The Unraveling of Violeta Bell (2 page)

Tinker shooed me off his desk, scooted forward in his chair and gathered up his papers. “And if she had, Maddy? Would you have confirmed or denied?”

“No comment.”

Tinker walked me to the door. “I had the same concerns you had. I talked to her about it. She was genuinely anguished.”

I reached for the doorknob. “Was she now?”

He grabbed the knob before I could. “A lot more than a certain librarian when she was caught investigating another murder on company time.”

“I did not investigate Gordon Sweet’s murder on company time.”

I headed for the morgue. Tinker headed toward his meeting. Both of us were laughing.

***

My old Dodge Shadow likes June better than any month. It’s neither too cold nor too hot for its delicate insides. I made it all the way home to my shoebox on Brambriar Court without a single warning light on the dash flashing at me. Which was a small but welcome victory given my foul mood.

Good gravy! Gabriella Nash? Of all the hungry kids with journalism degrees out there? If I didn’t know Tinker better, I’d think he hired her just to get my goat. But he’s a serious newspaperman. He wants
The Herald-Union
to have the best reporters possible. He wants the people of Hannawa, Ohio, to have the best coverage possible. So if Gabriella Nash hadn’t had good grades, a good portfolio of clips from the college paper, and high praise from her professors, he wouldn’t have hired her, no matter how much he wanted to punish me.

And I did deserve to be punished. I’d not only promised Detective Grant that I wouldn’t interfere in his investigation of Gordon Sweet’s murder, I’d refused to give the paper what I dug up.

So I was prepared to coexist with Gabriella Nash. As long as she had the good sense to tread lightly.

James was waiting for me in the kitchen. So were a puddle of spilled water, a chewed up potholder, and a big glob of poop. “Looks like your day was more fun than mine,” I said, scratching his floppy ears.

James, I should explain, was not my husband. That worthless beast was long gone. James was my neighbor’s American water spaniel. An enormous ball of brown knots. A drooling pink tongue the size of an Easter ham. Eyes that could melt the icecaps on Mars.

My neighbor, Jocelyn Coopersmith, left James with me when she went to California to take care of her daughter, who’d fallen apart after her husband was swept into the Pacific Ocean while collecting mussels for a paella. Jocelyn said she’d be out there for five months. That was fifteen months ago.

So after all those years of living alone, I had a dog.

And a man, too, believe it or not.

I cleaned up James’ mess. And before I could stop myself I called that man. “Hi—you have your supper yet?”

“Good Lord, Maddy. It’s only Monday.”

“A bad Monday.”

“I’ll pick up a pizza.”

“Thanks, Ike.”

That’s right. The new man in my life is a man who’s been in my life for a good fifteen years. For a long time Ike Breeze and I were nothing more than coffee shop owner and cantankerous customer. Lunch hour by lunch hour we became buddies. Now all of a sudden we were, well, we were something a whole lot more complicated.

At my age, any man would be a complication. I’d been without one for decades. But Ike and I both came with a few high hurdles for the other to leap. Above and beyond the usual not-putting-the-cap-back-on-the-toothpaste crap. Ike, for example, was a man. And I, thank God, I was a woman. Ike was black. I was white. Ike, for some reason, was a Republican. I, like anybody with a thread of common sense, was a Democrat. Ike went to church. I went past them as fast as I could. Ike was a widower who’d loved his wife to pieces. I was a divorcee who had long ago picked up the pieces. Ike was even-tempered, understanding, excruciatingly tolerant of others, simply a beautiful human being to be around. I was, well, I tended to have trouble in those areas.

2

Sunday, June 25

“Oatmeal, Maddy? On Sunday? What ever happened to bacon and eggs?”

I tilted back my head and looked straight up at Ike’s unshaven frown. “My raging cholesterol.”

He yawned his way to the Mr. Coffee on the counter. Joined me at the table. “So let me get this straight, Mrs. Sprowls—you’ve got high cholesterol and I’ve got to eat oats like a damn horse.”

I went to the stove to get him some. “Can’t sacrifice a little for a beautiful woman?”

He yawned again. This time like a hippopotamus. “I’m sacrificing plenty.”

I knew what he was getting at. It was the one sore spot in our relationship. I spooned more oatmeal into his bowl just for spite. Banged the bowl down in front of him like a surly waitress. “I wait twenty-five years to get another man in my bed and he can’t handle a little snoring?”

Ike scraped half of his oatmeal into my bowl. “It’s not just the snoring. It’s all that thrashing about you do. Kicking out the covers so my feet get cold.”

“I like a man with cold feet.”

Ike is a serious man. A retired high school math teacher who thinks the best way to spend his retirement is to work sixty hours a week running a coffee shop. “A sleep disorder is nothing to joke about, Maddy.”

I sprinkled brown sugar over his oatmeal, a not-so-subtle hint he should shut up and eat. Our medical writer, Tabitha Geist, had done a four-part series on sleep disorders. Sleep centers were popping up like mushrooms. Significant others all over the country were begging their bed partners to get tested. But as far as I was concerned, sleep apnea was just the latest disease-of-the-week. Remember that scourge of the 1970s, hypoglycemia? When everybody was rushing to the doctor to get their blood sugar tested? Still, I could see that Ike was worried about me. And that wasn’t such a bad thing—not that I was going to do anything about it. “I realize sleeping with me can’t be easy,” I said, “but people have been snoring for a million years.”

“Dying before their time for a million years, too.”

“Rub the sleep out of your eyes, Mr. Breeze. I’ve already jumped that hurdle.”

Ike quietly ate his gruel. He’d apparently had enough of my stubbornness for one morning. I let James out the back door for his morning pee and then went to the front door to retrieve my Sunday paper off the four-foot rectangle of cement I call my front porch.

By the time I got back to the kitchen, Ike had not only finished his oatmeal, he’d finished mine. I handed him the business section. “You going to church today? You didn’t bring your suit.”

He went straight for the stock listings. “Of course I’m going to church. I just forgot to bring in my suit from the car.”

I like Ike for a lot of reasons. One of them is that he never asks me to go to church with him. And it isn’t because I’m white and he’s black. At our age, Ike and I are quite comfortable in our respective wrinkled skins. We couldn’t care less what other people think. Ike doesn’t ask me about church because he knows I wouldn’t go. I’m just not churchy. I guess I got my fill of it back in LaFargeville. I spent half of my childhood twisting in a church pew. Maybe I’d go to church if I could find one with a minister who gave five-minute sermons, or a choir that could resist singing all five verses of those awful, throat-burning hymns.

I scanned the front page. I read the first three paragraphs of every story in the metro section. I shook open the editorial pages to see what silly positions we were taking on the big issues of the day. I eyeballed the obituaries, looking for people I knew. I gathered my strength and pulled out the lifestyle section to read Gabriella Nash’s feature on those four crazy garage sale ladies.

It was, as I expected, the top story. There was a huge color photo of the four women pretending to squeeze into Eddie French’s taxi with armfuls of bargains. There was an intriguing headline:

‘THE QUEENS OF NEVER DULL’

From garage sales to Caribbean cruises, Life just gets better for these grande dames of Hannawa

There was Gabriella’s first professional byline:

By Gabriella Nash
Hannawa-Union Staff Writer

And there was her first story:

Hannawa—Cab driver Eddie French pulls into the Carmichael House’s curved drive at eight o’clock on the button.

Waiting for him under the condominium tower’s portico are four seventy-something women. They are dressed to the nines in colorful microfiber pantsuits and wide-brimmed straw hats.

The women squeeze into the freshly washed yellow Chevrolet with their travel mugs of coffee and a big box of Danish. They also have the classifieds from that morning’s paper. Every garage sale in the city and its near suburbs is circled in red.

“To the hunt!” commands one of the women from under her purple hat. “One-nineteen Plumbrook.”

“One-nineteen, it is,” French answers, tugging dutifully on the bill of his bright orange Hannawa Woolybears baseball cap. He swings his cab back onto Hardihood Avenue and heads for Greenlawn.

Ike was busy calculating the current value of his stock portfolio. But somehow my “Damn it!” penetrated his brain. “Something bad, Maddy?”

“I’ll say. The girl can write.”

Ike sadly shook his head. “I’ll ask the reverend to say a special prayer.”

“Thank you—unfortunately I don’t think God will take her talent back.”

“I was talking about a prayer for you.”

“I don’t think that one will get through either.”

We laughed. Winked at each other. Went back to our respective sections of the paper.

French knows only too well what he’s in for today. Every Saturday for the past five years—from early May to the end of October—he has been driving this spirited foursome on their search for treasure.

And when he’s not driving them to garage sales, he’s driving them to rummage sales and auctions. Or to charity luncheons and teas. Or to concerts or plays. Or to the airport.

“They’ve got to be the busiest ladies in Hannawa,” says the bewhiskered, 61-year-old French. “I know I’m the busiest cab driver.”

And just who are these four always-on-the-go golden girls?

Wouldn’t you know it. Right when I got to the part of the story I wanted to read most, James let go with his
I’m-done-peeing-let me-in
howl. I looked at Ike for assistance. Ike pretended he didn’t see me. So I let James in myself. And filled his bowl with his second breakfast of the day. And I poured myself a second cup of coffee.

“No fresh-up for me?” Ike complained.

“Sorry, I thought you were dead.”

I took the empty mug out of his hand and filled it. Finally I sat down to what looked to be one of the best features I’d read in our paper in a long time. Apparently Alec Tinker was not the dunderhead I figured. And even though I was not about to forgive Gabriella for spilling the beans about my investigation into Gordon Sweet’s murder, I had to admit our first week of colleaguedom had gone well enough. She’d waited patiently for the background stories she needed. She’d said nothing more long-winded than “Hi” when we bumped into each other in the cafeteria. Most importantly, she hadn’t called me Morgue Mama to my face—a mistake most new reporters make and then forever regret.

Collectively they call themselves The Queens of Never Dull.

“It’s a club without rules or dues,” says Kay Hausenfelter, curled up on the pink loveseat in her sun-washed living room. “We started out as a bridge foursome in the clubroom here. I guess we just liked each other’s company. Before you knew it we were bumming all over town together.”

While all four of the Never Dulls call the upscale Carmichael House condominiums home, Hausenfelter has lived there the longest, a few months shy of ten years.

Hausenfelter moved into the pricey, tenstory tower after the death of her husband, Harold Hausenfelter. Before his retirement, he had served as president and CEO of Hausenfelter Bread Company, the city’s largest bakery. They had been married for 41 years.

“Harold was the sweetest man on earth,” she says, adding quickly that he was also one of the toughest. “He had to be tough to take on a project like me,” she says.

Hausenfelter met her future husband in 1954, when she was appearing at the Orion Theater on South Main Street.

“That’s right,” she laughs. “I was a striptease artist. Twenty-four years old and not so fresh out of Elk City, Oklahoma.”

“Can you believe that!”

“Believe what, sweetie?”

Ike’s question almost stopped my heart. He’d never called me sweetie before. Either it was a term of endearment that I wasn’t ready for, or the mechanical response of a widower. I peeked around the paper at him and decided it was the latter. I read the quote to him. “‘I was a striptease artist. Twentyfour years old and not so fresh out of Elk City, Oklahoma.’” Ike partially emerged from his trance. “I thought you were from some little town in New York?”

“Not me
sweetie
—this old woman in the paper. I can’t believe the copy desk let a quote like that run. ‘Not so fresh out of Hot Springs.’ Why didn’t we just run a list of all the men she’d slept with?”

He was listening now. Grinning at my fuddy-duddiness. “Times they are a changing, Maddy. Anything goes.”

It was my turn to grin. At his eclectic command of musical clichés. “Bob Dylan and Cole Porter in the same sentence. Not bad.” I went back to Gabriella’s story.

I finished reading about the former stripper and bread heiress, and moved on to the next garage sale queen:

Ariel Wilburger-Gowdy pleads guilty to “being something of an earth mother these days.” Her condo is filled with plants and cats. Atop the stack of books on her coffee table is her prized copy of Jane Goodall’s book, Reason For Hope.

She proudly shows the inscription to visitors.

“Ariel,” the famous scientist wrote, “hear your heart.”

“I’ve always had a noisy heart,” Wilburger-Gowdy admits. “In the old days it was preoccupied with men—most of whom I married. Today it’s animals, organic food and recycling glass bottles.”

And just how many times has she been married?

“Four and no more,” she jokes.

Her first husband, former state senator Walter Wilburger, is the father of her only child, a daughter who teaches business ethics at Hemphill College.