A Bad Day for Mercy (11 page)

“You’re a
mom,
though,” Chip said. “I know Dad loves me and all, but he wasn’t around much when I was a kid, and then when we started seeing each other more, it’s not like he was staring in my ears much. Way it worked, Mom would have me all clean and my clothes washed and my stuff packed when Dad picked me up for a weekend, and then by the time I went back I was a mess, since I usually just wore whatever was on top of my suitcase the whole weekend. Heck, half the time Dad forgot to make me take a bath.”

“Oh, Chip,” Stella said, suddenly sorry she’d mentioned it. “That must have been hard.”

Chip shrugged. “It got better when Dad married Gracellen, anyway,” he said. “She kind of took over that part. She even used to take me shopping and all, helped me out with my school projects … came to my soccer games.”

Stella made a mental note to appreciate her sister more the next time she saw her. She knew Gracellen loved Chip but had no idea she’d been so involved in his life—more so than Chess had been, it seemed. Her affection for the boy grew, thinking of all his tender feelings that had gone unnoticed and trampled.

Chip seemed to be thinking along the same lines, because he took a deep breath and swiped at his eyes. “Hey, let me get what I need and we can get out of here.”

He went to the computer at the front of the class and poked around for a few minutes. Stella sat up front next to him in a chair she dragged around from behind the tables, and faced the screen so she wouldn’t have to look at the staring heads, which were a sight she didn’t reckon she’d be getting used to anytime soon.

While Chip muttered and tapped, she thought about what he’d been like as a little guy, the first time she’d met him. He’d been seven then, a wiry thing, with big dark eyes and long fringy lashes, his olive skin smooth and perfect, not yet afflicted with the teenage acne that would come later. His hair was long, with a little tail that came halfway down his back. When Gracellen had explained to Stella that his mother had a fondness for prescription drugs that took up all her free time and some of the time that was supposed to be used on parenting as well, his general state of neglect made a little more sense—the too-small sweater and too-short pants, the shaggy haircut.

Mostly, little Chip had been quiet at the Thanksgiving table—taking occasional bites of his food until after a while he appeared to simply run out of steam, after which he just sat and stared at his plate. Chess had tried to cajole him into talking, and Chester Senior, who even then was hard of hearing, had boomed questions at him across the table and then yelled at him to speak up. For her part, Gracellen had piled his plate high with the best slice of turkey, the homemade relish, potatoes with butter and gravy—anything she could think of to win his favor. Chip had been unreachable back then, though, a lonely, confused little boy who barely recognized the man who showed a sudden and unprecedented interest in being his father.

“Hah, got it,” he muttered now, clicking the mouse a couple of times and then snapping off the computer. “It’s only a couple miles from here. If we’re lucky, he’ll be home, getting ready for class. Only, if he really took your boy, I’m not sure how you’re gonna get him to answer the door.”

“You forget,” Stella said grimly, taking a deep breath and heaving herself off the stool. “You’re working with a pro now.”

Chapter Ten

As they retraced their steps to the car, Stella noticed a few sleepy-looking folks wandering into the building, suggesting it must be close to class time. These future plastic surgeons sure weren’t what Stella expected. Her experience with practitioners of the discipline was limited to the improbably hot and well-dressed guys on
Nip/Tuck,
but these students were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, athletic wear and sneakers. Some looked even younger than Noelle and Chrissy; others were a bit longer in the tooth. None of them gave Chip and Stella any notice as they wove their way through the halls.

Stella lowered her voice while she walked. “Look here,” she said carefully. “You know some things about me now that Gracellen don’t even know, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way.”

“You mean like the fact that you carry a gun and all?”

“Well, sure, that, for a start. But there’s a little more to it. I, uh … well, I have a friend in law enforcement. A good friend, really, and he’s let me do the citizen’s police academy kind of on a, what do you call it, like an unofficial basis.”

“What, you mean you do ride-arounds and stuff?”

“Kind of,” Stella hedged, “and, you know, target practice and some, well, martial arts training, self-defense, that kind of thing.”

It was true that she’d taken up studying martial arts, though it didn’t come naturally to her. The whole focus on serenity, the centering and breathing and focusing, wasn’t really in line with the middle-aged irritability she carried around.

Still, she needed to get the point across to Chip that if they happened to stumble into any dangerous situations, she was probably a better bet than he was, and he needed to set aside any notions of gallantry he might be burdened with and get out of her way.

“Well, that’s great, Auntie Stella,” Chip said, distracted, as they reached the truck.

“What I’m trying to say is, seeing as we don’t have a lot of time here and we need to get some information out of this guy as quickly and efficiently as we can, how about if you let me take the lead?”

Chip regarded her doubtfully. “I don’t know, Stella. I mean it’s cool and all that you’re learning new things and staying in shape, but you
are,
like, Gracellen’s age and, no offense, if things get weird in there, if he doesn’t feel like talking, well, I’m not sure you really want to be in a situation where a big guy—I mean, Stella, he’s six feet easy—if you want to be going up against that.”

Stella took a breath and held it. She got herself underestimated every day, and it never failed to irritate her, but she tried to keep in mind that this was a simple case of Chip not having all the facts.

It would be easier to show him, though, than to try to convince him.

“Tell you what,” she said, “how about I give it a shot when we get there. If it looks like I can’t handle him, why, there you are to back me up. Deal?”

Chip hesitated, but in the end his basic good manners got the best of him. “Deal,” he said, and Stella nodded with satisfaction and blew past the sleepy streets of Smythe for the third time in twelve hours.

*   *   *

“Let’s go slow
here, Chip,” Stella suggested when they got to the wood-sided house, a holdover from the seventies when “Aspen style” meant nailing cedar boards at an angle and wearing boots made out of yak. It and a couple dozen similar houses were tucked into a neighborhood thick with tall evergreens.

She parked behind a slick little black SUV that sat at a rakish angle in the drive leading up to the house. Bumper stickers plastered to the back declared
FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS EAT FARMED SALMON
and
EARTH DOES NOT BELONG TO US, WE BELONG TO EARTH.

“These med students,” Stella asked, curious. “They get paid while they’re still in the practicing stages?”

Chip shrugged. “I don’t think so. Not much, anyway. Most of ’em live in dumps here and there, share apartments, rent rooms in houses, that sort of thing. I guess Doug is kind of the exception.”

“Why don’t you hang here a minute,” Stella said. “Let me just check out the back.”

“Check out the who?”

“You know, figure out what-all options this guy has for getting away in a hurry, if he has in mind to run out on us.”

“This one of your citizen police academy things?” Chip asked with a roll of his eyes.

Stella gritted her teeth as she jogged around the back. The house had a nice covered cedar patio that overlooked a wooded area, and she had to admit that the architecture, dated though it was, had a ski lodge sort of appeal. A bicycle hung from a complicated hook arrangement bolted to the overhang, and a wheeled device leaned against the wall, about twice as long as a skateboard and a bit wider, tapered at one end. She would have guessed it belonged to a neighborhood kid except that she’d seen enough of these types hanging around the state college at Harrisonville to know better: She’d lay odds that this was the latest thing in transporting oneself around campus, made with only the most sustainable, environment-friendliest, expensive materials and technology available on the market.

Why, the entire place looked like a page from a catalog Noelle got in the mail, where you could pay five times as much for a jacket made out of soda bottles as you could for the same thing at Walmart, except for a little logo on the front so everyone would know you didn’t bust up a nest of endangered ducks or chop down any old-growth forests in the process. There wasn’t a huge earth muffin crowd in Prosper yet, but in addition to the ones in Harrisonville, Stella had noticed a nest of them over in Coffey, and whenever business took Stella up to Independence, it seemed like the ground was thick with ’em.

It wasn’t that Stella had anything against the eco-happy crowd. Hell, she dutifully sorted her recycling and bought the organic stuff if it was on sale and used eggshells and Ivory dish soap to keep the pests under control instead of the poison in the cans. She hoped as much as anyone to leave a tidy, healthy planet for any grandchildren she might one day have. Only, the way she saw it there were a number of holes in the logic spouted by some among the earth-saving crew. For instance, she thought as she peered in the back window of the house into the kitchen and noticed an expensive-looking canvas jacket slung over a chair and a couple of pairs of shoes—the kind made out of colorful woven straps and cork and who knows what else and cost more than an entire closet full of Naturalizer sandals—if they slowed down on the purchasing of rafts of hippie fashions and accessories and instead wore the perfectly good clothes they bought a few years ago, that would be a whole lot of manufacturing power that could be saved. Even when you made shirts out of hemp or alfalfa or old tires or whatever, you had to figure there was a factory somewhere using up energy and belching out manufacturing by-products, and according to Stella’s math that was still a check in the negative column even if every person who drew their paycheck at the factory planted a tree on their way home and composted their nail clippings and ate raw wheat berries for lunch.

And big toy skateboards for grown-ups? Stella shook her head with disgust.

Back in front of the house, Chip was drumming his fingers impatiently on the little hybrid SUV’s hood. Stella tutted under her breath. Noelle had recently bought a hybrid, but only because she’d driven her prior car into the ground. Yuppie folks who protested rain-forest butchering and white flour but drove a brand-new car every few years—Stella wouldn’t mind giving them a piece of her mind either.

“You know, Chip, down in Cuba they’re still driving cars made before you were born.”

Chip blinked, confused. “Uh…”

“Yeah, no one’s bought a new car there in like forty years. They make parts out of melted beer cans and old radio components and stuff and they keep that fleet running—I saw a show about it on TV. You ever think about how much shit we could keep out of the landfills if we just fixed it now and then and kept on using it?”

“How does…”

“Like for instance, the stove in my house used to be my mom’s. It was built in 1959 and it works fine, but you go on over to the Home Depot and they got them four-thousand-dollar ranges all lined up and none of ’em with more than a year or two warranty. Then when they break they tell you it’s gonna be cheaper to get a new one than fix the one you have. That make sense to you?”

“But what…”

“Never mind. Just thinking out loud. Hang on, give me a sec here.”

Stella reached into the backseat and grabbed a couple of her smaller Tupperware containers, the contents clanking around inside. She tucked them into a mesh bag she’d lifted from the Green Foods up in Independence for that purpose—yet another brilliant idea from the eco-nuts, manufacture bags to haul groceries around in as though every household in America didn’t already have half a dozen gym bags and sewing totes and advertising freebies lying around. Then she and Chip tromped up to the door, not bothering with stealth.

Within moments of her knocking, the door opened and a bleary-eyed, shaggy-haired, handsome young man stood blinking in the sun, pulling a T-shirt over his bare chest. He was wearing what appeared to be ladies’ drawstring pants in a shade somewhere between taupe and brown. Around his wrist he wore what looked like a friendship bracelet made by a Girl Scout who’d run out of ribbon and used her dad’s boot laces and dental floss instead.

“Hey,” he said, covering up a yawn. “Good morning. What can I do for you?”

“I was just wondering if we could have a few minutes of your time,” Stella said. “I’m Dora Whitney and this is my associate, Caleb Gomez. We’re speaking with people who have supported sustainability initiatives in the past, about a new threat to the fragile ecosystem of, uh, midsouthern Wisconsin.”

“Um, sure…” Doug said, rooting around in the sagging pocket of his lady-pants and digging out an iPhone. He thumbed it and squinted at the display. “Yeah, I got a few minutes before I need to get motivated. Come on in, I just put on some coffee. It’s Nicaraguan fair trade.”

Stella winked at Chip, who looked like he was about to object, and followed Doug into the house, through a nicely furnished living room into the kitchen. The coffee smelled wonderful, so it was a great disappointment to see that there was very little of it, slowly dripping through what looked like a science lab experiment beaker.

“It’s French press,” Doug said, getting three dainty cups down from a cabinet. Stella noted to herself that all her favorite men—her dad when he was alive, Goat, BJ, Jelloman—drank coffee out of big mugs and didn’t stint.
Man
mugs, you might say.

“Nice dishwasher,” she said.

“Oh yeah, it’s a Miele. Crazy good, the lowest water usage you can get. So anyway, what have you guys got?”