Spooky Little Girl (2 page)

“You know, if you brush your teeth,” he said as he sat up, “we could still have a good time.”

Lucy wanted to vomit all over again. Her pulse pounded in her temples. She looked at him, picked up her purse that was sitting at the foot of the bed, and then opened the door to find Marianne coming down the hallway with her key card in her hand.

“Hey,” Lucy said to the guy before she shut the door, “Define ‘asshole.’”

By the time the plane touched ground in Phoenix, Lucy didn’t want anything more than to simply go home. She couldn’t wait to fall onto her own creaky couch, pet her dog, Tulip, and crack open whatever cold drink she could find in the fridge. She was excited to see Martin, and hoped that they could spend that night watching old movies on TV, their favorite way to spend any night.

Waiting for the trio of girls to emerge from behind the security gate was Warren, Jilly’s broad, tall, bearded, and jolly husband, who had agreed to give Marianne a lift home, too. Lucy looked around for Martin but didn’t see him anywhere.

“I’m sure he’s just running behind,” Lucy said, and smiled, although she couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed that he wasn’t there to meet her. He’d probably had a late truck come in at Safeway, where he was the manager of the produce department and had
to unload it.
That’s Martin. Got busy, lost track of time, forgot to call. Probably doesn’t know he’s late
, she thought.
I wonder if he even remembers that I was coming come today. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that man was having an affair with a head of cabbage
.

Warren came forward with a huge grin and gave Jilly a kiss on her freckled cheek and a quick squeeze before he picked up her bag.

Lucy flipped open her phone and speed dialed Martin’s number.

“Just what I thought,” she said, and laughed a little when it went straight to voice mail. “I’m sure that there are five hundred heads of lettuce demanding his attention.”

Jilly nodded and smiled. “Nah. I bet he’s down at baggage claim, waiting with a big bouquet of flowers,” she reassured Lucy. “You just wait and see. Martin, forget anything? You’re insane, or your blood alcohol level still hasn’t recouped yet.”

But when they descended the escalator to baggage claim, there was no bouquet of flowers waiting for her, no Martin. She tried his cell again. Straight to voice mail.

“What should we do?” Jilly asked Lucy after she saw her hang up again. “Warren brought the truck … so there’s only room for three of us…. I could have him drop us off and then come back.”

“I can be back here in forty minutes,” Warren confirmed.

“No, that’s silly, that’s silly,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “I’ll try him again, and if I don’t get ahold of him, I’ll take a cab. How much could it possibly be, ten, fifteen bucks?”

“Are you sure?” Jilly asked, tucking a strand of her straight strawberry blond hair behind her ear. “Warren doesn’t mind.”

“I’ll take a cab.” Lucy laughed. “I’m a big girl. I should have called him this morning to remind him. He just forgot. I’ll see you at work tomorrow. I swear I’m fine.”

“All right,” Jilly agreed, hesitantly. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” Lucy said firmly.

“See you tomorrow, Lucy,” Marianne called as she waved. The three of them started for the parking lot.

The cab had circled the Safeway parking lot two times when the driver asked Lucy if she wanted to go around again. Martin’s beat-up red Ford Ranger truck was nowhere in sight. Lucy had figured that the cab could just drop her off at the store, Martin could run her home, and they’d save a couple of bucks, but it wasn’t working out exactly as she had hoped.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe I should run inside and see if he’s on lunch or something.”

“Your dime,” the driver said. “Meter’s running.”

Lucy could see her fare was already almost twenty dollars, and she didn’t have much more than that in her purse. If she ran around Safeway for several minutes, she wouldn’t have enough to pay her fare if Martin wasn’t around, let alone a tip.

“Just take me home,” she said, sighing.

After Lucy had rather unsuccessfully won the tug of war over her wedding dress and the cab had driven away, she found herself standing in front of her house, shaking her head, trying to make sense of things. She fished her house keys out of her purse and started up the driveway, dragging her suitcase behind her, the ruined dress under her arm. As she passed the bed of her truck, she saw heaps of her clothes, shoes, purses, everything from her closet. On the lawn was her television, computer, books, photo albums, a blanket her grandmother had crocheted. Everything she owned, everything that was hers. Lucy’s head spun like she had downed a six-pack and gone on a Tilt-a-Whirl ride. Her mind searched for any reason that could clarify the scenario. Had they been robbed and everything out here was not worthy of stealing? Or worse, had
some part of the house caught fire and this was what had been saved? Did Martin have some sort of yard sale, after which he had neglected to bring anything back inside the house? Were they being evicted, was the house being foreclosed on, had he stopped making payments and not told her? What was going on, what had happened? Where the hell was Martin?

As she neared the front door, she dialed Martin’s cell again, praying for him to answer. The phone rang, rang, rang, and then, again, went to voice mail.

“CALL ME BACK,” Lucy demanded into the phone. “What happened? Everything’s out on the lawn.
Would you please call me back?
Are you all right? What is going on?”

She tried to insert the key into the lock, but it wouldn’t fit.

The key,
her
key, refused to slide into the lock. She tried it again, this time with more force. It wouldn’t fit. She took a step back and took a deep breath. “This can’t be happening,” she said aloud, then took the key again and with all of her might, with her teeth grinding, tried to shove it into the keyhole, but to no avail. Had they been evicted and the locks changed? But when she looked in the living room window, everything appeared normal. There was Martin’s La-Z-Boy recliner, their nasty burlap couch, the coffee table. All was as it should have been.

This was unbelievable. She let go of the suitcase, took a step back from the door again, closed her eyes, and tried to calm down.

But Lucy knew she wasn’t very good at calming down.

She raised her hand and threw her useless key ring against the front door as she screamed.

Suddenly, she heard barking. There, inside the house, standing at the window, was Tulip, Lucy’s old, graying golden retriever mix.

“Hi, sugar,” Lucy said, immediately feeling her blood pressure drop as she put her hand up to the window. “How are you, sweetheart? Are
you being a good girl? Are you? Did you miss me? I missed you. I really did. Do you know why the TV is next to the mailbox and why my panties are scattered all over the bed of my truck? Do you? Do you know what’s going on? I wish you could tell me.”

Tulip licked her side of the glass where Lucy had put her hand, then sat, panting patiently. She barked again, moving her head almost in a nod, her eyes on Lucy the whole time. She had been Lucy’s best friend for years, since the day Lucy had found her at the pound as a puppy. Flea-bitten, shivering, and scared, Tulip had come home with Lucy, and from that day on, they had slept in the same bed, watched the same television shows, and celebrated life’s accomplishments together. Tulip was always there to cheer Lucy up, to comfort her when she needed it, and to be the one constant thing that Lucy always knew she could depend upon. Tulip made Lucy feel grounded and safe and always loved. Tulip was everything a dog should be to its person: a valued member of the family, a dear friend, a skilled secret keeper. And when Lucy met Martin three years ago, Tulip came along with the package, as did her basket of balls and hair-covered bed when Lucy eventually moved into his house. Now, standing on the other side of the glass, Tulip wagged her tail and pawed at the window, barking slightly in a very definitive way, as in, “Don’t just stand there, come in!”

From inside her purse, Lucy heard the ring of her phone. She grabbed it.

“Martin?” she asked into the receiver, without so much as looking at who was calling.

“No,” Lucy heard on the other end of the phone, followed by a quick little laugh. “It’s Jilly. I got a call from—Wait, you mean Martin is still MIA? That boyfriend of yours is a workaholic.”

“Well, I’m at the place that apparently used to be my home,” Lucy replied, as the severity of the situation started to sink in. “Jilly
everything I own is tossed out on the street and I have no idea why. I don’t know what’s going on. All of my clothes are in the bed of my truck, the furniture I inherited from my grandmother is in the yard, and I just fought a homeless woman for my wedding dress, which is now ripped to shreds. The locks to the house have been changed. I can’t get in! Martin won’t answer his phone, he won’t call me back, and I can’t even get inside to get Tulip. He wasn’t at Safeway. I drove around the parking lot twice. I don’t know what to do. I have no idea what to do. I think he has thrown me out.”

“Just stay there,” Jilly advised. “Warren and I will be there in ten minutes.”

Lucy put the phone back into her purse and shook her head, then looked at her dog on the other side of the glass. Tulip didn’t take her cocoa-colored eyes off Lucy for one second.

Tulip panted. Lucy tried to smile for her, to make sure Tulip knew everything was going to be all right. She walked into the yard, grabbed the closest box—full of several pairs of her favorite cowboy boots, including a treasured vintage pair from the forties—and tossed it into the bed of the truck. Another box, brimming with purses and shoes, was the next to go. A stack of books from dental school. A pile of white and pastel-colored uniforms for work.

A box of wedding invitations that Lucy had just gotten back from the discount printer and had decided to put off addressing until after she returned from Hawaii, even though the wedding date was only eight weeks away.

She had thought she would have plenty of time.

It wasn’t going to be a big wedding, anyway, Lucy had rationalized when she’d found herself daydreaming about her vacation instead of getting a pen and sitting down at the kitchen table. It didn’t really even matter when she addressed the invitations. Just a few friends in the backyard with the reception catered by the barbecue place down the street, Martin’s favorite. Martin didn’t like big things, didn’t like to make a fuss. He was a direct path kind of guy. If he was at point A and he needed to be at point B, he’d go from A to B, and that would be it. No turns, no sidetracking, no pausing, no stops, just travel the most direct route. Their vacations or weekend trips were always like that. No plans for a detour to see fossilized dinosaur bones embedded in the side of a mountain, because he’d say it all looked like rock, couldn’t tell which was which, anyway; no point in stopping to take a picture of a dozen vintage Cadillacs, half buried nose first in the ground at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid, if you could already see
them from the highway; and why would a grown woman want to stop and have lunch at Flintstones Bedrock City on the way back from the Grand Canyon when that cartoon wasn’t even on the air anymore?

Thus, when Lucy finally got her sliver of an inheritance check from the sale of the family farm after the death of her grandmother a year earlier, she knew exactly what she was going to do with it. With nonchalant disregard to her upcoming nuptials, she spent almost the last dime of her inheritance on the Hawaii trip, justifying the cost by categorizing the trip as her bachelorette party and something of a last hurrah. Martin had already informed her that any extended honeymoon was out of the question; work was too busy, as it was spring and this was his season to make his department shine. Maybe they could take a weekend and camp in Sedona, but nothing longer than that. When Lucy suggested going to Jerome, a former mining town turned artsy enclave, Martin gave her a long look.

“We’d have to stay in a hotel up there,” he reminded her. “Why pay for a hotel if you have a tent?”

So when Lucy got her inheritance, she already had her mind made up. She didn’t want to take any sort of vacation she would have to drive to, which were all the vacations she had taken with Martin. She wasn’t going to camp in a tent, or sleep in a roadside motel with worn carpet and stiff polyester bedspreads and thin beige plastic buckets for ice. She had done all of that for him, and to be honest, she never had any longings about sleeping on the ground in a tent for a week without bathing, like a Joad. Wherever she went on her vacation, she was going to fly. She was going to go as far as she could imagine. She immediately decided on the most un-Martin place she could think of: Hawaii. It was that simple.
Hawaii
. She imagined herself laughing on the beach and sipping frivolous drinks under exotic trees with fringe. She wanted to stay
at a fancy hotel, eat steak and shrimp and roasted boar, and wake up early to walk along the beach, even if she didn’t have a point A or point B already in mind.

So she called Jilly and proposed that they go. Warren was game. He was up for the girls having a good time for themselves, and then Marianne mentioned that she’d always dreamed of going to Hawaii. Splitting the hotel room three ways sounded great. Lucy pitched it to Martin as sort of a “last hurrah” girls’ weekend before she and he tied the knot; Marianne found a great deal on a beachfront “resort.” Lucy bought her ticket. And while it turned out that it wasn’t the most glamorous vacation on earth and she had spent the most memorable moments of it puking in some sleazeball’s bathroom, getting away from home had given her time to think, time to laugh, and time to realize that maybe it wasn’t such a sin that she hadn’t quite gotten around to addressing those invitations just yet.

Martin was a good man. He had good bones, a good heart, a kind voice. He was a quiet man with a gentle character. Typically on-the-dot dependable. So nice anyone could always count on him to help them move. And if there was anything Martin was, it was satisfied. Satisfied with his job managing the produce department at Safeway, waking up at three in the morning to make sure cabbage was in, unloaded, and stacked in the display cold case with just the right spacing. Satisfied with his thirteen-year-old red dented truck with a frozen driver’s side window and a seat belt so tired of being wound that it could only give enough length to be fastened if he tugged hard at it twice and let it go gently a third time. Satisfied with the spring popping up on the left side of the brown plaid couch every time he’d get up, satisfied with waiting for a movie to go to rental before he would see it, satisfied with basic cable. Satisfied with not complaining once when he would come down with a cold. And, by all accounts, he had been satisfied with Lucy.