From Herring to Eternity (17 page)

“It’s signed Joseph M. Bushyhead,” K-Two concluded.

I once read about a pig, in Medieval France, that was arrested and put on trial for murder. So I’m not sure that this situation was unprecedented in the history of jurisprudence. But it was definitely like nothing I’d ever encountered. And it also meant—apparently—that I was not just going to be relocated because of a yearlong dig, I was about to be displaced permanently.

“So—does this letter say that the biker chick owns your home?”

“That seems to be the claim,” I told her.

“Wow. At least you can sleep at your deli, right?”

“Yeah. Right there on the counter. I’ll use the paper towel dispenser for a pillow.”

“Why don’t you just bring one from here?” K-Two asked.

I smiled at the phone. Sometimes, God sends humor at just the right moment.

And sometimes, God sends that
loch in kop
.

Nicolette Hopkins came back after finishing her mail route and asked to see me alone. I invited her back to the office. The little room no longer seemed empty. Nicolette was a smallish woman, the classic five-foot-two, eyes-of-blue, albeit with some miles on the chassis. The longest conversation we’d ever had was at Christmas when I gave her twenty bucks. She told me she was a single mother, that her job was in jeopardy due to USPS downsizing, and that her union was worthless. The only thing I hadn’t known was about the kid, an eight-year-old boy who was a hell raiser.

“I just wanted to tell you, I think Detective Daniels is angry,” she said. “At you.”

Nicolette was now three-for-four telling me things I already knew.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“He asked if anything was loose in the case when I found it. I told him I didn’t think so.”

“Oh,” I said.
Oops
, I thought.

“Did you open it?” she asked.

I said evasively, “Why would I?”

She nodded. “That’s what I told him. He didn’t seem to buy that.”

“Well, something could have jogged loose when I moved it from the counter,” I said. “Hey, neither of us asked for this to drop in our laps—or in our mail bag, right?”

She nodded, though she was obviously unhappy to be part of a criminal investigation. Like many of the people I’d met down here, Nicolette seemed to be a sort of down-home type who was happy to go through her day—her life—without any kind of high drama. Or homicide.

“You were here that morning,” I went on. “Did you see anything unusual?”

“Besides Mad?”

“Do you know Mad?” I asked. I had felt compelled to ask that; I didn’t like snap judgments about people based solely on the way they looked or dressed. We were all a little strange to someone.

As it turns out, Nicolette had every reason to judge Mad.

“I know her,” the fortysomething woman told me. “My ex-husband Samson owned the tattoo parlor where she and the other witches did their body art. One of the women wanted eyes on her eyelids. Sammy did it—but some ink dripped in the corner of one eye. It got infected and she lost her sight.”

“Ginnifer,” I said.

Nicolette nodded. “It was kind of a hobby for Sammy. I was the breadwinner and he was not a very good businessman. He hadn’t paid the insurance. It cost us everything to settle the debt and pay our lawyer. Sammy was so ashamed he ran off. I never got to tell him I was pregnant.”

“Jesus!”

Nicolette was suddenly embarrassed. She turned away. “I shouldn’t be troubling you with all this—”

“It’s no trouble,” I assured her. “A fire in a saucepan—
that’s
trouble.”

“Thanks,” she smiled. She was tearing up and I fished the tissue box from under my inventory clipboard. I extended it toward her. She yanked one out and blew her nose. “Jesus,” the woman said bitterly. “Sammy was MIA. But Mad was not. The other morning, when I saw her here? I almost left. But I didn’t want to let her impact my life—again.”

“What happened between you?”

“Sammy swore he warned Ginnifer that tattooing her eyelids wasn’t the best idea in the world,” Nicolette said. “Mad was there when he told her—but when we had her deposition, she said he never told them anything.”

“Were you there?”

“I was on my route,” Nicolette said. “But Sammy talked about it over dinner the night he did it, told me he told them how nuts it was.”

“Then why did he do it?” I asked.

“Because Sammy liked a challenge. He was an artist, not a brain surgeon.”

Or an ophthalmologist
, I thought. “I assume you’ve tried to contact him.”

“I tried hard,” she said. “As soon as I had some money, I hired a private detective. He traced Sammy as far as Bristol, then lost him in the Appalachians. I figure he must be up there, somewhere, living a life without lawyers, without witches, without electricity. He’s probably holed up in a cave somewhere, making his own paints and doing, like, prehistoric art.” I was still holding the tissue box. She took another. “I just wish he could see his son and his son could see him. How’s that for a life’s ambition?”

“Sounds pretty good, actually.” I was thinking of my own father blowing out of New York and making minimal effort to see me for the rest of his days. I palmed a tissue as I put the box back on my desk.

“I should go,” Nicolette said. “I’m glad I came back. I hope none of that stuff with the trumpet case gives you any trouble.”

“It won’t,” I assured her. “We were just being good citizens.”

I felt a little bad lying to her, but the trumpet case was a passing thing. I would see Nicolette every day. I didn’t want her to think I was a pushy New Yorker who would insert herself where she didn’t belong—even though I sort of was. It’s something most Nashvillians wouldn’t understand.

I dried my own eyes and ignored the private line when I saw that it was Grant calling. If he had a professional beef, he could take it up with me officially, in person. I wasn’t going to give him a convenient opportunity to transfer his frustration with me to whatever he thought I did with the case. I had this perverse fantasy that Grant and Reynold Sterne would show up at the same time and beat each other’s brains out in an effort to get to me.

I left the office and went to see how Thom was. As I walked toward the counter, I heard something that surprised me.

A lot.

Chapter 17

The bathroom was off the wall opposite my office. As I walked toward the dining room, Luke was walking the other way. He was an aspiring musician who played local gigs with his band, the Gutter Crickets, whenever he could get them.

As he passed, he was singing a song I recognized.

“Whoa,” I said, turning as he passed.

“Huh?”

That exchange was crudely monosyllabic, even by Luke’s and my standards.

“That song—what is it?”

“‘More Coffee,’” he said.

“That’s the name of it?”

He nodded. “It starts out slow and then gets wild.”

“I see. This is the third time I heard it recently,” I told him. “Where did
you
hear it?” “On the radio,” Luke said. “It’s the new one by Ximene, the Spanish electric harpist. It’s gonna be a big, big hit.”

That would explain it, then. Why everyone seemed to know it but me. When I listened to music, it was usually sugary, romantic-era piano—Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Beethoven. That was also what I had played, in truncated dumbed-down form, during the three years I endured piano lessons. “Für Elise.” “The Spring Song.” “The Minute Waltz
.
” I wasn’t a snob, I just didn’t like breaking in new stuff . . . or listening to lyrics. I heard enough words during the course of the day. Still, a harp didn’t sound so bad. So far, today, I had a new tune and new porn added to my mental Netflix-iTunes repository.

I thanked Luke for the information and continued on my way.

I could tell that Thom’s engine was running down. Usually, if there was no one to seat or no bill being paid, she would refill the toothpick dispenser, add mints to the bowl beside the cash register—the one with the little spoon no one ever used; for some unholy reason, people just dug in with their fingers—or make sure the laminate menus were free of ketchup, coffee, or pickle-juice stains.

She was just standing there, looking vacantly into the dining room. Granted, she had been here since early morning and had hit the tiles running. But this look was something different. It spoke of an inner exhaustion. I’d seen that in my mother toward the end of her life, and that concerned me. Mom wasn’t that much older than Thom when she died. Granted, my mother had packed a lot of disappointment into a steady decline. She’d managed the women’s outerwear department for Gimbels in Herald Square. Mom had loved the retailer so much that she actually collected postcards of the area that showed the big blue and yellow store sign. Some of my own earliest memories were of running in and out of the circular clothes racks with my childhood friend Alice. My mother wept for days when the chain went broke in 1987. When her marriage went bust, she bootstrapped herself into survival mode and held a variety of jobs in retail. But she was never the same not exactly happy but content woman I remembered. She grew thin, the lines in her face deepened with more than age, her eye sockets blackened in a way that sleep couldn’t erase. It was almost as if she carefully, methodically laid the groundwork for the heart attack that took her in her sleep at age fifty-nine.

Thom wasn’t much younger than that. She didn’t have the kinds of stresses that my mother had allowed to pile on and Thom, at least, could push some of them off onto Jesus. But I recognized the thousand yard stare. An explosion of violence, a release of pent-up rage, followed by an arrest—that could be as traumatic to a God-fearing Southern Baptist churchgoer as a retail store closing was to a New York Jewish woman.

“Hey,” I said, approaching the checkout counter. “No daydreaming on the job.”

Thom rolled her eyes toward me like a Kewpie doll. “I’m not daydreaming. I’m thinking.”

I said in a conspiratorial whisper, “You’re setting a bad example for employees who
don’t
think. If I let Newt stare into space, fries will crisp. If I let A.J. or Dani stare into space, the Cozy Foxes will go unfed.”

Thom’s eyes shifted to the group of women sitting in the corner. She lifted and lowered her broad shoulders.

“So? They take up a big table for hours while they talk about their mysteries, only ordering free coffee refills.”

“It’s good community relations,” I pointed out. “And it’s good for passersby to see people at the tables. Folks don’t like to eat alone, or think the food is
drek
.”

The big eyes shifted back to me. “You’re right. I know. I’ll get to work.”

“No, what you’ll do,” I said, “is work on getting over what happened. Standing there thinking about it isn’t going to do you any good.”

“I was praying,” she said.

“You weren’t,” I said. “Your lips move when you pray.”

“They do?”

“Just a little,” I smiled. I leaned in a little closer. “You did it. It happened. You learned. If you hold onto anything but the last part, you’ll keep reliving the misery. Isn’t that what hell is? Do you really think you, of all people, deserve to be there?”

She looked at me with surprise. “Gwen Katz, that was practically—”

“Rabbinical?” I asked.

“I was going to say pontifical, but yes, that would be more appropriate.”

I smiled. “I took a philosophy course in college and one of the few things that made an impression was the idea that the door to hell is locked from the inside. I’m not going to let you stay there. Get the Windex.”

Her eyes went wide.

“Back on the horse,” I said. “There’s a new bottle under the counter—I put it there myself. Get it and clean.”

Slowly, like one of those Disneyland robots, Thom bent and picked up the plastic bottle and the roll of paper towels. She held the neck of the bottle as though it were a cobra, a mortal enemy.

And then her lips moved. I could swear she said, “Get thee from me Satan.” And she smiled—not just her mouth, but her entire face. And finally she started cleaning. She looked at me, still smiling, and nodded.

The world was back on its axis.

For about a minute.

A short, bulldog of a man whom I did not know walked in, asked me for me, and I told him he’d found me. He handed over an envelope that had my name ink-jetted front and center and the address for the Court for the Middle District of Tennessee on the upper left.

“It’s a summons,” the man said.

“Too bad,” I replied. “The word ‘subpoena’ stamped in red spoiled your surprise.”

He made a face that looked like a big white raisin. “Hey, I only wanted to be sure you understood, lady,” he growled. “Some folks can’t read.”

“They’re lucky,” I remarked.

I saw, eyeball left, Thom look like she wanted to spray the man. I eased myself between her Windex and the process server as he tipped his baseball cap and left. I sighed and, making sure Thom had calmed again, I walked back to my office, where I slit the envelope with my finger and got a paper cut. I put my finger in my mouth and removed the document inside. It was a yellow piece of paper with what I assumed was the handwriting of Andrew A. Dickson III demanding that I come to court the following morning at ten a.m., prepared to produce any and all documents pertaining to the ordination of my home as a Church of the Wiccan Faith, Nashville Coven.

“Well, that will be easy,” I thought.

All I had were some melted candles and an apple skin. I should probably bring those.

What an unmitigated
shande, I thought. That means disgrace. The whole thing, from the strong-arm tactics of my Wiccan sisters to the stronger-arm tactics of the university and its tool, the court system. It wasn’t a question of who was right and who was wrong; we’d all made mistakes. The question was, who the hell was on my side except for Thom and her Windex bottle?

K-Two
, I thought—until I got a text from my personal superhero saying that she was going to leave because Dr. Sterne was no longer paying her—at least, not until this issue was resolved. That was just lovely. I thought about paying her myself, but then I wouldn’t sleep counting the money I was wasting. So I would be home alone tonight with Sally Biglake camped on my lawn, her demon-hunting cat prowling through the bushes, and my two fraidy cats deep under the sofa. Having Grant in my bed was starting to look good again. Or maybe I should just break another of Robert Barron’s portholes and stay with him.