The Fixer Upper (17 page)

“A
re you all right?” I asked Tee.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just grateful she didn’t hit me with the broom handle. Now, that would have been painful.”

“Sorry about that,” I said, raking my fingers through my hair just to make sure Ella Kate’s weapon of choice hadn’t left me with a headful of cobwebs or worse. “I’ve been trying to get her to warm up to me. I drive her to the drugstore, and to run errands, I even buy treats for her dog, but I don’t think it’s working. She still detests me.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Tee advised. “According to my father, she’s always been what he calls ‘eccentric.’”

I picked up my heat gun and switched it on again. “Eccentric. That’s one of those colorful Southern euphemisms, right?”

“Exactly,” Tee said. He wrapped his arms around my waist again. “Now, about that question.”

“Better make it quick,” I said, glancing over his shoulder. “Don’t forget, she does have a shotgun.”

“Which makes my question all the more relevant,” Tee said. “Look. You’ve been under a lot of pressure here lately. I can’t even get you to let me take you out on a proper date. And we sure as hell can’t get any privacy, what with Ella Kate lurking around here, and me living with Dad. One of my law school classmates has a little cottage down on the coast, on Saint Simon’s Island. Let’s take a run down there next weekend. We’ll have a nice dinner, ride bikes, take a walk on the beach. Just relax. What do you say?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

His face fell.

“It’s just not good timing…with this Hoddergate thing hanging
over my head, and the damned FBI agents skulking around town, and this newspaper reporter calling my family and friends.”

“All the more reason to go away,” Tee said.

I put both my hands on his chest. “I can’t. Not right now. Give me some time, please, Tee?”

He sighed. “All right. No pressure. The offer stands. There’s just one thing I need for you to do.”

“Anything.”

“Hand over the gun.”

I
t was pitch black when I woke up the next morning. I groped in the darkness for my cell phone, and saw that it was only 6:30
A.M.
I lay back in the bed and groaned. Tee and I had worked on the kitchen cabinets until my hands and arms ached from all the scraping and sanding. We’d managed to finish stripping all the cabinets, but I still had plenty of sanding left—not to mention priming and painting.

I willed myself to go back to sleep, but it was no good. After five minutes of staring at the ceiling, I got up, shoved my feet into some slippers, and struggled into my bathrobe. Coffee. I needed coffee. Stat.

Soft, heartbreaking whimpers echoed through the high-ceilinged hallway. I hurried into the kitchen, where I found Ella Kate, sitting on the floor, cradling a writhing Shorty in her arms. She was dressed in faded red flannel pajamas, hair lank, wild eyed.

“Ella Kate?” I asked, crouching down beside her. “What’s wrong? Is Shorty sick?”

“What do you think?” she snapped. “He ain’t right, that’s all I know. He wouldn’t eat no supper, and Shorty never misses a meal. I took him outside to do his business last night, but he wouldn’t go. Now he’s bad sick.”

“Poor baby,” I said, looking down at the sad-eyed cocker. “Is there anything I can do for him?”

“Get that bottle of castor oil,” she said, jerking her head in the direction of a bottle sitting on the kitchen counter. “I been trying to get some down him, but he keeps jerking away from me. I’ll hold him, and you dose him.”

“Castor oil?” I wrinkled my nose.

“Just get it,” she ordered. “That’s what my mama gave all us young’uns when we had a bellyache.”

“Is it safe for a dog?”

“Get it!”

I did as I was told.

She clamped her arms around the wriggling dog. “Hold your hand over his nose so he’ll open up his mouth, then, when he does, you pour that stuff down his throat.”

I uncapped the bottle of castor oil, and clapped my left hand over Shorty’s snout. I held the open bottle over his jaws, but just as I tipped the bottle forward, he flailed wildly with his front paws, and the bottle went flying, an evil-smelling arc of viscous oil spreading over the stack of freshly stripped cabinets.

“Oh no!”

“Now look what you done,” Ella Kate cried. “You done spilt every last drop of the castor oil.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, hurrying to mop up the mess with a wad of paper towels. I stopped short when Shorty let out another high-pitched moan.

“He’s bad sick,” Ella Kate said quietly.

I bent over to stroke the dog’s head, but Ella Kate pushed my hand away. “Leave him be,” she said gruffly. “He don’t trust strangers.”

I didn’t bother to point out that I was hardly a stranger. Shorty’s listless brown eyes told volumes about his obvious suffering.

“Maybe we should call a vet.”

“I done that,” she said. “Think I’m an old fool? They got an answering machine, says to call back at nine. Unless it’s an emergency. Then they say to go to some hospital I never heard of, clear down in Macon.”

“I think it’s an emergency,” I said. “Where’s the hospital?”

She shrugged, holding the dog closely against her chest. “Shorty don’t like doctors. I know he ain’t gonna like a hospital.”

I sat down on the floor beside her. Gingerly, I touched the dog’s pale pink belly. It was hard to the touch, and Shorty yelped and jerked away from me.

“It’s definitely his stomach,” I said. “Look, I really think we better
get him to that animal hospital. I’ll run upstairs and get dressed. Can you call the vet back and get an address for the clinic?”

She nodded absentmindedly, then bent over Shorty, stroking his head and crooning some tuneless song.

When I got downstairs, Ella Kate had somehow managed to change into a shapeless cotton housedress and worn blue cardigan sweater. But her wiry white hair was uncombed, and she still wore her battered brown bedroom slippers, a fact I dared not point out to her.

The first pale peach fingers of daylight were dawning as Ella Kate seated herself in the front seat of the Catfish, Shorty clutched tightly in her arms.

“Don’t you have a crate or something he could ride in?” I asked, glancing nervously over at Shorty, whose head hung droopily over Ella Kate’s arms.

“No, ma’am,” she said firmly. “I’ll hold on to Shorty. You just drive where I tell you. Now, let’s get a move on!”

My hands clutched the steering wheel tightly as I sped through the quiet streets of Guthrie.

“Turn left up here, and that’ll take you to the bypass,” Ella Kate directed. The only other words she spoke to me on the forty-five-minute ride to the Middle Georgia Animal Clinic were tersely worded directions. I drove, Shorty whimpered, and Ella Kate sat stone still, her jaw clenched in concentration.

When we got to the animal clinic and reported Shorty’s symptoms to the young receptionist, she nodded calmly, charting the dog’s vital statistics on a clipboard. “He’s hurtin’ bad,” Ella Kate said pointedly.

“I’ll take you back right now,” the girl said, showing us to an examining room. A minute later, another fresh-faced young woman, her brown hair swept back in a ponytail, came into the room.

“Oh, fella,” she said softly, when she saw Shorty writhing in Ella Kate’s arms. “You are feeling lousy, aren’t you?” She held out her arms to take the cocker spaniel, but Ella Kate jerked away.

“He don’t like strangers,” she said. “We’ll just wait for the vet.”

“No wait at all,” the girl said calmly. “I’m Chrissy Shoemaker. Dr. Shoemaker. We’re sort of short staffed today.”

Ella Kate stared. “Are you sure you’re old enough to be doctorin’ people’s pets?”

“I’m thirty,” Dr. Shoemaker said. “And I’ve been in practice here for three years.”

“Hmmph,” Ella Kate said, clearly unconvinced.

“I’ll take good care of him, I promise,” Dr. Shoemaker added, holding out her arms again.

Shorty whimpered, but finally, Ella Kate handed him over.

Dr. Shoemaker placed Shorty on a stainless-steel examining table. She stroked his head and caressed his floppy ears. “Okay, fella,” she said. “Let’s see what’s going on with you.”

She checked the dog’s eyes and ears, looked down his throat, and took his temperature. “Nothing here,” she said.

“It’s his belly,” Ella Kate said. “He’s got a bad bellyache.”

Dr. Shoemaker gently rolled Shorty over and examined his abdomen. She looked up at Ella Kate. “His tummy is pretty rigid. Is there a chance he’s eaten something he shouldn’t? Like a remote control or a lipstick or something like that?”

“I don’t wear lipstick, and I don’t own a remote control,” Ella Kate said stiffly. “Shorty hadn’t ever eaten nothing like that before.”

“Well,” Dr. Shoemaker said, “I have a feeling he’s got a foreign object in that belly of his. If you’ll step into the waiting room, we’ll take some blood and do an X-ray to see if we can spot what’s hurting the poor little guy.”

“X-ray?” Ella Kate’s head jerked up.

“Don’t worry. He won’t feel anything,” Dr. Shoemaker said, opening the door to allow us to leave the examining room.

Ella Kate and I sat on a couple of molded-plastic chairs in the empty waiting room. The only reading materials were pamphlets dealing with spaying and neutering animals. I read one of the pamphlets. Very educational. Ella Kate sat and stared out the windows.

After ten minutes, Dr. Shoemaker rejoined us. “He’s definitely got something in his stomach,” she said. “We won’t be able to tell exactly what it is until we operate.”

“Operate!” Ella Kate exclaimed. “Can’t you give him something to make him throw up whatever it is? You saying you’re gonna cut on Shorty?”

“If he could have passed it normally, he probably would have by now. I’m afraid surgery really is the only option,” Dr. Shoemaker said. “But it’s a very common procedure. Dogs and cats are constantly eating things they shouldn’t. I did three of these surgeries last week. You should see the assortment of stuff I’ve found in pets’ tummies. Don’t worry. We’ll take very good care of Shorty.”

Ella Kate’s lips compressed into a thin colorless line. “I reckon if you gotta, you gotta.”

“We gotta,” Dr. Shoemaker said. “We’ll put him to sleep and it shouldn’t take too long. Would you like to go on home, and I can call you to let you know what we found?”

“No, ma’am!” Ella Kate said, looking directly at me. “I’m a-stayin’ right here.”

The minutes dragged by. The phone rang, and people came and went with their pets. Ella Kate stared out the window. I stared at everything else.

For lack of anything better to do, I tried to strike up a conversation with Ella Kate.

“Just how old is Shorty?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He was just a pup when I found him. That musta been eight or nine years ago.”

“He was a stray?”

“Yes, ma’am. He was eating out of a trash can behind the Piggly Wiggly. Poor little thing was about half starved. Had sores all over his paws. Nobody else wanted him. Just like me. I took him on home and doctored him up myself. Pretty good, since I never even had no pet growing up.”

“Never? Not even a goldfish?” I’d had a fairly fractured childhood myself, moving from Lynda’s house to Mitch’s house, and then all around the country, whenever Mitch’s job required it, but I’d always managed to have a cat or a dog—or even a hamster, for one short summer.

“My mama and daddy had eight head of children,” Ella Kate said. “Mama said she didn’t need another mouth to feed. And then, when I got grown, I was working and didn’t have no time for a dog. Anyway, Livvy liked cats.”

“Livvy?”

“Olivia,” Ella Kate said, looking away. “She’d be your grandmother. Livvy always had cats. Up until she married, she was always real partial to Siamese cats, but she did have a calico kitten one time that somebody left on her doorstep, after she busted up with Mister Killebrew and he went off and took the baby with him.”

“Baby? You mean my father? Mitch?”

“That’s right,” Ella Kate said. “Mister Killebrew wouldn’t let Livvy have a pet of any kind. He didn’t allow animals in his house. Never mind that it was really Livvy’s house that her mama and daddy gave her. He said cats were nasty dirty, and she especially couldn’t have a cat after the baby, which was your daddy. He said he’d heard a cat would suck the breath right out of a little baby. Nothing Livvy said could change his mind.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

“He was a terrible man,” Ella Kate said, tossing her head. “Rotten old bastard, and I don’t care if he was your granddaddy. He broke Livvy’s heart when he took that little boy away. She never was right after that.”

“Ella Kate,” I said, leaning forward. “Why did he take my father away from Guthrie? Wasn’t that pretty unusual back then, for a man to get custody of a child instead of the mother?”

“I wouldn’t know. Look here,” she said, changing the subject abruptly. “You and young Berryhill. What’s his daddy think about him romancing you, and you being a client and all?”

I laughed despite myself. “I don’t know that Tee is ‘romancing’ me. And I don’t know if Carter has an opinion either way. Tee and I are just friends. He was helping me strip the kitchen cupboards last night. He’s a nice man.”

“Looks to me like the two of you were getting good and friendly last night,” she observed, arching one woolly gray eyebrow.

I blushed and hoped there would be another subject change. But her next topic didn’t make me any more comfortable.

“Say. What happened to them government agents that come around the house this weekend?” she demanded. “What all did they want with you?”

I paused. How much did Ella Kate already know? And how much should I tell her?

“It’s confidential,” I said finally. “The FBI is investigating an elected official in Washington, D.C., and they wanted to ask me a lot of questions about him.”

“I heard that much at church,” Ella Kate said. “Way I heard it, you’re mixed up with some Yankee congressman, and you and your boss, a married man, were in cahoots to try and bribe him.”

“They were talking about me at your church?” I was mystified. And mortified. “Nobody in this town knows me.”

“Huh. People know you better than you think they do. Anyway, they think they do. It’s a little-bitty town. Everybody knows everything, even if they don’t.”

“What you heard is a lot of lies,” I said hotly. “I did not bribe a congressman. And I certainly did not hire prostitutes for anybody. Those FBI agents, they told me yesterday that if I don’t help them, they’ll charge me with bribery. I could get fifteen years in prison. And be disbarred.”

“If you’re innocent, why don’t you just do what them FBI people want you to do?”

I knotted and unknotted my hands. My back was stiff from sitting in the hard plastic chairs. I stood up, stretched, and walked around the waiting room, which smelled of disinfectant and dog hair.

“It’s not that easy,” I told Ella Kate. “The FBI wants me to call my old boss and get him to agree to meet me, and then trick him into admitting what he did. I’d have to wear a bug so the FBI could record everything he says.”

“What’s so hard about that?” she asked.

“Everything,” I cried. “It’s so sneaky. So dishonest.”

“Ain’t he the one who really did bribe a congressman?”

I sighed. Maybe it was time to face facts. Alex Hodder was a liar and a cheat, not to mention a man who had no compunction about letting me take the blame for his crimes.

“Alex took Congressman Licata on expensive trips, which were paid for by our client, an oil company. They were supposed to be fact-finding missions, but as far as I know, the only fact Licata was interested in was what time was tee time, and at what five-star restaurant he was getting a free meal. My boss knew Licata was on the take, so he just kept offering him free stuff, like the trip to the Bahamas. Alex knew that if Licata had a good time, he would vote to support the energy bill the oil companies wanted passed.”

“Hmmph. Sounds to me like your boss and that congressman were crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”

“Maybe so,” I admitted.

“And the FBI wants you to help put them in jail,” she said.

“Yes.”