Brightleaf (13 page)

“Oh.”

Then to me he says, “I’m gonna hafta miss out on that egg casserole. Early meeting, but give Mavis my best. He winks at us then goes upstairs for something.

“You should bring your company to Share Group,” Eleanor calls after him.

“I doubt he’ll bring his company,” I say, pulling a coffee cup from the cabinet. “It’s his ex-wife.”

“Why is his ex-wife staying at his house?”

“It’s a long story,” I say. “Hopefully it’ll be temporary.” I wonder how long Jeanine will stay at Terry’s looking for the dog. Surely she’s got to return to her parties and yachtsmen or whatever soon. Not that I mind Terry staying here.

“Ned and I talked about marriage,” says Eleanor.

Terry walks back into the kitchen and grabs his coffee cup. He heard it, too.

I’d like to call her on that so bad, but maybe she did talk about it, and maybe Ned nodded, stoned out of his gourd. Terry lifts an eyebrow, then motions for me to follow him to the front door.

“Is she serious about Ned?” Terry asks in a whisper.

“Can’t tell,” I say. “I have a policy against romances between boarders. Once they figure out they’re in love they need to find someplace else to live, because eventually there
will
be drama. So I know for sure, or at least think I know, that when Ned was living in the carriage house nothing was happening between those two.”

Terry shakes his head and walks out the door.

28

Dry Cleaning

Mavis

“Mavis speakin.” I got the phone in one hand and Floyd in the other.

“Hey, Mavis, it’s Terry. You doing alright?”

“Never better, Dr. D. I hate it that you missed my famous egg casserole this mornin cuz it was deee-lish, and it ain’t very often I cook somethin that didn’t start out in the freezer.”

“Sorry I missed it, too. Hopefully, next time. Listen, is Mary Beth around?”

“MB just left to take the toddlers to the preschool, then she’s off to who knows where. You want me to have her call you?”

“Actually, I was calling to see if she would pick up my dry cleaning. The laundry service delivered it to my house about thirty minutes ago, and it’s hanging on the front door. I would get it myself but I don’t want to see Jeanine.”

“Well, hey, Doc, I’m fixin to head down to the Goodwill. On my way back I can catch a bus and swing by your place. It ain’t too much trouble.”

“Mavis, I can’t have you do that. I’ll just take my chances at lunch and pick it up myself.”

“I already told you it ain’t no trouble. You go on and save your energy for your ladies in the waitin room. I’m gonna fetch your dry cleanin like I told you.”

“If you’re sure, then thank you. You’re a sweetheart.”

“No sweat, baby.”

The Goodwill puts out all the newest donations on Mondays. I like to get there real early, just as it gets laid out. It would shock you to see all the thangs people just up and give away. Like perfectly good stuffed animals. How I love me some stuffed animals. Lord a mercy. And the household stuff ain’t bad neither. Once I got me a lamp that turns on when you touch it, turns off when you touch it. Who in their right mind would give
that
to the Goodwill for nothin? I brought that lamp home, and it tickled me for near a month, touchin that thang on and off. They didn’t have Goodwill in the town where I’m from. Back then there wasn’t much in the mountains. No Family Dollars or nothin. We pretty much made do with whatever hand-me-downs were circulatin through the relatives or whatever the Lystra Springs Baptist Church was handin out from the clothes closet. Most of the clothes that was passed along was homemade to fit a particular person and not me. The Goodwill is a one-stop shop. If your house burnt down today, you could go to the Goodwill and get you all the furniture, clothes, towels, bed sheets, and kitchen stuff you need for a hell of a lot cheaper than what you’d pay at the Family Dollar. And the Goodwill has the best t-shirts in town, but I ain’t gettin none today. I’ll have my hands full with Dr. D’s dry cleanin…and this stuffed bear.

“Montague and Oak!” shouts out the bus driver, but I already know it’s my stop. I take the bus cuz I never did get me a driver license, but that ain’t never stopped me from gettin around. I’ve got friends who carry me when I can’t get a bus, and my feet do the rest. I hug my new bear and step off the bus. I only need to walk two blocks and turn right to get to Doc’s house.

Somebody sure is troubled about their dog bein lost because there’s pictures of this white dog nailed to every telephone pole on the street. When I get up to Doc’s yard, it looks like somebody done took all the leftover signs, and dumped them here—right in the middle of his yard. Every tree has a picture of the dog, and there are them little realtor signs that normally says, For Sale, except the dog is on near five of them.

Doc’s dry cleanin is hooked on the front door. I lift the hangin pile of shirts covered in that silky plastic, and underneath is a big ol’ poster of the same damn dog. Doc’s ex is serious about finding it. I take me a good hard look at the picture cuz who knows? Maybe I seen it.

But it don’t take me long to recognize this dog. I recognize it all right, like I would
my
own
son
.

I’m fixin to grab that knocker and bang till the ex opens. But I stop myself. If her lost dog is
my
Floyd, it don’t make sense that Dr. D has seen Floyd two thousand times and don’t know him. So maybe they ain’t the same dog. I look at that poster again—look deep in the eyes.

It sure as hell
is
Floyd.

I says to myself, I says,
Mavis, you gotta think here. This here is a mystery. Dr. D couldn’t never be the abusive pervert Mary Beth was tellin you about.

So I set myself down at the bus stop and start to thinkin about how Floyd came to us in the first place. It dawns on me that one thang is for sure, that me and Miss Mary Beth Green is gonna have us a talk.

29

Yohimbe

Mary Beth

Yohimbe is a dark herb.
A
lust potion
. It is indeed used during occult ceremonies like Detective Metz was saying, as
a love sacrament for pagan matrimony
. I got all that off the
Occult Accents
website, the Wicca’s answer to
Southern Accents,
I guess. I didn’t peruse it long to enough to find out if it lists favorite pagan home decor, or cutesy pagan holiday meal serving suggestions like,
Use your old skulls for serving guacamole on Halloween!
I went straight to the page dedicated to yohimbe, and now I’m sorry I ever did. According to
Occult Accents
, after some pagans get married, they have an orgy that can last up to fifteen days with the help of yohimbe.
Fifteen days.
Just reading that made me totally exhausted and thirsty for a gallon of bleach. Yohimbe is also used in all-night raves as a hallucinogen. But taking too much can cause… death. Seems like too much of anything can cause death. I bet too much scallop lasagna could cause death.

On the bright side, yohimbe is the only other substance approved by the FDA to treat impotence other than Viagra. So basically, either you solve your impotence problems or
hello afterlife
.

There’s a lot you wouldn’t know about a person by just looking at him. Was Ned an all-night rave kind of guy? Who can tell? Everyone has a skeleton in his or her closet or, at the very least, undisclosed information they do not wish to share with the whole community. Now unfortunately, with my newly acquired knowledge, whenever I imagine Ned he’s either tearing off his clothes under a full moon or in a graveyard stabbing baby dolls to death.

Terry is still renting a room here for fear of sleeping in the same house with his ex-wife. It’s been nice having him around for the last week or so. He helps out more than the other boarders. Not that I expect my boarders to help out. I only require them to pay the rent on time and stick with the rules. But Terry takes out the trash, helps with the dishes, and changed a light bulb once. It’s nice in other ways, too. We often sit around the kitchen table chatting with Mavis or dilly-dally on the front porch after supper.

I push open the kitchen door, and there’s Mavis and Terry sitting side-by-side at the table, looking at Terry’s laptop. He’s explaining a parody news website,
The Onion
, to her, but Mavis does not seem amused.

She looks up at me and says, “Now that’s a waste of time. There’s already a bunch of crazy news to be had in the real world. Like that old lady who dug up her dead twin sister from the backyard because she got lonely. Baby, if I ever get lonely, the skeleton of Aunt Minnie ain’t gonna cut it. And don’ forget that full-grown man who pretended to be autistic to get ladies to change his diapers.” Mavis lifts her eyebrows. She draws them on each day with eyebrow pencil, so when she lifts her eyebrows it’s real dramatic.

I tell her I agree and open the fridge. “What’s this?”

“Tuna Helper. Have you some. It’s real good.”

“Hmmm. What was for dessert?”

“Sarah Lee coffeecake. Saved you a piece.” Mavis walks across the kitchen and pulls a piece of pecan coffeecake from the breadbox. “Had to hide it.”

Terry stands up, pulls out a chair for me, and then pours a glass of wine.

“How’d your day go?” he asks.

“It was really good,” I say, eyeing the wine. I pick a pecan off my plate and chew it. “Can I have some of that?”

“I hate to tell you, Mary Beth, but this isn’t Cheerwine,” says Terry.

“Oh, I thought it was. Please? Just a little in my coffee cup?”

Mavis says, “MB, baby, you’re a grown woman. You don’t gotta be hidin your liquor in a mug that way.”

I say I’m doing it for other reasons. “I can’t be having boarders walking into the kitchen seeing Terry and me drinking wine like we’re on some kind of date.”

“Why not?” asks Terry. “What if we are?”

Mavis looks at us, shaking her head, and says she’s going to bed. She takes a quart of buttermilk from the fridge and pours some into a plastic cup with a Captain D’s logo. She says, “I got me a bottle of Bailey’s up in the room. Nothing better before bed than a glass of Bailey’s and buttermilk.” She whistles for Floyd, and they go back to her room, where he’s got a dog bed in the corner.

I turn to Terry. “Boarder romance is against the rules. If my boarders think I’m breaking the rules, next thing you know everybody will start having boyfriends and girlfriends all up in their rooms and causing all kinds of disturbances and problems.” Then I go into this long explanation of all the problems romances between boarders have caused me in the past, yelling and door-slamming being just the tip of the iceberg.

“So you’re basically running a safe little boarding house. A place for priests and spinsters?” He smiles.

I tell him that there is nothing wrong with that and to quit making something good and regular come off sounding disturbing.

Terry laughs and says, “You said it, not me.”

“It’s not like I’m forcing people to repress their carnal desires,” I say. “Nobody’s making anyone live here. Let them go off and live in a motel or a frat house for all I care. I’m just one woman on my own. I don’t have the ability to keep an eye on everyone. That rule saves me headaches.”

“Sorry I teased you. But it seems so funny that you, the owner of the Rapturous Rest, cannot have a romantic evening. Even just sitting on a sofa watching TV with me scooched a little closer to you. It’s harmless.”

“I know. Hey,” I say changing the subject. “I’ve got some news.”

I hold out my coffee cup and wait for him to pour. He pulls a few bottles from the bag he brought home from the Wine Warehouse and asks if I’m a white or red person. I shrug. He picks a pinot noir.

I take a sip and must have made a face. Terry says, “You don’t have to drink that, you know.”

“I know, but I feel like I want to. To celebrate.”

“What are we celebrating?”

“Everything I found at the library the other day. Before your Trekkie convention.”

“It’s worth celebrating?” says Terry. He holds up his glass for a toast, and I click my mug with his glass.

First of all, I tell Terry about the yohimbe and how Ned had it in his blood.

“Do they think that’s what killed him?”

“They didn’t know as of a few days ago, but Detective Metz could get in
big-time
trouble if anyone knew he told me. He acted like it was top secret.”

“Detective Metz is feeding you top secret info, huh?” He raises an eyebrow. “That may not be all he’s feeding you.”

“Stop,” I say. “The detective understands how much I care about Ned.”

“How understanding of him.” Terry gestures for me to carry on.

I tell him how I found out yohimbe is the bark of a tree that grows in Africa. And how dangerous it can be if people consume too much. Then I tell him about the dark side. “You wouldn’t believe what all I learned about pagan rituals and that type thing, even zombie lore.”

“My god!” Terry clutches his heart like he’s not taking me seriously. Then he says, “What are you saying? Ned was practicing voodoo or what?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. What I do know is
unspeakable
activities often revolve around that drug. Ned’s dying was not right.”

“Unspeakable?” Terry makes a face like he’s not sure if I have my facts straight. Then he says, “I agree. Ned’s death wasn’t right.”

“Also, the police found Ned’s journal, the one where he wrote his dreams. Apparently they thought it was a hoot. Like Ned was a few clowns short of a circus. Loco. But I think there must be something important in it.” I take a big gulp of wine. “I keep going back to Doyle and his prediction for Ned.”

“As weird as Doyle is, he’s actually got talent,” says Terry. “He had me pegged.”

“It’s not a talent. Grocery reading is inherent to the Stubb family,” I say.

We both laugh. Then we get into this conversation about the difference between talents and giftings, inherited versus learned. It’s great, and I’ve managed to drink more wine than I planned.

Then I end up saying something that’s been gnawing at me.

“How long to do think Jeanine will stay?”

Terry takes a deep breath. “Don’t know.”

“What if she never leaves?”

“She will.”

“Do you think she hopes ya’ll will get back together?”

He looks at me. “I hope she understands that’s not happening. I’m here because she’s driving me batshit. I mean, she opens my mail, calls my office four times a day, uses my razor, and sleeps in my shirts. She’s totally invaded my privacy. I told you before she moved in this wasn’t about love. I’m just helping her.”

“Be right back,” I say.

I run down the hall to the bathroom, forgetting my pipes aren’t fixed yet. I’ve got to say I’m pretty excited, though. He was talking about Jeanine when he said this
wasn’t about love
back when he called me to let me know Jeanine was moving in. This emboldens me to act on an idea. I run upstairs, quickly change clothes, then, stumble a little coming back down the steps. When I get back to the kitchen, I hold out my coffee cup again. I think I’m starting to like wine. Terry is looking at something on his laptop. When he looks up at me, he laughs.

“You look really nice,” he says. “Nicer than I imagined.”

“You imagined me?”

“More than once,” he says closing his laptop.

“Are you some kind of pervert?”

Terry stands and walks slowly over to me, smiling. I am wearing the
Star Trek
stretchy suit he bought me at the convention. He puts his hands on either side of my waist and says, “Thank you. You look beautiful.”

“I don’t look fat?”

“You don’t look fat at all.”

I hold up my face to his, closing my eyes, thinking this is probably about the time that he should kiss me. He’s still holding my waist, and we’re standing so close I can smell the starch on his shirt. The seconds tick past, and he still hasn’t kissed me, so I open my eyes. Terry is standing there, staring at me in a way no person has ever looked at me in all my life. Like he’s considering my very molecules. Like he wishes he could inhale me right here, on the spot. And then I’d disappear. All my particles would be absorbed into Terry. And as far as I’m concerned, he can do that. Make me disappear. So I close my eyes again, expecting something to happen.

“It’s getting late,” he says.

Then he takes my face in his hands. He leans in and kisses my forehead.

I open my eyes and look at him. I am so embarrassed I don’t know what to say. Was it my breath?

“Time for bed,” he says.

“Bed?”

“Good night.” And he walks out of the kitchen.

I stand there in the stretchy suit, feeling all at once like a goddess, and a goddess rejected. But mostly drunk.

I down the wine in my cup and walk after him. “Hole it right there, buddy. You can’t jus walk away fromme in my Cap’n Janeway outfit.”

“Your rules,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “Just following the rules concerning boarder romance. Sleep tight.” Terry smiles and walks upstairs. I hear his door softly close.

I have a pressing reason to see Detective Metz, but I can’t remember what it is. I just know I need to get down to the police station. For some reason, I’m wearing a very short skirt, and I keep thinking that my underwear is showing in the front, so I keep pulling my skirt down. When I see Detective Metz, he looks at my skirt, and then I realize I wore it to get information out of him. He approaches me, staring at my legs, and says, “Want to get some wine, Ms. Green?” I’m sick of him looking at me like that way, so I say, “You have many other fish in your sea, Clark. I have no plans to be another notch on your stick, another charm on your bracelet, another apple in your basket that you chew down to the core and spit out.” Then Ned walks up. A certain light-headedness creeps into my being, accompanied by a blackness, and then I only hear voices.

Detective Metz says, “Nedbolyth Hillman, what are you doing here?”

Ned says, “Just taking a break from Evil Otto, man.”

“How’d you get away?” Metz wants to know.

“Spinach, man. It’ll save your life.”

I open my eyes and see Ned. He’s looking down at me lying on the pavement. I grab his hand.

Ned says, “It’s okay, Mary Beth. I came to warn you that Otto is coming and that you better run.”

Then Ned runs.

I’m confused until this smiling face comes bounding towards me. I freeze, terrified, and realize there’s a good chance I’ll be exterminated if I just lie here. So I make a subtle move to edge myself away from Evil Otto’s smiling approach. My limbs are heavy, like sandbags. Otto yells, “Intruder alert! Intruder alert!
”
So I force myself to move. I am suddenly zipping through passages with electric walls. Somehow I know that if I touch the walls, I’ll die. And now I’m running through Brightleaf; robots surround me blurting, “Get the humanoid.” I easily knock them down and continue making headway for Main Street and home. I run up the front steps, so happy to be safely home. I reach for the knob, and Otto materializes through my front door. “Intruder alert!”

I’m doomed.

My head is pounding when I wake up. I’m not good at drinking wine, I discover. Also, I do not recommend sleeping in a
Star Trek
stretchy suit. After peeling off the suit and kicking it to the floor, I lay in bed for another fifteen minutes. Eventually, I slide one foot out of bed and then the other, pull on my robe, and open my bedroom door. Someone at some point slid a note under my door. It says:
Drink lots of water. Eat asparagus
.

I assume Terry put that there, and that he’s speaking of my jumbo headache. We might have a can of asparagus in the kitchen. We definitely don’t have any fresh. Anyway, I have other pain that needs attending that I doubt asparagus will make right. I hope to heck Terry won’t be downstairs when I get there. The clock says it’s ten, so there’s an excellent chance he left for work an hour ago. I peek through the curtains. His car is gone, but the light is blinding. I put on my sunglasses and grab some Aleve from the medicine cabinet, a towel and toiletries, and tiptoe down the steps and out to the carriage house.