Stranded (32 page)

23

I’ll say one thing for my first motorcycle ride. It had its heart-in-the-throat moments, but it wasn’t as wild as riding with Doris Hammerstone in her Lincoln. Mac had produced a helmet for me out of a luggage box mounted on the back of the motorcycle. (Which made me wonder: how many other LOLs, with arms clasped around him as mine were, was he giving rides to?) I was both chilled and windblown when we arrived at the log cabin, but it was a short trip, and all was well otherwise.

I slid off the padded seat, feeling a little shaky anyway. “You carry the motorcycle with you on the motor home now?”

“I had a special rack built on back for it, with a little ramp so I can zip right up on it. No lifting.” Mac opened the luggage box, and I dropped the helmet inside. He smiled as if he knew what I’d been thinking. “In case you’re wondering, I bought the helmet especially for you just before I left Florida.”

“How did you even know I’d ride on this thing?” I don’t know much about motorcycles. This one was relatively small, certainly not as big and mean as some I’ve seen, but it had a lot of racy-looking chrome.

Mac grinned. “Ivy Malone, you’re the woman who jumps into murder and mayhem the way some women jump into a shopping spree. I didn’t think you’d turn down this new adventure.”

Hmmm. I decided to let that one go.

Kelli had given Abilene and me each a key, and I led the way inside the cabin, where Koop and Sandra Day met us. Do cats remember people? I’d swear Koop remembered Mac from when he’d visited us in Oklahoma. As soon as Mac sat down, Koop jumped on his shoulder, rubbed his whiskers on Mac’s ear, and revved up his purr.

I started making the peach cobbler immediately, though I had to do it with canned peaches, of course. We caught up on what Mac’s daughters and their husbands and the grandchildren were doing, and the travel article assignments he’d done about sponges in Florida and the theme park in Texas. I told him about my job setting up books for the new Historical Society library and a little more about the Revue and the people in it.

Finally, as I was checking the cobbler in the oven to see how it was coming along, he said, “I do believe you’re avoiding telling me about this murder. And the fire.”

“Not avoiding,” I protested. “It’s just that it’s no big deal. And you seem so . . . disapproving. It’s not that I go around looking for murders, you know,” I added defensively. “I just kind of . . . stumble into them.”

“Ivy, I admire your sleuthing abilities. I’m amazed by them, in fact. So it isn’t really disapproval—” He broke off as if checking that statement for validity. “Well, maybe it is disapproval in a way. But it’s only because I worry about you.”

“Worry? About me?” I was astonished.

“Yes, worry. Because murderers are dangerous. And you always seem to wind up in some weird situation.”

Truth in that, I had to admit. But the worry element was a new and not displeasing thought. You don’t worry about someone unless you care, do you? While I was contemplating that, the phone rang.

I had assumed both Kelli and Abilene would be home soon, but this call was from Kelli saying she and Chris were going to have dinner with Charlotte, and she wouldn’t be home until later. Then, no more than a minute after that, Abilene called and said she was going with Dr. Sugarman out to a ranch to look at a sick horse.

So there we were. Just Mac and me. Although that was not to hold true for long.

I got out pork chops to cook for dinner, feeling a little guilty about my earlier hostile thoughts toward DaisyBelle. I really wouldn’t want to see her cute little chops in my frying pan. I was peeling potatoes, Mac sitting at the kitchen table keeping me company, when the back door rattled under the pounding of a fist.

Someone coming to the back door wasn’t unusual. It was the entrance everyone used. But the pounding . . . “Now who could that be?”

I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and went to the door. I’d no sooner cautiously opened it than I was engulfed in an enormous, smoke-and-garlic-scented bear hug.

Norman drew back and looked down at me. “Ms. Ivy! Glory be! You’re all right! I went over to Hiram’s house lookin’ for you, and I saw all that mess from a fire, so I come over here to see Kelli and find out what happened to you—” He broke off when he looked over my shoulder and saw Mac.

I glanced back too. Mac had risen from the chair, his expression somewhere between alarmed and puzzled. My first inclination was to ease Norman politely out to the Dorf, which was sitting in the driveway, and send him on his way. Which wasn’t possible, I realized with an inner groan, because the Dorf stood there as lopsided as a woman with a missing high heel.

“There’s a flat tire on your pickup.”

“Yep. Found that tire layin’ along the road a few months back, so I figure I got my money’s worth out of it.” He grinned cheerfully.

I wouldn’t simply have sent Norman on his way anyway, I realized. He was a good guy, in his own eccentric way, and I couldn’t do that to him.

“Come on in, Norman,” I said. “I’ll introduce you and Mac.”

Norman clumped in, his beat-up old Nikes leaving a trail of ashes from the house, and I introduced them. Mac MacPherson, Norman—Norman what? I realized I’d never heard anything past Norman. Nutty Norman.

Norman held out his hand. “Norman Pierson. You kin of Ms. Ivy’s?” He sounded hopeful.

“No. No kin.” Not a common word in Mac’s vocabulary, I suspected, but he used it as if it were. “Just . . . good friends.”

The two men regarded each other warily. Norman hadn’t worn his suit today, so apparently he hadn’t intended to take me to the Café Russo again. Tonight he was wearing black denim pants, ragged around the bottom, and a heavy jacket a couple sizes too large for him. Cold or wind had fluffed his beard to electrified-cat proportions, which made his ponytail look skinny as a twisted string hanging down his back.

“Did you come to town for some special reason?” I asked. “I hope you’re not ill?”

“No, I’m fine. I had to come in to the hardware store. Ginger died, but my shovel handle broke, and I couldn’t dig any more till I got a new one. I brought you some eggs. They’re out in the Dorf.”

Mac looked even more puzzled, and there were, I realized, various elements in those statements that were as mysterious as some Dead Sea language unless you knew Norman. A Dorf. A dead Ginger. Well, I’d explain some other time.

“I’m sorry to hear about Ginger,” I said.

“What about that fire?”

I explained about the blaze in the trash room that had expanded to engulf the whole back side of the house, with the fire department’s conclusion about what had started it. “So then Kelli invited Abilene and me to stay with her here at the cabin for a while.”

All the while we were talking I could practically hear Mac’s puzzled thoughts:
Who is this guy? How come he shows up and hugs you like some long-lost sweetheart?

Okay, I didn’t want Mac thinking Norman was some sort of love interest, though that bear hug might take some explaining. But neither did I want Norman’s feelings hurt thinking I was embarrassed about him and anxious to get rid of him. So I did the only thing I could think to do.

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Norman? I’m fixing pork chops and gravy, and there’s peach cobbler for dessert.” I’d already put on a couple of extra chops in case Abilene came home hungry, so there was plenty of food for one more.

Norman’s eyes lit up. “Glory be, I sure would like that, Ms. Ivy.”

Norman immediately took off his jacket and sat down at the table across from Mac, ashes fluttering around his feet. Green suspenders held up the black pants, and his sweatshirt had a NASA logo. And a few unidentifiable stains. I put on an extra place setting and poured coffee for both men. Koop, objecting to Norman’s cigarette scent, pulled one of his stiff-tailed departures. Mac eyed Norman speculatively.

Maybe this would work out just fine, I decided. Arousing a bit of jealousy is a rather immature ploy, but it wasn’t as if I’d set it up on purpose, and maybe it wouldn’t hurt for Mac to see another man was interested. Even if that man wasn’t exactly Senior Hunk of the Year.

Was that what happened? Guess.

“You ain’t from around here, are you?” Norman inquired of Mac.

Norman had this peculiar blend of reasonably correct and considerably flawed English in his speech, and it was odd, but I was never quite certain which was the real Norman. Was he basically uneducated but had picked up some correct wording from all the reading he did? Or was he a lot educated and deliberately plugged himself into hermit-from-the-hills speech much of the time?

“No. I’m traveling,” Mac said. “I just got in from Florida.”

“Florida, eh? I was there, long time ago, down in those Keys. Quite a place. All those bridges hoppin’ from island to island.”

That surprised me. I’d never pictured Norman as having a life before his hermit existence out at the mine, and certainly not one that had taken him to the Florida Keys. This obviously interested Mac too.

“I didn’t get down to the Keys, but I wish I had. I’ll have to go back someday. I spent most of my time around Tarpon Springs.”

“Hey, I worked on a sponge boat outta there for a while.”

And they were off, talking sponges, boats, Florida Keys, and motorcycles. Then they got started on the Lucky Queen and its history, which brought in Hiram McLeod, of course, and soon they were into his mysterious murder.

I sat there thinking,
Well, this is good, isn’t it?
No unpleasant jealousy scene, just friendly talk, like two old buddies who haven’t seen each other in months. I wouldn’t have wanted them pulling guns and having an old-fashioned shootout or fistfight over me, would I? Of course not. Although would it have hurt if one of them exhibited just a
smidgen
of jealousy or hint of competitiveness for my affections? But neither did. Their appetites were just fine too. They both chowed down on pork chops and gravy as if they hadn’t had a solid meal in days, passing platters back and forth and talking all the time.

Then I sighed. I should have known this was what would happen. I already knew Mac was the kind of guy who could talk to anybody and found everybody interesting. No reason to think he’d be any different with Norman. And Norman, for all his peculiar ways, had a core of what I could only call gentlemanliness.

“Good peach cobbler, Ivy,” Mac said over dessert.

“The best,” Norman echoed.

So there it was, a unanimous vote of approval from my non-suitors.

Afterward, they went out together to fix Norman’s flat tire. Norman came in to wash up, and then I walked out to the Dorf with him to pick up the eggs he’d brought. I noted he didn’t do his little whirl and hop as he had when leaving the Café Russo. Perhaps that ritual was necessary only after being in some public place.

“Right nice fellow you’ve got there, Ms. Ivy,” Norman said.

“He’s not my . . . We’re just friends.”

“He’s thinkin’ more than that.”

“What makes you say that?”

Norman tapped his temple. “A man can tell.”

I’d have had more faith in that knowledgeable-sounding statement if that tap on the temple hadn’t been the same gesture he’d used to indicate how he contacted the aliens flying around in their UFO.

“You’re kind of soft on him too, ain’t you?” Norman asked.

“Just friends,” I repeated.

“Well, I’ll be going now. But if he don’t treat you right, you let me know, okay?” He momentarily got an almost ferocious scowl around his eyes.

“Okay. I’m glad you came, Norman.” And I was, I really was.

He twisted and jumped and flung himself through the window of the Dorf but sat there without turning on the engine, something obviously on his mind. I didn’t know whether to encourage him or not.

Finally he said, “I figure I oughtta mention something, Ms. Ivy. I didn’t want to say anything inside, ’cause it’s kinda personal. You might even say it speaks ill of the dead. And Hiram was my friend and always done right by me.”

I had no idea where this was going, so I just shifted the sack of eggs from one arm to the other.

“The thing is, when I was over at the house lookin’ for you, I went inside, trying to figure out what happened. The front door’s locked, but anyone could go in the back way, like I did. You might mention that to Kelli. There’s a lot of valuable antique stuff in there yet.”

“I’ll do that. But I think she plans to have it boarded up temporarily within the next few days.”

“Anyway, I saw them fancy carousel horses, like on merry-go-rounds, there in the bedroom. And they reminded me of something.” Pause. “Someone.”

I made a neutral murmur.

“This is the part that’s kind of hard, Ms. Ivy, because it don’t speak well of Hiram. But he had a girlfriend on the side, someone besides Lucinda. Which I never thought was right, not right at all.” It was hard to tell what his face was doing under the beard, but his brow wrinkled with disapproval.

“He told you about her?”

Norman nodded. “One night when we were drinkin’ tequila. The reason this come to mind now is that he said she was just crazy about merry-go-round horses. And I seen them carousel horses, and I figure he must of bought ’em for her. So now I’m wondering . . . well, I’m not quite sure what I’m wonderin’.”