Boo (5 page)

“What about him?”

“Well, apparently he had this big conversion or whatever you want to call it, and apparently Miss Peeple witnessed it, and apparently he’s turned his life over to God, and apparently now he’s some sort of Christian or something.” By the time she was done explaining, her arms were folded against her chest and her eyebrows were closing together in a scowl.

Her father smiled in surprise. He never kept up with the town gossip. “Boo’s turned his life over to the Lord?”

“Apparently
, Daddy. Didn’t you hear me say
apparently?”

“What makes you think he didn’t?”

Ainsley stood and grabbed a head of lettuce, tearing the pieces off with a fury that Martha would never tolerate. Thief, her father’s cat and quirky sidekick, jumped on the counter. Ainsley scowled at him, and he purred with indifference as he made his way around her lettuce pile and over to the next counter. “Off, Thief!” Her voice quivered in anger. She wasn’t really mad at the cat, though he had an annoying habit of thinking he was human. “Well, it was just so
perfect
. I mean, having lunch
with Reverend Peck, just to show the town how
great
he is now. How
spiritual
. It takes more than breaking bread with the pastor to change, you know.”

Her father’s eyes were bright with bewilderment. “He had lunch with Reverend Peck?”

“
Yes
. At The Haunted Mansion, of all places. What does that tell you? Huh? HUH? It’s some sort of ploy. Some sort of—I don’t know, marketing scheme or something. Who knows? Who knows what kind of nonsense a deranged mind like that can think up?”

“Ainsley, Ainsley,” her father said with a short laugh. “Whoa now. I think you’re jumping to conclusions here.”

“Me?”
Ainsley almost dropped the mutilated head of lettuce. “I’m not jumping to conclusions! Everyone else is. By assuming that he’s gotten saved just because Miss Peeple, Miss-Garth-Clones-Pigs-Peeple, said so.”

“Well, he was seen with Reverend Peck.”

“That means nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She turned to a new head of lettuce, a wonderful Ruby Red. The colors were nothing short of fabulous, as Martha would say. She carefully tore each piece, mindful not to make them too big because one should never have to cut a piece of lettuce down to the proper size while eating a salad.

“Ainsley, dear, I know you mean well. And I know you’ve not agreed to what has happened to this town in the past few years.”

“Oh, by that you mean that you can’t walk down Main Street without feeling like you’ve died and gone to H-E-double-toothpicks?”

“Honey, you’re being harsh. Boo’s work has done wonders for our economy. People from all over the country, even the world, come to our little town of Skary just to visit. So it’s catered a little to a horror novelist. What’s worse? That, or that our town would become nonexistent, which, as you know, was about to be the case before Boo came to live here.”

Ainsley felt her nostrils flare. “So everyone says. I think God could’ve just as easily done something big, some sort of miracle to save our little town. Instead, the devil decided to have a little fun with us.” She turned to her father. “Daddy, I have to wear vampire teeth and a
black cape just to get a job here.” She knew she was being a little overly dramatic, as she could probably just go the next county over to work, but she was trying to make a point.

Ainsley set the lettuce down and rejoined her father at the table. He took her hand and stroked it. “You must give the man the benefit of the doubt. If he has indeed changed and become a Christian, then shouldn’t we be thanking the Lord? And isn’t that an answer to your prayers?”

“So you’ve forgiven him for the Thief incident?”

Her father’s bright expression diminished ever so slightly at her words. “Well, I had to do that a long time ago. God tells us to do that. Besides, it’s still unclear exactly what happened.” He studied Thief as the cat moseyed around his ankles and over to the food bowl.

“It’s not
that
unclear. He calls animal control to take your cat to the shelter because he
says
Thief was having a little fun with a girl cat on his property, which is ludicrous because everyone knows Thief is neutered.”

“I know, I know. Who knows what he thinks he saw? That was a year ago, and I let it go.”

Ainsley looked long and hard at her father, then down at the table. “You’re right, Daddy. As usual. You’re right. Who am I to judge so quickly? If it’s genuine, then we’ll know. And if it’s not, then God will know, and that’s what matters.” She glanced up at him. “Right?”

“That’s my girl.”

She shrugged. “I actually talked to him today.”

“Oh?”

“He sat in my section at the restaurant. He ordered meatloaf.”

“Well, what did you think? Was he nice?”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

“Well, what was your impression of him?”

Ainsley thumped her fingers against the table. “Hard to say. We didn’t have much of an exchange, other than the order.”

“And?”

“He was handsome.”

“Handsome?”

Ainsley nodded and watched her father stand and go to the kitchen counter, taking up where she had left off with the lettuce. “Well. That’s interesting. Of all the attributes a person can have, you pick up that he’s handsome?”

“Daddy, it’s no big deal. I’m just stating a fact. I’ve seen him a lot, but I never noticed that about him before.”

“You’re right about Miss Peeple. She misses the mark quite frequently. I mean, Garth Twyne cloning pigs is just one example. One of many examples.”

“Daddy—”

“I’m just saying, you have good instincts about people. You always have. If you think something fishy’s going on with this
supposed
conversion, then I think you need to go with your gut. You received those instincts from me, you know.”

“Daddy!”

“The man creates fiction and fables for a living. I wouldn’t put it past him to be making this up too.”

Ainsley threw her hands up and laughed. Her father glanced over his shoulder with a frown. “What’s so funny?”

“You are. I’m going to be an old maid because of you.”

“Me? It’s your fault that nobody’s good enough for you. And besides, who will take care of me if you’re not here?”

Her smile faded. His tone was light, but there was so much truth to it. She slumped in her seat and thought of the impossibility of her leaving town.
Once
an impossibility. Until six months ago. When she had made up her mind. With finality. As soon as her Aunt Gert passed away, she would leave Skary, go somewhere far away from the burdens of family and the indecency of what had happened to the town her mother had adored so much.

Ainsley stood to help her father with the salad. “Give me the lettuce. You’re tearing the pieces too big. Grab that knife and chop the celery, will you?”

Her father obeyed, and for a few moments they prepared the dinner
in silence. She tried not to think about Aunt Gert. She hated the idea that she would pass on soon, and she hated the idea she had made Aunt Gert her gatekeeper. But nevertheless, it was reality, and along with the decades of responsibility she felt for taking care of her father, Aunt Gert was the only other reason Ainsley stayed. She shook her head and looked at her father. “All I said was that he was handsome.”

“OUCH!”

“Daddy!” Ainsley grabbed his hand and found a small trickle of blood on his index finger.

He snatched his finger away and sucked on it. “Could you just stop repeating that?”

“You’d better leave the chopping to me.” Ainsley took the knife away from him with a smile. “And what about ‘the benefit of the doubt,’ Daddy? Didn’t you just tell me I should give him ‘the benefit of the doubt’?”

Sheriff Parker went to the Band-Aid drawer. “That was before I knew he was handsome.”

Missy Peeple thumbed through the pages of the book. She’d never read or even touched a Wolfe Boone book. The cover of
Black Cats was
bright red, with a dark shadow of a cat at the corner. His name was in large letters, and the title was much smaller, centered at the bottom of the cover, nearly obsolete, as if to say, “Wouldn’t anyone read a Wolfe Boone book, regardless of the title?”

She had to admit, out of all the books he’d written, this one sparked her curiosity more than the others. After all, just the title somehow insinuated that the book might be at least loosely based on the town. For nine years an odd phenomenon regarding the population of cats had plagued Skary, and no one could explain it. A shelter had to be set up just to manage the problem, and though most everyone had their animals spayed or neutered, the problem still had not gone away.

Missy’s knobby fingers glided over the small embossed title as she
considered the implications of Mr. Boone’s conversion. And a strategy, too. Yes, her mind was always thinking of strategy, no matter the circumstances.

Ever since their little town inherited Boo, nothing had been the same. Their tourism capital couldn’t be rivaled within three hundred miles, and it had more than tripled in the last five years alone.

And so she sat in her rocking chair, alone in her dusty old house, dark though it was bright and sunny outside, and rocked back and forth, forming a plan. A sketch of a plan really, for she knew she needed more information. Information was a deadly weapon, and the more she had, the more she would have to modify her plan. But few people knew how flexible Missy Peeple could be.

First, she knew, in order to acquire more information, she would need help. So her mind sifted through possible accomplices. She’d have to be careful. This was going to require a lot of subtlety. A lot of finesse. Her “accomplices” would operate only on a need-to-know basis. There was nothing more dangerous than the wrong person with the right information.

Her eyes narrowed with determination. People were foolish to reason that this little conversion of his would not affect the comforts of this town. She would be an unappreciated hero for her efforts to save Skary and its prestige, its fame, its wealth.

She could remember driving back and forth down Main Street at the ripe old age of seventy-one for thirty minutes, seeing nothing more than a dog on the sidewalk. Now Skary was vibrant. Flourishing! Perhaps only she had eyes to see that, once again, Skary was on the brink of becoming a deserted old town that nobody in the world had heard of.

Not if she could help it.

Perhaps her tactics would be frowned upon by some who thought angels came to sing to them in the morning. But those people had no common sense, much less a regard for the sacredness of reputation, namely, the reputation of this town.

The first piece of information she must acquire was the identity of the person responsible for the man’s conversion. Aside from God, that
is. She needed a name. She had her suspicions, but she needed to know for sure who had felt obligated to share the good news with this man.

And keep that person at bay.

Then she needed a plan to return Boo to the way he was.

She turned to the last page of
Black Cats
and read the acknowledgments. Who was Boo close to? Who mattered to him? Though a little blurry even through her glasses, Missy Peeple was able to make out the name of a man that she knew immediately would be very helpful in her crusade. She snapped the book shut.

The first person to unwittingly join her cause.

There would be more.

Wolfe had imagined, and he had quite an imagination that stemmed all the way back from his childhood, that as he walked the neatly swept sidewalks of Skary’s main street, people might thoroughly welcome him, or at least smile and wave. After all, he felt so different inside. Surely everyone else could sense it.

But instead, on this chilly early morning, he found people staring at him through their shop windows, their noses pushed up against the glass, as if they knew something he didn’t. He even tried to wave a few times, thinking perhaps people just weren’t used to seeing him venture into town any farther than the grocery store and The Haunted Mansion. But only one person waved back, an elderly man who seemed to have such poor eyesight he probably couldn’t make out who he was waving at. And a black cat took a little interest in him as he passed by a music store.