Aloe and Goodbye, page 14
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I repeated, not sure what else I could say. I wanted to quiz Meg about where she’d been the night her mother died. Could Meg be a cold-blooded killer? She undeniably had a reason. It seemed she could use the money, especially being a newly single mother with two kids. Speeding her mother’s demise along might have been a way for her to cash in on the Stramtussle estate and give her the financial stability she clearly needed.
“I’m sorry about Mrs. Heard too. To lose two important women in your life—that’s got to be hard.”
“You tell me—how were your interactions with Mrs. Heard?” Meg asked, a sharpness in her voice I hadn’t expected.
“The last time I talked with her we had an argument about Allie’s placement test.”
“I know! That was par for the course for her. That was a weekly occurrence. She wasn’t the beloved principal she appeared to be.”
This was news to me.
“I’m just curious. You know the day we came into the office to sign Allie up for school, Mrs. Heard couldn’t find her red glasses. Do you remember that?”
“Do I ever! She hounded me about those damn glasses for days. She accused me of stealing them—imagine that. I’d just lost my mother, and had come to work to distract myself from the depression I was suffering. There was Mrs. Heard, ransacking my desk looking for her glasses. It was insane! She never did find them.”
“Darla Cotton said Mrs. Heard never came back after setting up the pumpkins at the hayride. Did you see her at the end of the day?” I asked.
“No, but I left early and took the kids to their dad’s, so if she came back, I wasn’t at the office.”
Just then, the baby started crying, and Boomer leaped up and barked, sending the boy into an even higher volume of sobbing.
“Is that Ricky, my mom’s dog?” She gave her son another piece of cookie, and he calmed down a little, but I could tell he wasn’t going to be happy in his high chair for much longer.
“As a matter of fact, it is.”
“We’ve been looking for him,” Meg reached down to pet the dog, who returned her affection with several licks. My stomach lurched. Could Meg want the dog? Allie would be devastated to lose Boomer now.
“Darla Cotton told us he needed a home, so we adopted him.”
“Maybe she should have asked me first,” Meg said, grabbing his collar and protectively pulling the dog toward her. He looked up at her and wagged his tail.
“Allie’s become really attached to Boomer.” I clenched my jaw at the thought of losing the dog.
“Boomer? This is Ricky—didn’t Darla tell you that?”
“She did, but we didn’t really like that name.” I certainly couldn’t tell that I’d watched someone named Ricky kill a man in cold blood just a few weeks before.
“You can have him, I’ve already got my hands full. But just so you know, that dog meant the world to my mom. So, if I ever hear you’ve not been treating him well, then I will take him away from you.” Her voice was taut with certainty. I knew she’d be someone I could never cross—a real mama bear. I could relate; I was one as well.
“So, are you working? Pretty tough getting a job around here,” Meg said, thankfully changing the subject.
“I’m going to be working at the Hilltop Hotel.”
“And who’s looking after Allie?”
“I’ve got her set up with Flora Lane. She seems nice, though a little eccentric,” I said, thinking that I’d already made a commitment to her, but wondering if that had been the right decision.
“You want to stay away from her. She’s a few crayons short of a box.” Just then, the baby reached for Meg, his cookie crumbled in bits on the high chair tray and all over his hands and face. “Sorry, I need to get Gus cleaned up! I’ll send Allie out,” Meg said, hoisting the baby from his chair and rushing off.
“Are you ready to go?” I asked Allie, as I opened the door to let ourselves out. Allie beamed and nodded. Whew! It seemed like the playdate had gone well.
I was glad Boomer was coming home with us. I opted not to tell Allie about Meg’s attachment to the dog, since I didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily about him being taken from us.
I wondered what Meg meant about Flora. I was usually a good judge of character—okay, maybe not a great judge—but I saw nothing seriously wrong with Flora. Perhaps Meg had some history with her, which wouldn’t be surprising, given that everyone seemed to have a history with everyone else in Paradise.
On our way home, we heard the distant sound of coyotes howling. It was always a thrill for us, a reminder of where we were, in an utterly different place than the world we left behind. Most of the sounds we’d hear in New York around this time were the horns of taxi cabs during rush hour. The coyotes’ yipping seemed much more soothing as we walked through town on this warm fall evening.
Once home, I gave Victor a call.
“Victor! Guess what?”
“You got a job,” he replied.
“What a party pooper. You’re supposed to let me tell you that, not guess. But you’re right. I have a job.” I told Victor about my job at the hotel and how I’d even located a babysitter for Allie. “And you know what else this means?”
“I already brought you a bag of dirt, two lamps and a computer,” he said, an amused tone to his voice.
“Again, with the guessing. You’re supposed to let me tell you!”
“I’m proud of you, Ruby. It looks like you and Allie are really settling in.”
“Yes, but …”
“But what?”
“Crazy things are happening here.”
“What kind of crazy?”
“There was a hayride the other night—”
“Hayride? How quaint.”
“Here’s the not-so-quaint part. There was a spooky scene with a dummy who had been stabbed. Instead, it was real. The school principal had been attacked with a pitchfork, and was lying dead across a hay bale. I’m just wondering if the murder is connected to the one that happened the first night we arrived.”
“You can stop wondering,” Victor said.
“Why? Because you know that they are?”
“Of course not. That’s not my department. My department is keeping innocent folks safe. Just as long as they stay innocent, got it?”
“Got it. But—”
“No buts. I want you to go about your business. Work on your garden.”
“I’ve got my very own cactus—it’s not in a pot yet, but it’s a start. And I have some cuttings that I got from Luke.”
“Luke?”
“He’s the cook at the local café, and also a farmer.”
“You’re making friends right and left, aren’t you?” He didn’t know just how close a friend Luke was rapidly becoming. I returned to the subject of cacti. “Succulents come in all of these fun shapes and colors—and it’s really difficult to kill them. And I’ve got myself a compost pile, but that’s not enough. Though, I could use some wood to make a nice compost bin and lid to hold it and a big roll of shade cloth ….”
“Compost bin? Shade cloth? You really are going to become a farmer, like your new friend Luke?”
“Well, maybe not a farmer, but some sort of gardener. You know … a horticulturist!”
“Horticulturist?” Victor snorted and laughed. “I’ve never known anyone who had that as a job!”
“You’ve probably never met an astronaut, and I can assure you that’s a real job. Besides, I’m also working at the hotel, so I have my bases covered,” I said, proud that after my false start at the feed store, I was finally getting settled into a job. “So, any chance I can get some of those garden supplies?”
“You show me you can keep a job, I’ll see what I can do about your requests,” Victor said. There was lightness in his voice, like he was pleased we were getting acclimated. “And how is Allie doing? Did you get things sorted out at school?”
“I’m still working on that. She’s made a new friend, so that’s helped a lot. Another Stramtussle.”
“Stramtussle? As in the woman who died next door?”
“Her granddaughter, Lucy. This town is lousy with Stramtussles.”
“Just try and stay away from them. They’re going to make your life complicated,” Victor said. It was good advice that I doubted I could follow.
EIGHTEEN
Thursday was my first day at the Hilltop Hotel. I stopped at Bette’s Place for lunch before my shift started. I took a seat in a booth to wait for Darla. Within minutes, Bette was in front of me with a mug and a pot of steaming coffee, but she’d lost her usual cheery disposition. While she moved quickly, her smile was missing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I can’t talk about it here, sugar,” she replied, in a shaky voice. I noticed there was no engagement ring on her hand. Uh-oh. Had her engagement with Derek Stramtussle already ended? If so, that would possibly be one of the shortest engagements in history.
That Derek Stramtussle was a piece of work. I liked Bette, but I had to wonder why she’d want him. He seemed sort of creepy to me, just a little too slick to be trusted. She had to know about him. Everyone knew everything about everybody. And that worried me—if someone found out who I really was, everyone would know within a matter of days, make that hours. If that happened, I had no doubt Victor would move us to a new town. I didn’t want that. This quirky town had grown on me, and Allie was happier than I’d seen her in weeks.
“I’m worried about you. Will you come over to my house after I get off work? I want to hear about what happened,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll find my ring by then.”
“I hope so, but if not, please visit me—maybe I can help. I’m starting my job at the Hilltop Hotel today, but I’ll be home and waiting for you after seven.”
It looked like getting tangled in the web of gossip that the town ran on was inevitable. But gossip aside, I was concerned about Bette. She was usually such a ray of sunshine. Seeing her this upset really worried me. We made a plan for her to visit me after my shift.
Darla arrived a few minutes later and we both ordered Reuben sandwiches for lunch, not really a healthful choice, but it reminded me of the deli I used to go to in my old neighborhood. I missed New York, but somehow, it had become more of an abstraction, not so much a real place to me as it once had been.
“I got some results back from the lab on the piece of plastic you found. They won’t have time for a couple of weeks to do DNA testing, but it’s definitely the temple from a pair of eyeglasses.” Darla said. “But I’m still not sure they belong to Mrs. Heard. Last Friday when I went to see her—the day of the hayride—she wasn’t in the office and neither was Meg, so I have no confirmation that those glasses belonged to Mrs. Heard.”
“But I do! I asked Meg about them when I picked up Allie from a playdate.”
“And?”
“Mrs. Heard most definitely had lost her red glasses. Apparently, she gave Meg quite a bad time about it—accused her of stealing them,” I said. “So that piece must be from Mrs. Heard’s glasses.”
“Looks that way. Though it doesn’t really help us much. Now that she’s dead, she’s no longer a suspect.”
“She could have killed Mrs. Stramtussle, and then someone turned around and killed her,” I said.
“True, but I somehow think it was the same person. I mean, how many killers could we have in this town?”
That was an excellent question.
After lunch, I waved at Luke in the kitchen as Darla and I left.
“So, are you going to tell me what happened with you and Luke?” Darla asked.
“Oh! Look at the time. I’ve got to run, or I’ll be late for my first day on the job.”
“I can’t believe you’re not going to tell me,” Darla said with a heavy sigh.
“Maybe someday!”
I arrived at the Hilltop Hotel at one o’clock. Henry met me at the front desk and gave me the standard-issue black polyester blazer along with a silky bow to wear around the collar of my blouse. They were horrifying. I was a good sport and put them on, looking sufficiently funereal to work at a haunted hotel.
I spent the afternoon learning how to check people into their rooms on the computer. That was easy. It was a challenge when I realized that hauling patrons’ luggage to their rooms was also part of my job description. Fortunately, there were only a few customers that day, but I could imagine how difficult it might be if the hotel had no vacancies. I hoped when that happened Henry might see his way clear to hiring a bellman.
On a break, I called Flora to make sure Allie had made it to her shop safe and sound. Flora said, yes, of course Allie was with her and had been a great help in locating a rattlesnake, then abruptly hung up the phone. A rattlesnake. I really didn’t want to know what that was about. Perhaps Meg Stramtussle was right—Flora was insane. I could only hope she was crazy in a good way.
About an hour before my shift was to end, Henry showed up at the front desk to see how things were going.
“Fine, no problems. I haven’t had any issues with the computer or helping customers. Everything’s great,” I said. Just then, I spotted one of the guests, Mrs. Hess, chugging toward me down the hall. She arrived at the front desk with a beet-red face and a grimace. This would be my first customer service challenge, and I had to do it while my new boss watched.
“We haven’t seen a single ghost. We were promised paranormal phenomena,” Mrs. Hess smacked her palms on the reception counter. “Why else would we stay in a haunted hotel?” she asked indignantly. Before I could say a word, Henry took over. Rats! I’d already blown it.
“I’m sorry about that. Sometimes the spirits take a little while to settle down before they appear,” Henry said.
What a load of crap.
“Why don’t you sit right here in this comfy chair.” Henry guided the woman to an overstuffed chair with a good view down the short hall to the elevators. “Ruby, why don’t you get Mrs. Hess a glass of port? Wouldn’t you like that?” he asked the woman.
Mrs. Hess nodded appreciatively from her seat while Henry returned to his place behind the counter. As I passed Henry with the glass of port, he slipped his hand under the countertop and discretely pressed a button. I presented Mrs. Hess with her glass of port, and as I turned, I saw the elevator doors open, close, and then the elevator began to ascend. We watched as the arrow ticked up past each floor number and then down again on the dial above the door. The elevator doors opened again, with no one on board.
Mrs. Hess gasped and tossed back her port.
“Was that the ghost you told me about, who rides the elevator each night around this time?” Mrs. Hess asked Henry.
Henry gave her a knowing nod. “Yes, it might be.”
Satisfied, Mrs. Hess returned to her room a few minutes later, once it became clear that the invisible man wasn’t going to repeat his trip.
I turned to Henry.
“Are you going to explain to me what the heck happened just now?”
“You’ve got to give them what they want. The guests are going to be disappointed if they don’t see some sort of supernatural events when staying at a haunted hotel.”
“And your little remote-controlled elevator stunt provides that.”
“That, along with some other features.”
“Do you mind telling me what other features?” I asked. I was getting more disgusted by the minute. Basically, this guy was a charlatan, a scam artist. He brought people to his hotel under false pretenses. His hotel wasn’t what he claimed it to be, but then again, neither was I. However, I had reason to misrepresent myself—my life depended on it. But Henry? Did his life depend on it? I doubted it, but certainly, his livelihood could. If customers only came to see the hauntings, then he might not have a single paying guest without his special effects.
“Ah well, those are trade secrets,” Henry said, wiping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. “But as you continue to work here, I’ll show you some of the other ways we enhance our guests’ experience.”
This seemed like a total charade to me. And the old version of me would have called him on it. The new me needed a job. I smiled and nodded. One thing was clear, I didn’t feel nervous about being in a haunted hotel since it wasn’t actually haunted.
NINETEEN
Having gotten off work a little early, I retrieved Allie from Flora’s shop, and all the way home, Allie chattered about how much fun she’d had at the store. I was relieved to hear the snake was a taxidermy rattlesnake and not, in fact, a live one. I was also relieved that Flora seemed to be working out. It was a step in the right direction. I wasn’t sure if the same could be said about me. While Allie had enjoyed being at Flora’s, she hadn’t gotten much homework done. After dinner, I sent her off to her bedroom to finish her assignments moments before a frazzled Bette showed up on my doorstep. She was in tears.
“Oh no! Bette! Please come in.” I ushered her to the armchair, where she collapsed. “Let me get you something to drink.” I dashed to the kitchen and was back a minute later with iced tea. “Here, drink this. You’ll feel better if you do.”
She drank and sat quietly. I wondered what awful things Derek Stramtussle had said to her.
“Now tell me, what did Derek do? Did he break up with you?” I asked once she’d calmed down enough to talk.
“What? No, of course not!”
“You’re upset, and you don’t have your ring on anymore, so I thought maybe you two had called off the wedding.”
“No. It’s not that at all. I lost my ring. Or maybe it’s been stolen. I just don’t know. But I’ve looked everywhere, and I simply can’t find it.”
“When was the last time you had it?”
“I took it off when I was working in the kitchen at the café. I thought I left it on the shelf above the sink, but maybe I put it in my pocket, I can’t really remember. When I went back for it a little while later, it was gone.”
