At number 982, Taylor and I finally hit paydirt: nine Barbies. Their hair showed evidence of brutal attempts at styling, but their toes were pristine. They were four dollars each, but the buxom brunette with the moneybelt said twenty-five dollars could buy the lot.
As I was paying, Taylor arranged the Barbies carefully in a cardboard box that was lying in the corner of the garage. She chattered about garage sales all the way home, and when I dropped her off she leaped out of the car with her wicker cat-carrier and a satisfied sigh. “That was so fun. Let’s do it again tomorrow night.”
My cellphone was ringing when I pulled up in front of EXXXOTICA. It was Howard Dowhanuik.
“Amazing timing,” I said. “I’m on my way to visit Charlie’s next-door neighbour?”
“Kyle Morrissey? What the hell’s that all about?”
“Unfinished business,” I said. “When you had me playing Nancy Drew, I talked to his great-grandmother. She asked me to run an errand for her.”
“Still working on stars for your heavenly crown.”
“How about you?” I said.
“No crown. No stars,” he said curtly. “So what’s happening out there?”
I glanced over at the perfect fifties house that Charlie and Ariel had shared. The vision of them happily planning, choosing the colours of paint and trim, the kinds of flowers that would fill the hanging baskets, made me drop my guard. The words tumbled out. “Howard, there’s something you should probably know. Ariel’s being cremated tonight. There’s a service up at her family’s place in Lac La Ronge tomorrow morning.”
I could hear his intake of breath. “Cremated. God, it’s hard to believe that she can just – cease to be.” For a beat, he was silent. “Are you going to the service?”
“Yes.”
“Say one for me, will you?”
“I will,” I said.
The penny dropped. “Jo, if you’re going to the Warrens’ island on Lac La Ronge, you’re going to have to fly.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Then I’ll say one for you.”
EXXXOTICA was looking remarkably shipshape. The front window had been scraped clear of the last remnants of the handbills, and two giant pots had been chained to steel poles and filled with those hardiest of floral survivors, dwarf marigolds. When I came through the door, Ronnie Morrissey was at the cash register facing a man in a sports jacket made out of some shiny synthetic. She glanced up, raised a finger to indicate she’d be with me soon, and went back to business. Her customer lowered his head when he saw me, but I had time to notice that his hair was freshly cut, and that he had doused himself with Obsession. The title of the video on the top of his pile was Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls. Judging by the way he bolted up the stairs and out the front door the moment Ronnie handed him his movies, he was a hungry man.
Ronnie watched him leave, then came out from behind the counter. Today she was a western belle wearing a denim halter top, matching ankle-length skirt, and hand-tooled cowboy boots. Her hair was almost to her waist and sun-streaked. A skeptic or a stylist might have suspected extensions, but the wild profusion suited her. So did her manicure: each of her nails was painted in a different pearlized colour – I knew the names of the shades were ultra-cool because of Taylor’s unrequited longing for them: Bruise, Urban Putty, Raw.
Ronnie caught me staring at her fingers, and she wiggled them obligingly. “Make quite a statement, eh?”
“My younger daughter would love them. She’s always wanting to paint her nails.”
“It was the same for me when I was a kid,” Ronnie said huskily. “Of course, given the circumstances, it was out of the question.” She shrugged. “Well, better late than never.”
As she had before, Ronnie led me to the back of the video store and unlocked the back door. When she opened it, I found myself face to face with a young man I recognized from the newspapers as Kyle Morrissey. He was soap-star handsome with bulging pecs, a trim waist, a mop of black curly hair, and what we used to call bedroom eyes, languid and long-lashed. He was wearing a T-shirt that cautioned “Think Long and Hard Before You Take Me Home,” but there was a vacancy in his sexy eyes that gave the warning an unsettling edge.
“That’s quite the shirt,” I said.
Kyle smiled obligingly. “Ronnie gave it to me. It’s sort of a joke, but not really.” He adjusted his features to an appearance of solemnity. “You’re here to see Bebe,” he said. He looked at the cardboard box in my hand. “I hope there are Barbies in there.”
I smiled. “Nine of them.”
“Great,” he said. This time the smile was as open as a prairie sky. “Bebe will be really happy.”
He led me up the stairs, but stopped outside Bebe’s room.
“Wait here till I get our snack,” he said.
“Thanks, but I just ate.”
His brow furrowed. “Bebe said we’ll need a snack.” He looked confused.
“Okay,” I said. He disappeared into a room on the right and reappeared almost immediately with a tray upon which were a litre of milk, a bag of Dad’s cookies, a cow-shaped plastic container of chocolate syrup, and three glasses. I followed him into Bebe’s big front room.
As she had on my first visit, Bebe was sitting in the wing chair by the window. In the early-evening shadows, the sea of bubble-gum-pink Barbies had muted to dusky rose, and Bebe herself seemed softer, an old woman who welcomed the gentle embrace of the gloaming. It was a scene from a Hallmark card, and just as remote from reality.
The second she spotted me, Bebe flicked on the powerful standard lamp beside her, and the illusion shattered. “Let’s see them,” she barked.
I handed her the cardboard box. She lifted the flaps and examined the dolls with the professional squint and unerring fingers of a veteran customs inspector. When she’d checked out the last one, she smacked her lips. “Not bad,” she said. “How much did you pay?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
Bebe made a hissing sound through her teeth: whether it was a hiss of approval or opprobrium was impossible to tell. “Better you than me,” she said finally. “Let’s visit with Kyle for a bit, then you and I can talk business.”
Kyle passed around the cookies and mixed the chocolate milk with exquisite care. When he handed Bebe hers, she turned up her nose. “You know I like a double.”
He picked up the plastic cow obligingly and poured syrup into Bebe’s milk until she held up a palm to indicate that he could stop.
“That’s more like it,” she said, then she raised her glass. “To justice,” she said.
“That’s a surprising toast coming from you,” I said. “Has something happened?”
“You bet your sweet bippy something’s happened. The cops have finally figured out our boy couldna done it. Proving once again that, as soon as you put a blue uniform on a person, they have a harder time adding two plus two than a normal person does. But I’m getting off track. The point is the cops finally found themselves the truck driver who gave Kyle the wrong directions. Of course, Kyle told them about this lady driver on day one, but they didn’t exactly bust their humps looking for her. Anyway, on the morning in question, this lady truck driver was dumping off a load of wiring in the sub-basement – no connection with what Kyle was doing, so of course no one pursued her. Kyle asked this driver where he should go to fix the air conditioning, and she got turned around and pointed him towards the room where, unbeknownst to her or Kyle, that girl Ariel was already dead.” Thrilled by the vagaries of fate, Bebe Morrissey rocked back and forth in her chair. “The one lucky thing for Kyle was that the truck driver was a lady.”