Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (7 page)

“I’m not afraid of him,” I say, but that’s not true. I’ve always been afraid that he’d come back, always been afraid that I’d still be in love with him, and always been afraid of what that might mean.

Joanie doesn’t say anything.

Right after Johnny left me at the altar, I bought a condo. Ed was the guy who fixed the air conditioning unit when I moved in. We started dating right away. I railroaded him into marrying me. I really did. He didn’t see the need to rush into anything, but for me it was like building a wall against the past. A wall, a moat, a castle, anything that would be sturdy and solid. I wanted to make sure the past couldn’t get back in and hurt me again.

Joanie says, “I don’t know if you’re being incredibly brave doing what you’re doing, or being a big chicken. What are you doing in Florida? Are you reinventing yourself or just running away. Do you know?”

I wish I did.

Chapter 12

Tweenie and Uncle Paulie live in a lake community. The lakes are manmade and sit evenly along the sides of the entrance. I give my name at the elaborate gatehouse and wind around the manicured golf course humping over a few more quiet shimmery lakes. I follow Sunshine Court till I reach Holiday Lane. Here and there people are shushing around on their golf carts, steering from one smooth path to the next.

Florida is rife with activity. Everyone seems to have somewhere to be, some luncheon to attend, some dance step to learn or some ceramic mold to fire up. People are constantly changing from one bright outfit to another, mastering this stroke or that. Total strangers are waving to me as I drive by. I’m nodding vaguely, hiccupping over the speed bumps, trying to follow the directions I scribbled on the back of the Staples receipt, waving to people right and left. “Keep your hands on the wheel,” I say to a guy who waves at us in his golf cart. Dreamer’s looking out the window drooling and totally rapt, wagging her tail at every passerby. “Stop encouraging them,” I tell her.

Tweenie is just getting out of her car as we pull into the driveway. She’s a waitress. She looks a little like Lucille Ball but rounder, and she’s wearing a pink uniform-dress with white piping that says “Tweenie” in fancy script on the front pocket. She is actually part owner of the diner where she works, Uncle Paulie told me. I’ve never been there, but it’s some retro place on the Caloosahatchee River. Uncle Paulie married her a couple years ago, so I’ve only met her twice, at the wedding, and then again the other night at dinner. Uncle Paulie said her father knick-named her, short for “in between”—the girl sandwiched between her older and younger brothers. I somehow expect her to look skinny, kind of squeezed-looking every time I see her, but here she is round as a turnip.

She’s getting a bag of groceries out of the back seat of her car. “Here, let me help you with that,” I tell her taking the bag.

Uncle Paulie comes out of the house. “I put the lasagna in the oven. I made a salad. Did you get the good bread?” he looks into the bag.

“Only the best for you, my love,” Tweenie says, then gives him a big hug and smushes the plastic bag against him. My uncle is smiling and looking at her face. They are about the same height, and their round faces are pressed up against each other.

My uncle was married to my Aunt Dee for 25 years. They didn’t have any children. Aunt Dee was a beautiful woman whose house always looked like a museum. They had plastic runners on their rugs in pathways where you were supposed to walk. When I was a kid, I thought it was a game—like Twister. You had to keep your feet on the plastic. My mother said my Aunt Dee wasn’t bad, just someone who liked things just so. We didn’t see her a lot, I don’t think she really liked us, but my uncle used to come over to our house all the time and put his feet up, as my mother called it. He’d stop by to “see if we needed anything,” and would end up watching the Yankees and drinking a beer or having dinner with us. While my dad was working all hours of every day chasing criminals, he taught me how to play catch with a baseball mitt. When Aunt Dee got breast cancer, my Uncle took care of her until she died. We didn’t see him a lot then, and afterwards, he moved to Florida to go into business with my dad.

Tweenie is a whole other ballgame. She and my uncle are rocking and hugging and laughing. Tweenie says, “That’s not going to be garlic bread, that’s going to be a garlic pancake.”

Uncle Paulie breaks away. “Let me get you a glass of wine,” he says to me.

“Great,” I say and I give him the bottle I’ve brought along. He goes into the house.

Tweenie sits down next to me. “Oh, my feeties…,” she says kicking off her shoes and peds and putting her bare feet up on the railing.

“Nice here,” I tell her.

“It is peaceful, isn’t it?” she answers. “You have been through the wringer, haven’t you?”

“What?” I say. I put a little effort into my appearance tonight and wore a black sundress, applied some under-eye concealer and everything.

She puts her feet down and leans toward me. “Don’t take this wrong now. You’re a beautiful woman.”

I don’t know what to say so I sit there.

“You are so contained, aren’t you?” she says, “just like your daddy.”

I wonder how Tweenie and my dad get along. Probably rough waters.

The sun is beginning to set and the lake is shimmering pinkly. The shade is growing more intense on the fifth green across the lake. Details seem very sharp in this afternoon light. “Oh look, someone’s putting,” I say.

She looks across the lake at a couple lining up their putts. The woman hits and I can hear the sound of the ball falling in the hole—
clup
. “Good shot honey,” the guy says. The sound carries so clearly that I can hear the undertone of resentment in the guy’s voice. Tweenie looks at me and smiles.

My uncle comes out and hands us both a glass of wine, then he goes back inside. Dreamer is sleeping next to Tweenie’s chair. She’s breathing deeply and contentedly. I try to breathe deeply and contentedly too. But I’m no good at stillness anymore. Maybe my friend Joanie is right. Maybe I am on the run.

My uncle Paulie comes out again with his own glass of wine. “Everything is cooking!” he announces proudly. He holds his glass up, “Here’s to my girls.” We raise our glasses. Tweenie takes a couple sips and then says she’s going to take a shower.

“How’d you get yourself involved in a murder?” Paulie asks me.

“I fell into it,” I say.

“You were always a magnet for trouble,” he says smiling. He was the one I turned to when I was an adolescent and always in trouble with my father. He was the one who laughed when I broke every rule my father set. It was just kid stuff—ignoring curfews, smoking cigarettes in the girl’s locker room, drinking in the woods. But, still, I was always grounded. My uncle never seemed to take it seriously.

In college, I straightened out my attitude. But, my father was gone by then.

I started dating bad boys and married professors then. A string of unavailable men. I seemed to always be reading books entitled something like:
Why would a smart woman like you do incredibly stupid things like this?

My father was happy when I married Ed. He thought I was “settling down,” becoming normal. Or so he hoped. Well, so did I.

Except Ed turned out to be not-so-normal himself.

“I’ve been leading a totally boring life,” I tell my uncle.

“Maybe that’s changing,” he says.

“I got hired by someone to investigate this murder. Kind of hired,” I tell him.

I expect him to be shocked, but there’s no riling up my Uncle Paulie. He’s as even as they come. Plus, he always trusted in me. All he says is, “Really? Well, Squirt can help you do some background searches. You can learn a thing or two.”

I must look a little alarmed because he says, “Listen, the cops will probably have the guy who did this nailed in another day. Come on,” he pulls my arm, “I’ll show you my orchids.”

The flowers are hanging in pots from the branches of the bottle brush trees around the deck. They are purple and white and pink. “I didn’t think they were real,” I tell him. They seem waxy and mysterious and incredibly delicate.

“People handle them with kid gloves,” he says. “They sterilize scissors before they cut them and put on these plastic gloves like surgeons before they separate the roots. I just pull them apart with my hands. They like to be touched.”

I think about my marriage and how Ed got so that he wouldn’t even touch the things in his collections, how he used those plastic gloves to handle even rubber band balls. He’d tell me all the time how the human hand had oils that were damaging.

There’s a slow quiet leak out of the corner of my eyes. Tweenie comes out and we eat dinner on the deck. My Uncle Paulie and Tweenie pretend not to notice my tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I say. I never cry.

My uncle hands me a tissue. Then they talk among themselves about people they know and I feel the warm bath of their conversation washing over me. I eventually stop crying.

Tweenie and I clear the dishes, and I say I should go, but they want me to stay in their guest room. My uncle hugs me and his shirt smells like laundry soap. Tweenie turns my bed down. She plumps up my pillow. My uncle says he’ll take Dreamer down the street a bit before he turns in if I don’t mind. He likes a little walk before bed. He pauses by the door as he’s going out. “I love you honey,” he says.

“Mmmflvetoo,” I kind of say. I lay down in this strange bed exhausted from all this tenderness.

Chapter 13

The first thing I notice as I pull into Alligator Estates is that all of Marie and Ernie’s whirligigs are gone. It’s still really early, almost dark, but their absence is tangible. I stop the car. I look. I get out. It’s very quiet where there should be whirligigging. Dreamer pokes her nose out the window and sniffs. We left Paulie’s before anyone was up, and I scurried her into the car without even giving her a chance to pee. I have this go-go-go thing that clicks in sometimes: Post Emotional Stress Syndrome, I call it. It’s really just more running, I suppose.

Maybe Marie just got sick of the whirligigs, I think. Maybe they reminded her too much of Ernie. Nah, I think, she would have done it more neatly. Someone stole them. It has the look of a crime scene. There’s something violent in the holes left in the ground.

I get back in my car. “The great whirligig caper,” I tell Dreamer. We drive on to my still slanted trailer.

I’m just getting out of the shower when there’s a knock on my door. The trailer shakes. I see a big blue shirt through my front door window. “Hold on,” I yell and throw on some clothes.

“Ma’am,” the detective says when I open the door a minute later.

“What?” I say. My hair is dripping and I’ve got a robe on that really is a beach cover-up and my eyes are all puffy and red. This is so unfair. He looks like he’s been up for hours, running and eating egg whites and combing his chest hair.

“Can I come in?”

I almost say, “If you can fit…” but I don’t. He does essentially fill up the trailer. And there’s nowhere to sit unless you consider the cot or the cardboard chair. So we stand there. “Marie Ellis reported all her whirligigs stolen and said that she saw you leaving the scene of the crime.”

I look at him. Dreamer comes up to him wagging her tail happily.

“I was just looking,” I tell him. He pats Dreamer’s head a couple times. Then he takes out his notebook.

“I stopped the car to look,” I insist.

“What were you doing driving around at that time?” he asks.

“I slept over at my uncle’s. They, um, pity me.” I gesture vaguely at my living area. We both look around at my anemic home.

“Why would I steal whirligigs?” I ask him.

He doesn’t say anything.

“This makes no sense. Was there something inside of the whirligigs?” I ask.

He shakes his head. I can tell he feels like he screwed up, like he should have searched them himself.

“I heard Ernie was a blackmailer. Maybe he kept his blackmail evidence in the whirligigs,” I say. “Or his blackmail money. Joe told me that Marie cleaned so much that there wouldn’t have been any place safe to hide anything in that little trailer.

“Did you find anything in Ernie’s room when you searched?”

He shakes his head. “What else do you know about this?” he asks me.

I clam up. There’s one thing I know. I’m not giving him any more information. It only gets me deeper in trouble.

“I don’t really know anything,” I say, “but you’re really starting to bother me.”

“Bother you?”

I say, “There’s a real murderer walking around, and you’re wasting your time on me.”

His eyes look away.

“So focus your attention on someone else,” I tell him.

Maybe it’s my imagination, but he almost looks wounded.

Chapter 14

Eight a.m.: There’s a knock on my door. It’s Joe. “Oh good,” he says when he opens the door, “I thought you might already be in jail.”

“What?”

“I heard the cops came to get you this morning.”

“Who said that?”

“It was probably just a rumor.”

“Sheesh,” I say.

“You didn’t steal the whirligigs, did you?” he looks behind me into my trailer as if there’d be a whole pile of them on my cot.

I step aside. “You want to search?”

“Nah,” he says.

“What’s that?” I say. He’s holding a laptop under his arm.

“It’s Ernie’s computer. I knew he had one. It was Ted and Fritzie’s. He bought it after Ted and Fritzie died and there was a yard sale. Marie kept it in her bread bin. She said she forgot about it. After I asked her about it, she found it. Then she called the detective and he’s coming to get it later, but she let me take it home first. I’m heading there now. I figure we have about a half an hour to look at it.”

“I’ll be right out,” I say.

He smiles. “This is a lot better than being retired,” he says.

When we get to his trailer, Joe sits down and opens it up. I stand over his shoulder. We check to see if Ernie had email. Nothing. Very lonely. We check files to see what he stored. Nothing.