Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [10]
“Hey, Mr. Treton,” I said, climbing out of the car. “Hedges are looking good.”
He grunted and continued trimming with his beat-up hand clippers. No newfangled, fancy electric ones for Mr. Treton. “Just another way the electric company’s trying to rip off honest Americans,” he’d grouse. He was a thirty-year army man who believed insubordination from anyone, including plant life, needed to be promptly nipped in the bud.
“Talked to your grandmother lately?” he asked, his clippers never stopping their clop, clop, clop.
“Not since yesterday,” I said, smiling good-naturedly. He knew Dove checked up on me almost every day. She used to say it was because I needed watching over since I was living alone in the city and didn’t have the sense God gave a duck. Now that I had the personal protection of the chief of police, she said she had to make sure, in the interest of public safety, that I wasn’t driving Gabe too crazy. “Do you need something?”
“All out of honey,” he grumbled. He’d grown addicted to Dove’s fresh clover honey when she used it to bribe him into giving her reports on my daily activities. She didn’t require his detecting services any longer, but Mr. Treton still craved the honey.
“I’ll swipe you a couple of jars next time I go out to the ranch,” I promised. He nodded his thanks and attacked a rebellious mock orange tree.
Inside the house I kicked off my ruined shoes and peeled off my wet socks, gave them a satisfied smirk and padded across the room where the answering machine winked its red insect eye. A well-known and mostly well-loved voice brayed out, practically melting the wax in my left ear.
“Where are y’all?” Dove asked. “Benni Harper, it’s seven o’clock in the morning, and you haven’t gotten up this early since you left the ranch. If you’re there and occupied, call me when you’re through. And you take it easy now. Gabe’s ticker isn’t as young as yours.”
I snickered and didn’t rewind the tape so Gabe could hear Dove’s comment on his sexual endurance. Only my grandmother would have nerve enough to tease him that way. Glancing into the bedroom where the sheets and thin blanket were shoved in a tangled heap at the foot of the king-sized bed, I had to say she knew us better than we’d probably like to admit.
I went into the kitchen and grabbed a Coke before returning her call. With everything that had just happened, I suspected it would be a long and detailed conversation. Back in the living room, I picked up the cordless phone and settled down on the brown tweedy sofa, but before I could dial, it rang.
“Benni, help,” a panicked voice wailed. “She’s back.”
“No one here by that name,” I said, and hung up.
3
SECONDS LATER, THE phone shrilled again. I waited three rings before reluctantly picking it up, knowing without a doubt that trouble lurked at the end of this line.
“Very amusing, young lady,” Dove said. “If you were still living within spittin’ distance of me, I’d be taking you out behind the barn with a hickory switch.”
“Have to catch me first,” I said smugly.
“Don’t think I can’t.”
An arrow of panic shot through me. “She’s not here already?”
“No, thank the Lord. We pick her up at the airport tomorrow. She says she’s done left W.W. for good.” She paused for emphasis. “Again.”
“She” was Dove’s only sister and only sibling, Garnet Louann Wilcox. She and Dove, though they loved each other to pieces, got along about as well as two porcupines in a gunnysack. W.W. (pronounced in the way that only Southerners can—Dubya, Dubya) was, or rather is, Garnet’s husband, William Wiley Wilcox. They’d been married fifty-three years, all of which time, Uncle W.W. was the plumbing contractor of choice in the Sugartree, Arkansas, area, about fifty miles north of Little Rock. After fifty-five years, he’d finally retired to live out his dream, designing