Her eyes dropped. She turned and closed the top of the detergent box and put it back on its shelf, fiddling to get it perfectly aligned. Then she wiped a few grains of detergent off the lid of the washer. At last she turned back and said, “I just hate to talk about it. It sounds so stupid. We broke up over a parking ticket.”
“A parking ticket?”
“Well, you know how crowded Maple Street has gotten, right? Some days you can't find a parking place for blocks, and all of us who have businesses here depend on people being able to get to our stores. Most of the people who work in the area drive as well. We’ve had a lot of hassle about employees parking their cars on the street. And the police station and city hall are only a couple of blocks away, and the people who work there need to park too.”
I nodded. Even in the daze in which I had cocooned myself for the past six months, I was aware of the parking problem. The city council made a couple of vacant lots into parking areas and put time limits on the street parking places a few months ago, and the police were quick to write tickets if you overstayed your two-hour welcome.
“So about the time everyone was so worked up about parking and that’s all we talked about at city council meetings, I noticed that Ed and the other cops parked their cruisers in the two hour spaces and sometimes left them half the day. They were out giving other people tickets for staying too long, but they weren’t willing to walk two blocks from the station or move their own cars. So I brought it up at a council meeting.”
“Did you talk to Ed about it before you brought it up at the council?”
She looked abashed. “Well, no. I was already kind of mad at him because of his mother and his daughter.”
I held up a hand to stop her. “Wait. Wait. I know you’re about to digress and I will never find out what happened at the council meeting. Keep going and we will come back for the mother and daughter.”
She laughed and leaned her hip on the now-vibrating washer. “I see you still have your meeting facilitation skills intact,” she teased. “Okay, we’ll take his mother and daughter under advisement.”
“Good.”
“I happened to mention at a council meeting that I thought it was unfair for the cops to be able to park their cars on the street all day while they gave tickets to other people for the same thing.”
“I’m just curious, did you casually mention it or did you raise a stink?”
“Okay, okay, maybe a little bitty stink. I wasn’t ranting and raving and waving my arms or anything. But it ended up with the council instructing Ed to tell his deputies they had to follow the rules too, and he was pretty peeved. And you’re right, he was mostly mad about me blindsiding him with it.”
“Yeah, I imagine so.”
She sighed. “I don’t know why I was so stupid. Of course I should have talked to him about it first, but I just blurted it out in public.”
“We all do stuff like that though. My mouth has gotten me in trouble plenty of times.”
A twinkle gleamed into her eye. “We’ll take that under advisement too. I'm going to want to hear about this. Anyway, about a week later, I had to run a quick errand. I started out but realized I'd forgotten to grab the mail and I was going near the post office. So I circled the block and saw a parking place right in front of my door. I ran inside for the mail, and the phone rang, and one thing led to another, and before I knew it a couple of hours had passed. I suddenly remembered my car was parked on the street instead of behind the building. So I went out to move it, and there was Ed writing a parking ticket.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Right. I told him I was moving my car and it could only been a hair over the two hours, but he kept writing that damned ticket and saying something about what’s good for the gander ought to be good enough for the goose.”
“He didn’t!”
“I wanted to smack him but he would have arrested me for attacking a police officer in the execution of his duty. So I grabbed the ticket and tore it into little bitty pieces and threw them at him and got in my car and drove it around back and parked it and practically busted the door slamming it when I got out. I stomped around kicking the walls for a few minutes until I was a little calmer. When I went back in the store, I found a new parking ticket lying on the counter, plus another ticket for littering. Which I have not paid, either of them. And we’ve barely spoken to each other since.”
“Wow,” I breathed. “I haven’t given him enough credit for bravery.”
“Damn straight. He’s lucky he’s still walking around. He could have ended up like that TV cop in the wheelchair.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Oh, about two seconds before Roger died, which is why you never heard about it. Didn’t seem right to be talking about parking tickets just then.”
I reached over and gave her a hug. The spinning washer vibrated us both. “I should have had the brains to ask, but as you know I haven’t been able to find my head with both hands for months. But I am better, mostly thanks to you.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t do anything that any upstanding and loyal cousin wouldn’t have done. I think Bob has made all the difference.”
“There you go again, changing the subject.”
“I'd say he is the subject, or at least his duds are. Looks like they’re ready to put into the dryer.”
I opened the dryer door and she threw the clothes in. As I set the timer I said, “Okay, so now to the tabled part of the agenda. What’s the deal with Ed’s mother and daughter?”
“I think they really started all the trouble between us. We were getting along okay. Not that we didn’t argue about stuff, because he’s really pigheaded sometimes, but that was okay. It wasn’t serious fighting, just some bickering.”
“Fun stuff,” I suggested.
She grinned. “Yeah, actually it was.” Then her expression turned serious. “You know his wife had died—”
“Cancer, I think you said?”
“Yeah, she had breast cancer. He still worked for the state police then, but after she died he took an early retirement. But that made him crazy with nothing to do so he came to Willow Falls. His mother moved in with him and his daughter Faith to keep house and take care of them. That’s her story, anyway. I think she just loves to tell people what to do. I don’t know how he stands her. Faith is a great kid though.”
“But what did they have to do with you and Ed?”
“Well, you can't get away from family, can you? Mrs. Johnson decided as soon as she met me that she hated me, so she was constantly pushing at Ed to break up with me. And Faith and I really hit it off, and she was pushing her dad to marry me. So with one of them pushing in one direction and the other in the other—“
“I bet he was wishing he’d never heard of you.”
“Right. And the thing with the parking just sent it right over the edge.”
“What about you, what do you want? Wouldn’t you like to try again?”
“Hell, no,” she said robustly. “My life is just fine the way it is. At least it will be as soon as we get hold of that tape of Bob’s and get this murderer taken care of. Come on, let’s go call Trixie’s number again, and tell Bob his clothes are drying.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
A heavenly smell preceded Ambrose up the stairs from the shop. He entered the apartment bearing gifts: two large, fragrant pizza boxes. “Hello, Louisa, Bob. I picked up something to nosh on. Kay and I both think better with pizza in front of us,” he explained.
She took the boxes and set them on the dining table, saying, “Doesn’t everyone? Though it does seem like we’ve had a meal every twenty minutes today.”
Ambrose shrugged off his tweed sport coat and adjusted the cuffs of his periwinkle silk shirt. “God, Kay, this pizza habit goes back to that very first one we made all those years ago, when we were designing the costumes for the school play.”