The Blue Coyote (The Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mysteries Book 2) (2 page)

Friday Afternoon

Screeeech.

Scraaape, rattle...the sound
shattered the harmonious atmosphere. Frannie felt a sinking certainty that
something was going to mar their perfect weekend.

The rasping, scraping sound
moved nearer and passed. Larry emerged from pulling a plastic bin from under
the cover of his pickup bed and looked toward the road. Nothing in sight as the
sound receded. He looked over at his brother-in-law.

Mickey was putting out the
awning on his class C Lazy Daze motor home--the 'Red Rocket'--so he could hang
his outdoor lights before nightfall. He was struggling to control a smile and
only nodded.

“Yup. Training wheels. She’s
been by here about four hundred times since we got here.”

“Oh, man,”
Larry
said, running his hand over his gray military-style crewcut. He looked at the
sky and pleaded “Why me?”

Sabet watched him, puzzled.
“What’s the matter with training wheels, Grandpa?”

“Only one thing—noise.”

“Your grandpa hates training
wheels,” Mickey told her.

“More than lima beans,” Jane
Ann added.

“More than Uncle Mickey’s
Iowa State flag?” Sabet asked.

They nodded. “Ohhh,” she
said, understanding and looked up. “ Does Granny Fran hate ‘em too?”

“Not as much as your grandpa.
Nobody hates them that much,” Mickey answered, as he got out a string of lights
to hang on the awning.

“Mickey, I’m so impressed
that you got that fire going and the stew on as instructed,” Frannie changed
the subject.

“I can follow pretty simple
directions,” he said, straight-faced. Mickey, a retired English teacher,
relished his role as the self-anointed irresponsible clown of the group. Since
the Ferraros planned to arrive at the campground first, Frannie had dropped a
container of turkey stew off with Mickey and Jane Ann before they left their
hometown of Perfection Falls with instructions to warm it over the fire so that
it would be ready for the evening meal when everyone else arrived, but she was
not overly confident that Mickey would remember on his own.

Larry pulled the kids’ bikes
out of the back of the truck. A young girl, about Sabet’s age, came back up the
road on a gaudy purple bike, complete with handlebar streamers and a white
wicker basket festooned with cartoon-like purple flowers. She was not wearing a
helmet. The training wheels, old cracked plastic, ground out an atonal dirge loud
enough to drown out any conversation. She continued up the road to a dead end
loop.

As Sabet watched the bike go
past, she said, “That girl
does
look
pretty old for training wheels.”

“Her folks must be camped on
that circle,” Mickey said, “And I’m guessing they told her not to ride there
because they don’t want to listen to it either.”

“Of course they don’t,” Larry
said.

“I see Terells have arrived,”
Frannie said.

“Yeah, they’ll be over soon.
They got here about a half hour after we did,” Jane Ann said.

“Can we ride
our
bikes, Grandpa?” Joe asked. And then
he added, “We don’t need training wheels.” Unlike his sister’s round open face,
Joe’s face had small features and he only smiled with his mouth closed, kind of
a Grinch effect. But much of the time he was pretty serious, like now, and
looked as if he was asking to borrow the truck or have access to his
grandparents’ pensions. He sat on the bench of the picnic table, petting and
nuzzling Cuba.

Larry looked at Frannie. “How
soon is supper?”

“Oh, probably an hour.”

“Go ahead,” he nodded to Joe.
“Just stay on this road, though. After supper, Granny Fran and I will go with
you and we’ll go around the whole campground.”

“Yippee!” Joe jumped in place
and pumped a fist in the air.

“Wear your helmets,” Frannie
added, and to Larry, “It doesn’t take much to make that kid happy.”

He agreed, and as she got
their lantern lights out to clip on the edge of the awning, she smiled to
herself thinking of Sam’s warnings earlier that afternoon when she and Larry
picked up the kids. “Don’t let them out of your sight or let them go to the
bathroom by themselves or ride their bikes without their helmets.” Sam, who, in
his own childhood, had been out on his bike every summer day from dawn to dusk,
with no helmet of course, grudgingly stopping at home only to update his mother
on his plans: to the pool, fishing, to the park, to the ball diamond. And when
he was home, he was building ramps in the gravel driveway to jump his bike or
scheming with the neighbor boys to build a treehouse and move into it. Sam’s
wife Beth didn’t seem nearly as nervous about the children as Sam did. Perhaps
Sam remembered only too well all of the possibilities.

Ben and Nancy walked into the
campsite carrying lawn chairs and their Boston terrier/beagle, Chloe. Chloe’s
rabbit-like ears perked straight up, not to miss any new sounds. Ben Terell,
with his reddish blonde hair and short beard, resembled a leprechaun more than
anything else, but in real life was a physical therapist and his small stature
belied his upper body strength. His optimistic sunny disposition and
laid back
manner usually complemented, but sometimes clashed
with, his wife’s bent for organization

“Hey, guys,”
Nancy
said now. “Glad you made it okay. Larry, hate to tell
you but there’s a kid here with training wheels. I reminded Mickey to put the
stew on and I made some biscuits to go with it. I think Jane Ann brought some
coleslaw and dessert.”

Frannie pointed at Mickey and
said, “Busted!”

Mickey shrugged. “What can I
say? I was just going to do it when Nancy reminded me.”

“Right.”

“I already heard the wheels,”
Larry said.

Nancy set up her chair and
tethered Chloe to it. “What a crazy summer it’s been! We haven’t camped with
you guys in ages.”

“And it shows,
Nance—we’ve developed bad habits—total lack of organization,”
Mickey said.

“Come off it, Mickey. Not
even Nancy can organize you,” Jane Ann said. And to Ben and Nancy, “We really
missed you on the Minnesota trip. That is a great bike trail.”

“How many went on that one?”
Ben asked. “Did you say twelve or fourteen?”

“We had eighteen for supper
on Saturday night. Mickey smoked a brisket and everyone brought
stuff—took a whole picnic table just for food!” Jane Ann laughed.

“Well, I just couldn’t get
out of that conference.” Nancy grimaced. “And then with the house remodel, we
thought we’d better keep our noses to the grindstone.”

“And the kitchen’s done now?”
Larry asked.

“The kitchen is,” Ben said as
Nancy stood shaking her head behind him, “but there’s still tiling in that half
bath that we added.”

“There’s
lots
of little things yet to finish in the kitchen,” Nancy said.
“Trim, hardware, touching up paint...”

“But it’s usable,” Ben
insisted.

“Usable isn’t finished,”
Nancy said.

“You’ve had this discussion
before, I think,” Larry grinned.

“I can’t wait to see it,”
Mickey said. “Jane Ann said you put in a six-burner range.” Mickey loved to
cook and loved the accoutrements even more.

“We did, and we can’t wait
for
you
to cook us something on it,”
Ben said.

“Where are the boys this
weekend? They didn’t come?” Frannie asked.

“They’re at their mom’s,” Ben
answered.

“That means Monday will be
another deprogramming day,” Nancy added with a grimace.” Ben had two teen-aged
sons from his previous marriage
who
often balked at
Nancy’s efforts to regulate their lives.

Ben gave her a sharp, hurt
look. “They’ll be fine. It’s only a weekend.” Nancy started to reply but
apparently thought better of it.

Sabet and Joe rode their
bikes back into the drive, Joe skidding his a little for effect.

“Guess what!” Sabet said,
hanging her helmet on her handlebars. “There’s somebody across the road, and it
looks like the girl is my age!”

“Yeah, but I didn’t see any
boys
,” Joe grumbled, as if that negated
any value of Sabet’s news.

Frannie glanced across the
road where Sabet pointed. A family was bustling around a small fifth-wheel
trailer, setting up their campsite. A young woman with shoulder length dark
hair was spreading a tablecloth on the picnic table, helped by the girl Sabet
had spotted.

“Can I go talk to her?” Sabet
begged.

“You can go introduce
yourself, but we’ll be ready for supper soon. Maybe I’ll walk over with you and
introduce myself too,” she added, thinking of Sam’s warnings.

Sabet grimaced slightly but
decided to be a good sport about it. “Okay. Maybe Cuba wants to go, too.” At
the sound of her name, the dog was by Sabet’s side and she switched out the
tether for the leash.

“We’ll be right back,”
Frannie told Larry, and they headed off to meet the newcomers.

The dark-haired woman looked
up as they approached and smiled. “Hi.”

Frannie introduced herself
and explained. “My granddaughter was excited to see that you have a girl about
her age and wanted to meet her. This is Sabet and she’s nine.”

The woman held out her hand.
“I’m Peggy Barnes and my daughter Tessa just turned ten earlier this summer.
That’s my husband Jody,” she indicated a slender blond man who was pulling lawn
chairs out of a storage compartment in the trailer. He looked up and gave a
little wave. Tessa, pixie-looking with doe eyes and dark bobbed hair, smiled
shyly at Sabet and mimicked her father’s wave.

“Did you bring a bike?” Sabet
asked Tessa.

“Yeah.” Tessa noticed Cuba
and dropped to her knees, throwing her arms around the dog’s neck.

“We’re going for a bike ride
just around the campground after supper,” Sabet said. “Can she go with us,
Gran?”

“Sure, if it’s okay with her
parents.”

“Tessa, would you like to
go?” Peggy Barnes asked her daughter.

Tessa looked up and her face
lit up. “Yeah.”

“We’ll stop by after supper
then,” Frannie said. She and Sabet started back to their own campsite.

“She’s nice, dontcha think,
Gran?” Sabet said.

Frannie smiled at her,
thinking how wonderful the world was when you could decide someone was nice
based on two ‘yeahs.’ “Yes, she is.”

When they got back to the
trailer, Joe, sitting at the table, looked up from his video game.

“Is it time to eat, yet,
Granny Fran?”

“Just about—and I could
use some help bringing stuff out.”

“I will,” Sabet bounded up
the trailer steps while her brother headed to the campfire to add a log or stir
the coals—whatever the fire tenders would let him do.

Inside, Frannie got down
plastic plates for the four of them and put them on a wooden tray. Sabet was an
experienced helper and got the silverware caddy out of the cupboard, counting
out the necessary flatware and adding it to the tray.

“Do we need knives?”

“You bet—Nancy made
biscuits. Better get the napkin holder, too.”

Sabet very unselfconsciously
turned an awkward pirouette, left over from her brief dancing lesson days, in
the cramped space on her way to get the napkin holder. Frannie thought
wistfully of uninhibited youth, so evident in this delightful granddaughter,
and probably about to disappear soon in the agony of the preteen years. Sabet
was so nicknamed because when little brother Joe came along and tried to twist
his novice tongue around Sarabeth, ‘Sabet’ was the best he could do and it
stuck.

Frannie impulsively gave her
a hug as she twirled the napkins back to the tray and realized with a jolt that
Sabet was about to pass her up in height. Of course, Frannie had never been a
target for any basketball recruiters.

“Don’t grow up too fast,“ she
begged.

Sabet pulled back and looked
at her grandmother in surprise. “Gran! I can’t grow up any faster
or
slower than anybody else!”

Frannie raised her eyes in
surrender—flummoxed again by nine-year-old logic.

“Okay, let’s get this stuff
out there.”

“How do you like your new
abode?” Jane Ann was asking Ben and Nancy. The Terells had recently traded an
older popup camper for a new hybrid—a small trailer with canvas and mesh
enclosed beds that dropped open from each end, giving them more space but a
fairly small unit to tow.

“We love it!” Nancy said
enthusiastically. “Just having an actual bathroom, no matter how small, is
fantastic. I just about got everything organized, but Ben, of course, keeps
putting things in the wrong places.”

“It’s only wrong to you, my
dear,” Ben said to his wife. “It seems right to me.”

Nancy ignored him and placed
a flyer on the table. “One of the rangers is giving a talk tonight about snakes
at the nature center. I thought the kids might be interested,” she said to
Frannie.