Thirty-Four and a Half Predicaments: Rose Gardner Mystery #7 (6 page)

“Okay.”

“No worries, Lady. You’ll do great.”

“There’s a lot more to worry about than that, Skeeter.”

“But it’s the only thing that matters to me.” Then he hung up.

Butthead.

I went back to our table and stopped as I rounded the corner. This day was worse than a drunk stuck on a tilt-a-whirl ride.

Kate was sitting at our table.

She glanced up at me with a sardonic smile. “Don’t be shy, Rose. Come join us.”

I looked over at Neely Kate, who dipped a French fry in ketchup and shrugged.
Great
. Reluctantly, I took my seat.

“You don’t look very happy to see me,” Kate said. “I thought we’d bonded in the waiting room.”

The mention of Neely Kate’s hospital stay made my friend freeze, French fry mid-air. She set it down on her plate.

Now I was pissed. “What do you want, Kate?”

“And here I was trying to be helpful and return this to you.” She slid Mason’s credit card across the table.

I stopped myself from cringing. Mason had only given it to me a couple of hours ago, and I’d already almost lost it. Just great. “Thank you.” I grabbed the card and picked up my purse.

“Were you and Joe really engaged?” she asked.

I put the credit card into my wallet. “Why don’t you ask Joe?”

“Because I’m asking you.”

I looked up into her face. “I’m not sure why you even care. Joe and I broke up. I’m with Mason and I’m happy. Joe is moving on.”

She laughed, but it was a harsh sound. “You really believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter if I believe it or not. Joe is no longer my problem.”

Kate studied me for a moment. “No. You can claim you don’t care all you want, but I don’t believe it for a minute.”

I leaned forward. “Why do
you
even care?”

“Joe’s my brother. I want him to be happy.”

I shook my head. “Then where have you been these last two years? He’s been through hell. He needed you then.”

Her smile fell. “He had you.”

“No. Not when it mattered. He was all alone.” I turned to Neely Kate. Her face was pale and she looked like she was about to cry again. “Are you ready to go?”

She nodded and stood.

I got out of my seat and handed her some cash. “Neely Kate, why don’t you go pay. I need to talk to Joe’s sister for a moment.”

Neely Kate glanced between the two of us, but when I nodded to show her I was okay, she walked to the register.

As soon as she was out of earshot, I turned my wrath on Kate. “She’s been miserable for two weeks, but she finally found a tiny bit of happiness today. But you and Hilary Wilder just keep snatching it from her—you with your careless tongue and Hilary parading around with a pregnancy nobody wants but her, and even then only for selfish reasons.”

Her eyebrows shot up in bewilderment. “What did I do?”

I lowered my voice. “I have no idea what kind of game you’re playing, but I’m not part of it. Leave me and Neely Kate alone.”

Neely Kate had finished paying, so we left the restaurant, leaving Kate still sitting at the table.

As soon as the door closed, I turned to her. “Neely Kate, I’m so sorry. I just wanted you to have a nice afternoon, but Joe’s sister and his witch of an ex-girlfriend went and ruined it.”

“Oh, Rose. This is the best I’ve felt since losing the babies.”

“But Kate…”

“One good afternoon isn’t gonna make me instantly better. You know that after your breakup with Joe.”

“I know. But I wanted it to last as long for as long as possible.”

She lifted her hand to her pink and purple streaks. “I love my hair, although you still haven’t explained why you had Mason’s credit card.”

I cringed. “I think you can figure it out if you think about the business’s cash flow.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Only temporarily, as Mason pointed out. Plus he made a suggestion that makes me feel better about letting him help me out.”

“Good, because that man loves you somethin’ fierce.”

“I know.”

“Don’t back down from talking to him about Dora and Hilary tonight. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for everything, and you’ll feel better knowing.”

I sure hoped she was right.

I unlocked the car so she could climb inside, then walked over to the office to pick up Muffy. Bruce Wayne had already left, so Muffy was happy to see me, and even happier to see Neely Kate once I let her into the car. My little dog covered her with licks until she started laughing. “Okay, girl. That’s enough lovin’.”

After I dropped Neely Kate off at her house, I stopped at the Piggly Wiggly on the way home, leaving Muffy in Mason’s car. I hadn’t been in the grocery store since an unfortunate incident right before Thanksgiving involving a shopping cart and a can display had resulted in my equally unfortunate arrest. I halfway expected alarms to go off and security guards to tackle me, but the only one who seemed to notice was Bennie, the guy who’d replaced Bruce Wayne’s best friend as a bagger.

I knew Bennie from Jonah’s church. He was in his twenties and had Down syndrome. He’d asked me to come see him while he was working, so he was excited when I walked through the door. He waved, his face breaking out into a huge grin. “Hi, Miss Rose! You came to see me!”

I gave him a quick wave. “Of course!”

“You’re gonna let me bag your groceries, aren’t you, Miss Rose?”

I gave him a warm smile. “I wouldn’t let anyone else do it.”

The cashier turned and gave me a glare.

I sighed as I pushed my cart toward the produce aisle. I should have expected some animosity from the staff. Even if the incident hadn’t been my fault.

Since Muffy was in the car and I didn’t want to leave her for very long, I only grabbed what we needed for the next few days, but the pile was bigger than I’d expected. I made it to the checkout lane and had put most of my items on the conveyor belt when Miss Mildred’s voice grated out from behind me.

“I thought you’d been banned from the Piggly Wiggly.”

I turned around to see my former neighbor standing in line behind me. The octogenarian looked the same as ever—
cranky
—only there were some new faint blue streaks in her white hair.

I lifted my chin. “I guess that’s just proof you can’t believe everything you hear.” I pulled a bag of pasta out of the cart. “I like what you’ve done with your hair.”

She patted the top of my head. “What happened to my hair is none of your business.”

Fair enough. I turned my back to her.

“Are you still living in sin with the assistant DA?”

“I could argue that the answer to that question is none of your business, but I have nothin’ to hide. So if you’re asking if Mason and I are still living together, the answer is yes.” I set a container of strawberries on the conveyor belt. “What have you been up to, Miss Mildred? Have you stalked any other neighbors lately?”

“The neighborhood has been remarkably quiet since you left. Murder and mayhem are at an all-time low.”

“You can’t blame Miss Dorothy’s death on me. That was Jonah Pruitt’s mother.”

“And then there was the bank robbery.”

“I was an innocent bystander. Besides, you weren’t even there.”

She pointed her finger at me. “I heard about your job at that stripper club. God rest your poor momma’s soul.”

“I never stripped! I never even took my clothes off!” I protested louder than I’d intended. She didn’t need to know Neely Kate had taken a disastrous turn on the stripper pole.

A mother with two small children was rounding a corner just then, about to head down another aisle. Her mouth dropped open and she gave me the stinkeye as she shoved her poor preschool-aged boy on the other side of her, away from me, as though my presence might somehow infect him. Only she pushed him a little too hard and he crashed into a cereal box display on the endcap. An avalanche of boxes came crashing down on him and his mother.

“Look what you did!” Miss Mildred shouted, louder than any loudspeaker could hope to be. Every person in the front of the store turned their attention to her.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I shouted. “I wasn’t anywhere near that display!”

The store manager walked toward the cash register as Bennie—who was sacking my groceries—stared, taking everything in.

Miss Mildred narrowed her eyes and pointed her finger at me. “You are a menace to society. I’m gonna start a petition to have you kicked out of town.”

“You can do that?” If so, maybe I could somehow get Hilary kicked out on her rear. But my excitement over possibly evicting her was short-lived. I quickly remembered Joe saying if he had the authority to force her out of town, he would have done it by now. “Well, I guess that’ll give you some excitement to take your mind off how boring the neighborhood’s become without me.”

That wasn’t the reaction she’d wanted, but she clamped her mouth shut.

The mother of the boy was trying to dig him out from under a pile of boxes while her little girl started sobbing. “I lost my brother!”

The store manager had rushed over to help, but he kept throwing glances my way that clearly said he was trying his best to figure out how to blame me for the latest mishap.

Thankfully, the cashier said, “That will be one hundred and thirty-six dollars and fifty-nine cents.” Her tone let me know she was just as eager to be done with me as her boss was.

Bennie was bagging the last of my items. “Look, Miss Rose. I was careful with your eggs.”

“You did a great job, Bennie,” I said as I dug through the cash in my wallet. The girl was crying louder and her brother had joined in the chorus, although not because he was hurt—he was upset his mother had dug him out of his new fort. The afternoon had gone from bad to worse and I just wanted to go home. When I realized I didn’t have enough cash, I handed the cashier Mason’s credit card.

She glanced at it and turned it over. “This isn’t your card.”

I rested my hands on the small shelf near the conveyer belt, wondering why I hadn’t just slid the card through the card reader. “It’s okay. It’s my boyfriend’s.”

“But it’s not
yours
.”

“Well, no. But he gave it to me to use.”

She looked over her register toward the fracas behind me. “Ed.”

But Ed was too busy tripping over boxes and dealing with the irate mother to hear her.

“Ed!” she shouted, and when she got his attention, she continued. “We got a case of identity theft at register four.”

“
What?
” I gasped.

The mother looked up at me like I was one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

Bennie’s eyes widened like saucers. “You’re a thief, Miss Rose?”

“What? No!” I turned to the cashier. “I didn’t steal his identity. If you’ll just call Mason, he’ll tell you it’s okay.”

Miss Mildred gave me a smug grin. “I knew you were wicked since you were little. It was only a matter of time before you were put away in prison.”

“I didn’t steal Mason’s identity!”

The cashier’s frown deepened and it was a wonder she hadn’t set permanent lines in her face. “You can tell it to the Henryetta Police.”

Crappy doodles.

By employing a few evasive tactics, I managed to text Mason to tell him I’d used his card at the Piggly Wiggly and was in a heap of trouble.

The store manager, the cashier, poor confused Bennie, and Miss Mildred had formed a loose circle around me, as if corralling a dangerous criminal, by the time Officer Ernie arrived. The police officer slid through the automatic door as it was opening, only the door moved too slow and his shoulder got caught in the edge. He lowered his sunglasses and glared at the door as though it were a punk kid who’d pulled a prank on him. Then he turned, settled his sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose, and strutted toward us.

Somebody had watched too many cop shows.

He stopped several feet away from me, his thumbs hooked on his belt, a cocky grin on his face. He was Henryetta’s own version of Barney Fife and he played it to the hilt, whether he realized it or not. “Well, well, well. Look who’s causing trouble again.”

I put my hands on my hips and said, for what had to be the hundredth time, “I didn’t do anything wrong. If you would just call Mason, we could get this all sorted out.”

Officer Ernie gave me a satisfied smirk. “We’ll sort it out down at the station.”

Miss Mildred was fit to be tied since I was still blocking the checkout lane. “Some of us don’t have all day to deal with your shenanigans. Just haul her off to jail and be done with it.”

I turned to face her, my anger nearing the boiling point. “Then why didn’t you move over to lane four like the manager told you to do?”

She shot me a scowl. “My stuff’s already on the belt.”

I was about to scoop her three bottles of Metamucil into her cart when everyone turned toward the doors. I whipped around to see Mason walk through them, already giving Officer Ernie an irritated look. “What in Sam Hill is goin’ on here?” His annoyance came through loud and clear.

The policeman gave him a haughty look. “Rose Gardner has committed identity theft.”