Slip and Go Die (A Parson's Cove Mystery) (2 page)

I grinned. “Can’t drink my coffee over the phone, you know.”

She grinned back. The door slammed shut. The outside storm door flew back and whacked the side of the building. The plastic salt and pepper shakers shaped like snowballs bounced on the shelf. I poured myself another cup of coffee. This morning I might need it.

Beulah, the first black person ever to move to Parson’s Cove, was gone. I’d miss her. She was an elderly spinster (like me) who lived in a log cabin, surrounded by grassy hills and ancient trees. She’d arrived in Parson’s Cove at least thirty years ago, a retired schoolteacher who had dreams of becoming a writer. Had she ever written anything? Not to my knowledge. Instead, she’d discovered her latent love for nature. It was a common sight to catch glimpses of Beulah hiking through the woods or to hear of her camping out for days at a time, all alone in the middle of nowhere. Every week, all through the summer, she would bring in baskets of wild berries and vegetables that she’d grown and I would let her display them on tables outside my shop. She’d always wanted me to come out and spend some time with her but I never did. Strange how time passes by and we think it’s never going to end.

Beulah may have been old but she was in better shape than most fifty-year-olds. I couldn’t believe that she would die from slipping on the ice and hitting her head. She was too smart for that. Maybe Flori hadn’t received the correct information. I decided that during my lunch hour, before I went home to feed my cats and make sure they hadn’t destroyed most of my house (all seven of them appeared to be suffering from some form of cabin fever), I would make a brief visit to the police station and check with our sheriff, Reg Smee. In this kind of weather, I’d much rather pick up the phone and call but since he has a habit of accidentally dropping the phone back on the hook, it’s better that I go in person. I didn’t want to alarm Flori but something didn’t sit right with me.

Chapter Two

As it turned out, I didn’t get over to the station at noon. In fact, I didn’t get anywhere. About eleven, it started to snow, by eleven-fifteen, it started to blow, and at noon, I couldn’t see the edge of the sidewalk in front of my shop.

I wasn’t too worried about my cats not receiving their usual lunch. They’re survivors. If I’m gone for too many hours, they start eating my plants. I was more concerned about my drapes and furniture. I’ve never figured out if only one cat is demented and this influences the group or if sheer madness overtakes them all at the same moment and they make a mad dash to see who can be the first to reach the top of the curtain rod. I only know that if I walk in on them in the middle of their little soiree, they look up at me as innocent as newborn kitties. Okay, cats, I know my cotton drapes didn’t rip into shreds all by themselves. Give your mistress a little credit.

It’s a bit of a headache having so many. It started innocently enough. I was going through a lonely spell so Flori suggested that I get a kitten. It was a good suggestion: something warm and cuddly to keep me company during the cold winter nights. One of my customers gave me a cute male kitten that I named Phil. (Named after Prince Philip, of course, because I figured he’d make a dashing figure of a cat.) About a year later, Phil became Phyllis when ‘he’ gave birth to five kittens. Phyllis’ soul mate kept hanging round, looking doleful and making the most pitiable moans and groans, so I took him in. When you add them all up, it means that I have seven cats (all, by the way, de-clawed and de-sexed).

By three, the storm had intensified to a full-blown blizzard. The temperature quickly dipped into the danger zone. My furnace burped, sputtered and expired. Well, what could I expect? It was almost as old as the building. Which, by the way, was one of the first ones built in Parson’s Cove. There was only one thing I could do–I piled on all the clothes I could find (three sweaters, an old pair of sweats that I’d wrapped around one of the water pipes to keep it from freezing, and one sock that I discovered in my ‘Lost and Found’ box). Then, I  phoned Flori to tell her that I was heading for home. I warned her that if I didn’t make it, to let the snow ploughs know in the morning so they could watch out for any oddly-placed lumpy snowdrifts.

“Oh, Mabel, I wish you could wait awhile. Maybe the wind will die down.”

“I can’t take a chance. The thermometer in here says it’s now fifty-two degrees. If I stay here for another five minutes, it might hit thirty-two. My furnace is kaput. It’s not going to warm up. If I wait much longer I’ll be lying stiff and frozen beside Beulah over at the morgue.”

Flori let out a gasp. “You shouldn’t talk like that. Death is not a laughing matter. Neither is walking home in a blizzard. You make sure you phone me the minute you walk in the door. Are you listening, Mabel? If I don’t hear from you in half an hour, I’ll get Jake to go looking for you. Okay?”

Wouldn’t Jake love that! If he saw me half buried in a snow bank, he’d probably throw some more snow on me. Jake is thoroughly convinced that I’m a bad influence on his wife. He’s been trying to break up our friendship since we were sixteen. Because Flori and I have been close friends for more that fifty-five years, however, it’s more likely that Parson’s Cove Lake will dry up.

Flori, of course, being the sweeter of the two of us, continually struggles to keep the peace. In Flori’s world, there is only harmony; everyone loves everyone and no one ever swears, hits or talks back. It’s obvious that all her children (and, unfortunately, her grandchildren) have inherited their father’s (grandfather’s) genes.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call the minute I get in the door. If I go down the back lane it will be quicker.”

“All right, sweetie. Remember that I love you.”

I pushed the back door open. Snow pelted my face, stinging my skin like tiny pieces of crushed glass. I had a feeling that the two blocks were going to feel more like two miles.

There was one thing in my favor: the wind was at my back. Well, at least, you’d think that would be in my favor. I fairly flew down the lane except when a hard snowdrift appeared suddenly in front of me. In the first block, I fell on my face three times. By the time I was half way through block number two, I’d learned to keep my eyes to the ground. I was moving in a swirling world of white. It was impossible to see anything on either side. Well, to my right there were only the backdoors to the businesses. On the other side, there were mostly uneven droopy fences, garbage cans and a few dilapidated sheds. I can’t say our back lanes have ever been right up to snuff.

Our main street, named Main Street (clearly, our forefathers weren’t too imaginative), is only two blocks long. There are a few small scattered shops on a couple of side streets. Myra and Denny Wakefield sell Watkins Products, Fuller Brush and Raleigh’s Products from their house. Scooter Macalvey repairs shoes in his heated garage. Amy Hunter has a day care called Wee R Kids. (I don’t know how she ever came up with a name like that. Makes absolutely no sense.) Benjamin Jacobson repairs small appliances in his dining room. He’s obviously divorced now. Other than that, everything else fits onto Main Street.

At the end of the second block, I bowed my head low and struggled across the street. I had to stop for a moment to hang onto my neighbor’s fence. Now that I was out in the open, the wind whipped against the side of me, zapping my breath away every time I opened my mouth. I pulled my scarf up over my face. Frost and snowflakes clung to my eyelashes and flew into my eyes. One foot dragged after the other. I hated winter! Parson’s Cove might be a paradise in the summer but it could be a brutal unforgiving prison during a winter storm or cold spell.

Finally, I managed to propel myself through my front gate. I could barely see my house but I’d made this trek so many times over the years that I could do it with my eyes closed. I turned back to shut the gate. The wind and I were fighting to see who would win this round. I lost. I managed to push it about three inches. The snow was already too deep.

I labored my way, puffing and gasping, through the snowdrifts to my backdoor. The snow was getting deeper by the second. It felt as if there was as much snow in my boots as outside my boots.

Ah, a slight reprieve–when I rounded the corner, there was a snow bank about three feet high, shaped like a half-moon that hugged the corner of my house, allowing me to walk on almost bare ground. I stood for a moment on the step and looked around. I could just see the outline of the house behind mine. The only thing that separated our yards was an old, wooden fence that my father had built years before. Now all I could make out were a couple of fence posts sticking a few inches above the snow.

All of a sudden, there was a brief lull in the wind. It was then that I noticed I was not the only idiot wandering about in this sea of white. It was impossible to see who it was, whether male or female (or even human, for that matter), but there was definitely someone rounding the corner of the house behind mine. He, she or it was bent forward, head almost to the waist, struggling against the wind. Now, that in itself would be a cause for worry; who else would be stupid enough to be out in a storm like this? The thing that was most worrisome, however, was the fact that the house was empty. It was one of our rental homes. No one ever occupied that house except in the summer.

Who, unless it was some lost soul from the Antarctic, would want to spend their vacation in Parson’s Cove in this weather?

Chapter Three

That evening I phoned Bob Crackers about my furnace. Bob is the only person in Parson’s Cove who knows anything about furnaces. He’s also the local plumber, telephone repairman and gravedigger.

“Can’t see I can do anything for a day or two, Mabel.”

“But I need the heat on in my store. Otherwise, I’ll have to close up, Bob.”

“Well, don’t look like you’d get much business anyway. Nobody’s going out to buy trinkets in this weather.”

I had a mind to tell him my so-called trinkets meant a great deal to some people, but I knew Bob was not the kind of man who’d understand. Every time his wife, Myrtle, came into the shop, she’d spend the better part of an hour or more complaining about him. I probably knew more about Bob’s idiosyncrasies than he did himself. Nevertheless, as she so often repeated, he really was the salt of the earth. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he usually smelled a little on the earthy side, too. Probably after digging a grave, I suppose.

“Why can’t you do it tomorrow?”

“Got the grave to dig, you know. It’s gonna take a might of work to get that hole dug. Gotta’ put up a tent with heaters. Lots of work there, Mabel.”

“Oh, okay. Sorry.” I had, for a moment, forgotten about poor old Beulah. “What a terrible time of year to die.”

“Yeah. Wish she could’ve planned it better, but you know, guess it was her time.”

“Oh, fiddle-de-de. It’s never anyone’s time. You die for a reason: like accidents, kidney failure or heart combustion. Stuff like that.”

“Well, you know more about things like that than I do, Mabel. Women always do, I say.”

He paused for a moment and I knew he was switching his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. Ever since he quit smoking, he chews on a toothpick. Myrtle said he forgot to take it out one night when he went to bed and almost choked to death. Doc Fritz told him if he didn’t stop that habit, he’d puncture his insides with a stray splinter. And that, he said, was worse than dying from smoking.

“Anyway, I’ll get to your furnace as soon as I can.”

“That’s all I can ask. By the way, who found Beulah?”

“Who found Beulah? Didn’t you know? It was Esther Flynn.”

“Esther? Are you serious? What on earth was she doing up at Beulah’s place?”

“No idea. Sure good thing she was though. Otherwise, Beulah’s old body woulda been layin’ out there in the snow all winter. Gotta go now. I’ll give you a call when I’m ready to fix your furnace.”

I padded back into the living room and snuggled under my afghan to watch the news on television. I’d changed into my warm flannel pajamas and a pair of woolen socks. The socks had been a gift from Dottie, one of the ladies who lived at Parson’s Cove’s nursing home. She’d knit them with leftover yarn that she had accumulated over the years. They were a weird color and a weird shape but the most comfortable I’d ever worn. I’d refused to put them on for the first couple of years just because they were so ugly. Fortunately (for me), she kept asking how I liked them. I thought that the least I could do was wear them around the house for a few minutes. Now, I almost live in them during the winter.

First, of course, I’d phoned Flori. It was a good thing too because she’d already forced Jake to put on his snowmobile suit. I could hear him muttering in the background. It sounded like he was saying, “Stupid women.”