"Excuse me for asking, but I was wondering why your group was interested in this part of Ohio. You seem southern, and there is so much farming land available down there ..."
"God told us to come here," I said.
"Oh," Mrs. Bishop said blankly. She shrugged her broad shoulders and assumed her Selling Smile. "Well, let's go find that place that's just right for you. We'll go in my Bronco, since we're looking at farms." So for a whole morning I drove around in rural Ohio with Mary Anne Bishop, looking at fields and fences and run-down farmhouses, thinking about how cold and isolated some of these farms would be in winter, how the land would look covered with snow. It made me shiver to imagine it. None of these farms was Martin's.
How on earth could I get her to show me the right place? Evidently Flocken hadn't listed it with anyone, was just sitting on it to keep Martin and Barby out. I began to hate Joseph Flocken, sight unseen. We returned to town for lunch, after which Mary Anne excused herself to recheck the afternoon's appointments. I sat alone in the waiting room and fretted about seeing the right property. Even after that, maybe he wouldn't sell to me. I got up to look in the mirror on the wall above a tiny decorative table, a little closer to Mary Anne's office. My hair, which leads its own life, was escaping from the bun in a tightly waving chestnut nimbus. I began repair work. If I listened really hard, I found, I could make out Mary Anne's words. "So I'll bring her out this afternoon, Inez, if you're ready. No, she doesn't wear funny clothes or anything like that. She's tiny, and young, and she's wearing a suit that cost a mint..."
Damn! I should have gone and picked out something at WalMart. "... but she's very polite and not at all weird. A real southern accent, you-all!"
I winced.
"No, I don't think the pastor would mind," Mary Anne said persuasively. "This group evidently doesn't drink, smoke, or believe in having guns. They can only have one wife. It sounds pretty respectable, and if they're off in the country by themselves... well, I know, but she has the money, it seems ....kay, see you in a little while."
Mary Anne strode out of her office with a bright face and a sheaf of papers on the various places we'd see this afternoon. My heart sank down to join my spirits.
It was a long afternoon. I learned more about agriculture in mideastern Ohio than I ever wanted to know. I met many nice people who really wanted to sell their farms, and felt sorry for most of them, victims of our economic times. But I couldn't afford all those farms.
By four o'clock I'd toured everything Mary Anne Bishop had lined up. There were three more places to see the next morning. I was pretending to consider seriously two of the properties we'd looked at, but found sufficient fault with them to make her eager for tomorrow. We were pretty sick of each other by the time I got in my rental car, which had been parked at her office all day. I'd tried a couple of times to steer her conversation toward the years Martin had been growing up here, but she'd never mentioned the Bartells, though she and her husband were both natives of the town.
I missed Martin dreadfully.
I was almost through with my paperback, so when I saw a bookstore on my way back to the motel, I pulled into its parking lot with happy anticipation. Any place books are massed together makes me feel at home. It was a small, pleasant shop in a little strip with a dry cleaner's and a hair salon. A bell over the door tinkled as I went in, and a gray-haired woman on a stool behind the cash register looked up from her own paperback as I paused just inside the door, savoring the feeling of being surrounded by words. "Do you want anything in particular?" she asked politely. Her glasses matched her hair, and she was wearing, unfortunately, fuchsia. But her smile was wonderful and her voice was rich.
"Just looking. Where are your mysteries?"
"Right wall toward the rear," she said, and went back to her book. I had a happy fifteen or twenty minutes. I found a new James Lee Burke and an Adam Hall I hadn't read. The true crime section was disappointing, but I was willing to forgive that. Not everyone was a buff, like me. The woman rang up my books with the same cheerful live-and-let-live air. Without thinking at all, I asked her where Cindy's Flowers might be. "Around the corner and one block down," she said succinctly, and reopened her book.
I started my rental car and hesitated for maybe thirty seconds before going to Cindy's Flowers instead of the Holiday Inn.
It looked like a prosperous place on the outside, with a very pretty Easter-decorated front window. I powdered my nose and inexplicably took the pins out of my hair and brushed it out before I left the car. The front of the store held displays of both silk flowers and live plants, and some samples of special arrangements for weddings and funerals. There was a huge refrigerator case, a small counter for paying. The large work area in the back was almost totally open to view. Two women were working there. One, an artificial blond in her fifties, was putting white lilies on a styrofoam cross. The other, who had very short dark hair and was about ten years younger, seemed to be making a "congratulations on the male baby" bouquet in a blue straw basket shaped like a bassinet. Being a florist was a rites-of-passage occupation, like being a caterer—or a minister.
The women glanced at each other to see who was going to help me, and the dark-haired woman said, "You finish, Ruth, you're almost done." She came forward to help me silently and quickly in her practical Nikes, ready to listen but obviously in a hurry.
"What can I do for you?" she asked.
She had large dark eyes and a pixie haircut. Her face and her whole body were lean. She was beautifully made up and wore bifocals. Her nails were long and oval and covered with clear polish.
"Um. I'm just here for a couple of days, and I suddenly realized my mother's birthday is tomorrow. I'd like to send her some flowers." "From the sunny South," she commented, as she picked up a pad and pen. "What did you have in mind?"
I wasn't used to being so identifiable. Every time I opened my mouth, people knew one thing about me for sure; I wasn't from around here. "Mixed spring flowers, something around forty dollars," I said at random. She wrote that down. "Where are you from?" she asked suddenly, without looking up.
"Georgia."
Her pen stopped for a second.
"Where do you want these sent?"
Uh-oh. I'd walked right into this. If I'd had the brains God gave a goat, I'd have sent the flowers to Amina, but since I'd said they were for my mother, I felt stupidly obliged to send them to my mother. I had sustained a deception all day, and perhaps I was just tired of deceiving. "Twelve-fourteen Plantation Drive, Lawrenceton, Georgia."
She kept writing steadily, and I shed an inaudible sigh of relief. "It's an hour later in Georgia, so I don't know if I can get anything there today," Cindy Bartell pointed out. "I'll call first thing in the morning, and I'll do my best to find someone who can deliver them tomorrow. Will that do?" She looked up, her eyes questioning.
"That'll be fine," I said weakly.
"You have a local number?"
"The Holiday Inn." She was past being pretty; she was striking. She was a good six inches taller than I.
"How'd you want to pay?"
"What?"
"Cash? Credit card? Check?"
"Cash," I said firmly, because that way I wouldn't have to give her my name. I thought I was being crafty.
I'd been watching the blond woman work on the funeral cross; I always like to watch other people do something well. When I looked back at Cindy Bartell, I caught her staring at me. She glanced down at my left hand, but of course my engagement ring was still zipped in my purse. "Do you have relatives here, Miss?"
"No," I said with a bland smile. And I handed over my money.