3 Loosey Goosey (6 page)

I pressed in the code to unlock my phone and hit messages.

Why didn’t I know your brother was in Helena? And what is this picture about?

Complete sentences. That was a good sign. At least she hadn’t completely gone off the deep end.

But the mention of a picture was not. Obviously, the photograph printed in the
News
today had also been featured in the online edition, which my mother read religiously.

My need to find Ben had just increased 100-fold. I’d already taken one fall for his goose. He could man up and take this one with our mother.

Chapter 5

When Kiska and I arrived at Dusty Deals, the shop was already hopping. Or at least the two occupants were... hopping mad, that was.

Betty, dressed in a conservative dove gray drop-waisted silk, held one end of a rectangular coffee table while Phyllis, wearing eye-searing hot pink, tugged on the other.

“It is not trash. It’s mid-century,” Phyllis proclaimed, giving the table’s top a jerk.

“This is an antique shop, not the local thrift store.” Betty pulled back.

“It’s Danish modern!”

Phyllis’ eyes narrowed and her brows lowered. It was Betty, though, that worried me the most. I could see a glimmer in her eye that boded ill for Phyllis and any merchandise that the Texan’s body might hit when Betty slung her out of the way.

I scrambled past Kiska, who had stopped to gawk, and wrapped my arms around the middle of the object de objection. Both women, apparently oblivious to my presence, continued to tug.

“Drop it!” I yelled. For once I must have gotten the tone of command right; women and dog alike turned their heads to look at me. “We don’t have time for this right now. I found the new chef dead under my brother’s car!”

It was a lot to blurt out, but the announcement did the trick. Betty and Phyllis both released their holds on the table and stepped back. Unfortunately, that left me holding forty pounds of maple by myself.

I staggered forward, almost hitting a stack of china before Betty and Phyllis jumped back in to grab the table and help me lower it to the ground.

“Yowza, girlfriend. You found another body?” Betty shook her head. “How’s Peter handling that?”

“Not Tiffany Williams! I dropped off pictures of some of our mid-century pieces there two days ago, and her landlord just called me back yesterday. He’s supplying her apartment furnished, but now... poor girl.” Distress shone in Phyllis’ eyes. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it was at Tiffany’s demise or the thought that her deal might be compromised.

Still, I had to appreciate that both women, in their own ways, expressed concern on how Tiffany’s death affected me and Dusty Deals before anything else.

They both, though, seemed to have missed the part about my brother.

Someone else hadn’t.

“And just where can I find your brother?”

Busy with the table and my news, Betty, Phyllis, and I had completely missed the tall, lanky, and arrogant Detective Stone entering the store. Kiska might have seen him, but if so, he’d decided the police officer wasn’t a likely prospect for cookies and had wandered off somewhere, probably to take a nap.

“Officer Miller said you left before giving us a contact number.”

“I was told I could leave.”

“By Detective Blake?”

The insinuation was obvious. I chose to ignore it by pretending interest in the placement of the table that Betty, Phyllis, and I had nearly smashed onto the floor.

I pushed it back a bit with my foot, then stepped away to assess its positioning.

“What is this, body number three, Ms. Mathews?”

It was, and he knew it. I turned to find Betty and Phyllis lined up beside me like guard dogs or geese. With Betty’s usual choice of clothing, the fowl comparison was a lot more accurate.

Betty flicked a bit of lint off her dress. “Someone has to find them.”

Stone glanced at my employee as if surprised to find someone else in the room with us. “True, but Ms. Mathews does seem to be developing a knack.”

“Perhaps you’re worried she will put you out of a job?” This from Phyllis. Her Texas accent added a bit of charm to the question, but the bite was still there.

Stone, however, missed both. He turned his attention back to me. “Your brother?”

I met his gaze. “Is staying at Moose Creek Campground. That’s all I know.” I wasn’t lying, and I refused to grovel.

“No phone?”

I shrugged. “I don’t have a number.”

“But you do have your family’s number. Surely someone knows how to reach him.”

“They’re vacationing, camping. No phones for a week.” I could bluff with the best of them when the deal was big enough and not having Stone contact my mother before she heard from Ben or me first was one gigantic deal.

“But you have a number...”

“Not on me. They’ll be checking into a cabin. My mother gave me the name, but I left it at home.”

“Really?”

I put on my best good girl face. “I can call you with it later if you like.”

“That would be lovely,” Stone drawled, sarcasm thick.

I smiled as bright as a mercury mirror.

A few minutes later, we were Stone-free.

I turned to Betty. “Did Ben call? Or Rhonda?”

“Nope, but I think I know where you can find them.”

Ten minutes later, I was at HA! headquarters, otherwise known as the local organic grocery store.

The back entrance was propped open with a cinder block. Taking that as an invitation, I waltzed inside.

The back room, a stock room, was filled with cardboard boxes and the scent of markers. Rhonda, Ben, and six others were stretched out on the concrete floor napping. A few feet away, a stack of posters sat beside a tower of blue painters tape.

Scattered across the floor were empty coffee cups, half-eaten tubs of hummus, and a bowl of something green that smelled suspiciously like dead fish.

I wrinkled my nose and kicked my brother in the foot.

He grunted.

I kicked him again, harder.

Rhonda sat up. “Lucy! What are you doing here?”

Ben threw out his arms and blinked his eyes. “Yeah, sis. You here to help?”

He’d always believed in fairy tales.

“Get up. You need to call Mom.”

When this didn’t elicit the race to action that I wanted, I kicked him again.

“Hey.” He grabbed for my leg, but fear of facing my mother made me swift. I danced out of his reach.

Rhonda, apparently not appreciating our sibling bonding, got to her feet and moved between us. “Lucy! What is going on?”

I hadn’t spoken to her since Ben’s arrival. She’d completely broken the number one rule of female friendship, picking a man over your friend. Then she’d compounded it by breaking a second rule – no dating a friend’s ex or relative. Period.

Or at least it appeared she was trying to break that rule.

For a moment, forgetting everything except her betrayal, I scowled.

Then my phone chirped, bringing me right back to the severity of my situation.

I stepped to the side so I was looming over my brother. “Tiffany Williams, the chef, is dead, and they found her body under the Lemon.” I waited a second for the news to soak in before adding my bombshell. “And mom wants you to call.”

Ten minutes later, we were gathered around a table drinking organic shade-grown free trade coffee, which I had to admit beat the beans out of the canned stuff I had at home, and discussing why Tiffany Williams might have felt the need to stretch out under Ben’s Lemon and die.

“She could have been messing with your brakes,” offered a twenty-something blonde named Hope, who obviously had little “hope” or trust in her hummus-eating heart.

“Or maybe she dropped something.” Another brain trust, this one male and named Xander, added.

“Or maybe someone put her there, hoping to cause trouble for HA!” A middle-aged hippie type offered this.

I gave him a skeptical look, but Hope jumped back into the conversation. “Has that happened before?” Adoration shone from her eyes.

Before the man could answer, Rhonda gave me a warning look. “Eric is the founder of HA! He’s also the owner of Food for Our Planet.”

“Responsible big business with a heart,” my brother explained.

Even I had heard of Food for Our Planet. There wasn’t a store in Montana, but I had seen them on a trip to Oregon a couple of summers ago. They also had a line of frozen foods that the grocery store we were sitting in carried and that Rhonda bought frequently.

I looked at the hippie with fresh eyes. If he owned a company that size, he had to be rich.

Rich and a fan of recycling and reusing. And I had a whole store filled with things to be reused.

I brightened my smile a bit and tried to look interested in his reply.

“Not to HA!, but other animal welfare and environmental protection organizations have been targeted. There are many groups that pretend to be consumer advocates that are really nothing more than fronts for factory farming, chemical companies, and mining. They set up websites that make false claims about funding and where donations go. So it is possible, and something we should keep in mind.”

“Definitely,” Hope added, her eyes bright and her head nodding.

My eyes rolled to the side. A kick under the table from Rhonda kept them from making full orbit.

“Well, before we panic, we should probably find out what she died of,” I added, feeling very prim and slightly superior. It was obvious I was sitting at a table of ozone addicts.

Still, the idea that someone had put Tiffany under Ben’s vehicle made me feel a tad better.

“They would be able to tell that anyway, wouldn’t they? That she’d been moved?” I asked the table in general, mainly because I hadn’t pinpointed one of them yet who seemed to have any more idea about such things than I did.

Ben, looking bored and a bit annoyed, said, “It doesn’t matter. They just found her body under my van. We don’t even know what killed her, and I was here all night.”

Well, then, he just had that all figured out, didn’t he?

“Fine. Call Mom and explain the picture she saw in the paper and why a police detective may be calling her. Then call Detective Stone.” I slid my phone across the table along with Stone’s business card, which, unfortunately, I had from the last dead body I’d found.

“I don’t use cell phones,” my brother explained, disdain clear on his face. “The mountain gorilla population has been cut in half because of mining to supply the U.S.’s hunger for new technology.”

I glanced at Rhonda, who had helped me choose my latest phone and the adorable Scooby Doo cover that adorned it.

Her gaze dropped to her bag where I guessed her own gorilla-endangering device lay.

While Ben went to find a landline and the other HA! workers went about gathering up their supplies, I wandered out into the customer area of the grocery store.

Rhonda followed.

“You’re mad,” she stated as I poked at a strange star-shaped fruit with my finger.

“I didn’t realize you were such a dedicated follower of HA!,” I replied.

“I had the T-shirt for a reason.”

I dropped my pretense of interest in the fruit bin to stare at her.

She tilted her head to the side. “Okay, they were giving them away last month when you bought $30 worth of Food for Our Planet meals. But I believe in their cause.”

At my skeptical look, she added, “I do!”

Maybe. But she believed more in the cause of finding herself a date. Which was fine, as long as the date wasn’t my brother.

She dropped her head. “I’ll leave him alone.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I can see it’s bothering you. So even though Ben and I have more in common than anyone I’ve met in years, I’ll leave him alone.”

Her accompanying hang-dog sideways look was probably meant to guilt me into saying “Oh, no, that’s okay. Take my brother.” But I had dealt with better guilt slingers than her.

I accepted her offer with a smile that showed no signs that I realized her ploy. Then, as happy as I’d been since before Ben’s arrival, I went to make sure he had done his part by calling our mother and Stone, and keeping both of them satisfied enough that neither came looking for me.

He was back at the table, working on more posters. He said Mom had been fine once he explained that Pauline had been lucky to escape with her little feathered neck intact, and that I had been the hero of the night.

“What about Stone?” I asked. My mother hearing I was a hero was great, but it wouldn’t get us far if Stone called her looking for her son in connection to Tiffany’s death.

“I’ll go by later. I have to get the Lemon anyway, and Rhonda says the station is close by.”

Also good, but not what I was worried about.

“No, did you tell Mom he might be calling?”

My brother, clearly obtuse, dropped his marker on the table and chose another one. “Why would I?”

“Because he’s going to call her if he doesn’t hear from you?”

One shoulder rose. “So?”

So, I was the child she could find. I was the child she would hold responsible for any perceived humiliation his actions —anyone’s actions – brought upon her.

I sputtered that out, along with a few other things that stemmed back to childhood and probably made no sense to anyone but myself, but dammit they were still important.

He shook his head. “You need to chill.”

I needed to chill? Easy for golden boy to say. I leaned forward, ready to reset his thermostat.

Rhonda, apparently once again confident in my love for her, hip checked me.

While I staggered to the side, she smiled and nodded and made polite noises loud enough to cover my mumbling comebacks. Then she grabbed me by the arm and steered me out the back door.

She got me all the way to my rig before I was able to think straight enough to express my thoughts clearly.

“I’m going to pluck his goose and have her for dinner.”

“Not today.” Then Rhonda shoved me in my rig and watched me until I drove away.

o0o

The next morning, I awoke to a non-blinking answering machine. I took this as a sign that Ben deserved to live another day and, hopefully, that he had done as he’d promised and visited Stone early enough that the detective had not found it necessary to search out my mother’s number.