"I never would have thought that for a second," Jim Bob said sincerely. Holding in a belch so's not to give her an excuse to launch into a lecture about unseemly table manners, he stood up. "I think I'll run down to the SuperSaver and finish up some paperwork."
She looked over her shoulder at him. "Is that all you're planning to do?"
Despite the fact the oven had been off for quite a while, he felt a sudden dampness in his armpits. Her eyes weren't as yellowish as most of the Buchanons on her side of the family (her legal name being Barbara Ann Buchanon Buchanon), but they were real beady and, at the moment, real shrewd. There wasn't any way she could know about his plans for the weekend, he told himself as he forced a grin. "Someone's got to make sure the store doesn't run short on canned corn while I'm gone. The ladies in the Missionary Society'd whup me when I got back."
"Would they?" she murmured.
He grabbed his jacket and headed for the back door. "I may be there till midnight, checking stock and working on the payroll. No reason for you to wait up, what with your busy day tomorrow getting ready for the rummage sale. Asking you to be in charge is the only smart thing Brother Verber's done since…"
Unable to finish the sentence, he shut the door and hurried out to his truck, where a half-pint of bourbon was tucked under the seat. It was the only antidote he knew for the indigestion that invariably accompanied a dose of his wife's self-righteousness.
C'Mon Tours had no walk-in trade, since it was situated in the kitchen of a house in one of the shabbier neighborhoods in Farberville. Pesky zoning regulations made it necessary to use a post office box as an address, and not so much as a discreet brass plaque hung beside the front door of the residence.
Miss Vetchling, who served as president, office manager, secretary, bookkeeper, and receptionist gloomily thumbed through the folder marked "Elvis." With only six pilgrims lined up, she would barely break even. Certainly there would be no profit after the van rolled back to Farberville and the driver submitted the invoices for gas, motel rooms, and his fee.
She pulled out a calculator and crunched figures. She'd determined the price of the tour based on eight paying customers, and even then would have netted less than five hundred dollars to cover office overhead and unanticipated expenses. The van had more than a hundred thousand miles on the odometer, and had broken down twice on the Gala Azalea Tour to Little Rock. The windshield wipers had quit working on the Cherokee Spree to Tahlequah the preceding summer; the turn signals had done the same midway to the Branson Bonanza Weekend.
Being self-employed had not proved to be quite as invigorating as Miss Vetchling had hoped. It had seemed so very promising when she came upon the idea of arranging tours for those with modest means yet a thirst to explore the world, to feast their weary, middle-class eyes on the wondrous and even the exotic. Giddy with her own sense of derring-do, she'd used her savings to purchase the van (surely the first of a veritable fleet of sleek silver buses) and placed a small ad in the local newspaper. She'd thumbtacked flyers on bulletin boards outside grocery stores and taped them on utility poles along Thurber Street.
She knew better than to expect to make a profit during the first several months, but it seemed to her that rather than building up a roster of satisfied customers clamoring for the next tour, she was spending entirely too much time writing letters in response to their complaints. It was ridiculous to presume one would be staying in a Hilton when one was paying a pittance. She had never knowingly booked rooms in a dangerous establishment or requested a breakfast buffet of stale muffins and tepid coffee. She'd simply relied on the integrity of her colleagues in the travel industry. It was not her fault that some of them had let her down. How could she have known about dirty sheets, cockroaches, and, in one instance, a thriving drug business conducted in the lobby of the motel? None of her customers had been wounded during the raid. In all honesty, she reflected testily, it might have been the most exciting thing that would ever take place in their pedestrian little lives.
Miss Vetchling shoved a strand of gray hair out of her eyes and studied her calculations, searching for ways to economize. The married couple would share a room, as would the two women from Maggody. This left the male professor and a woman, who dotted the i's in her name with little hearts, in single rooms, unless they perchance struck up a romance on the road to Memphis. Otherwise, they might object to being roommates. Her driver had made it clear that he wouldn't so much as start the engine without the promise of a room to himself.
Perhaps it would be best to cancel the tour, she thought. As loath as she was to acknowledge failure, she was even more loath to spend her last few dollars to subsidize the pilgrimage. She would be obliged to return their money, however, which meant she might not be able to pay the long distance bill at the end of the month. Without a telephone, C'Mon Tours would go nowhere and she'd be back in some dreary office, filing papers for executives who could scarcely recite the alphabet.
A rap on the back door startled her out of her dispirited reverie. She gave herself a second to resume her composure, then gestured at the man on the porch to come into the kitchen.
He was not an imposing figure, but he was vital to her operation. He was several inches shorter than she and moved with an odd scuttle, as if he fancied himself to be a CIA operative approaching a snitch in a smoky Berlin nightclub. Liver spots and moles were sprinkled across his wrinkled brown face, and his eyes were disconcertingly cloudy for someone with a current chauffeur's license. Miss Vetchling was careful never to ride with him.
"Yes, Baggins?" she said.
"I changed the oil like you told me to," he said. "I suppose it'll make it over to Mississippi and back, but it sure as hell ain't going to pass no safety inspection when it's time to renew the plates."
"We'll worry about that at the appropriate time. At the moment, I'm trying to decide whether to cancel the tour. Only six people have signed up."
Baggins sat down across from her and looked at the figures she'd written on a pad. "Gas ain't gonna cost that much, and you're paying insurance even if the van's parked out back."
"That may be true," she conceded, not pleased to be corrected by an employee lacking a high school diploma, even one who was proficient in automotive repairs and maintenance-skills that she suspected had been learned in prison. "That does not affect the cost of motel rooms, however. We require five rooms each night, and I've budgeted forty dollars for each. It comes out to six hundred dollars."
"I got a cousin what lives in Memphis. He might know of someplace cheaper than forty dollars."
She was pondering this when the telephone rang. "C'Mon Tours," she said into the receiver. After a moment, she continued, saying, "It does happen that we've had a cancellation for the Elvis Presley Pilgrimage, dearie. We will be able to accommodate you, but I'm afraid there's an additional charge because of last-minute adjustments. You do realize the price is per person, double occupancy, don't you?"
C'Mon Tours was back in business.
2
"I was under the impression this was to be an escorted tour," Estelle said as she climbed into the van and assessed her fellow travelers. It was a mixed bag, but everybody looked respectable-for the most part, anyway. The two women who'd taken the first double seat were tacky, gussied up like they were planning to stop by church on their way to a beer bust. Estelle had never trusted women that wore fake fur coats, and she could see right off the bat that no critters on God's green earth had been sacrificed in the making of theirs.