I climbed down from Misery and shut her door, leaving my nigh fiancé in there to simmer and stew.
Three women who’d been arguing were still arguing when I walked up. Their disagreements seemed to center around the items in the yard sale. Two were dressed to the nines in mid-twentieth-century apparel. I guessed them to have died in the 1950s or ’60s. The third one, and the smallest, was in a fluffy pink robe with a V embroidered on the chest and tiny house slippers.
“Oh, I remember that music box,” she said, looking on as a young girl picked it up and opened the lid. “Daddy made it. He gave it to you, Maddy, on your sixteenth birthday.”
“No, he didn’t, Vera,” the tallest of the three said. “He gave it to Tilda on her twelfth birthday.” She gestured to the third woman, who nodded in agreement.
The first one, Vera, was having none of that. “Madison Grace, I remember that box, and I remember the day he gave it to you.”
“He gave Maddy a picture frame on her sixteenth birthday,” Tilda said.
“No, he gave me a picture frame on my fifteenth birthday.”
“Was it your fifteenth?” she asked, looking skyward in thought. “I thought that was the year you were sent to your room for sneaking a kiss with Bradford Kingsley in the broom closet.”
“I never kissed Bradford Kingsley,” Maddy said, appalled. “We were just talking. And besides, he liked Sarah Steed.”
All three heads dropped in unison, apparently remembering their friend fondly.
“Poor girl,” Vera said. “She had such bad breath.”
They all nodded sadly before Tilda added, “If only she could’ve outrun that rooster, she and Bradford may have eventually married.”
I watched the three reminisce with no one the wiser. The tiny one, Vera, seemed to be the oldest, with Tilda second and Maddy bringing up the rear. Watching them was kind of like watching a sitcom. And since I rarely had time for TV anymore, I stood back and took complete advantage of the entertainment.
They started arguing again about a paint set as the little girl took the box she’d found to her mother. The woman’s eyes sparkled with interest. “How much is this?” she asked a man sitting in a lawn chair.
“I’ll take two and a quarter.”
“Two and a quarter?” Vera yelled, rocketing out of her melancholy. She shook a fist at the man. “I’ll give you an even five square in the jaw. How’s that?”
“Don’t get your hackles up,” Maddy said, eyeing her elder sister.
Vera cupped her ear and leaned forward. “What?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Vera Dawn, you can hear me just fine, now. We’re dead.”
“What?”
Tilda shook her head and looked over at me. “She does that to annoy us.”
I laughed softly and scanned the small crowd to make sure no one was paying too close attention. “Would you like to cross?” I asked them.
“Goodness, no,” Maddy said. “We’re waiting for our sister. We all want to cross together.”
That was new.
“That sounds nice. You know where I’ll be when you’re ready.”
“Sure do,” Vera said. “You’re kind of hard to miss.”
I spotted an old piece of equipment sitting lopsided on a card table. “What is that?” I asked, my eyes glossing over in fascination.
“Not really sure,” the man in the lawn chair said.
“Maddy, your grandson always was a dirty scoundrel.” She looked at me. “His poor mother hasn’t been in the nursing home a week, and he’s selling everything she ever owned.”
“Everything any of us ever owned,” Tilda said. “And that’s a lie detector. Our father worked for Hoover, don’t cha know.”
“That Hoover was an odd man,” Vera said, her nose crinkling in distaste.
Maddy frowned at her. “How come you can suddenly hear?”
Vera cupped her ear again. “What?”
I stifled a giggle. “A polygraph machine? For real?”
“What?” This time it was the dirty scoundrel of a grandson who’d asked.
“Does it work?”
“No idea,” he said before lifting a beer.
“Does it work?” Maddy asked as though I’d offended her. “It works like a dream. I used it on Tilda once when she went out with my boyfriend behind my back.”
“That wasn’t me, Maddy. That was Esther. And because you had no clue what you were doing, the results were inconclusive.”
“How much?” I asked the man.
He shrugged. “I’ll take twenty for it.”
“Sold.”
“Twenty? Twenty dollars? That should be in a museum, not in a yard sale. That boy needs his hide tanned something fierce.”
I paid the guy, then walked back over to them. “I agree. If this is original FBI equipment, I bet I can get it to the right people.”
“You can do that?” Maddy asked.
“I can try,” I said with a shrug.
“Thank you,” Vera said.
I nodded and took my prize.
“I did too know what I was doing,” Maddy said as I walked off. “I just chose to be the bigger person.”
Tilda snorted and the arguments began again. I almost felt sorry for their sister Esther. She had a lot of baggage waiting for her when she passed.
I decided to drop off the polygraph machine at home before checking in at the office. If Agent Carson and I were still friends, I would give it to her with explicit instructions to get it to the right people. Surely there was an FBI museum somewhere, and it could earn me brownie points. I was a firm believer in brownie points. They were like Cheez-Its. And Oreos. And mocha lattes. One could never have too many.
As I was driving home, however, an elderly woman appeared out of nowhere in the street ahead of me. Reflexes being what they were, I swerved to the right, narrowly missing a herd of parked bikes and sideswiping Misery against a streetlamp.
I screeched to a halt, hitting my forehead on the steering wheel
The woman had been in a paper-thin nightgown, both the gown and her hair a soft baby blue. Though I’d only seen her a second, it was enough to register the fear on her face, in her fragile shoulders. She looked nothing like Aunt Lil, but I couldn’t help but compare the two. If Lil was scared and lost, I would search the world over for her. That was the impression I’d gotten from this woman.
Thankfully, the area I was in at the moment wasn’t super busy. No one noticed my little mishap. I glanced over to check on Mr. Andrulis. He was still staring straight ahead, nary a care in the world, so I scanned the area for the woman. She was gone.
Left with no other choice, I pulled back onto the street and started for home again, only to have the woman appear again. In the middle of the road.
It took every ounce of strength I had to curb my knee-jerk reaction and slam on the brakes. Swerve to the side. Hit something. I bit down and braked slowly as we drove through the woman. After checking traffic, I pulled into an empty parking lot and got out. She was gone again.
No way was I playing this game all day. I’d kill someone at the rate I was going. So I crossed my arms, crossed my ankles, and leaned against Misery in wait. After another minute or two, the woman appeared again. She materialized right in front of Misery, looked around as though trying to gain her bearings, then disappeared again. I rounded the front of my Jeep and waited. This time when she appeared, I gently took hold of her arm.
She blinked, then furrowed her brows, squinted her eyes, presumably against my brightness, and looked up at me.
“Hi,” I said softly about a microsecond before she hauled her foot back and kicked me in the shin so hard, it brought tears to my eyes. I let go of her, took hold of my shin, and hopped around, cursing under my breath. After gathering myself, I turned and glared at her. “That had to hurt your toes.” She was barefoot, after all. “Please tell me that hurt your toes.”
“Where are you taking him?” she demanded, her wrinkled face, like cracked p
orcelain, puckering in anger. She raised a fist at me, reminding me very much of Vera from the yard sale.
“Your name isn’t Esther, is it?” I asked. She could have been the sister they were waiting for.
“My name is none of your concern, hussy. You give him back this minute.”
Hussy? “Hashtag color-me-confused,” I said her. “And this week’s insanity award goes to the crazy lady with the blue hair.”
“I ain’t crazy, and you give him back. I heard about women like you.”
She eyed me up and down like I repulsed her. I was horridly offended.
“No. I’m not giving him back.” I leaned in and said through my teeth still gritting in pain, “You can’t have him.” Then I frowned in thought. “Who?”
“Like you don’t know.”
I had a thousand comebacks, but none of them made sense. One can only say things like Your mama and Stick a sock in it in certain situations. So I gave up on the smart-ass route.
“Look, little crazy lady, I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
She focused on something over my shoulder, and I looked back at Mr. Andrulis.
“Wait, Mr. A? He’s yours?” I asked, suddenly hopeful.
Her anger evaporated the minute she looked at my naked dead man. “We were married over fifty years ago. And I catch him in a car with a hussy. After all this time!” She broke down and sobbed into her fists. In the span of sixty seconds, she went from angry to nostalgic to grief-stricken.
“You didn’t happen to be on medication when you died, did you? Perhaps something in an antipsychotic?”
Her gaze slid up over her fists. And back to anger.
“Look,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “He’s only here because he’s been waiting for you.” That was an educated guess. He’d never told me why he was there. Wait, maybe it was to get away from his spouse. Maybe he’d come to me seeking refuge. That would suck since I just handed him over to her.
I walked her around to the passenger door, suddenly realizing to my utter mortification we had an audience. Correction, since the onlookers could hardly see the little crazy lady, I and I alone had an audience. Wonderful. I opened Mr. Andrulis’s door and put a hand on his arm to hopefully draw him to me. With his wife close by, it could work this time.
And it did. He slowly turned toward me, then glanced over at his wife.
“Charles?” she said.
Luckily I realized she was talking to him and not me before I answered.
She stepped closer and I moved out of the way. “Charles, what are you doing with this hussy?”
Oh. Em. Gee.
“After all these years —”
Dawning realization and a knowing smile crept across his face. He lifted a hand and wiped a tear off her cheek.
They didn’t say anything else. They embraced and hugged for several minutes as I surveyed the damage to the side of Misery. Freaking light pole came out of nowhere. Fortunately, the scratches were very superficial. Surely they could just be buffed out.
My audience, which consisted of three kids on Huffy bikes, stood waiting for me to explode again and argue with air, their phones at the ready. I so did not want to go viral. Praying they hadn’t thought to record my earlier confrontation with Mrs. Andrulis, I went about my business, ignoring them. But any second now, I was going to have to explain to the Andrulises who I was and what I was and let them know they could cross through me if they wanted to. I’d have to pull the talking-into-the-phone routine. But before it even came to that, they were through.
It happened so fast and unexpectedly, it made me dizzy. I sank onto one knee as their memories flashed in my mind. Charles Andrulis was born in Chicago and stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base for two months before he was blindsided by a redheaded concession worker at the local movie theater. It was love at first sight, but he was so afraid to ask her out, so afraid she’d say no, that he simply stole her employee-of-the-month picture off the wall. He was sent to war a week later, but he carried that picture with him everywhere, cursing himself for being so stupid, vowing to ask her to marry him the next time he saw her. If he made it back alive.
He did and he did.
He made it back alive albeit a bit roughed up, but by the time he got out of the hospital and back to New Mexico, the redhead no longer worked at the theater.
But she’d been good friends with a couple of the employees there and he found her the next day, working the reception desk at a local law office.
Taking no more chances, he walked straight up to her – or, well, limped up – in full dress uniform, struggled to get to one knee in front of her, and proposed. At which point, the feisty redhead slapped the ever-lovin’ crap out of him. But not before she, too, fell in love. They were married a week later and what followed was a whirlwind of children and grandchildren, of long workdays and short family vacations, of struggling to survive and loving each other through the worst of times.
When I blinked back to the present, the air cool against the wetness on my cheeks, I realized something that had never even occurred to me before. Life really was short. The Andrulises’ lives were rich and colorful, even the bad parts. But it was worth every second. Charles had never once regretted marrying… Beverly. Her name was Beverly.
I liked her.
I carried the heavy polygraph machine up the two flights of stairs to my apartment, vowing to get an elevator installed the first chance I got. How expensive could they be? My phone rang the minute I sat it on my kitchen table. The convent where Quentin lived on the weekends appeared on the caller ID. Sister Mary Elizabeth, a very interesting woman who could hear the conversations of angels, was on the other end. I could tell something was wrong the moment she spoke.
“Charley?” she said, her voice quivering.
“Hey, Sis, what’s up?”
“It’s Quentin. The School for the Deaf called. He left campus this morning and has been gone all day. He’s never done this. Have you seen him?”
Alarmed, I asked, “Have you tried his phone?”
“Yes. I’ve texted him several times and tried to do a video chat with him. Nothing. He’s not picking up.”
The alarm level rose. That was so unlike Quentin. He was the sweetest kid on the planet. Well, most of the time. He was a beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed sixteen-year-old whom I’d met when his physical body was possessed by a demon. The demon was ripped to shreds by my handy-dandy Rottweiler guardian, and Quentin had been a friend ever since. He had no family and lived at the convent with the sisters when he wasn’t at school. I wasn’t sure how the Catholic church felt about that – but so far, so good. At least he hadn’t been kicked out yet, but if Quentin started misbehaving in any way, I couldn’t imagine the church would let him stay there much longer.
“Okay, let me see what I can do.”
The moment I hung up, Cookie rushed upstairs and barreled into her apartment. I walked across the hall and watched her as she searched it.
“What are you looking for?”
“Amber,” she said, diving for her phone. “I went to pick her up from school and she wasn’t there. The office said she was marked absent all day. Why didn’t they call me?” She was panicking, but I was amassing an all-consuming kind of dread.
Surely they wouldn’t have.
Before I could tell Cookie about Quentin, my phone rang again. “It’s Amber,” I said to her, then put an index finger over my mouth to shush her before answering. I had a feeling I knew what was going on. And I had a feeling I knew why Amber was calling me instead of her mother.
“Hey, kiddo, how was school?” I said, unable to resist.
“Aunt Charley?” she said, her voice quivering more than Sister Mary Elizabeth’s, and that dread I’d felt rose like a tidal wave inside me.
“Pumpkin, what’s wrong?”
“We’re at the top of the tramway. Something happened. I need you to come get us.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No,
we’re… okay. It’s just, Quentin is kind of freaking out. He won’t talk to anyone but you. He’s really scared. We were supposed to be back before school let out, but we got up here and he just lost it. I’m so worried about him.”
Relief washed over me so completely, my knees almost buckled. “Stay on the line. I’m leaving now.”
“Please don’t tell my mom.”
Damn it. I knew she’d called me for a reason. “I won’t. Stay right where you are.”
Cookie pawed at me, frantic for information on her daughter. I covered the phone while retrieving my bag and keys. “They’re okay,” I said to her quietly. “They decided to skip school and take the tram to Sandia Peak. But something happened with Quentin.”
“Oh, my goodness, what? Is he hurt?”
“No. She said he’s scared. Either he has a fear of heights he didn’t know about or something else happened. Something supernatural.”
She grabbed her bag. “I’m going with you.”
“No, she didn’t want me to tell you, and you have to pretend I didn’t.”
“What? Charley, this is no time to be the beloved aunt. She skipped school. Anything could have happened. She is going to be grounded for the rest of her natural-born life if I let her live that long.”
“I just promised her I wouldn’t tell you. Besides, you have a date to get ready for.”
“A date?” she screeched. “You’ve got to be kidding. I can’t go on a date.”
“I went to a lot of trouble to set this up. You can’t leave me hanging, Cook. And this is just as much for Amber. You need to act like you know nothing about this.”
“Why? So you can be the hero? I am perfectly happy with being the bad guy in this, Charley. She will be punished for skipping school and pulling something so dangerous.”
“I know,” I said, putting a hand on her arm. “And she’ll do the right thing. You watch. But let her be the one to tell you, Cook. If she knows I told you, she’ll never trust me again.”
“I can’t be worried about your relationship with her —”
“She tells me everything, Cook,” I said, trying to get my meaning across. “She asked me the other day about contraception.”