The Miss Fortune Series: Nearly Departed (Kindle Worlds Novella) (7 page)

And then I
imagined his response.

Thanks for
the warning. Have a nice life. Bye-bye.

“So, when
people found out who the real Bradley was, did you lose friends?”

French Fry
shook his head. “No. I found out who my real friends were.”

I sighed. That
was the problem. I didn’t want to know who would stay and who would walk away.

It took two
hours of adding prosthetics and makeup, creating lines and wrinkles, and wig
styling before French Fry allowed me to view his masterpiece—my face. Actually,
Cookie’s face.

He handed
me a mirror. “I present to you: evil incarnate.”

I’m glad I
wasn’t chewing gum at the time or I would have choked on it.

“Holy crap!”

“Hmm-hmm.
You asked for it.” French Fry turned in the direction of the kitchen, where he had
exiled Gertie and Ida Belle two hours earlier. “Ladies, she’s ready for you.”

Gertie ran
into the room. Ida Belle was close behind. I looked up at them. Gertie screamed
and dropped a piece of coffee cake. Ida Belle clasped a hand over her mouth.

French Fry
held up his hand and flicked his fingers toward himself. “Praise. I want to
hear some praise.”

“You’re
scary good,” Ida Belle said.

Gertie
nodded. “I’m afraid to go near her.”

“Now you’re
talking,” French Fry said, gathering his makeup and accessories. “FYI, when
that dreadful Cookie woman does finally bite the dust, I would appreciate if
you suggest to her next of kin that I NOT do her makeup. This has been a very
traumatic experience for me.”

“Think how
I feel
looking
like her,” I said, still staring at Cookie in the mirror.
I saw a few pieces of something hanging from my face and neck. “I think
something weird happened here. What are these things?” I touched one of them.

“Don’t
touch!” French Fry screamed at me. “Those are skin tags. Her face is covered
with them. And that brown-crusty thing on the side of your nose? Wart. I had to
mix a few of my powders to get the color right.”

I looked
closely at my image in the mirror. “You gave me nose hairs?”

French Fry
nodded. “You probably thought I was tweezing your nose hairs, didn’t you? No. I
was gluing some in. When you’re done with this sick masquerade, you need to
yank real hard to pull them out. Expect a nosebleed.”

“What about
her teeth?” Gertie asked.

French Fry
picked up a row of fake teeth from the table. “These slip on over her own. And,
if you’ll notice, Fortune, I added some latex to make your ears longer. Did you
know ears continue to grow throughout life? Well, they do. Older people have
bigger ears.”

I noticed
both Gertie and Ida Belle tugging at their ears.

“You’re
magnificent, French Fry.” And I meant it. I’d been done up by CIA makeup
artists, and I don’t think one of them produced the type of results French Fry had
just achieved.

“Yes, in
fact I am magnificent, dear,” he said in his French Fry voice. “I’m fabulous
and wonderful. And, sadly for you, I must go.”

Ida Belle
picked up her purse. “How much do we owe you?”

French Fry
waived his hand at me. “Do you really think I would take money after turning a
beautiful woman into this?”

“We have to
pay you something,” I said.

“Oh you
will. Someday I’m coming back to Sinful and turning you into the goddess
lurking somewhere inside your rough exterior. You owe it to me, bitch.”

I swallowed
hard. “Are you sure you won’t take cash?”

He shook
his head. “When you least expect it, I will be back for a girls’ day out. We’ll
shop for shoes, sit on park benches and whistle at all the hot men we see, and
then we’re coming back here and I’m doing your makeup. Ta-ta.”

Arms loaded
down with his makeup bags and prosthetic kits, French Fry strutted to the front
door. He rolled his eyes and sighed. “Hello.”

Gertie ran
to the door and opened it for him, waving to him as he sauntered down the
walkway. She then closed the door.

I ran my
hand lightly over my face. “It feels like I gained a hundred pounds with all
the stuff he had to add to my face.”

Gertie winced.
“Those are the most realistic skin tags I’ve ever seen. God help me, I want to
snip them off.” She bit her hand.

Ida Belle
stared at my chest. “Amazing. How did he get your boobs to sag?”

“They’re
not mine. My real boobs are smashed back with an ace bandage. The saggy ones
are prosthetics.” I squeezed one of them. “Can’t feel a thing.”

Gertie
reached over and gave them a squeeze. Ida Belle slapped at her hand. “Do that
again and I’ll have to have my eyeballs removed.”

The aroma
wafting in from the kitchen beckoned me. “Did you cook something?”

“Hmm-hmm.
We thought you’d be hungry after all this,” Gertie said, walking into the
kitchen. I trailed after her in the wheelchair.

She went to
the stove and lifted the lid off the dutch oven. “I remembered Delphine saying
this was her mom’s favorite. Cabbage soup. It’s actually the recipe that caused
the gas that killed poor Missy LeFort ten years ago.”

“We’re
hoping it’ll give you that
I’ve got gas face
that Cookie’s known for,”
Ida Belle said.

“Why don’t
I just fake it?”

Ida Belle
placed her hands on her hips and stared down at me. “This is Mission Next-to-Impossible.
If you’re going to survive another outing at the Swamp Bar you have to make a
believable Cookie.”

“And no
amount of latex is going to fake that sour face,” Gertie said as she scooped a
ladle full of soup into a bowl. “When you’re done with this bowl, I’m feeding
you another. I hope to get a few bowls down you before tonight.”

I opened my
mouth to protest, but then stopped. An operative needs to do everything
possible to pass while in enemy territory. And I was definitely going into
enemy territory.

If I wanted
to return home alive from my mission, I had to be Cookie—warts, gas-face and
all.

The sun bid goodbye to another day
in Sinful. An hour to go before I would wheel myself into the Swamp Bar in an
effort to find a potential killer.

I’d been
living in Cookie’s chair all day. Eating the foods Cookie ate. Watching old
Hee
Haw
reruns that Cookie watched. I even made a call to Walter’s store
pretending to be Cookie, complaining about a bottle of fizz-less Coke he sold
me.

“Where are
the little bubbles in my Coke?” I had screamed at him when he picked up. “If I
wanted to drink something brown with no bubbles I’d go out and get me a glass
of swamp water. You want me to drink swamp water?”

“No, Miss Cookie,”
Walter said to me.

Gertie had listened
while I made my prank call, holding her hand over her mouth to keep from
laughing. I must have been convincing because Walter apologized, offering to
comp me a brand, spanking new two-liter bottle of Coke the next time I came
into the store.

I was
ready.

Eighty-thirty
finally arrived. Gertie left the house first, in order to scout for any nosy
neighbors lurking about. Luckily there were only a couple of teenage girls
sitting on my neighbor’s low brick wall surrounding his yard. They were
engrossed in some emotionally charged discussion about some guy named Wyatt who
was found sucking face with some girl named Ashley. They wouldn’t be a threat.
At least to me. Couldn’t say the same for Wyatt and Ashley.

I wheeled
myself down my walkway to a van Ida Belle had borrowed for the night from one
of the Sinful Ladies; it was equipped with a wheelchair lift. A cane rested on
my lap. Ida Belle said Cookie could walk with a cane, but that after her
daughter, Delphine, started whizzing around in her mobility scooter, Cookie
insisted on wheels of her own. She would still get up and walk if the occasion
called for it, like a square dance at the senior center, or, Ida Belle was told
by an informant, a game of pool at the Swamp Bar.

We were a
few feet away from the van when Ida Belle, who walked by my side, whispered,
“Uh-oh, we’ve got trouble.”

Following
her gaze, I saw the sheriff’s department SUV pull up in front of the neighbor’s
house and stop.

Carter
stepped out and shut the door.

My pulse raced.
My hour of reckoning was coming sooner than I thought. It was one thing to fool
a drunk in the Swamp Bar. But, Carter?

“Ladies,”
Carter said, walking toward us. But his focus was totally on me. “Miss Cookie?”
He arched an eyebrow. “What are you doing here?”

I scrunched
my face. “What?”

“He asked
what you’re doing here, Cookie,” Ida Belle screamed.

“None of
your business,” I said to him.

“Delphine’s
a little under the weather,” Gertie said. “So we offered to keep her mother
company for the day.”

“Really?
That’s… unusual for you, isn’t it?”

“Are you
saying we’re not kind enough people to want to lend a hand to Sinful’s elders?”
Ida Belle asked, playing up her indignation by placing her hand on her hip.

“No, it’s
just… What with all you’ve been through with the funeral… And I’ve never seen
you take an interest in Cookie.”

“Your
zipper’s down!” I screamed.

Carter
looked down.

“Ha-ha,
made you look,” I said, pulling my head down into my shoulders.

Ida Belle
walked around the van and opened the side passenger door. “We should get her
back to Delphine’s house.”

“O-kay,”
Carter said, still confused. “Well, you have a nice rest of the evening, Miss Cookie.”

He headed
toward my front door.

“She’s not
home,” Gertie said. “We brought Cookie over to see if Fortune could recommend
some books to her, being a librarian and all. But she wasn’t home.”

“Yeah,” Ida
Belle said, coming back around and grabbing my chair. “Then I remembered she
was going out with Ally tonight. I think a late movie or something.”

“Huh. Well,
okay. I was just checking on you three. When I didn’t find you at your houses I
thought I’d try Fortune’s.”

“You know,
you don’t have to check up on us so much,” Ida Belle said. “I bet whoever
rigged the casket is long gone by now.”

“But it is
sweet of you,” Gertie said, reaching her hand out to pat Carter’s shoulder.
“We’re so lucky to have you around, aren’t we, Ida Belle?”

“Yeah,
lucky.”

“Where’s a
puppy?” I screamed.

“No, we
said we’re lucky!” Gertie yelled.

“Lucky?” I
screamed. “I haven’t been lucky since that sailor in seventy-five! Oh, jeeze, who
just cut one?”

“Was that
my radio?” Carter asked. “I have to go.” He turned and sprinted for his car,
yelling back over his shoulder to call him if we noticed anything out of the
ordinary. He burned rubber before his door had fully slammed shut.

Once he squealed
around the corner at the end of the block we sprung into action. Using the
van’s lift, my chair and I were hoisted up and secured inside. Ida Belle hopped
into the driver’s seat and Gertie slid into the passenger side.

“Time for
Mission Next-to-Impossible,” Gertie said, flashing me a thumbs-up as Ida Belle
peeled away from the curb.

The drive
to the Swamp Bar lasted about thirty minutes, the last ten minutes of it on a
bumpy dirt road that I would never recommend to anyone who had eaten four bowls
of cabbage soup.

If the
parking lot was any indication, the Swamp Bar was already packed.

“I wish I
could go in and watch Fortune work,” Gertie said, as she and Ida Belle lowered
me from the van to the ground. “I remember the first time I dressed as a little
old lady on a sting. Do you remember, Ida Belle?”

“How could
I forget? We found ourselves in the middle of a riot.”

“We were
investigating a crooked Bingo game down at the senior center,” Gertie explained.
“Well, old Barbara Cook accused old Edna Fusilier of stealing her lucky dauber.
So Edna grabbed a dauber off the table and started daubing Barbara’s face with
it.”

Ida Belle
laughed. “Then old One Leg Parsons took his prosthetic leg off and bashed
Barbara on that hump she had on the back of her neck. Sheriff Lee had to call
in reinforcements to get it under control.”

Gertie
shivered. “I still can’t go to a Bingo game without having flashbacks.” She
pulled her gaze at me. “Don’t worry, Fortune, I don’t think anyone in there’s
packing a dauber.”

“Lucky me,”
I said. “You brought a thermos of coffee, right?”

Ida Belle
nodded.

“And a
backup disguise for me, in case I have to go in and perform an extraction,”
Gertie said.

“Good.
Settle in, girls, because this could be a long night.”

Ida Belle
shut the van door. She and Gertie threw me a thumbs-up and scurried back into
their front seats.

Mission
Next-to-Impossible had officially begun.