Bowled Over (4 page)

Jaymie had tried to figure it out at the time and had pleaded for reconciliation, but then had backed off. She had left things alone too long, she supposed, thinking time would sort it all out, taking her mom’s advice to let Kathy cool off over whatever was bothering her. The cooling-off period had stretched to sixteen or seventeen years, with no end in sight. It was certainly too late to rekindle a friendship now, but she could try to at least get to the bottom of the animosity.

If Kathy wouldn’t talk to her, maybe the people
around
Kathy would. She’d have to talk to Craig “Pooper” Cooper. Her cheeks burned. How could she have forgotten making up that dreadful, childish nickname? She must have put it out of her mind because she was so ashamed of herself. She hoped her memory was right and it had been an out of character slip-up.

She jumped up, determined suddenly to do something about a dark spot that had bothered her for too long. “Hoppy, wanna go for a walk?” Her little dog did a clumsy spin on the grass and trotted into the house past her with the loping gait that had earned him his name, Hopalong, while Denver, her moody tabby, watched from the safe shelter of the space under the Hoosier cabinet. Jaymie snapped on Hoppy’s leash and set out into the beautiful early July morning. The Glorious Fourth was tomorrow. She had to figure out what her contribution was going to be to the picnic dinner that she, Becca, Daniel and Becca’s new mystery beau, Kevin, were to share. When she got home she would flip through her old cookbooks in search of a vintage Fourth of July recipe.

She headed to the Queensville Emporium and put Hoppy in the puppy pen to the side of the store, where he could usually meet and greet some of his Queensville buddies and rivals. It was empty this morning, but there were toys and pee-mail,
lots to keep him busy. Jaymie entered from the creaky wood porch and waved at Mrs. Klausner, Mr. Klausner’s elderly wife. She looked up from her knitting and nodded, her mouth turned down in her habitually sour expression.

Valetta was sorting catalog packages but looked up as the wood floor creaked. “Jaymie! What can I do for you?” she asked, coming to the catalog window.

“I’m on my way to Laskan Cooper.”

“Oh. Accounting problems?”

“No, I want to sort out, once and for all, what is wrong between me and Kathy. I know Kathy works for her husband, but she’s not actually in the office, is she?”

“She does data entry, but works from home, so she only drops in to pick things up or drop them off. Why? Do you want to see her, or no?”

“I want to see Craig first, so I want to be sure she won’t be in the office.”

Valetta made a quick call and established that Kathy was out. She leaned back out the order desk window, and said, squinting behind her thick glasses, “That all you need to know? Do you want to know what I think of your plan to befriend Kathy?”

“Not really,” Jaymie said. It was her own battle, and she had been stung by her sister’s memory of her as a mean girl. She didn’t think she had been that bad, but still, she was an adult now, and would do better. Would
be
better.

Valetta shrugged. “Just thought I could help.”

“Who is Kathy friends with these days?”

“Dani Brougham,” Valetta answered swiftly. “Dani owns a horse farm not too far from here, and she comes into Queensville to the feed-and-tack shop. Today will be her day to pick up her feed, as a matter of fact. She’ll be there the moment they open.”

“Guess I’d better go see Craig, then hopefully Dani.” Jaymie was nervous suddenly and wished she hadn’t sloughed off Valetta’s offer of advice so nonchalantly.

“Be yourself,” Valetta said with a smile twisting her thin lips. “Be sincere. Be honest.”

“Should I apologize for coining Craig’s nickname in high school?”

Valetta laughed, a horsey
haw-haw
that made Mrs. Klausner frown over her knitting. “I don’t think telling him you were the one who thought up ‘Pooper Cooper’ is going to win you any points.”

“You remember that stupid name, too?”

“How could I forget?”

Jaymie left the store and retrieved her dog. With Hoppy by her side, she set out to the street along the river where the office of Laskan Cooper took up the five rooms of a modified cottage. Taking a deep breath, she entered, a buzzer announcing her arrival. Craig Cooper came out to the reception room from a back office and looked around. When he saw Jaymie and Hoppy, he frowned and adjusted his glasses on his nose. “Jaymie Leighton,” he said. “Surprised to see
you
here.”

“Can I come back and talk, Craig?”

Brows raised, he nodded, and said, “Sure.”

She followed him back and took a seat across from him as he settled behind his desk in a room that once would have been a bedroom. It now had no identity but grayness: dove gray walls, steel gray furnishings, charcoal gray blinds. Even Craig was dressed in gray.

“What can I do you for?” he said in a brisk, jaunty tone that no doubt made clients produce folders of tax forms or receipts. He grabbed a sheaf of papers and tapped them into alignment.

She examined his pale, serious face, glasses set high on a beaky nose over thin lips, then took another deep breath, and said, “Craig, I don’t know if Kathy said anything, but I had a bit of a run-in with her yesterday at the Emporium.”

He nodded. “Heard about it.”

She reached down to pet Hoppy and untangle his leash from the leg of the chair. He settled underneath her and curled up on the nubby, mottled gray carpet. “I didn’t want that to happen, especially in front of Connor. But it involved Ella Douglas—she was Eleanor Grimshaw back in the old days; do you remember her from school?—and she’s in a wheelchair.” Craig was about to start talking, and Jaymie put up one hand. “I’m not here to argue over who was right or wrong. It doesn’t matter. At least…it doesn’t matter now. It’s over.”

She paused, trying to find the right words. “I just want to…I really want to put this all…the old mess…behind us, Kathy and me. Do you think…” She sighed and shook her head, then continued: “Do you know how I can make amends to Kathy? Has she ever told you why she hates me so much?” It was awkward, and Jaymie struggled, but she was determined to move ahead.

He tapped a pencil and glanced at his computer monitor, which held an image of a spreadsheet of some sort. When he saw her glancing at it, he turned the monitor away. “I don’t know. You were kind of a snob, back in high school. I figured it was something to do with that. Kathy really has never talked about it, at least to me. If I were you, I would just leave it all alone.”

That was not unexpected, but she was not going to be so easily deflected. That was what had caused her to let the grievance stew for sixteen years. “Let it alone; she’ll forget about whatever it is,” well-meaning friends and even her
mother had told Jaymie. But Kathy hadn’t forgotten about it. Most people would have, but she was cut from different cloth. So Jaymie poured out her reasons for making amends after such a long time, reminding Craig what he should already know, that being “enemies” in a small town made folks uneasy. Mutual friends felt that they needed to take sides. No one invited Kathy and Jaymie to the same events or parties. It was silly. She stopped and watched Craig’s gray eyes behind the glinting glass of horn-rimmed spectacles.

He sighed and shook his head. The front door chime sounded just then, and Matt Laskan poked his head into Craig’s office a moment later. “Just me,” he said. He glanced at Jaymie and smiled, then said to Craig, “I just got done at the insurance agent’s office. That little break-in we had last week is not going to be worth claiming, despite the scrambled hard drive and the broken window. We’ll have to just pay the costs and swallow it. But we’ll have to be more vigilant, my friend, about keeping the alarm on.”

“Thanks for taking care of it, Matt.”

The fellow glanced at Jaymie, then said, “I ran into Kathy. She seems to think that the move idea is still on. Haven’t you had the talk with her yet?”

“Can we get into this later, Matt?” Craig asked, glancing swiftly at Jaymie and then back to his partner with a significant look.

“Okay, all righty. Just sayin’. You gotta keep the old lady in line.” He disappeared, whistling, presumably to his own office.

Hoppy, alerted by the whistle, whined a little and stood up, wobbling toward the door to the end of his leash. Jaymie tugged him back, and asked, “What did Matt mean about a move idea?”

“Nothing!” Craig said. “Jaymie, just leave Kathy alone. She’s got enough on her mind without
you
screwing things up more.” His tone was irritable, where it
had
been calm and equable.

What had happened? She stood up. She was not going to leave it alone, but she didn’t have to tell him that she was going to go talk to Kathy’s best girlfriend now. Maybe Kathy told her girlfriend things she didn’t tell her husband. “I’ll let you get back to work, Craig. Sorry to bother you.”

He nodded.

But Jaymie just had to ask again, as her brain processed the remark Craig’s partner had made. “So…are you moving? You guys leaving town?”

“No, of course not. It’s nothing important.” He didn’t meet her eyes and was already tapping away on the number pad of his keyboard, clearly signaling he was too busy to talk.

She glanced at her watch as she left the accounting office. Time for a brisk walk through Boardwalk Park, then to the feed-and-tack store down by the dock.

Queensville, situated as it was on the St. Clair River across from Johnsonville, Ontario, overlooked Heartbreak Island, shared by both Ontarians and Michiganders. The Leighton family owned Rose Tree Cottage on the island, and Jaymie oversaw its cleaning and rental through the spring, summer and autumn months, a task that most cottage owners assigned to a property management company. She stood on the walkway and leaned on the railing, watching a Norwegian tanker navigate the shipping channel, the narrow waterway in the middle of the river that was deep enough to accommodate such vessels. The tanker moved north majestically past Heartbreak Island, and back into the deeper blue of the safer passage in the middle of the St. Clair. The day was warming up. Canada was clear right now, the tiny town
of Johnsonville just a green blob on the far shore, but on some mornings in summer there would be a haze near the river, a profound fog so white and dense nothing could be seen. A foghorn would sound to remind ships to navigate carefully.

As she strolled with Hoppy down the walkway, Jaymie’s mind drifted to the problem of Daniel Collins. Until recently she hadn’t thought much about Daniel, who ran a computer software applications company out of Phoenix, Arizona. Three years before, while driving through Queensville, he’d bought historic Stowe House on a whim; the Queen Anne–style gem of a house was where the Tea with the Queen event was held each May. How rich did you have to be to be able to buy a house like that on a whim? Fortunately for the village, he had become a good and careful conservator of a piece of local history.

Recently they had gotten much closer, and she liked Daniel a lot. He was the kind of man you could depend on, a good friend to have in a crisis. She supposed that what they were doing could be called dating, but she hated to pin a label on what was really just a friendship at this point, at least in her mind.

Daniel had dropped a medium-sized bomb on her a few days before. His parents, who lived near Phoenix, were coming up to see Stowe House. They were anxious to meet her, Daniel had told her. That meant he had been talking to them about her.

Also, he wanted to go with her the next time she went over to Canada to meet her Grandma Leighton, the family matriarch. That, along with his consulting her about changes to Stowe House, had her wondering if he was becoming a little too attached much too quickly. She was just seven months out of a serious relationship and wasn’t ready for anything more than casual dating. Joel Anderson had broken
her heart into a million tiny pieces in December of the previous year, walking out on their serious relationship a couple of weeks before Christmas. She was just beginning to glue those shards back into something that resembled her heart.

Shaking herself out of her gloom, she walked on, keeping pace with the tanker ship as it majestically slipped upriver toward an oil refinery on the Canadian side. One thing at a time, and no point in worrying about things that might or might not happen between her and Daniel. His parents probably just wanted to see his lovely historic house.

At the end of the park, the walkway descended to the municipal docks and from there to an area of small, old shops, leaning against each other for support like rest home residents. Among them was a bait-and-tackle shop for the fishers who trolled the waters of the St. Clair, and beside it was the Queensville Feed and Tack. She checked her watch. The feed-and-tack shop opened at eleven, and Dani Brougham reportedly was regular as clockwork, their first customer of the day.

As Jaymie strolled toward the feed shop, an old green GMC pickup skidded into the parking lot, throwing up a spray of gravel, and a woman in jeans leaped out and headed toward the door. Jaymie followed, curious to see if this was her quarry.

Her guess was confirmed as she followed the woman in, and a guy in overalls looked up, and said, “Hey, Dani, what’s shakin’?” then glanced at Jaymie with curiosity. Jaymie smiled, but kept right on, following Dani Brougham to the back of the shop, where stacks of paper sacks were piled on skids in neat rows. She hadn’t thought of an approach, and everything she considered sounded weird and faintly menacing.
So, you’re Kathy Cooper’s only friend, right?
Or,
Say, Dani, can we talk for a minute about why Kathy Cooper
hates me so much?
As it turned out, Hoppy provided the icebreaker by launching himself at Dani Brougham and dancing excitedly round the woman.

“Hey, little guy! Aren’t you a cutie-patootie?” Dani Brougham had a pleasantly gruff voice, and she continued to talk as she hunched down to scruff Hoppy’s neck until the little dog was wriggling with ecstatic joy. She finally looked up, and said, “He’s a cute li’l tripod, isn’t he? What kind of dog is he? How’d he lose his leg?”