Invisible (6 page)

I lifted the magnolia-shaped doorknocker beside the brass nameplate that said Magnolia House. It was really a very modest little house, though that fact was fairly well hidden by the camouflage of magnolia trees, dramatically larger and more lush than any others in the area. I could hear Magnolia’s energetic tread bustle across the living room. When she opened the door, she wasn’t wearing a silk magnolia in her hair, as she usually did. But her hair . . .

“Ivy, dear, how good to see you!”

My mouth fell open. Magnolia’s hair had always been a red that rivaled any traffic light and, I’d always suspected, probably stopped traffic occasionally. But now . . .

Pink. Not shell pink, not carnation or rose pink. No, this was . . . It came to me. The color of that fuzzy fiberglass stuff that goes between walls. Insulation pink. It was also in an enormous new style. With a green bow that matched her gauzy green outfit. Magnolia has an impressive, dowager-type body, the top-heavy kind you see in drawings of elegant Victorian society ladies, and she wears clothes that have a life of their own, flowing and swirling giddily long after Magnolia herself stops moving.

Magnolia pushed the screen door open. “Come in! We’ve been unloading the motor home, and I’m ready for a break. Iced tea?”

Magnolia was, as usual, in full armor. Dramatic blue eye-shadow. Eyebrows swept out to bird-wing length. Blush like a tree-ripened peach. Also, as usual, her lipstick matched her hair. More insulation pink.

The total effect of hair, makeup, and floating attire was quite overwhelming, so much so that Magnolia was well into an animated account of their motor home adventures before I recovered enough to do more than nod.

“And in South Dakota we located this wonderful woman still living out on an old ranch all by herself. She is, as nearly as we can figure out, my great-great-grandfather’s great-great-great-granddaughter by his first wife.” She paused, reflecting. “Although I’m not positive I have all the ‘greats’ right.”

From what I’d heard, most people do research into family genealogy on the Internet these days, but Magnolia prefers her research on the hoof and in the flesh.

I took a deep breath and interrupted. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard yet, since you just got home . . . Thea passed away while you were gone.”

Magnolia’s genealogical mapping abruptly ended, and her hands flew to her cheeks. “Oh no.”

Magnolia, for all her flamboyancy and a certain pretentiousness in saturating her surroundings with magnolias to draw attention to her name, truly does possess a warm and caring heart. Last year, when I was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, she drove Thea over to the hospital to visit me every day. And even after I went home, she continued to visit my elderly roommate whom none of us had known before. Now she jumped up, then slumped back into her chair, her expression stricken.

“I can’t believe it. Her heart?”

I nodded. “I found her dead in her bed last Sunday. We buried her on Friday.”

“Oh my. Oh my. We should have been here.” Magnolia’s heavy elbows dropped to the table. The green gauze fluttered around the drooping flesh. Her blue-shadowed eyelids quivered. Even her pink insulation hairdo seemed to wilt. “It—it won’t be the same around here without Thea, will it?”

“No, not the same at all.” Such an understatement that my throat swelled and constricted with the words.

“Was her funeral well attended?” Magnolia’s voice suddenly bristled. Not attending a funeral was a major sin in Magnolia’s book. When the time came, anyone who didn’t attend Magnolia’s funeral would suffer for it, I was certain.

“There weren’t many there, no. But I think she went easy, and that’s a blessing.”

Magnolia’s husband, Geoff, came in the back way with a big plastic garbage bag slung over his shoulder. Geoff is a short, wiry guy, though he is a bit taller than his hair, so a pink shine shows through. He always seems to be trailing in Magnolia’s wake, although on rare occasions he puts his foot down and Magnolia meekly accedes. He is also the only person in the world who dares call her “Mag.” Now Magnolia gave him the news.

Geoff echoed his wife. “Oh my,” he said, and sat down. The plastic bag spilled dirty clothes at his feet. I would just as soon never have known that Geoff wore boxer shorts printed with miniature magnolias.

“Anyway, the reason I came over,” I said with as much briskness as I could muster, “I’m wondering if you’d like to have Thea’s plants. You know plants don’t do well in my house—”

“They go down like the Titanic.”

Yes. “So if you’d like to have them . . . ?”

Magnolia’s bird-wing brows flew together in deliberation. “We’re gone so much . . . But yes, of course. We’ll take them.” Her attitude was protective.
Keep those innocent plants out of Ivy’s murderous hands!
And, even though they were gone a lot, Geoff had set up a drip-watering system so their house plants didn’t suffer while they were away.

Magnolia instructed Geoff to get a wheelbarrow to transport the plants, and we all trooped over to the house. After the second wheelbarrowful Geoff went into one of his rare I’m-laying-down-the-law modes and said that was enough plants.

“I can probably give the rest of them to my niece, then,” I said.

Magnolia kindly made no comment on the plants’ chances of survival until I could pass them along to DeeAnn. Instead, eyeing the basement steps at Thea’s house, she said, “Is that young woman still renting the apartment?”

“Kendra? Yes, she’s still here, but I believe she may be leaving soon.”

“Is she in some sort of trouble?”

The question startled me. “Why, I don’t believe so. Why do you ask that?”

“Oh, just something I sensed about her. I’m very sensitive to the vibrations emanating from people, you know.” Magnolia put a hand on her chest and breathed deeply, as if those vibrations came through her nose and she was inhaling fresh ones even now. “And there is just something about her that immediately put me on alert. An aura of darkness. Perhaps even danger.”

I couldn’t vouch for Magnolia’s sensitivity. Her vibrations hadn’t informed her that the young Beckett couple she invited to dinner last spring were strict vegetarians, and she’d blithely served them shrimp salad, big T-bones, and mashed potatoes laced with bacon bits. Nor had vibrations served her particularly well when she’d clasped a visiting baby to her breast with happy coos of family similarity, only to discover she was not holding her grand-niece after all.

But it had also been Magnolia who had recognized Effie McKenzie’s handsome new boyfriend as a con man even before he started trying to sell us all stock in some phony Montana mining company. Unfortunately, Effie had been late acknowledging the validity of Magnolia’s vibrations about Roger, which was why her resulting financial situation forced her to move in with her daughter in Texas.

Now, after Geoff unloaded the last of the plants in my backyard, I considered Magnolia’s question about Kendra. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if Magnolia could be right. Was Kendra in some sort of trouble, some danger even beyond her possible involvement with a married man?

I considered what I’d observed. Kendra’s careful weighing before giving any information about her past. Her expertise at diverting questions about herself. Dyed eyebrows. Her lack of possessions. Her job at sleazy Barney’s. Her odd pale-to-blush transformation when I asked if she was up to something. Those terrible, bug-eyed fish curtains that she’d never bothered to change.

Even I felt a hint of ominous vibrations.

* * *

I called the dental clinic the following morning. I’d been going there since old Dr. Sorenson retired. I requested the young dentist who’d filled my last cavity, but he was unavailable.
“But Dr. Griswold has a cancellation today, and if you could come in at 2:00 . . . ?”

I wasn’t surprised by the shift. They seemed to play musical dental chairs at the clinic. I said I’d be there. What I didn’t say was that if this new man called me “young lady,” as the ophthalmologist I’d tried out last year had done, I was going to kick him in the shins and stomp out.

Dr. Griswold did not do that. He politely called me Mrs. Malone, gave the tooth a professional inspection, and told his cute young assistant to take me in the other room for X-rays.

The girl helped me climb into the chair and solicitously settled the protective lead shield over my chest and abdomen. She patted my shoulder. “You’ll be okay now?”

“Of course.” Why wouldn’t I be okay? This was just an X-ray, not a rocket ride to the moon.

“I remember last time, how you got that terrible attack of claustrophobia, because the shield was so heavy on your chest.”

This was news to me. “The shield’s never bothered me.”

The young woman frowned as if she thought I was stubbornly refusing to acknowledge something she well remembered. “And then, when your sister came in, she had the same problem—”

“No problems,” I said. “No sister. Perhaps you have me mixed up with someone else?”

“Oh. Oh, I see. Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s just that we have several elderly ladies among our patients, and you—” The girl put a hand to her mouth and broke off, flustered, but the unspoken ending was obvious:
You all look alike to me.

The girl suddenly became very businesslike. She stuffed the uncomfortable little X-ray things in my mouth, zapped me a couple of times, and took me back to the other room. Her freckles pulled together in a concentrated frown all through the drilling and filling procedure. I could almost read her thoughts:
I’ve got to keep these old ladies straight.

* * *

I stopped by the one-hour photo shop to drop my payment in the box the utility company had there, which saved me the expense of a stamp. I had the utility company’s envelope in my hand and was just reaching to drop it in the proper slot when a young man pushed in ahead of me. No apology, not even acknowledgment of my existence when he knocked my envelope right out of my hand. He shoved his envelope in the slot, another envelope in the cable company’s slot, and away he went to grab a carton of film off a shelf down the aisle.

I picked up my envelope, now decorated with a dark footprint, and stuffed it in the slot. I had to push his sloppily inserted envelope in also.

Well.

I don’t want to be one of those doom-and-gloom senior citizens who believe the manners of the younger generation are careening the world toward a state of barbaric savagery, but sometimes you have to wonder.

Or maybe it wasn’t just the younger generation. While I was in the little shopping center, I decided to go over to the drugstore. I was almost out of that pink hand cream I splurge on because the scent is so lovely. Two middle-aged clerks were stocking shelves and carrying on an animated conversation about someone named Destiny.

“Well, the thing is, she’s just not in
touch
with herself,” the woman in the purple T-shirt asserted as she climbed on a step stool to place bottles of blue shampoo on a top shelf. “Know what I mean?”

“There’s this fantastic new psychic over on Madison Street. If you could just get her to go there . . .”

A psychic on Madison Street now. Just what we need.

I wandered up and down the aisles, looking for the hand cream, which was not where it had always been. I passed the women several times. Once I had to dodge the swing of the step stool as the clerk moved down the aisle.

“How about aromatherapy?” the woman in green pants suggested. “My cousin says—”

Finally I interrupted. “Excuse me, but I’m looking for some hand cream, and it’s always been right over there.” I pointed to a shelf loaded with a dizzying array of lotions and creams. “I don’t remember the brand name right now, something about lace, I think. And it’s pink. Oh, wait, I may have a coupon in my purse . . .”

It was a fairly long bit of conversation, from my point of view, but apparently it flitted right past the saleswoman. She looked through me to a leggy young creature studying a carton of hair coloring.

“May I help you find something?” the saleswoman asked with an eager air of concerned helpfulness. The other salesclerk was already disappearing through the swinging doors into a rear storeroom.

I gave up on pink hand cream for today. My numb jaw now felt as if it was getting ready to burst into an ache. I wondered if, under the lingering effects of Novocain, I’d perhaps mumbled my request to the clerk. Or, heaven forbid, drooled over the numb lip.

Yet by the time I got home, a different and shocking new possibility rose up to confront me.

6

I’m invisible.

The proof was all there. The driver who hadn’t seen me and almost ran me down with his car. Rena Rasmussen looking right through me at church. The young man pushing in front of me at the utility box, never seeing me. The dental assistant, seeing me but not
seeing
me. The salesclerks in the drugstore.

I stopped the Thunderbird in the driveway. At the moment I didn’t feel up to putting it in the garage. I sat there with hands wrapped around the wheel.

Some of what I’d encountered could no doubt be attributed to simple carelessness. Or uncaring rudeness. People were busy, preoccupied, stressed. Manners were no longer a high priority. But was that all there was to it? No. People simply did not
see
me.