Knot the Usual Suspects Page 12

  “Al,” Shirley whispered.

  “Who?”

  “From Chicago.” Mercy stared at my face, then threw herself back in her chair. “I knew it. A waste of time and good skulking. I told you, Shirley. Didn’t I tell you? She doesn’t know Al from a fire hydrant.”

  “And you should have listened,” Shirley said, “because it was me who told you.” She scooted her chair back, taking a layer of linoleum with her, but avoiding another kick.

  I avoided pinching the bridge of my nose. To me, that would have been a sign of holding it together—barely. To the twins it might have been a sign of weakness. “Shirley, I’m at your mercy. Mercy, surely you can tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “Now you’re making fun of us,” Shirley said.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “A fine way to thank us,” said Mercy. “And after we came to warn you. Come on, Shirley.”

  I held the door so they couldn’t slam it. After they took off with a spatter of gravel against the garage, I dialed Mel’s again.

  * * *

  Mel manned the café counter when I ran in to pick up the order, her apron crisp, her hair alert.

  “Date night?” she asked, handing me a bag with two Reuben sandwiches, two of orders of sweet potato fries, and a box with two pieces of what she called Chocolate Cubed—a cube of two dense layers of chocolate cake filled and topped with dark chocolate ganache studded with dark chocolate chips. After the day and evening Joe was having, and after my unexpected Spivey Time, I’d changed my mind about lentil salad. We both deserved calories and comfort. “Don’t go passing this off as your own cooking, though, Red. Joe might be moonstruck by your charms, but he won’t fall for that baloney.”

  “You know what you need, Mel? Music for people to listen to when they’re on hold instead of silence that lets their own thoughts run away with them. Merely a suggestion.” I plunked two bottles of root beer from her cooler on the counter. The plunk might have sounded more aggressive than it needed to. I probably needed those calories and comfort more than I’d realized. “No offense meant, though, Mel.”

  “None taken, Red, though I do wonder why you bring that up this evening. Apart from your obvious case of nerves. But do you know what we really need? Caller ID. It’d be helpful for business purposes, and it might also cut down on prank calls. We had a screamer tonight. Scared the new guy out of his wits. He might never be the same.” She looked at me with assessing eyes. “You know anything about that, Red?”

  “Your guy’s voice came out of dead silence and Mercy Spivey was looking in my kitchen window.”

  Mel flinched. “Say no more. Your reaction is totally understandable. You aren’t the first one to suggest hold music, either. I’ve toyed with the idea of reading the menu into a tape recorder, you know, describing each item in sultry, salivating detail and using that instead of music.”

  “I think it’s all digital now, Mel.”

  “Whatever.”

  “So, why don’t you do it? It’d be great.”

  “Because I don’t do sultry, Red. But if I did, it would be great and then we’d have people calling from who knows where just to be put on hold and I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense.”

  “Can I ask you a quick question?”

  But she didn’t have time for any more chitchat, either. She flapped me away with her apron and turned to help the next person in line. I’d wanted to ask her who Al from Chicago was. I saved the question for Joe.

  * * *

  Joe was capable of many things and good at what he enjoyed doing. Herding rabid craftspeople—even if only over the phone—wasn’t one of those things. I drove over to the school and called him from the parking lot. He told me the door at the far end of the building, under the security light, was unlocked. I found him inside, sitting on the stage, knitting. A long snake of garter stitch spilled from the stage to the floor below. It was striped in an amazing range of colors. He must have put every odd inch from his stash in it.

  “Is that helping?” I asked.

  “Fishing would be better. Not an option right now. Just taking a short break. Steadies the nerves. Never knew my nerves could be so easily shot.”

  “Is it really that bad?” I shouldn’t have asked. It was like hitting a man when he was feeling down because the big one had slipped the hook. I put the bags and box from Mel’s on the stage and boosted myself up next to them. “Put your needles down and scoot over here.” He did and I gave him a kiss. “Now we eat. And then, if things aren’t looking better after Reubens, fries, and Mel’s Chocolate Cubed, we’ll call the whiners and the bullies and tell them we’re refunding their money and they should take their crappy crafts and go away. Do you have the authority to do that?”

  “I have authority over many rolls of painter’s tape for marking booth spaces on the floor and numbering them consecutively. I ran out of the allotted number of rolls this afternoon and had to buy more. Now I have an extra roll. I could use it to bind and gag the most obnoxious of the crap people, but I don’t have authority to do that.”

  I shushed him with a finger over his lips. “If you don’t have the authority to dump those losers, then we’ll call whoever’s in charge of the whole caboodle and toss the problems in his or her lap. Who is in charge?”

  “Olive.”

  One of the charms of small-town life—that everyone knew everyone else—could also be one of the problems. People often assumed I was on a first-name basis with everyone, too. “I don’t think I know an Olive.”

  “Pokey’s wife.”

  That name I did know. There was only one Pokey that anyone talked about—Mayor Pokey Weems, son of Gladys the Blue Prune who’d kicked Clod’s shin and been as pleased as Ardis to hear that Hugh McPhee was back in town. I wondered how Gladys was taking the news of Hugh’s death. “Did you know that she and Hugh were cousins? Ardis mentioned that at the meeting.”

  “I should cut her some slack.”

  “Probably, but Ardis said they weren’t close. And anyway, being the mayor’s wife, Olive should be used to dealing with all kinds of situations. Doesn’t she have a committee and know how to delegate?”

  “She does.” Joe nodded. “And when she called last week and asked me to do this favor for her, because the person who was in charge of logistics suddenly backed out, that’s what she was doing—demonstrating how she deals and delegates by rolling the two up into one f—one freaking mess and slam-dunking the whole thing into my lap.” He stopped and held up a hand. “Not that I’m bitter. I’m not. Want me to show you how much I’m not bitter?” He pulled me to him and he was right. Aggravated he might be, but his kiss was gentle and sweet and not bitter at all. “It’s my fault,” he said, letting me go. “I should’ve asked more questions before I said yes.”

  “You think she knew these people were going to cause a fuss?”

  “At this point, whether she did or not doesn’t matter. Besides, what happened to ‘Now we eat’?”

  I opened the bag and handed him his sandwich, fries, and bottle of root beer, and we sat with our legs dangling from the edge of the stage. Joe and I had eaten supper in the gym once before, when we both went to the Historical Trust Annual Meeting and Potluck in the spring. We hadn’t been a couple then, but we’d ended up going through the supper line together. Joe, noted local potluck connoisseur, had been the perfect tour guide through the various pots, bowls, casseroles, and cake and pie plates. The gym looked bigger without the ranks of folding tables that had crowded it for the potluck. The blue rectangles Joe had spent the afternoon taping and numbering on the floor looked like a quilt, or an odd game of hopscotch.

  Mel’s Reubens came on grilled pumpernickel with beef she corned and sliced paper thin. The smell alone had calories. Salty, tangy, cheesy, warm—Joe was lucky I hadn’t pulled off to the side of the road between Mel’s and the school and eaten my sandwi
ch and half of his. It was a messy sandwich for takeout, but so worth it. And Mel, knowing the habits of her sandwiches, included an extra wad of napkins in the bag. The sweet potato fries were caramelized from the hot oven and sprinkled with a nicely balanced combination of salt, garlic powder, and smoked paprika.

  “I’m guessing Olive—”

  “No more about Olive,” Joe said. “I’m enjoying Reuben.”

  “You’ll enjoy this, too. I was just going to say that I guess Olive isn’t anything like her mother-in-law.” I told him about meeting Gladys, and about Gladys’ pocketbook meeting his brother’s diaphragm. It was good to hear him laugh when I described her new superhero status as the Blue Prune.

  “Gladys is a pistol,” he said.

  Pistol. “Have you heard anything about how Hugh McPhee died?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me about him. Ardis and Gladys were happy he’d come home. Your brother seemed excited, too.”

  “Someone wasn’t. Did you guys come up with anything at the meeting this afternoon?”

  “A lot of questions and not much else, but that’s the way we usually start. Did you know Hugh?”

  “By reputation,” Joe said. “He was enough older that he wasn’t on my radar.”

  “Cole seems to think he was in town for Handmade.”

  Joe chewed that over with the last bites of his sandwich. “No one from the sheriff’s department has called to ask if he was registered for a booth. No one’s called me, anyway. But they’d probably talk to Olive.”

  “Was he registered for one?”

  “No, but the committee only took one name for each booth registration. That’s been part of the problem. They should have taken the name of every person associated with a booth, but they didn’t. So I’ve had people calling and complaining about how the booths are arranged, and where their booth is, and they’re not on my list, so I don’t know if they’re legit or trying to pull a fast one or trying to screw someone else over.”

  “They’d do that?”

  “Crazy, isn’t it? But these folks are serious, and to them, you’re nowhere without location. No one wants to be buried back by the restrooms.”

  “So who is?”

  He looked away and raised his hand.

  “You’re too good.”

  He shrugged. “I have a trick or two up my sleeve. People will find me.”

  “Isn’t there a master list of craftspeople, though? Didn’t they all have to pay a fee, separate from the booth fee?”

  “Olive said she’ll be here tomorrow afternoon and she’ll bring the list with her.”

  “She couldn’t send you a copy? Wouldn’t that have helped you deal with the irate calls this afternoon?”

  “She’s a technophobe. Only has a hard copy, and only the one copy.” He wadded his sandwich wrapping, squeezing it into a tight ball. “She would have brought the list this afternoon, but she had other commitments and no time to ‘share the information.’ Those were her words, ‘share the information.’”

  “You should have given everyone who called her number.”

  “She switched her phone off. Her voice mail is full.” He added my sandwich wrapper to his. I hadn’t picked the last scrap of salty beef from my paper, though, and watched sadly as he compacted it, his knuckles turning white. It was probably good therapy, but I was glad I wasn’t one of those sandwich wrappings.

  “Calm down, there, hotshot.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Here.” I handed him his share of the Chocolate Cubed. “And when Olive calls next year, say no.”

  I blessed Mel for the ameliorating effect of her cake. And while we benefited from it, I remembered that I hadn’t told Joe about the Spivey invasion or asked if he knew Al from Chicago. One or the other of those tidbits should take his mind further off Olive and her cantankerous craftspeople.

  “I forgot to tell you why I was late.”

  “I should have asked.” He put his empty cake plate aside. “I’ve been selfish. Thank you for bringing supper. I feel better.”

  “Supper can do that.”

  “You do that. Thanks for coming. So go ahead, tell me why you were late.”

  He looked so calm. At peace. Maybe I shouldn’t disturb the good-natured curve of his lips and the tranquil blue of his eyes by mentioning Shirley and Mercy. But I’d spent too long thinking. His eyebrows rose.

  “Did Ardis get back to you?” he asked. “Is everything all right?”

  Ardis! How could I have forgotten? “No, she hasn’t called. Wow, I’d better try her again.”

  “If anything were really wrong, we would’ve heard.”

  “Would we?”

  “If it’ll make you feel better, go ahead and call, but first, why were you late?”

  He was still calm, but only in the way strong, silent types appear calm on the surface when they’re trying to keep everyone around them from panicking. I wasn’t exactly panicking about Ardis, but niceties, such as easing into the topic of Shirley and Mercy, were right out the window.

  “The twins were skulking around my house,” I said. “Not very gracefully, though. Mercy put her foot through a flowerpot and cut her ankle. They were being all Spivey and dramatic.” I waved my hands to capture the full Spivey effect, and thought I detected a smidge of a twitch in Joe’s calm strength. “They had Angie’s car and pulled it around the side of the garage so no one could see it from the street. Then they peeked in my windows.”

  Definitely a twitch that time.

  “They said they had information about Hugh McPhee.”

  That was met with a minor eye roll.

  “That’s what I thought, too.” I handed him my root beer bottle, sacrificing the last of it to help him bear up. “They were keen to tell me who they saw with Hugh yesterday afternoon. They obviously thought it was significant, but when I didn’t know who they were talking about, they got all snooty and left.”

  “Who’d they see?” It would have been better if he’d waited for my answer before swigging the last of the root beer.

  “Some guy named Al. Al from Chicago.”

  Chapter 14

  “Who is this guy?” I grabbed the extra napkins Mel had put in the sandwich bag. “Should I be worried about him? Hey, wait a second—” If I’d thought Joe was blindsided by the mention of Al from Chicago and coughing to clear his lungs of aspirated root beer, I was a hundred and eighty degrees off. He wasn’t shocked or shattered. He was laughing. Although still coughing. But coughing meant he was breathing, so I didn’t pound him on the back. I waited for an explanation.

  “Al Rogalla,” Joe said. “And yeah, he is from Chicago—twenty-five years ago. At least.”

  “Okay, so what’s the big deal?”

  “Nothing. He’s a nice guy. An accountant. Volunteer fireman, too.”

  “So why would anyone care if he spent time with Hugh McPhee yesterday? Why were the twins acting like it was earth-shattering news and they were in danger for breathing his very name?” And why did the name suddenly sound familiar?

  “Consider the source,” Joe said. “Behold, they are Spivey. The thing is, after all these years, Al does still sound like he’s from Chicago.”

  “And there’s a problem with that?” I might have said that with narrowed eyes and a hint of hypersensitivity, having been told on more than one occasion, by people who thought they were being helpful or informative, that I “talked funny.”

  “I hope you know that I don’t think so.”

  I nodded.

  “And it was kind of you to snarl on his behalf.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But again, you have to consider the source. To Shirley and Mercy, and others of the Spivey ilk, Al’s still ‘not from around here,’ as silly as that is. There are also some who’ve never forgiven him for being a big, muscular kid
who excelled at football for the two years he played on the high school team.”

  “That sounds illogical, even by Spivey standards.”

  “Doesn’t it? But he had the bad grace to break a long-standing record. Two, really. Rushing touchdowns in a single game, and then rushing touchdowns in a season. And he didn’t just break the records—he tore them to shreds, mopped the field with them, and tied the rags to the goalposts. If a local boy had done that, it would’ve been a different story and hailed for all time. But Al was bigger than the other boys, and a better player, and he hadn’t paid his local-boy dues.”

  “You mean he hadn’t been playing here for years? That was hardly his fault if they’d just moved here.”

  “Of course it wasn’t his fault. And I don’t want you to get the wrong idea; not everyone felt that way. But it wasn’t just Al, who really was, and is, a nice guy. It was his father. He came down here, big man from the big city, with a management job at the paper mill, and arrived with all the worn-out myths about benighted, impoverished, uneducated southern Appalachia firmly in place. And he thought he could lend a hand up.”

  “Lord Bountiful?”

  “With his lady. I’m sure they meant well. They were joiners and they wanted to be movers and shakers. That’s what I remember hearing, anyway.”

  “People like to talk as if they know all about someone, and if they don’t know it, they’ll make it up. Granny used to say that.”

  “Ivy was another pistol,” Joe said.

  I’d never thought of Granny quite like that, but as soon as he’d said it, I knew she would have liked the label. At some point after I’d gotten busy with my preservation career at the museum in Illinois, and didn’t make it back to see Granny as often, she and Joe had become good friends. It had turned out that there was a lot of Granny’s life I hadn’t known about. That was only natural, I knew. But sometimes I wished I could have been a fly on the wall—or like Geneva, a ghost on the ceiling fan—and watched Granny and Joe and listened to what they talked about.