The Riddle Man, page 1
The Riddle Man
Edita A. Petrick
Copyright 2020 Edita A. Petrick
All rights reserved.
www.editaapetrick.com
https://twitter.com/EditaBoni
https://www.facebook.com/edita.petrick
The content of this book is protected under Federal and International Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be electronically or mechanically reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or retention in any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, locations, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Book Cover Art by Juan Padrón
www.juanjpadron.com
Book Formatting by Maureen Cutajar
www.gopublished.com
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Epilogue
Chapter One
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
It was ten minutes to five o’clock when the phone rang. Angela looked at the call display. It wasn’t her boss. She could ignore the appliance. She’d already set it on messaging. If it was a new client who wanted to arrange an appointment to view another scenic waterfront property with a majestic view of the Kootenai Valley, he’d leave a message. If it was an existing client, asking when he should expect deer and elk to come to his doorstep to feed on command, he’d leave several messages. She would deal with all such nuisance in the morning. She’d be in a better frame of mind to give the client a sales pitch on thrills and joys of living in nowhere-Idaho.
She printed the last set of pages of “Offer to Purchase,” and made sure everything came out of the printer. She left it there, then logged-off and shut down the computer.
“Another productive day as Pudgy McLean’s slave,” she said, shoving the chair under the desk. Three years ago, if someone had told her that she’d end up living in a gingerbread cookie-cutter house with paper-thin walls in Coeur d’Alene, she would have laughed. Had they said she would be typing real estate offers and making coffee for an overfed little man who wore a corset, she would have shot the fortune-teller—for free. But then she lost Gareth and then she lost her initiative…well, was it a surprise then that she lost her freedom and her mind?
She locked up the office, and tossed the keys into the green mailbox impaled on brass hooks next to the door, because Pudgy had anxiety attacks in the middle of the night. If a glass of hot milk mixed with ground nutmeg didn’t help him go back to sleep, he’d come to the office and work until he had another anxiety attack. The first month of working for him she came in an hour early and found him huddling under a desk. He wore a wooly brown housecoat over a beige corset and Disney theme boxer shorts that gave her nightmares. Still, she considered herself uncommonly brave and a few months later on a rainy morning, she came in early again. She nearly had a heart attack when she opened the coat closet to store her umbrella. She found him huddling on the floor. He wore the same hideous house coat and corset but at least he bought new boxers—with Santa’s reindeer theme. “I’m working for an elf,” she’d thought and softly closed the closet door.
She shook her head. These were not the memories she wanted to keep.
“And here you are, my love,” she said, clicking the remote to open the car door of her Shelby GT500. “I want you to know that I’m doing this for you,” she said and climbed inside.
She’d bought the Mustang six months ago, right off the showroom floor. The previous weekend was some kind of arts and crafts festival. It was a mystery to her why people flocked to these types of events. What seemed like the entire population of Idaho poured into Coeur d’Alene. She had to cruise the food mart’s parking lot twice before she found a parking spot for her ten-year old Chevy. When she came out with the groceries, the parking lot looked like a wrecking yard. Idiots squeezed in and parked even in laneways. A middle-aged man offered to maneuver out her boxed-in Malibu, saying, “When I was younger, I used to race stock cars. Those were the fun days. Don’t worry. Your lady-car won’t suffer a scratch.”
“What do you mean my lady-car?” she’d asked, baffled by his terminology.
He nodded at the Chevy. “It’s a Malibu, gently driven by the looks of it; a real nice lady-car; the kind I want to buy for my wife but she just won’t give up her truck.”
The next day, Angela stood in the car showroom, beside the Mustang Shelby. She tried not to yawn as the salesman went through his sales pitch. She told him she’d financed the car purchase through the bank. Pudgy got a more creative story. An aunt on the east coast died and left her a small legacy. She spent it foolishly, on a car with more horsepower under its hood than could be found on a horse ranch. However, if another aunt died and left her money, she would spend that bounty wisely—on real estate. Those neighbors on Phippeny Forest Lane who’d admired the car and waited for her to tell them how she could afford it, were given a “leased” version. Boring young men in coffee shops who wanted to get a ride and get laid in the back seat, were told it was her boyfriend’s. By the time an old lady in a supermarket parking lot asked her about the car’s roots and ownership, she wasn’t sure what the truth was. Or even if she was capable of distinguishing it from the many lies and fantasies, she had to spin these last two years for Coeur d’Alene folks.
She made the three-mile drive home hardly getting out of the first gear and felt overwhelmingly sorry for the car. For a split second she imagined it on the Autobahn, its engine purring with expectancy of forward surge as gears were shifted….
“This place will yet drive me crazy,” she murmured and put on her left-turn signal. She turned into a laneway that served as a dignified access road for the cemetery next door, as well as the sixty-four assembly-line houses of Phippeny Forest Lane. They were so close together, there was no place for a car-port, never mind an attached garage. She backed in, parked such that she’d be able to pull out quickly and head down the laneway. That way she would exit on Compton. It was the fastest way to make it to the Interstate. She would head that way too…but not today.
She parked and got out of the car. Five minutes later, she was in her kitchen. She stared at the fridge door and fought an urge to re-arrange the fruit-magnets. Other than order-in chicken or Chinese, and eat in front of the TV, there wasn’t much else on her evening agenda.
In two years of living in Coeur d’Alene she hasn’t made a single friend because it was neither wise…nor safe.
She went to change out of her drab gray suit because Pudgy disapproved of her wearing jeans to the office. She tried to alert him to the fact that it was a one-girl office and at least when she wasn’t chauffeuring clients around Idaho, she could wear any damn thing she pleased. His face froze as if he saw an unpleasant vision and she dropped the issue. She didn’t want him to suffer an anxiety attack in the office. He might disrobe completely….
She was just pulling a green sweatshirt over her head when she heard the back-door bang. It wasn’t hers. She’d made sure her back door closed with a discreet click and the five-hundred dollar “silent-spring” system worked according to its manufacturer’s specs. Besides, she was in her bedroom and there was less than three feet of space between her paper-thin headwall and the newly occupied house next door; which meant her reclusive neighbor had come out to cut the grass in his postage-sized yard. In three months since he’s moved in, she’d seen him on a handful of occasions, none of them long enough for her to catch up to him or intercept him to at least say “hello.”
She learned his name from his mailbox—Alfred Ames. It didn’t suit him. He didn’t look like Alfred or Ames. Then again, his parents could have just had a warped sense of humor.
One day, when Pudgy lost his mind and asked her out to dinner, she excused herself because it was time to go for her monthly check-up and fill her prescription for Herpes medication. That’s what she told him. His shock-stilled eyes said he believed. She came home early that evening and opened up her neighbor’s mail box. She learned nothing about him because it was empty.
He drove a silver Mazda. She was willing to overlook his poor taste in vehicles because he looked like he stepped out of one of those large highway billboards, advertising designer male fragrances and aftershaves. He was always clean-shaven which would be understandable if he was a male model, plugging scents that drove women crazy. If she could only get him in the house, she’d lock him up for three days. Then he’d have a stubble-covered face that was an absolute must for a man who’d share her bed. He wore dress pants, even when cutting grass. That was the only habit she’d have to break because men with trim waists, bulging pecs and rippling six-pack under a tight t-shirt should cut grass in shorts; preferably tight but that might be considered overly suggestive…and sexist.
“I’m going crazy,” she said, yanking down the green sweatshirt past her hips. These days she didn’t own anything that wasn’t either drab or shapeless.
Her first week in Pudgy’s paper emporium, she dressed the way she used to. In those times, no matter what passport she’d pick up from a stack of working identities, it would show a gorgeous, sexy young woman…or at least a girl who’d make even the most dour, humorless airport security man crack a smile. Gareth used to say that she had the kind of beauty that adapted itself to any disguise without marring its seductive appeal. But he still claimed he liked her best “au naturel.” Of course, his understanding of it was auburn hair, light-brown eyes and bare skin. She liked herself as a reddish-blonde with contacts that either deepened her natural eye color or changed it entirely. She considered it her most “forgiving” appearance that let her sail through any customs, get fast service from any salesman and avoid a lot of parking tickets.
The ordeal of the last few months must have addled her wits, as her foster mother used to say, because on her first day of work, she dressed in skin-tight green leather pants, supple-leather black boots with three-inch spike heels and a rust-colored cotton camisole she considered comfortable.
She didn’t do much to her shoulder-length hair other than smear a dab of sculpting gel into her hands and squeeze her natural waves into tighter hold. By the end of the day, Pudgy still couldn’t manage a coherent sentence. At one point it looked like he wanted to sit in her lap to show her all his files on the computer. She recovered her wits quickly enough though she was careful to make her transformation gradual; she didn’t want to shock the poor elf more than she already had. If his business suffered as a result, then he’d not be able to pay her and she was expected to earn wages that in her past life, on any given day wouldn’t even meet her need for pocket change. Hell, she used to leave tips in restaurants that were more than her weekly wage.
A week later, she was what she should have been all along—a mint-popping, subdued young woman who never went to college and never had any ambition beyond earning a meager secretarial wage that would see her retire on nothing else than social security. She went to Salvation Army store, donated her existing wardrobe and purchased a new one. It consisted of ill-fitting drab purple, brown or gray suits. Pudgy called them ensembles. When she sat in her old Chevy Malibu, she felt that she perfectly matched its upholstery.
She drove to Spokane to find a health-food store that sold natural hair dyes and bought one in each color. She experimented until she came up with just the right mixture. It turned her hair the color of straw that had been left out in the field for many seasons. It was neither brown, nor gray, nor golden, although strands of each could be found next to each other. It was what Gareth would have called a “perfectly anonymous color.” She bought three pairs of rubber-soled loafers and half a dozen no-name oversized sweatshirts; brown, navy and green. She hoped such camouflage would keep Pudgy away.
Unfortunately, he had a good memory. She had to crank her “repellent” a notch by adding a nearly nauseous cinnamon-and-rotten-apples scent to her toiletries. It didn’t work as well as she hoped because now and then he still wanted to make conversation that was not rooted in business, but at least it kept him on his side of the messy office.
She hardly ever went out because she wasn’t interested in social life or life in general. Once Pudgy discovered that she was just as adept as he was at showing properties, he let her chauffeur his “unimportant” clients around Idaho. She always made sure that she was dressed for the occasion—as a needy, humble secretary. But she made it into a personal gesture of defiance to wear her only pair of decent jeans whenever she went food shopping. She spent her thirtieth birthday staring at the washroom mirror, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t seeing a hollow-eyed apparition.
Then three months ago, a new owner or tenant moved into the house next door that had been vacant ever since she came to live at 34 Phippeny Forest Lane.
Well, why don’t I go completely crazy and go out there and ask him over for a beer? she thought, closing her eyes and grimacing. She had been fighting the temptation for three months now and knew she was weakening. She would have long yielded and knocked on his door—front or back—if she’d seen at least one visitor these last three months. However, someone whose lifestyle seemed to parallel hers, who seemed to have no friends, and certainly no girl friends or women visitors, had to be approached with caution. The man was a hermit though he did get in his Mazda every morning and drove away. He returned every evening, though not at the same time because sometimes when she came home his Mazda was already sitting out front, on the street. He lived on a very simple schedule. Of what she saw of him these last three months, he seemed to live a boring life. That alone was a curiosity—and a mystery that kept her from knocking on his door.
“Oh, what the hell,” she groaned and kicked her shapeless “bean-bag” purse. She always dropped it on the floor, in the hallway next to the coat rack, when she came in through the back. She put on her Nikes, hiked up her sleeves and stomping like a sumo wrestler marched for the back door.
“Great,” she mumbled when she didn’t hear the roar of the lawnmower. Of course, since the yard was a postage stamp, it would take five minutes to mow. He’d finished and gone back inside. She eyed the wooden fence. It was six-feet tall, hardly a challenge. She leaped, grabbed the top, effortlessly pulled herself in a chin-up and slung one leg over. She brought the other one up, crouched for a second and then leaped down. She landed silently in a crouch. She smiled, letting the memory of all those other silent climbs wash over her and then straightened up. She walked to the back door and rapped it hard.
She thought she’d have to repeat it at least a few times to get results and flinched when mere seconds later the door opened.
“Hi,” she said, feeling utterly foolish and strangely inadequate. “I’m Angela Davis, your next-door neighbor.”
“I know,” he said, sounding neither inhospitable nor forbidding…just flat.
“Do you? I never got a chance to introduce myself yet.”
“Your name is on your mail box. You work for McLean’s Real Estate and are always loading your car trunk full of “for sale” signs.”
“Of course. You can read. That’s comforting.”
“Is there anything you want?”
“Yes. I want to clean behind the fridge and need to move it. Can you leap over the fence with me and come help me?”
He leaned forward and looked at the fence.
“It’s not very tall. I managed it quite easily but if you’re worried, I can help you,” she offered.
“If you managed to leap over it easily then you can probably manage to move the fridge all by yourself,” he said, sounding reflective rather than sarcastic.
“Probably,” she said, “but I still wouldn’t mind if you came over and helped.”
“Right now?”
“Yeah, while it’s still light outside. I don’t leap fences in the dark,” she said, stifling the rest: anymore.
He seemed to be weighing the consequences and just when she was about to turn around, he said, “All right. Let’s leap the fence.”
She didn’t bother pretending that she needed his help to climb or jump down but it annoyed her that he didn’t even look to see whether she needed assistance.
“Is this the fridge?” he asked when they stood in the kitchen. She got an impression that he believed all along that it would be a built-in appliance, the kind that only a wrecking crew could remove.
