The Rejected Writers' Book Club (Southlea Bay) (15 page)

I looked at him as I brushed my teeth while standing in the tiny gray-and-white-tiled bathroom. Something had to be done. The thing was humongous, too bulky for me to lift off the wall. I looked around the room. As I searched, I heard the gentle tinkle of a music box coming from the nursery and the unmistakable giggle of Annie. I was glad someone was having fun. Opening an enormous blanket chest at the foot of the bed, I found a clean white sheet. That would have to do. By standing on the throne, I managed to throw the sheet right over the moose’s head and cover it perfectly. It looked better already. What I couldn’t see wouldn’t hurt me.

Getting into bed, I suddenly missed Martin and my own cozy bed at home. Checking my phone, I could see there was still no signal. At least by tomorrow we would be back in civilization. Battling with the stiff white sheets and the bedspread, I eventually managed to burrow myself inside.

Replaying the day’s events as I lay there, I felt deeply sad for Doris. This was hard. The only other thought that preoccupied my mind as I drifted off to sleep was . . . what if the secretary’s baby was really an alien?

Chapter Twelve

RONALD TRAMP, THE GRIZZLY BEAR

In my dream, there was a girl floating about in a white wedding dress, holding a candle and calling my name. She reached toward me with an outstretched hand and shook me. It felt so real. Opening my eyes, I tried to focus through the darkness.

The girl in my dream appeared to be standing right next to my bed. Was it a ghost? Maybe this was Grandma coming back to punish me for covering up her moose head. As the girl moved closer, I realized it was only Flora in her nightgown.

“Are you okay?” My voice was dry and rasping.

She bent down and whispered to me, “There’s something in the kitchen. I think it might be a bear!”

Annie arrived behind her, yawning as she put on her own robe.

“Someone needs to investigate,” added Flora.

“It’s probably just this old house settling.” I yawned. I did not relish the thought of leaving my bed. “I don’t think a bear would come all the way inside. Besides . . .”

I never finished my sentence because all of a sudden there was a clear, dull thud in another part of the house. It sounded like a book or a log being dropped to the floor.

Suddenly, one thought rendered me fully awake: the back door. I couldn’t remember if any of us had set anything heavy against it as Joe had advised us to do. Jumping up out of bed, I followed Flora out into the corridor. Switching on the lights, I looked down the hall toward the noise.

“Maybe Doris is up,” I whispered to them both.

Doris’s door suddenly opened.

“Up where?” inquired a curler-clad Doris.

We filled Doris in on the situation. She nodded and then went back into her room for a second, arriving back in the hallway with a pile of her pots and pans.

“What are we going to do with these, cook it an omelet?” I asked, bewildered.

“If you see a bear,” hissed Doris as she started to tiptoe down the hall, “you’re supposed to make yourself very large and make a lot of noise.”

Ethel’s head popped out of her bedroom door and made us all jump. Doris gave a pan and lid to Ethel, who didn’t seem the least bit fazed by being handed kitchen equipment in the middle of the night and then being asked to join the end of the Scooby-Doo line that we were forming.

“So here’s the plan,” hissed Doris. “We’ll walk up the hallway, slowly. When we reach the kitchen, we’ll run in and bang our pots together as hard as we can.”

We started to creep behind Doris. I looked back at our old lady battle line and didn’t hold out much hope for Ethel. The bear would probably see her as a delightful little snack.

As we tiptoed into the main room, I couldn’t help myself.

“Doris, why do you have your pans in the bedroom?”

She stopped and looked back at me as if I were an idiot. “They’re my best ones!” she said indignantly. “I don’t want anyone stealing them.”

“Who are you talking about? We’re not exactly at the end of the world, but we can see it from here!”

Doris looked back at me again as if the thought had never actually occurred to her. She appeared to be about to answer me when we heard another noise from the kitchen, and it sounded as if something were exhaling. We were all frozen to the spot for a second, and then Doris raised her pot above her head, holding her pan lid up in the other hand as if she were about to crash an enormous pair of cymbals. She gestured for us all to do the same. As we lifted our arms, Flora’s lid slipped from her hand and clattered to the ground. Doris rolled her eyes as Flora hastily picked it up and mouthed her apologies. Signaling us to follow, Doris charged toward the kitchen, banging her lid on her pot and screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Aaaaaaaaaarh!”

We all followed behind, banging and yelling at the top of our voices too.

“Aaaaaaaaaaarh!”

We saw a flash of movement and a jumbled mass of matted fur running for its life toward the back kitchen door, screeching. Somehow, it managed to miss the doorway and run smack into the kitchen wall instead. Ricocheting off it, it hit the floor hard, and then it just lay there. The impact of the crash shook the walls and knocked down the “floozy clock,” as Doris had nicknamed it. The Coca-Cola girl lay on the floor, smiling up at us, her legs still rocking back and forth.

We all looked down at the mass of fur with concern. Whatever it was, we had just killed it. Scared it to death, no doubt. It lay on the black-and-white-tiled floor, fearfully still. We put down our pans, and Doris turned on the light.

“What is it?” asked Annie.

“It’s an extremely odd shape for a bear,” added Flora.

“That’s because it’s Big Foot,” snapped Ethel.

We all walked slowly toward the animal lying on the floor. As we got closer, I noticed it didn’t have paws, but fingers. Oh no, this ragbag of jumble definitely wasn’t a bear.

“It’s a man!” said Flora, moving closer.

We gathered around and looked closer. He was wearing what looked like flour sacks pulled together as a sort of cape and tatty pants being held together with a piece of string. He had long, matted, sandy-colored hair and a ragged beard. The newest, cleanest thing on him seemed to be his boots.

“Should we try and wake him?” asked Flora, leaning even closer to his face.

Suddenly, a sticklike hand shot out of the cape and grabbed Flora’s arm. We all screamed, except Flora. She seemed to be frozen in shock. He opened his eyes and screamed too.

Flora was incredible. She came to life, put her other hand on his shoulder, and reassured him. “Don’t be scared,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you.”

He stopped screaming, his wild brown eyes flicking fearfully from one of us to the other, like a caged animal in terror. He seemed to be summing up the situation extremely quickly and deciding if we could be trusted.

“Can you sit up?” asked Doris, starting to take command.

He just stared at her.

“Ethel, get him a glass of water.”

Flora gently patted his shoulder; I reached down and took him by the arm.

He slowly started to sit up. It was like lifting a tiny bird. He was really bundled up, but I was guessing he was just a pile of skin and bones.

Ethel came back with water and handed it to him. His grimy, shaking hand stretched out and took the glass. He took a couple of gulps, then opened his mouth and said, “What y’all doin’ here in my house?”

“Sorry?” said Doris.

“My house,” he said, sounding braver. “Why y’all here?”

We all looked at him in bewilderment.

“We’re guests of Tom and Joe at the Fish and Cut Bait Store,” I said.

“Who?” he said, screwing up his eyes.

“Down the mountain,” I added, weakly.

“Never heard of ’em! This is my cabin. I’ve been using it for years.”

The man was obviously a little deranged, so I decided to play along. “Oh. We thought you wouldn’t mind us staying one night. We ran out of gas on the road, and it was very cold to sleep in the car.”

He eyed me cautiously over his glass of water, then said, “S’pose that’d be okay. But you can’t go around yelling and hollering like that. You darn near gave me a heart attack.”

“Oh no, that’s because we thought you were a bear.”

“A bear!” he screeched, incredulously. “How could you think I looked anything like a bear?” He sniffed then, as if he believed we were all obviously a little stupid.

Doris picked up the kettle. “Would you like a cup of coffee or something?”

His eyes narrowed. “As long as you don’t poison it or anything,” he snapped gruffly.

Doris held her tongue, but the disapproval was obvious on her face.

With Flora’s help, he climbed to his feet. He folded his arms and huffed, then sat himself firmly down on the edge of the booth and started picking at his teeth. He looked ridiculous sitting there, a bundle of rags and matted hair on the shiny, buttoned buffet seat.

We all congregated around the stove to talk as Doris made coffee.

“What should we do?” asked Annie, concerned.

“What can we do? We’re all stuck up here in the middle of the night with no phone,” I answered.

“He could be an axe murderer,” sneered Ethel with a look as if she were half-hoping that was exactly what he was.

I looked back at him as he now picked at his nails. “I don’t think he’s dangerous. Besides, he’s as light as a feather. Ethel could take him down.”

She looked up at me, then back at the man. She wrinkled her nose and sniffed.

“There’s nothing we can do now. It’s four in the morning,” I said, glancing at the floozy clock that was still rocking her way around the kitchen floor. “We may as well wait until it gets light. Then we can go down the mountain and get Joe or Tom.”

“What are ya birds whispering about?” shouted our scruffy guest from the booth. “I don’t like all that whispering. Makes me nervous. Makes me think you’re plotting to kill me and throw my tired old bones in the creek.”

“Oh, we would never do anything like that,” said Flora, walking over and sitting opposite him. “Do we look like the murdering type to you?”

He looked straight at Flora, narrowed his eyes, and said with conviction, “Yes. You look exactly like the murdering type. Using all your feminine wiles to get on me good side and then you’d be killing me stone dead.” He emphasized his words as he spoke. “Yes, siree,” he said. “You are exactly the murdering type.”

Flora just sat, blinking, with her mouth open.

Doris brought over his coffee and slammed it down in front of him. I could tell she was not putting up with any of his nonsense. “Would you like some sugar for your poison?” she asked sarcastically.

He just sniffed and begrudgingly took a sip.

I approached him and sat next to him.

“My name is Janet.” I held out my hand. “What’s yours?”

He looked at me like a lame dog that had just been beaten and was not sure whether to trust this hand of a stranger or not. Then his eyes twinkled, and he screwed up his nose, thrusting a darkened, scraggy, half-mittened hand into mine saying, “Ronald Tramp. You may know my brother. Pleased to meet ya.”

Then, as if this were the funniest thing anyone had ever said, he rocked back, slapping his leg and laughing hysterically, baring all four of his blackened teeth in the process. His breath left something to be desired.

I placed my hand strategically across my nose. “Do you come from around here?”

He looked at me as if he’d never made small talk in his life, then, scratching at something in his hair, he said, “Do I come from around here? Course I come from around here! It’s not like I got a Lamborghini parked out front, you know, so I can shoot off to Vegas on a whim. I live as far as these two walkers will take me. Normally up into town and back.”

Fed up with listening to me beating about the bush, Doris went straight for the jugular. “What are you really doing here?”

“I told you, this is my house. I live here once or twice a year when the season changes and the snow comes, to shelter from it for a couple of days. There are usually a couple of cans knocking around in the cupboard to keep me entertained.” He picked at his teeth again. “I leave the place as clean as a whistle when I go. It’s kind of a game with me. I think of myself as the cat burglar of Siskiyou Pass. ’Cept I don’t steal anything, save a couple of old cans or so. I just like to live it up for a couple of days and let my bones catch up and then be on my way.”

He narrowed his eyes then as if we were the intruders.

“Usually we don’t see city folk up here till a couple of days after the snow comes. Then they all come up here in their fancy German cars with their little white snow suits and pink booties, cars all full of kids and skiing gear.” He tutted heavily, like skiing was way up there with washing.

“We got trapped behind a rockslide,” said Flora, smiling at him as she sat next to him on the bench.

Doris still wasn’t having any of it. “I don’t care who you are and where you came from. You need to leave once you finish your drink.”

Ronald looked thunderstruck. “What! You would throw an old bag of bones like me out into the snow just like that?”

“Snow! What snow?!”

He looked at Doris as if she were stupid. “The snow. It’s snowing outside! That’s what snow.”

“It isn’t snowing outside,” said Doris, gruffly. “It’s raining.”

Ronald rocked back in his seat and laughed again. “I’m a lot of things, but I am not stupid, and unless that is the fattest, fluffiest rain I have ever seen—and I wouldn’t put it past my old eyes to trick me, but my bones will tell me every single time—it’s been snowing out there for hours!”

Flora went to the hallway and pulled the door open. Doris and I joined her. Sure enough, it was bucketing down outside. There had to be at least a foot already, and it appeared to show no sign of stopping in the near future.

“No!” I exclaimed, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.

“We’ll never get out today,” groaned Flora, reading my thoughts.

“Never is about right,” said Doris. “And what are we going to do about that piece of work in the kitchen?”

“We can’t turn him out into this snow,” said Flora. “He came in here to get away from it.”

“We should keep our eyes on him,” said Doris suspiciously. “One of us should watch him at all times.”

Ronald joined us, standing in the hallway. We smelled him before we saw him.

“I hope none of you ladies are wanted by the law and need to make a fast getaway or anything,” he said, looking up at the sky as he linked his arm in Annie’s and mine. He gave us all a broad, gummy smile before adding, “’Cause we could be trapped up here together for weeks!”

Ethel looked as if she were going to pass out on the spot as Doris muttered, “Nonsense,” under her breath and moved away from the door. Then over her shoulder, she shouted back, “We have places to go, and as soon as it stops, we’ll be out of here and on our way.”

She sounded severe, but not certain.

“In the meantime”—she marched toward the bedroom—“I am going back to bed till it’s a decent time to get up!” Then, as an afterthought, she looked at Ronald and added, “I’m locking my bedroom door, just in case you were wondering.”