“You threatened her,” Stella prompted in a pleasant voice, as though it were the best idea she’d heard all day.
“No, no, get this—I threatened the
cat,
see? I mean, she’s got to love cats, right, it’s her job. So I picked up this big old gray one like this—” He reached around and got hold of his own nape for illustration, causing Chrissy to roll off the couch into a shooter’s stance in a split second.
“Go easy,” she said, her voice full of menace.
“Sorry, sorry.” Jake pulled his hands away and left them out to his side in midair. The effect was of a man trying to levitate. “Anyway, it worked like a charm. She said Priss was visiting her brother for the weekend, a last-minute thing, and she knew the name of the town ’cause I guess her and Priss were friendly that way. All’s we had to do was call directory assistance and turn on the GPS, and here we are.”
“And you were, what, going to just wait around until they showed up? If you couldn’t find the drive on your own?”
“Uh—I mean…”
“Would you be interested in knowing that she and her brother both have disappeared?”
It was almost too easy. Stella watched Jake’s eyes flicker with the effort of trying to process what she was saying.
“Disappeared … like what
kind
of disappeared?”
“Like the kind where somebody called in a disturbance last night.”
“Like the kind where there was all kinds of uniforms here last night and you are
so
fucked if they find you here,” Chrissy added. “Didn’t you notice the damn fingerprint powder everywhere? Whadda ya think, Stella, suppose we ought to tie ’em up and call it in? Let these guys tell their story all over again for Sheriff Jones?”
Stella pretended to consider it.
Pretended for several moments, long enough for Jake to look like he was about to cry and Lawrence to go through an entirely new string of curses.
Then she left Chrissy in charge while she went out to the Jeep to get a few supplies from the Rubbermaid totes she had loaded in the back.
When Stella was working on one of her bread-and-butter clients, the men whose wives and girlfriends had finally gotten tired enough of being smacked around that they were willing to hire Stella to convince them they were on a wrong road, she employed an extensive set of bondage and S&M equipment she had acquired over the years. She owned a range of padded restraints and cuffs and spreader bars and collars and irons for keeping them in one place. Crops and paddles and floggers and canes and whips for turning them around to her way of thinking. And, when necessary, a few really esoteric items that she found on a fascinating Web site—these she saved for tough cases, for giving the worst offenders something new and unforgettable to think about the next time the urge came over them.
But these guys presented a whole other challenge. They were a different sort of scum, the sort that had already demonstrated they didn’t mind taking chances with the law. Abusive men generally managed to convince themselves—as astonishing as it was to Stella—that they were in the right, that the hurt they doled out had been earned by their defenseless and terrified women.
Thugs were different. They
knew
they were in the wrong—and they didn’t care. While she was pretty sure she could scare them—particularly Jake—she doubted they’d stay scared longer than it took for them to hightail it back out of town.
So in the end, Stella picked out her camera and a few Rem Oil Wipes. She and Chrissy emptied and wiped the men’s guns, just to be safe, since they hadn’t taken off their latex gloves since they got to the house. They pressed the men’s unwilling fingers all over the guns and packed them into a couple of Ziplocs. Then they had their new acquaintances pose for photos around the house, making sure the background was easily identifiable as being Liman’s cozy abode.
As Stella was tucking away her insurance policy, Chrissy convinced Lawrence to hand over the keys to his car—convinced him by threatening to employ the same instep-stomping technique she’d used on Jake in the bathtub.
“Okeydoke,” she said, twirling the key ring on her finger. “I’ll drive on down to Grover’s Shell and leave your car in the lot. It’s about two, two and a half miles from here heading west. Stella here’s gonna take her car. Both of us can drive and aim at the same time, so I’m thinking you don’t want to come out that front door until we’re good and gone. Then you can start walking. I’ll leave your keys under the mat. Sound good?”
“Oh, but you’re going to be kind of cold,” Stella added, trying to keep from looking amused. “Y’all might want to root around in Liman’s stuff, see if you can come up with something warm to wear.”
“He’s probably got him a extra flannel shirt or two in there. Maybe one a them
I’m with Stupid
T-shirts.” Chrissy grinned broadly. “Bye now, boys.”
“Why, you’re just a
sadist,
” Stella said as they backed out the front door, her gun trained on their new friends.
As they headed for the cars, she reflected that she admired her protégée more every day.
Chapter Eleven
Morning dawned with the lovely aroma of strong coffee. Stella stretched luxuriously. A while back, once she had become thoroughly accustomed to sleeping alone, without the snoring malodorous hulk of Ollie taking up more than his share of the bed, she’d bought herself a set of flannel sheets at the Linens ’n Things up in Fayette. Ollie never let her buy flannel—he said it made him too hot, and it was true, he sweated like a pig even on the coldest day of winter.
Being new to the whole independent-thinking thing at the time, Stella had been overwhelmed by all the choices and confined her search for new linens to the clearance table. There, she’d found a set of premium German-made brushed flannel sheets in a very odd print. It was floral—sort of. If the multihued blobs that looked like they were trying to mate with a background pattern of pretzelly curlicues were regarded through squinted eyes, the effect might be vaguely flowerlike.
But Stella didn’t care. They washed up fluffy and unbelievably soft to the touch. And that was when she unleashed phase two of her new winter bedtime plan—she started wearing nothing but her panties and an old stretched-out camisole to bed, all the better to feel that wonderful warm flannel next to her skin.
Some nights, some decadent devil-may-care nights, she skipped the camisole.
Oh, but it felt delicious to slide under those velvety sheets in next to nothing at the end of the day, the weight of her fluffy comforter like a cloud that had settled down to gently embrace her. She went to sleep with a smile on her face. And she had wonderful, bad-girl dreams, often featuring the hands-off man in her life.
But Goat hadn’t visited last night. Stella kept her eyes shut for an extra five minutes, shuffling through her dream memories, just to make sure, but she came up blank.
Then she started wondering who the hell had made coffee in her house.
By the time she came into the kitchen, wearing an old pair of pajama pants printed with lollipops and a Chicks-A-Plenty sweatshirt she’d gotten for free at the chicken processing plant’s spirit day, she was brandishing a large-barrel curling iron, ready for trouble.
“Hey, Mama, I ate all your Pop-Tarts.”
Stella’s heart leapt to a crescendo—mother love on overdrive. There, tucked into a kitchen chair and stuffing cotton balls between her toes, was Noelle. She was wearing an emerald green slinky, sparkly sweater that looked about four sizes too large, and a lacy black bra and tight black knit pedal pushers. Her trumpet vine tattoo curled prettily across her collarbones and disappeared under the off-the-shoulder sweater to twine, as Stella well knew, down her back.
“Oh, sugar, thank heavens I didn’t shoot you.”
“Well, I love you, too, Mama. And—and—I think I might need a hug.”
At that, Noelle burst into tears and Stella, fueled by an imperative as old as time itself, or at least as old as the first amphibian mothers to walk on land, all the while fretting that their children were keeping up on their little webbed feet—or perhaps as old as the cavewomen, who surely sat up at the cave mouth many a sleepless night waiting for their daughters to return from raids on neighboring tribes—Stella gathered her little girl in her arms and rocked her back and forth and let her baby’s hot tears fall on her neck and made shushing sounds and hummed in the back of her throat. She kissed the top of Noelle’s head, not even minding the gel in her spiky fuchsia hair, and then she kissed her right above her eyebrows, where the skin was warm and soft. And then she kissed her baby’s soft-as-petals cheek.
“What’s wrong?” Stella finally asked, knowing she’d let everything else fall to the wayside if it meant she could provide Noelle a moment’s comfort. Let the bad guys surge forth over the land. Let civilization fall; let evil gain a toehold. Nothing in the world would keep Stella from this moment.
“Mama,” Noelle finally managed to snuffle after burrowing her sweet face into the crook of Stella’s neck and hanging on for dear life, “I took a leave of absence at the salon.”
Stella kept rocking. She snuggled tight and weighed her words and considered her five decades of experience and her daughter’s nearly three, and she bit down hard on her tongue to keep from saying anything until she got it planned out right:
“Is that right?”
“Yes, Mama,” Noelle continued, oblivious of her mother’s considerable psychic torment. “It was the best thing to do. I mean, I’m almost thirty years old. It’s high time I figure out who I am. Who I
really
am. You know what I’m sayin’?”
Stella didn’t know, not entirely, but she nodded encouragingly. “Does this have anything to do with your charming new friend?”
“Joy? Yes!” Noelle drew back to smile at Stella, her tear-sparkled eyes lit up with delight. “So you
sensed
it, Mama. The chemistry between us. Right? It was the kind of thing you just couldn’t
help
but notice, wasn’t it?”
Stella did a complicated end run around her sensibilities and forced a smile on her face. She didn’t have any desire to know what her baby girl was getting up to—
that
way—or with whom. It wasn’t that she had anything against Joy, or any other suitor, for that matter. It was just that thinking of one’s child as being with—with—well, with anyone at all—thinking of one’s child as possessing a robust sex life was a trifle awkward.
“Oh, Mama, I think Joy might be the
one.
”
“Now, when you say ‘the one’… do you mean like the person who, um, makes you feel like you’ve never felt before? Or do you mean more like the one who you intend to grow old with, the person who’s going to change your Depends after you have a stroke?”
Noelle frowned, pursing her lips. “Mama. Do you have to take the romance out of everything? Come on, I’m young. You just don’t remember how
intense
it can be.”
Stella didn’t much care for that, but she also wasn’t about to tell her daughter that middle-aged motors could hum along just like fresher-minted ones, albeit with a few more kinks in the works occasionally. She was pretty sure her daughter knew about her ongoing flirtation with the sheriff, but if Noelle wanted or needed to consider her mother post-sexual, Stella guessed that was all right.
“So … you’ve pretty much decided you’re a lesbian, then,” she said.
“Oh, yes. I mean think about it, Mama. Why else would I have hooked up with all those losers for so long? I mean, unless I was secretly trying to, you know,
sabotage
myself so it never worked out?”
“My, that’s—well, that’s some complex thinking,” Stella said carefully. She eased out of the hug with an affectionate little pat on Noelle’s cheek and went to pour herself a big mug of coffee. This might be the sort of conversation that required artificial stimulants.
“No, really. I mean, every guy I’ve dated since Schooner’s been mean as a snake. I think what I was doing was, I was punishing myself for ignoring my true authentic real self, see?”
Stella regarded Noelle carefully. “You been watching a little extra of those talk shows lately?”
“No, Mama.” Noelle rolled her eyes, but her enthusiasm was sufficient to keep her from getting annoyed—yet. Stella remembered well from Noelle’s teen years that one always had to be on high alert with one’s daughter—they had a preternatural ability to get ticked off at conversational subtleties one wasn’t even aware of exhibiting. “It’s, like,
proved
and all. It’s all about self-contempt. Denying your true nature can just cripple you. I went to this seminar when we were up at the regionals.”
Ah.
Ahhhh.
Now Stella was getting it. Noelle was a talented stylist, and in the last year, she’d been exhibiting and winning awards at several regional hair shows, where she met all kinds of wonderful and interesting people—and a few flakes. The beauty business did seem to attract a bit more of its share of odd ducks, judging from Noelle’s stories. No doubt she’d run into some self-proclaimed New Age truth-spouter with an agenda.
Though, in fact, the basics that Noelle was spouting were sound. Who knew it better than Stella? She hadn’t unleashed her own inner self until Ollie was gone, and though she didn’t do regrets, a lot of years had gone by while that self, buried deep under a blanket of denial and victimhood and misery, paced unhappily like a caged panther.
Stella didn’t want that for Noelle, that was for sure. She just wasn’t convinced the girl was barking up the correct new and authentic tree.
Stella didn’t have anything against gay folks. She’d had a few gay clients, in fact, and among other things, that had taught her that right and wrong weren’t concepts that the straight community had any kind of patent on. Mean came in every stripe—and so did good. Sure, she’d like grandchildren, but there were all kinds of ways to come across those these days—hell, Tucker was kind of like a little grandbaby to her. Not to mention Todd and his sisters.
“Sooo. Let’s say you
are
gay. Are you sure you ought to be putting all your chips on the first girl to catch your eye? Shouldn’t you, you know, play the field a little?”