Authors: Kelly Rey
"First Amendment. Let me read." She was quiet for a minute. "This is so not good," she said. "Tell you what we're gonna do. You stay inside. Lock the door. Close the blinds. I'm going to go see Honest Aaron about a car. If they track down where you live and what you drive, it'll be a feeding frenzy."
It already felt like one to me. "What are we going to do, Maizy?"
"We're going to do just what we planned," she said firmly. "Only we're gonna do it in a Pacer. Sit tight 'til I get there."
* * *
While I was sitting tight, I thought it might be a good idea to check my e-mail. Not that I expected to find anything from Curt. But I was pathetically hopeful anyway. Maybe he'd been mistaken when he said he'd have connectivity issues while he was gone. And if the reports of my criminal activities had made the papers in upstate New York, I was pretty sure Curt would have contacted me somehow. But my in-box was empty, except for a message from a helpful stranger offering to pay me great gobs of money for the temporary use of my bank account to shelter an incoming windfall.
So maybe Curt hadn't gotten around to checking his mail. That didn't mean I couldn't reach out to him.
I clicked on compose and typed Dear Curt. Then I backspaced that away and typed Hey, Curt! No, that didn't work, either. I hit delete and tried Curt: which was much too curt, no pun intended. How could I have no idea what to say to him when I had so much to say?
I typed
I really need you
and let the icon hover over Send. Not sure why I didn't want to send it. It was the truth.
But it wasn't
normal.
I bit my lip and exited out of the program entirely. While I considered a do-over, the phone rang.
"Have you seen Wally?" my sister shrieked in my ear.
Well, it was bound to happen. "If you mean his black hair and that silly pink earring," I said, "no, I haven't seen him."
Sherri was quiet for a second. "You know," she said at last, "one day
you're
going to have problems, and
you'll
want a shoulder to cry on, and then where will you be?"
Same place I was now. I
had
problems, and the only shoulder I could cry on belonged to a teenager, because my so-called maybe sort-of boyfriend was playing Grizzly Adams with his brother.
"I can't go out with that," she said. "I swear his earlobe said something to me!"
"He did it because he cares about you," I said quietly. "And he thinks that's what you want in a man."
"A raging infection?" she screeched. "Who'd want
that?
I can get that from Frankie!
"
Oh, gross. Also, way too much information. Also, note to self, don't let Sherri use my toilet for awhile.
"You have to get him to back off," Sherri told me. "He tries too hard. It's as if I don't even have to make an effort, 'cause every time I turn around, he's there."
"Tell him yourself," I said. "I won't be seeing Wally anymore. I was fired."
Sherri responded with exactly the sort of sisterly support I'd expected. "Well, that's just great. How could you do that to me? I swear, you can be so selfish!" She took a breath. "What did you do? Is it that murder thing again?"
"Yes," I said. "It's that murder thing. Apparently I give the firm a bad name."
"Oh, please." Sherri snorted. "They could use the publicity. That firm hasn't been relevant since Doug Heath died. Personally, I think they need to make those sleazy commercials again. Give us a call if you died during botched surgery? Priceless."
Now,
here
was the support I'd been hoping for. I could really go for some Parker, Dennis bashing right about now.
"You could even star in them," Sherri added. "Right now, you're the sleaziest thing they've got going."
I decided to pretend she'd meant that with affection. Then I decided we were done talking about Parker, Dennis because I knew she hadn't. "Think of Wally as a lump of clay," I told her. "Mold him into whatever you want him to be. Just tell him
something."
Sherri didn't miss a beat at the change in topic. She never did, when it was about her. "I told him to go back to blond," she said. "And that he should try black onyx. He's more black onyx than pink sapphire."
"Okay. That's a start."
"And if he really wanted to impress me, he'd get my name tattooed on his private parts." She giggled. "I don't think he'll do it, though. He's weird about his private parts. I'm just testing him."
From the sounds of it, she should be more worried about testing herself. But I couldn't be concerned about Wally's private parts and this Romeo and Juliet thing he had going on with Sherri, or Sherri and the free clinic thing she had going on with Frankie Ritter.
"He did bring me a red velvet cake, though," Sherri said, sounding thoughtful. In Sherri's world, red velvet cake cured almost any problem. "From Leonetti's
.
Got to give him points for that."
"Yes," I said, "lots of points. That's going above and beyond. What a guy."
"Except I couldn't eat it," she said. "Not with that ear sitting there watching me the whole time."
I sighed. "Don't be so superficial, Sher. The ear will go away. And so will Wally, eventually, if you keep stringing him along." I looked out the window at the empty driveway, where Curt's Jeep should be. Well, except it wouldn't be there right now, anyway, because he'd be at work, since he was gainfully employed, and a homeowner, and he could cook and clean and wore clean underwear. I was pretty sure. Anyone with looks like his had to wear clean underwear. Unless he went commando. That thought made my legs weak. Either way, any one of those things put him head and shoulders above Frankie Ritter, and most of them put him above Wally too. Which made me a lucky woman.
Except the driveway was empty, and I didn't feel very lucky.
I saw a flaming red Plymouth Valiant pull in, and Maizy leaned out the window and tapped the horn. It gave a wheezy bleat, but that was enough for me.
Sherri was still whining about Wally and his talking earlobe when I hung up.
"I asked for the Pacer, but Honest Aaron offered me this for fifteen bucks," Maizy said when I got in.
I could see why. It was little more than four bald tires and a steering wheel. The bucket seats were covered with floral sheets to hide God knew what and stacked with yellowed newspapers to provide an actual place to sit. There was no backseat. I tipped my head questioningly toward the empty space.
"He couldn't get the bloodstains out," Maizy said while we creaked and rattled along. "So he took the whole thing. But the car's in such good shape, he didn't want to junk it either. So it's on perpetual sale." She looked at me. "How are you doing?"
I shrugged. I wasn't doing too well. I missed Curt, I was afraid to leave the house for fear of being recognized, I was afraid to stay home for fear of marauding journalists, and I had no job.
"Something's gonna break soon," she said. "I can feel it."
"It might be me," I said. "I don't know if I can take this for much longer."
"Are you kidding? You're the strongest woman I know." Maizy's cheeks tinged pink. "I mean, you can handle this. I'll help you."
I smiled at her. "You're a big help, Maize." Then I noticed it. "Your hair's still blue!"
"Yeah." She wrapped some around her finger. "I decided you were right. I've worked hard for this hair. I'm not giving it up for Brody Amherst."
"Good for you." I was floored that she'd actually listened to my advice. "I'm proud of you," I told her.
"Yeah. Me too." Her dimple flashed. "Now let's go find a killer."
Roger Marrin's neighborhood turned out to be pretty nice. His house was not. It sat angled away from the other houses, as if shunned by them. The paint was peeling, the shutters were askew, shingles were missing, and an aircraft carrier appeared to be moored in the driveway under a dingy black cover. A skinny calico cat stared at us from the front window. I knew there'd be cats.
Roger's SUV was nowhere in sight. Hopefully that meant he was at the Shop 'n Save for the next eight hours. Probably we should have checked there first to make sure, but he struck me as a man who couldn't afford to risk his job.
"Park down the street," I suggested. "I don't want anyone noticing the car."
"Who'd notice it?" Maizy asked. We looked out at the flaming red hood. "I'll park down the street," she said.
There was virtually nowhere to hide a 1968 Valiant, so we left it on the side of the road and walked back, keeping our heads down, our hands in our pockets, and hope in our hearts that we'd finally stumble across a definitive clue. I still had trouble imagining mousy Roger Marrin clocking Dorcas with her own crystal ball, but if I'd learned anything from Wally and his earlobe, it was that you couldn't judge a book by its cover. Without his house, Roger Marrin looked neat as a pin in his Shop 'n Save vest and nerdy checkered pants. With it, he looked like an axe murderer on steroids.
"How do you want to do this?" Maizy asked.
I glanced up and down the street. No curtains fluttered. No doors opened. No birds sang. Just the wind pushing relentless cold our way. "We're just looking in the windows," I said. "Why don't we go around to the back?"
"Right. Looking in the windows." Maizy scuttled around the corner of the house, her scarf trailing behind her like a banner in the wind.
I hurried to keep up with her. "We
are
just looking in the windows, Maizy. We can't go around breaking into buildings all the time."
"Yeah, B&E was a lot easier before people started locking their doors." She gave a little start, as if she hadn't meant to say that out loud. "That's what my dad tells me, anyway. Ugh." She stopped short at the edge of the backyard, holding her hand over her nose. "What
is
that?"
That
was a combination of putrid pool water and mold and animal waste with maybe a little garbage thrown in for good measure. No wonder the other houses on the block shunned this one. This one was a pig.
"This place is gross," Maizy said, picking her way across the grass. "He didn't look like this much of a slob at the Shop 'n Save. Why can't we ever break into a nice center hall Colonial?"
"We're not breaking into anything," I repeated. "We're just looking in the windows."
"Yeah," she said. "That's what I meant."
I gave the pool a sidelong glance, shuddering to think what might be hidden under the surface.
The Addams Family
had nothing on this place.
Maizy dragged a trash can over to the house, upended it on a scrubby little mud patch under a window, and climbed on top to press her nose to the glass.
I held my arms out to spot her, although from everything I'd seen, she was as sure-footed as a squirrel. "What do you see?" I asked.
"Same thing we already saw, except on the inside," she said. "No surprises here." She pulled back to look at the window to her right. "Think we can reach that one?"
She climbed down, carried the trashcan a few feet more and scrambled back up to look into that window. I heard her suck in a sharp breath. "Well, here's our surprise."
I stiffened. "What is it?"
"You'd better look for yourself." She climbed down, and I climbed up to find myself staring into Roger Marrin's bedroom. Instantly my heart rate zoomed into the danger zone. I saw those little black spots in front of my eyes and heard that weird roaring sound in my ears. Roger Marrin's bedroom was decorated in Traditional Psychopath, with photographs of Weaver Beeber papering the far wall. Weaver picking up his morning paper from the walk. Weaver walking Chandler. Weaver emerging from the 7-Eleven with a Slurpee. Thankfully, there were no photos of Weaver in the shower, or I might have been seriously freaked out.
"Pretty mediocre photos," Maizy said from below me. She was scraping mud off the soles of her Doc Martens. "Bet you he tried to manually focus. He should've relied on auto focus. He must not have very good eyes."
Good enough that you could identify Weaver Beeber in every one. I felt slightly dizzy and realized it was because I hadn't taken a recent breath. I climbed down and sat on the trashcan until the black spots and the roaring went away, leaving only the bewilderment. "Why would he have all those pictures of Weaver Beeber?"
Maizy shrugged. "Isn't it obvious? Roger has been learning Weaver's daily patterns so he can strike when the moment is right."
I stared at her.
"Or he has a little thing for Weaver," she said.
"That," I said, "is not a little thing. That's a full on obsession. How could Weaver not notice him lurking around like that?" I'd like to think
I
would notice if someone was photographing my every waking move. Not that my every waking move was worth photographing. Neither was Weaver's, if those mundane photos were any judge.
"Thanks to telephoto lenses, he didn't have to lurk," Maizy said. "He just had to be in the vicinity. We saw that much." She shivered. "It's really creepy. I bet you he plans to cut Weaver up into little pieces and throw him in the pool."
We both turned and looked at the pool. It wasn't inconceivable. Roger was furious about losing his life savings to Dorcas. It was possible that despite what he said, he blamed Weaver just as much as he blamed Dorcas and had a similar fate in mind for him, minus the crystal ball.
We put the trashcan back where it belonged near the back door. Maizy reached out and casually turned the doorknob.
The door opened a crack.
"Oops," she said and went in.
"Get out here!" I hissed. "What are you doing?"
She didn't even turn around.
Crap.
I glanced over my shoulder, and said a quick prayer to the supermarket gods that they would keep Roger Marrin busy for the foreseeable future, long enough for Maizy to make her rounds and come back. Because there was no way I was stepping foot inside this rat's nest.
I glared through the door, curious despite my revulsion. The kitchen was pretty much what I expected: linoleum floor, avocado green appliances, paneled walls. Beyond the kitchen lay the living room. The room was small, the furniture was big, and the wall color shrank the space even more.