Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery (8 page)

Joey had waited until a few years
later to frighten me half to death, taking off to the Midwest to obtain his
commercial trucker’s license. He then
criss
-crossed
the country in a seventy-three-foot rig for a couple of years before settling
down in Massachusetts with his bride and baby girl. We had all been fortunate
to survive these coming-of-age episodes and discover we were still friends, and
I had every intention of keeping it that way.

Except now my daughter was telling
me she may have met The One, and he lived in Oregon, and she wanted my advice.
Or did she merely want my approval to pursue this improbable dream? I could
tell her what I really thought, which was that however wonderful this new man
was, and however magical the chemistry between them might be, long-distance
relationships very seldom work out, so she was probably wasting her time and
airfare. But where would that pronouncement get me? On the receiving end of a
chilly brush-off as she went home to pack her bags and dream of a West Coast
future, that’s where. So I did what any mother in her right mind would do: I
lied.

“I think you need to do what you
need to do, Emma, and you’re the only one who knows what that is. You’re all
grown up and in charge of your own life. Just know that Armando and I will be
tickled to death if things work out well, and if they don’t, well, we’ll be
here for you anyway. Daddy and Sheila will feel the same way, I’m sure.” This
last was pure bravado, since Emma’s father Michael and his second wife Sheila
tended to be on the conservative side and would probably be horrified at this
latest development. I beamed at Emma with as much confidence as I could
manufacture.

She listened to my little speech
with a straight face and swallowed the last of her chili. “Well, well,
Pollyanna lives,” she said after patting her lips on a napkin. She chose
another cherry tomato from the plate in my lap. “Who are you, and what have you
done with my mother? You are so full of baloney, I don’t know whether to laugh
or cry, but I applaud your instincts. I only hope you can get to a phone fast
enough to encourage Daddy and Sheila to suck it up, too. I’m not looking
forward to that conversation, I can tell you.”

As usual, my intuitive daughter
had seen right through me, but that was okay, I told myself. As long as she
knows we’re in her corner, she won’t run off to Elkton just to spite us, as she
would have ten years ago. I blew out a breath and handed the rest of the salad
plate to her.

“Okay, you got me, but at least my
heart is in the right place.”

“You definitely get points for
that,” she agreed.

“Of course I’m terrified for you
and hope you aren’t setting yourself up for a terrible fall, but you’re not
fifteen anymore, and you’re smart enough to have weighed the negative
possibilities already.
 
The amazing thing
to me is that you’re also optimistic enough to see the positive possibilities
and go check them out.
 
After all the
boyfriends and break-ups in your past, that’s pretty darned resilient, and I
admire that. I do.”

Her grin was sly. “I get it from
my mom,” she told me. “I’ve been watching you pretty closely for the last
thirty years, you know, and I picked up a thing or two about getting back on
the horse that threw you.”

“Yee haw,” I acknowledged the
compliment.
“Ride ‘
em
, cowgirl.
Now tell me everything about Russell. Why is he in Elkton when his family is
here? Wouldn’t it be easier for him to fly back east and stay with his folks?
What does he look like, do you have any pictures? Come on, give with the
details.”

An hour or so later I crossed the
Putnam Bridge again, this time heading back to Wethersfield. I had broken my
daughter’s silence, to be sure, but now my head was swimming with almost too
much information. Russell was an environmental restoration consultant and had
just landed the job of his dreams in Oregon, which meant he didn’t have any
vacation time accrued and couldn’t make the trip east. He loved living on the
West Coast and had done so for more than ten years, although most of that time
had been in California. He was a couple of years older than Emma and had never
been married. In addition to the brother who was married to Emma’s friend
Ellen’s sister, he had a married sister in New Jersey. He also had college
friends all over the country with whom he kept in touch and often visited.
 
He skied and hiked and played the guitar. No
pictures yet.

Was I happy? No, but how often is
a mother truly thrilled with her adult children’s choices? Exactly,
which is why I clung to my original principle of parenting at this
stage of things and got an even tighter grip on my misgivings and my mouth.
Emma would do what she would do. She was a big girl, and she’d been raised to
think for herself. She had a good brain and a ton of common sense, so even
allowing for the fact that hormones trump intelligence almost every time, I was
hopeful. What else could I do? I wondered how much to tell Armando. Emma was
his princess, and he had enough on his mind at the moment without adding this
to his list of worries.

On Wednesday
Strutter
took her turn at the Vista View sales desk, leaving Margo and me to hold the
fort. We arrived at the Law Barn within seconds of each other and let ourselves
in, expecting to see May presiding over the coffee pot, but we were
disappointed. A bad feeling came over me as I shut the front door behind us and
gazed at May’s empty office. The concern on Margo’s face told me she felt the
same way.
 
We looked at each other.

“Did you talk with her last night
or this morning?” I asked.

Margo shook her head slowly. “No,
the last time I spoke with May was on the way out of here late yesterday
afternoon. We were both about dead on our feet after the day we’d put in, but
she was
feelin
’ pretty cheerful. She said she was
down to the last few manuscripts to review, and she’d just about made her mind
up about them. She was also
lookin
’ forward to a
visit from one of her favorite authors, Judy Hathaway or Holloway. She writes
some of those steamy romances I’ve been
tryin
’ to get
you and
Strutter
to sample.”

“Is Judy arriving soon? Maybe May
is just running around doing hostess-type things, like putting sheets on the
guest room bed and planning menus,” I offered without any real conviction,
heading for the copy room to start the coffee maker. Margo trailed after me.

“
Mmm
,
maybe, but Judy won’t be here for a couple of days yet. I think Auntie May said
she was going to ask Tommy to finish up on
paintin
’
the upstairs walls before then so she could air out the fumes.” She put her
briefcase on the floor and stuck her head into May’s little room, peering
around as if she might be hiding behind a file cabinet. She looked at her
elegant little wristwatch. “This doesn’t feel right to me. It’s not that early.
I’m going to call her and make sure she’s all right.” Having made her decision,
she picked up her briefcase and disappeared down the stairs to our office.
Frankly, I was in complete agreement with her. This didn’t feel right to me
either.

A few minutes later I negotiated
the half-flight of stairs, holding two steaming mugs of coffee, and found Margo
drumming her polished fingernails on the Mack Realty desk, lost in thought. I
put one mug down in front of her and retreated to the sofa.

“Did you reach May?”

She focused on me and frowned.
“No, I didn’t, and I tried twice. Now I’m really concerned. I think I need to
take a drive to her house. Do you mind? She is over seventy years old and lives
alone.”

“Not at all.
In fact, I wish you would. I’m worried, too.”

Just then we heard the Law Barn’s
front door creak open. Our heads snapped toward the sound, and we scrambled to our
feet in unison.

“Auntie May?” Margo couldn’t help
calling as we jostled for position on the stairs. She
won,
big surprise.

“It’s me,” May called across the
lobby as we clattered up the steps to join her. “Well! I wasn’t
expectin
’ a welcoming committee, but I’m glad to see you
both. Is that coffee I smell?” She trudged wearily toward the copy room in
search of caffeine while Margo and I exchanged glances.

“Is everything okay?” I asked,
careful to phrase my query in general terms. I’ve noticed that older people
often don’t appreciate specific questions about their health. As I’d already
begun to realize about myself, the number of minor aches and pains one
experiences on a daily basis tends to escalate with the passing of the years,
and who wants to be reminded about that, much less make it a topic of
conversation? I kept my voice light and my expression neutral.

“No major disaster has befallen
me, if that’s what you mean, but everything is definitely not okay,” she
answered in what for her was a downright testy tone. “I’ve been the victim of a
practical joke for the second time in a week, and I’m not at all happy about
it.”

“Oh, dear, now
what?”
Margo asked as May filled her mug and added an envelope of
sweetener. We all trailed back downstairs, where Margo and I could reclaim our
cooling coffee, and took our usual seats on desk chair and sofa.

“At least this time I was able to
get a good night’s sleep before
dealin
’ with it,” May
began after a restorative slug of caffeine.

“Dealing with what?” I prompted,
almost afraid to ask. What could be more bizarre than having live bats stuffed
into your house through an open window in the middle of the night?

“Pumpkins.
A great big
ol
’ pile of pumpkins in
my driveway, right in front of my garage door.
They were very artfully
arranged, I must say
,
to cover a large area but not be
visible to a driver backing out.”

“How could a pile of pumpkins not
be visible?” Margo wanted to know.

May
snorted
in that familial Farnsworth style. “You know my garage is attached to the house,
so I go through a connecting door from the kitchen to get to my car. After I
get in, I press the remote control clipped to my driver’s side visor to open
the garage door, start the car and back out, all of which I did this morning. I
checked the rearview mirror, of course, put the car into reverse, pressed the
accelerator and wham!
Smashed into a mess of pumpkins stacked
just below bumper height.
My god, I thought I’d run over somebody’s dog
or a small child for a minute. My heart was just
thumpin
’.”

I could imagine her distress.
“That’s awful. Do you know how the pumpkins got there, May?”

“You mean, who put them there,
don’t you? Pumpkins are heavy, and they don’t move themselves. When I got my
legs to stop shaking and climbed out of the car, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
There must have been fifty of them in all sizes, enough to clean out the
neighborhood farm stand, and half of them are mashed into the asphalt. Somebody
went to a lot of trouble, not to mention expense, to give me a fright, and
after the bat episode, I’ve got to wonder who’s got it in for me.”

Margo and I looked from May to
each other, perplexed. “But it sounds so very childish, Auntie May. Pumpkins
piled in the driveway? It’s a mess, and I’m sure you were scared to death for a
second, but it doesn’t seem to have any weight as an act of revenge. What do
you think, Kate?”

I was busy imagining the awful
mess in May’s driveway. “You’re right. It sounds like a Halloween prank to me,
but who did it? Transporting and piling up that many pumpkins takes a lot of
effort. It doesn’t sound like the work of one youngster to me, more like a team
effort, but I’m as clueless about a motive as you are. Is your painter—Tommy,
is it?—going to clean up the wreckage for you?”

May huffed and thumped her mug
down on a side table. “He will, good fellow that he is, but if my writer friend
Judy wasn’t
showin
’ up this weekend, I’d let them
just sit there and rot, let everybody in the neighborhood see the mess one or
more of their little darlings is responsible for. You know as well as I do that
word would spread like wildfire, and somebody in the know about who’s
responsible couldn’t help but leak it to a few people. Sooner or later, the
guilty kid would show up at my door with his mama or daddy insisting he
apologize, and that would be that. I might even get to know a few of the people
I’m supposed to be neighbors with. That would be very nice, I must say.”

My eyes bugged out. “Do you mean
to tell me you haven’t met any of the people who live on your street, not even
the people on either side of you? I mean, this is New England, and we can be a
bit reserved, but not so much as a
hi-we’re-the-neighbors-and-feel-free-to-borrow-a-hammer-anytime?”

May shook her head. “It surprised
me, too. I cannot imagine that happening back in Atlanta. If anything, I’d be
pullin
’ my blinds down and hiding from visitors by now.”
Her face looked as if it were about to crumple in tears, and my heart sank.
“Why don’t they like me? I’ve been as polite and cordial as I know how to be,
always wave hello if I see someone on the sidewalk or say good morning or
whatever. I know the renovations have made a lot of noise over the past week or
so. Do you suppose that’s why they’re all mad at me?”

Margo quickly enveloped her in a
hug, then backed off and shook her by the shoulders. “Don’t you even think
it.
Nobody’s mad at you; how could they be? They don’t even
know you, and when they do, they’ll love you just as much as everybody else
who’s ever met you does. Isn’t that right, Kate?”