Val Fremden Mystery Box Set 1 Read online

  “Nice toe rings,” she croaked in a scarred, toady voice that perfectly matched her appearance.

  Sprawled out on a pink, plastic beach lounger, she reminded me of one of those dried-up frogs you can still find now and then in politically incorrect souvenir shops.

  I was running on just one cup of coffee that morning, so it took a moment to realize she was talking to me. I sighed and wiped my eye again.

  “Thanks.”

  I turned to take a step toward the water, but the old woman wasn’t having it.

  “Wanna beer?”

  She grinned at me from under a pink Gilligan hat. Her oversized dentures looked clownish, wedged between two wide smears of bright-red lipstick.

  “It’s Sunday, you know. They ain’t servin’ booze ’til ’leven today.”

  Her salty-sweet Southern accent had a familiar ring. I’d spent three decades trying to rid myself of one just like it. She tilted her head and motioned toward a small cooler nestled in the sand beside her. I shook my head.

  “No thanks. I’m good.”

  I forced a smile and gave her a quick once-over. The old lady was one shade up from mahogany and as wrinkled as a linen pantsuit after a high-stakes game of Twister. Her arms and legs looked like four Slim Jims sticking out of a neon green bathing suit. It was the kind of simple, one-piece suit women over forty wore. One that supported the boobs and hid the belly.

  I was grateful for her modesty.

  Freckles and white spots covered the old woman’s dark-brown arms and legs. The Florida sun hadn’t been kind. She could have been fifty-five or ninety-five. With hard-core beach bums, it was impossible to tell. But given the full-on dentures, I placed her in her late sixties – at the youngest.

  “Okie dokie then, have it your way,” Slim Jim said.

  She watched me carefully from behind black, bug-eyed sunglasses. Her gaze never shifted as she reached instinctively into the cooler, pulled out a can, then cracked the tab on a family-size Fosters. I seized the opportunity and turned to take another step toward the water. That’s when I thought I heard her say, “Screw you, kiddo.”

  I whirled around to face her.

  “What?” I asked, thinking I must have heard her wrong.

  “Screw you, kiddo!” she repeated, flashing her denture-cream smile.

  She hoisted up the pint-sized beer between her boney fingers, causing half a pound of costume jewelry to cascade toward her elbows and twinkle in the glaring sunlight.

  Uncertain if the woman was a witch or a comedian, I tilted my head and cautiously mirrored her ear-to-ear grin. “That’s what I thought you said,” I replied. “Well, screw you, too.”

  “Love it!” she shot back. “Where you from?”

  I let go of my grip on my fake grin. “Someplace you’ve never heard of.” I turned and took a getaway step toward the shore.

  “Try me.”

  I sighed and turned back to face her. “Greenville, Florida, okay?”

  “No kiddin’! I know exactly where that is.”

  My mouth fell open. “You and three other people. How on earth do you know about Greenville?”

  “Well, kiddo, that’s a long story. Used to travel around a lot. I think I’ve been to every two-bit town east of the Mississippi. Sit down and I’ll tell you about it. You don’t look like you’re in no hurry, now. Are you?”

  I thought about taking off running, but the heat had zapped my will to flee. Besides, it would have been rude, even for me. So I plopped my bag onto the powdered-sugar sand, unfolded my chair and sat my flabby butt down.

  So much for a walk. Maybe tomorrow.

  SHE TOLD ME HER NAME was Gladys, a dirt-poor Kentucky girl who’d escaped a life of farm labor by marrying a traveling revival preacher named Bobby.

  “I used Bobby the way he used the Lord – as a ticket out of Nowheresville,” she said with a cackle. “After the weddin’ I spent the better part of a decade traveling the country with Bobby, pitching revival tents and per-tendin’ to be the perfect wife. Pious Patty, I called myself.”

  “Why?” I asked, more out of Southern hospitality than curiosity.

  Gladys shrugged and fortified herself with a slug of beer.

  “I had to do somethin’ to cope with those dang church people and their mindless jabber over endless, Sunday-go-to-eatin’ buffets of tuna casserole, squash casserole, green-bean casserole and some kind of godawful dessert casserole they called a trifle.”

  The old woman explained that back then, staying overnight in random parishioners’ homes was part and parcel to the life of a traveling preacher and his wife.

  “Even over the dad-burn tedium of pot ‘piss out of luck’ dinners, I dreaded havin’ to stay in other people’s houses,” she said. “After a while, I just stashed myself away and per-tended to be what others expected. It was just easier that a way.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said absently.

  Gladys eyed me dubiously from behind her sunglasses.

  “Do you, now? Well, I took it to a whole new level, kiddo. Even started watchin’ soap operas for acting tips, you know? But after a few years starrin’ in The Pious Patty Show, I was bored outta my gourd. That all ended one night in Hoboken when I got up to sneak a late-night smoke. Ran right into the husband of the house. One look at me in my nightgown caused that man to ‘revive’ somethin’ of his own, if you know what I mean.”

  I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear what came next. But I was powerless to stop the old lady. Gladys was barreling down memory lane in a Mack truck with no brakes.

  “I tell you what!” she cackled with glee. “When that dirty old man tried to hit on me, I flat-out told him ‘No sir!’ Then I hit him up – for fifty bucks!” She laughed. “Quick as a flash, I went from Pious Patty to Blackmail Betty.”

  “You don’t say,” I offered.

  “A guilty conscience can be an expensive liability – if you hit the right target,” she said proudly, without a hint of embarrassment.

  I had to hand it to her, Gladys was a good storyteller. Crude, but entertaining. I relaxed back into my chair, and my desire to flee slowly dissipated in the late-morning heat.

  “What’n long before I had my own revival business goin’,” she continued with unabashed entrepreneurial pride. “I started savin’ ev’ry dollar Blackmail Betty earned me. Tucked the cash away in my J.C. Penney jewelry box. Hid the money in the secret compartment under that dancing ballerina, don’t you know. When I’d cashed up to nearly a grand, I was getting’ ready to cash out and leave Bobby’s old butt behind.”

  Gladys took another swig from her Fosters and looked out at the Gulf. Her face was devoid of emotion. I watched her carefully, glued to my cheap beach chair by a fast-holding mixture of curiosity, disgust and morbid fascination. That, and I had absolutely nothing else to do with my life.

  “What happened then?” I asked.

  “That’s when Bobby told me he’d landed a revival gig at a church in St. Petersburg, Florida. We were in butt-crack Alabama at the time. I remember thinking, ‘What the hell.’ I tell you, kiddo, when me and Bobby got to St. Pete, it only took me one look to know I’d been right to hang on for one more of his stupid gigs.”

  Gladys sat up, slapped her knee and laughed.

  “Woo hoo! I was hooked like a snook, kiddo! Blue sky. No chance of snow! There was even a place that gave away free ice cream if the sun didn’t shine on any given day. I liked that. St. Pete had – what ’cha call it – an optimistic vibe about it.”

  I shook my head in admiration. Over the years, I’d heard countless tourists tell how, after taking a gander at the sugar-white sands and turquoise waters of St. Pete Beach, they’d decided to ditch their old lives like losing lottery tickets. But nobody had ever matched Gladys for grit and gusto.

  The old woman stood up.

  “Honey, I grabbed onto the Sunshine State’s butt with both hands.” Gladys’ hands latched onto her own scrawny butt cheeks in a way-too-literal visual accompaniment. S
he grinned, shook her boney hips for good measure, then lowered her arms and sat back down.

  “Nope. It didn’t take me long to hatch my escape plan, kiddo. Last day of Bobby’s dang revival, I snuck out the back of that church tent and into the driver’s seat of a 1966 Minnie Winnie RV.”

  She winked at me salaciously. “I’d done got it real cheap off the guilty husband me and Bobby been staying with.”

  I watched sparks dance in Gladys’s eyes as she recalled that day.

  “Kiddo, I climbed into that Minnie Winnie and shifted gears in more ways than one, you know? Drove to Sunset Beach and never looked back. It was 1974, by golly. Back then a body could do that. Just up and disappear.”

  Gladys drained her Fosters and shook her head wistfully. “Nowadays, they ain’t no good place to be a vagabond. Some uptight jerk with property rights always shows up to chase you away.”

  I thought back to all the quaint little beach houses I’d seen bulldozed over the years in the name of so-called progress.

  “Yeah, you’re right about that, Gladys.”

  The old woman flipped back her sunglasses and locked her beady eyes with mine.

  “Name’s Glad, kiddo. Not Gladys. I ain’t that scared young woman no more. No more Pious Patty. No more Blackmail Betty. No more Gladys. I’m just Glad now. Plain and simple.”

  I studied her a moment. A smile crept across my lips.

  “The name suits you.”

  Glad beamed at the compliment. “That’s mighty nice a you. What’s your name, sugar?”

  “Name’s Val. It’s nice to meet you, Glad,” I said, surprised to find I actually meant it.

  Since my disastrous return to my hometown of St. Pete Beach, friends had been hard to come by. Glad didn’t fit the usual profile of who I would have considered for a new pal, but as the saying went, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  I reached over and shook Glad’s boney brown hand. She grinned from ear to ear.

  “Sure you won’t have a beer?” she asked. She let go of my hand and tempted me with a wink and a frosty silver can.

  I bit my lip as I weighed the consequences.

  Since that fateful coin toss in the plane on New Year’s Eve, I’d tried to retain some kind of standards as to how low I’d allow myself sink in this latest incarnation of my tattered life. I’d broken them all except one; No drinking before 8 a.m.

  I checked the time on my cellphone. It was 8:03.

  I smiled at the old woman and took the pint of Fosters she offered. I cracked the tab, tilted my head back, and took a long, deep draught.

  *Author’s note: For the whole story on how Val went from top-of-the-world business woman to down-and-out amateur sleuth, check out the Val Fremden prequel novel, Absolute Zero: Misadventures from a Broad.

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZXYK776

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  Chapter Three

  MAY MELTED INTO JUNE and I fell into a comfortable routine of sharing a brew and a blab on the beach with Glad four or five times a week. No matter when I showed up, she never failed to be there, sprawled out on her pink beach lounger like a pile of spilled beef jerky.

  “Screw you, kiddo!” she said every time I set my stuff down next to hers. Then she’d shoo me off with a flick of her sun-spotted hand, encouraging me to take my usual morning walk on the beach.

  The walks didn’t help much. I usually wasted the time wondering what was wrong with me.

  A little over a year ago, I’d known precisely who I was – the “exotic” American wife of a handsome but moody German vintner. I’d lived in a fabulous, ancient winemaker’s house made of stone in a quaint country village nestled in a picturesque fairytale land dotted with vineyards and apple orchards and castles on hilltops. Now that I was back in St. Pete, I was living in a wooden hovel above somebody’s garage – and I couldn’t even land a job as a waitress.

  Even worse, the long years abroad had slowly turned me into a stranger to everyone I used to call a friend. During the long years away, punctuated only by sporadic phone calls and rushed holiday visits, the cozy familiarity I’d once enjoyed with them had eroded into the kind of arms-length, shallow kindness afforded to the lost and the elderly.

  I’d become nothing more than a random tourist wandering the outskirts of my former life.

  Worse still, to many of the people I used to know, I’d morphed into a curiosity – an odd puzzle they couldn’t comprehend. Perhaps my all-or-nothing, sink-or-swim life choices had made them fearful of wading out into their own deep waters. Maybe they didn’t have any deep waters. But whatever the reason, since my return from Germany, the majority of my estranged family and former friends had labeled me as reckless at best – pathetic at worst.

  And I’d begun to fear they were right.

  “MY LIFE SEEMS TO BE one screw-up after the next,” I said to Glad at the beach one morning. “Career down the drain. Three bad marriages.” I blew out a breath of frustration. “I wonder what my next mistake will be.”

  “Maybe it’s that bathing suit,” the old lady quipped and stuck out her lizard tongue.

  Her sharp humor made me wince.

  “Screw you,” I shot back, only half joking.

  The withered prune of a woman studied me from under her Gilligan hat. Finally, she spoke.

  “Girl, don’t you know by now? Mistakes are just thangs you hat’n figured out the reason for yet. Once you do, their worth shows up. You either learn somethin’ or get somethin’ from ever’thing that happens to you.”

  I stared at the wrinkly sage in a fluorescent-yellow bathing suit and matching turban. “Yeah, sure. Everything’s a lesson or a gift. I’ve heard that before.”

  “Then maybe it’s time you started listenin’.”

  A surge of restless energy jerked my body to standing. I looked down at my stomach. It spilled over the bottom of my two-piece bathing suit like a fallen soufflé. Suddenly, I became as self-conscious as the runner-up at a Ms. Middle-Aged Muffin-Top Pageant.

  Maybe Glad was right. This bathing suit was a mistake.

  I shifted my gaze from my belly over to the old woman.

  “Glad, have you ever made any mistakes you’ve never found the reason for?”

  Glad twisted her beer can slowly into the white sand and looked out toward the Gulf.

  “Just one, kiddo. Lost my true love once. My only real regret in this lifetime.”

  “Who was it?”

  Glad didn’t answer. She just kept staring out at the sparkling water as a single tear snaked its way down a ravine in her wrinkled, raisin of a cheek.

  SUNSET BEACH WAS ON the back burner this morning. I had plans to meet an old acquaintance, Tamella Fitz-Franklin, at a coffee shop in downtown St. Petersburg.

  While I was in Europe, Tammy had married a bigwig banker and moved into his mansion on Snell Isle (aka Snob Isle) off Coffee Pot Bayou, adjacent to the swanky Old Northeast neighborhood. In anticipation of seeing her for the first time in ages, I’d applied full makeup, blow-dried my hair, and donned a dress and heels. No big deal for most. But for me, it was an effort I usually reserved for first dates and funerals, which, given my track record, had often proved difficult to distinguish one from the other.

  I was heading out the door to meet her when my cellphone pinged. It was a last-minute text from Tammy, cancelling for the third time in a row.

  It read, “Something’s come up. Maybe next dweeb.”

  I was contemplating whether I was a victim of auto correct or a Freudian slip when I realized that maybe I was neither!

  Maybe she really thought I was a dweeb! A dweeb who no longer fit in her social circle, obviously. Crap!

  The only thing “circling” me these days was the credit vultures �
� my FICA score stunk to high heaven.

  “OK,” I texted back, then kicked off my heels and unzipped my dress.

  I hated that crap like that still bothered me, but it did. I flung the dress onto my old couch. Was Tammy ashamed to be seen with me? Maybe I’d sunk too low to be worth her time anymore. It wouldn’t have hurt so badly if she had been the only one to reject me like this. But like life itself, Tammy had moved on, just like almost everyone else I used to know.

  Painful memories stung my heart and caused my eyes to water. I’d let go of so much lately. Tammy was just one more drop in a huge barrel. So why did it hurt so much? Then I studied my face in the mirror and realized that even I was embarrassed by me.

  Oh, crap on a cracker!

  My thoughts turned to the old lady I’d met on the beach, and what she must have had to give up, too. Glad was homeless, as far as I could tell. She’d lost everything. Yet she’d found a way to be happy despite it all. I hoped I could, too. I just needed time – and a new set of skills.

  Specifically, I wanted to be immune to the stinging hurt of other people’s judgement. I wanted to be free to live my life my way, with no regrets. But what I wanted most of all was to not give a crap anymore about what anyone else thought of me.

  Period.

  From what I’d witnessed over the past few weeks, Glad was the Jedi Master of Don’t-Give-A-Crap University. Her carefree attitude and genuine, everyday happiness did more than intrigue me. It made me envious. More envious than I was of Tammy Fitz-Franklin, to be sure.

  Who needed a witch like that for a friend, anyway?

  I pushed up my chin, pulled on my best bathing suit, grabbed my purse, and headed to Sunset Beach, still sporting my full-on war paint.

  “HOW DO YOU DO IT, JEDI Master?” I called out as I picked my way across the sand in Glad’s direction.

  The summer sky and lazy gulf were the same gorgeous shade of azure blue. As I crossed the thirty feet of beach that separated us, the late-morning sun set about frying the back of my neck like eggs in a skillet.