From the Grounds Up (6 page)

West Side Story
meets Mr Rogers.

The metal cleats made click-clack noises as Ronny crossed the wooden floor. I almost screamed 'You're going to scratch up the surface,' but managed to restrain myself. After all, if he did damage the wood, he could fix it. Secondly, it was hard to imagine any more damage than already had been done to the planks over the last century and a half.

Ronny gave Sarah a hug. She kept her elbows locked and air-kissed, but it still was the closest thing to a physical expression of affection I'd ever seen from my friend.

Ronny turned to me. 'You must be Maggy. I'm Sarah's cousin, Ronny Eisvogel.'

I took his hand. 'Thanks so much for coming out here to meet with us. This can't be the easiest time for you.'

Ronny's face saddened. 'First Auntie Vi, who was so good to me, and then my father. He and I weren't close, but it's hard to have both your parents pass inside a week.'

'Probably means we're next.' Sarah, Plain-spoken and Tall.

I assumed it was a joke, but I thought I knew what she meant. Parents and grandparents are a buffer between death and us. Once they're all gone, Sarah's logic was unavoidable: We'd be next.

'It's a good thing nobody else got hurt,' Ronny was saying. 'My father shouldn't have been driving.'

'Could your dad have had car trouble?' I was thinking about the disconnected fuel line.

'Beyond it being crumpled by a train at ramming speed?' Sarah asked.

Ronny apparently knew Sarah too well to take offense. A lifetime of her might do that. 'The last time I checked, the Buick was running fine,' Ronny said. 'In fact, my father took, like, fanatical care of his car.'

'Better than he treated most people,' Sarah grumbled.

'Maybe.' Ronny let that lie. 'But he managed to keep the thing up and running for nearly thirty years.'

'I understand you're a contractor,' I said, hypocritically wanting to steer the conversation away from speculation on the subject I had broached. So on to my thing: The new Uncommon Grounds. 'Has Sarah explained the time crunch we're under?'

'Yeah, but it's very workable.'

'We already have a kitchen here.' I led him behind the ticket windows and through a door.

The kitchen looked to be fairly new, if renovated within the past twenty years qualified. It was arranged, though, for a short-order operation. Griddle for eggs and bacon in the morning. Burgers and grilled cheese at noon. Baskets to cook French fries and onion rings in hot oil. A blender for shakes, and a soft-serve ice cream dispenser.

'You had a coffeehouse, right?' Ronny surveyed the room. 'You thinking of expanding, like maybe into a restaurant?'

'And actually
cook
?' He might as well have asked if I was going to leap feet first into the deep fryer. Sarah wasn't the only one who lived on carryout. 'No, we need to stay with what we know. Coffee and pastries. Maybe packaged sandwiches and soup down the line.'

'But we're not going to pull all this equipment out, are we?' Sarah picked up a fry-basket. 'What if we change our minds?'

'I don't see it.'

My partner bristled at my offhand rejection, so I tried to soften it. 'We'll have mostly commuter traffic. People heading to work in downtown Milwaukee. They're not going to be coming back here for hamburgers, fries and a shake at noon.'

'No,' Sarah said, rubbing her chin. 'But maybe they'd like a hot breakfast sandwich.'

'True.' I looked at the griddle. 'We'd have to find someone who can cook.'

'Anyone can cook eggs,' Sarah said. 'Even me.'

Before I could raise an objection (such as, 'what about your real estate business?'), she continued. 'And we shouldn't forget the evening rush. There must be
some
thing we can sell them.'

'A nice glass of red wine,' I said. 'But we'd need a liquor license.'

Sarah pursed her lips. 'Just a limited one, though. Beer-and-wine type.'

Against my will, I was getting sucked into the possibilities. Then, 'Wait! I've got it.'

'What?' an eager Ronny said. He seemed as excited about this as Sarah and I. I like that in a contractor.

'We could sell prepared foods,' I suggested.

Sarah and Ronny exchanged looks.

'As opposed to, like . . . raw?' Ronny asked.

'No. No, I mean we could have a hot food and deli counter, where people could pick up something for dinner to take home. That way, they wouldn't have to stop at the store or cook themselves.'

Sarah cocked her head. 'Great idea, but if you're worried about grilling a couple of breakfast sandwiches, how are we going to "prepare" your food?'

I'd been thinking about that, too. 'Luc and Tien.' Luc Romano and his daughter Tien had owned a grocery store and deli in the same ill-fated mall that Uncommon Grounds had occupied. And I knew first-hand that Luc was a great cook.

Sarah's eyebrows rose. 'Not a bad idea. Though I thought Tien wanted to do something else.'

'Luc
wanted
Tien to do something else,' I said. 'And Tien wanted Luc to be free to do whatever he chose. Last time I talked to them, they both had realized they liked things the way they are. Or were.'

'That girl's never going to get married.'

I looked at career bachelorette Sarah. 'So?'

She shrugged. 'Point taken.'

'Maggy?' This was from Ronny, now standing on a chair, looking at the ceiling tiles. 'Do you have a blueprint of your old place? It'd help me understand what should maybe be in this new one.'

'Not a blueprint, really, but a diagram.' I pulled a folded legal-size sheet of paper from my handbag as he climbed down off the chair. 'Will this do?'

'Perfect,' he said, then checked his watch and fluttered the paper. 'I'd love to go over this and talk to you more today, since time is short. But . . .'

'We're here,' Sarah said. 'Let's do it.'

'I have to go to Brookhills Manor.' Ronny seemed apologetic. 'Get Auntie Vi's things and make arrangements for Dad's.' Hope suddenly floodlit his face. 'Unless somebody else wants to do it?'

Sarah's face, on the other hand, darkened.

Ronny continued enthusiastically. 'That way, I'd have an hour or so to look at Maggy's plans and do some sketches before you get back.'

I grabbed Sarah's arm. 'C'mon, I'll go with you.'

She shook me off. 'I hate that place. All those old people.'

'We'll be "those old people" some day.'

'Some day, but not yet, thank God,' Sarah muttered.

'It's sure up to you,' said Ronny. 'But we're cutting it close the way it is. I'm willing to work weekends, but even so—'

Sarah knew when she'd been out-leveraged. 'Fine,' she snarled at her cousin, 'but you call them about your father's things. I'm just getting Aunt Vi's.'

She turned back to me. 'C'mon, depot-freak. Next stop, Geezerville.'

Chapter Seven

Unlike Sarah, I was looking forward to the visit, mostly because I hadn't seen one of my favorite people, Henry Wested, for a while.

With Uncommon Grounds closed, there was no place for our regular customers to gather. I wanted to make sure Henry hadn't gone over to the dark side. Or 'Mickey D's', as in McDonald's.

We entered Brookhills Manor through the main entrance, labeled 'The Villas'.

'Villas, my ass,' Sarah said. 'They're tiny little apartments with two windows and a kitchen you can't even turn around in.'

'I don't know,' I said as we moved through the foyer. 'Henry seems to like it here.'

'I'm sure he does. Auntie Vi said Henry and Sophie have been banging each other like bass drums.' Sophie Daystrom had been another regular at Uncommon Grounds.

Sarah related her gossip loudly enough for the ten or so seniors, sitting in chairs and participating in a quasi-exercise class, to stop in the middle of their shoulder shrugs.

The instructor, a young, dark-haired man, glared at us.

'Sorry,' I said, holding up my hand. 'My friend didn't mean it.'

'Well then, she's an idiot,' the second old lady from the right said. 'Sophie's been in that man's room so much she might as well just shack up.'

'Damn right,' said the only man in the class. He looked like an albino prune. 'And more power to 'em, I say.'

That started everyone chattering and arguing. I grabbed Sarah's arm and pulled her to the main desk while the instructor tried to control the roaring--if still seated--mob.

'We're here about Vi and Kornell Eisvogel,' I told the teenage girl behind the desk.

'Kingston,' Sarah corrected me. 'Violet Kingston. She never took Kornell's last name.'

'Gotcha.' The girl took a wad of gum out of her mouth and tossed it in the wastebasket before turning to her computer. 'Vi and--can you spell the Colonel's name for me?'

'Not "colonel", Sarah said. 'Kornell: K-O-R-N-E-L-L.'

'Oh,' said the girl, 'like the Russian version of Cornell University.'

'Yeah,' I said before Sarah blew a gasket. 'Like that.'

'Sweet. We are the world, right?' She typed into her computer. 'Kingston and . . . E-I-S-V-O-G-E-L.'

Through clenched teeth, Sarah said, 'You got it.'

The girl swiveled back to us. 'Sorry to tell you, but they're both, ah, no longer with us.'

'Yeah, like that'd be a novelty here,' Sarah snapped. 'We didn't come to visit them. We want their stuff.'

The girl's face almost relaxed. 'The old people have been dropping like flies around here. I just don't like to tell the . . .' She waved her fingers at us.

'Family?' I supplied.

'Yeah, that.' She unwrapped a new stick of gum and plopped it into her mouth.

'Did your chewing gum lose its flavor?' Sarah asked, quoting the old Lonnie Donnegan song.

Miss Information gave Sarah a curious look, like she recognized the line. 'Isn't that part of a legend or something?'

'Greek mythology,' Sarah said solemnly. 'I'm Goddess of the Juicy Fruit and she's my spearmint-carrier.'

I cleared my throat. 'Is there someone we can talk to about the property of the . . . deceaseds?'

'Sure.' The girl wisely dropped the lesson in mythology gone awry and yanked a couple of lanyards with 'GUEST' passes dangling from them out of her drawer. 'Put these on and take that hallway.' She pointed to a sign that read 'Sunrise Wing'.

Plucking the second piece of gum from her mouth, she dropped it in the basket, too. 'When you get to the end of the hall, you'll see Mr Levitt's office. He's the social worker.'

'Thank you,' I said as we turned away. No wonder the kid was working so young. Had to support her gum habit.

I peered down the corridor. There was a window at the far end. 'I guess we should just walk to the light.' I slapped a hand over my mouth. 'Sorry. Didn't mean that.'

Sarah threw me her practiced, sidelong glance as we started down the hall. 'The hell you didn't.'

'I . . . OK, maybe I did. But it wasn't nice of me.'

'C'mon, let's get this over with.' Sarah hustled me to the end of the corridor. There was nothing there but the window we'd seen and a right-angle turn.

'I guess we just keep going,' I said. Two more turns later, we were still walking.

'How in the hell do the old coots manage this?' Sarah said as we approached our fourth blind corner. 'Even
I'm
disoriented and exhausted.'

As she spoke, a leg encased in a pink plaster cast rounded the corner, coming fast. The leg was attached to a tiny woman projecting a scent of flowers and driving a candy-apple red motorized wheelchair with a joystick.

'Coming through!' she yelled, laying on her horn and glaring at us from under thick white bangs. She reminded me a little of Frank the sheepdog driving a bumper car.

The woman brandished her plaster cast like a tank's cannon barrel. Sarah and I parted like the Red Sea, me ducking into the doorway of a stairwell and my friend seeking refuge behind a potted palm.

'Next time be more aware of your surroundings,' NASCAR Granny yelled as she left us behind in a floral-scented cloud.

Sarah brushed palm fronds out of her hair. 'I told you this place was—'

Just then, another plaster ankle swung around the corner.

'Take cover,' Sarah ordered. 'They must travel in packs.' She and I dove for our lives. Or, at least, our skeletal integrity.

'Hello?'

I stuck my head warily into the corridor. 'Sophie? Is that you?'

Sophie Daystrom sat in a wheelchair, cast on one elevated leg. Unlike the last chair, though, this one wasn't motorized. Instead, Henry Wested shuffled behind, propelling the chair onward.

Sarah emerged from behind her chosen palm and gestured at Sophie's leg. 'What happened to you?'

'I should ask you the same damn thing,' Sophie said. 'What are you doing to that plant?'

'Don't underestimate the allure of inter-species love.' I plucked a palm frond from Sarah's hair as she gave me a very sour look. 'We were hiding from a nasty woman in a wheelchair.'

'Must've been Clara Huseby,' Henry said, tipping his gray fedora to us. 'Was it a powered model?'

'Over-powered, more like it,' Sarah said, checking her hair for any other flora. 'The woman's a menace.'

'She lost her husband last year,' Henry said. As a long-time resident, he probably functioned as the place's archivist.

And, apparently, had shared the information with Sophie, who tended to be less charitable. 'That's no excuse,' Sophie said. 'My husband died, too, but I didn't turn into a kleptomaniac.'

'Kleptomaniac?' I asked. 'Doesn't that take finesse? How stealthy can a woman in a leg cast and wheelchair be?'

'Stealthy enough to ambush us at a blind corner,' Sarah said dryly.

She had me on that one. 'But where does Mrs Huseby shoplift? And how does she get there?'

I was imagining NASCAR Granny motoring across Poplar Creek Road to prey upon the drugstore down the block.

'Here at the Manor, I'm afraid,' Henry said. 'Rumor has it she glides silently into rooms when they're empty and pilfers toiletries and other sundries. Then she hides them in her lap-robe and backs right out.'

'Genius,' said Sophie, shaking her head in what seemed like reluctant appreciation.

'Sophie,' Henry warned.