I went to church alone on Sunday. The Miss Nora was back at the marina, but Fitz said he needed the time to clean up after the latest guests. I thought about nagging him, but, in my experience, nagging a man tends to be about as effective as talking to a toaster.
But that evening he showed up with a nice chunk of prime rib left over from an onboard dinner. I fixed garlic mashed potatoes and salad, and offered the blessing I was now accustomed to doing. After dinner we sat together on the sofa and watched a DVD of an old detective movie. I wasn’t granting Fitz total “man of my dreams” status yet, but he was definitely perched on a high rung of the dream-man ladder.
Early next morning I called and talked to daughter Sarah and granddaughter Rachel before they left for classes at the University of Florida. Rachel had dumped her motorcycle boyfriend, which made Sarah happy. Sarah also said she and Rachel were both taking karate lessons, and I should too. I took some elderly clients to the Log Cabin for a lunch celebration of their 60th wedding anniversary. Fitz came over again late in the afternoon, and we raked leaves and cleaned up the back patio, then in the evening went to a fun high-school musical production of Beauty and the Beast. On Tuesday and Wednesday I made various limo runs, one an especially joyful trip where a new father brought his wife and twin babies home from the hospital, another evening run over to Seattle for a 90th birthday celebration at the Space Needle restaurant. Phreddie went along on most of the runs, most clients not even aware of him as he slept peacefully in his wedding-gown cat bed up front with me.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Tom came over and said Mary Beth had told him I could come over tonight if I’d like to talk to Trafalgar again. He said this with all the enthusiasm of a dad offering the family car to a teenage son for a night out.
I had no intention of going, but I was curious enough to ask, “Will it be just you and Mary Beth?”
“She has group sessions every Wednesday. It’ll probably be six or eight people.”
“How do these people hear about the sessions?” I’d never seen any “Come meet the entity” ads.
“I don’t know. I guess people just tell other people. Or sometimes Mary Beth meets someone and invites them. She meets a lot of people.”
“Through her work?”
“That, and she’s very friendly, you know. And into various activities.”
“What kind of people come?”
“Just people.” From Tom’s attitude, he hoped that wouldn’t include me. Apparently my behavior last time was right up there on the level of picking my teeth with a fork. I was almost tempted to tag along just to worry him.
“You don’t know anything about these people?”
“I checked up on a few of them,” he admitted. “I don’t want anyone hurting Mary Beth.”
“Hurting her how?”
“Oh, you know. Accusing her of something. Acting like she’s some kind of phony or weirdo.” He looked off toward the end of the street as if he were uncomfortable with this line of talk.
“So what did you find out? What kind of people are they?”
“Just people.”
Getting information out of Tom felt like trying to pull a nail out of a board with my teeth.
“Rich people? Poor people? Young people? Old people?”
“All kinds. Lots of people have messed-up lives and need help. Last time there was a waitress and a hairdresser. A couple of widows. Some retired banker. A girl with a ring in her nose. An older guy who kept wanting to talk about Atlantis. Look, do you want to come or not?”
For a couple of reasons I rather did want to go. I wanted Mary Beth to know she was distorting that verse in John about a “Helper” to make it apply to Trafalgar, but I also figured someone more experienced and knowledgeable than I am should discuss that with her. Perhaps I could get someone from church to talk to her. I was also curious about the “love gifts” these people offered. But none of that was enough to make me bypass Fitz’s warnings and my own feeling that this was dabbling in a dangerous unknown.
So I said, “No, but tell Mary Beth thanks anyway, okay?”
Tom managed not to jump up and down with glee that I wasn’t coming to humiliate and embarrass him. He departed with a noncommittal grunt.
On Friday I had an all-day run to take a six-person group down to see Mt. St.Helens, the volcanic mountain that had blown its top in an eruption back in 1980. I wasn’t expecting any more contact with Tom, but he rushed over as I was getting home just before dark.
“Are you busy tonight?” he asked.
I was too tired even to make some facetious remark about whether he was asking me for a date. “No, it’s been a long day and I’m through now. I don’t have any more appointments this evening.”
Non-astute Tom didn’t pick up on my tiredness, of course. “Good,” he said. “I want to surprise Mary Beth.”
“Surprise her how?”
“She had a big rush job this afternoon. People all of a sudden decided they had to make a place look better for an open house tomorrow. She said she probably wouldn’t get done before nine or ten o’clock. So we weren’t figuring on doing anything tonight, but I want to surprise her by picking her up with the limo when she gets home and taking her to Starbucks for one of those fancy coffee drinks she likes.”
Going through the drive-up line at Starbucks in a limo. I had to give Tom credit for more imagination than I figured he had. It even sounded rather romantic. But my energy level hovered somewhere around dishrag level.
“I’m really tired—”
Then Tom said the magic words. “I’ll pay extra for it being so late and all.”
My business mentality said to my energy level, Tough luck. You can take it easy when the figures in our bank account have a couple of commas in them.
“Okay. Nine-thirty?”
“Good.”
I warmed up leftover meat loaf for dinner, took a long, revitalizing soak in the tub, and relaxed in front of the TV with Phreddie in my lap. On the way over to pick up Mary Beth I intended to ask Tom how the group channeling session on Wednesday went, but he sat incommunicado in the rear seat this time.
At the house, the red Honda was already in the carport, so Mary Beth must have gotten home from her rush job. The living room was dark, but a dim glow showed that a light somewhere in the rear of the house was on. Again a jiggled curtain in the house next door suggested the neighbor was on duty. I wondered if she and Tom wouldn’t make a better match than he and Mary Beth; the couple that spies together stays together?
Again Tom jumped out of the limo and actually ran to the door, eager to offer his surprise. He punched the doorbell. The door didn’t open. Two more jabs at the doorbell, then an impatient knock on the door. Still no response.
So, even though the car was here, apparently Mary Beth wasn’t home. Or perhaps she’d been tired enough to go to bed early, and the glow was just a night light in the hall.
Tom started to turn away, but then, in what was surely an old-Tom type nosy gesture, he put his ear to the door. Then he tried the door, but it was locked. After a few more seconds he dashed through the carport, apparently headed for a back door.
Was something wrong?
I uneasily thought of what a local detective had once called my limo: a magnet for murder. The phrase reverberated in my head now. Yes, the limo and I had been entangled in a couple of murders. But surely not here, not now, not again—
Reluctantly I grabbed my cell phone and opened the limo door. I was about half way to the front door of the house when Tom burst through it as if a herd of entities in this dimension were after him.
“Tom, what—”
“Go!” he said. He’d left the door open behind him.
“Go where?”
“Just go. Now.”
“Tom, if something’s wrong we can’t just run off and leave!” My unspoken thought was, If there’s a dead body in there—
“You wanna go in and hand them a towel or something? Let’s go.”
I couldn’t think of any response to that unlikely statement, so I slid back in the limo and started the engine. Tom shut the rear door behind him as if slamming the door on the mob of entities. I scrunched the limo around and headed back out to the street. Tom hadn’t said where he wanted to go, but Starbucks didn’t seem a likely choice now, so I headed for home.
I pulled to the curb at Tom’s house. This time he didn’t leap out, so I went back and opened the door. He was just huddled in the rear seat, hands clasped between his knees, his expression woebegone.
“Are you okay?”
No answer.
“Can I do anything?”
“No.”
He still didn’t seem inclined to get out, so I climbed inside and sat beside him on the rear seat. “You, umm, saw Mary Beth?”
“More than I’ve ever seen of her before.”
I wouldn’t have suspected Tom of being capable of a double entendre, but that almost sounded like one. “She was okay?”
“Fine and dandy.”
Again I didn’t know how to respond, but he’d said “them” when he came out of the house, so I took a guess. “She wasn’t alone?”
“I rang the bell. I knocked on the door. Then I heard a noise from somewhere in the house. I thought maybe Mary Beth was in trouble. Maybe a burglar had broken in, and something bad was happening. I tried to open the door, but it was locked.”
I’d seen all that. “So you went around back to check?”
“The back door wasn’t locked. There was a light on in the bedroom. I heard a noise from the bathroom. I grabbed a vase to use as a weapon.”
“What kind of noise?”
“Laughing. Squealing.”
A burglar telling one-liner belly-busters did not sound a likely possibility, so all I said was a cautious, “Oh?”
“I ran to the bathroom. Mary Beth was just getting out of the shower.” He swallowed, as if he were trying to get an elephant down. “She wasn’t alone. A man got out right behind her. He snapped a towel at her, and they were both laughing, and she threw one of those, what do you call ‘em, foofah things at him.”
Which was how he’d seen more of Mary Beth than he’d ever seen before. More of her companion than he wanted to see also, no doubt. The knight in shining armor, vase in hand, rushing to the rescue only to find the princess playing games with the moat keeper?
“Did they see you?”
“Oh yeah. We all got a good look at each other.”
“Was he someone you know?”
“No. I threw the vase at them and didn’t wait around for introductions.”
I was still puzzling over foofah, but at this point that didn’t seem important. I started to say something about this perhaps not being what it looked like. Maybe there was some good explanation. But the possibility struck me as about as likely as a supermarket thief trying to explain the rump roast stuffed under his coat. This was what it looked like. Mary Beth had another man, and her rush staging job had been a fabrication to keep Tom out of the way. A man who was on considerably more intimate terms with her than Tom was. Mary Beth and her towel-snapping companion hadn’t been in the shower channeling Trafalgar. Loofah, that’s what Tom had been trying to say with his foofah, I decided.
“I’m sorry, Tom.”
“Yeah, well, serves me right. I should have known better. She was probably just after my money.”
Since, so far as I knew, Tom didn’t have any money, that seemed unlikely. Although she’d managed to wangle that necklace out of him.
“Would you like to come over to my place, and I’ll make a pot of coffee?”
“No.”
He suddenly jumped up and stormed out the limo door. I stumbled after him, alarmed at this sudden switch from shock and numbness to active fury.
“Tom—”
“She’s not gonna get away with this!”