“That’s not very likely.” Gregory, who had climbed into the passenger seat, and taken Eloise’s parking brick without comment, stared in disbelief as her engine sputtered to life. “Did you just hot-wire your own car?”
“Yeah. Something’s wrong with the part of her ignition where you put in the key. This is the only way to get her going. It’s not too bad so long as you don’t hold the wires long. All righty, off we go!”
Eloise stalled seventeen times before we finally rolled into the small town of Rose Hill. Since it was the middle of the night, Main Street was silent and empty, the road and sidewalk creepily dark, and spotted every ten yards with jaundiced pools from flickering streetlights.
“Well, this is straight out of a horror movie,” I said as we crept down the street. I peered back and forth, looking for signs of a clinic or doctor’s office.
“I don’t think it’s that bad, but it’s certainly not where I wish to be at this time of night.” Gregory glanced at his watch. “Where do you plan on taking Peter?”
“To a doctor. He’s been stabbed,” I reminded him, then frowned. “You don’t seem to be overly worried about that fact.”
“I’m not.”
“He could die!” I exclaimed, horrified at Gregory’s callousness.
“I told you that wasn’t likely.” He shot me a curious look with an even more curious half smile. “Peter is not easily killed.”
“And you know this how?”
He just shrugged. “We are at the end of the town and I have seen no signs of a doctor. What now?”
“Now I use that phone I saw at the gas station and call 911.”
“You seem to delight in making me repeat myself—” he started to say, but I interrupted him.
“Yes, I know you said that Peter wouldn’t want an aid unit called, but there’s no doctor, and not to beat a dead horse, but he has been stabbed!”
“There’s some sort of a motel over there,” Gregory said, pointing across the street from where I’d coaxed Eloise to park, prepatory to using the gas station’s pay phone. “Why don’t we dump him there, and since you seem to insist that Peter receive some sort of medical care—which, I assure you, is unlikely to be needed—I will call someone to see to his injuries.”
“Call who?” I asked, making a shooing gesture until, with a sigh, he climbed out of the window.
He waited until I followed before answering. “A healer. What are you doing?”
“Peter mentioned something about someone he was meeting at this motel. I’m going to see if the guy is here.” I marched resolutely up to the front door of the motel—which had clearly done duty in the past as a small church—and gave the door a shove.
“Someone else is here with him?” Instantly, Gregory was at my side, suspicion giving his eyes a glint of interest. “Who?”
“Don’t know. He just said a friend. Hello?” Lights ran down a long narrow hallway toward a black space at what must have been the nave of the church. “Anyone here?”
“It’s almost two o’clock,” Gregory said, brushing past me to stride down the aisle toward the yawing blackness. “I doubt if this place runs to a night clerk, but perhaps they have some sort of a register we can check.”
“A register?” I trotted after him, feeling a bit unnerved as we approached the dark section that consisted of a cluster of dimly visible chairs and small round bistro tables. There were a couple of night-lights on the walls that cast ovals of blue-white light on the walls and floors. “Why do you care about a register? Peter needs a doctor!”
“Ah. Staircase. Perhaps the office is upstairs.” Ignoring my question, Gregory ran up the black wrought-iron metal staircase, the sound of his footsteps echoing eerily enough that, after one quick look around the room, I hurriedly followed him.
“Gregory, what about this doctor person you said you were going to call? Oh, hello. Um. You’re not a doctor, are you?”
“No. But I do have a first aid kit.” The woman who emerged from a doorway on the second-floor balcony was clad in an oversized T-shirt, and had obviously been sleeping, because not only was her hair mussed up; she also had sleep wrinkles from her pillow crisscrossing one cheek. “Do you want a room? We don’t normally take people this late at night, but—”
“You wouldn’t be able to let me look at your register, would you?” Gregory asked with a smile directed at the woman that she’d have to be dead to miss.
I glared at him, and knocked off several sexy-guy points for the fact that he was so blatant with the use of his handsome self.
She blinked at him; then a slow smile spread over her face. She leaned against the doorframe and said, “It’s on the laptop, and that’s password protected. You want to try to get the password out of me? I’ll warn you that I’m very security conscious.”
“We need a doctor,” I said loudly, giving Gregory a hard shove on his back. “Like right now.”
“Why?” the woman asked, looking me over before returning her gaze to Gregory.
“Because we have a man in my car who’s been stabbed, and he said something about coming here to meet a friend of his.”
“A man? What man? Sec.” She disappeared into the room for a moment before emerging with a silk kimono pulled on over her sleeping shirt. “I can call 911, but it will take them forever to get up here. We don’t have paramedics around here anymore. People voted them out since it raised taxes. Your car out front?”
“Yes.” I trotted after the woman as she ran down the metal stairs, following her flapping robe as she hotfooted it down the hallway to the front door. “Is there a doctor in town? Or a nurse? I hate to leave Peter stuck in my car—”
“Peter?” The woman hesitated for a second as she reached the door, casting a curious glance over her shoulder at me. “Tall, dark, and has purple eyes Peter?”
“Yes.” I frowned again. Just how did this woman know about his eyes? She was probably one of those women who threw herself at every male-model-worthy man she ran across. Poor Peter. He might be somewhat annoying, but he didn’t deserve to be pestered by hussies like this. “His eyes aren’t purple, though. They’re violet. Like Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes, except prettier.”
“He’s in your car?” She dashed through the door and down the couple of steps to where Eloise sat.
“Yes, but don’t move him,” I said, ignoring the fact that Peter had been moved several times since he passed out. “He’s been grievously injured and…where is he?”
“I don’t know, but he’s not here.” She tried to open Eloise’s door, but that had long since been frozen shut. Abruptly, she spun around and glared at me just as if I’d done something wrong. “Are you trying to pull a fast one on me?”
“A fast what? Look, Peter was in the car. He’d been stabbed, and was unconscious. Gregory had to help me get him—Gregory!”
It suddenly occurred to me that Gregory wasn’t there backing up my story to this man-ogler.
“What the—oh no, you don’t!” As I ran back up the steps and into the churchish motel, the woman dashed past me and ran hell-bent for leather to the spiral staircase. “Hey, you! I’d better not find you’ve been into the motel records on the laptop, because that’s private property and it’s against the law to pry, and I know the sheriff in this—”
Her words stopped before I made it to the top of the stairs. The door to her room was open, light spilling out onto a small wooden desk that sat before it, upon which was a laptop that was indeed turned on.
“That bastard! He went into my room and got the laptop!” She whirled around and jabbed a finger toward me. “And I just bet you were the bait to get me away from it, weren’t you?”
“No!” I protested, irritated at any number of facts, not the least of which was that Peter had disappeared (along with Gregory), which left me looking like I was guilty of nefarious intent. “Everything I said is the absolute truth. Peter was stabbed. We stuffed him in my car and brought him to town to find a doctor. I don’t know how he got o
ut of my car so fast, since he’s a big guy and Eloise’s window is small, but evidently he did, and he wandered off somewhere.”
“Right, like that’s going to happen when he has a perfectly good honeymoon suite here.”
I blinked. “He’s on his honeymoon?”
“No. It’s the best room we have. And I don’t care what you say, I know the truth when I see it, and so will Sheriff Al. I’m going to call him right now to come over and grill you about your rotten boyfriend.”
I straightened myself up to my full height, squaring my shoulders. “Peter is not my boyfriend. I just lay on him in order to hide him from Gregory’s cousins.”
“Not Peter!” She shot me a scornful look that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. “He wouldn’t be interested in someone like you. It’s the other one. I just bet you Al will be able to track him down.”
I was rallying a really potent retort when she strode into the bedroom to get her phone. I have occasionally been called a bit naive about some things, but I’ve never been horribly slow on the uptake, and there was no way I was going to waste the opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge while the motel woman was on the phone.
On my way to the stairs, I paused at the laptop and glanced at the opened spreadsheet that showed the current occupants of the rooms. Sure enough, there was a Peter Moore listed for the honeymoon suite. But it was another name that had me thinking when I ran as quietly as I could down the metal stairs, and out to Eloise. Was it a coincidence that Dalton McKay the allergy sufferer was staying in town, or was he…my brain stopped when I tried to think of viable reasons he might be there. “It’s not like he fell madly in love with you and is stalking you,” I said aloud as I released the parking brake, removed the parking brick (needed because the parking brake was frequently as temperamental as Eloise’s engine), and hunkered down to flick the ignition wires together. “It’s still kind of an odd coincidence nonetheless.”
I heard a woman’s voice over the roar of Eloise’s engine as she came to life, and obligingly drove down the road toward the main highway. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I smiled at the sight of the motel woman doing a little dance of rage in the street, and waved cheerily when she shook her fist at me. “Not the brightest enchilada at the fiesta,” I said before spending the rest of the trip back to the Faa camp wondering how I was going to track down Peter.
Just because I wanted to make sure he was all right. Not because his chest held an unholy fascination for me.
My egos rolled their eyes at that qualification. My id started a journal called “I Wouldn’t Kick Him Out of Bed for Eating Crackers.” And I pondered what the man was up to that people would so viciously attack him.
SIX
“What do you know about anal glands?”
I stared in horror at the tiny woman who sat across the table from me bathed in the bright morning sunshine, and wondered if lack of sleep from my interrupted night had finally, some eight hours later, caught up with me. At least this topic had the benefit of distracting me from wondering where and how I was going to find Peter, a subject that had been uppermost in my mind the last few hours. Right, anal glands. “Um. They’re in the behind?”
“Here.” Reluctantly, I accepted the pair of thin latex gloves that were thrust at me. “It is time for Jacques to have his anal glands expressed. If you do not do it every two months, he attempts to do so himself by dragging his bottom on the carpet. It is most disconcerting, not to mention unclean.”
We both looked at the fat pug who lolled on his back in a patch of sunlight that ran down the interior length of the RV. The morning sun was strong, heralding a warm, pleasant day, but I felt as if dark clouds had suddenly rolled in and started a deluge overhead.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help Jacques,” I protested with careful choice of words, “but I’ve never…er…expressed anyone before. I don’t know how to do it other than, judging by the gloves, you must go…inside.”
“Ah. Yes.” Mrs. Faa rummaged around in a large cloth bag that sat next to her on the suede couch, and emerged with a small object. “Lubricant.”
“I wouldn’t want to hurt Jacques because I had no practical experience in the matter,” I said somewhat desperately. There are many things I am prepared to do in life, but expressing a pug’s anal glands isn’t one of them. Not unless it was a life-or-death situation. “Besides, I have big hands. See?”
She frowned at my hands. “They are large,” she admitted.
“Right. And Jacques’ little orifice is small. Even lubed up, I don’t think he’d enjoy the experience at all.” I sure as shooting knew I wouldn’t.
“Hmm.” She looked at Jacques, then at my hands again, then back to Jacques. “Perhaps it would be wiser to have a veterinary doctor do the expressing. At least until he can teach you how to do it properly, so you won’t cause discomfort.”
I made a mental note that no matter how much money I might be short when the time of Jacques’ next tune-up was upon us, I would quit my job and run far, far away. “Sure thing. Is there a vet in Rose Hill?”
“No.” She named a town to the south about fifteen minutes away. “You will take Jacques to the vet there as soon as you can make an appointment. In fact…” She paused a moment in thought. “Yes, it has been almost a month. You will also set up appointments at the grooming shop in Rose Hill, since you will be passing through it after the expressing. That way you might get both tasks accomplished easily. You have a mobile phone, yes?”
“I do, but it’s always been temperamental, and besides, the battery is about dead, and I don’t have the charging cord with me. If you have one…?”
She shook her head. “Electronics do not work well for me. I do without.”
“I’m sure I can use a phone in town,” I said, making a note on a little notebook that Mrs. Faa had given me to keep track of all the doggy things to be done. “What do they have done at the grooming place? Just a bath, or something else?”
“Bath, brushing, nail trim, ear cleaning, and of course a blueberry facial.”
I laughed until I realized that she was serious. “They make blueberry facials for dogs?”
“Of course. It is excellent for removing the stains around their eyes. You will make those appointments for tomorrow afternoon, following Jacques’ visit to the veterinary doctor. Since my darlings have had their morning constitutional, they will remain with me for the next three hours. I wish for you to go into town to the post office, where a case of the dogs’ special food is awaiting pickup. We will not need that until their suppertime, so you may have until—” She glanced at the clock on the wall behind me. “You may have until two p.m. to do as you like. By then they will want to visit the lake and have a brief swim before supper. My grandsons’ wives and their children will likely also be there if the weather is suitably hot; please keep the dogs away from them. The children are much too rowdy for my darlings’ safety. That is it, I believe. You may wash your coffee cup at the sink.”
I looked down at my list of chores and, seeing nothing there that required further explanation, did as I was ordered. “This really is a gorgeous RV,” I commented as I rinsed out the cup Mrs. Faa had given me with her morning audience. “I can’t believe you have water and power out here in the middle of the woods.”
“We use a generator for power, and my grandsons bring in water regularly,” she said grandly. “We stay here because of the privacy it affords us from the townsfolk. They do not like us being here, and have attempted to drive us away.”
“I bet that attitude gets old real fast.” I dried off the cup and set it and the saucer back in the cupboard. “I can’t believe in this day and age people have that sort of prejudice against Gypsies.”
“Gypsies?” Mrs. Faa snorted, and with an effort, dislodged her blanket of pugs and got to her feet before tottering over to a reclining leather chair. Two pugs followed her and leaped onto her lap as soon as she reclined in the chair. The other three reassumed expressions of bl
iss as they spread out in the pools of sunshine. “We are not Gypsies!”
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry! That’s politically incorrect, isn’t it? You prefer…oh, what’s the word…Romany, isn’t it?”
She glared at me, her gnarled hand shooting out to grab my arm, and pulled down my cotton shrug, poking one finger into the lightning flower on my bicep. “We are not Romany. We are Travellers, girl, just as you are.”
“You are?” I asked, thoroughly confused now.
“Yes.” She let go of me, allowing me to straighten up. Absently, I rubbed my arm where her finger had jabbed me somewhat painfully.
“OK. I don’t get to travel around much, but I am here and I live somewhere else, so I guess that qualifies me as a traveler. I won’t be getting any frequent-flier miles with Eloise, but I’d rather have her than be zipping all around the country.”
The old lady looked at me like I was a crumpet short of a high tea. “What are you talking about?”
“Traveling.”
She opened her mouth to say something, closed it again, then narrowed her eyes at me. “Where is your family?”
“My parents died when I was a little girl. It was an accident, caused by a freak lightning storm that came out of nowhere. Some trees were zapped, and went up in flames, and since it was the middle of a droughty summer, the whole camp went up in a matter of minutes. I don’t remember any of it, to be honest. I have a really great foster mom and two foster brothers, but they’re all out on the coast.”
She glanced at my arm again, then sighed a long, slow sigh. “You do not know, do you?”
“About a lot of things, no, but I have a really big curiosity about stuff, and I like to learn. What is a Traveller if it’s not someone who travels around?”
“We are an ancient people, long persecuted for our ways. We seldom settle in one place for long,” she answered, her face serene, but she didn’t meet my eye.