Choke (3 page)

Drew ran into the room carrying a Barbie doll. “Drew,” said Immy, “I thought I told you to get Fuzzy Bear.”

“Don’t like Fuzzy Bear. Like Barbie.”

Immy shuddered. She didn’t want to raise a Barbie-loving daughter. That doll sent all the wrong messages to children, for heaven’s sake. She reached to take the doll, but Drew snatched it back, gave an impish grin, and ran down the short hallway to the bedroom that mother and daughter shared.

“Imogene, compensate the man.” Hortense carried the flowers into the kitchen. Immy found a dollar in her purse and reluctantly parted with it. There weren’t that many more where it came from. She hoped Uncle Huey would pay her soon for the shifts she had worked before she quit.

She wandered into the kitchen. Her mother was on her knees, rummaging under the sink. Hortense emerged triumphant with her one and only cut glass vase. Immy gave her mother a hand up and helped her trim the stems. The blossoms looked crowded in the vase, but Hortense said she didn’t want to put them in plastic.

“Who are they from?” asked Immy, although she already knew. Clem Quigley, the cook at Huey’s Hash, was the only person who regularly sent Hortense flowers.

Hortense opened the florist’s square envelope and held the card to her bosom, smiling. “Such a silly, old fool,” she said, but she kept smiling.

The subjects of bottom pinching and lying to your mother didn’t come up again that night.

The next morning, as Immy drove the family behemoth, an ancient Dodge van of bilious green, into Wymee Falls, she worried that her lies were piling up a little too tall, like tumbleweed stacked up against a fence by the wind.

She had told her mother she was going to the larger town to look for work in some restaurants, which wasn’t too much of a lie. She was looking for work, but not waiting tables. That was a dead end for her.

Why hadn’t she shown her mother the business cards she’d picked up yesterday? Maybe she should have. No, she argued, she’d better not. If she did, her mother would completely dismiss her desire to open her own business, she knew she would.

She knew the litany by heart, having heard it often enough. Little Immy couldn’t do anything on her own. The family took care of her. Look how she had become an unwed mother at eighteen. She hadn’t graduated from high school with honors and become a librarian like her brilliant mother.

But she had graduated, in spite of being pregnant when she crossed the stage. She wasn’t stupid, and she would prove it. She did not have to be taken care of.

Whenever Immy mentioned wanting to be a detective, Mother told her she needed to think realistically, but Immy had known for years that she could detect. Hadn’t she found the Yarborough twins’ new puppy when it was missing? She had been the one to leave the gate open while feeding it for them when they were dove hunting, that was true, but she had followed the little puppy footprints in the dust beside the road, discovered it under a clump of sagebrush, and brought it home safe and sound.

She had also found out why old Mrs. Jefferson couldn’t hear her chiming clock any longer. One reason, of course, was that Mrs. Jefferson had become almost stone deaf. In trying to insert a new battery, the lack of which was the reason for the non-chiming, Immy managed to mangle the chiming mechanism so that it would remain non-chiming forever. But Mrs. Jefferson would never know, unless she got a new hearing aid, and she thought Immy had fixed it.

Those were her two most successful cases, but she was confident there would be others.

She’d been poring over the classified want ads in the paper that came to the diner for the last several weeks, and today she had her route mapped out. Although, she thought, Wymee Falls wouldn’t be hard to find your way around, even if you hadn’t grown up twenty miles from it. It was a town holding its breath, in her mind, waiting for the next big industry to move in, hanging on, sort of like Saltlick but on a slightly larger scale. It had multiple restaurants, but most of them were steak places with a few chains. It had a shopping center, but one of the two anchor stores had moved out ten years ago. It had quite a few strip shopping centers, but only about two-thirds of them were occupied. When the interstate planners had decided to bypass the town with the superhighway, hope for vast expansion in the near future had been shelved. The citizens of Wymee Falls, the optimistic ones, like commercial real estate agents, still held out hope for the far future.

Her first stop in the city was a small, dark office downtown. It was on one of the main streets, and Immy had to park on a side street. Half the block was a bus stop, and three extra-long-bed pickups took up the four parking spaces. Wymee Falls needed some parking garages. The private investigator proprietor had advertised for an office assistant, but he wasn’t in, and the place was locked up tight. Maybe she should have called first, but this was a spur-of-the-moment trip, after all. Immy slipped her résumè under the door. She hoped that working at this place would teach her how to open up her own place.

Next, she drove to the Wymee Falls police station located at the edge of the downtown area. It had a parking lot, Immy was glad to see. She walked in and applied for the advertised job of dispatcher. Not today, and not next month, but one day she was going to be handing out her own business cards, once she learned the ropes a little, and one of these jobs would help. She hoped.

After she filled out the form and was told she would be called for an interview, she visited the used book store, a cramped, cheerful place on a shady, unzoned side street. It was an old house that had been converted to a shop. She found an almost new copy of
The Moron’s Compleat PI Guidebook
, from the Moron’s Compleat Guidebook series. Just what she needed! She thumbed through the pages, eager to devour the entire volume. She clutched it to her chest and paid for it, then carefully put it on the floor of the van.

To make it seem to Mother like she was job hunting all over Wymee Falls, she drove around for a while before returning home. It was surprising more jobs weren’t being offered in her field. The job market was bad, but weren’t people always looking for answers to life’s puzzles?

That afternoon, while her mother picked Drew up from preschool, Immy took advantage of being alone to leaf through her new book.

She had just finished studying the table of contents and had almost decided which section to read first when a hard rap sounded on the door. Immy peeked out the window in the door to see the Saltlick Police Chief, Emmett Emersen, in full uniform and wearing a nasty scowl on his beefy face.

She opened the door. “Can I help you?”

He strode in and looked around. “Where’s your mother?”

“She’s picking Drew up. What do you need?” Why was Emmett acting so serious? Solemn, almost. He usually cracked a lame joke out the window when she saw him driving around in his shiny new Saltlick cop car, one of two the small town owned. He drove the new one, and the other policeman got the old one.

“She’d better be back soon.”

Immy stood rooted to the spot while Emmett paced the length of the small room and back. Something was very wrong.

Emmett paced out to the front porch to wait, and Immy followed. Hortense soon pulled the old Dodge up beside the trailer. Immy wanted to warn her about Emmett’s mood but couldn’t move, couldn’t get her mind in gear to figure out how.

Drew ran up the steps to her mother and gave her a hug. Immy thought to tell Drew to go to her room before Emmett could confront Hortense. For once Drew didn’t tell Immy she couldn’t make her do it.

“Hi Emmett,” began Hortense with a smile. Then she saw his stormy visage. “Do you want to come in?” Her voice wavered a bit as her smile faded. Emmett trailed Hortense and Immy into the living room.

“Uh, please have a seat.” Hortense plopped down in her recliner, leaving the plaid couch for Immy and the chief to share. Immy perched as close to the arm as she could. Emmett laid his shiny-billed hat on the cushion between them.

“I have a few questions.” He pulled a curling notebook from his pocket and clutched a pen in his thick fingers. “Where were you yesterday, late afternoon and evening?”

“Mostly here,” answered Hortense. “Why?”

He turned to Immy. “Where were you?” His ruddy complexion was at its ruddiest. Immy even saw his scalp redden through his thin gray-blond hair.

Immy tried to swallow, but a huge lump was in the way. She licked her lips with an almost dry tongue. She twisted her straight reddish-brown hair around a shaky finger. This was scary, being questioned by a crabby police chief. How much to tell?

“I worked part of my shift at the diner, then I came home.”

“When did you come home?”

“Um, it was about—what was it, Mother? About one?”

“Closer to two, I should think.” Hortense didn’t look at her daughter, keeping her gaze intently on the chief.

Actually it was around three. My shift went until five and I quit three hours early. Then picked up my new business cards. If Mother weren’t here I could tell him the actual time I quit, but I don’t want to make her look like a liar.

“And neither of you were in the restaurant later than that?”

“Most certainly not,” blurted Hortense. She stiffened her spine and sat as tall as her five feet, two inches permitted. “I never go there anymore. I do not like the way Hugh manages the establishment.” She shook her head, setting her chins quivering.

Yikes! Mother is lying to the police on purpose! Now what do I do?

“Why do you ask, pray tell?” Hortense said.

Mother, maybe you shouldn’t be so belligerent with the cops.

“Were either of you there today at any time?”

They both shook their heads.
At least we don’t have to lie about that. We haven’t been near there all day. Mother’s only gone out to take Drew to playschool and pick her up. I think.

Why was the chief looking at them like that? Immy felt her neck hairs rising.

“Hugh Duckworthy was found murdered this morning. Someone gagged him to death. A package of raw sausage was stuffed down his throat.”

After the chief left their home, Immy tried to get used to the fact that Hugh was dead, to wrap her head around the idea. It didn’t quite seem real. Such a short time ago, he had been alive. And she had parted with him on bad terms. At some point, she knew she would have to deal with that, but she didn’t want to now.

Hortense was quiet, too, and seemed a little jumpy. It had to be as big a shock to her as it was to Immy.

Immy shook herself to try to get rid of the image of Huey lying dead with raw sausage protruding from his mouth. Ugh. The chief said it was thawed when they found him but had probably been frozen when Hugh died, judging from the abrasions and the fact that the wrapper was ripped mostly off.

Maybe she should try some deduction to take her mind off the vision. That’s what a PI would probably do. Hugh always kept his supply of sausage in the freezer until he was ready to use it. If it was thawed when his body was discovered and frozen when he died, the murder must have happened well before he was discovered. There! That was good deduction, she felt.

The busboy had found Hugh when he arrived at the diner that morning, Emmett had said. The busboy was probably Baxter. The last Immy knew, Kevin, the other busser, had the week off and was visiting family in Abilene.

“Mother, where were you yesterday after you went to the diner?”

Her mother looked more worried than Immy had ever seen her.

“I just walked for a while. Hugh had me so upset. He said you were lying to me about the reason you quit. I didn’t know what to think. You don’t usually lie to me.” She didn’t look at Immy. If she had, Immy might have had to avoid her gaze. “I went to the little park on the other side of town and sat on a bench. I must have stayed there a long time. My feet started feeling numb. It was cold out and windy.”

How to say this to her own mother? “Mother, why did you lie to the police chief?”

“I was embarrassed when he first asked me. I didn’t want Emmett to know how foolishly I had behaved, storming over there and ranting away at Hugh like that. But Immy, Huey’s dead. Murdered. Now Emmett might think I did it.”

“Why would he think that?”
Should I think it, too?

Hortense spotted the book lying beside Immy. “What’s that?” Her voice took on an accusatory tone.

Good save. Way to change the subject, Mother.
“It’s something I picked up the other day.”

Hortense snatched it from the couch. “
‘The Moron’s Compleat PI Guidebook
? Why the hell do you have this?”

“I bought it.” Immy stuck her chin out. She wasn’t going to back down on her dream. “And I bought these.” She fished her new business cards out of her purse and waved them in front of her mother. This had the effect that a rodeo clown with flapping arms has on a bull.

Hortense read from a card. “Imogene Duckworthy, PI. PI, for God’s sake?”

“Mother, your language.”

“Don’t you Mother-your-language me, little missy. PI? You are not a damn PI. You are not going to have anything to do with investigation or detective work of any kind. Get that through your substantially thick cranium. Your dead sainted father, bless his soul, was a detective, and that’s what got him killed.”

“He was a police detective. There’s a big difference. I want to be another sort of detective.”

Hortense read from the card. “No case too big or too small. We do it all.” She glared at Immy. “Imogene Duckworthy, you are not Nancy Drew. You are not even Agatha Christie, and you are not a detective.” She flung the cards down and threw the book on top of them, then stomped to her bedroom and slammed the door.

Immy knelt and gathered her belongings, blinking back her tears. She knew Mother wanted the best for her, but she didn’t understand Immy’s passion.
I will not cry. Detectives don’t cry. She will
not
make me. There’s no reason I can’t be a detective. I don’t know how yet, but I will some day. I swear to God above I will.