Handcuffs in the Heather

by Dale Mayer

  “Okay. Let’s shelve that discussion for another day and enjoy our spaghetti,” she said as she attacked it with vigor.

  “You didn’t bring a spoon?”

  She gave him a shamefaced look and said, “I’ve been eating it without lately.”

  He watched, fascinated, as she wrapped the noodles around on her fork, picked it up, put in her mouth, and then sucked up the rest of the noodles.

  “That’s how a lot of people eat it. You know that, right?”

  She nodded. “And that in itself was very freeing. I always had to have the spoon in order to make it look ladylike,” she said with a laugh. “So something is very satisfying about sticking it to my ex by deliberately not using a spoon.”

  Mack chuckled. “Now we’re back to that you being you matter, whatever that quintessential you really is.”

  “I don’t even know who she is,” Doreen said sadly. “I feel like I’m just starting to find out.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “Enjoy the journey. And may it last forever.”

  She stared at him in surprise and then smiled and said, “That’s one of the nicest things I’ve ever heard anybody say.”

  He shrugged. “I might not be as deep a thinker as some people, but I do have my moments.”

  “You can cook. That’s worth a lot.”

  “Thank you,” he said, almost humbly but with a big grin on his face.

  Chapter 25

  Monday Evening …

  “Also,” Mack said, “have you put any more thought into your deck?”

  “Lots of thoughts. I’ve spent a fair bit of time walking around and looking at it, and I was thinking maybe either gravel and big thick mats alongside the house to stop the weeds right up to the gate at least.”

  “That makes sense, and I think we should price some of the materials we’ll need.”

  “The problem with that,” Doreen said, “is that I don’t really know what materials or how much materials.”

  “Right. I can probably help you with that.”

  “If we could get that much figured out, I can go in and talk to somebody, get a price quote. That would give me a place to start.”

  “Go to the hardware stores. Several are in town. Take in the materials list and a diagram, and they can do a cost analysis and give you a quote.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  They finished their dinner and then walked into the backyard with a tape measure and a notepad. They marked off the full measurements of the deck they had decided on.

  “Now,” Mack said, “take that to the hardware store and see if you can get an idea of what you need for materials. Obviously also check whether you’ll have to pay for a delivery or do a lot of trips to pick it all up yourself.”

  “I know. I was thinking about that. I don’t have any way to get heavy materials in.”

  “No,” he said, “but, as I said, this isn’t a terribly big job, but also not so small we can minimize the work going into it.”

  “Understood,” she said with a smile.

  “You might want to consider if you want to put a small deck back where we found the body. Or, if you want, make that just patio straight down this side.”

  She frowned. “I guess I could take the deck right across at the same height, making it wider, and then have the stairs, maybe curved stairs. Or is that too much?”

  Mack shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not that it’s too much. We’d have to consider the total cost.”

  While he had that thought in mind, Mack got a call from the office and had to leave again. Doreen called her animals inside, and they all went upstairs to bed. Doreen fell asleep easily, dreaming about having a big deck and maybe a barbecue for herself.

  Tuesday Morning

  The next morning, she woke up bright and early. This time Goliath lay at her feet, Thaddeus sat on the nearby windowsill, and Mugs lay right across the pillow from her, his hot breath blowing into her now-open eyes. She laughed. This was so much better than waking up married to her ex. Still smiling, she had a simple breakfast, since she was still partly full from the previous night.

  After that, she grabbed Mugs and headed to one of the big local hardware stores. It had been open for about an hour, but it wasn’t busy yet. Carrying their plan, she went over to talk to the guys in one of the contractor areas. He half smiled at her. “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know anything about this stuff, but I’m trying to figure out how much the materials would cost for a deck like this.” At that, she held up the picture Mack had helped her draw on graph paper.

  Interested, the clerk looked at it and, on a separate piece of paper, wrote down how many cinder blocks she needed, how many braces, how many cross pieces, and how much decking board. “You’ll have to take a look at the railings too. The costs varies depending on style.”

  Doreen’s brain swirled with the information, but, as she looked at the list, it seemed almost doable. “And how much does this cost?”

  “Give me five. I’ll punch it in and get you an official quote. I’ll hold it for seven days.”

  She looked at him in delight. “Really?”

  He nodded. “We can get close enough that, if you decide to go ahead with the project, then you can just bring the quote back, and we can collect the materials for you and arrange delivery, if you want.”

  “How much would it cost to deliver all this?”

  He looked down at it and asked, “Are you in town?”

  She nodded and gave him her address.

  “Seventy dollars, for all of it.”

  She stared. “That seems reasonable.”

  “It’s why we do it,” he said. “You can’t expect everybody to have a big truck and the time to do multiple loads.”

  She nodded. “Well, give me a quote then, and I’ll mull it over.”

  It took a little longer than five minutes for him to calculate the quote. Finally he printed it, signed it, dated it, and handed it to her. “There you go.”

  And, with that, she gave him a delighted smile. She took Mugs and headed back to her car and home again. At home, she studied the quote and saw it was more than she had expected. It was $2,600, just over what she got in cash for the sale of the car parts. She scanned in the quote and emailed it to Mack.

  When he called her midmorning, he said, “That’s a decent price.”

  “How do you figure?” she asked. “It’s more than we were talking about.”

  “But we also extended the deck alongside the house where that garden bed is,” he reminded her. “And we added in steps along that front piece so you can sit on them and look at the water.”

  She nodded as she thought about it. “I guess we did. Do you think that’s a decent quote?”

  “It is,” he said. “If you want though, you can go to another hardware store and get another quote. We can compare their prices afterward.”

  “You think they’ll come in cheaper?”

  “Some things will be cheaper, and some things will cost more money.”

  “So then, what do we do?”

  “We have to figure out if you save enough by splitting up the orders and getting some things from one and some things from the other,” he said cheerfully. “But keep in mind the delivery costs too, whether you can get the bigger stuff all delivered for the same seventy bucks or whether you have to pay for two deliveries. Or maybe we can even do it all in one order, and I can go pick up the rest of the stuff.”

  Stunned, she sat back and said, “There’s more to this than I figured.”

  Mack laughed at that.

  Chapter 26

  Wednesday Morning …

  Doreen woke the next morning, groggy and feeling slightly out of it. Then again she’d spent the previous afternoon doing research until her brain couldn’t handle any more and had an early night. She’d hoped to wake up clear headed. Instead, it’s as if she took her deck issues along with Norbert and Manny into her dreams.

  Make
that nightmares.

  Moving slowly, she got up, had a hot shower, and worked her way downstairs. It was a gray overcast day. Maybe she hadn’t dressed warmly enough. She glanced down at her short skirt and her oversized T-shirt that hung off her shoulder. Her ex would have been horrified.

  On the other hand, she didn’t give a damn. She put on coffee, yawned again, and wished she had braided her hair while she was upstairs. So, while standing here, looking out the kitchen window, she ran her fingers through her hair and formed a braid to run down the side of her shoulder. She shrugged and said, “Good thing nobody’s here to see me then, isn’t it?”

  She disarmed the security, opened the door, and let Mugs out. She had seen no sign of Goliath. He was probably hiding from the weather. Thaddeus though was muttering to himself as he stalked back and forth on the kitchen table. She put out her hand, and he hopped on.

  “Good morning, Thaddeus,” she said.

  He rubbed his beak gently back and forth across her cheek.

  She chuckled. “That’s a lovely good morning from you. Thank you.”

  With his voice in an almost hoarse whisper, he said, “Thaddeus is here. Thaddeus is here.”

  She stepped out on the deck, while gently stroking his feathers. Every time she saw the deck now, it just made her more determined to get a new one. Maybe that was where she should start her day. She’d get a quote from the other place. Like Mack had said, it was possible to save a few hundred dollars by splitting up the order. Of course, there was no guarantee it would work out that way, but he had suggested he could maybe do a trip too.

  First though, she needed food before heading off to the hardware store. It seemed so strange to not have a million things on her to-do list. She’d already done the typewritten index file for Solomon’s folders, plus the scanned summary sheets on each file, and that was all sitting on her laptop for easy access.

  She hadn’t slept well during the night, as she kept thinking about Manny and all the weird possibilities to his case. She understood that, from a cop’s perspective, there was probably very little connection between Norbert’s hit-and-run and Manny’s disappearance. They were one week apart and worlds apart, as far as who the people themselves were. But the connection was there because Norbert had been one of Manny’s regular clients. But was that part known when the police investigation had first been launched?

  As she sat outside with her first cup of coffee, her phone rang. She groaned. “People need to leave me alone early in the morning,” she announced. “I’ve decided I’m not a morning person.” But still, the insistent ring wouldn’t let her go. She snatched up her phone and saw it was Mack. She hit Talk and said, “Good morning.”

  “It’s Manny,” he said, his tone abrupt. “We matched dental records.”

  She straightened. “Really? Wow, that was fast,” she said in satisfaction. And then she winced. “I shouldn’t be so happy, should I? I guess I’m just hoping for closure for his family and friends.”

  “No,” Mack said, “but at least there’ll be some answers now.”

  “Some,” she said. “Exactly where did you find him? You mentioned Paul’s Tomb. Were the remains really in a cemetery? How could you possibly find it?”

  Mack chuckled. “I guess that’s true somewhat. Paul’s Tomb is a popular hiking spot on Knox Mountain. Manny’s body was off the normal path.”

  “After all this time …” Doreen said. Then she stopped and frowned. “Cause of death?”

  “That’s not for public knowledge yet. You know it’ll be in the news soon enough.”

  “Well, you must have some inkling. Can’t I get consultant’s status or something?” she complained good-naturedly. “I’m not spreading it around. But I do need that little tidbit of information.”

  “Why is that?” he asked curiously. “What can you do with it?”

  “It’ll help me to determine whether he was killed by a john or a friend.”

  “How is that possible?”

  He may have worked hard to keep the derisive tone out of his voice, but she heard it anyway. She clammed up and said, “I’m not talking to you if you’re mean.”

  He sighed again. “I’m not being mean. At the moment, I can’t give you a cause of death because nobody has given us a final answer yet.”

  She groaned. “Which means it’s probably not a bullet to the head.”

  “You’re becoming quite the little forensic scientist, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not a little anything,” she snapped.

  “Well, that depends,” he said. “Did you eat breakfast yet?”

  It took her a moment to handle the switch in conversation to realize he considered her skinny and wasting away. “Not yet,” she said. “I’m just sitting here having coffee. I had a rough night.”

  His tone turned solicitous in an instant. “I’m sorry. That’s not fun.”

  “No,” she said. “I kept thinking of Norbert and Manny.”

  “Honestly I haven’t had a chance to go through the files yet.”

  “Being busy isn’t an excuse.”

  Exasperated, he snapped, “Remember my desk has high piles of things on it.”

  “Sure, but this could be two cold cases solved,” she said cheerfully. “You have to open Manny’s back up again because you found his body.”

  “True,” he said. “Which means I need to know everything you know.”

  She snorted. “That’ll take a lifetime.” And she hung up on him.

  Instantly her mood was much better. She danced into the kitchen, grabbed a second cup of coffee, and called the animals. Goliath shuffled toward her slowly, as if he’d just woken. He meowed, and she bent down to scoop the big tubby into her arms and carried him and her coffee in her hands, while Thaddeus perched on her shoulder, with Mugs running around her feet all the way down to the creek. There, she sat on one of the big rocks with Goliath still in her arms and Thaddeus still on her shoulder and said, “We just need to spend a little time here. This water gives me solace like nothing else.”

  Content, at least for the moment, Doreen sipped her coffee as she tried to figure out what finding Manny’s body would mean for the investigation. Now they should get all kinds of evidence from the body, if they were lucky. Maybe even some serious forensic evidence. Paul’s Tomb though, where the heck was that? She remembered she had vaguely seen it somewhere when she was cross-referencing maps, looking at other things. Probably related to the search in Glenmore for the guys who had helped Crystal escape. At the reminder of Crystal and how her life had been turned around, she brightened yet again.

  “Mack said a hiking path or something,” she announced to her animals. “Now why the devil would somebody take Manny out there?” She pondered on it more and then muttered, “Of course the answer is, it’s fairly out of the way. But, if it’s a popular hiking spot, then a ton of people and a ton of dogs could be there any given day. So his body must have been well buried.”

  She muttered more as she contemplated the options. But then, all of a sudden, Mugs started barking by her side, his tail wagging like mad. But instead of jumping up and turning around to see who it was, her shoulders sagged. “You might as well get the last cup of coffee from the pot,” she called out.

  Ten seconds later, she heard the kitchen door bang closed.

  She chuckled. Mack hadn’t liked her hanging up on him again. And that was likely why he was in a foul mood. Well, that was fine. She’d woken up that way, so it was okay if somebody else was too for a while. Besides, she was in a good mood now. She waited until she heard Mugs race back to the house, barking yet again as he greeted Mack.

  Thaddeus whispered in her neck, “Mack is here. Mack is here.”

  She reached up and gently nudged his cheek. “You’re such a great watchdog,” she said.

  Thaddeus settled in against the crook of her neck and leaned his body weight against her. She loved it when he did that. It made her feel loved. She didn’t have to wait long before she heard the heav
y footsteps crunching toward her. Finally Mack stepped beside her and said, “You don’t even greet your visitors anymore?”

  “Depends if they come in a good mood or a bad mood,” she said, looking up at him. But his countenance said he wasn’t pissed. She smiled up at him. “So, if you’re not angry at me, I’ll say hi.”

  Chapter 27

  Wednesday Midmorning …

  Doreen laughed at the look on his face. It was one of disgust and yet almost acceptance.

  “I guess you’re getting to know me well, huh?” He sat down on another large rock nearby and studied the water’s movement. “The water’s definitely rising.”

  She nodded. “It is, indeed. But I don’t think it’s too dangerous yet. But then, it’s getting harder to reach Steve’s house.”

  He looked at her and laughed. “Oh, well, that’s a benefit of the water rising. I never considered that you were going up through the creek though.”

  “I travel via the creek every time I can.”

  “You might want to consider getting yourself a kayak.”

  That stopped her cold. “Seriously?”

  He shrugged and said, “Why not? You’re only a few houses from the lake.”

  “For one, I don’t know how to kayak. Although I think those boards people stand on look really graceful. I mean, that would be them looking graceful.” She shuddered. “You know I’ll be the one who’s upside down in the water.”

  He chuckled. “But you swim, don’t you?”

  When she didn’t answer immediately, he asked again with a narrowed gaze and in a much harder voice.

  She looked at him and nodded. “I know how, but I haven’t had to in a long time.”

  “I can understand that,” he said. “But, at least, you know how to survive if you get into trouble, right?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I haven’t tried in a long time.”

  He nodded. “The lake isn’t far. After the high water has dropped again, you could certainly end up with a nice calm pathway to the lake for a swim.”