Authors: Lorena McCourtney
“Missed taking our anti-snarky pill this morning, did we?”
Mac gave a long sigh. “You’re a good, caring woman, Ivy Malone. A woman of character. True-blue. Trustworthy.
Responsible. You care about people. You’re willing to take risks for them.”
I looked at Mac sharply. He was laying it on a little thick, but I could see from his eyebrow-scrunched expression that he wasn’t into snarkiness or sarcasm now. He really thought all those complimentary things about me. I was flattered. Although I suspected that in this situation he also thought I was being a true-blue, trustworthy, caring, responsible
nincompoop
. That any woman with good sense would jump in her motorhome and run.
“You’re also stubborn,” he stated. “You are one stubborn, hard-headed woman. Which can be dangerous.”
“Stubbornness can also be a useful, even admirable quality,” I suggested. Stubbornly.
“If you say so.”
Then, as if he’d come to some decision, he slapped his thigh with a palm and stood up briskly.
“You’re taking off already?” I asked, suddenly dismayed. I knew he’d be leaving before long, but I hadn’t figured it would be this soon
And this, I realized, might be a final parting. He’d made this big detour to see me, and I was stubbornly planting myself right here. I blinked, suddenly afraid I was going to go all girly with a flood of tears. I hid my emotions . . . stubbornly . . .behind a snappy question.
“Will you tell me one thing before you go?”
“What?”
“Why do you have a blue motorcycle tattooed on your arm? All the time I’ve known you I’ve wondered about that tattoo. You don’t even have any interest in motorcycles. You told me that.”
He lifted his arm and looked at the tattoo. It was very intricate, with lots of fine-line detail.
He let the arm drop. “No.”
“No?”
“No, I’m not going to tell you. It’s a secret.”
“Now who’s being stubborn?” I countered.
“It’s an admirable quality, remember?”
Is there anything more frustrating than having your own words quoted back to you?
A wife would have a right to know. But you don’t marry a man just to get the story on his tattoo. Besides, as far as I could tell, that hasty California proposal of marriage had been deleted, and marriage wasn’t an option now.
I stood up too. I’d manage an unemotional goodbye even if I had to blink my eyes sixty-seven times a minute to keep from getting all teary.
But what Mac said was, “I’m going to go find the closest RV park. I can’t camp out in your driveway indefinitely.”
“You aren’t leaving?”
“Doesn’t every sleuth need a sidekick?”
I thought I detected a hint of facetiousness in that question, but I was relieved. No, much more than relieved. Happy. Mac wasn’t leaving!
But then he added, “I can’t leave while the Braxtons are still after you,” and my momentary joy morphed into indignation.
“I don’t need a babysitter!”
Mac gave me an unexpectedly appraising look. “Ivy, when I look at you, I do not think of babysitting.”
He had an equally unexpected gleam in his eye. Which gave me an unexpected thought.
“Should I be blushing?”
He winked. “Might be a good idea.”
#
I thought Mac intended to drive around looking for an RV park, but he’s more efficient than that. He let his fingers do the walking on his smart phone. While he did that I decided, with my not-so-smart cell phone now charged up, to make a few calls. First, my niece DeeAnn down in Arkansas to let her know I was back on Madison Street.
DeeAnn was doubtful about the wisdom of my being here, especially after I told her about the body in the bathtub, and she said to call her immediately if I needed a hideout or if they could help in any way. She said everything was fine with the family, and that grand-niece Sandy was now writing a teen news column for the local newspaper. She also said Sandy had a little gift for me. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, just that she’d mail it up to me. I thanked her, but I felt a bit apprehensive. Sandy has a good heart but a sometimes rather startling teenage sensibility, and she keeps trying to prod me into the 21
st
century. Her previous get-with-it gifts have included thongs and toe rings. What now?
Then I called my young friend Abilene in Colorado and got some great news. She and her veterinarian husband were expecting their first baby next spring. They hadn’t yet decided whether to find out ahead of time if it was a boy or girl. They were working on names for both.
I next tried to call my friend Matt Dixon, now stationed down in Arkansas with the FBI, but I couldn’t reach him and left a message for him to call. “Just to chat,” I added, so he wouldn’t think I was in trouble. Again.
After that, I called the mail forwarding outfits through which my mail has been routed, and used my code to get everything changed to the Madison Street address.
Lastly, I called Magnolia and got a report on her latest genealogical adventure. Unlike meetings with most of the distant relatives she’d located, this encounter had not gone well. The woman she’d found was quite wealthy, with inherited money from a silver mine in Idaho, and she’d accused Magnolia of contacting her with a scheme for making some genealogical claim to part of the fortune. Of which, the woman had assured her, she wasn’t going to get a penny.
“That’s too bad,” I sympathized. “I know you never had any thought of that.”
“Of course not. And this coming right after I found the grandson of a third cousin’s half-aunt, and he said I was ridiculous to think we were in any way related. That we probably didn’t share more than six genes altogether.”
“I think God gave us more shared genes than that, just because we’re human.”
Magnolia gave a big sigh. Magnolia is a hefty woman. She can give a really big sigh. “At the moment, I’m rather disheartened about my family.”
Family
used in the most all-encompassing way, of course. Because for Magnolia there’s no relative too distant not to be embraced to her generous bosom as family. She doesn’t so much have a family tree as a family jungle.
At the last minute I asked her if they’d received an offer on their place, as I had. She said no, but their mail hadn’t caught up with them for almost a month.
“But I can’t imagine selling out. Can you? I mean, Madison Street is our
home.”
We talked a few minutes more, but she was so distressed about the unpleasant turn her genealogical investigations had taken that I never did tell her about the dead body in my bathtub.
By the time I finished the phone calls, Mac had located an RV park only a couple of miles away. He drove the motorhome and I followed with his pickup. The park looked new and probably hadn’t even existed when I left Madison Street. He got a shady spot near the central grassy area with picnic tables and a horseshoe pit. He leveled the motorhome with the attached jacks, hooked up water, sewer and electricity, and unrolled the awning. Then we went out for the shrimp salad I’d suggested earlier. Afterward he dropped me off at the house, and I invited him back for dinner.
That afternoon, for the first time in much too long, I cooked in the kitchen of my old home. It felt, as grand-niece Sandy would say, awesome. Not that my motorhome’s tiny kitchen is dreadful, but the house kitchen is so airy, the stove so large and roomy, countertops so generous I could tap-dance the length of them. Not that I’m quite up to tap-dancing in high places, but I did do a happy twirl beside the kitchen sink. The house filled with wonderful scents of pot roast and homemade bread and peach cobbler. Koop even deigned to come inside and settle on the kitchen window sill. The air-conditioner in the living room window sometimes sounded as if it were preparing to zoom off to outer space, but it cooled both living room and kitchen nicely.
I heard Mac’s pickup pull into the driveway, and an old saying suddenly did a tap-dance of its own through my head.
The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
No way, I scoffed vigorously. I’d never resort to some cheap subterfuge like that . . . would I? Although I had to admit that sometimes my subconscious has an agenda of its own.
I was just getting the pot roast out of the oven when a totally unrelated thought occurred to me. Nothing to connect it with what I was doing, no reason for the thought to pop into my head at this moment. But there it was. Actually doing more than
popping
into my head.
The realization whammed into it like the whack of a baseball bat.
I just stood there with the hot pan of roast between my potholdered hands. I’d thought I was safely anonymous for a few days but—
Mac stuck his head through the door and sniffed appreciatively. He started to say something, but I cut him off.
“The Braxtons already know I’m here.”
Chapter Nine
“What do you mean?” Mac asked. “Have they been here and threatened you or done something?” He glanced around, fists clenched, ready to do battle with any lurking Braxtons. My hero!
Although he’d be horrified if I called him that, of course.
“No, but— Remember I told you Officer DeLora said the Deputy Chief of Police had married a Braxton, so now her name was Haldebrand?”
“So?”
“At the time Haldebrand sounded vaguely familiar, but it didn’t register with me why. Now it just came to me. That supervisor I talked to at the power company? Her name was Haldebrand.” I plopped the pot roast pan on a hotpad on the counter. “So she doesn’t have to extract from her police boss husband the information that I’m back in town to pass onto the Braxton clan. I waltzed right in and announced it to her. This
might be
where the Braxtons got the information that an Ivy Malone was living here before. The whole family has
no doubt been wearing blisters on their fingers texting and facebooking and twittering the news to each other.”
“The woman at the power company and the police guy’s wife aren’t necessarily the same person even if they’re both named Haldebrand,” Mac pointed out with what seemed to me unnecessary logic. “There may be lots of Haldebrands around.”
“So you think I’m being paranoid?”
“I’m just pointing out a possibility. I don’t suppose you know any first names?”
“Officer DeLora said the Braxton the Deputy Chief of Police married was . . . Susan. Or Simone.
Or something
like that. I didn’t get the first name of the woman at the power company.”
Mac got out his cell phone and started doing something with it that would totally baffle my non-smart phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking on Haldebrands in the area.” He did thumb things for a minute. “There are several here, but none is identified as the Deputy Chief of Police. I see an Andrew and Clarissa Haldebrand—”
“No. I’m sure Officer DeLora didn’t say Clarissa.”
“There’s an A.F. Haldebrand, and here’s a Eugene and S. A. Haldebrand—”
“S.A.? That could be it.”
“Also a Sylvester Haldebrand, a T. D. Haldebrand, and a Ted Haldebrand with a wife named Laura.”
“So the Haldebrand woman at the power company may not be married to the Deputy Chief of Police Haldebrand.” Which is exactly what Mac had said, of course. “Which means the Braxtons don’t necessarily know I’m here.” I tried to feel relief, but my bones had an unexpectedly achy feeling. Some people get an ache that says a change in the weather is coming. My bones aren’t interested in weather predictions, and I’d never felt this particular ache before, but it definitely felt like a prediction. A
Braxtons-are-gonna-get-you
ache.
Mac started to clip his phone back on his belt but changed his mind and tapped something more into it. When someone answered the call he said, “I’m trying to locate a Mrs. Haldebrand who I understand works for the power company. I hope I’m not calling at an inopportune moment? I’m working on some genealogical connections, and I’m wondering if the Mrs. Haldebrand I’d like to talk to could be you.”
Working on genealogical connections. Not an actual untruth. Mac has never done any genealogical research, but he has mentioned a couple of times that he was
thinking
about looking into his family background. They carried on several minutes of friendly conversation. Mac can talk to anybody about anything, and this woman was apparently happy to dive into genealogy. Now Mac tossed out various names – MacDonald, MacDermott, MacHenry – without ever actually including his own MacPherson, and they got deep into Scottish and Irish ancestry, how to do genealogical research while vacationing in Mexico, and, somehow, hobbies involving stuffed animals. During that time I put the roast back in the oven to keep it warm.
“So?” I said when he finally put the phone away.
“Her name is Sylvia, and she works for the power company. Her name before she married Gene Haldebrand was Braxton, courtesy of former husband Dwayne Braxton, with whom she has two daughters, Celeste and Beth. Her maiden name was McDougal. She’s never been to Scotland or Ireland to check into McDougal ancestry, but she’s hoping to persuade Gene to go next summer. She wondered about trying haggis. I advised her to start with a small bite, not a big mouthful. Scottish haggis is definitely an acquired taste.”
An impressive amount of information for a few minutes of conversation.
A little more time and he’d no doubt have known her date and place of birth, where she and Deputy Chief of Police Haldebrand honeymooned, and whether her belly button was an innie or an outie.
“I wonder if she still has close ties with the Braxtons?”
“She may have. She said one of her daughters lived with her grandmother, and they were having a big Braxton family get-together for the grandmother’s birthday this weekend. She
seemed like a nice, friendly person. She collects teddy bears.”
“She didn’t seem all that nice and friendly when she was telling me I had to pay that back bill on the electricity.”
But Mac does have a talent for bringing out the nicer side of people. Now he added, “She names each of the teddy bears. Her latest is J. Edgar.
Named after J. Edgar Hoover, whom her husband greatly admires.”