Val Fremden Mystery Box Set 1 Read online

  “Yeah, copper. You found the skeleton in my closet.”

  “Chattahoochee? That’s some skeleton!”

  “My relatives aren’t in the mental hospital. They’re in the area. My mom’s from Greenville. My aunt lives in Two Egg.”

  “Two Egg?” Tom asked. “That’s not even grammatically correct!”

  “Now you know why I had to escape.”

  Tom laughed and picked up a bean pod and squeezed it. A soybean shot across the table onto the floor. I giggled.

  “Letting another perpetrator escape justice, I see.”

  “Hey, nobody’s perfect.”

  “True enough. So, tell me, Tom. Why is this Thelma Goldrich in a hospital for the criminally insane? Did she kill somebody?”

  “No. Nothing that bad. Just garden-variety craziness, mostly. And she likes to set fires.”

  “Great.”

  “I’ve got her mugshot if you want to see it.”

  “Of course!”

  Tom reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. He unfolded it and laid it on the table in front of me. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it sure wasn’t this. Thelma looked like Miss Piggy after a bar fight and a bareback romp in the hay. Despite her angry, dirty and disheveled appearance, some aspects of her reminded me of Glad.

  “A real looker, wouldn’t you agree?” Tom quipped.

  “She’s blonde. Big boobs. Like Glad.”

  “Still, it doesn’t automatically make her the one. Val, I still don’t understand why the Thelma you’re after can’t be one of the other two women on the DMV list.”

  “Because Mister...because Jacob confirmed that Glad’s baby was definitely Tony’s, and that Glad had named her Thelma...after her own mom. Tony and Glad are both white, so that rules out the other two, obviously.”

  “Obviously,” Tom agreed. “I guess Jacob didn’t have any information on where the daughter is, or you’d have led with that.”

  “No. He told me a lot about Glad and Tony, and what happened with her and her first husband Bobby. But we ran out of time. I’m meeting him later this afternoon to find out what he knows about their daughter. When I dropped him off at Water Loo’s, he told me he didn’t know much about her. But he’s been known to tell lies.”

  “What do you mean?” Tom asked. He sat up and looked serious for the first time.

  “Long story. Just take my word for it. Of course, if Jacob doesn’t know where Thelma is, he also doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive.”

  “I’m rooting for alive.”

  I smiled at Tom. “Thanks. Me too. What makes you so positive?”

  “Tony and Glad. Think about it. If they had known for sure their daughter was dead, why would they have made the will out to her?”

  “You know, you’re pretty smart for a cute guy.”

  Tom sat back and showed me his perfect, pearly whites.

  “Thanks, Val. You’re not too dumb yourself. You know, I’m off until Tuesday. We could go up there and meet this crazy Thelma woman. It’s just a five- or six-hour drive. We could spend the time getting to know each other.”

  My neck flushed with heat and my brain slammed into sabotage mode. “I’m picky about who I spend my time with, Tom.”

  Tom grinned back at me. “So, pick me.”

  A knot of panic clogged my throat.

  Why did he have to be so cute and charming?

  “I’m not sure I’m ready for another relationship, Tom.”

  “Whoa, Val. I’m just talking about a long drive here.”

  “Yeah. Every relationship I’ve ever been in began with a long drive and ended in a long, painful death.”

  “Wow. That’s pretty heavy, Val. You know, if you don’t stop carrying that giant chip on your shoulder, you’re going to turn into Quasimodo.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I JERKED ON THE HANDLE of my overnight bag, trying to dislodge it from between two boxes on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. For the first time since I could recall, I was actually busy. Triple-booked, even. A synopsis to write. Jacob to interview. And now this trip with Tom.

  What happened to my quiet little life as a washed-up writer wandering the beach and getting wasted?

  Tom was going to pick me up at eight tomorrow morning. I was supposed to meet Jacob at six this evening. It was already after two. I had about three hours to pack and take a final stab at Double Booty. I needed to focus. I needed a clear head.

  I needed a TNT.

  I gave a final tug. The bag let loose, sending me careening to the floor along with it. The seismic tremor created by my medium-large bottom hitting the wooden floor sent a small, blue box tumbling off one of the shelves. As it hit the ground, the lid flew off. A tiny object fell out, ricocheted off the floor and landed on my lap. I stared at it and shuddered. It was the broken-off piece of jewelry I’d found in one of Glad’s shoeboxes.

  It was as if my evil deed had come back to haunt me.

  I’d kept the silver oval embedded with green rhinestones as a memento. I’d figured no one would miss it. That’s what I’d told myself at the time, anyway. Now I could feel the full weight of the real truth on my conscience. I hadn’t rescued it. I’d stolen it.

  After looking through Glad’s shoeboxes of memorabilia, my heart had ached to keep a little piece of her with me. It had felt right at the time to take this little memento of her. Who would care about a worthless, broken little piece of junk? But now I realized that maybe this piece of junk belonged to someone else. Maybe that crazy woman in Chattahoochee. It might mean the world to her, for all I knew.

  I turned the tiny object over and over in my hand, feeling as lost and out of place and incomplete as it was. Then I remembered something – I didn’t have time for all this sappy sentiment.

  I grabbed the blue box and placed the broken piece of jewelry back into it. I hauled myself up off the floor, unzipped my overnight bag, and dropped the little box inside.

  RUNNING SHORT ON TIME, I’d told Jacob to meet me in Straub Park this afternoon. I could walk there from my apartment in under five minutes.

  Situated on the waterfront downtown, Straub Park was a long, rectangular patch of green grass dotted by statues and skirted by sidewalks and benches. It was sandwiched between the small shops and restaurants lining Beach Drive on the west and the expansive blue water of Tampa Bay on the east. The Vinoy Hotel sat at the northern end of the park. St. Pete’s Museum of Fine Arts completed the rectangle to the south.

  Designed with the intention of being a respite for city dwellers, the north end of Straub Park was almost entirely shaded by beautiful, old, oak trees. Their canopies provided a natural refuge from the blazing Florida sun, and made sitting outside tolerable most days, even in summer.

  I recognized Jacob’s thick head of steely-grey hair from a hundred feet away. He was waiting for me on a park bench under the trees. I’d made some progress on Double Booty, but I knew it was nowhere near ready for prime time. I needed to hit pay dirt during this meeting with Jacob. Something juicy for my novel, and hopefully something useful for my trip with Tom. As I passed the corner sidewalk lined with miniature azalea bushes, flop sweat trickled down my back.

  What if Jacob had nothing worthwhile to tell me about what happened to the baby?

  Jacob was facing the water. Intently watching the boats in the bay, he didn’t notice me walk up.

  “Hi, Jacob.” My voice caused the old man to jump.

  “Oh! Hello there, Miss Val.”

  I smiled. Jacob’s Southern upbringing was showing. Adding the term “Miss” before my name was what a polite Southern man did out of respect for an unmarried woman of uncertain age. He was dressed again in a saintly uniform of mostly white – a white t-shirt, white tennis shoes and socks, and a white belt to hold up his white-and-plaid shorts.

  “Any problem finding the place?” I asked.

  “Huh? Oh, no. None at all. How was lunch with Tom?”

  “Fine.” I thought about telli
ng Jacob about the trip I was taking tomorrow, but my gut told me to withhold the information, for the moment, at least.

  “This certainly is a neighborhood for the ‘haves,’” Jacob said. He pointed to the collection of opulent pleasure boats and catamarans bobbing in the Vinoy Club yacht basin across the street from the snooty, pink, wedding cake of a hotel.

  “Yeah.”

  “So, Val, are you a ‘have’ or a ‘have not?’ ”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘have.’ I ‘have’ bills. I ‘have’ doubts. I ‘have not’ money, if that’s what you mean.”

  Jacob eyed me almost suspiciously, then gestured for me to sit down on the bench next to him. As I did, my eye caught on the sharp contrast between the grey, faded wood of the bench and the fresh, clean wood of the new armrest recently installed in the middle of it.

  How ingenious. And apropos.

  St. Pete had found the perfect, politically correct solution to keeping penniless people from turning the benches into bedsteads. The new armrests made it impossible to lie down across the bench.

  Score another one for the “haves.”

  “So how about you, Jacob? Are you a ‘have’ or ‘have not?’ By the way, what’s your last name?”

  “Oh, I’d say I’m a ‘have not,’ on the way to being ‘have not-er,’” Jacob joked, then laughed dryly. “You said you’re short on time, Val. Should we get to it? What else do you want to know?”

  “I need to know everything you know about Glad and Tony’s baby. What could have happened to Thelma? Where she might be. I guess I was hoping to hear about whatever clues you might have picked up along the way.”

  “You want the long version or the short one? Either way, it doesn’t add up to much.”

  I sighed. Then I remembered Tom’s words. He said cases often get solved by gut feelings. I had a gut feeling Jacob had some of the answers, whether he knew it himself or not. The more information I could get out of him, the more data I’d have to sort through myself.

  “I guess I’ll take the long version.”

  “Okay. Where’d we leave off? Oh yeah, Glad moved into the RV. Wait. Before I forget, when she first got to my sister’s, Ang and I took pictures of the bruises on Glad’s arms and legs. It was awful. Glad was dang near a walking skeleton. Ang had one of those old 8mm cameras at the time, so we made a movie of Glad, crazy as she was, talking about how the devil had done all that damage to her. Well, we all knew who the real devil was. So would anybody with half a brain, we figured.

  “So Ang and I got the paperwork and filled it out for Glad to press charges against Bobby. We didn’t mention the baby in the court proceedings. We thought it would have been too much for Glad at the time. The real focus was to get Bobby in the slammer and pronto. The last thing we needed was him to come snooping around and find her. So, Glad signed the papers and, well, we showed the judge the pictures and the home movie, and it was pretty much a slam dunk. Bobby went to jail for felony assault and Glad went back to hiding in that RV.”

  “Wow. Do you still have the pictures or the home movie?”

  “Yeah, somewhere I guess. At Ang’s probably. Do you really want to see them?”

  “Maybe.” My gut flopped. “Not really. You know, Jacob, Glad never mentioned having a baby to me. What happened to it?”

  “I’m getting to that. Like I said, Glad was in real bad shape when we found her. Not just physically. She was scared as a whipped puppy. It took her a good three months of living in the RV before she felt safe enough to peek her head out. She still believed that devil Bobby was coming back to get her. Anyway, Ang called me one day saying she’d had a breakthrough with Glad. I drove down to see what she was talking about.”

  “So, what had happened?”

  “I don’t exactly know for sure. It was like that RV full of butterflies was some kind of magic chrysalis or something for Glad. Ang had a routine of checking on Glad a couple of times a day. She’d bring meals to her in the RV. When she did, Glad was usually staring off into never-never land or sleeping. But one day Ang walked in and Glad sat up and started talking. It was still kind of crazy talk, but any talking was good in Glad’s case.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Mumbo jumbo, mostly. Bobby must have brainwashed her good. She said crazy religious stuff like the devil was after her. That the devil himself had chosen her virgin child among all others or something like that. One thing I remember for sure was that Glad said Jesus sent ‘the butterfly’ to save her.”

  “The butterfly? To save who? Glad or her baby?”

  “Hmmm. I don’t rightly know.”

  “How had a butterfly saved her?”

  “As far as I could tell, it hadn’t. She was crazy. But you know, Val, there’s moments in life you can hardly believe, even though you lived through ’em yourself. I asked Glad pretty much the same question – how had a butterfly saved her? You know what she did?”

  “What?”

  “She reached a hand into her mouth, pulled out her top dentures and handed them to me. I was so floored I couldn’t do anything but take ’em. Glad stared at me for a minute, then she told me to look on the back of her teeth. I did, and I’ll be darned. Glued to the back of her dentures was a little silver piece of jewelry with tiny green stones in it. She told Ang and me that the butterfly had left it for her so she could find Thelma again.”

  I shivered despite the late afternoon heat.

  “That...that doesn’t make any sense, Jacob.”

  “I told you. Glad was crazy back then. It took another year of coaxing for us to sort out that Glad’s mom had given her a pin shaped like a butterfly. Glad had worn it all the time in memory of her dead mother. But one day Bobby punched her on the shoulder and broke it. After that, Glad kept the main part of the brooch pinned to the inside of baby Thelma’s diaper. The broken part she kept glued to her dentures.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she was crazy – like a fox,” Jacob said, and touched a finger to his graying temple. “Glad said her dentures were the safest place to keep something because Bobby had quit hitting her in the mouth by then. He didn’t want to have to pay for another set of new teeth. Probably wouldn’t have bought the first set if he didn’t have to keep up appearances with his customers...the church people. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to change the baby’s diaper. Pretty clever of her, if you think about it.”

  I thought about it. It really was clever.

  “Anyway, from then on, Glad kept the main part of the brooch on the baby and the broken-off piece glued to her dentures so that they would always be connected. I guess she thought it was some kind of talisman against harm. Maybe she thought the butterfly was her mom protecting her from up in heaven. Whatever she thought, I guess it didn’t work, because one day, baby Thelma just up and disappeared.”

  “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “That’s the saddest part of all. Years later, when Glad was a lot better, almost back to herself even, she confessed to me that she wasn’t sure what happened to her daughter. She said she woke up one day and baby Thelma was gone. She didn’t know if she’d done something with her, or Bobby had. When she confessed that to me, Glad broke down and cried like nothing I’ve ever seen before or hope to see again.”

  Jacob looked away for a moment and studied the boats in the harbor. A fat grey squirrel ran by carrying a peanut in its mouth. Jacob watched it run along the edge of the sidewalk past our bench. He turned back to face me and continued.

  “Glad had blanked out a lot of memories. Self-preservation, I guess. Anyway, she said she could have been the one who got rid of Thelma. She could have given her away or left her somewhere. She knew first-hand that Bobby was a ticking time bomb. She remembered fearing for Thelma’s safety so much she could hardly sleep or eat. Giving Thelma away for her own good might have won out over Glad’s own desire to keep her. Considering Bobby’s violent temper and the sheer misery of their situation, Glad confessed she th
ought that maybe those people at the mercy home had been right. She should have given Thelma up for adoption.”

  I tried to picture Glad back then. I couldn’t imagine how desperate she must have been. I didn’t want to imagine it. “Poor Glad! Do you think she did? Get rid of her baby herself, I mean?”

  “Who knows? She could have. But my money’s on Bobby. After all, he was paid five grand to make the baby disappear. And after Thelma vanished, Glad said Bobby took great delight in torturing her by saying he saw the devil himself come and steal her illegitimate child away. One time he even told her he saw the devil tear Thelma to shreds and eat her. He gave Glad a lock of blonde hair as proof. Glad hid the hair away, like she did the butterfly pin. She showed the hair to my sister Ang, but it turned out to be plastic threads like from a Barbie doll head.”

  My heart sank. “So Thelma’s probably dead.”

  “Probably. But I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anybody, Val. I wanted proof, and the only person I figured knew for sure was Bobby Munch, the devil himself.”

  “What are you saying, Jacob?”

  “Bobby did twelve years at Appalach’. Part for what he did to Glad, the other for embezzling church funds. When I found out Bobby was getting out, me and a friend of mine made a plan. Bobby didn’t know neither one of us. When he came marching out, wasn’t nobody waiting for him. I told that buck-toothed jerk that my friend had just got out of the slammer, too. We invited Bobby along for some whiskeys and beers to celebrate. Believe me, he didn’t need much convincing. After we got him good and drunk we threw him in the back of the truck. You know, there’s lots of woods up there near Chattahoochee. Lots of places no one can hear a man scream.”

  Another shiver went down my spine. I scooted a few inches down the bench away from Jacob. I watched his face grow cold and bitter as he spoke.

  “When morning came around, we were about as far from earshot as a man can get. Bobby woke up on the ground hog-tied and hungover. Now Val, I’m a Southern gentleman. I asked Bobby politely what he did with baby Thelma, but he wasn’t talking. Well, I’m a man who believes in Old Testament justice. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. I figured Bobby owed Glad about eight teeth. So I got out a set of pliers and got to work. I was fair about it. I gave him a chance to talk between each tooth. He hollered plenty. But he never confessed. I guess prison taught him how to tolerate pain. Or maybe he figured losing his choppers was better than another stint in the hoosegow. Or death row for murdering the baby.”