Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey (2 page)

“How was the library this morning?” Martin asked, after we’d stacked the last piece of wood.

I stood back, feeling sweat bead on my forehead from the exertion though the air was bracingly chilly, and smiled at him. He knew I was happier now that I’d resumed part-time work at the Lawrenceton library.

“Sam decided patrons with overdue books would be more likely to return the books if they were called personally, rather than sent a postcard. This comes from him reading some study in a magazine, of course. So guess who got to make at least fifty phone calls this morning? Thank God for answering machines. I decided it wasn’t cheating to leave a message on the machine.” I watched Martin pull off his heavy gloves. “What about you?”

“I had my annual physical, followed by a morning-long meeting about implementing the new EPA regulations.” My husband Martin, who has a pirate gene stuck somewhere in his DNA, frequently gets frustrated with his job as vice president of manufacturing for Pan-Am Agra, an agricultural products company. He has not always done something so legitimate and safe.

“Sorry, honey.” I patted his shoulder sympathetically. We strolled back to return the things to our toolshed. Darius’s pickup and small trailer were still parked blocking my car in, halfway on the gravel and halfway on the grass; when I’d okayed that, I’d only expected him to be there for a little while. The ground had been nice and dry, but as I turned to go back into the house, big drops of rain began to patter down. We simultaneously thought of the truck making troughs in the softened dirt, and hurried back to check the cab of the truck.

Martin said a heartfelt and obscene word. The ignition was empty.

I looked in the passenger side. Perhaps Darius had just withdrawn the keys and tossed them on the seat to silence the little beeper that reminds you your keys are in the ignition. I do that occasionally, if I have to run back into the house for a minute or two.

“Look, Martin.” I pointed. But not at a set of keys.

Martin stuck his head in the door.

There was an open bottle of generic pain reliever, acetaminophen, on the seat.

Martin raised one eyebrow at me. “So?”

“He started acting so funny so fast, my first thought was that he’d taken a drug. And I don’t think he’s the kind of man who would ever think of doing something so dangerous.”

Martin said, “We’d better call the sheriff’s department again.”

So once again Jimmy and Levon drove the mile out of town that got them to our house, and Jimmy pulled on plastic gloves before he picked up the pill bottle. He poured its contents onto the gloved palm of his other hand. He didn’t tell us to leave, so we watched.

Martin saw it first. He pointed.

Levon bent over Jimmy’s palm.

“Damn,” he said in his deep voice.

One of the pills was a smidge smaller than the others, and not quite the same shade of white.

It didn’t have the manufacturer’s initial on it as all the other pain relief tablets did. The difference was obvious when you were looking for it. But without some good reason to examine the medicine, who would think of doing so?

“We got another one,” Jimmy concluded, looking down at Levon.

“Someone else has been drugged?” I asked, trying to keep my voice casual and sort of insinuate the question.

“Yes’m,” Jimmy said, not catching the warning look Levon was trying to send him. “Lady last week left her purse in the cart in the grocery while she walked over to the frozen section to get some Ore-Ida hash browns. When she was driving home, she took a pill from a fancy case in her purse, that she used to carry her—well, some prescription medicine—with her. Instead of getting tranquil, she went nuts.”

“What did she do?” I asked, fascinated.

“Well. . .”Jimmy began, treating me to a grin that told me the story was going to be a good one.

“We need to be getting this back to SPACOLEC,” Levon said pointedly.

“Huh? Oh, right.” Jimmy, aware he’d been on the verge of indiscretion, flushed to the roots of his reddish hair. “When one of Darius’s kids shows up, we’ll tell them you’d appreciate them moving the truck. The keys were in Darius’s pants. I coulda brought ‘em out here, if you’d mentioned them over the phone.”

I flushed guiltily. I’d been so excited over finding the pills, I had forgotten why we’d looked in Darius’s truck in the first place.

I watched as their car turned out of our long driveway and began the short stretch into Lawrenceton, piqued that I hadn’t gotten to hear the rest of Jimmy’s story. I wondered if my friend Sally Allison, a reporter for our local paper, had heard anything.

“I have to go back to the plant for a little while,” Martin said unenthusiastically. “I have a stack of letters to sign that need to go out.” He climbed back in his car, started it, and rolled down the window as I turned toward the kitchen door. “Don’t forget,” he called, “we’ve got dinner at the Lowrys’ house tonight.” The rain picked up a little momentum.

“I have it on the calendar,” I called back, trying not to sound dismal.

If there’d been a can in front of me I’d have kicked it on my way into the house. It didn’t seem like a good night to eat out with people I was (at best) on cordial terms with. Close friends and homemade chili sounded good; friendly acquaintances and dressing up didn’t.

Catledge and Ellen Lowry were not soul mates of mine. But they were among the leading citizens of Lawrenceton. Catledge was the mayor for a second term and Ellen was on every board and a member of every club worth joining in our small town. Keeping the town government, ergo the Lowrys, pleased was important to Martin’s business, and therefore to a great many people in Lawrenceton who depended on Pan-Am Agra for a paycheck.

“They’re not that bad,” I said out loud to my silent house. Even to me, I sounded sulky. I trudged upstairs to figure out what to wear, straightening one of the pictures hung by the staircase as I went up. Gradually the house warmed and cheered me, as it nearly always did. My house is at least sixty-five years old, and it has beautiful hardwood floors, tall windows that no standard curtains will fit correctly (so every single “window treatment” has to be custom made), and a voracious appetite for electricity and gas. I love it dearly. We’d had it renovated when we married. Since we’ve been married less than three years, and have no children and only one alleged pet, there’s nothing to redo yet; at least not for a basically practical person like me. I still have space on the built-in bookshelves lining the hall, and now I can afford to buy hardbacks.

I showered and shampooed, once again going through the tedious process of combing and drying my mess of hair. At least curly, wavy hair was fashionable now. It was a pleasant change to have others actually envy me my abundance, rather than peer at it with pity in their eyes.

I flipped through the garments in my closet without much interest. The cerise wool dress my mother had brought me was too fancy for the occasion, so I finally decided I’d wear a longsleeved garnet silk blouse, a black-and-garnet patterned skirt, and my black pumps. Looking at my collection of glasses—I’m very nearsighted—I had a wild impulse to select my purple-and-white-framed ones.

Oh, hell. The Lowrys would be offended if my glasses were frivolous. I got my new black-rimmed ones with the delicate gold wire-and-bead decoration and set them out on my vanity table. This morning I’d put on my favorite workday red specs, and I viewed them in the mirror with some satisfaction. They added a spark of liveliness to my unhappy face.

“So, why’m I sulking?” I asked the mirror.

That particular question never got answered, because the front doorbell rang.

What a lot of visitors I was having today, if you counted the deputies coming twice.

Through the opaque oval glass pane in the front door, I saw the silhouette of a woman with a baby carrier in her arms. I assumed it was my friend Lizanne Buckley Sewell, who’d had her baby boy two months before. I disarmed the alarm and opened the door with a smile that collapsed in on itself. I stared blankly at the plump, dark, pretty young woman who stood on my front porch with a perfectly strange baby, who seemed smaller than Lizanne’s infant.

“Aunt Roe!” said the dark young woman. She looked exhausted, and she also looked as if she expected a warm welcome.

I had not the slightest idea who she was.

The next instant everything clicked, and I would have thunked myself on the forehead with the heel of my hand if I’d been alone. I was aunt to only one young woman, and that was Martin’s niece, the daughter of his sister Barby.

“Regina!” I said, hoping my recovery hadn’t been too obvious.

“For a minute there, I didn’t think you recognized me!” she said, laughing.

“Ha, ha. Come on in! And this is little . . .” Regina had had a baby? It was covered with a blue blanket and wore a red sleeper. Martin had a—great-nephew?

How could I have missed that? Granted, we don’t often see Martin’s sister and her daughter, but I would have expected a certain amount of phone calling to herald the new arrival.

“Oh, Aunt Roe! This is
Hayden
!”

“And you call him Hayden.” I nodded with a wise look. “No nicknames.” I could hardly recall ever having been more at sea.

“No, me and Craig are set on him being called Hayden,” Regina said, trying to look firm and determined and failing completely.

Martin may not have gotten all the looks in the Bartell family—Barby and Regina are both pretty, in their way—but he’d surely gotten a disproportionate amount of the brains and resolution.

I craned out of the front door, trying to see if Craig Graham was maybe getting luggage out of the trunk. “Where’s your husband?” I asked, never imagining this would be a sensitive question.

“He didn’t come,” Regina said. Her generous mouth clamped tight.

“Oh.” I hoped I didn’t sound as blank as I felt. “And how’s your mother?” I was gesturing to Regina to come on in, still peering around in the hopes of spying a companion. She’d driven all the way from Corinth, Ohio, on her own?

“Mama’s on a cruise,” Regina said, too gaily. This gal was having serious mood swings.

“Hmmm. Where to?” I repeated my “come in” gesture, more emphatically.

“Oh, she’s taking a long one,” Regina chattered, finally stepping over the threshold. “The boat stops by some islands in the Caribbean, then over to two stops in Mexico of several days apiece, then back to Miami.”

“My goodness,” I said mildly. “She’s with a friend?”

“That guy,” Regina said, depositing the baby, still in his infant seat, on the coffee table in front of the couch and unslinging a huge diaper bag from her shoulder. There was still a fabric-care tag dangling from the shoulder strap of the diaper bag.

“That guy” was Barby’s fiancé, investment banker Hubert Morris, whom the divorced Barby Lampton had met when she’d bought a condo in Pittsburgh, the closest major city and airport to Corinth, Ohio, Barby and Martin’s childhood home. Though Barby hadn’t lived in Corinth since her teenage years, Regina had met her husband-to-be while she and her mother were in Corinth visiting an old friend of Barby’s. Regina had married the boy—I mean, young man—only two months later.

Martin and I had flown up to Pittsburgh for the wedding, maybe seven months ago. We’d gotten the impression that the young couple would be living in very straitened circumstances.

Craig Graham had been a dark, lanky no-brainer, whose greatest apparent virtue had been that he cared for Regina. He was eighteen to Regina’s twenty-one. The groom’s share of the wedding duties and expenses had been borne by Barby, who had tried to be unobtrusive about it. Of course, Martin and I had noticed. But Barby had made it clear to us (to Martin, anyway, since she seldom talked to me directly) that after the wedding, the young couple was going to be financially independent, as far as she was concerned. She’d made some pointed remarks about who had made beds and who would be lying in them.

“Would you like a drink? Coffee, or hot chocolate? Though maybe those things aren’t good for the baby.” My friend Lizanne was breast-feeding; and, though I hadn’t asked, she’d generously given me a
very
thorough grounding on the subject. After being indoctrinated with Lizanne’s opinions on the virtues of, and necessity for, mother’s milk, I was taken aback when Regina gave me a blank look.

“Huh? No, I’m bottle-feeding,” she said, after a pause. “Gosh, if I nursed him, it’d have to be me that fed him every time.”

I kept a smile planted on my face. “So, some coffee?”

“Please.” She slumped back. “I’ve been driving for hours.”

She
had
driven all the way from Ohio. This was very strange, and getting stranger.

I brewed some coffee, shuddering at Regina’s protest that instant would have been fine. After I’d poured a cup for each of us, adding cream and sugar to Martin’s niece’s, I listened to Regina blather about the long drive, the baby, her mother’s condo, her Aunt Cindy . . .

“Oh, I’m sorry!” she apologized. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Aunt Cindy” was Martin’s first wife, the mother of his only child, Regina’s cousin Barrett. I sighed internally,
still
kept my smile pasted on, and assured Regina that she needn’t apologize. A little corner of my brain repressed an urge to ask Regina why she wasn’t at Aunt Cindy’s instead of Uncle Martin’s, if Aunt Cindy was so great.

“Did you see Barrett on TV the other night?” Regina said enthusiastically. “Boy, didn’t he look handsome? I always call all my friends when Barrett’s going to be on television.”