Val Fremden Mystery Box Set 1 Read online

  Thank heaven for the slight breeze, I thought as I stood over Glad. She was sprawled out in her lounge chair, and my body was casting a sliver of shade across her face.

  Taking advantage of the respite from the sun, Glad flipped her bug-eyed sunglasses up on her forehead and stared at me with eyes as blue and piercing as a glacier shard.

  “What you mean, kiddo? How do I do what, exactly?”

  I crinkled my nose. “Stay so upbeat. I mean, it’s like nothing gets you down.”

  “Oh!” She laughed. “There ain’t no magic hocus pocus to it, kiddo. You just gotta remember that you decide how you feel about whatever’s happenin’ around you. You’re in complete control a your feelin’s. Don’t let nobody take your power, child.”

  “But what about....”

  “No buts!” she said, cutting me off. “You wanna be sad, Val, be sad. You wanna be happy, be happy. It’s always a hunnert percent your choice. Own it, girl.”

  I grabbed a beer and plopped down in my chair. I didn’t say anything for a while. Actually, I was kind of pissed.

  So that was Glad’s secret to a happy life? It was so freaking simple. So utterly profound. So undeniably true. How had I never figured this out before? And why was I so pissed about it?

  I was on round three of beating myself up inside when Glad sat up in her lounge chair and studied me.

  “Why the makeup today, kiddo? You don’t need it.”

  “I was going to meet a friend...or should I say, ex-friend for coffee this morning. She ditched me. I guess I’m no longer up to her standards.”

  Glad leaned across her beach lounger and took my hand in hers – something she’d never done before. “Let me tell you something, girlie. Who gives a crap what that cow-brained heifer thinks a you? All that matters is what you think a you. And if you don’t mind me sayin’ so, I think you’re kind a wonderful, Val.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had complimented me. Hot tears sprang up and spilled from my eyes. My throat tightened so that I couldn’t speak.

  Glad smiled, let go of my hand and sank back into her lounger. After a while, I wiped my eyes on my beach towel, picked up my beer and took a big gulp.

  Jedi Master Glad chose that precise moment to lift a scrawny butt cheek and trumpet out a magnificent, flappy-assed fart.

  Two foamy furrows of Fosters shot straight out my nostrils.

  As I half-suffocated between gasps and giggles. Glad shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly and smiled at me with a grin Jimmy Carter couldn’t match.

  “See how easy you can change your own mood?” she said.

  I was too stunned to reply.

  A few short weeks ago, I would’ve been aghast at Glad’s behavior. But as I sat there beside her on the beach, I felt nothing remotely on par with horror or disgust or shame. Glad’s flatulent act was no longer an embarrassing faux pas to me. Instead, it was...it was – a wake-up call – a noisy refusal to be defined by social mores. It was...total freedom!

  Wait a second, Val. Have you lost your mind? Farting equals freedom?

  I scowled.

  Why the hell not?

  Looking back on my life thus far, it made as much sense as anything else ever had. Besides, Glad’s words weren’t just some bull-crap theory from an old gasbag. She had mastered total, who-gives-a-crap self-acceptance. I wanted that, too!

  An empty beer can hit me on the elbow, startling me out of my inner machinations. I looked over and saw Glad grinning at me playfully.

  “We create our own dad-gum prisons, Val,” she said. “But I’m here to tell you, we always got a-hold of the keys. We got the power to set ourselves free anytime. Anytime, I tell you. All you got to do is choose to feel good, no matter what kind a crap rolls your way.”

  I nodded at the wise old guru disguised as dried beef sticks.

  She’s right.

  I sniffed back a drop of inhaled beer still tickling my nose and looked out at the ocean. A single thought whirled around in my head like a water sprite.

  I have the keys. I have the keys. I have the keys.

  So why was I still loitering around in an orange jumpsuit, waiting for someone else’s permission to go free?

  Chapter Four

  OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, a new feeling began to take hold in my heart. I wasn’t sure what to call it, but I think it might have been hope.

  In a surge of renewed optimism, I dusted off my old resume and writing portfolio and began to look up some old contacts in the advertising industry. I also applied for waitress positions at a couple of restaurants on the beach and downtown, just in case my old copywriting career was as dead on arrival as I’d felt on that plane home from Frankfurt.

  Yes. Glad’s crazy-but-effective, no-bull-crap tutelage had started to take root. I felt freer, looser somehow, like a crab that had sloughed off an old carapace that no longer fit. With new room to breathe, a tightly bound knot of rubber bands had begun to unravel in my chest. The unexpected snaps pinched and hurt, but the relief always outweighed the pain. With Glad’s help, I’d even managed a good laugh or two at my situation.

  Glad was good medicine, even though her remedial words were often hard to swallow.

  ONE MORNING AS I PULLED Shabby Maggie into Caddy’s parking lot, my cellphone pinged. It was a text from Cannon & Tate Advertising, thanking me for my interest in a position there. Unfortunately, the feeling was not reciprocal.

  Another rejection. Argh!

  I grabbed my beach chair out of the backseat and picked my way across the parking lot. Halfway across, I tripped on a broken whelk shell and blew out my left flip-flop.

  Really?

  I scowled and limped my way toward the picket fence, my cheeks hotter than the morning sun. When I reached the beach, I took off the other flip-flop and tossed both cheap shoes into a garbage bin. Glad waving at me from her spot by the clump of sea oats. I forced my pursed lips into a smile. My phone pinged with another text message. Beachshore Grille didn’t think I had what it took to be waitress, either.

  “Crap, crap and double crap!” I grumbled as I marched across the sand.

  “What’s up, kiddo?” Glad asked from beneath her floppy hat and sunglasses.

  I held my phone out for her to see.

  “Look. Two job rejections in five minutes. With my luck, I couldn’t land a job cleaning shoes in a crap factory.”

  Glad took off her hat and glasses and glanced at my phone.

  “Don’t sweat it, kiddo. You’ll get a job when you set your mind to it.”

  She smiled and wagged her McDonald’s-arches-for-eyebrows at me. The perfect crescents of black eyebrow pencil scrawled on Glad’s sun-spotted forehead gave her a permanent look of astonishment that had, at first, made me secretly embarrassed for her. Now, seeing the double arches in action caused a smile of endearment to curl my lips, despite my frustration over my unemployment situation.

  “When I set my mind to it? I really need a job now,” I said as I set up my beach chair. I fumbled through my bag for a copy of The St. Petersburg Times I’d folded to the job classifieds.

  Glad sat back in her lounger. Her pink Gilligan hat returned to its perch atop her short shock of silver hair. She reached a long, Slim Jim arm toward the cooler for another beer and said, “I think you should hold out for the job you really want.” She punctuated the end of her sentence with the click and vacuum-whoosh of a fresh can of beer opening.

  As I watched her take a slug of beer, what was left of my tentative good mood evaporated.

  “You don’t get it,” I argued. “I lost my career, Glad! I need to get back in the workforce. Otherwise, how am I going to be a worthwhile citizen?”

  Glad shot me a sideways glance, then burst into a laugh that shook her entire boney body. Beer sloshed onto her purple swimsuit as she slapped her knee and said, “Worthwhile citizen! What kind a horse crap is that?”

  My mind raced around for the right answer. Somehow it wasn’t as easy to pluck black-and-white from my grey
matter anymore. Glad watched my struggle with the kind of patient amusement usually reserved for kindergarteners and idiots. I finally fumbled out something that sounded familiar.

  “To be productive, Glad! To keep the economy going. To make a difference in the world. It’s what we were taught to believe is right!”

  Glad sat up in her pink lounger, dug her brown toes in the white sand, and beamed at me like a mother who’d just taught her daughter to go potty all by herself.

  “Bingo, kiddo! You hit the dang nail on the head!”

  Glad’s blue, laser-beam eyes stared intently into my own dark-brown ones for what seemed like a minute. She appeared to be searching for something inside me, but ultimately failed to find it. Finally, she explained, “It’s what we were taught to believe, all right. But whose beliefs are they really, Val?”

  “I don’t know, Glad!” I shrieked, then shriveled into a growing grey cloud of uncertainty. “Everyone’s, I guess.”

  “Not mine!” Glad slapped her thin brown thigh and cackled out a laugh. It wasn’t a cynical laugh. It was a genuine, hearty chuckle laced with a good Southern dollop of joy.

  I stared at her blankly.

  “I ain’t done much else but sit my butt in this chair and drink beer for the last twenty years,” she said. “Do you think I’m a worthwhile citizen, kiddo? Tell the truth now. You know it’s all the same to me.”

  I turned the ignition on my old belief system, but the judgmental engine just sputtered and failed. I got out of the old jalopy and slammed the door defiantly.

  “Before I got to know you, I might have said ‘no,’ Glad, you weren’t a worthwhile citizen. But now...now I’d say ‘yes.’”

  Glad’s expression never wavered. “So, Val, what changed your mind?”

  I pursed my lips. “You did.”

  “Little ol’ me?”

  Glad grinned and planted a hand on her hip, then jabbed an index finger into her dimpled cheek and twisted it provocatively, like a pinup girl from back in her day.

  I wanted to laugh, but my throat was swollen tight with the pressure of unshed tears.

  “You’re the most worthwhile person I know, Glad,” I finally choked out.

  Glad’s arms dropped to her sides and her eyes grew as liquid as mine.

  “But I haven’t changed a peep since we met, Val.”

  “I know,” I whispered. “What does that mean?”

  Glad sat back in her lounger and grinned at me proudly.

  “It means you have.”

  Chapter Five

  GLAD WAS RIGHT. I’D not only changed. I’d been turned upside-down and inside-out.

  Before I met Glad, I’d read about six million self-help books trying to fix my broken life. But nothing ever cut through the crap like a single hour with her. I’d never laughed so hard or felt so totally accepted in my entire life.

  Over weeks of “drinkin’ and discussin’” as she called it, Glad had become my friend, my confidant, my surrogate mom, even. I could tell her anything and she’d find the bright side. I could be so down I didn’t know up and she’d get me laughing until I nearly peed my bathing-suit bottom.

  “There ain’t no subject off limits to a good laugh,” she liked to say.

  After six weeks of “Glad Therapy,” I’d begun to see her point.

  So I was surprised one Monday at the end of June when I dropped my beach bag by Glad’s lounger and she didn’t say a word. The orange glare of the rising sun reflected off her dark sunglasses, obscuring her eyes.

  I grinned. She was asleep.

  Feeling lighter and more playful than I had in years, I decided to have some fun. I snuck through the sea oats behind Glad and tried to catch her off guard.

  “Screw you, kiddo!” I yelled, and jumped flat-footed in front of her, my arms posed Karate-chop style like in a bad ninja movie.

  Glad didn’t respond.

  I touched her arm. Even in the summer heat she felt cold. I nudged her. Nothing. The hair on the back of my neck bristled. I squatted down beside her and shook Glad by her boney brown shoulders. Her sunglasses fell off. Her once bright-blue eyes were dull. The heat had already wicked them dry.

  Glad was dead.

  A knife blade stabbed my heart, making my knees buckle. My mentor, my touchstone, my only friend was...gone!

  Stunned, I stared at Glad’s peaceful, smiling face for a moment, then folded her arms gently across her chest and covered her with my beach towel. I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t work, and I collapsed down on top of Glad and cried. Pain ripped through me, hot and heavy and draining. I lay across her chest and cried for Glad, for myself, and for all the other people I’d lost along the way.

  “Thanks for being my friend,” I whispered into her cold, brown ear. “I know wherever you are now, they’re lucky to have you.”

  In my grieving mind, I heard her whisper back, “You better believe it, kiddo.”

  A laugh escaped my lips, and I hugged Glad’s body tight one last time.

  As if offering me one final goodbye, Glad let out a long, flappy fart.

  I laughed out loud, then ripped into another crying jag. How could the world ever realize what a treasure it had just lost?

  After a while, I pulled myself together and wiped the dripping snot from my nose with the beach towel. I whispered goodbye to Glad one more time, then got up and stumbled blindly toward Caddy’s beach bar.

  I bumbled out the sad news to the first waitress I ran across.

  “Not Glad!” she screamed. Her voice sounded strange, as if it were underwater.

  Two other waitresses came running over to find out what was wrong. Before long, a knot of people had gathered up in a circle around me, hanging on each other’s shoulders and sobbing. Even the old guy who picked up trash on the beach broke down when he heard the news.

  I soon found out that all the employees and half the customers at Caddy’s had known Glad. Why wouldn’t they have? Unlike me, Glad had been an open book worth reading. Making friends had come easy for her.

  Paralyzed with grief, I watched through a yellow-grey haze as the usual stuff that happened next swirled around me. An ambulance arrived. An EMT pronounced Glad dead. Strangers loaded her onto a stretcher. A grey bag zipped up around her until her face disappeared. They shoved her into the back of an ambulance.

  Its lights were off. There was no hurry.

  As I stood in a semi-stupor, one of the paramedics came up and asked the crowd who was going to identify and claim the body. Glad had no identification on her.

  It was quiet for a moment, then several people all at once said, “I will.”

  I was one of those voices. The sad chorus that accompanied me belonged to three grungy guys I’d seen loitering around Caddy’s. I didn’t know their names, so I felt obliged to introduce myself.

  “I’m Val,” I said, squeezing the required breath out of my tight, empty lungs. My words wafted softly in the steamy air. My eyes wandered, unseeing, nowhere in particular.

  “We knows who you are,” one of the men answered.

  The thick, Southern twang in his voice coaxed me back to attention. The first thing my watery eyes focused on was a herniated navel protruding from a swollen beer belly as tight as a satiated tick’s. The belly was attached to a short, thick man in a baggy, knee-length bathing suit.

  “I’m Wally,” he said, and held out a pudgy, freckled hand for me to shake. “But Glad liked to call me Winky.”

  “Wee Willie Winky. Get it?” Glad’s familiar voice whispered in my ear.

  Instantly, the stabbing pain in my heart was forgotten. I struggled to stifle an unwelcome giggle rising up my throat like soda bubbles, pinging against my tonsils. I had the unfortunate habit of giggling when I was nervous, but this was something different. This was a real, honest-to-goodness laugh trying to get heard.

  I bit down hard and shook Wee Willie’s hand.

  Dang it, Glad! Won’t you let me be sad even at your passing?

  “How do you kno
w me? Have we met?” I asked Wee Willie – Wally – whatever!

  “We seen you sittin’ with Glad all them times,” said Winky, scratching his bare belly with a dirty index finger. “But she told us not to bother you two. Said you had important thangs to discuss that didn’t need no man messin’ it up.”

  “Oh. Well...thanks for that, I guess.” The words felt strange and sticky in my throat.

  “I’m Stu,” said another man, sidelining Winky for my attention. He was taller. A good six feet at least. Thin build. Thick moustache. His head was as bald and brown as a roasted peanut.

  “But Glad called me Goober.”

  I nearly choked.

  Another freaking inside joke!

  I made a pathetic attempt to pass my unwanted laughter off as crying. Failing that and not wanting to appear insane, I excused myself and bolted to the ladies room to compose myself.

  “Dang it, Glad!” I said under my breath as I closed the stall door behind me. “This isn’t funny!” I collapsed onto the toilet and buried my face in my hands, laughing and crying and laughing and crying until I couldn’t tell one from the other anymore.

  God I’m going to miss that woman!

  “You all right in there, honey?” a woman’s voice sounded from the other side of the stall.

  “Yes, thanks,” I answered, then blew my nose on some toilet roll.

  “Okie dokie then. I’m here if you need me, you know.”

  “Thanks Glad,” I said without thinking.

  I sat there another second before it hit me.

  Glad!

  I jumped up off the toilet and slung open the stall door. No one was there.

  I know I heard Glad’s voice—first outside and now in the restroom.

  I wondered if I might be going crazy. Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and removed all doubt. Suffice it to say, Alice Cooper was not a good look for me.

  I stared at my pathetic, mascara-meltdown reflection for a moment, then yanked a paper towel from the dispenser on the wall. As I reached over to turn on the tap, my hand jerked back involuntarily. A huge, greenish-blue dragonfly was perched on the faucet handle. Its iridescent wings spanned a good four or five inches.