink?” he asked.
Chapter 17
I enjoy detective or mystery stories.
[ x ] TRUE [ ] FALSE
Francine followed Bruno down narrow stairs covered in carpet the color of Barbicide. Given the context of walking into a near-stranger’s basement, she tried not to think about how much the brand of blue, comb-disinfecting liquid also sounded like the murder of a hair stylist.
Nose plugged with twin tufts of toilet paper, Bru
no passed a pool table and disappeared behind a nautical-themed bar bathed in the light of a neon Budweiser sign.
“I think the previous owners kept a bottle down here somewhere,” he said. “They left a lot of teddy bear stuff in the kitchen too. They were obsessed with teddy bears.”
Francine took a seat on one of the cracked-leather bar stools and readjusted the bag of frozen peas she was holding to her ear. Bruno reappeared from behind the polished dark wood of the bar with two dusty highball glasses and a half-full bottle of Cutty Sark scotch.
“You might wanna rinse those out—” she started, but Bruno was already pouring into the glasses.
He slid a glass of dusty scotch across the bar, held up his own, and exhaled deeply.
“I trust you. You trust me. Agreed?”
Francine clinked the glasses and kept her eyes on him as they drank, feeling the dry scotch cut through the pain in her slowly-numbing ear.
“I’m not a writer.”
“No shit, Bruno.”
“I’m a teacher. You were right. The writer story was because I needed an excuse to be here.”
“So what’s the real reason?”
“I’m…kind of a detective.”
“Holy shit.” Francine looked at him skeptically. “Seriously?”
“Not officially. I don’t work for a police department, and I’m not licensed or anything. It’s more like freelance work.”
“A hobby.”
“Yeah, I guess. I haven’t been doing it long, and I’m not great at it, but even I know that when you’re working a case you can’t just go around telling everybody about it. So that’s why I lied.” He stopped abruptly, awaiting her judgement.
“You’re really a teacher?”
“Ninth and tenth grade history at St. Anastasia High School in the Bronx. Go Eagles.”
Francine thought it over. “So, what? Paper grading by day, crime fighting by night?”
“I pick up cold cases, stuff the cops have moved on from. Sometimes a new look or beginner’s luck can crack a case. It happens.”
“Holy shit,” Francine repeated.
“I pick a case and do my research during the school year.” He pulled the twists of toilet paper from his nose. “Over summer break, I hit the road in my car and investigate in person. I have to be back in New York by mid-July to prep for the school year. If I haven’t figured out the case by then, I move on.”
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