“The Closed sign is still on the door,” she said, looking at her watch. “But it’s almost eleven. Molly always opens promptly at nine.” She picked up the phone behind my counter. “Guess I’ll call her.”
I handed her my cordless phone. “Here—use this. My answering machine’s out of commission again.”
One after the other, Ruby punched in both of Molly’s numbers—the bookstore and the one that rings on the third floor, where she lives. But after letting the phone ring and ring, she gave it up. “If she’s there,” she said worriedly, “she’s not answering.”
At that moment, Constance Letterman stamped in. “What’s going on at the bookstore?” she demanded. “I’ve been pounding on the door and nobody answers. I even went around to the back and checked the garage. Molly’s car isn’t there. Is she on vacation?”
“If so, she didn’t tell me about it,” I replied, thinking that it was just like Constance to go poking in Molly’s garage. Next thing, she’d be telling us what Molly stashed there.
Sure enough. “You’ll never guess what she’s keeping in there,” Constance said, leaning forward.
“I don’t care what she’s keeping in there, Constance,” I said. “It’s none of our business.”
“But something is wrong, China,” Ruby chimed in. “She doesn’t answer her phones.”
“Yes,” Constance agreed. “Something is
definitely
the matter. I feel it in my bones.”
I gave her a look. “Remember the time you felt in your bones that the Loves were running some kind of funeral home scam? Or when your bones insisted that Mrs. Tuttle, at the library, was pocketing the library fines?” Both of these non-events caused a great deal of embarrassment when Constance raised the alarm, but she hasn’t yet learned her lesson. She still insists on imagining crises and disasters all around her—most of which never come true.
Constance glared at me. “I don’t know why you’re bringing up all that ancient history,” she snapped. “You should be concerned about Molly McGregor. We all need to keep an eye on what happens in the neighborhood. It’s our responsibility as citizens. Anyway, Molly is a friend as well as a neighbor. Don’t you care what happens to her?”
Just then, somebody came in to buy some rosemary plants, and I didn’t have to find an answer to the question. Constance stalked out, and that was the end of the conversation. It wasn’t, however, the end of people’s concern about Molly’s welfare.
At noon, I left Laurel in charge of the shop and headed out to make the deposit and pick up some credit card slips. On the way, I stopped in at the
Enterprise
to leave my weekend ad with Ethel Fritz. She squinted at it, allowed as how it would probably do, and took my money. As she was writing me a receipt, she said, “What happened at the Hobbit House this weekend?”
I frowned. “Nothing, so far as I know. Why?”
She tore out the receipt and pushed it across the counter. “Because Diggety Dolittle came in just a few minutes ago. He said there’d been a break-in or something.” Diggety is Pecan Springs’s mail carrier. “He had a package to deliver and the shop was closed, so he went around the side and peeked through a window. The place was all torn up inside, like there’d been a fight, or maybe a break-in.” Ethel’s look was accusing, as if I should have been paying closer attention to what was going on at my elbow. “You mean, you didn’t know?”
I wanted to say, “Am I my sister’s keeper?” but settled for “Nope.” However, I was beginning to feel definitively uneasy.
“Well, maybe you’d better check it out,” Ethel said tartly. “Around here, folks keep an eye on other folks. We believe in Neighborhood Watch.”
Feeling chastened, I went to the bank, where I headed for Bonnie Roth’s window. Bonnie—a member of the Herb Guild and a regular customer at the shop—is my favorite teller. Fingers flying on the adding machine, she began to work on my deposit. Without looking up from the checks, she said, in a low, worried voice, “China, what’s going on with Molly McGregor?”
“I’m not sure,” I said cautiously, thinking about what Diggety Dolittle had seen when he peeked through the window. “What makes you think there’s something going on?”
Bonnie leaned closer, her brown eyes anxious. “I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I was on the drive-up window Saturday afternoon about four, when Molly drove up and wanted to cash a check. A
big
check.”
“Oh?” I cleared my throat. “How big?”
Bonnie looked to the right and the left, then wrote $10,000 on a slip of paper and slid it through the window. “Of course,” she said, watching my eyebrows go up, “for a check that size, I had to phone Mr. Carson. He was watching the UT-OKLAHOMA game on TV.” She made a face. “It was overtime, the score was six to six, and UT was inside Oklahoma’s ten-yard line. When I interrupted him, he was mad enough to spit nails.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. Carl Carson, the bank president, used to be a cheerleader for the UT football team. He’s one of the Long-horns’ biggest fans. “Did he approve the check?”
“Finally, after UT kicked a field goal. He had me tell him Molly’s balance.” She frowned. “It worried me, though. Because of that guy.”
“What guy?”
“The guy in Molly’s minivan, with her. He looked like a
gangster.
” Bonnie shuddered. “Big and square, with muscular shoulders and a day’s growth of beard. Huge hands, with black hair on the back. Very sensual lips.”
Bonnie certainly had seen a lot through that drive-up window. “Not everybody can look like Tom Hanks,” I protested mildly. “Had you ever seen this man before?”
Bonnie shook her head. “A total stranger,” she said, her voice ominous. “Molly took the ten thousand out of the caddy and that thug grabbed her arm and said, ‘I’ll take that.’ In a really nasty voice.”
I frowned. “And then what happened?”
“And then he said, ‘Let’s get the hell outta here,’ and they drove off.”
“I suppose,” I said, “that there are all kinds of explanations for this.”
“I can think of one.” Bonnie’s mouth was set and grim. “That gorilla kidnapped her at gunpoint, made her drive to the bank and withdraw that money, and then—” She stopped.
“And then what?”
She shuddered. “I don’t want to think about it,” she said, and looked over my shoulder. “Next!”
Back at the shop, I grabbed a sandwich from the tearoom and went in search of Ruby. I found her on her knees in her front window, setting up a display of Tarot decks. I filled her in on what Diggety Dolittle had seen through the side window at the Hobbit House this morning, and what Bonnie Roth had seen through the bank’s drive-up window on Saturday.
“Ten thousand dollars!” Ruby’s eyes popped wide open. “Why in the world would Molly give that kind of money to some strange thug, unless she was coerced?”
“Bonnie only thought he looked like a thug,” I pointed out. “He might be a perfectly respectable person, for all we know.” But even to my ears, I didn’t sound convincing. I sighed. “Let’s go next door and see what Diggety was talking about.”
We went through the garden gate, and I took the key to Molly’s back door out of its hiding place behind the loose shingle. Ruby and I let ourselves in. The back room, where Molly keeps the science and nature books, looked perfectly neat. But when we went into the main room, we could see right away that something was wrong.
Ruby gasped. “What a
mess
!”
That was almost an understatement. Books had been knocked from the shelves and lay open on the floor. Potted plants had been pushed from the windowsills, the soil spilled all over the floor, even tracked across the pages of books. The blinds hung askew, posters were crooked, and the toys were scattered in the play area. It looked as if a tornado had ripped through the place. And on the carpet in the middle of the room, we found a big smear of dark, dried blood.
“We’d better call the police,” Ruby said through clenched teeth. “There’s obviously been a fight of some kind. Maybe that gangster beat Molly up.”
“Let’s check upstairs before we call,” I said, heading for the stairs. But the second-floor rooms were untouched, and Molly’s living quarters on the third floor—a cute little three-room apartment—looked just the way they usually did. Except that the table had been set for two and not cleared after the meal was eaten, Peter Rabbit’s cage door was open and Peter was gone, and there was no sign of Mrs. T, Molly’s large calico cat.
“Molly’s been kidnapped,” Ruby said grimly.
“Maybe she’s just . . . gone away somewhere,” I said, trying to think of alternative explanations.
“And left Peter’s cage open and the place in a mess?” Ruby snapped. “No way.” She reached for the phone. “I’m calling the cops.”
In Pecan Springs, phoning the cops usually gets you Tommy Ryan, who handles the calls in our part of town. Because it was Ruby calling, however, we also got Sheila Dawson, the Pecan Springs chief of police and a close friend of ours. Sheila and Ryan showed up in a matter of minutes. After a look around, she dispatched Ryan to check the windows and doors for signs of forced entry, then opened her notebook and asked us what we knew about the situation.
“Actually, we don’t
know
anything,” I said. By this time, I was feeling very defensive. “All we can do is guess. And we don’t have much to go on.”
“That’s nonsense, China,” Ruby replied tersely, and told Sheila what Ethel Fritz and Bonnie Roth had told me. “Obviously,” she concluded, “Molly’s been kidnapped by some big gorilla of a guy, who forced her to withdraw ten thousand dollars from her bank and—”
“Ruby,” I said, “I don’t want to throw cold water on your theory, but we don’t know that anybody forced Molly to do anything. All we know for sure is that she made a withdrawal and—”
“And now she’s gone,” Ruby interrupted. “Her rabbit and her cat are also missing, the downstairs has been totally wrecked, and there’s blood all over the carpet. Those are
facts
, China, not guesses.”
“We’ll check everything out,” Sheila said, standing up. “And I’ll ask the DPS to keep an eye out for her vehicle.”
We gave her a description of Molly’s van and found a photo of Molly on the bedroom dresser. We couldn’t find an address book, unfortunately, and none of us knew exactly where her daughter, Karen, lived. Ryan came back to report that none of the windows or doors had been jimmied, and Sheila called for somebody to come and check out the blood on the floor. “Let me know if you hear anything,” she said. “I’ll keep you posted on our progress.”
For the rest of the week, the neighborhood could talk about nothing but the mysterious absence of Molly McGregor. The news of her disappearance traveled up and down the streets faster than a computer virus, and each of the Neighborhood Watchers had a different view of the situation.
“She ran off with the UPS delivery man,” Mr. Cowan told me with obvious relish when I met him in the alley the next morning, where he was walking Miss Lula. “I saw ’em together, out there strollin’ through that garden o’ hers.” Miss Lula yapped vociferously, and he added, “Oh, yeah. Miss Lula wants me t’ tell you that she chased that white rabbit outta the yard last night.”
“Last night?” I asked.
“That’s what I said, ain’t it?” Mr. Cowan snapped. “Whatsa matter? You hard o’ hearin’ or something?”
“Before Mrs. McGregor ran off to Mexico, she turned her calico cat loose,” Vivian Baxter lamented, coming into the shop to buy some more catnip. “The wretched beast destroyed my catnip last night!”
Last night. So both the cat and the rabbit were still in the neighborhood. Which didn’t solve anything, unfortunately. It only added to the mystery.
“I never believed that story about Molly McGregor inheriting money from her mother,” Leona Love told me, when I saw her on the street. “If you ask me, there’s something
ve-ry
crooked going on here. Maybe she and that gangster stole some money together, and he tracked her down and forced her to hand over his share.”
And so it went, each neighbor embroidering an already disturbing picture with one more bit of speculation. It would certainly have been helpful if the police had been able to track down Molly’s car or get a fix on her whereabouts, but they seemed to have drawn a complete blank. A few questions did get answered, however.
The smear of blood on the carpet turned out to be animal, not human blood, and a likely explanation emerged when I discovered Mrs. Tiggywinkle nonchalantly washing her paws on my back patio and saw that her shoulder had been badly nipped. When Ruby found Peter Rabbit hiding under the holly bushes, there was enough dried blood on his white fur bib to convince us that he had been the nippee. And as we straightened up the Hobbit House, we decided that the mess was probably made by Peter and Mrs. T. Peter’s cage must have come unlatched, and he and Mrs. T, normally best buddies, had gotten into a spat that had escalated into full-blown war, Mrs. T employing claws and fangs, Peter using his strong back feet and his sharp front teeth, perfectly honed for carrot-crunching. If the two of them had had access to nukes, there’s no telling what would have happened before they made their exit through the kitty door and down the alley.
It was the next Monday morning, however, before we learned what had happened to our friend Molly—and by that time, the neighbors were thoroughly sick of their own gossipy tales and wild for some real information. I was in the shop, unpacking a box of crescent moon-shaped, satin-covered dream pillows that my friend Carol had made for me, when the door opened and Molly herself stepped in.
“Hey, China,” she said. “I’m back.”
China’s Dream Pillows
Dream pillows date back to the times when herbal fragrances were used to summon sleep, invite pleasant dreams, and fend off nightmares. You can make fancy shapes and fabrics, like the crescent-shaped, satin pillows that Carol makes for China’s shop. Or you can do it the easy way, by using a 3
×
5‘ cotton drawstring bag. Fill it with ¼ to ½ cup of a dried herbal blend and add a few drops of essential oil. At night, place your dream pillow inside your pillowcase; during the day, keep it in a zippered plastic bag. To renew the scent, just add a few more drops of oil. Here are some traditional herbs, in the order of their prominence in the blend:
•
For pleasant dreams: lavender, roses, mugwort, peppermint, rosemary, chamomile, with a few drops of lavender oil
•
For romantic dreams: roses, violets, mugwort, yarrow, catnip, lavender, marjoram, passionflower leaves, with a few drops of rose or violet oil
•
For psychic dreams: mugwort, jasmine flowers, catnip, hops, calendula, rosemary, marjoram, lemongrass, peppermint, fennel seed, cinnamon chips, with a few drops of jasmine oil
“Molly!” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet, scattering pillows and knocking over a display rack with a loud clatter. “It’s really you!”
“Well, of course it’s me,” Molly said wearily. She sat down on the window seat and kicked off her shoes. “Boy, am I bushed. I’ve been driving all night.”
Hearing the commotion, Ruby dashed in from the tearoom, where she’d been talking to Janet. “Molly!” she cried excitedly. “Where
have
you been? We’ve been worried sick!”
“Why, I’ve been to Oklahoma City to see about my daughter,” Molly replied, surprised. “I told you I’d be back today.” As we looked at her uncomprehendingly, she frowned. “What’s the matter? Don’t tell me you didn’t get my message!”
Ruby and I traded looks. “What message?” she asked.
“I left a message on China’s answering machine last Sunday night,” she said. “Didn’t you pick it up?”
I shook my head. “My answering machine was dead on Monday morning,” I said. “I had to replace it. What did your message say?”
“That my ex and I were driving to Oklahoma City to be with Karen, who was having emergency surgery. She’s going to be okay, but it was really scary for a while.” Molly shook her head. “Poor kid, she didn’t have hospital insurance, so I had to dig into my piggy bank to help her out.”
“Good grief,” Ruby said. “So Max was the gangster in the car with you when you cashed the ten-thousand-dollar check at the bank?”
“That’s right,” Molly said. She gave Ruby a startled look. “Gangster? That’s Max, for sure, especially when he hasn’t shaved in a while. But how in the world did you find out about him—
and
that check?”
Ruby sighed. “It’s a small town. Nobody has any secrets.”
“I thought Max was in prison,” I put in hurriedly.
“He served his term and was released,” Molly replied. She folded her arms, scowling. “Okay, you two, answer my question. How did you know about Max and the money?”
It took us a few minutes to explain to her about Constance Letterman, Diggety Dolittle, Ethel Fritz, Bonnie Roth, the chief of police, and the Neighborhood Watchers. Then it took a few minutes more to get Molly’s side of the story.
It seems that when Molly and Max got the news about Karen, Max (newly released from a prison near San Antonio) had taken the bus to Pecan Springs. When he arrived, he and Molly went to the bank to pick up the money, then drove non-stop to Oklahoma City, to get there in time for Karen’s surgery. Before they left, Molly had hastily locked Peter Rabbit in his cage with a generous supply of bunny niblets, poured enough food in Mrs. T’s bowl to tide her over until Monday morning, and hung the Closed sign on the door. Then she called and left a message on my machine, asking Ruby and me to take care of the animals and explain to people why the Hobbit House was closed for the week. Sometime over the weekend, Peter Rabbit must have escaped from his cage and he and Mrs. Tiggywinkle went to war.
“Well, it’s a good thing those cops didn’t find us,” Molly said with a wry laugh. “Max would have had a heart attack. He’d probably have thought they were going to drag him back to prison.”
“Your daughter’s going to be all right?” Ruby asked worriedly.
“After some recuperation,” Molly said. “She wanted me to stay and help her out.” She sighed heavily. “In fact, she’s begging me to move my bookstore there. She’s found a place she thought would be even better than the situation here. And of course she fancies that her father and I might get together again.”
“Are you tempted?” I asked. I wouldn’t blame her if she decided to move, now that she knew what Pecan Springs was really like.
“Not on your life,” Molly said, shaking her head decisively. “This may be a gossipy little town, but at least people care.” She gave a little shrug. “Anyway, you know my philosophy. Bloom where you’re planted. And I’m planted
here.
”
“Well, we’re glad you’re back,” Ruby said, giving Molly a hug.
“Right,” I agreed. “And next time you have to go somewhere unexpectedly, leave a note on the door.” I paused to consider the possibilities—Constance Letterman, Diggety Dolittle, Mr. and Mrs. Love, Mr. Cowan and Miss Lula—and thought better of it. “No, don’t do that. Somebody might read it. You’d better phone both Ruby and me. But don’t leave a message.”
Ruby grinned. “Better yet,” she said. “Don’t go.”
“Now, there’s an idea.” Molly stood. “And here’s another, China. How about helping me plant a new garden?”
“Sure,” I said enthusiastically. “Where are you going to put it?”
“In the space beside the garage.” Molly’s face became determined. “We’ll build a tall fence around it so nobody can see in. We’ll call it the Secret Garden. And when we want to do something that we don’t want the Neighborhood Watch to know about, we’ll do it
there.
”
“I’ll get my spade,” I said.