Girls' Night Out, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Girls’ Night Out
An Excerpt from Den of Iniquity Prologue
Chapter 1
About the Author
Also by J. A. Jance
Copyright
About the Publisher
Girls’ Night Out
My name is Twinkle Winkleman. I’m sure my daddy, Leonard Winkleman, thought the name was hilariously funny when he wrote it down on my birth certificate—funny for him, maybe, but not for me. That handle was a pain in my ass for most of my childhood and not a whole lot of fun for some of my classmates, either.
In grade school, I punched the lights out of more than one would-be bully for following me around the playground bellowing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” at the top of his lungs. Eventually most of the boys and some of the girls, too, figured out they if they messed with my name, they were likely to have a close encounter with my fists. Once they got that message, my quality of life improved immeasurably. As an adult, I’ve finally come to appreciate Daddy’s sense of humor. Now, when the occasional dim bulb raises that issue, all I do is level an icy, unblinking stare in his or her direction. That usually ends the discussion without my having to say a word.
When I was done working on Maude that Saturday evening and was ready to go back into the house, I had put in a full day’s work. Maude is the 1973 International Harvester Travelall that Daddy, flush with cash at the time, had bought new off the lot in 1973. He spent the next thirty years making sure Maude was in good running condition, although in his final years, once he was confined to a wheelchair, I did the work for him but always under his direct supervision and scrutiny.
When I was a kid, cell phones and video games didn’t exist. In grade school the girls played with jacks and boys played with marbles. At home, girls messed around with Barbie dolls and boys did whatever boys did back then. Not me—I spent most of my childhood in Daddy’s garage, standing on a stool next to him with his head and chest buried under the hood as he worked to fix whatever ailed some vehicle or other.
In the process, he taught me everything I needed to know about mechanics. Daddy was dyslexic, although no one ever mentioned that to him back when he was struggling in school and everyone, teachers included, were busy calling him stupid. Over time he managed to develop some rudimentary reading and writing skills, especially when it came to auto parts, but he knew everything there was to know about making car engines run, and he was a great teacher.
After Daddy passed away, his beloved Maude came to me. Along with the vehicle, I inherited what he called Maude’s Bible, the multivolume record of her service history. There, in lined notebooks and written in print form rather than cursive, Daddy maintained a complete record of Maude’s mechanical upkeep, including the dates of every oil change, brake job, battery replacement, and engine overhaul from 1973 up to the time of his death. Once Daddy was gone, I took over. That’s when the record began being written in cursive.
According to the Bible, Maude’s gas tank had been replaced on April 8, 2001. The original sending unit had stopped working years earlier, which meant that the gas gauge always indicated she had a full tank even when Maude was running on empty. I managed that problem for years by simply keeping track of the mileage between fill-ups. Daddy was one of those guys who always maintained that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But once the replacement tank itself developed a slow leak, I decided the time had come to redo the entire system with a new fuel pump, filter, fuel lines, gas tank, and sending unit. That took the better part of the day. When the job was completed and dutifully recorded in the Bible, I went on to the second part of the job—bringing Maude’s annual winterizing routine up to snuff.
I don’t have to work at a regular job because I’m more or less an heiress, albeit an unlikely one. Daddy grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Despite his learning disability, he managed to bluff his way through grade school but dropped out of high school his junior year. Because he’d been held back a couple of times, he was already eighteen by then. He went straight to the army recruiter’s office and joined up. After serving in the army, he came home as a full-fledged mechanic and went to work in a garage owned by a friend of the family. He may have been short on reading, writing, and arithmetic, but when it came to repairing vehicles, he was a whiz. As a working mechanic, he made good money. He was also handsome as all get-out, enough so that he managed to reel in a true beauty. Unfortunately my parents’ natural good looks skipped a generation and weren’t passed along to me. When my son, Tad, came along, he was a handsome devil, too—Daddy’s spitting image.
Although I’ve seen photographs of my mother, I have no actual memory of her, since I was only a year old when Daddy pulled up stakes. With me and my older brother, Chad, in tow, we left Tulsa in the dust and moved to faraway Anchorage. Once there, Daddy found steady employment in yet another garage, this time as the chief mechanic and manager. He took the position primarily because it came complete with an upstairs two-bedroom apartment.
By then Chad was old enough to go to school. As for me? If there was a preschool for kids my age in the neighborhood, Daddy didn’t send me there. His idea of childcare was to stuff me into a pair of Oshkosh overalls, carry me downstairs, and let me wander around the garage so he could keep an eye on me while he worked on cars. For as long as I can remember, Daddy and his friends called me Button. I didn’t find out until the day of Daddy’s funeral that the origin of that name was due to the fact that when I was little, everyone in the garage—workers and customers alike—thought I was cute as a button.
Daddy always passed himself off as a widower, which, as it turns out, was more or less the truth. Although we had some interactions with Daddy’s folks back in Oklahoma, there was never any contact with our mother’s side of the family. That was something that puzzled Chad and me, especially when Daddy completely stonewalled any questions we asked about her. According to him, she was dead and that was that. Chad was always rebellious, and he and Daddy never saw eye to eye. If Daddy said something was up, Chad insisted it was down. After graduating from high school, he left home and joined the air force instead of the army. On his first leave, he went straight back to Oklahoma and dug up the real story.
When I was six months old, our mother had run off with a smooth-talking car salesman in town, who earned twice as much as Daddy did. A little more sleuthing on Chad’s part revealed that the two runaway lovebirds died in a car crash in Texas less than two months after leaving Tulsa. Since the divorce was never finalized, Daddy was a widower, all right, just not in the usual sense of the word.
Once Chad clued me in on what had really happened, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as any kind of father and son relationship was concerned. Daddy simply wrote my brother out of his life. To my knowledge, they never exchanged another word. After that, the only time they ever occupied the same room was when they both came to the mortuary to attend my son’s funeral.
Once Chad was out of Daddy’s life, he was mostly out of mine as well. The truth is, the two of us had never been especially close. For one thing, I was five years younger than he was. When we were kids, he constantly gave me all kinds of grief, calling me a spoiled brat and claiming I was Daddy’s favorite, which, come to think of it, was probably true. When Daddy passed away ten years ago in 2012, I let Chad know about Daddy’s passing, of course, but he refused to come to the funeral.
Once the will was read and I discovered our father had left everything to me, I offered to split things fifty-fifty with Chad, but he turned me down cold. He said that since I was the one who’d had to spend my whole life putting up with the stubborn old goat, he thought I deserved every penny. Let’s just say no one in my immediate family ever got the memo about turning the other cheek, and we’re not big on forgiving and forgetting, either.
Anyway, I was in middle school when Daddy’s boss, the owner of the garage in Anchorage, took sick. At that point, Daddy was able to buy the business, not only the garage, but the land it sat on as well. Years later, when a big corporation showed up in town wanting to buy the property to build a high-rise, Daddy sold out and walked away with a bundle. With that sudden influx of money he not only paid cash for Maude but also for a large piece of property on the outskirts of town, where he set about building a house.
At the time, our place was not only outside the city limits, it was also out of reach of city planning and zoning requirements. As a result, when he built his own place—the one I still occupy—he included an attached, customized garage, complete with two bays, two hydraulic lifts, and a whole wall of bright red Sears and Roebuck tool chests and cabinets. Believe me, those were chosen, installed, and filled long before he picked out a single kitchen cabinet or appliance. In his book, equipping the garage took precedence to furnishing the house. Once we moved in, he kept on doing what he’d always done—working on cars with me, his little gearhead, right beside him, drinking it all in.
About that time, Daddy spotted another need in town, which he decided to address by starting Anchorage’s first-ever car service. Over time, he and Maude built up quite a reputation. In the dead of Alaskan winters, they were able to get people where they wanted to go no matter what kind of weather Mother Nature dished out. The car service business grew like crazy. Eventually he was forced to buy more vehicles and bring on more drivers. When the next corporate buyer came to town, Daddy sold that business, too, reserving the right for me to operate a one-vehicle car service for as long as I wished,
With a good chunk of my inheritance still in the bank, I don’t need a regular job—which I would no doubt hate, by the way—but that doesn’t mean I don’t watch my pennies. I take on some garage work—mostly rehabbing collector cars and keeping beloved old V-8s in good running order for a few select, longtime customers. As for the car service operation? TW Transportation generally operates on a seasonal basis. Maude and I hit the road when everyone else prefers to be hanging out at home with their feet propped up in front of a blazing fire.
In terms of running the car service, wintertime Alaska is my favorite time of year. Helping people get home for the holidays is something that appeals to me. Maude and I are both at our best in difficult driving conditions. We can get people to destinations by traveling iced-over roadways where most hotshot Uber drivers would fear to put their steel-belted radials.
The weatherman was predicting that the year’s first major snowstorm was due to start sometime overnight. Just because I may have put off my winterizing chores until the last minute, I didn’t skip any steps or cut any corners. I checked all fluids, repacked wheel bearings, changed brake pads, installed new wiper blades, and traded my fair-weather tires for a trusty set of Blizzaks. My last task for the day was using the garage’s winch to reattach my wintertime-driving essential—a removable snow plow.
As I worked, good old-fashioned Country/Western music blared through Daddy’s now-antique high-fi system while I hummed along to his favorites. I mined “Sixteen Tons” with Tennessee Ernie Ford, went out “Walking After Midnight” with Patsy Cline, was left talking to those “Four Walls” with Gentleman Jim Reeves, and rode with Glen Campbell on his way to Phoenix. Then, of course, there was Johnny Cash’s classic, “A Boy Name Sue.” That one hit the charts the year I was born. I always feel a sense of kinship with that poor kid, and I’m pretty sure Daddy was intent on toughening me up when he gave me my similarly oddball name.
That whole Saturday, while working out in the garage, I had been breathing in the delectable aroma of my daughter-in-law’s venison stew, simmering away in a Crock-Pot on the kitchen counter. When it comes to making venison stew, Cindy Winkleman’s can’t be beat. Once I finished attaching the snow plow it was time to clean my tools and put them away. As per usual, when it was time to deal with the wrenches, I started thinking about Daddy’s pumpkin pies.
One of my second-grade arithmetic homework assignments called for writing down the numbers from one to five hundred in a tablet. It was boring as hell. I hated it, and I let Daddy know I hated it. But the night I was complaining about that assignment happened to be the night before Thanksgiving. Not surprisingly he was baking pumpkin pies, which were almost as good as Cindy’s venison stew.
The next day, when it was time for dessert, he came to the table with one of his freshly baked pies in hand along with a knife, a sheet of paper, and a pencil.
“Finished with your homework assignment?” he asked.
I nodded.
“And when you wrote down all those boring numbers at school this week, where did you start—with what number?” he asked.
I thought it was a trick question, because Daddy was good at those. “Number one, I guess,” I said.
“Right,” he said, moving the pie until it was directly in front of me. “Now, how many pieces of pie do you see here?”
“One,” I said.
“Right again.” He drew a circle on the paper and wrote the number one on it. Then he took the knife and drew a line directly through the middle of the pie. “How many pieces do you see now?” he asked.
“Two,” I answered.
“Right again,” he told me. “I just cut the pie in half—into two pieces.” On the paper he drew another circle with a line through it. On each side he wrote 1/2 and 1/2. “Now, if you take those two half pies and add them together, what do you have?”
“A whole pie?” I asked.
“Bingo.”
He sliced the pie again, this time into quarters, and then drew another circle on the papers, this time adding 1/4 notations. “We now have four quarters. If you add those pieces together, what do you get?”
This was starting to be fun. The idea that those boring numbers could be broken into pieces somehow made them more interesting, and this time I knew the right answer before I said it aloud. “A whole pie!”
“Atta girl,” Daddy said, beaming at me. Then, to my dismay, he cut into the pie again. The next set of pieces were a lot smaller than the first ones had been. I had been hoping for one of those quarter slices, although the eighths weren’t that bad. But then he divided it again, this time into sixteenths. Those pieces were tiny.
“So now you get to choose your piece of pie,” he said. “What size do you want—a quarter or five sixteenths?”
So I counted the tiny slices off one by one, touching the crust with my fingers. “Five sixteenths,” I told him confidently, and that’s what he dished up for me—a piece that was made up of five sixteenths. I could see at a glance that it was bigger than a quarter. Once he slathered the five-sixteenths piece with a layer of whipping cream and set it in front of me, the fact that my portion was made up of five separate pieces was completely invisible. He was the one stuck with less than a quarter.
We enjoyed our dessert, but once we’d both cleaned our plates, Daddy reached into the pocket of his coveralls and pulled out two of his wrenches. His tools were always perfectly clean, and the numbers on them were clearly visible. One was labeled one inch and the other was five sixteenths.
“From now on,” he said, “when it’s time to put away tools, you’ll be in charge of the wrenches. Each wrench goes in a certain slot in the appropriate tool drawer. Both the wrenches and their slots are clearly marked. When I’m working and call for a wrench of some size, you’ll be my gofer and bring it to me on the double. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
“And when we’re done for the day, it’ll be your responsibility to put them back in the right places so it’ll be easy to find them again when we need them.”
From then on, that’s how it worked with me putting away his wrenches Eventually I didn’t even have to read the labels to know which was which. I could tell just by looking at them.
By the time fourth grade rolled around and everyone else in my class was struggling with fractions, I was in my element. Thanks to Daddy’s pumpkin pie, I went straight to the head of the fraction class. I remember Mrs. Markham, the teacher, telling me that since fractions were so easy for me, maybe I should consider being a mathematician or a teacher when I grew up.
I remember shaking my head. “I don’t think so,” I told her. “I want to be a mechanic, just like my daddy.”
With my tools cleaned and properly put away that Saturday, I banked the fire in the garage’s woodburning stove so the garage would stay warm overnight and I wouldn’t have to start the fire from scratch in the morning. I had winterized Maude today. Tomorrow I’d do the same thing for Cindy’s Jeep Cherokee. Since Cindy isn’t the kind of person who gives her car a name, she calls her vehicle, the “Jeep.”
I went inside, shed my coveralls, washed up, and headed for the kitchen, intent on my daughter-in-law’s venison stew rather than on Daddy’s pumpkin pie.
It turns out Cindy Winkleman is my daughter-in-law in much the same way Daddy was a widower—which is to say not exactly. Fifteen years ago, just back from a honeymoon trip to Hawaii, my son, Tad, stopped by the house with his bride in tow and asked if Cindy could stay with me for a couple of days while he flew down to Seattle to take care of some “unfinished business.” That was the last time either Cindy or I saw him. He was alive when he left for Seattle and came back home as ashes in a funeral urn.
It turns out Tad’s “unfinished business” had to do with a previous wife whose divorce hadn’t quite been finalized by the time he and Cindy tied the knot. That was the same stunt Tad’s father, Larry Rhomer, had pulled on me years earlier. Daddy may have taught me all there was to know about auto mechanics and hunting and fishing, but he hadn’t taught me diddly-squat about dealing with men. That ill-fated marriage blew apart a month or so after I turned up pregnant and prior to my getting around to changing my maiden name. When the dust settled and the divorce was final, I was still Twinkle Winkleman, and once Tad was born, Winkleman was his last name, too.
