Antiques Maul: A Trash 'n' Treasures Mystery Page 11

  “He’s not gonna be traveling as much,” she said with a smile. “And I’m already looking forward to this winter, cozy evenings by the fire….”

  Teen and Kev had been trying to have a baby for a couple of years now; no luck yet, but they seemed to be having a good time trying. She kept herself otherwise busy working at the Serenity Tourism Office, which allowed her flexible hours (like now).

  Tina took a sip of her frothy drink, then asked, “And how’s the new antiques business going?”

  She obviously hadn’t heard about the death of Mrs. Norton, so I recapped the events of yesterday morning, going light on the antics of one Vivian Borne.

  Tina shook her head. “How awful…how terrible. Poor woman…. She was a great teacher. I had her, too, you know. Really liked her. Strict but fair.”

  “Too bad life isn’t. Well, it’s strict. Just not fair.”

  She frowned. “Why in the world would Mrs. Norton keep a vicious animal like that around? She seemed more like the Chihuahua type to me. You know, nervous energy attracting nervous energy.”

  Dogs often did mirror their owners. (I’m not sure what that says about me and Sushi.)

  “Tell you the truth,” I said, “it’s more surprising that the animal went after her that way. He seemed more bark than bite.”

  “You’d run into the thing before?”

  I explained that we had, setting up our booth.

  “The mutt seemed devoted to her,” I said, “and vice versa. She said she was using the pit bull to protect the mall at night…instead of putting in a security system. But I have a feeling that was just an excuse. She liked having the company.”

  “Certain breeds can turn on you,” Tina said with a shiver, “even when you’re pretty sure the animal loves you.”

  “Kind of like men.”

  Tina didn’t disagree. Her eyes narrowed and she leaned forward. “What’s going to happen to the antiques mall now?”

  I shrugged. “I hope someone else will take it over. Mrs. Norton has relatives, though I don’t think in town. I was counting on that place to keep Mother out of mischief.”

  Tina nodded sympathetically. “La Dame Borne is still reeling from the playhouse disappointment, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes. She wanted to be director in the worst way, which I’m sure she would have been. But losing her best friend in the process put salt in a very melodramatic wound. Yesterday, when we found the body, and after?”

  “Yes?”

  I shook my head, sighed. “Mother misbehaved. Started spouting ‘murder’ again.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Only Mother would look at a mauling by a pit bull and see visions of Agatha Christie.”

  Tina’s smile went lopsided. “Well, hon—she’s had the playhouse stage taken away from her. That only leaves the streets of Serenity for her theatrics.”

  I held up a palm. “Stop. I’ll scream or cry or something. Sometimes I think getting involved in that murder last year, however well things turned out, was the worst thing that ever happened to us. Put all kinds of ideas in Mother’s head, wackier ideas even than usual.”

  Our conversation, thankfully, turned to more vital subjects, like the latest season of Battlestar Galactica, lawn prep for winter, and—exploring that most important of decisions—whether or not to buy gauchos.

  The more trivial our talk got, however, the more distracted Teen seemed. Even as self-absorbed as I can be, I could always read her, so I asked, “You have something else on your mind, don’t you?”

  She laughed. “I’m that transparent?”

  “No more than Barbra Streisand’s 1970s Academy Award outfit.”

  Tina said tentatively, “Well…maybe it’s none of my business.”

  “And this has ever stopped you?”

  She laughed. “It’s just…I really do wish you’d get off that Prozac.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Why? Most people prefer me mellow.”

  “Maybe. But, sweetie, mellow is simply not you.”

  I snorted. “And this is bad, how?”

  She sighed and sat forward, asking, “How long have you been on that stuff, anyway?”

  “Oh, I dunno…year, maybe.”

  Her eyes were slits. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t antidepressants supposed to be used for getting someone through a bad patch? Since when is a year a bad patch?”

  I shrugged. “Well, maybe I just have a lot of patches, and they’re all bad, and they’re sorta strung together.”

  She shook her head. “Honey, you’re using that junk as a crutch.”

  “For what, Teen?”

  “You tell me.”

  But I didn’t have to: The medication helped me not to feel anything. Numbed me from the disappointment dished out by Peggy Sue, protected me from the anger administered by Jake, and softened the loathing lobbed by Roger. If I weren’t on the stuff, I’d be crying into my pillow every night.

  She reached across and took my hand and her eyes held mine. “I think it’s time you faced life, sweetie, even if it hurts a little. How else are you going to begin the healing process?”

  “Same as always.” I jerked a thumb toward the door. “Retail therapy.”

  Tina smiled sadly, squeezed my hand, then drew hers away. “I won’t mention it again.”

  And she wouldn’t. That’s how good a friend she was.

  Tina stood and heaved a change-of-subject sigh. “Now…how about buying some gauchos?”

  “I will if you will,” I said. “But they’ll be out of style before we walk out of the store with our sacks.”

  And I took the last noisy slurp of my cinnamon mocha frappé with whipped cream and candy sprinkles, and rose to follow my BFF into battle.

  The air outside was crisp and cool, putting us in a perfect mind-set for looking at fall/winter fashions.

  Tina is the only person I can shop with and not get a migraine. We’re veterans of the shopping wars and have the scars to prove it. We’d honed our craft years ago by once hitting nine malls in the Chicago area over two days, and proved our mettle (and our friendship) by still speaking to each other at the end of the trip.

  I have some advice (big surprise) on shopping etiquette for beginners, and old hands, too.

  (1) No visiting while you shop with a friend or friends. Do your gabbing ahead of time, like we do. The most Tina and I ever say while looking at clothes is “Who shot the couch?” or “Does clown makeup come with this?” Mostly, we grunt.

  (2) No talking on the cell phone. Do you know what I do when someone yakking on a cell dares to come around the rack I’m sifting through? I start singing “Feelings,” nice and loud. With feeling.

  (3) Never shop with someone who doesn’t have the same taste in clothes as you. Nothing is worse than being dragged into Christopher & Banks when you want to go to Arden B.

  (4) Slower traffic, stand to the right! Sure, I like to browse…but if I come into contact with a woman on a mission (or on her limited lunch hour), I know enough to gangway. She’ll be gone in a nanosecond—and hopefully not with all the good stuff.

  (5) Don’t be a dressing-room hog. If you can’t make your mind up about something, don’t buy it. Or, step out of the room and ask the lineup of impatient women waiting their turn; we’ll tell you what we think and won’t mince words!

  October is Breast Cancer Awareness month (that got your attention, didn’t it?), and Ingram’s Department Store—where Tina and I were headed—had come up with a brilliant idea to encourage women to have a mammogram.

  Working in conjunction with the local hospital, the department store had the mobile X-ray unit park just outside their back entrance, and offered 20 percent off on everything in the store (cosmetics and jewelry, included!) to each lady who got one.

  The weeklong response was tremendous…. Because if there’s one thing a woman likes more than saving her own life, it’s getting a nice discount!

  Plus, no anxiety or tears to ruin the shopping day; X-ray result
s had to be forwarded to the hospital for evaluation and that would take a few days.

  As a pianist somewhere in the store mangled “Wind Beneath My Wings” into a crash landing, Tina and I filled out a form at a table just inside the department store. Then we were each handed a card with a number—mine was sixteen, hers seventeen; number eight was being paged at the moment over the store’s intercom.

  Tina and I split up (as prearranged), her heading for the shoe department, me to the David Yurman counter. I already had one of his rings for my left hand and wanted another for the right. (A word of caution: Don’t ever put David Yurman in a liquid jewelry cleaner; it’ll take off the signature black. I wish somebody had told me that!)

  As I tried on rings, the time flew by (not for the poor clerk helping an indecisive me) and just when I was zeroing in on one with a black pearl, my number got called. Curse you, Breast Cancer Awareness Week! I caught sight of Tina pawing through a sales rack of jackets (her weakness) and waved that I was heading to the back of the store.

  There, I presented my number to another woman, who checked off my name, handed me a discount coupon, and ushered me outside, watching to make sure I really entered the trailer-size X-ray vehicle and didn’t sneak around to the front of the store with my coupon. (You can’t trust anybody these days.) (Including me.)

  Once inside the mobile unit, I slipped off my jacket and bra, and a female technician assisted me in getting my left breast into the jaws of torture, which she kept squeezing until I hollered uncle.

  She chided me to “take it like a man,” and I commented that if a man had to have his testicles squeezed in one of these things, a kinder, gentler machine would be invented pretty darn quick!

  She retorted that a little minor discomfort was a small price to pay for possibly saving my life, and I would have agreed, if I hadn’t been clenching my teeth in discomfort. Then the tech disappeared behind a protective partition and took the picture.

  The other boob getting squished didn’t hurt at all—go figure—but I would have bet a hundred smackers that a man held the patent on that machine.

  Clutching my 20 percent reward, I passed Tina coming out of the store just as I was going back in, and gave her a thumbs-up. This was not a gesture of pride in having taken responsibility over the care of my health, rather an acknowledgment that some really serious shopping was about to go down….

  Returning to the jewelry counter to close the deal on the Yurman ring, I happened to come upon a certain girlfriend of Peggy Sue’s, who was looking at a table display of particularly tacky Halloween sweaters. That a witch was interested in that holiday was no big surprise to me.

  Of all my sister’s gal pals, Connie Grimes was the most snobbish, conceited, arrogant, botoxed, and bitchy. Unsuccessfully, I tried to slip by before getting recognized.

  No such luck.

  “Weeeell, Brandy…” She always smirked when she saw me, like she knew something I didn’t, making the very utterance of my name seem like her own special and very hilarious inside joke. As usual, Connie was hiding her heft under voluminous Eileen Fisher.

  I smiled sweetly, “Hello, Connie…. Contemplating a Halloween sweater? I’d recommend the one with the witch with the rhinestone mole.”

  Her smirk smirked some more. “And who put a little troll like you in charge of fashion in Serenity?”

  I smiled sweetly. “Just thought my sister’s bestest best friend might appreciate a little help…. The large sizes are on the right, there….”

  Her smirk turned into a sneer. “I’ll tell you who could use a little help—you and that nutcase of a mother of yours!”

  She’d barely finished the sentence when I slapped her.

  Sometimes the Prozac works, sometimes the Prozac doesn’t work.

  Barrel-shaped Connie retaliated, bopping me alongside my head with her Dooney & Bourke bag. Head ringing, I punched her in her considerable stomach—that belly could hide underneath that Fisher smock, but it couldn’t run….

  Connie staggered back into the table display, where she and the Halloween sweaters took a tumble and went down in a blur of fall colors.

  Then Tina was holding me back, and a security guard from the store arrived and helped Connie—sprawled down there like a cow giving birth—up onto her feet, while quite a crowd of shoppers gathered. The onlookers’ reaction was appropriate to Halloween, too: amusement and horror, in various combinations.

  Connie, a hand clutching her tummy, sputtered to the security guy, “I want the police! That horrible creature assaulted me, and I’m going to press charges!” To me, she spat, “You’re going to be sorry you tangled with me, sweetheart!”

  I already was—I was pretty sure a playback of the department store’s surveillance tape would prove that I threw the first blow. Next time I’d have to make sure I wasn’t near one of those darn cameras.

  Tina whispered in my ear, “Honey, I take it back about the Prozac…. In fact, maybe you’d better increase the dosage.”

  I wasn’t in lockup long.

  To pass the time, I was mentally working on my cinnamon-mocha-frappé-with-whippedcream-and-candy-sprinkles defense, when the chief himself came around to spring me.

  Tony Cassato looked none too happy.

  Without a word, he opened the cell and motioned brusquely with two fingers to follow him, which I did, down one cold corridor, and then another, arriving at his office.

  I took the chair in front of his desk, and he sat behind it heavily, eyes boring into me like disgusted lasers.

  “What in the hell is the matter with you?” he mused rhetorically. “You’re how old? Thirty? And yet you act like an immature teenager.”

  Another dissatisfied customer.

  Tony continued: “Mrs. Grimes—Connie—has agreed with my decision not to bring charges. I explained that the shock of finding Mrs. Norton yesterday most likely led to you overreacting in this situation.”

  I muttered, “Thank you,” looking down at my hands in my lap. My nails could sure use a little TLC. That was what I got, giving up manicures to save a few bucks for mall crawling.

  “But you’re not going to get off so easy with me,” he said. “I’m going to see to it that you take an anger management class.”

  Which really pissed me off, but I held it in and said only, “Okay.”

  Tony studied me for a moment. Then: “You still seeing a psychiatrist?”

  “Psychologist.”

  “Who?”

  “Cynthia Hays.”

  He jotted the name down. Which meant that if I didn’t come clean with her at my next appointment, Tony was going to tattle on me.

  “I’m seeing her next week,” I said.

  “Good. How about your mother?”

  “Yeah, how about my mother?”

  “I mean,” he said tensely, “is she still seeing a psychologist?”

  “She sees a psychiatrist. She needs the heavy meds.”

  “I’m not surprised.” He shifted in his chair. “Listen, Brandy—it didn’t make it into the reports, but I’ve been told your mother was…acting out yesterday, at the crime scene.”

  I frowned. “Was it a crime scene?”

  He just stared at me, the kind of blank expression that precedes an executioner pulling the switch on Old Sparky. “Why do you ask?”

  “Uh…I just didn’t know if a dog was exactly a, uh…criminal. And don’t you need a criminal to have a crime scene?”

  “No criminal,” he said slowly, “seems required to have your mother make a scene. I am told she was talking murder and making inappropriate comments and asking inappropriate questions.”

  I gave him a pretend grin. “Yeah, that’s my mother! Would make a pretty decent sitcom, if this were 1958.”

  He pointed a finger at me—Uncle Tony Wanted Me. “I won’t have her sticking her nose into police business. I won’t have you helping her, either.”

  “I’m not! I don’t even know that she’s…doing anything.” I leaned forward and asked,
“Can you have a little empathy? Mrs. Norton was a friend, and Mother found the body. Of course that got her going! It was a shock, wasn’t it?”

  He just stared at me. “You were helpful with that other case, but I don’t want you making a habit of—”

  “Then it was a crime scene! Are you saying this is a murder? Did Mrs. Norton die of something other than a pit bull mauling?”

  He closed his eyes. He kept them closed for a long time. When he opened them, he seemed disappointed I was still there.

  Then he said, “Brandy, I just finished telling you this matter wasn’t any of your business. And you just asked me a series of questions that are none of your business. They are, in fact, police business.”

  “Sorry.”

  Tony shook his head, then stood, handing me my purse, which had been taken from me. “Where’s your car?”

  I told him it was still back at the mall, and he said he’d drive me there in his.

  That may have been the most uncomfortable ride I ever took, me hugging the passenger door, my chauffeur staring stonily ahead. By the time we got to my Buick, I had started to blubber, feeling sorry for myself (since no one else seemed willing to).

  When I snuffled snot, he snapped, “Do you have to do that?”

  “I…I don’t have a tissue.”

  He reached into his coat pocket, handed me a tissue, and I blew my nose, with a honk his car horn might have envied.

  Tony was shaking his head again, but more sad than disgusted. “I don’t get you, Brandy…. When I first met you, you were professional, focused…back when you helped the department initiate our new mental health program.”

  “Back when I had a life, you mean.”

  “And whose fault is that?” He handed me another tissue. “Here…stop crying, you big baby.”

  Second person today to accuse me of that.

  And I didn’t dare tell the chief that the real reason I was bawling was not his lectures about my behavior at the mall and my enabling of my would-be detective mother, rather that…

  …I didn’t get my David Yurman ring!

  I blew my nose again, and promised I’d try to behave myself. Tony spared me any parting words of advice, and I made my escape out the passenger door.