Acts of Violets (2 page)

“Abby, you have mustard on your shoulder.”

Wonderful. I took a tissue from my tire-engraved purse and blotted the yellow stain on my white shirt. Why had I even bothered to come? It was a sunny Saturday morning, and although my flower shop, Bloomers, was open on Saturdays, this was my one weekend a month to sleep in. But no. Attending the Annual Pickle Fest Parade was a family tradition, and to break that tradition was to incur the wrath of my mom, Maureen “Mad Mo” Knight.

Speaking of whom, where was she? I’d never known her to miss the start of the parade, when Peter Piper led his merry band of Pickled Peppers up Lincoln Avenue to the strains of a John Philip Sousa march.

I scanned the crowd lining both sides of the street. Today was the start of New Chapel, Indiana’s, fall Pickle Festival—a weeklong celebration of brine-soaked vegetables attended by thousands of people from all over the state, some from as far away as Chicago, giving the local newspaper, the
New Chapel News,
fodder for headlines such as VISITORS RELISH THE PICKLE FEST. I had a hunch it wasn’t so much the pickled produce as it was
getting
pickled that was the actual draw.

All four streets around the courthouse square had been blocked off to accommodate the huge crowds. Restaurant owners set up tables in front of their establishments to sell beer, hot dogs, bratwurst, dills, pickled beets, pickled tomatoes, pickled watermelon, and, yes, pickled peppers to the hungry visitors. For the truly desperate, pickled herring and pickled pig’s feet were also available. Shoe shops, gift boutiques, and clothing stores put out their wares, and even Bloomers had a display of mums, roses, asters, and greenery for sale.

Then there were the ever-popular arts and crafts booths that dotted the huge lawn around the big limestone courthouse in the middle of the square. Beneath the shady maples and elms, brightly colored canvas tents housed ceramics, watercolors, oils, clay sculpture, silver jewelry, quilts, pottery, toys, metal sculpture, and even marble birdbaths.

My mother would have her work on display somewhere in that mix. In addition to being a kindergarten teacher, Mom now fancied herself an artist, having received a pottery wheel for Christmas last year. Before she grew bored with clay, she had produced a variety of weird sculptures such as the infamous
Dancing Male Monkeys Table
and the
Human Footstool.
She had since moved on to mirrored tiles, with which she’d covered nearly every object in her house, making a washroom visit a truly frightening experience. I didn’t know what craft she was into this week. My father would only say, “It’s a tickler.”

“Do you see my family?” I asked Nikki. Being a head taller (even more if you added her spiky blonde hair), she had a sight advantage. She also had a body advantage—slender, long legged, and small breasted, something I had aspired to from the age of thirteen. My brothers, both doctors, insisted that people stopped growing when they reached puberty, but they were only half right; I hadn’t gone beyond my five-foot-two-inch frame since junior high, but I had gone
way
beyond my training bra.

“I don’t see any of them,” Nikki said, holding up her hand to shield her eyes.

Normally, they weren’t hard to pick out, since Jonathan and Jordan had the same flame red hair and freckled skin that my dad and I had. My mother’s hair was a soft brown, lucky woman, and my sisters-in-law—Portia and Kathy—had also escaped the curse of the red.

“There’s Marco,” Nikki shouted in my ear as the New Chapel High School marching band passed by. She pointed between green-coated band members to the opposite side of the street, but I had already spotted him. How could anyone miss a dark-haired, virile-bodied, extremely hot hunk like Marco Salvare, a former Army Ranger and ex-cop who now owned the Down the Hatch Bar and Grill—as well as my heart?

“Who’s that woman talking to him?” Nikki asked.

I eyed the attractive girl beside him. “I don’t know. She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

“
Pffft.
No way. Ew. And would you look at those split ends?”

“Nikki, you can’t see split ends from here, and besides, it’s okay to agree with me. I don’t feel threatened by the woman. I’m not the jealous type.”

She burst out laughing.

Ignoring her, I narrowed my eyes at the pair, watching as Marco tilted his head toward the woman to catch something she said. She couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five, and had an oval face with delicate features framed by long, thick black hair topping off a perfectly proportioned body. She was talking animatedly and pointing to something or someone up the street. The Pickled Peppers? The clown troupe? Someone in the marching band?

“Abigail, there you are!” my mother called. I turned to find her parting the crowd so the humongous feathered hat on her head could fit through. Normally, she wasn’t one to wear hats, let alone feathers, but she did have a way of surprising me. “We’ve been looking all over for you. Why aren’t you in front of Bloomers?”

“Because we always meet here, by the Clothes Loft. Where are Dad and the gang?”

“By your shop, which is where I thought you’d be.”

“It’s hard to see the parade from Bloomers, Mom. You know it doesn’t go down Franklin. Besides, we always meet here. If you wanted to meet elsewhere, you should have told me.”

“I would have told you if I thought there was a need to tell you. But since you’re a shop owner now, I really didn’t see the need.”

I started to argue that my being a shop owner had nothing to do with it, but Nikki nudged me and coughed. That was the signal we used when one of us was expecting a family member to be rational.

“Shall we go get everyone and bring them back here?” Mom looked at me from under the wide, feathered brim of her hat, her eyes scouring me for signs of illness or distress. Like a hawk, she instantly homed in on the yellow splotch on my shoulder. “How did you spill mustard on your shirt?”

“Ask him,” I said, hitching a thumb toward Mr. Oblivious, who was now giving a running commentary to whomever was on the other end of his phone line. “He pushed me into the path of a clown.”

“Well, thank heavens it was
only
a clown. It could have been that team of horses.” She pointed toward the two grays hauling a nineteenth-century fire wagon. Seated on a bench beside the driver was a giant inflatable cucumber dressed in an old-fashioned red fire hat and yellow slicker. Every entry in the parade had to incorporate something pickled, which could have gotten racy except that entrants also had to go before a review panel of six somber senior citizens.

“But
this
clown threatened me, Mom.”

“A clown threatened you?” asked a familiar, husky male voice from behind me.

My heart skipped a beat as I turned to see the owner of the voice, Marco (minus the pretty woman), looking extremely macho in his tan Down the Hatch T-shirt, slim-fitting blue jeans, and dusty brown boots. He’d managed to cross the street between floats and was now holding a strawberry ice cream cone, unaware that he was being ogled by every woman within a ten-yard radius.

Marco wasn’t handsome in the movie-star sense of the word. He didn’t have a straight nose, or baby blue eyes, or a wide, perfectly even smile. What he
did
have were deep, dark, bedroom eyes, a masculine nose, a firm mouth that curved devilishly at the corners when he was amused, and an olive complexion that was rarely without a five-o’clock shadow. He was tough and quick-witted, but amazingly sensitive to my moods and feelings. Maybe that was why he brought me the cone.

He held it out and I took it. Ordinarily, I don’t eat ice cream before lunch, but after being shoved and threatened and stained with mustard, I felt a strong need to soak my irritated nerves in butterfat. Once they were thoroughly saturated, I’d ask him about the woman.

“Morning, Nikki,” he said with a little nod in her direction. “Mrs. Knight, new hat?”

“Yes. Thank you for noticing, Marco.” Throwing me a
shame on you for not noticing
look, Mom gave him a hug. She gave everyone hugs. It was part of being a kindergarten teacher.

“Tell me about the clown,” Marco said, regarding me with that intense expression cops get when interrogating a witness. I knew that because my father had been a cop, and throughout my high school years my dates had been subjected to both the expression and the interrogation.

“He was just your standard, bulbous-nosed, orange-haired, cucumber-juggling unicyclist with an attitude problem,” I said between licks, “who mistakenly believed I threw my purse in front of him to knock him off his cycle. Who then went on to snarl something about paybacks being murder, as if he wanted to get even with me for tripping him. Go figure.”

Marco rubbed his jaw, staring up the street after the departing fire wagon. “Not your typical clown behavior.”

“His name is Snuggles,” Nikki put in helpfully. “It’s on the back of his costume.”

“Snuggles,” Marco repeated, as though storing it away for future reference.

My mother gazed at me sadly. “I’m sorry, honey. You’ve always liked clowns.”

I swallowed a big glob of ice cream. “I’ve
never
liked clowns. I’ve had a fear of them since I was five years old, when a clown with bad teeth tried to toss me into a burning building. You have to remember that.”

“We were at the circus and it was part of their act,” she assured me. “If there had been any danger involved, your father would never have let your brothers volunteer you.”

“They volunteered me?” I sputtered.

She handed me a tissue to wipe the ice cream off my mouth. “When Abby was little,” Mom explained to Marco and to anyone else who cared to listen, “she had imaginary friends who were clowns.”

“They weren’t my friends, Mom.” I rolled my eyes at Marco.

“Then why did you play with little Jocko and Bimbo? Hmm?” To Marco she whispered, “That’s what she named them. Jocko and Bimbo.”

“I played with them because I’m a firm believer in the keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer philosophy. It was purely self-protective.”

“You were such a cute girl,” she said, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear. Mothers were forever tucking and straightening and—even worse—licking their palms to flatten hair that wouldn’t lie down. “Mom-spit,” my brothers called it. I’d long ago made a vow to never inflict that kind of torture on my kids—if I ever had the urge to have any.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “shall we go? Marco, you’re coming with us, aren’t you?”

Of course he was coming with us. He’d promised to watch the parade with my family, and then he and I were going to hang out together for the rest of the day and enjoy the festivities.

“Thanks, but I have some business to take care of first.” He put his mouth close to my ear and said huskily, “I’ll catch up with you later.”

I started to complain, but he was staring past me with a perturbed frown—the same frown he’d worn the time he’d cautioned me not to attempt the rescue of a young, captive Chinese woman, which I did anyway, then was nearly drowned in a hot tub. Or the time he warned me not to go back for the funeral rose I’d delivered to a dragon of a law professor, which ultimately led to me being the prime suspect in a murder case. It made me wonder what kind of business he was talking about now.

“Marco, you wouldn’t be going after that clown, would you?”

“Nah.”

“He didn’t hurt me, you know. No harm done.”

“I know that. I’ll be back soon.” He nodded a quick good-bye to Nikki and Mom, then slipped into the crowd.

Oh, yeah. He was going after the clown.

“
A
bby, where are you going?” my mother called as I started after Marco.

“On an errand. I’ll meet you and Dad back here in ten minutes.” I turned and ran into a trash can. Luckily, I needed to find one anyway to dispose of the sticky ice cream cone wrapper in my hand.

“I’m coming with you,” Nikki said, dodging people—and the trash can—to catch up with me. “You’re following Marco, aren’t you?”

“Why would I follow Marco?”

We wove through a gaggle of teens and veered around a young mom pushing a stroller.

“To see if he meets up with that woman. I mean, come on. You have to be a tiny bit curious.”

A
tiny bit
curious? Was she kidding? Great. Now I had two missions instead of one. “I think he’s just looking for Snuggles, Nikki.”

“To do what? Rough him up? He didn’t take the clown’s remark seriously, did he? I mean, he’s a
clown
.”

“Maybe he knows something about Snuggles. Maybe the man beneath the white paint and rubber nose is someone Marco has had run-ins with before. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a point in going after him. It’s not like there’s a need to defend my honor, and Marco isn’t the type to browbeat someone for making an idle threat.”

“Which takes me back to my original conclusion. He’s looking for that woman.” Nikki lifted an eyebrow.