Murder Hooks a Mermaid (18 page)

“You want the truth?” She sounded a little sheepish. “You cannot repeat this to anyone.”

“What, did you have a convincing lie ready? Really, Freed, this isn’t junior high. Do I need to pinkie swear?”

“Just promise you will keep this to yourself. I told Riley I wouldn’t tell anyone, but I’m pretty sure he expected me to tell you.”

I heard a decided snort as Jake fought back a chuckle at our exchange.

“Okay. I promise. But this had better be good.”

“It’s about Riley’s folks.”

I sobered. The older Freeds were lovely people, and Karen loved them like her own family.

“Riley’s dad is so freaked out over this thing with Bobby, Riley doesn’t want him driving. Doesn’t
trust
him to drive. But he can’t say that. He can’t drive his dad’s car without a fight, and he can’t fit everyone in his truck. So he took the SUV. He can take the whole family, and he tells them he has to drive since it’s my car. Then he tells his dad that he—his dad, not Riley—needs to concentrate on his mom because she’s upset.”

I tried to imagine the situation Riley was in, but I didn’t have anything to compare it to. I’d only ever known my parents as a child, never as an adult, and the idea of taking care of your parents was completely foreign to me.

We made small talk for another couple minutes until Riley arrived to take Karen home. Wherever home was for her at the moment.

Jake and I walked Karen down to the back door, where Riley waited with Karen’s SUV idling next to my battered Civic.

Next to her immaculately maintained new vehicle, the Civic looked even more decrepit. I would have to replace it one of these days, but I kept stalling. I had an aversion to car payments and higher insurance rates.

I watched Karen climb into the passenger seat and strap herself in. Riley leaned toward her, but quickly reversed himself. He put the car in gear and pulled away with a wave.

Jake hesitated at the door, as though he were uncertain about coming back in.

“I’m tired, and I do have to work tomorrow,” I told him, “but I could use a glass of wine, and I’d be glad to have some company for a little while.”

Jake accepted my invitation and followed me back up the stairs to my apartment.

As though by unspoken agreement, the subject of Bobby—as well as the related subjects of the divers, the dead federal agent, breaking into strangers’ apartments, and the Tuesday opening of the commercial fishing season—was dropped. Instead, Jake flipped through my collection of DVDs and found a movie while I poured a couple glasses of wine.

I must have dozed off at some point, because I jolted awake as the credits were rolling. Embarrassed, I tried to apologize, but Jake just waved away my protests.

“I just hope you’d already seen the movie, since you slept through the end,” he teased. “But now that you’re up, I need to be getting home. Tomorrow’s a work day.”

I yawned, and this time I didn’t even try to hide it. I
looked around for my wineglass, but it was already on the counter, along with Jake’s.

I gave him a tired smile and followed him downstairs. He went out the back door, and I locked up and set the alarms before heading back upstairs.

Bluebeard, for once, didn’t wake up and yell at me about disturbing his sleep.

Chapter 21

A QUIET MONDAY SEEMED LIKE A SPECIAL TREAT
after the hectic activity of the weekend. Bluebeard, uncharacteristically subdued, spent most of the day dozing on his perch. I checked in deliveries and restocked shelves, leaving the occasional customer to Julie.

Between customers, Julie returned again and again to the nursery area in the back. She fussed with the arrangement of diapers and blankets, and folded and refolded the stack of tiny shirts and sleepers that filled the drawers of the changing table.

Late in the afternoon, I passed by the alcove on my way to pull more stock from the storeroom and spotted Julie sitting in the rocking chair. Her head rested against the back of the chair, and her eyes were closed, but a frown wrinkled her forehead and drew faint lines at the corners of her eyes.

I almost let her be, thinking she might actually be asleep, but she shifted in the chair and her frown deepened.

“Are you okay?” I asked, moving to her side. “Is something wrong?”

She shook her head without opening her eyes. “Just tired,” she said. “I get tired so easy right now. I swear I must sleep about ten hours every night, and I still want to take a nap in the afternoon.”

I propped my shoulder against the wall and leaned back. “Well, from what I hear, you better get all the sleep you can before she gets here. Because once she arrives, you won’t sleep again for months.”

A dry chuckle escaped her lips. “I’ve heard all the horror stories from my so-called friends,” she said. “And not just about sleeping, either. Some of them just couldn’t resist telling me about how terrible their pregnancies were, or how painful labor is, or some other horrible thing that like to scare me half to death.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at me. “Why do people have to tell you those things? All they do is make you afraid, and it’s not like you can do anything about it, anyway.” She leaned her head back against the chair. “Doesn’t feel very friendly to me.”

“I wish I had an answer for that. Some people just don’t think before they open their mouths.”

“I did get one good piece of advice, though,” she went on. “My friend Penny told me to get rid of Jimmy’s big ol’ truck. She says it’ll be a huge pain getting the baby in and out of that thing. Her husband has one, and she hates to go anywhere in it.”

“Truth be told,” I answered, “I wondered why you didn’t
get rid of that thing a long time ago. Owning it always seemed like it was Jimmy’s idea, not yours.”

“I thought about it, but every time I did it just seemed like such a hassle, and I didn’t really want to go to Fowler’s. You know how that is.”

I nodded. Her ex-husband had worked for Matthew Fowler, the local car dealer, before his arrest. I could understand why she wouldn’t want to go there, but there wasn’t another car dealer in town.

Trading in the truck would mean taking it down to Pensacola and finding a dealer there to give her a decent price. It was really only a few miles to Pensacola, but sometimes it felt as though it were a world away.

“Maybe I should just sell it to you,” she joked. “You could use a truck, couldn’t you?”

The image of Jimmy’s extra-tall, tricked-out pickup sprang into my brain. “I’d probably need a stepstool just to get in it,” I said.

Make that a ladder. At five-seven, I wasn’t a tiny woman, but I recalled the truck towering over me.

Julie winced, and closed her eyes for a second.

“Are you
sure
you’re okay?”

She nodded without opening her eyes. “Just an occasional cramp. Mom says it may be a little false labor. Nothing to worry about, she says.”

Easy for her to say. She didn’t have an employee sitting in her shop who just might decide to have a baby at any moment. And like the character in
Gone with the Wind
, I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout birthing babies.

“You know, it’s almost quitting time, Julie. Why don’t we call it a day? You can go home early and I can close up.”

She didn’t argue. While she gathered up her purse and sweater, I turned the sign in front from “Open” to “Closed.”

I locked the door behind her and set the alarm, watching the two green lights come on to indicate it was armed. I turned down the shop lights and made a last check on Bluebeard.

He was already in his cage and settled in for the night. I gave him a pat and he hopped out onto my arm and snuggled against my chest, his head tucked under my chin. It felt like he was ready for an early night, too.

I had almost reached the stairs when the phone rang. I answered reluctantly, really wishing I could just ignore it.

And immediately wished I had.

“Glory?”

“Hello, Peter.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. That worried me. Every time Peter started thinking, it meant trouble for me.

“Yes?” I said, warily.

“About what we discussed last week?”

I racked my brain. So much had happened in the past few days, I barely remembered last week, much less my conversation with Peter. Of course, I did my best not to remember conversations with Peter. It was better for my blood pressure that way.

“Go on,” I said, stalling. I hoped he would say something specific that would tell me what he wanted.

“Well, I was thinking about the website, and how you said you didn’t have time to do it.”

“That wasn’t what I said, Peter. I said I was doing what I knew how to do, and I needed time to learn to do more. Did you even look at the site?”

“Of course!” His indignation came clearly across the phone. “You don’t need to take that tone with me.”

He sounded so much like Aunt Missy, I expected him to add “young lady,” just as his mother had when I was a young girl and she didn’t approve of my behavior.

Which was most of the time. I had never been enough of a lady to satisfy her.

I drew a deep breath but didn’t reply.

After a few seconds of silence, Peter continued.

“Well, I’ve been looking into getting some help in that department, and I think I have a solution. There’s a guy down in Pensacola. He comes very highly recommended, and his rates are quite reasonable. I’ve been talking with him, and looking at some of the sites he’s done. I’m pretty impressed with his work.”

I held my bottom lip between my teeth, biting back the words that threatened to tumble out.

“Anyway, he just e-mailed me to say he has an opening. He can come up one day this week to meet with you and see what you need. It’ll only take a couple hours for the assessment, and about ten hours for the basic site.”

I couldn’t bear to hear any more.

“Who’s paying for this?” I asked.

“It’s a business expense, Glory. A necessary one. We need to get this done, and it’s clear you don’t have the time to do it.” He left unsaid his obvious judgment that I wasn’t managing my workload well, and
should
have time.

“And just how much is his ‘reasonable’ rate, Peter?”

“It’s only a hundred an hour, Glory. And he won’t even charge for the travel time to come up and meet with you.”

One.

Two.

Three.

“And he’ll do the maintenance. Said it would only be a couple hours, twice a month, to update everything.”

Four.

Five.

Six.

“Oh, and one other thing!” The joy in Peter’s voice was palpable, and I could envision him in his excited mode, practically wiggling in his seat. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

Seven.

“He said he’d help you establish a social-media presence. Show you how to do all the networking sites and stuff. All part of the standard contract.”

Eight nine
ten.

“Peter! Stop it! You’re talking about at least a thousand dollars to start, and four or five hundred a month to keep this up. And that’s before you even start this whole social-media thing. There is no way we can afford it.”

“But Glory”—the whine was back, and growing—“we need to do this. And if you don’t have time to do it yourself, you need to pay somebody to do it for you. I just found you somebody who can do that.”

I stopped myself from using some of Bluebeard’s favorite words. “No, Peter, we
don’t
. Not unless you are willing to pay for all this out of your share of the profits. We
can’t
afford it, and we
won’t
afford it, and if you promised this guy anything, you will have to call him, or e-mail him, or send him a social-media message, or whatever you need to do to tell him there is no job here. I will do the best I can, and if that isn’t good enough for you, then you figure out another way.

“Good night, Peter.”

I hung up the phone and let fly with a string of profanities. I don’t swear in front of other people, but it was just me and Bluebeard, and it felt good to let out the anger that welled inside me.

Bluebeard stuck his head out of the cage at the burst of curses and added a few of his own.

“Idiot!” he said quite plainly before stomping back into his cage.

Apparently, Bluebeard shared my opinion of Peter’s business abilities.

And buying him out had just moved up my priority list.

Chapter 22

AT FIRST I THOUGHT IT WAS THE CAR ALARM THAT
woke me, but as I struggled to consciousness I realized Bluebeard was making an awful racket downstairs.

Not an angry, making-a-mess kind of racket but a frightened, I-need-to-run-away squawking; a noise I’d heard rarely in the past, and never for more than a few seconds.

I flung a robe over the ratty T-shirt and shorts that served as my pajamas and ran for the stairs, stuffing my phone in my pocket.

I grabbed my home-security system—an old wooden baseball bat—as I sprinted down the stairs.

Halfway down, a sobering thought managed to seep into my still-half-asleep brain: whatever was causing Bluebeard’s distress was
downstairs
. And I was about to run straight into who-knew-what.

I slowed my feet, though my heart still galloped at a
frantic pace, and tried to listen for any noise besides the squawking of the parrot.

I heard nothing inside, but outside the car alarm continued blaring. It was a common enough sound; people unfamiliar with their rental cars regularly set them off, but they usually weren’t this close.

They usually weren’t right outside my back door.

And the inside alarm hadn’t gone off.

Forcing myself to ignore Bluebeard’s cries of distress, I drew a deep breath and tried to take stock of the situation.

No alarm meant one of two things: there was no one inside, or the alarm wasn’t set. I concentrated on remembering what happened before I went to bed, struggling with the remnants of sleep that clogged my brain and the adrenaline rush that demanded immediate action.