Roll Over and Play Dead (2 page)

“Here’s an opportunity to start as assistant manager at a fast-food place.”

“You are not funny, Mother. This Is Important. Do you realize everyone in school will be there except your daughter, who might as well sit in her room until she’s covered with mold?”

“If you keep leaving dirty dishes in there, your whole room’s going to be covered with mold,” I said, moving on to the real estate section. If I could find a house I could afford, perhaps I could move while she was at school and leave no forwarding address.

“All I need is twenty dollars,” she said with a sniffle. More sniffles ensued. “A measly twenty dollars is all that stands between Mousse and utter misery for the rest of my life.”

A devastatingly brilliant idea struck. I lowered the paper and said, “I know a way for you to earn twenty dollars, dear.”

“Earn? Why do I have to earn it? Inez’s father just gave it to her, but my father’s dead so I guess that won’t work.”

“Cool it, Little Orphan Annie,” I said, increasingly smitten with my idea. “You want to earn twenty dollars or not?” When she gave me a level look, I continued. “I told you and Inez about Miss Emily’s violets and dogs. I will pay you a dollar a day to go over there after school and see to things.”

“I have to buy the ticket tomorrow.”

Well, at least we were working toward our respective goals. Although I wasn’t pleased with the necessity of trusting her, I said, “I’ll advance the money so you can buy the ticket tomorrow, but you hand it over to me until the concert, okay?”

“What kind of dogs—little yappy ones or big grungy ones?”

“Somewhere in between,” I said lightly, willing myself not to flinch as her laser-eyes bored into me. “Basset hounds named Nick and Nora. They stay in the backyard, so all you need to do is mix up their food and set it on the porch. Their water’s in a bowl under a drippy faucet; it needs to be checked every now and then. Feed the dogs, water the plants, bring in the mail, and you’re done in less than half an hour.”

Caron was no great whiz at math, but I could see numbers spinning around in her head. At last she raised her eyebrows and said, “Fifteen minutes to walk over there, half an hour to mess around, and another fifteen minutes to walk home. You are offering to pay me a dollar an hour, Mother. A Dollar an Hour. What about minimum wage? What about child labor laws, for that matter?”

“What about being the only person in all of Farberville High School who won’t get to see Mush?” I countered.

“Mousse. The group is named Mousse.” She stood up, gave me a calculating look, and started for her room. “I’ll think about it. It sounds like a lot of work for a dollar an hour. It’s supposed to rain this week, you know. I’d get totally drenched.”

She strolled out of the living room and down the short hallway to her bedroom door. I remembered the sensation of paws on my derriere and drool on my neck.

“Oh, all right!” I called ungraciously. “Two dollars a day, and I’ll drive you if it rains.”

“Payable in advance?” she said from the hallway.

“I hope you grow up to be a labor negotiator for a bunch of dockworkers.”

“Interesting idea.” Her bedroom door closed very softly.

The next afternoon it was raining, naturally. Not sprinkling or drizzling, but raining hard enough to fill the gutters with satiny brown water and send the few pedestrians darting from doorway to doorway as they worked their way up Thurber Street toward the campus of Farber College. Occasional claps of thunder broke up the monotonous rhythm on the roof of the bookstore.

Caron and Inez were breathing heavily as they arrived under the protective portico of the Book Depot. While Inez stopped to struggle with the umbrella, Caron came inside, her expression leaving no question as to the identity of the party responsible for the rain. To some extent, this was my fault, having exaggerated maternal powers to an impressionable toddler, who readily believed I had the unlisted telephone numbers of everyone who mattered, including Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy (who left several testy notes about sloppy dental hygiene).

I gave them a minute to recover and then herded them out to my car. After a brief debate about who was going to drive (we were dealing with the dreaded learner’s permit), I handed them the six pages and we pulled out of the parking lot.

“What’s all this?” Caron demanded.

“Instructions. As in what to do and how to do it. Just read through them.”

“I’m not reading anything, much less doing dogs, until I have my ticket,” she announced.

I drove them to a music store and waited in the car for an eternity while they battled a long line of Mousseketeers. Once the ticket was in my purse, I drove to Miss Emily’s house and parked. “I’ll wait here,” I said as I took out a book.

Inez tried the same ploy, but it met with scathing comments about fair weather friendship, craven cowardice, and other less charitable sentiments, and the two dashed to the front porch. I watched to make sure they found the key, and was about to escape into my mystery novel when a young man came up the sidewalk and turned toward the house. He had long, black hair plastered on his head like a bathing cap, and I caught a glimpse of dark, angry eyes as he passed my car. His lips were thin, his jaw sharp and angular, his cheeks strikingly concave. He wore a stained trench coat that might have come off the back of Sam Spade, and he carried a briefcase.

Caron and Inez looked alarmed as he approached, but he ignored them as he checked his mailbox, stuck a few envelopes in his coat pocket, and went around the corner of the house to an exterior staircase. According to page six of Miss Emily’s instructions, he was Daryl Defoe, the upstairs renter and sometimes “a wee bit irritable, but basically a good boy.”

Caron and Inez made it inside the house, so I settled back to outwit the bumbling inspector and identify the wicked soul who’d laced the souffle with cyanide. I was quite confident that I would succeed; this was, after all, mere fiction and I’d outwitted the Farberville CID on more than one occasion. Not that I would describe Lieutenant Peter Rosen as a bumbler. We’d met a while back when I’d been suspected of murder—just one of those annoying little things that happens to us all, I suppose. I’d been obliged to solve the mystery, and in the process had become interested in the hawk-nosed cop with curly black hair, molasses-colored eyes, and ferociously white teeth that hinted of vulpine ancestry.

Peter is a man of great charm, although he lapses from grace when he implies (a mild word) that I meddle in official investigations and stick my handsome nose into police business. He does this quite often, since I do try to take an interest in his work, as any good friend should.

Lately he has been bringing up the M-word. He is divorced and I am widowed, and we have been keeping company in the contemporary sense of the word. My deceased husband ran afoul of a chicken truck several years ago, and I have become settled in my singlehood and protective of my territory, both physical and intellectual. However, the idea of marriage is not loathsome, and at idle moments, such as this one, I allow myself to debate the relative merits.

I was trying to envision the division of closet space when a hand rapped on the window. I jerked my head up and found myself staring at a face only an inch from the car window. The face belonged to an elderly woman with a great cloud of uncombed gray hair somewhat restrained by a scarlet scarf, faded blue eyes, enough makeup to unhinge a Mary Kaye saleswoman, and a wide smile that seemed to consume the lower part of her face. A gold tooth glinted at me.

“Hello,” she shouted.

I rolled the window down a cautious inch. “Hello.”

She seemed unaware of the rain splattering down on her. She stepped back, giving me a better view of the tangled mass of plastic beads and gold chains, a frilly blouse and peasant skirt, a pink fringed shawl, and a leash in her hand. At the end of the leash was the most enormous black cat I’d ever seen. From its malevolent gaze, I deduced that it was not pleased to be taking a stroll in the rain.

“You’re Claire Malloy,” the woman said.

“I’m Claire Malloy,” I said, noting the car door was not locked and wishing I could push down the button without seeming alarmed, which I was.

“I’m Vidalia Lattis,” she continued in a melodious trill, “and a very dear friend of Emily’s. She told me you had agreed to take care of things while she was off on her tour. I think the Southwest is so intriguing, don’t you? I’m very sure those old caves must be haunted by brooding Indian spirits, and of course the desert is so dramatic. A veritable stage for the unfolding of the struggle between life and death, the survival of man in the most brutal environment.”

“Oh, yes,” I murmured.

She gestured at the cat. “This is Astra. In an earlier life, she was a pampered pet of Cleopatra. Can’t you imagine her on a barge on the Nile, sitting regally on a pillow and surrounded by dark-skinned servants with platters of caviar?”

I nodded, although it was easier to imagine the cat starring in a Stephen King movie. It is best not to contradict a gold-toothed woman oblivious to buckets of rain being splashed on her. “Nice to have met you,” I added.

“You must come by for a cup of tea some afternoon. I live in the red-brick apartment house right there on the corner. It’s terribly cozy, Astra thinks, and so convenient to the library and grocery store, and it is important for us to have—”

She stopped as a large yellow dog shot out of the side yard and came at her, barking like a banshee. She snatched up the cat and darted around to the passenger side of my car. Before I could determine what was going on, she was sitting beside me and the dog had his muddy paws on my window.

Vidalia smiled brightly and said, “As I was saying, the location is good but the neighborhood is not exactly what I’m used to. When I worked at the insurance office, I had my own bungalow, but the yard work became too arduous and I opted to rent an apartment.”

She continued to rattle on, but I was missing most of it because the dog was barking its brains out, rain was pounding on the roof of the car, and a great boom of thunder added to the confusion. And at this point, Caron and Inez reappeared on the porch, assessed the situation, and were now shrieking about what they were supposed to do with that monster attacking the car. Caron was, anyway; Inez’s mouth was moving.

I reacted in a mature fashion by covering my face with my hands. Vidalia dribbled into silence, perhaps appreciating the implications of my gesture, and the dog stopped barking and sat down on the sidewalk. The rain eased up.

As I removed my hands, I saw Colonel Culworthy striding toward us, his khaki jumpsuit protected by a black umbrella. “Did you open the gate?” he demanded.

I rolled down the window an inch. “I haven’t stepped foot out of the car,” I said.

“Someone did,” he said. “Patton’s out. It’s not allowed. The town has a leash ordinance, and a damn good one. Don’t like to see dogs roaming.” He bent down and glared at my companion. “You open the gate?”

Vidalia clutched her cat so tightly its eyes bulged and its tongue poked out. “Of course not, Colonel. I was merely having a chat with Ms. Malloy when that animal came bounding at me.”

“Who opened the gate?” Culworthy demanded.

I remembered the upstairs renter had gone around the side of the house that adjoined Culworthy’s yard, but I had no desire to offer the information. “Maybe you left it unlatched,” I said.

“Nonsense. I always latch it.”

Vidalia leaned forward to stare at him. “Then how did Patton get out twice last week? He scattered my garbage all over the alley, and it took me the entire morning to clean it up. Astra was so alarmed that I had to entice her out from under the divan with the tuna fish salad that I’d saved for lunch.”

His face turned red. He straightened up, and in a gruff voice, said, “Must have slipped out while I was setting out my garbage cans. Pure accident. Gave him a dressing-down he won’t forget. Sorry about the mess in your alley, Vidalia.”

I was relieved to see we were not headed for open warfare conducted over my body. Culworthy grabbed Patton’s collar and marched him back between the two houses. Once the coast was clear, Caron and Inez came down the sidewalk and waited impatiently while Vidalia thanked me effusively for protecting her and Astra from the certain death, reiterated her invitation for tea, and removed herself from the car.

“Good grief, Mother,” Caron said as we drove away, “this neighborhood is thick with weirdos. Did you see that serial killer come at us on the porch? I was sure he was going to pull out a dagger.”

“He was so glowery,” Inez added in a whisper.

“He’s a graduate student,” I explained.

Caron was unimpressed. “That doesn’t give him an excuse to look at us as though we weren’t there.”

Inez shook her head. “He didn’t look at us, even though we were there. That was what was so incredibly unnerving.”

“And that gypsy who threw herself in the car,” Caron said to me, ignoring the minor dissension. “Who on earth was that? I mean, really—didn’t that sort of peculiar clothing go out in the sixties?”

“She’s a neighbor of Miss Emily’s. She seemed pleasant enough, although I may not make it over for tea.” I braked in time to let a truck run the light. “How’d it go inside? Did you find everything you needed?”

Caron took a deep breath, and in the pained voice of a martyr with flames licking between her toes, said, “Do you realize there are seventy-seven African violets in the kitchen? And those dogs are disgusting. One of them licked me on the hand. I’ll probably get mange or rabies.”

“They drool,” Inez said.

“They were covered with mud—and who knows what else!” Caron, front seat. “It was nauseating.”

“The dog food smells terrible.” Inez, backseat.

“And it looks like vomit when it’s mixed up.” Caron, front seat.

“Then it’s a good thing you only have nineteen more days,” I said brightly as we headed down Thurber Street. I tried not to think of the quantity of complaints I would be forced to endure, and with a properly sympathetic expression. For a person who was not fond of dogs, I was going to hear a great deal about them. But at least, I told myself, I could do so at a civilized distance.