Spooky Little Girl (24 page)

“Maybe you could give me time to clean some mayonnaise and lettuce off my shoes,” he volleyed. “It appears that we’ve been attacked by a sandwich.”

“What?” Nola said as she rushed into the living room and looked at the carnage of ham, salami, and lettuce that was every bit as shredded as a photograph of Lucy. “My sandwich! Where did you find that? I’ve been looking for that! All I had to eat for lunch today was a tub of potato salad!”

Martin emitted a small sigh, and shook his head as Nola collected the sandwich from his meaty hands.

“How did this even happen between these two?” Naunie said, pointing her finger back and forth between Nola and Martin. “This brings up something I’ve wanted to ask for a while, and I just can’t hold it in any longer. Did this happen after you, or was he fooling around and kicked you out to move her in? Because if that’s the case, more things than sub sandwiches can get shoved through the mail slot.”

Lucy shrugged and threw her hands up. “I honestly don’t know,” she admitted. “I try not to think about it. The Martin I knew wasn’t the kind of guy to mess around, and honestly, I never would have thought that Nola was his type at all. Clearly, however, weirder things have happened.”

“So you two were getting along fine, nothing seemed odd or out of the ordinary?” Naunie questioned.

“Nope,” Lucy replied. “Everything was fine. I mean, we were getting married in eight weeks when I found my stuff outside.”

Naunie paused. “Really? Everything was fine?” she asked again. “Because this is the first time you’ve mentioned that you were
engaged and weeks away from a wedding. That doesn’t sound fine to me.”

Lucy laughed a little and nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she confirmed. “It probably wasn’t so fine. Things weren’t exactly great. I think we might have both been having second thoughts, but the suspicion of him cheating—especially with her—never crossed my mind until after I wound up back here.”

“Wanna find out for sure?” her grandmother said with her trademark wicked grin.

“I don’t know.” Lucy hesitated. Naunie certainly did carry tricks up her sleeve, but so far, they consisted of pinching people on the toilet and ramming food through mail slots. “How?”

Nola returned to the room with a dish towel for Martin to wipe his hands on.

“Watch and learn,” Naunie said slyly, then sidled right up to Nola.

Lucy couldn’t help but feel wary.

“Remember when we met?” Naunie said directly into Nola’s ear.

Nola smiled pleasantly, then cocked her head slightly to one side.

“Martin, remember when we met?” she repeated, as if being fed lines for a role.

He, in turn, looked puzzled as he wiped condiments and lettuce bits from his palms.

“What?” he asked, scrunching his brow. “What do you mean?”

“I mean do you remember when we met?” Nola continued on in the delight of her memory. “Remember, I came into Safeway and you were busy picking the bad grapes off of the display?”

“Sure, sure. But I never have bad grapes on my display, although there might be some overextended ones. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I was remembering,” Nola explained. “It was fate, don’t you think?”

“You got me, Nola,” he answered. “Do you think it was fate that you needed boiler onions that day?”

“This is stupid. Give me something I can use!” Naunie nearly hissed, then went back up to Nola’s ear. “Where was Lucy?”

“Well, not exactly,” Nola replied. “But running into you at the store was fate, I think. That was a nice surprise, wasn’t it? And Lucy—”

“Lucy had been gone for a while, and it certainly was nice of you to invite me to dinner,” he said, handing her back the dish towel. “I sure did need the company. But it wasn’t as if that was our first meeting, since we talked on the phone when the girls were in Hawaii. Maybe that was the fate part.”

“Oh, I was just doing my job,” Nola reminded him. “Someone had to track down that deposit.”

“Very true,” Martin said, and smiled. “Your strong work ethic is something that I’ve always greatly admired about you.”

“That’s terribly sweet of you, Martin,” Nola gushed.

“I’m glad you think so,” he replied, then leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

She blushed.

“Now, what’s this about your missing programs?” he asked her. “Let me see if I can help.”

Naunie looked at Lucy. “Answer your question?” she asked.

“I can’t say it’s not some sort of relief,” Lucy said. “But why on earth would Nola not call me directly about the deposit? Why did she call Martin looking for it? What could he have possibly done? I never heard a thing about her calling him. Not a thing.”

“When was the last time you spoke to him? Do you remember?” Naunie asked. “He didn’t mention her calling?”

Lucy thought for a moment. “It had to have been the night I ate the bad shellfish, but to be honest, I was so sick I couldn’t talk. Jilly talked to him, though, and told him what was going on.”

“And Jilly never said anything about the deposit being missing while you were in Hawaii?” Naunie questioned.

“No, no, no,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “She didn’t know a thing about it until we came home, and that’s when she told me.”

“At least you weren’t dumped for that,” Naunie said, then reached out and pinched Nola on a fat flap on the back of her arm.

“Ouch!” she cried, and immediately slapped the spot.

Naunie chuckled. “If you think that’s something,” she said, clapping her wrinkled hands together, “wait till I show you how Freudian slips are not so Freudian unless Freud is the spook whispering them in your ear.”

Martin, in his noble effort to assist Nola and rescue her viewing choices, could not find the remote control. He searched the coffee table, under the couch, ran his hands along the ends of the sofa cushions, scoured the tops of each side table, rolled Tulip over side to side, and still came up empty.

“Nola,” he called out to the kitchen. “Where is the remote for the digital recorder?”

“Um, it should be right there,” she answered, clearly forgetting that she had thrown it across the room in a temper tantrum. The two ghosts who had witnessed the embarrassing display had found it wonderfully delightful and would not only remember it but would reenact the fit for the rest of eternity, to howls of laughter from many of the dead.

“I’m not seeing it,” Martin said to no one other than himself.

Now, it’s true that Naunie and Lucy had the complete capacity to help Martin out with his search, since they were both aware of where the remote had ended up while Nola had had a cow, but neither one of them was feeling generous enough to stick their hand through the chair and nudge it out.

Martin stood in the middle of the living room, hands on his hips, and almost declared himself defeated until he spied two more possible options. He went to the table nearest the side of the couch with the springing coil, and opened the drawer, only to find batteries, some coasters, and a dried-up pen. But after he closed that drawer and went to the table on other side of the couch, he opened that drawer and found something quite different.

Martin hadn’t seen a picture of Lucy in nearly a year.

After he had stood in the shadows of the kitchen and watched her pack up her stuff into Warren’s truck and leave, he knew that he had done what he had to do. If he looked at something and it had one single memory of her attached to it, he put it in a produce box and put it out on the lawn. He tried to wipe the house clean of her, otherwise it would have been too difficult. He knew that. After she was gone, he realized he had missed some things, and they offered themselves up to him over the course of the following months: the broken coffeepot, an old lipstick shoved into a corner of the medicine cabinet, a stray earring hiding between the nightstand and the wall. For the most part, however, he had succeeded in taking the Lucy part of his life out while trying to leave the Martin part in. There were some things he left, including the pictures, which he knew he wanted to keep but couldn’t bear to look at. The pictures weren’t like a pair of her shoes or her bathrobe; the pictures were a record of a time, a capsule of their life together, and abolishing them seemed more harmful than beneficial. Each one was like a book, to be remembered and read if needed. Once they were gone, they were gone. You couldn’t get things like that back. Lucy had been a part of his life. And he realized that someday, a long time from now, when he was able to digest the truth of what had happened, he would have the photos there if he ever needed or wanted to see them.

But now, here they were, in his hands. Wrinkled, creased, crushed, angrily shoved into a drawer of the side table by someone a little too jealous to leave them alone.

Behind the closed door of his hobby room, he took them out of his pocket, and the sting returned, feeling fresh and new. He knew he shouldn’t look at them, but he did, ignoring the part of him that insisted he put them away and just forget about her like he had been doing. Lucy cooking eggs on a gas stove outside a tent at Big Bear. Lucy pretending to hold up the underside of the massive statue of Babe the Blue Ox in the redwoods, which happened to be very largely anatomically correct for all intents and purposes, even if they were balls of concrete. Lucy squinting in the sunlight, dirt streaked across her forehead as she struggled to stake the tent down, smiling broadly.

He wasn’t sure if he would ever understand, and honestly, he never expected to. They’d had a good life, he thought, he and Lucy. It hadn’t been perfect, it hadn’t been grand, but it had been good and it had been solid, and there wasn’t a whole lot more that he’d known how to give her. He felt foolish thinking he had been used. He was humiliated that he’d believed so much in her only to be proven so very wrong. He had wanted her to go to Hawaii, he had wanted her to have fun and enjoy herself, but he hadn’t been prepared for what that had really meant for her. And once it happened, once he knew, there was no going back. There was only a life without her, and as soon as he’d hung up the phone, he had begun building it, by going back to the store and grabbing every box he could find.

Lucy had only given him one option.

She sent a letter afterward. Martin was sure it was full of justifications, pleas, and Lucy’s explanation for everything she had done. He never opened it. He was so angry at her that he threw it away. He didn’t want to hear her excuses. He didn’t want to hear anything
from her. She never even came back for Tulip when she said she would, and that told him everything he needed to know about her. If she wanted her dog, he thought, she was going to have to show up to get her, not send some letter full of reasons why she couldn’t. Tulip deserved better than that. So after Lucy was gone, the thing Martin decided to look for in his life, the thing he thought he needed, was something that was the opposite of her, as far away from Lucy as he could get. He wanted no reminders, no familiars. He wanted none of it.

And then came Nola, looking for boiler onions—bulbous, practical, unadorned boiler onions. She was easy to satisfy, dependable. She needed so little.

She needed even less than he did.

From the corner of the hobby room, Lucy watched him as he went through the crumpled photos he had pulled from his pocket, the ones Nola had torn from the album and shoved into the side table drawer.

She watched him as he studied each picture, shook his head, pursed his lips, and rubbed his forehead, then returned to looking at them again. And she watched him, as the sun began to set, as the room slowly lost its light, as he placed the photographs on his desk and tried to smooth each of them out, one by one.

“You haven’t heard from Lucy, have you?” Nola asked Martin as he sat down to have his morning coffee.

“Mmm-mmm.” Martin shook his head after he took his first sip. “Why do you ask?”

Nola shrugged as her Eggo waffle popped out of the toaster. “I dunno,” she said simply. “Just thought she might have checked in or something.”

“Not a word since the letter I got some time ago,” he said, flipping the morning paper open. “Anyone from the office heard from her?”

Nola shook her head as she slathered butter on her Eggo. “I don’t think so, but not that any of them would tell me,” she replied. “Thick as thieves.”

“Yeah, well, things get sticky when lines are drawn,” he added. “I could see why they wouldn’t bring it up in front of you. I don’t
know Marianne very well, but Jilly is good people. She was used by Lucy just like everyone else. Don’t hold it against her.”

Nola brought her waffle over to the table, smiled, and took a bite.

“Okay,” she said.

Martin was quiet as he read the headlines.

Nola poured more syrup on her waffle. She watched him read.

“Because if you think she’s been skulking around,” Martin said, looking up, “you should tell me. I should know.”

“No,” she replied simply. “I don’t. I was just curious.”

Several weeks before, it wouldn’t have crossed Nola’s mind that Lucy would come back, ever, for anything, or at least that’s what she told herself. She repeated it over and over again in her head that her former co-worker would be far too embarrassed after being caught stealing drugs and attempting to pilfer twenty thousand bucks from her employer. Nola tried not to really pay too much attention to the mug incident at work, chalking it up to Jilly and Marianne trying to pull a stupid trick on her, and the mailman was clearly suffering from dehydration. It must have been some heat-induced mirage when he thought he saw Lucy in the house. Half the time, he didn’t even deliver the right mail to them and it was up to Nola to trudge up and down the block, handing over bills, magazines, and junk mail to their rightful owners. If she could find them, why couldn’t the mailman? Wasn’t he trained specifically in mail arts? It was ridiculous to even think that it was a possibility that Lucy had been in the house to begin with. She didn’t have the key, and if she had been there, why hadn’t she taken that dumb dog of hers? It was the only thing left of Lucy’s in the whole place. Why break into the house just to hang out? Nothing had been touched, taken, or tampered with.