“Well, that was then and this is now. You may a heard the economy’s in the crapper.”
“Yes, Gracie, news does still reach these parts now and then,” Stella said wearily. The decades her sister had spent on the West Coast had unfortunately drained any affection she had for her home state, though Stella had observed on her visits that Sacramento seemed to have its share of the same chain restaurants and ugly-ass strip malls that Kansas City did. “They bring it in on the Pony Express, so we’re a bit behind, plus since we’re still trading in shiny rocks rather than cash—”
“Don’t make fun of me,” Gracie snuffled, then burst into full-scale sobs. “Folks aren’t buying pecans like they used to. Everybody’s all over the almonds now that the stupid California Almond Board’s going around saying they can cure cancer and make you more regular and what-all. Never mind that a almond ain’t even a proper
nut,
it’s a seed, but you never hear them talking about
that
! It’s false advertising, is what it is!”
“But Gracie, there’s got to be money—”
“Oh, Stella, you wouldn’t even believe it. Our house ain’t worth what we paid for it, so there’s no way Chester Senior’s is, and besides, he took out a second mortgage a while back on the ranch.”
The “ranch” was a god-awful rambling affair that Chess’s parents had built on a fifty-acre patch of land outside Sacramento, complete with fountains and a brick circular drive and enough arches and columns and porticos to make its architectural inspirations murky at best.
“And there’s something else.” She hiccupped gently and snuffled a few times, trying to get enough composure to continue.
“Aw, Gracie, what could be so bad?” Stella asked, her heart squeezing up with fear, because she knew firsthand that a bad situation could always get worse. Still, her role in the sisterly dynamic was to be the optimist. Even after she herself had taken out her husband, Ollie, with a wrench three years back after decades of abuse, she broke the news to Gracie from jail by saying that they had some “things to work through.”
“Chester Senior’s being investigated for fr- fr- … for fraud. Chess’s got to meet with them federal people tomorrow. He’s so nervous he threw up in the Olive Garden parking lot—and that was
before
we ate.”
“Chester and Chess have been ripping off their own company?” Stella demanded, incredulous. “Don’t take this wrong, sugar, but how the heck do you even cook the books when you’re just moving nuts around?”
“I don’t know,” Gracellen wailed. “It was all Bill’s doing, before Chess had to fire him. You know I never get involved in the business side of things. But they absolutely cannot have even a hint of Chip’s gambling problem getting back to the investigators. How’s that gonna look? And how can you even
think
they’re guilty, it was that stupid Bill and the problems in the warehouse, only they sent this team down here don’t got any kindness in ’em at all, Chess says they never even take off their
jackets
and plus one of ’em’s a
vegan,
wouldn’t even try one a my turtle brownies I sent in to the office.”
“You sent brownies to the office? To what, make them change their minds?”
“Well a’course I did, Stella, times like this we all got to pull together, everyone has to do their part. Which is why I’m calling you! We got until Sunday and then they’re gonna start chopping off more pieces of poor Chip!”
“Who’s ‘they,’ anyway? Chip’s bookie?”
“I don’t know, Stella. The note ain’t signed, there’s just instructions where to bring the money. It’s got to be dropped off in person. Chip ain’t picking up his cell phone and we don’t know what he’s been up to, we actually thought he was doing better, he told us he hadn’t touched a card game in months, he was even talkin’ about tryin’ them meetings they got, you know, the Gamblers Anonymous people—”
“Okay,” Stella sighed. Things
were
bad, but letting Gracie carry on this way wasn’t going to help. “Let’s take this from the top. You got a note and an ear. The ear’s Chip’s. No one can get ahold of Chip, and unless someone brings thirty thousand dollars up to Wisconsin, they said they’re going to mess him up some more. That about right?”
“Yes,” Gracellen said meekly. “There’s a address that I Google Mapped, looks like a warehouse-type situation. The note says leave the money in a white barrel with black letters that’s gonna be out by the door anytime between now and Sunday night at midnight and if we do, won’t nothing bad happen to Chip. Oh, Stella, he must be so scared, and what if he didn’t have his tetanus shots, and plus just think how he’s gonna have to wear his hair now to cover up where his ear used to be—”
“Calm down, Gracie,” Stella snapped. Her sister had always tended toward the hysterical, but usually when they were together there was nothing more vexing than an overdone turkey or mud tracked into the powder room. “If we’re gonna get through this, we’ve got to stay focused and smart.”
“You’ll do it, then, Stellie? You’ll take care of Chip?”
In her sister’s wobbly, teary voice Stella heard echoes of every childhood scrape they’d ever got into. She’d stuck up for her baby sister on the playground, told mean girls to back off, taken a swing at the boy who first broke Gracellen’s heart, patched her cuts and bruises, helped her study, and shared her chores. She’d always been there when it counted, and that wasn’t about to change now.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” Stella asked carefully. Gracie knew very little about her off-hours activities, and she hoped to keep it that way.
“Just, if you could go fetch him? And maybe bring him down to stay with you a while until we figure what to do next? Chess is going to go talk to the bank, see maybe about the retirement money—”
“But Gracie, if these fellows are pros, don’t you suppose they have their eye on his place? How do you suppose they’re gonna feel about me driving him away like we’re off on a Sunday picnic? Plus also what if he doesn’t want to come with me?”
“No Stella, see, that’s what makes it work, is who’s gonna think twice about
you
showing up? In that old car a yours, wearing some old jog suit, why, you could be the cleaning lady.”
Stella bristled at the wide swath of insult her sister had just painted, not bothering to point out that washed-up gambling addicts didn’t generally employ domestic help. “Yeah, okay, fine, I’ll do it.” She sighed. “I’ll go get your boy. Speaking of those brownies, you still make ’em with the cream cheese and the pecan toffee bits?”
“Oh, yes,” her sister said, relief flooding her voice. “I’m gonna go mix up a batch right now. I’ll have Chess take ’em to work for the UPS. Why Stella, they’ll be waiting at your house soon’s you straighten out this thing with Chip.”
After she wrote down all the details and hung up the phone, Stella reflected that there had been many occasions when she’d dived into danger for far less than one of Gracellen’s brownies, which had taken the blue ribbon at the Sawyer County Fair in 1972, beating out even Flora Meldercone’s coconut three-layer cake, which had been rumored to be the foundation of all three of her marriages.
Chapter Four
It didn’t take nearly as long for Stella to explain the latest turn of events to BJ as it had for Gracellen to lay it out for her, especially as she stuck to a streamlined and not entirely accurate version. For instance, she steered clear of the “fraud,” “gambling,” and “severed ear” aspects of the story, saying only that her sister’s stepson had got himself into a bit of a jam and she needed to make an unexpected trip north to Wisconsin to straighten things out.
Stella was accustomed to doctoring up the versions of the truth that she doled out to those around her. That practice was made necessary by the nature of her work, which had the disadvantage of making her a candidate for arrest and jail and even, if folks believed some of the rumors going around in certain circles, the prospect of a long stint in the section of the prison from which folks never returned.
Yes, there were some who believed Stella Hardesty was a cold-blooded murderer. Technically, she supposed she was, given the whole Ollie thing, but both the Sawyer County judge and her own conscience—and popular opinion in town as well—had long since let her off the hook for that one, given the thirty-year spate of bruises and loosened teeth and sprains and black eyes and concussions she’d put up with from the man before the incident with the wrench.
She’d been happy to be let off the hook, but once she started helping other women out with their abusive men, she discovered that there were advantages to cultivating a certain mystique. When Stella corralled a wife beater and straightened him out with any of the many tools and props of her profession, she had found that it often helped to imply that other wrongdoing men had met with even greater misfortune. Since the terms of Stella’s “agreements” with her clients’ abusers, who she thought of as parolees, often involved them leaving town and staying gone, it was an easy enough thing to imply that they were the six-feet-under kind of gone rather than the two-states-over or staying-with-a-cousin variety.
It wasn’t like this fiction traveled very far. Her parolees were generally more than happy to keep to themselves the fact that they’d had the shit kicked out of them by a 5'6", 160-pound fifty-year-old woman. Stella’s clients were usually experts at hiding things, too, given the fact that most had been covering up injuries and insults and threats for years, even decades, before they’d finally had enough and sought out Stella’s help. Sure, there was an underground network among abused women. One of the sad truths of this sisterhood was that no one could convince an abuse victim that it was time to leave before her time. Stella wished she had a nickel for every time some dumbfuck said something along the lines of “If things is so bad why don’t she just leave?” In fact, Stella would enjoy sticking all those nickels into a sock and swinging it at the idiots who made further assertions that “
I’d
leave the minute he looked at me cross-eyed” or “She must be getting something out of the abuse, she’s probably just codependent.”
Getting beat up as long as Stella had tended to make a gal a little cranky about this sort of analysis.
Anyway, Stella figured the best thing she’d done in life besides raising a beautiful and kind daughter was to be the person who said
I will
when an abused woman looked around at her personal hell and the so-called justice system and concluded
No one can help me.
For her to keep doing her work, though, she had to maintain the fiction that she was nothing more than a mild-mannered sewing shop owner with a Bowflex and a bad attitude.
“So anyway, I guess I better hit the road,” she said, with regret that she hadn’t had to manufacture. Despite the confusing specter of Goat Jones and the consternation and compunctions and second thoughts that came with it, things had been trundling along from steamy well on their way to mind-blowing. Stella was tired of being a reclaimed virgin—she hadn’t had sex in something like five years, a fact that she avoided dwelling on since it depressed the hell out of her—and she was ready to start wearing the rubber off her treads again. Sure, it would have been nice to carve that first notch with the apple of her eye, but a woman could only wait around for so long. Goat’s law career had proved a maddening obstacle, both because of the fact that his little three-man-plus-one-woman shop stayed busier than ticks on a hound trying to keep a lid on crime in the county, and because both he and Stella were still so wary of an entanglement that brought with it so much built-in potential for disaster, given their respective professions. With one of them upholding the law and the other breaking it, a doom scenario seemed likely, which wouldn’t stop Stella in the heat of the moment, and given how close they had come on several occasions seemed like it wouldn’t maybe stop Goat either, but their red-hot romance had been sidetracked by so many obstacles that Stella was getting impatient.
“I guess I better call Chrissy and see if she’ll lend me her car,” she sighed. “Potter said the Jeep won’t be ready until tomorrow, earliest.”
BJ’s eyebrows rose in alarm. “You’re gonna take the Celica?”
“Oh, she don’t need it, she only works across the parking lot.” Chrissy lived with her four-year-old son in a tiny apartment at the back of the China Paradise restaurant, which shared a parking lot with Hardesty Sewing Machine Repair & Sales. If Chrissy needed anything while Stella was gone, the Freshway was only a couple of blocks away. Plus, Chrissy—ordinarily loose-lipped about her many and varied romantic entanglements—had been seeing some mysterious new suitor who evidently couldn’t get enough of her. Stella was well aware of Chrissy’s powers of persuasion, and it was entirely likely that she could get the man to drive her around in a stretch limo, feeding her strawberries dipped in chocolate, if she wanted to.
“No, it’s not that, it’s just—” BJ balled his hands into a fist. “Damn it, Stella, I don’t want you heading up the tarnation to Wisconsin in that thing. Why, it ain’t even safe.”
Stella had to smile. The ’96 Celica wasn’t much to look at, it was true, but Chrissy’s extended family included a variety of brothers who weren’t great at hanging on to conventional employment but who were masters of innovation when it came to doing a lot with a little. Whether it was coaxing hardscrabble crops out of the family’s poor clay-plagued acreage, or convincing women that underneath their skinny and unspectacular frames purred high-test engines of love, or fixing up broke-down cars with bits and pieces lifted off the abandoned vehicles parked all over the back field, the Lardner boys generally got the job done. “That old car could take me around the world, BJ. I imagine it could probably drive right across the oceans, just like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
BJ seized her hand, a stealth move that caught Stella by surprise and started her heartbeat on the increase again. “Take my truck, Stella. I’d just feel better.”
Stella’s jaw dropped in astonishment. “Your truck?” She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d offered to carve out a kidney with his pocketknife and hand it over. It was well known around town that there was nothing BJ Brodersen loved more than his truck—not his stack of medals from the first Gulf War, not his popular bar. Its origins as a humble red Ford 250 had been disguised and augmented with thousands of dollars of upgrades and custom options, and on weekends BJ could be seen in his driveway, lovingly scrubbing and polishing and drying it. He gave local kids rides around the block just for the sheer joy of tooting the horn at crossroads; he drove it with a bevy of young lovelies in the back for the homecoming parade.