Triple Shot (12 page)

‘Talking?’

MaryAnne moved back a step, then stage-whispered. ‘For now, honey, they find you interesting. The accidents, the body count, the –’ finger-flicking air quotes – ‘“investigations”?’

I didn’t know what to say. So for a change, I kept silent.

MaryAnne continued, ‘And, therefore, so long as any related “inquiries” don’t involve them or their friends personally, your curiosity is just that – a curiosity. Even a diversion?’

A diversion. From what? Leading their lives of glitzy desperation? ‘By them, I assume you mean Brookhills’ elite?’

‘Or those who consider themselves to be such?’ She held up her hands. ‘For my part, I think you’re a . . . do you know what a mensch is? It’s a Yiddish expression.’

Yiddish. From our
numero uno
Southern belle?

‘An unrepentant, overly officious intermeddler?’ It was how Pavlik described me, so I figured it was as good a guess as any.

A grin crinkled the area around MaryAnne’s eyes. No Botox there. ‘I’m sure you’re that, too, honey, but no. A mensch means, literally, a human being . . .’

So far, so good.

‘ . . . but it’s come to mean someone with honor and integrity. Someone you’d be happy to spend time with. A guy – or gal – who wants the best for the people around her, and will stand up to secure it.’

I felt vaguely uncomfortable, having pretty much lived my life under the banner of ‘under-promise and over-deliver.’ And sometimes even that set my bar too high. Mensch-dom seemed far out of reach.

‘MaryAnne, you give me too much credit. Essentially, I’m selfish and self-involved. I can’t even remember –’ I waved vaguely at her table – ‘customers from visit to visit. I’m considering sticking name tags on their foreheads as I greet them at the door.’

The crinkling got deeper. ‘Which begs my question, Maggy: If you, like Rhett Butler, truly don't give a damn, why do you continue to be an “unrepentant, overly officious inter meddler”?’

I looked around the coffeehouse. The tables that needed to be wiped. The coffee that needed to be ground. The Barbies, who were just plain . . . needy.

A shrug. ‘I get bored?’

Chapter Eleven

‘I like your style, Maggy Thorsen,’ MaryAnne Williams said. ‘Always have.’

‘Same here. See you tonight?’

‘As I said, I wouldn’t miss it.’ MaryAnne moved on to her table and I got on with the myriad chores I’d let slide as I sat with my tablet of paper, making lists of how to find out why Brigid had died instead of doing what I should have been.

MaryAnne could think I was being modest, but there was a lot of truth in what I’d said.

I
did
get bored, dammit. I loved planning the coffeehouse. I loved
opening
the coffeehouse, and even its
re
-opening. But . . . working there? Not so much.

I picked up a damp rag and crossed to a crumb-covered, coffee-ringed table to wipe it down for the next hungry, thirsty slobs.

Who were, in turn,
my
bread and butter.

And it’s not that I manufactured the crimes and bodies to escape the mundane. They just seemed to drop into my lap. Or, in the case of Brigid Ferndale, my subterranean room.

And as for the ‘intermeddling’, if I was able to help the people involved, well . . . that made
me
happy.

And wasn’t that, when you boiled it all down, selfishness? Me, a mensch? I didn’t think so.

The chimes on the streetside door jingled and I glanced up from the table I’d been wiping – and wiping and wiping – as I’d been thinking.

A man with a buzz-cut and a muscular physique, but wearing a business suit and topcoat, stepped across our threshold and looked around.

‘Robert,’ Gabriella Atherton called. ‘Over here.’

He turned and caught sight of the ladies who do lunch – and occasionally other women’s husbands – at their corner table.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he said, leaning down to kiss the top of Atherton’s head.

Robert. Of course, this was Elaine Riordan’s ex-husband, now Gabriella Atherton’s fiancé. Who dared imply that Maggy Thorsen couldn’t remember names?

Oh, yeah. That would be me.

I approached their table, telling myself I was being a good server, but knowing the nosy truth in my despicable heart of hearts. ‘Can I get you anything? Or, everybody else, refills?’

‘Oh, that would be fabulous,’ Atherton said for both her and . . . Jan . . . Jane? – yes, that was it – pushing their cups toward me.

Robert said, ‘No, thanks. I can’t stay.’ Then to Atherton: ‘I just saw your car and wanted to stop by, say hello. I’m on my way to the courthouse.’

A cellphone blinged the abbreviated signal that indicates a text message and three of the people went digging. Gabriella Atherton and Jane Smith into their purses, Robert Riordan into his suit jacket pocket.

MaryAnne Williams looked on with the pitying – nay, withering – smile of the non-addicted.

Robert said, ‘Mine,’ as though he’d won a coveted, if somehow shady, lottery. He punched one button and then, rather abruptly, a second before plunging the phone back into his pocket. ‘Not important.’

Right.

Gabriella Atherton wasn’t fooled either. ‘Who was it?’

‘Just Elaine –’ he waved his hand a little too nonchalantly – ‘with another question about COBRA.’

‘Cobra? I thought that was a rattlesnake,’ Smith said.

Everyone looked at her.

‘I mean your Marine tattoo, Robert. You know, “Don’t tread on me”?’

Ahh, I got it. Didn’t understand it, but . . .

‘Jane, how did you happen to see—’ Atherton started to say.

‘COBRA is an acronym,’ I hastily injected by way of conciliatory interruption. The last thing I needed today was a coffeehouse cat fight. ‘C…O…B…R…A with all capital letters.’

Smith threw me a startled, who-asked-you look. And here I was just trying to help bail her out of an embarrassing – if obviously unappreciated – situation.

Maybe MaryAnne Williams was right. I really
was
a mensch.

Though no good deed goes unpunished.

‘COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act,’ I drove bravely onward. ‘It allows people to extend health-insurance coverage through their former employers’ plans. If you can afford it.’

Another lesson learned from personal experience. Both an individual health-insurance plan and, now, a group plan for our small business, had each proved cheaper than using COBRA after the divorce.

‘Or your former husband’s insurance plan, in this case.’ Atherton nodded to Robert. ‘Go ahead and get back to her, if you need to.’ She chin-gestured toward his pocket, looking all the world like the perfect future wife, totally unconcerned about any residual gravitational pull Robert might feel from his former spouse’s orbit.

‘Thanks, Gabriella. And I will, though I don’t know why she’s asking. Elaine dropped her COBRA months ago.’ He gave Atherton a kiss on the cheek. ‘I appreciate your understanding.’

‘Hey,’ Atherton said, waving her hand. ‘I know what it’s like to be there.’ A smile, though sickly sweet. ‘I’m just glad this realtor doesn’t have to be anymore. On
my
own, I mean.’

The woman looked up at her fiancé with obvious affection. Barbie in love with GI Joe. Go figure.

###

It was nearly seven when I turned the deadbolt on the front door of Uncommon Grounds, and then let myself out its platform one. Securing that deadbolt, too, I realized the palm of my right hand was itching.

‘You’ll be getting money soon,’ I could hear my grandmother saying in my head.

‘That would be very welcome, Grandma,’ I replied out loud as I descended the steps toward the depot’s parking lot. ‘I could use it to fix our Swiss-cheesed lawn.’

Not wanting to bother Pavlik’s overburdened sheriff’s department, I’d called the town police and they had been kind enough to send an officer by to shoo away the treasure hunters. The holes, though, remained, which I realized as I veered off the sidewalk toward my car and nearly twisted an ankle.

But . . . hole? It seemed more like someone had been laying pipe, parallel to the sidewalk and about three feet inside of it. Or maybe they had, back in the day, and I’d just never noticed the topographical dip. After all, the wastewater from the toilet and sink in the waiting room had to be borne away somewhere.

Driving my Escape home, I tried to figure out what I should wear that night. It’d been a l
ooon
g time since I’d gone clubbing in Brookhills.

Try, like never.

A small, ‘bachelorette’ apartment on the East Side of Milwaukee had been my home when I was single. It was only after Ted and I married that we’d moved to Brookhills and by that time my ‘clubbing’ days were over, fondly remembered through a haze of Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers.

So, proper attire for Sapphire? I had no idea, but figured ’twas better to err on the conservative side. Maybe a nice skirt with a pretty cami and a jacket I could take off if I felt too buttoned up.

Perfect, I thought, as I walked toward my house’s front door. This way I won’t look like I’m trying too hard. Or trying at all, for that matter.

I went through the usual act with Frank, who apparently had gotten over his snit enough to shove past me toward bolting to the nearest tree, then follow me into our kitchen for his treat.

From there, I went straight to the laundry room, where I stripped off my jeans and Uncommon Grounds T-shirt and then on to the bathroom and its shower. When the hot water hit me, a kaleidoscopic scent of coffee beans arose. While at work, the stuff seemed to sink into your pores. And while coffee is a relatively positive smell – enticing even – you don’t necessarily want to become one with it 24/7/365.

I shampooed once and realized my right palm was still itching. Also red, though that may have been due to the hot water or the scratching I’d done earlier. I stuck my hand out past the shower curtain into the better light of an overhead fixture to get a better look.

And that’s when I heard something. ‘Frank?’

No answer.

‘Frank, is that you?’

A partial bark answered me, but like the sheepdog had been somehow quieted.

Uh-oh.

I shut off the water, not bothering to finish rinsing my hair. Janet Leigh might have been perfectly clean on the floor of that Bates Motel shower, but what good did it do her? Or her sheepdog.

Stepping over the side of my tub, I pulled a green flowered towel off the rack and wrapped it around me. A squeak now, from outside the bathroom door but certainly inside my bedroom. Floorboard perhaps? Or bedspring? Whatever, but Frank didn’t squeak. The big lummox thudded. Bounded.

Or, when he was feeling stealthy, he padded.

But Frank never squeaked.

‘Jake, you . . .’ I tried to say conversationally, but it didn’t come out. Clearing my throat, I started again. ‘You must hear that, too. Get your gun out of the . . .’ Where in the hell would my supposed shower-mate have stashed a gun in
this
room? ‘. . . um, the linen closet, Jake.’

Another squeak, this one seeming startled, assuming noises can be startled.

‘I’ll open the door,’ I continued loudly. ‘And you just start shooting. OK, Sheriff Pavlik?’

‘OK,’ from the other side of the door.

I cracked it open. ‘Pavlik?’

Sure enough. The sheriff got up from the foot of my bed, just as Frank came romping toward him, tennis ball in the pooch’s slobbery mouth.

I was incredibly relieved. And, therefore, pissed. ‘How did you get in?’

‘Your door was ajar and I was worried,’ he said, looking me and my towel up and down. ‘Even more so, when I heard you talking like somebody was next to you in the shower.’

‘You were supposed to be scared away. By
you
.’

‘Well, since I knew it wasn’t me . . .’ Pavlik pushed open the door and my towel slipped.

I grabbed the cotton hem. ‘Yeah?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ He ran his hand up my bare arm and across its shoulder as he dropped his lips to the notch below my throat.

As Pavlik kissed me there and worked his way southward, I felt my towel fall away completely. He murmured, ‘You know how I knew it wasn’t me in there with you?’

‘N . . . n . . . no!’ Apparently I’d suddenly developed a stutter. Then my back arched on its own and I tangled my fingers in Pavlik’s dark, curly hair.

He craned his head back to look up at me. ‘Maggy, you
never
call me Jake.’

###

Turns out that eleven thirty wasn’t all that late. In fact, after Pavlik left I had time for only a quick turnaround shower.

I hadn’t told our sheriff about my visit to Sapphire, lest he think I was officiously intermeddling. Besides, it felt a little like cheating. Not that I planned to. Cheat, that is. Officious intermeddling, however, was quite definitely in my plans.

I’d briefly considered scolding Pavlik for showing up at my house unannounced and then letting himself in. But . . . a tremor at the memory, it had been an awfully nice surprise.

Exercising uncharacteristic decisiveness at home – I’d decided to stay the conservative course on dress-code and therefore mirror-front dithering was kept to a minimum – I pulled up in front of Sapphire only a minute or two past half past eleven. By day, you wouldn’t even know the place was there. Or, if you did notice the empty parking lot and hulking building with its windows blocked out on the edge of an industrial park, you’d think it was just another vacant warehouse.

But at night? My-oh-my, things were
très différent
.

The parking lot was packed and after joining the parade of cars looking for spaces, I gave in and circled back to the building, waiting this time for the luxury of paying the valet fifteen bucks to park my Escape.

Leaving my keys and my vehicle, I hurried to the canopied door, where I was stopped by a man with a clipboard.

‘Name?’

‘Maggy Thorsen, but I don’t think I’d be on—’

‘Go right in, Ms Thorsen.’ He unclipped a velvet rope just like you see on television and a muscular young man opened the door for me, giving me an almost quizzical once-over as I passed by.