Happiness Key (15 page)

“You won’t catch me talking to a plant,” Wanda muttered.

Janya waited, as if she wanted to be certain Wanda had finished. “They must be watered regularly, with no lapses. They must be fertilized, pruned, and when they outgrow their flowerpots, they must be repotted. These things take a great deal of time, of love, of good instincts. So though I know little of Mr. Krause, I know he was a man who could lavish love when it was needed, who was willing to work hard and take time from easier things to do what was required, a man whose good instincts produced a forest in flowerpots that the rest of us can admire and enjoy today, even though he is gone.”

She nodded and sat down.

Tracy looked uncomfortable, but when it was clear
Wanda wasn’t going to speak next, she sighed and stood. “When I moved here a few weeks ago, I really wasn’t happy to be in Florida.”

“You’re saying that’s changed?” Wanda asked.

Tracy ignored her. “My life was topsy-turvy. Suddenly I was living here, and I’ve got to tell you, I’d only been to Florida once, and we stayed at the Ritz Carlton in South Beach. I know all of you will agree with me. Nothing out here on Happiness Key is much like the Ritz.”

“Amen,” Wanda said with feeling.

“Mr. Krause came over when he saw me moving in. And I guess he thought I might need some help. Of course, he was too old to carry things, but he brought me a folder with all kinds of brochures, and lists of his favorite places to shop, to take dry cleaning, to eat. It had flamingos on the front.”

She stopped and cleared her throat. “I guess I didn’t appreciate it. I’m not even sure where that folder went. Anyway, the point is that he didn’t have a lot to share, but he made certain to share what he had. And he always had a smile and something nice to say when I saw him.” She glanced at Wanda, or Wanda thought she did, although it was quick. “And he never expected anything out of me, either. He just took care of his place by himself.”

She sat down.

Wanda got to her feet, because now she knew exactly what she was going to say. “That brings back a nice memory. One day I was having an awful time with my screen door. It was such an old one, you know, all bent out of shape, and the screen was peeling back from the edges so bad every time I went to open it, I got scratched. And I wasn’t born yesterday, so I know all about lockjaw.
Those little wires were all rusted, and I was just waiting for the morning when I woke up unable to open my mouth—”

“That would be the day,” Tracy said softly, but not softly enough.

“I am speaking here,” Wanda said. Tracy didn’t look one bit guilty.

“Anyway, I did try to get that woman at the realty to have it seen to, but of course, she wouldn’t do a thing, said we could just move out if we needed to. Mighty big of her. So I decided I’d take it off myself and just put it outside for the garbagemen. Better not to have one than to have one that could kill me.”

Tracy sighed audibly.

“Well, there I was, struggling with that stump-ugly door, and by then it was just hanging from one hinge, rusted there like the Tin Woodman right when Dorothy finds him. And here comes Herb, with a can of WD-40, like he’d just been hoping to find somebody who needed it. Between us, we got that door off in a jiffy. And it wasn’t the only time he helped me like that. These days my Kenny’s as worthless as a doodlebug, and Herb always helped out when he could. Like once when the rain was just coming down, down, down in my bathroom, he came over and helped me soak it up. Too bad he’s gone now, ’cause next big rain, the same thing’s gonna happen.”

She smoothed her skirt and sat again.

Everyone was silent. After she had waited a while, Janya stood. “Here in his home, I know we hope that wherever he has gone, he will find peace and unity with God. Would one of you like to pray?” She waited, looking for all the world like somebody Aladdin would scoop up on his magic carpet.

Alice hefted herself out of her chair. Then, while Wanda listened in amazement, she recited the twenty-third psalm. Perfectly, with only a hesitation or two. Then, she sat down again.

“That was beautiful,” Janya said. She waited, and when no one else spoke she said, “This is from my own religious tradition.” She paused for a moment. “I am death, that snatches all, and the source of all that shall be born. I am glory, prosperity, beautiful speech, memory, intelligence, steadfastness, and forgiveness. I am the divine seed of all lives.”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Alice said.

“Amen,” Tracy said. Everybody else, except Janya, followed suit.

Wanda wasn’t sure exactly what had just happened, but she did know she felt better. There hadn’t been hellfire and brimstone, nobody pointing a finger at the living to remind them that they might be the next one lying in a casket. She just hoped that if Herb was someplace where he could hear this, he could forgive them all for having so little to say, when there should have been a lot more.

“The best thing we can do for the man now is find his family,” she said, getting up. “Where are we on that?”

The tension in the room eased; everybody’s shoulders drooped a little, as if they were glad to have that done.

Tracy stood and stretched. “Janya and I went to city hall yesterday. We didn’t find out anything about Herb, but we did find that Clyde Franklin, probably the same one considering the dates, was married back in 1942 to a woman named Louise Green. Here in Sun County.”

“And you think he’s the same one?”

“No guarantee. I guess we might be able to get a copy of their marriage license. Wouldn’t it have their birth dates on it?”

“Put that down, somebody. Something we can do,” Wanda said.

“If we just assume it’s the same one, the most important thing is whether either he or Louise is still alive,” Tracy said. “And if we can find them and ask about Herb’s daughter.”

Something was nibbling at Wanda’s brain. “You say the name was Louise?”

“Louise Green, until she married Clyde. Then she would have been Louise Franklin.”

“Louise Franklin…” Wanda chewed her lip, which didn’t matter, since she hadn’t had time to put even a dab of lipstick on it.

The ground rumbled and the cottage shook. It was trash pickup day. The private contractor who threw their garbage in the back of a dump truck could only be counted on to arrive sometime over the weekend, and she often forgot to put out her own stuff, because the times were so irregular. Luckily Ken—apparently he was good for something besides making coffee, after all—had remembered to put the can by the road that morning before he took off for wherever.

“Is there an agency that keeps records of people who have died?” Janya asked. “We could check that first. Clyde and Louise would both be old by now, and may be gone like Herb.”

“Social Security,” Tracy said. “But I’m not sure they would just give us that information. I could call—”

“Louise Franklin!” Wanda clapped her hands. “In the folders I checked. Herb had a bunch of newspaper clippings. I scanned them. None of them seemed important. More fishing holes, that kind of thing. But when I was flipping one of the clippings over, just to be sure, there was a news article about a woman named Louise
Franklin. I knew I remembered that name. And I wondered if that was why he’d cut it out, because it was cut to the size of that article, and on the other side, whatever it said, it was chopped off at the end, like it hadn’t been that important, although it
was
about tides or something.”

“You have a good memory,” Janya said. “Do you remember anything about the article?”

“No. But let’s get it and see. Where is all the stuff I gave you?” she asked Tracy.

“You said it was worthless, so I threw it away.”

The road outside was quiet now. The women looked at each other with alarm. “Did they just pick up the trash?” Tracy asked.

“Sounded like it.” Wanda was sprinting toward the window in her bare feet. “Yep, I can still see the dust they kicked up. They’ll head out to the point to turn around. They’ll be back in just a minute.”

“We’ve got to head them off,” Tracy said.

“Last week I tried to get them to wait while I ran back in for a second bag, and they just laughed at me. The first bag barely made it in before they took off down the road. And they wouldn’t stop on the way back, even though I was standing there holding it up for ’em. Those guys don’t stop for anything.”

“Oh, no?” Tracy threw the door open. “They had better stop for me.”

Wanda wanted to see this. She liked Tracy marginally better than she had, but the woman still needed some comeuppance. She hobbled out to Herb’s front steps to watch.

Tracy was heading for the road, and Wanda felt someone brush by her. Janya in her sari—that’s what it
was called!—had taken off after her. Before Wanda knew it, Alice was following.

“You watch they don’t run you three down,” Wanda called. “I wouldn’t put it past ’em.”

The point wasn’t far, which was what made this land so valuable and environmentally fragile. By the time the women were lined up along the road, Wanda could hear the truck returning. The engine coughed and sputtered, but she was pretty sure the truck was speeding up. The women were already jumping up and down, waving their arms, but she knew nothing they did was going to be any good.

Before she knew it she was back inside, slipping her throbbing feet into her sandals and grabbing for her purse. She left by the kitchen door, sprinting toward her own cottage through Alice’s yard, fishing for her car keys as she ran. Her feet felt like they were on fire, but she was moving so fast she didn’t have time to feel the worst of it.

Behind her, she could hear an irritated honking, then the driver of the garbage truck put his hand down on the horn and held it there without release.

She had parked on the road when she returned from work because Ken had put the trash cans so close to the edge of their driveway, she had been afraid she might hit them. She jumped into her car and backed around. She could hear the truck bearing down on her. The other women had done little more than slow their speed. She imagined the workers laughing at the sight of three women—one gray-haired, one exotically dressed, one Hollywood starlet—so convinced they could make the truck stop, trying so hard to wave them down as they sped by.

Wanda pulled on to the road so her car spanned the
width of it, jumped out and leaped to the side as the garbage truck roared into view.

Just in case.

Brakes squealed, and it took precious seconds for the tires to grip the oyster-shell road and slow to a crawl, then finally to a stop, just inches from the side of her old Ford Escort. Wanda didn’t even wince. She’d told Ken she needed something sassier than the old sedan. They didn’t even make Escorts anymore, for pity’s sake. She had her sights set on a Miata, the first thing she would buy after the divorce.

The men in the truck were cursing. Wanda went to the driver’s open window. “You got something belongs to my friends back there, mister. And it will be right on top, so it won’t be one bit of trouble to find it. Now you get out and throw down that last bag you put in there, and I’ll let you go past. I won’t even call your boss and complain about the way you treated us.”

“We got a job to do, lady!”

“You just bet you do. So you’d better go about doing it.” Wanda saw the others coming toward her. “Quick-like. They’re going to be hopping mad.”

Cursing, the man leaped down from the truck and went around to the back, climbing in and holding up a bag. “This one?”

Tracy had arrived by then. “That’s it. Just toss it down. We’ll take care of it from here.”

He did, and the bag split five ways ’til Sunday. But Wanda didn’t care. She nodded as he scooted by her, then she went to move her car.

The truck was halfway up the road again by the time she’d parked and joined the others, who had already cleaned up the worst of the mess.

“That was brilliant,” Tracy said.

Wanda didn’t care what Tracy thought, not really. But she had to admit, the words sounded nice coming out of the younger woman’s lips.

“Now, can you find the right article?” Tracy held up a file folder with articles hanging out the side. Wanda thought it was a lucky thing that whatever Alice had cleaned out of old Herb’s refrigerator must have gone into a different bag. The folder was bedraggled, but not coated with broken egg yolks or soaked in milk.

Wanda took it and thumbed through it. “This is the one.” She held it up.

“What’s it say?”

Wanda handed the rest of the folder back to Tracy and scanned the article.

“It says a woman was walking across a street downtown and got hit by a car. The hospital reported she was in critical condition when she was brought in, and they were unable to save her. The driver was somebody in town on vacation with a carload of kids, and apparently she didn’t see him coming.” She looked up. “And I was right. The woman was named Louise Franklin.”

“Is there a date?”

“No, darn, it’s cut from the middle of a page. But guess what else it says?”

“What?” Janya asked.

“I guess I didn’t read far enough the first time, else maybe I’d have realized this was important. Louise Franklin was a resident of Palmetto Grove, a widow. Her husband died in 1951. She had one daughter.”

“No names?”

“Not in the article, but I bet they’re named in her obituary.”

“So Clyde and Louise are both dead,” Tracy said. “No
help there. But maybe this daughter knows something about Herb or Herb’s daughter.”

“I’d still like to know how Clyde and Herb knew each other, and why Herb had Clyde’s birth certificate and discharge papers. Clyde had a wife. He had a daughter, just like Herb does. Why doesn’t the daughter have his papers?” Something seemed off to Wanda.

“Now we know when Clyde died,” Tracy said. “Maybe we can write off for his death certificate, and see if it tells where he died and of what. See if we can find a connection. Meantime, we can look for this daughter and see if she stayed in town. The newspaper might have a real obituary for Louise with the daughter’s name.”

“Clyde’s death certificate seems unlikely to help,” Janya said.