Catharine Bramkamp - Real Estate Diva 05 - A 380 Degree View (8 page)

“Okay,” her grandfather coughed. He coughed as often as he spoke; Sarah knew that soon the coughing would overtake the talking. Already Grandmother more often than not spoke for both of them, when she wasn’t coughing herself.

“We would like tuna today for lunch.  We need more milk in the house. Your grandfather is cold.”

Sarah made the sandwiches, brought hand-crocheted afghans to their chairs and offered her grandfather more cough drops.

Grandfather was fond of saying he acquired his cough in the seventies. “Breathing in all that airborne insulation.”  He bragged, as if that was a badge of honor.

That was back in the day when it was not only okay, but important, to kill yourself for a job.  Sarah thought that kind of attitude was ridiculous.  She only expressed that once and had the opposition beat out of her by this very same oxygen-impaired grandparent.  The beating did not change her mind.  She knew that a mere job, any job, was never worth dying for.

“I will come home right after the play at eleven o’clock.” She automatically padded her arrival time, that way she was always home early. She once heard her grandmother bragging to Mrs. Chatterhill about how Sarah was always early, particularly when she was caring for her grandparents. And she had been caring for them forever.

Her grandmother waved her hand, engrossed in the talking heads: the heads were yelling at each other.              Sarah gazed at the scene in dismay. Her grandparents seemed to be slowly sinking into their matching Barcaloungers: hers a harvest gold, his avocado green.  Sarah knew that at some point they would become one with the chairs and be lost forever.  She had no plan for when that day came. Hers was not a planning generation. There didn’t seem to be much point.

She closed the apartment door and walked down the narrow hall to the front door.  She locked it after herself.  You can’t be too careful, with tourists and out of town people milling around on a Saturday night.  Oh, and what was on the news just now? Terrorists. She was careful to secure the house against potential terrorist threats.

Sarah paused outside and finally dared take a deep breath. She had done as much as she could.  Sarah walked to the theater; it was easier than driving. She didn’t like wrestling her grandparent’s Cutlass into the narrow parking spaces of the Claim Jump city lots.

She shoved her hands in her jacket pockets and trudged downhill. Sarah Miller knew what the good citizens of Claim Jump thought of her. It was difficult to ignore the looks and comments. The members of the Cornish Brotherhood of Men were not retiring women. Once the Millers joined, Sarah became an honorary member and a pet project for the group, for better or worse.   

Sarah possessed what was euphemistically referred to as an unhappy childhood. She would argue that her years in the Claim Jump Elementary School were pretty satisfactory, and her grandparents always fed her, they even let her fix up the upstairs apartment any way she liked. It was like living in her own place. Despite all these advantages, any child with a mother living on the Ridge was an object of some pity.

And now
at twenty-two, she cared for her grandparents the same way they cared for her. Okay, not exactly the same.

              Her grandparents had been old for a very long time. Grandfather retired from construction at age 55, which was a thousand in child years.  He was only 75 now, but looked and acted ninety.  How was that possible? Prue Singleton was the same age as the Millers, but she was lively and active.  She got around even after breaking her foot in her greenhouse.

A black SUV passed Sarah at the corner and headed up the street.  See? Another tourist. Sarah didn’t recognize the car.

I headed up the street, the car filled with pizzas.  I love pizza. I made sure to order enough so I could load up on as much as I wanted without worrying about shorting the others.  Rosemary would tell me to focus on my own abundance, but when it comes to pepperoni and sausage, I like to hedge my bets and purchase the abundance ahead of time.

“Never left town.” Prue was winding up the Sarah Saga as I came in with boxes of dinner.  “She has always been here.”

“Like the poor?” Ben asked archly.

“Why?”  Carrie asked.

Mike and Pat relieved me of the pizza boxes and began to serve. People didn’t bother to move to the table, they took an offered plate, a piece of pizza and ate where they were standing. My mother would have gone nuts.  Good thing she’s not here.   Raul searched for his theater webcam with one hand, the other clutched a wedge of the vegetarian pizza.  

“Why,” I wandered over to Raul, “are you watching the
Wizard of Oz
again?”

“Checking on the webcams.” Raul muttered around his crust.

Ben listened with rapt attention to a story I already knew by heart, so Prue had a new audience for one of her favorites topics, the perils of Sarah Miller.

“Her mother was a drug abuser.  It’s a wonder Sarah wasn’t born with one arm or an inflated head.”

Carrie gasped.  Pat rolled his eyes. Prue was on a role. Ben chewed and swallowed, his eyes never leaving his hostess.  “The Millers are strict Baptists, holier than God.  He used to work for Lucky in the seventies.” Prue waved her hand in the direction of all the tract homes (some recently burned to the ground) north of the house.

“God used to work for Lucky Masters?”  Ben asked.

“Lucky is very influential,” I explained.

“But he didn’t get the library.” Pat smacked his lips in satisfaction.  

“This Scott could be gay and not know it.” Mike mused.

“Happens all the time.” Raul squinted and angled his screen.

“At least they took in their granddaughter,” Carrie retorted.

“And now she is their sole caregiver. “ Prue said.  “Won’t have anyone else.  I don’t know what that girl is going to do when they really need help.  They won’t even allow a house cleaner. Melissa with Hospice told me she tried to come in last week and was practically thrown out.” 

“That’s pretty harsh,” I said.  “The girl needs some help, I’m sure.”

Prue sighed.  “They are pretty harsh people.”

“And you don’t really blame the daughter for escaping to the Ridge.”

“There are two sides to every story.”  Ben finished his first piece and opened every box looking for inspiration for his second piece.

“No,” Carrie bit into a slice of pepperoni and swallowed.  “No, sometimes there’s not.”

“Shhhh,” Raul waved his hands, “the overture.”

“As if we didn’t already know all the words, remember the
Wizard of Oz
sing-a-long?” Pat turned to Mike, gesturing with his wedge of chicken/pesto pizza.

“That was marvelous, those were fun years.”

Mike nodded, “Everyone was there, it was the place to be.”

Raul grunted and focused on the computer screen. I suppose this is his art, which means I don’t have to participate.

“Does Summer know you broadcast this all over the net?” I asked.

“Certainly, it’s good for business, makes a person want to see the real thing.”

Pat snorted.

We went on like that, watching poor Sarah hold up her end of the vocals as best she could.  The little dog playing Toto was pretty cute.  Ben pulled up a chair and raptly watched the drama unfold on the screen. The tornado scene wasn’t as dramatic as in the movie, but what could Summer to do on a budget? The tornado was mostly just Sarah spinning around and around in the middle of the stage accompanied by whistling and howling. 

The cardboard house dropped, color was restored to the stage and about a dozen Claim Jump third graders dressed in period costumes descended on our heroine.

A second bang, louder than the sound of the house hitting the hallowed ground of Oz, reverberated through the theater.  Sarah stumbled on her line about not being any kind of witch.

A howl came up from the front of the theater, just out of cam range, but Summer quickly appeared in view. Her black eyeliner was smudged into semicircles under her eyes, her black hair was no longer sleek and she looked to be on the verge of rending her black jacket and throwing ashes into the air. She looked worse than the flattened dummy under the house.

“Noooo,” Summer howled. “He can’t be dead!”  She jumped up on the stage and elbowed Dorothy/Sarah away. “He’s dead!”

Sarah
backed away from Summer so fast she almost tripped over a Munchkin.

“I thought the Wicked Witch was dead,” piped up a Munchkin.  Without my program, I did not know their real names.  The Munchkins were just listed as Munchkin number one, two, etc.

Another Munchkin began to cry. “You said it was pretend, that she really wasn’t dead!”  The child pointed to the stuffed legs sticking from the fake house and raised her wail another pitch.

“Honey, it’s okay.” A parental voice from the audience valiantly tried to reassure the child.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m so sorry!” Summer her harsh voice projected past the back of the theater and out to the street. It was difficult to tell if she was really sorry or just relishing the spotlight again. She paused dramatically and took a deep breath.

“It is my painful duty to inform you, that our patron, our friend of the theater, yes, a friend of all of Claim Jump…”

“It better be God.” Prue muttered.

“Lucky Masters was found dead.”

Three more Munchkins began to howl in sympathy, sensing that this was not make-believe, and their boss, the fabulous Summer, was not only truly upset, but was also not making this up.

A general murmur rose from the audience. Two parents rushed the stage and scooped up a Munchkin or two.

“In light of such a shocking event.” Summer continued, ignoring the exodus. “It is my sad duty to cancel the rest of the performance. I know you all share my grief and I hope you understand.”

“Can we go for ice cream now?”  A high little voice asked in the silence.             

“What happened to the show must go on?”  Raul asked reaching for another slice of the vegetarian.

I opened a bottle of wine while Raul immediately pulled up more information about the death.
Hacked
is the word, but he prefers the term necessary immediate discovery.

“I would have thought a jealous wife.”  Raul mumbled as he surfed through information options.

“Wife?”

“Husband. A man of course,” Raul backtracked. Pat and Mike rolled their eyes and moved back a step so we all could crowd around Raul’s computer screen.

We did not find out much, but what we did learn seemed more than enough.

“They found him this afternoon out at the shooting range.” Raul reported.

“The shooting range?”  Prue frowned. “He had a heart attack?  I didn’t think shooting was that stressful.”

“Quite the contrary,” Ben put in.  “Firing off rounds seems to be quite relaxing.”  He glanced at Carrie. Her eyes were huge.  “For some people,” Ben amended quickly.

“He’s a founding member of the range.  Was a founding member.” Prue said for the benefit of those in the room who were not local.

“Of course, Lucky would found something like a shooting range within the City Limits.”

“The manager of the range didn’t find the body until five o’clock at closing time.  They don’t inspect the range until the end of the week.”  Raul read and simultaneously editorialized. 

I remember visiting the firing range once with my grandfather.  It had been in use, unofficially, since the Gold Rush. The area was stripped clean by hydraulic mining.  Hydraulic mining was very efficient and ecologically disaterous. So much  sterile top soil  sluiced onto the farmland of the Sacramento Valley that the practice was shut down. All that was accomplished was a little gold and complete environmental destruction. On the other hand it was a great place to shoot your gun, who would care? Bored miners, some of them Cornish, I’m sure, claimed the land as their own and formed a non-profit gun club to justify the land grab.  Even after 150 years, the area is still devoid of any real vegetation or life. I remember seeing some plucky low scrub brush growing in the crevices of the bare hills, and of course, poison oak but that’s it.

By creating a shooting club, Lucky was merely following the order of the universe.

“How far away is it?”  Ben asked.

“Less than a mile, but you can’t take a shortcut any more, so it’s about five miles around the back of the mountain.  And there’s a fence now. Lucky put that up when they incorporated the range into a club.”

“Short cut?”  Ben asked faintly. Since he is a former boy, I imagine he can visualize how to best exploit an attractive nuisance better than I can. And indeed, taking the short cut to and through a firing range would be difficult to resist. It would make an appealing dare to any number of boys.   

              “We used to walk from here to the range.”  Prue explained. “Your grandfather and I tried it out a couple of times.”

“You know how to shoot a gun?” Great. I didn’t ask if she owned a gun because I didn’t want to hear that it wasn’t registered because she always meant to get around to it, but never had.

“Well honey, what with the pot and all, it seemed like a good skill to have.”