The Fixer Upper (32 page)

C
amerin Allgood stood over the ironing board in my kitchen and stared down at her spot-cleaned slacks. “Hey,” she said. “It worked. The coffee’s gone. Thanks.”

“No problem, Agent Allgood,” I said. “I got to be pretty good at stain removal while I was living in D.C. What with the cost of dry cleaning and all.”

“Next thing, you girls will be going out together for cosmos and pedicures,” Jackson Harrell said. “Could we please discuss some logistics here?”

“Bite me, Jack, okay?” Allgood said, smoothing the iron over her slacks.

“We need a place for the meet,” Harrell said. “Someplace a little out of the way, but where our equipment can get decent reception.”

“Normally, we’d have you meet him in a hotel room,” she told me.

“Sorry. I’m not checking into the Econo Lodge,” I said. “How about the café, on the square?”

“No good,” Harrell said. “I’ve eaten there. Always a big crowd, so there’d be too much ambient noise. And that’s a shame, because the food there is pretty decent. Man, that chicken and dumplings they do on Thursdays? And the fried okra? Makes me wanna slap my granny.”

“Jack!” Allgood said. “Focus. Meeting.”

“Right,” Harrell said. “We’re gonna need someplace quiet. Someplace we can install the cameras, like that. What about right here at the house?”

“No way,” I said quickly. “My, uh, cousin, is just home from the hospital. She’s old, and crotchety, and no telling what she’d do if Alex Hodder showed up here.”

“Probably wouldn’t work anyway,” Allgood said. “Hodder’s pretty cagey. He wouldn’t trust you not to have your house bugged. Look, Jack. Why don’t we take a drive around town, scope things out a little bit. We’ll find a place, get things set up, and we’ll call her as soon as we’re ready.”

Harrell nodded and stood up. “Sounds like a plan. You gonna put on your pants before we go?”

“Bite me,” she said succinctly. She walked into the hallway with her slacks draped over her arm, and a minute later, she was back, fully clothed, with my bathrobe over her arm.

“Here you go,” she said. “Thanks for the loan. And the lunch.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. I sensed a bonding between us. We probably wouldn’t be going out for drinks anytime soon, but at least she wasn’t still trying to put me in jail for the rest of my adult life.

I walked the two FBI agents to the front porch. “What should I do if Alex calls back?” I asked. “You know, like, what if he tries to back out, or whatever?”

“Just keep strong,” Allgood told me. “Remember, you’re in control now. Not him. In fact, if he does call back, just don’t answer. Keep him guessing.”

“Like all you women do,” Agent Harrell said. “Torture the bastard.”

Camerin Allgood shot him a look. “So. We’ll let you know about the meet place as soon as we’ve got it set up.”

I nodded.

She bit her lip, and fussed with the strap of the briefcase slung over her shoulder.

“Hey, uh, Dempsey,” she said awkwardly. “I feel kinda bad about something.”

“What’s a little intimidation and harassment between pals?” I said lightly.

“Well,” she said. “It wasn’t like it was something I enjoyed or anything. It’s my job, you know? Definitely not my favorite part of the job though.”

“What are you talking about, Agent Allgood?” I asked.

She shot Harrell a look. He frowned and shook his head, as if to warn her off. But she plunged ahead.

“Your mom, okay?” she said. “It wasn’t just your dad I went to see. I went out to California too. To talk to your mom. She seemed like a pretty cool lady. Way too cool to have ever been married to your dad.”

I felt my breath catch. “You did what?”

“She flew out to California and showed up at your mother’s house,” Harrell said helpfully. “To talk her into talking you into helping us out.”

I took a step backward, into the house. “I don’t believe you people.” I slammed the door in their faces.

I
didn’t have long to ponder the implications of a meeting between the FBI and my mother. In fact, I hadn’t even had time to find my cell phone to call Lynda before I heard a car come roaring up to the curb outside and slam on the brakes.

“Dempsey?” Ella Kate called from down the hallway. “Dempsey! Girl, what is going on around here?”

I went back to the front door and peeked through the sidelights. The car was a gleaming black Cadillac Escalade. As I watched, a petite woman got out of the driver’s side. Her long, honey blond hair fell in soft waves to her shoulders, accented by braided dreadlocks on either side of her deeply tanned, heart-shaped face. She wore a form-fitting chrome yellow long-sleeved top, and an orange-and-yellow-flowered chiffon skirt that fluttered around her knees. Her shapely tanned legs ended in orange platform espadrilles. She wore huge white-rimmed sunglasses, so I couldn’t see the expression on her face, and she had so many chains and strings of beads and baubles around her neck and wrists, that I could hear, from inside the house, the chink of glass and gold as she walked, haltingly, up the front walkway of Birdsong.

She stopped, halfway up the walk, and lifted the sunglasses up and into her tangled mass of curls, staring up at the house through kohlrimmed eyes, and shaking her head slowly, as though she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Her coral-tinted lips moved, and I could read what she was saying, even from where I stood, staring out at her.

“Oh. My. God.”

I opened the door and stepped onto the porch. “Lynda?”

She dropped the bulky Louis Vuitton carryall to the ground and flew up the front steps.

“Sweetheart!” she cried, flinging her arms around me and hugging me tightly—so tightly that I could feel the jagged chunks of automotive glass on her necklace biting into my sternum.

“Lynda!” I gasped, struggling to extricate myself from her embrace. “Mom, what are you doing here?”

She let me go, but cradled my face between her long, bejewelled fingers. “Angel,” she crooned. “How could I stay away? Knowing what my little girl is facing?” With a fingertip, she traced a line under my eyes.

“Such dark circles,” she tsk-tsked. “You haven’t been sleeping. Or moisturizing properly.”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I said. “Really. I’m glad to see you, but really, there was no need.”

“Of course there was a need,” she said briskly. “Now, let’s get my things out of the car, and then we can figure out this situation of yours.”

I followed her to the Cadillac. “Is this yours?”

“Oh Lord, no,” Lynda said, holding out the key fob and giving it a click so that the trunk popped open. “It’s a rental. You know I never drive a domestic car. But on such short notice, there wasn’t time to try to find a Jag or a Benz. Leonard swears this was the best he could do.”

The trunk held two more Louis Vuitton bags, one a small twenty-one inch, the other an elephant-size affair that could have held all of my own belongings, with room to spare. Lynda reached in and grabbed the smaller suitcase. I heard the distinct sound of glass bottles clinking together.

“The Stoli,” she said, catching my look. “I mean, Guthrie’s still dry, right? I just wasn’t taking any chances. Not in this kind of an emergency.”

I wrestled the larger suitcase out of the trunk. It weighed as much as an elephant too.

“Um, Lynda, this suitcase is pretty big. Just how long were you planning on staying?”

She was already heading up the front walk. “As long as it takes to save your life,” she called back.

When I caught up with her, she’d dropped her bags in the foyer, and was walking around the parlor, taking it all in with a practiced eye.

“Well,” she said, her voice trailing off. “This is…challenging.”

“You should have seen it when I got here,” I told her. “Not exactly what I was expecting.”

She pursed her lips. “I’m sure your father described it as Cinderella’s castle. Am I right?”

“Not a castle,” I said. “But he did tell me it was a showplace. And in all fairness to him, the photo he had made it look pretty fabulous.”

“And that photo was taken when? During the Nixon administration?”

“I guess he thought, because his mother’s family was such a big deal down here, owning the bedspread mill and all, it was still okay.”

“Ah, yes,” Lynda said mockingly. “The storied home place of the storied Dempsey family. Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said quietly.

She saw the hurt on my face. “Of course it’s not,” she said quickly. “Listen to me! I’m here five minutes and already your father’s negative energy is seeping into my aura. It’s a lovely house, Dempsey, and I can tell you’ve done amazing things with it. Now, let’s open up my suitcase, and fix ourselves a little ‘freshie,’ and you can show me everything.”

True to her motto of Be Prepared, Lynda had left nothing to chance. The smaller of the two vintage Louis Vuitton suitcases had originally been manufactured to hold eight pairs of shoes. But my mother had modified the suitcase to her own needs, slipping bottles of Stoli, tonic water, Perrier, and almond-stuffed olives, not to mention two bags of limes, into the elastic-ruched satin pouches of the suitcase.

While I fixed the “freshies” according to her detailed instructions, Lynda walked about the kitchen, exclaiming over the new island, the stripped pine floors, even my beloved junkyard sink.

“It’s like a movie set,” she declared, seating herself at the kitchen table. “I love it. So real. So organic. Only my brilliant daughter could have conceived of such a transformation.”

“You like it?” I asked, taking a cautious sip of my drink. Mindful of my earlier intake of Jack Daniel’s, I’d deliberately added only a drop or two of vodka to my tonic and lime. “I’ve still got a lot to do in here. Bobby just taught me how to lay tile for the counters. I mean, marble would have been great, or even granite, but that was so not in my budget.”

“Budget!” Lynda said, taking a long sip of her own drink. “Listen to you. Making budgets, stripping floors and cabinets, laying tile. And all the time these horrible federal agents are hounding you.”

“Well, maybe not hounding me,” I admitted. “Listen, Lynda. I am so, so sorry they dragged you into this. I love seeing you, but it was totally unnecessary for them to get you involved. I’m absolutely fine. We’ve got things worked out, and in a few days, this whole nightmare will be over.”

I picked the slice of lime out of my drink and sucked the rind. “See? We can have a nice visit this weekend, and then you can fly back to California and Leonard. He’s probably already going crazy without you.”

She frowned. “Hmmm. Not so much. Anyway, I have no intention of abandoning you again. I am here. Come what may, for the duration.”

“But where will you stay?” I blurted out. “You do realize, we don’t have a Ritz-Carlton in Guthrie. We don’t even have a Motel Six.”

Now it was my mother’s turn to look hurt. “I thought I’d stay here with you, of course. It’s such a huge old place. And your mother is a girl of very simple needs, Dempsey, I can assure you. Just give me a little cot up in the attic someplace, and I’ll be fine. Unless, you’d rather I leave…”

She was doing it. Making me feel guilty. “No, no,” I protested. “It’s not that I want you to leave. I love having you here. But the house looks bigger than it really is. It’s a work in progress. But that’s all right. You can have my room, and I’ll sleep in Ella Kate’s old room. No. I’ll sleep in Norbert’s. The mattress is awful, but that’s okay.”

“Ella Kate?” Lynda frowned. “You mean that batty old aunt of your father’s? I didn’t even know she was still alive, let alone living here at Birdsong.”

I sighed and started to reconsider my stand against vodka. “It’s a long story,” I said finally. “But basically, Ella Kate moved in here when Great-uncle Norbert got sick. She took care of him, and after he died, she just sorta…stayed. And anyway, she’s not Dad’s aunt. She’s a distant cousin. Of sorts.”

“She looked ancient when I met her, back before you were even born,” Lynda said. “And that was nearly thirty years ago. I still don’t
understand why she’s living here, with you. Shouldn’t she be in a nursing home or something?”

“Ella Kate is seventy-nine,” I said. “And except for the fact that she just totaled a car and fractured her hip, and the fact that she has breast cancer, she’s actually in pretty decent shape, for her age.”

Lynda set her drink down on the tabletop. “Breast cancer. Well, that settles it. I wasn’t going to say anything, but since you brought it up, I think I have to let you know that I’ve been feeling…assaulted with wave after wave of negative ions since I walked in the door of this house. It’s very unsettling.”

“Negative ions?” I said blankly. “Here? At Birdsong?”

“Don’t worry, precious,” Lynda said. “I’ll take care of everything.” She walked out to the hallway, and I could hear her unsnapping the lock on one of her suitcases. A moment later, she was back with what looked like a home-made broom. The handle of the broom had been made from a slender tree limb, stripped of all its leaves. Tied to the head of the broom, with an inch-wide wrapping of raffia, was a large bundle of dried-out-looking weeds.

“Now then,” Lynda said. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She exhaled slowly, then inhaled and exhaled.

She marched out to the foyer. I followed in her wake. She opened the front door wide. Then, standing in front of the door, she began making sweeping motions in the air, as though sweeping imaginary particles of fairy dust outside. After a minute or so of that, she began walking slowly through the downstairs rooms of the house, moving clockwise, sweeping the air. She swept up high, and she swept low, down at baseboard level. And while she swept, she hummed a high-pitched wordless tune.

I followed along behind. She swept the parlor and the dining room. She swept the downstairs bath, and the kitchen and the hallway. When we got to Ella Kate’s closed bedroom door, I held my fingers to my lips, to gesture that we should be quiet. Lynda nodded knowingly, and swept vigorously around the entire door frame.

She started for the stairway. I paused, and then decided not to stop her. After all, maybe the house did have some negative ions. It wouldn’t hurt to let my mother chase them away.

Lynda did a repeat of her downstairs ritual, spending extra time in Ella Kate’s old bedroom. Her eyes widened when she saw the stacks of furniture and knickknacks, but she said nothing. Apparently silence was an important part of the ceremony. She swept my own room too, even going so far as to open the closet door and all the windows, giving them a vigorous going-over.

She swept back down the upstairs hallway, and then down the stairs. Finally, she swept her way into the kitchen. She stopped only to open the kitchen door wide, at which point she made one last, huge, grand sweep out the door.

Satisfied, she closed the door and smiled. “There now.”

She glanced over at me. “Match please.”

I found the box of wooden kitchen matches in a drawer by the back door and handed her the box.

“Light it please,” she said. I did.

“Now, light the herbs,” she instructed. Again, I did as she asked, holding the match to the end of the leafy sticks. It took a moment, but soon a thread of white smoke wafted off the herbs, and the room filled with an earthy, tangy scent.

“What, exactly, are we doing?” I asked, staying well away from the burning weeds.

She didn’t answer. Lynda walked out into the hallway, and I followed. She waved the smoking sticks in a triangular pattern around the front door, humming tunelessly. She waved the herbs in front of the windows, and around the doorway to the parlor. She stooped down low and left a trail of white smoke along the baseboards, and she stood on her tiptoes and let the smoke rise ceilingward. She walked and hummed and waved the burning herbs in every room of the house, and I followed her, eventually managing to echo, in some fashion, the melody of her tuneless tune.

When she’d smoked the house out to her complete satisfaction, she went back into the parlor. She knelt down, and tenderly placed the smouldering broom on the grate in the fireplace.

She took another deep breath of the herbal smoke. I did the same. She gave me a blissful smile. “Much better, don’t you think?”

“I guess. Anyway, what did we just do here?”

“Dempsey? You’ve never done a purification before? Followed by a smudge?”

“Afraid not,” I said. “You know how Dad is. What were those herbs you were burning?”

“Just the usual,” she said. “Sage, of course. You don’t do a smudge without sage. Plus cedar, lavender, mint, rosemary, dill, parsley. Ordinarily I use fennel too, but the Whole Foods in my neighborhood was out. I gathered everything last night, at dusk, which is my serene time. And let me tell you, after that FBI agent showed up at my house, I haven’t had a lot of serenity. The tree branch was from my favorite olive tree in the garden. I’ve been saving it for something special. I didn’t have a lot of particulars about what all was going on with you and this Alex Hodder person, so my visualization wasn’t quite as detailed as I would have liked, but I think I managed to work it all out.”

“You visualized my situation?” I was touched. My mother and I were so very different, and we’d been apart for so long, and I’d been so independent for so long, it hadn’t occurred to me that she ever worried about me.

“Of course,” Lynda said, tenderly brushing my cheek with the side of her thumb. “I’m your mother, silly girl. I visualize you every night, the last thing before I close my eyes to go to sleep. Didn’t you know that?”

I shook my head, too touched, for a moment, to say anything. “How did you visualize me last night?”

She thought about it. “You were laughing, like you did when you were a baby. Silvery peals of laughter. You weren’t troubled or worried. You were happy. Healed. Whole. And, sweetheart?”

“Yes?”

“You weren’t dressed like one of the Beverly Hillbillies.”

I looked down at my overalls and paint-spattered Chuck Taylors. “Gotcha. I’ll try and do better next time.”