Val Fremden Mystery Box Set 1 Read online

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “My Aunt Glad always told me there is no situation you can’t find the humor in if you look hard enough. I think she would have found your comments a real hoot.”

  The thought of Glad cackling out a laugh made me feel better. I picked up my driver’s license and my copy of the form. I had substituted my own last name for Glad’s unknown one.

  Gladys Fremden, born the day after she died.

  That was one irony I didn’t stop to savor.

  THE MORTICIAN AT GRABB’S was more than happy to take Glad and the money required for her cremation. I was grateful and relieved he did. I gave him Glad’s case number assigned by the morgue and he said he would take care of everything. He tried to guilt me into buying a fancy coffin, but I told him basically he couldn’t get caviar from a can of pinto beans. He sniffed and informed me she’d be ready for pick-up at the end of the week. I gave him my cell number and made an appointment for Friday morning.

  I drove back to my apartment and crept inside. Even though Glad had never visited me there, the hovel I called home seemed emptier somehow. I cracked open a Fosters I’d picked up on the way and toasted my dearly departed friend.

  “Screw you, kiddo,” I said, then stared at the cellphone image of Glad in her lounger, shooting me her unabashed, red-lipstick, clown-faced smile. It was the only picture I had of her.

  When this picture is gone, will there be anything left of Glad at all?

  “Screw me,” I whispered.

  I was tired of trying to be brave and strong. I let go, and let the pain wash over me, warm and wet and aching to my bones.

  WITHOUT MY DRINKING buddy and confidant, I tried to return to my original solo act. But in the deafening silence left in the wake of Glad’s cackling laughter, quiet contemplation had lost a great deal of its appeal.

  Left to my own devices, the next four days drifted along as empty and aimlessly as a paper bag on a windy street. Once or twice, I thought about going to Sunset Beach. But I just couldn’t muster up the courage.

  One eternity and half a gallon of gin later, I woke up on the couch to discover it was Friday.

  Finally.

  I got myself presentable and drove to Caddy’s to get the donations from the Mr. Peanut container. The breakfast crowd was thin, so I took the opportunity to pull the rubber bottom stopper out of Mr. Peanut and shake his innards out on the counter by the cash register. Norma, the tough, mannish lead waitress, helped me count out the dollar bills and change. I was shocked. Since Monday, the good people of Caddy’s had stuffed $547.36 into Mr. Peanut for Glad’s cremation/memorial fund.

  “Let me make that right for you,” Norma barked. Her voice sounded as if it would break down if she tried to say more.

  She opened the register and counted out $550.00 in twenties and a ten. She handed them to me and said, “Thanks. You’re a good egg.” She slammed the register, shot me a quick, tight-lipped smile, and walked determinedly to the ladies’ room.

  I tucked the money in my purse and walked back to my car feeling as used up and useless as an empty booze bottle. I needed to keep my mind off Glad, so I did mortician math. The bill for cremation in a cardboard container had come to $635.00. I steeled myself. I’d have to pony up the rest.

  Eighty-five bucks. Ouch!

  Still, the sting felt more like an honor than a burden, even though my bank account was shriveling faster than a spider on a hot stove. I pulled out of Caddy’s and drove through thick clouds of memories all the way to Grabb’s Funeral Home.

  I NEVER UNDERSTOOD why beige and chocolate brown seemed to be the favorite color palate of funeral homes. Grabb’s was no exception. I walked inside the unremarkable building and into an even less remarkable lobby to be greeted by beige walls, a fake potted palm and a woman at a dark brown desk wearing a cream-colored dress. Maybe funerary proprietors believed that any use of color in their décor would set grieving people off.

  I guess nobody ever went ballistic over beige.

  “I’m here to pick up Gladys Fremden’s cremains,” I explained to the lady.

  “Cash or credit?” she asked, glancing up from her computer screen.

  The answer “cash” made her smile. Once the bills had traded hands, she disappeared behind a darker beige door. A minute later, the mortician, a thin, bald man dressed in a dark brown suit, crept from behind the door and shook my hand with the dead, five-fingered fish at the end of his arm.

  “Into what would you like to put the cremains?” he asked. “We have a biodegradable Ocean Scatter Tube for the value price of just $135.00.”

  A hundred and thirty five bucks for a cardboard toilet-roll tube? Unbelievable!

  I didn’t have the time or energy to argue.

  “No worries. I’ve got my own container.” I made a quick run back to my car.

  Mr. Peanut to the rescue once again.

  I handed the piggybank to the mortician guy. To his credit, he didn’t even blink. He took Mr. Peanut through the dark-beige door and returned a few minutes later. He handed me a noticeably heavier Mr. Peanut and dismissed me with a simple, “Good day to you.”

  A weird giddiness enveloped me when I stepped outside the funeral home with Glad in my arms. It was as if she and I’d just pulled off a robbery – and we were making a clean getaway together. I looked down at Mr. Peanut and grinned. I knew Glad wouldn’t mind taking her final ride in a goofy plastic piggy bank. But then again, maybe Winky, Goober and Jorge would.

  I bit my lip as I put Mr. Peanut and his stomach full of Glad on the seat next to me. An idea struck me, and I turned the ignition. I’d find a drugstore to buy a nice, gold-foiled gift box. After all, I could say Glad was like a gift. As good as gold.

  I knew it was corny. But lots of simple folks liked corny. And, ironically, most rednecks didn’t even get corny.

  I spotted a drugstore on the corner of Gulf Boulevard and 107th and was in and out with the box in my hand in under five minutes. Even so, with the top down, I’d given the July sun plenty of time to turn Maggie’s red vinyl seats into molten lava. As I slid into the bucket seat, I felt my naked thighs start to sizzle where they jutted out below my sundress.

  “Yow!”

  I jumped up from the driver’s seat and was engrossed in a curse-pocked commentary with an inanimate object when a sudden realization stopped me mid-syllable.

  The seat next to me was empty.

  Mr. Peanut was gone!

  I searched the floorboards. Nothing. I scrambled over the backseat for a look. Empty. My mind flooded with panic.

  No! No! No! Glad’s memorial was in less than an hour and some jerk has gone and stolen Glad’s final freaking remains!

  “Arrgh!” I screamed into the parking lot.

  A fat woman stuffed into a pink polyester shirt and shorts waddled by, looking like a bipedal pig in a cheap blonde wig. She stared at me as if she’d just smelled a rat turd.

  “Maybe she did. Maybe she likes rat turds.”

  That voice inside my head was back. Was it Glad...or was it my crazed mind saying what I thought she would say?

  As I debated with myself, pig-woman hoisted her fat butt into a white minivan. She backed out of her parking space and shot me that look again.

  “Maybe she’s got a van full of rat turds. Sells ’em on eBay.”

  I wanted to snicker, but I was in a bit of a jam.

  Okay, whoever you are, shut up! I don’t have time for this. I’ve lost Glad’s remains! Think of something, Val!

  I was making plans to leave the state when another idea hit me like a squirt of warm bird crap. I peeled out of the parking lot and made a beeline for the public lot at St. Pete Beach.

  Maggie lurched into a parking space. I cut the ignition, grabbed the gold box, snatched a colander I used for sorting shells, and sprinted toward the barbeque grills. I knew the park had five grills in total. Each was about the size of a briefcase and soldered onto thick metal pipes about three feet tall. They were ugly and indestructibl
e, and did their best to mar the beauty of public parks throughout Florida.

  After sieving through the ashes from four grills, I’d scraped together about two cups of whitish-grey powder. I had no idea how much cremains I should have, but the amount seemed kind of skimpy to me. The fifth grill was in use. A guy dressed in nothing but a blue banana hammock and ball cap was grilling chicken wings on it.

  What the hell. I decided to give it a try.

  “Hey, you got any ashes I can have? I use them to grow tomatoes.”

  “Nope, sorry,” he answered, flipping over some wings that looked as if they were on the verge of becoming cremains themselves.

  “Thanks anyway.” I turned and walked back to the car. I was about to crank the ignition when wing dude came running toward me. Not a pretty sight.

  “Hey lady, wait! I forgot!” he said, out of breath from a twenty-yard sprint. “I still have the bag of ashes I dumped when I cleaned the grill before I used it.”

  He tossed me a beige plastic grocery bag with what looked to be about another two cups of ashes inside.

  Score!

  “Thanks a bunch!”

  “No problem. Hope your tomatoes do good.”

  “Yeah. Thanks again. Enjoy your wings!”

  I dumped the ashes in the gold box and clapped on the lid. I glanced at my cellphone.

  Crap on a cracker!!

  The service was supposed to start in fifteen minutes. I peeled out of the parking lot, dual glass packs rumbling, and headed south on Gulf Boulevard toward Sunset Beach.

  THE PARKING LOT AT Caddy’s was crammed, but the attendant knew I was coming and had left a space open for me. I was surprised at how many people were there for Glad’s memorial. Probably a good hundred. I handed the gold box off to Goober, who looked mighty relieved to see me.

  “That was cutting it close, Val,” he said.

  He nervously smoothed his moustache down with his thumb and index finger. Goober had dressed for the occasion in the uniform of a burnout – a wife-beater t-shirt and impossibly baggy grey shorts that hung low on his waist and covered his knobby knees.

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  “I was beginin’ to thank you run off with the money, Val,” Winky said sarcastically. He shoved me on the shoulder and shot me a dirty look.

  “Sorry to shake your confidence in me, Winky. I ran into some...uh...technical difficulties.” I was contemplating getting peeved at the thankless jerk when Jorge interrupted.

  “Val! Good to see you!”

  The poor guy looked even more relieved to see me than Goober. “I was getting worried,” he said. “I don’t want to lose another...you know.”

  Jorge smiled shyly and offered me his arm.

  Besides handshakes and haircuts, I hadn’t been touched by a male human being in the better part of a year. Taking Jorge’s arm felt weird, but a good kind of weird. It made me feel lighter, somehow.

  We walked arm-in-arm down to the beach and joined the crowd milling about. It was a few minutes before 5 p.m. and at least half the people there already had a good buzz going. Jorge offered me a slug from his pocket flask, but it was whiskey. I didn’t do whiskey. After all, I had my standards.

  The air cracked with the sound of someone tapping on a microphone. In the silence that followed, a familiar voice said, “Okay, ever-body, listen up.”

  Winky.

  He was going to lead the eulogy. I settled in.

  This ought to be good.

  “I wrote a pome ’bout Miss Glad,” Winky continued. He cleared his throat, then spoke slowly, with a scholarly hillbilly affectation. “I call it, I Miss Glad. It goes like this:

  Glad was my friend. A friend to the end.

  She loved us all. And she was purty tall.

  I ain’t that tall but she never complained.

  She never complained ’bout a gaul-dang thang.

  A lady to the end, Glad made us all feel dear.

  Always there to lend an ear – and a good, cold beer!

  They’s a word for Glad. And that word is Glad.

  I was glad to know her. Y’all can yell now, if you wanner.”

  And with that, Winky yelled the most countrified, “Woo hoo!” I’d ever heard, and I’d heard plenty.

  The crowd did its best to follow Winky’s lead, and we bayed pathetically in the hot breeze like a pack of wormy hound dogs.

  “Please now turn your attention to the water,” Winky’s voice cracked over the mic again like a carnival barker. The crowd grew silent. “Goober’s gonna put Miss Glad to rest in the sea.”

  I turned toward the Gulf and saw Goober, six feet of skinny arms and stork legs, cussing and trying to balance himself on a stand-up paddleboard. I snorted back a laugh. From thirty feet offshore, Goober looked like a praying mantis afflicted with both Parkinson’s and Turret’s.

  A shirtless teenage boy paddled the board at the back while Goober did his best to stay upright, holding onto the gold box containing our girl Glad. Goober gave the crowd a stunted wave with his left hand, lost his balance and nearly fell face forward. Somehow, he managed to pull off a spectacular recovery by wind-milling his left arm and right leg like a pair of yard whirligigs in a cat-five hurricane.

  The crowd gasped in horror as Goober teetered between sea and air. They sighed in relief as his feet settled back onto the board.

  I held my breath as Goober took the lid off the glittering gold box. A light breeze blew a swirl of ashes from the container right into Goober’s face as he swung the box first behind him, then forward and up, as if he were pitching a softball.

  As Glad’s ashes flew up and out over the Gulf, I saw what appeared to be a chicken thigh bone fly out of the box and arc against the late afternoon sun. A huge, white seagull cried out and grabbed the bone midair.

  I shriveled for a microsecond in horror and shame.

  But there was no time for self-loathing.

  With all eyes still on Goober’s lanky frame, he lost his balance again. After tossing the cremains, Goober lurched backward on the paddleboard like a deranged zombie, overcompensated forward, then leap-frogged face-first into the gulf with a stupendous belly-flop. In a flash, he surfaced for air, only to be beaned on the noggin by Glad’s gold box. The box bounced once, flipped over, and found purchase on the right side of Goober’s shiny, bald head. It perched there at a rakish angle, like a square beret on a sunburned walrus.

  The crowd went wild with laughter. Catcalls pierced my ears.

  Without missing a hitch, Goober stood up in the thigh-high water, grabbed the box from his head, and bowed as if he were an orchestra maestro in top hat and tails. The crowd erupted again into a riot of catcalls, cheers and applause.

  I laughed so hard I peed my pants a little.

  I think Glad would have not only approved – she would have done the same.

  Chapter Eight

  AFTER ANOTHER LONELY weekend made blurry by potent cocktails of Tanqueray and tears, on Monday I decided it was time to start getting my life back on track. I ponied up some courage, drove Maggie out to Sunset Beach, and walked through the picket fence toward the crystal blue gulf.

  I hesitated at the vacant spot in the sand where Glad used to sit. Her absence felt personal and mortifying and raw, like the empty socket of a freshly missing tooth. But like everything in life, it would just take some getting used to. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the pelicans and seagulls were already getting on with their lives, fishing and flying and preening their feathers as they had before Glad or I or mankind itself had ever walked the Earth.

  The insignificance of life itself pressed down hard upon my head, making me stare at my feet.

  “You’re as significant as you wanna be, Val,” I heard my old friend say.

  I smiled sadly and unfolded my chair. I propped it up where her lounger used to be, tossed my beach bag on it, and headed toward the shoreline.

  If life truly does go on, I might as well get to it.

  AFTER AN HOUR OF BEA
CHCOMBING, I was a little bit perkier and a lot more parched. I slipped a beach cover-up over my suit and ducked into Caddy’s for a drink. Three days had passed since Glad’s memorial service, but it appeared that the good folks at Caddy’s were still in mourning. The waitresses were gathered around in a circle, sobbing.

  “I still can’t believe he’s gone. It’s just too much,” said Cindy, an impossibly blonde, impossibly tanned waitress who reminded me of Malibu Barbie.

  “He? Don’t you mean she?” I coughed through my bone-dry throat.

  “No...not Glad. Tony. Tony’s dead!” snuffled Cindy between sobs, her face a smear of soggy Cover Girl. “Two in a row. Norma, I can’t take it!”

  Cindy collapsed into Norma’s manly arms.

  “Tony was broke up real bad over Glad,” said Norma, her own rugged face stained with tears. Even though she sported a man’s short-cropped hair and a face to match, the hard disguise couldn’t mask Norma’s soft interior. “He hadn’t showed up for work since Glad died a week ago Sunday. Her passin’s probably what did him in.”

  Norma patted Cindy’s back like a mother hen and shot a glance at me over her shoulder. “Read it for yourself.” She jabbed a meaty thumb toward a newspaper laying on a nearby table. “Cindy was checking the obits when she saw a familiar face.”

  I knew Tony as the old guy who raked sand and picked up garbage on the beach around Caddy’s. The headline in the St. Petersburg Times article read, “Hoarder Dies Under Ton of Garbage.” Apparently, Tony had been really really into garbage. So much so, that he’d brought his work home with him. My warped sense of humor made it impossible for me to ignore the delectable irony that Tony had been killed by the very thing that had given his life meaning.

  Ambushed by a lifetime subscription to National Geographic, I presume.

  I didn’t really know Tony, and I wasn’t going to cry for him. I’d just learned the hard way that tears didn’t bring anyone back from the dead.