Lucky Stuff (Jane Wheel Mysteries) (4 page)

Instead of meeting the moving truck at the storage locker, directing the two burly workers to gently stack her boxes, her treasure chests filled with vintage photographs, crates filled with tin lithoed recipe boxes, her old suitcases packed with vintage tablecloths and kitchenalia, her red Formica-topped kitchen table, Arts and Crafts tiles, art pottery vases and flowerpots, file boxes filled with vintage maps, postcards, paper calendars from the twenties and thirties, metal boxes filled with hundred of keys, baskets filled with vintage padlocks, a collection of over one hundred advertising yardsticks, and carton after carton of vintage, collectible books, Tim had been here, making floral arrangements.

Jane had taped bubble wrap around knitting needles and sewing gadgets, advertising tape measures and paper-wrapped sewing needles from England. She had boxed boxes—carved wooden jewelry caskets and tea caddies, tramp art frames and whimsies, cast-iron banks, and a wooden chest filled with her vintage office supplies—tiny cardboard boxes shaped like miniature books that held paper fasteners and gummed reinforcements and labels and pencil leads. Leather bookmarks, coins, silver charm bracelets, and container after container of Bakelite buttons had been loaded into that moving truck. Jane had waved good-bye to decades of treasures she had hunted and gathered, knowing they would find a safe home at the other end, in a dry and well-lit storage locker in Kankakee, right next to the one where her friend Tim kept his own treasures.

In addition to all of those priceless treasures? Jane had packed up most of the clothes in her closet, since Melinda had advised clearing out half the stuff in every storage space. Nick’s closet was already empty, since he had taken everything that mattered with him to school. But Jane’s closet? It had been jammed with vintage beaded sweaters, swingy wool coats from the thirties and forties, plus her favorite professional clothes that she couldn’t part with even after she stopped going into an office on a daily basis. Shoes, scarves, expensive bags, everyday jewelry. It was true that for picking, for weekend rummage and Dumpster diving, she only wore jeans and sweaters and boots and running shoes with the occasional pair of Birkenstocks thrown in for good measure, but in her past life? She had never gotten rid of the clothes she loved because, after all, who knew? Maybe she would wear them again?

Melinda had suggested packing everything away in large cardboard storage closets that could be taken to the locker she was renting and Jane had filled two of them with all of her clothes, leaving just a coat and jacket or two, a few shirts and dresses hanging, waving in the breeze of her now spacious closet. Besides those few personal pieces, the contents of her bureau drawers and bathroom cabinet exempted in the contract, all Jane now owned for sure was in a small duffel bag in the trunk of her car.

“I’ve used these movers before. I mean they’re offbeat and alternative, but they’re good, they’re reliable. I will track down your stuff. They probably just went to get lunch and then…”

“They had your cell phone number, Tim. They would have called you, right? Maybe they were delayed since they didn’t call?” said Jane, with a question mark built tentatively into her phrasing.

Tim’s face lit up for two seconds, then his features flickered and went dark as he slapped his pocket, then realized he wasn’t wearing his sport coat. He still had on his white apron.

“I left my jacket in the…” Tim dashed out the door, and through the wide picture window that fronted the store, Jane could see him throw open the door to his T & T Sales van and grab his jacket, feel in his pocket for his phone. He stayed outside while he listened to his voice mail and Jane read his shoulders. Hunched up around his ears as he listened, then with a slight dip as they relaxed just a bit, then they slumped—low and discouraged. Jane watched Tim gather himself and turn and walk back into the shop.

“They gave me thirty minutes to contact them and meet them at the locker. When they couldn’t reach me, they had to proceed to their next location. Your stuff was a half load and they had another half load to deliver so they went on to do that, then I have to reschedule with them, since they’ll be picking up more stuff at the drop off and…” Tim sat back down at the computer. “I just have to call them and work out a new schedule, that’s all.”

“Where?”

“At the home office,” said Tim, almost in a whisper as he picked up the landline at his desk to call the company. “It’s not exactly an office, it’s…”

“No. Where? Did they mention
where
the other half load was going?” asked Jane.

Tim nodded, but didn’t speak.

The door to the shop opened, startling both Jane and Tim, who were so wrapped up in the drama of the missed delivery they had not noticed a rented white catering truck pull up outside.

“That you, Jane? How are you? Just saw your mom and dad over at the tavern, I was dropping off some cocktail napkins with Lucky’s logo on them and they were talking about your good news.”

Jane looked at Baby B. Berteau, whom she and Tim had known in high school. He did deliveries for Tim and house clean-outs after sales. Apparently he did other freelance deliveries, too, since he had just said something about dropping something off at the EZ Way Inn.

“Yup, nobody sells a house in just one day, except somebody very L-U-C-K-Y,” he spelled out, turning his back so they could read the word
LUCKY
on his jacket. “Seems like all the luck around here is rubbing off.”

Tim gestured to the cooler and Baby B. started loading the boxes of floral arrangements into the truck.

“I’ll make this up to you, Jane,” said Tim.

“Where’s that other delivery?” asked Jane.

“Omaha,” said Tim.

“Omaha,” repeated Jane.

“Yeah, then they pick up a quarter load in Lincoln, and probably another quarter somewhere else on the way back this way. They cover about five or six states,” said Tim.

Baby B—what was his real name? Jane could hardly call a grown man with two-day stubble on his chin Babyface—picked up the last box of flowers and turned to Jane before heading out the door. “You sticking around for Lucky Days? Might as well, huh? I mean if you don’t have a house to go home to, like Nellie was saying.”

Jane Wheel, homeless and unencumbered, with only the clothes on her back (and in her duffel), unburdened with the materialistic woes of the world … stuffless … sat down at Tim’s desk and began to rapidly click an old ballpoint pen before taking a breath and replacing the pen in a vintage McCoy nursery planter shaped like a lamb.

“I knew something like this was going to happen,” said Jane.

3

Jane Wheel did not like being told to
take a deep breath, count to ten, step back,
or
relax.
To her, those admonitions sounded condescending, judgmental, patronizing. Jane was perfectly capable of breathing and not letting the top of her head fly off like some cartoon of a pressure-cooker head wearing a hat and glasses. She knew that in tough situations, the tough got going.

That is why, after absorbing the news that she had sold her house and everything in it except for what might be left in her underwear drawer, and then discovering that the truck with all of the prized possessions she had quickly but carefully culled from her house was more than one state west of where she currently stood, Jane Wheel got into her car, locked the doors, checked to make sure all the windows were tightly shut, and opened her mouth to scream. She planned to belt out every vile, despicable word she had ever heard. She would invent new words—graphic portmanteau words combining anger and venom and despair. She would wail and moan and rend her garments.

But the scream would not come. In fact, Jane felt eerily calm.

“Isn’t ‘calm’ just ‘numb’ with a positive spin?” she asked.
Whatever,
she thought.
For now, I’ll go with calm.

“I can’t rend my garments anyway,” said Jane, again out loud, “since I don’t have any garments to spare.”

Jane chose to ignore the fact that calm people didn’t talk to themselves out loud and turned right on Station Street, heading toward the EZ Way Inn. According to Baby B, Don and Nellie were both there. Nellie must have abandoned the lawn mowing in order to rush to the tavern and tell Don about the miracle of Jane’s house being sold. Jane pictured her nondriving mother hustling the eight or so blocks to the tavern, pedaling Jane’s old bicycle. If Rita were a little shaggier and a lot smaller, Jane could imagine her head poking out of the handlebar basket and Nellie would be the spitting image of the determined, upright Miss Gulch taking off with Toto in the
Wizard of Oz
.

Driving west on Station Street, an illuminated sign caught her eye.

MACK’S CAFÉ OPEN 24 HOURS!

Mack’s Café hadn’t been open for years. Thinking about Nellie on a bike reminded Jane that Mack’s was one of those childhood bicycling destination spots, offering milk shakes, Cokes in glass bottles, and a candy counter. The diner had closed its doors before Jane finished high school. The storefront had remained vacant as far as Jane knew. Why would Mack’s reopen now, since all of the businesses that provided the lunchtime customers, the stove factory and appliance store down the road, had closed their doors?

Jane was in no rush to arrive at the EZ Way Inn, and answer questions about her house or lack thereof. She would have to tell her parents and anyone else who lounged at the bar about her wayward possessions. Knowing how Nellie felt about her stuff, her collections, her treasures, her rescued objets d’art, Jane was in no hurry to hear her mother say “good riddance” when Jane told the story of the runaway truck.

So why not stop at Mack’s and see if someone still knew how to make a milk shake?

Several booths were filled, which surprised Jane for two reasons. It was late afternoon, almost dinnertime in Kankakee. Jane knew her parents—if not working at the tavern or waiting for Carl, their longtime evening bartender, to arrive—like their fellow Kankakeans, preferred to have dinner between five and six. Once, when Jane attempted to cook her parents a special dinner and told them it would be ready at seven, Nellie had snorted. “What do you think we are, French?” “Or Italian?” Don had added. The customers who filled the booths at Mack’s were drinking coffee or sipping milk shakes. It was too late for lunch, too early—even in Kankakee—for dinner, but as far as she knew, this area of West Kankakee, mostly residential except for the businesses located few and far between on Station Street, didn’t support a big “coffee-break” or “afternoon-teatime” crowd. This all felt suspiciously European.

Who were these people, wearing baseball caps or sunglasses on top of their heads? Jane saw that most of the tables had one person who was writing in a notebook, taking down what others said. Although laughter occasionally erupted, the faces of these people looked dead serious. At the counter, a waitress had been bending down, picking up her order pad from the floor. When she straightened and looked at Jane, both of them gasped—one with recognition, the other with simple surprise.

“Ruthie?” asked Jane. Ruthie had been a waitress at Mack’s thirty years ago. Same white uniform, same striped apron, same pin with red rhinestones that spelled out
RUTHIE
. Jane did some quick calculations. Could Ruthie be the same Ruthie? Of course not. Wasn’t Ruthie Mack’s wife or sister, and wouldn’t that make her at least sixty now? Maybe seventy, eighty? This Ruthie, couldn’t be more than twenty-five.

“You startled me, didn’t hear you come in, honey,” said time-warp Ruthie. “Want a table? Or are you joining somebody?” The waitress waved her hands around the room.

“Chocolate shake to go, heavy on the chocolate, light on the whipped cream, please,” said Jane, automatically ordering just what she ordered when she was ten years old. Something threw Jane off—maybe it was being called “honey” by someone considerably younger and infinitely perkier than herself.

“Sure thing,” said Ruthie, repeating the order to a young man farther down the counter whom Jane hadn’t even seen before. She was relieved it wasn’t a thin prematurely white-haired man with the name
MACK
stitched across his pocket. “Sam makes a great milk shake. Just be a minute.”

“I used to come here when I was a kid,” said Jane. “There was a waitress named Ruthie,” Jane pointed to the pin. “Was it your grandmother or…?”

“No, but you’re close. I was hired because I looked like Ruthie. At least that’s what Bill said when I got the gig.” She pointed to an old photograph hung behind the counter. Ruthie, and Mack, and three others were all leaning in close to a covered cake stand with what appeared to be a four-layer coconut cake protected inside the dome.

The girl picked up a full coffeepot and ran over to a booth whose occupants had been waving at her.

“Top you off, sugar?” she asked, with no trace of irony that Jane could detect.

Two guys sitting at the counter smirked. “Overkill, yes?” said one, peering over his glasses, watching her make the rounds with the coffeepot.

“Method,” said his companion. “I heard her say her ‘dogs were barking’ a few minutes ago.

Sam came over and delivered her milk shake. Jane glanced up at the menu board to see the price. Some things—prices, for example—had to have changed, even if the new owners of Mack’s, if they were in fact new owners, were trying to keep the waitress looking the same as she did twenty years ago.

“Lucky Burger?” asked Jane, reading it off the menu.

“Sorry, grill’s off right now. We had a little problem back in the kitchen. Up and running by breakfast tomorrow morning. You signing for this?”

Sam had shoved a clipboard in front of her. The top sheet was divided into a kind of grid where one could sign his/her name, then there was a space for crew name, then date and time.

“I was going to pay cash,” whispered Jane. She leaned in, knowing that she was in some
Groundhog Day
scenario and wasn’t sure she wanted all the baseball caps and sunglasses to notice her confusion.

“You’re not with the show, are you?” asked Sam, also leaning in.