Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie We're In Trouble! (The Toad Witch Mysteries Book 2) (16 page)

“Did you think I buried her in the back yard?” I asked. “Is that why you were snooping there first? Or that I had chopped her into pieces and you needed a magnifying glass to find all of her?”

He looked at me blankly for a second, before he caught on. “Oh, right. Probably not so much.”

“So why don’t you knock it off and tell me what you’re looking for.”

“No disrespect, Dudette. But I would really rather not.” He shoved the magnifying glass into one of his pants pockets.

“Have you ever wondered why this place and I get along so well?” I asked. “It’s because we’re cut from the same cloth.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, his voice a low whisper.

“It means the cottage isn’t the only one who can turn you into a tree.”

J.J.’s eyes widened.

You had to love J.J. He was so gullible and sweet. I figured it was due to random brain cells being atomized by his on-going love affair with all things marijuana. If he wasn’t human, he’d be a stuffed toy—albeit a dirty, slobbered-on, stinky one that was more than ready for the washing machine.

“So, cough it up. What are you looking for?”

He sighed, made a face and stared down at his dirt-covered sneakers. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

I looked at my watch. “Great. Then you can tell me in the car.”

Chapter 29

I
grabbed his arm and dragged him with me—willing or not—over to Zed, my SUV. Zed had been Gus’s SUV, but I had traded him my red Mustang convertible when I moved out here, never expecting that Gus would soon be following me out.

“Dudette! Where are we going?!”

“I need to get to the pharmacy,” I said. “I can’t waste the day out here with you, while you debate whether or not to tell me the truth.”

*     *     *

Thankfully, it was warm enough that I could keep Zed’s windows rolled down as we drove into town. Because the smell from the kid was killing me.

“J.J., you know soap is supposed to be practical, not a decorative accent, right?”

“What are you getting at, Dudette?” He frowned at me. “I use soap.”

“Really?” I raised an eyebrow. “You shower every day with soap?”

“Well, no. It’s like bad for your skin. So I only use it once a week or so.”

“Seriously?” I glanced over at him, but he wasn’t laughing. “Not using soap is bad for your social life.”

“My buds don’t complain.”

“Between the cigarettes and the joints, your buds no longer have a sense of smell.” I turned the radio on, but the only station I could tune in was playing country, so I turned it off.

“You know what your problem is? You are a smell snob.”

“Just because I have a functioning nose, doesn’t make me a snob.” I tried to cast my mind out to J.J.’s apartment. The image I saw was dark. I could barely make out a rank-looking maroon-colored towel hanging on a bar by the shower.

“How often do you wash your towel?” I asked, then amended, “With detergent.”

He looked at me blankly. “I don’t know. Like… every month or two, I think. I mean, it’s not like I wear my towel.”

“That’s the problem. You’re taking a shower and then rubbing the stink back on when you dry off. You know what’s a good rule of thumb? When you wash your clothes, wash your towels. Pick one day a week and make it laundry day.”

“Seriously? Doing laundry that often would suck. I’ll just buy more towels.” He reached forward to turn the radio on, and the movement along with his sudden nearness, made me cringe.

 I tried not to breathe as I turned the radio back off. “And if you forget the laundry in the wash, for like, a day or two—”

“—How’d you know that?” he asked. “Do you do that too?”

The smell was starting to make sense. “You need to re-wash it.”

“Why should I? I washed it once already. I just toss it in the dryer.”

I rolled my eyes, wondering how he ever got to his early twenties without learning the basics of hygiene.

“Besides, too much detergent is bad for you and the environment,” he said. “I try to be green and limit my use of chemicals.”

“But you smoke cigarettes? That’s worse than all the detergent boxes put together.”

“Nah, Dudette. I got righteous. I quit those ciggies from The Man. I don’t need to make some fat, old, white men rich by ingesting their toxic chemicals. I roll my own. Pure, homegrown tobacco leaf. The Marlboro Man can suck my—.”

“—Hey! What about soap nuts?” I interrupted. “They’re actually berries, so they’re totally natural, and they work on laundry. I think MyLife has them.” MyLife was the local organic store.

“Seriously? The Crunchy Granola Store has berries that can wash clothes? Berries?! That’s so totally fucked up. Do they work? What if you get wasted and try to eat them? Does your mouth soap up? Or do they kill you?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t we stop there and you can ask them. I’ll bet they even have some natural, gentle-to-the-earth organic soap for your showers, too. Maybe even some organic toothpaste.”

“Nah, I’m good for that. I use baking soda. If you’ve got baking soda, apple cider vinegar, tomato juice, coconut oil, aloe and mayonnaise, you can pretty much make everything you need. I make a killer hair conditioner with mayonnaise and coconut oil.”

“How long are you leaving that in, before you rinse it? Minutes? Or hours?”

“I get distracted sometimes,” he admitted.

That explained the stringy hair.

“J.J.!” I rolled my eyes. “Do you ever want to get laid?”

“Dudette! Are you propositioning me? I’d be totally into that.”

“No!” I said, laughing. “I’m just trying to point out to you, I’m all for being green, but you have to do it right. You can’t just slop food on your head and hope for the best.”

“The Jayster doesn’t believe in rules and recipes. I am all about experimentation.”

“The ‘Jayster’ seriously needs to decide what’s worse. Giving in to personal hygiene? Or dying a virgin?”

“Ouch. Harsh.” He scratched his head, reminding me of the puppies when they had fleas. “Let me mull it over.”

*     *     *

I pulled up to the green loading zone, by the old-fashioned soda fountain/pharmacy on the corner of Main. It was a busy shopping day for the little town. Even the beauty salon was full for a change. All the parking spots, which were usually plentiful, were taken. But I figured J.J. could sit in the car for me, while I ran inside.

I turned the ignition off.

“Thanks for the lift.” He put his hand on the door.

I hit the lock button. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what you were doing in my yard.”

He sighed. “It’s really stupid, Dudette.”

“Stupid is fine. I can use the diversion.”

“Okay, well, just remember you asked for it.”

“You are absolved. Lay it on me.”

He sighed. “You know how me and my buds have our stash growing out in the woods by Highway Two?”

I nodded.

“Since we’ve been having so many warm days in a row, we wanted to throw a ‘summer is back’ party. So we went out there to weed our garden, if you know what I’m sayin’. But it was all freaking gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Pulled up. By the roots. All that was left was some scattered buds and cuttings.”

“So what did you do?”

He looked around, nervously, and scratched his head again. “We took what we could find and went home. Buddy and Moe wanted to cure it and smoke a spliff, but it was a righteous plant, so me and Rafe wanted to clone it.”

“Clone it?”

“Yeah, it’s when you plant the cuttings. So we leg-wrestled for it and me and Rafe won. Buddy and Moe have like, no appreciation of delayed gratification.”

“And what does that have to do with me?”

“We decided we were gonna plant the cuttings where no one was ever gonna mess with them. And we knew you had a really cool—and private—piece of land.”

I laughed. “You planted your pot at my house?” Gus was going to love that.

He nodded. “Not exactly
at
, because your house is a bitch, but in the
vicinity
. But we were stoned on some primo hash that Moe brought home from his trip to Mexico, and now no one remembers
where
exactly. We’ve been looking. I mean, since the weather keeps being so like, freakishly warm, it’s gotta be growing, right? But we can’t find it.”

 He looked out of the window. “Oh, shit!”

“What?” I looked around.

The local sheriff was coming out of the diner four doors down from the pharmacy, and Forrest, of all people, was going in. They stopped and chatted for minute.

“Don’t let him see me,” J.J. squeaked.

“I thought the sheriff was down with your weed proclivities.” I squinted, trying to read Forrest’s lips as he talked to the sheriff.

Not like I knew how to read lips, but I was willing to give it a try. The more I stared, the less sense it made, though. I tried to move my mouth to mimic Forrest’s. All I got was something that looked like
hello
,
nice weather
and
yellow balls fart pecans
.

How did deaf people do it? I sucked at reading lips. So I switched to glaring at Forrest, hoping to push him out of this section of town by the force of my will alone. That seemed to work as well as lip-reading. He was completely oblivious. Either that, or he was very good at blocking.

The sheriff walked over to his patrol car and J.J. squeaked again.

“Use your words, like a big boy.” I said, annoyed. “Don’t make me read your mind.”

Another squeak.

I looked over to where J.J. had been sitting. He was gone. In his place, was a large brown-and-white rat.

Chapter 30

I
looked down at the rat, and it looked up at me.

“What happened to J.J.?” I asked.

The rat’s whiskers quivered.

“Well,
hell
.”

Between the cargo pants and hoodie, J.J. had a lot of pockets. Was it possible he had stashed his pet rat in one of them? Had J.J. snuck out of the car and accidentally left the rat behind, while I was distracted with Forrest? Had I been that hyper-focused on trying to read Forrest’s lips?

Oh,
crap
. Was it possible that J.J. told me he was leaving, fully expecting me to hear him? Could he have asked me to take care of his rat while my mind was otherwise engaged?

 Or had J.J. somehow turned into a rat without my seeing it? But wouldn’t I have sensed that kind of magic building up? Could it have been the cottage? Was it pissed off about J.J.’s visit? Or his missing pot plants? Did the cottage’s reach extend into town? I looked around. I didn’t see any abandoned clothes, just the rat.

I wrinkled my nose and stroked the rat’s head. “Snap out of it Mara. That’s just crazy talk. People can’t really turn into animals.” Of course, they couldn’t turn into trees either, but tell that to J.J.’s great-great-grandfather.

It
had
to be J.J.’s pet rat. J.J. was just the kind of kid to keep a pet rat in his jacket pocket. With the smells emanating off the kid, the rat would feel right at home.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” I put my hand out for the rat to sniff and tried to look inside its mind.

It was a dark maze, lit up by images of food and grass.

Well, that was no help. Those images could belong to either J.J. or the rat. Gosh-dangit. Gus was going to laugh his ass off about this.

A tapping at the driver’s side window made both of us jump. I clutched at my heart, while the rat jumped down and hid underneath the passenger seat.

“Miss? Are you okay?” The sheriff asked, tapping on the window again with his nightstick.

I rolled the window down and smiled at him. “I’m fine.”

“You’re parked in a loading zone.”

“I was just dropping off…” Instinctively, I turned to the passenger seat, but remembered there was no one there. I turned back to the cop. “…a prescription. I’m sorry. I thought I could run in and be out in ten minutes.”

“Last I looked, loading zone wasn’t synonymous with shopping zone. You need to get moving.”

“Yes, sir.” I said, not about to argue. “I’ll do that right now. Sorry about that.”

I started the car and he moved aside. Thankfully, one of the cars ahead of me was just pulling out. I drove up a few feet, pulled into a parking spot, and turned off the ignition.

After the sheriff walked away, I cracked the windows so the rat could get some air. It was a gorgeous day out—which I was starting to get used to—but still a little overcast, so the car wouldn’t heat up too quickly.

*     *     *

I ran into the pharmacy to get my prenatal vitamins. There was a line to check out though, and by the time I got back into the car, the rat was sitting on the passenger seat, looking at me accusingly.

“I wasn’t gone that long.” I said.

The rat chittered. It obviously disagreed.

“Okay, okay. I’ll take you with me next time. Chill.”

The rat settled down and I started the car.

“So, ’fess up, are you J.J. or J.J.’s pet?” I asked him.

The rat twitched its whiskers and chittered again.

“Seriously, that’s the best you can do? Even Grundleshanks figured out how to talk.”

The rat glared at me with its beady eyes and said nothing.

“Fine. Be that way.”

*     *     *

I drove to the Trading Post but, Anna, the girl behind the counter, hadn’t seen J.J. at all that day. When I told her I had his pet rat, she gave me his address, as long as I promised not to tell him where I got it from. As I was leaving, I noticed that the picture J.J. kept at the register of his great-great-grandfather Jarvis, was missing. I was going to ask Anna about it, but another customer came in, demanding her attention. I filed it away, to ask her about later.

J.J. lived in a beige brick apartment building, in the middle of town. It was just as drab on the outside as what my vision had shown of the inside.

I rang his doorbell, but there was no answer.

I rang his neighbors’ doorbells, but no one had seen him. And no one knew if he had any pets.

By this time, the rat was perched on my shoulder like a furry bird. I turned my head and sniffed him. It did kind of smell like J.J. Wouldn’t that be wild, if J.J. could shapeshift into a large rat when he panicked?