Crowning the Slug Queen (A Callie Stone Mystery Book 1) (3 page)

The dishes were dry and Callie put them away in the cupboard. “Isn’t Skinner a pretty small community to be in competition for that type of award?”

Coral sniffed. “We may be small, but we have international impact. We continually support the rights of the homeless and we are working on a resolution to get out of the war in Iraq. We’re also a nuclear free zone.”

Callie always laughed to herself at the thought of that. That designation could only stand for as long as no one else decided to lob a nuclear bomb into your midst. But the sentiment was nice. Very Skinnerton.

Pie eaten and dishes done, Callie went back out to the car, led by the solar pathway lights to get her luggage, the earlier rain having slowed to almost nothing. She met her mom in the cottage behind the main house.

The cottage had begun life as a shop for the farm. It was really just one large room and when Callie’s mom had purchased the house and land, it had been filled with remnants of tools, boxes of old farm detritus, and spiders. The outbuilding hadn’t looked like much, but when empty it was over a thousand square feet.

Coral had added plumbing to the space with a bathroom in the back. She built in a kitchen along the north wall that had a full stove, refrigerator and sink. Now it reminded Callie of the large warehouse apartments in New York. The remainder of the space was mostly open, broken up into areas for sleeping and living by artful use of a multitude of bookcases.

Although she fully supported the WWOOFer’s while they were working for her, Coral liked them to have their own independent space. Sometimes the workers were from countries whose dietary choices didn’t mirror that of Americans, even on an organic farm. Callie remembered stories of a pair of Nigerians and their fish head soup. The soup’s pungent aroma lingered for well over a month once they’d moved on to their next agricultural adventure. At least they were using the entire fish, which was very ecofriendly, thought Callie.

At the south end of the large room was an area blocked off for the bedroom. The double bed was covered by a patchwork quilt sewn by Grandma Minnie.

“There are other blankets here in the closet,” said Coral, opening a large free-standing farm style cupboard.

Callie looked at what Coral was calling a closet. As half of the cupboard was taken up with extra blankets, Callie was glad she had only brought a few things as there was no room for her boxes of shoes here. She wouldn’t want to get mud and rainwater on her Jimmy Choos anyway.

“I won’t wake you in the morning.” Coral knew the three hour time difference between Skinner and New York would affect Callie for a few days. “But if you wake and want to work in the garden, there’s some zucchini picking to be done tomorrow.”

“Thanks, mom. It’s good to be home.”

“It’s good to have you honey,” Coral said, giving her a hug.

As Coral left the room, Callie realized that her words weren’t all just for forms sake. She really was glad to be home. As she wasn’t sleepy quite yet, even with the time difference, she unpacked her bags and went into the living area.

The low couch was comfy and although there was no TV, there was electricity, so Callie plugged her laptop in. Coral had Wi-Fi installed at the farm both for her business and for the WOOFer’s.

She went to the fridge and found her mom had thoughtfully put in some milk and other basic necessities. There was even a six pack of Cloudburst Liquid Sunshine Ale. Callie supposed even the ecologically friendly had to support local brewers.

She grabbed herself a beer and settled on the couch. Forty-eight hours ago, she had done roughly the same thing in NYC, but somehow, these same actions felt very different here.

CHAPTER SIX

The next morning Callie woke and lay in the bed with an odd feeling she couldn’t identify. Was she homesick for New York? Was she hankering for a Starbucks? Was she missing Peter?

No, she thought, it’s the fact she wasn’t missing or worried about anything. There wasn’t a single thing tugging on her conscience for once. No Bill Batson texting her about tasks he wanted her to do that day, no decision of what suit and shoes to wear. No discussion with Peter about his latest audition or crabby customer. She wondered if it was possible to get used to this.

After a shower in the cramped bathroom, she dried her auburn hair and pulled it into a ponytail. She slipped on her most casual jeans, even though they had cost $120, and tried to figure out what to wear for shoes. Her selection of what would be termed sneakers was limited to a pair of Burberry’s with their signature check print. She might be thinking of embracing the simple life, but destroying her designer shoes wasn’t quite yet the plan.

She searched the other cupboards in the cottage and came up with a pair of black rubber rain boots that fit well enough for today. Maybe she’d head into town later and see if the shopping options in Skinner had improved any since she had last visited.

As close to properly attired as she was going to get, she stepped outside and had her first look at her childhood nemesis, the garden. In the distance, at the farthest end of the field from the house was a small barn that housed her mom’s growing goat family and a half a dozen chickens. Nearest the house was this year’s fallow plot, growing grass and clover. Although most of the crops were rotated yearly, Coral devoted almost half of the space to a grass and clover meadow she flipped with the other sections of the garden every few years.

Callie could see the bean and pea section with its strings and poles already lush with leafy green plants. She remembered bean picking to be one of the worst tortures of all the garden chores. It had always seemed no matter how many beans she picked her bucket never filled. Then her mom would come over and find handfuls of beans left in areas Callie had supposedly already picked. Well, she wasn’t in for bean picking today.

She went to the main house and went into the kitchen by the back door. The counters were piled with faceted glass canning jars and their distinctive round metal lids. A large kettle of water was beginning to steam on the stove.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead!” said Grandma Minnie. “That city life is making you soft.”

Callie covered a yawn with her hand. “Well, when I woke up at what was my usual six a.m., it was three a.m. here. I had trouble falling back asleep. It’ll take me a few days to get a full night’s sleep. Did I miss breakfast?”

Callie knew breakfast was usually the most edible meal in Coral’s household. “Yes, I saved some scrambled eggs for you. There’s fresh bread and some goat cheese to spread on it.” Grandma Minnie pointed to a covered skillet on the stove next to the boiling pot. “Mind the kettle, it’s hot.”

Callie smiled at being treated like she was still an awkward teenager bumbling around the kitchen. “Thanks. Is there any coffee?”

“Only instant. If you want something fancy, you’ll have to head into town.” Skinner’s love affair with coffee was almost as great as Seattle’s. For such a relatively small town, the per capita number of coffee shops catapulted it into the top ten lists of caffeinated cities, if you believed such statistics. Callie supposed it was the fact that winter was so often gray and misty, and coffee was an effective antidote to such weather.

Callie decided to just stick with milk and sat down at the table to eat. “Where’s mom?”

“She’s out getting the first round of tomatoes,” said Grandma Minnie. Callie realized the two of them had a good partnership. Although Callie’s mom shouldered most of the meal preparation duties, Grandma Minnie provided the expertise necessary to preserve the bounty of the garden Coral worked so hard to manage. For vegetables and eggs the farm was self-sufficient and even managed to barter the leftovers into things like fabric, soap and other household items Coral didn’t want to spend time making. Grandma Minnie was not only an able seamstress, but had never met a vegetable she couldn’t freeze, can or pickle in some way. She believed a full pantry could see you through some mighty troubled times.

Callie wondered if her own attachment to designer clothing was in reaction to all the homemade clothes she had to weather through as a teenager. As soon as she was down to the end of the drive, before she got to the bus stop, Callie would remove whatever Grandma Millie sewn piece of clothing she had been made to wear that day and replace it with something bought with her dearly saved allowance. She also borrowed clothes from Audrey’s copious closet.

Callie had envied Audrey’s life back then. Her parents had divorced and so Audrey was being brought up by her lawyer dad. His life seemed very busy to Callie and she had seen him only rarely. Audrey had been on her own a lot, which was fine with both teenagers. He didn’t really even track her spending as long as she was happy. Callie now thought that although Audrey’s father loved her, he wasn’t really prepared to raise a daughter on his own.

The eggs, fresh from the henhouse were delicious, as was the brown bread she smeared with the crumbly goat cheese. “Who made the cheese? Have you added that to your preserving skills?”

“No, that seems like a mess of trouble. It’s milk from our goat, but we give it to a place down the road that has a whole herd of them. We also give them some canned goods. In exchange, they give us some goat cheese once or twice a month. Seems like a fair deal to me.”

With her mouth full of bread and cheese, Callie agreed.

Coral came into the kitchen with a bushel basket full of tomatoes. “Morning, Carline. We won’t be picking any more tomatoes today. It’s still a bit too early for a large haul. But these would go to waste if we didn’t get them put up today.” Only Coral ever called her by her full name. Callie guessed it was some sort of mother’s prerogative.

Oregon’s weather could be notoriously finicky and in some years it was too cool to really start a garden by the end of May or early June. Callie’s mom had a greenhouse and started some plants there trying to get prepared for when the weather finally turned to summer, but tomatoes were always a challenge. It was already August and they were just beginning to ripen.

“But the zucchini are running crazy. When you’re done with breakfast could you go out and pick all that you can find?”

Callie nodded as Coral went on, “And because I don’t want to be drowning in zucchini, can you also pick about half of the blossoms? I got a recipe from the farmer’s market where you stuff them with goat cheese. It’s supposedly some kind of delicacy.”

Callie raised an eyebrow at Grandma Minnie, but said, “Yes, I think I’ve seen it at some of the fancy restaurants in New York. I don’t think I’ve ever had it.”

“Well, waste not, want not as they say.”

Callie rinsed her plate off in the sink and grabbed some gardening gloves from the pile by the door.

The rain had departed overnight. Standing by the flower bed planted next to the house, Callie could smell the lavender through the warm sun baking off the last of the morning’s dew. She walked to the barn, checked out the goat and her new kid, Basil, and grabbed a large basket.

Thank goodness zucchini were much larger than green beans.

On Sunday afternoon, Callie texted Jeremy. She was definitely enjoying the change of pace in her life, but she couldn’t honestly see herself gardening for her entire time here no matter how long that was. A few hours in town organizing an event would keep her from going stir crazy. Besides if she spent all her time at the farm, she’d never get any use out of her rental car.

CHAPTER SEVEN

She set her phone alarm for six a.m. and managed to crawl out of bed. She didn’t shower, but instead immediately dressed in her dirty jeans and borrowed rubber boots. She’d have to upgrade her farm wardrobe in the very near future.

Callie fed the chickens and gathered up the eggs as she had when she was a kid. She always found morning chores to be more fun than those done in the afternoon. Morning chores were things like feeding animals or sweeping or gathering a small amount of some vegetable her mom wanted to use that day. The tasks were short, and like collecting eggs one was going to eat for breakfast, immediately rewarding.

Afternoon tasks, on the other hand, almost always seemed laborious to her. They didn’t really seem to be chores to her, but rather lengthy tasks like picking a whole run of green beans or crawling on her hands and knees after strawberries.

After she finished her chores, she dropped by the kitchen and left the eggs on the counter. She knew her mom and grandma were awake and probably working somewhere, so she didn’t wait for them, but left a note she’d be in town for the morning.

Freshly showered and in another pair of her expensive jeans, Callie went back out on River Road and headed into town. She didn’t take the Beltline this time, but took the slower surface streets staying on River Road until it turned into Chambers and then she turned on to Seventh Street. Jeremy wanted to meet her at a coffee shop before they went to the Skinner Days committee meeting.

Callie was glad she had given herself extra time, because she had to make two U-turns before finding the parking garage. Maybe subconsciously she remembered Skinner’s special downtown maze of one-way streets and the way the conference center cut through some main arteries making them dead end in unexpected places.

She parked at the lot under the Newsome Center and began walking the few blocks to the coffee shop, stopping momentarily on the corner to orient herself. The streets in the oldest part of downtown were paved with warm, red brick and along with the maple trees gave the area a mellow, old fashioned air. Across the street from the center she noticed a small community garden. There was a handmade sign being held up by a signpost made of what looked to be recycled bike parts. The sign read, “Felson’s Organic Garden.” By the looks of the prolific tomato and cucumber plants, Skinner’s mayor had a green thumb, although Callie wondered how much gardening was actually done in person by the mayor herself. Maybe having a successful garden was one of the requirements in being selected World Mayor.

The corner she stood on was already occupied by one of Skinner’s ubiquitous panhandlers sitting in an alcove with his two dogs. He didn’t look as if he was a permanent resident, but more likely one of the younger people who moved from place to place as a chosen lifestyle. He was a young man, with clean, if worn, clothes. One of the dogs, a small white mutt that looked to be a combination of a terrier and a poodle, wagged at her and she reached down to pet it. “Do you need directions?” asked the young man. He had long brown hair tied back with a yellow scrap of fabric acting as a headband and wore a faded tie dye shirt and cargo shorts.

She shook her head. “No, I’m from Skinner. I like to think I know my way around. I just haven’t been to this part of downtown in a while. But thank you for the offer. What’s your dog’s name?”

“That’s Garcia. The other dog is Jerry.” At his name, the other dog lifted his head and sniffed the air.

“Are you even old enough to have seen the Grateful Dead?” asked Callie.

“The band is all about being in a state of mind, so I’m thinking age has nothing to do with it,” he said.

As Callie had never been a fan of the band and didn’t totally understand other people’s devotion to it, this made as much sense as anything else to her. “I guess I can see that. Do you live here in Skinner?”

“Off and on,” he said. “I generally spend the winter farther south. With climate change and all, Skinner is having some pretty cold winters, so it can be hard to get by without some sort of permanent place to hang.”

“Why don’t you find a permanent place to hang?” asked Callie, genuinely curious.

“Like what I said before, it’s a state of mind, baby. We take care of the earth and it takes care of us. There’s no need for structures and rules.”

She laughed. “I think we approach the world from very different ends. By the way, my name’s Callie.” She stuck out her hand.

He leaned up and shook it. “I’m Jacob. And I’m good with that. It takes all kinds to make the world. As you’re one of those types that makes money, can I ask you for a dollar? I will feed the dogs with it.”

“Is this a good corner for panhandling?” she asked, as she pulled her wallet out of her purse. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of traffic.”

He shook his head. “At first, I choose this corner because the dogs really liked the garden and you know, I can go with the flow. It turns out the dogs were right as the garden people give out free vegetables during the day. So I don’t make a lot of money here, but I get to eat. I just have to keep the dogs from going over and digging it up.”

“Seems like you’ve got some smart dogs then,” she said, giving Garcia a final pat on the head. “Have a good day,” she said as she started towards the coffee shop once again.

Callie assumed Jeremy had chosen Caffe Misto, for its location near the Newsome Center, where they would be joining the committee. However, as soon as she stepped in and smelled the mixed odors of freshly roasted coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls, she thought differently. The number of people in line waiting for coffee apparently thought the same thing.

Jeremy was already in line. “What can I get you? It’s on me.”

She told him to order her a soy latte with a half shot of hazelnut and took a table in the back of the long narrow shop. The room was part of a renovated building and the walls were the original brick partially covered by large Persian carpets used as wall hangings. She took a table in the back to the room. Jeremy joined her a few minutes later with her coffee and a large, over-sized cinnamon roll.

“Want to share? I love these, but they are always too large for me to eat alone.”

She nodded eagerly. “I always enjoy helping out a friend in need.” Dinner last night had been some sort of vegetable stew that included kale and okra, both vegetables Callie usually went out of her way to avoid. Certainly it was healthy, but she could barely choke it down. A cinnamon roll might go a long way to balancing out that overly nutritious dinner.

“So what is it you wanted me to help out with? I think you mentioned a beauty pageant of some sort?” Callie imagined a spoiled batch of bikini wearing beauties who extolled the virtue of world peace.

“Let’s just say it’s in the format of a beauty pageant. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, our pageant queens aren’t the typical bathing beauties. In fact, I’d say the farther away from beauty they get, the greater their chance of winning. I know you’ve been out of town for a few years, but certainly you’ve heard of the Skinner Slug Queen?”

Callie looked at him wide eyed. “Yes, as a sort of peripheral thing. It was considered pretty flamboyant when I was growing up and even in liberal Skinner, not always in a good way.”

“I think the world has shifted significantly since then,” he said. “Here’s an article I pulled from the paper a few weeks ago that explains it faster than I could.”

“In Skinner one can’t say life has gone to the dogs, but one could easily say it’s gone to the slugs. The Society for the Legitimization of the Ubiquitous Gastropod (S.L.U.G.) Queen competition is back as part of Skinner Days.

The competition, created in 1983, is to Skinner what Miss America is to the United States. There are three parts to the contest: Costumes worn by the contestants, the answer to a question asked by previous winners (charmingly named the Old Queens) and a talent competition.

The first winner, Bruce Gordon, was a bicycle designer. In his first public appearance as Slug Queen, Gordon dressed up in a mint-colored gown and rode atop a convertible. He was followed in the parade by a twenty-five-foot slug, modeled after a Chinese dragon. Other winners have included a lawyer, a fireman, a factory worker, and a teacher. In a time honored tradition, four of the Slug Queens have been men, including a father of seven.

Last year’s winner, Miss Slugajawea, won with a dress sculpted entirely of spray foam which had been painted a luminous shade of green that glowed in black light. Her talent, pig calling, was put to use during a performance of America the Beautiful that brought down the house.

This year’s competition is guaranteed to be at least as entertaining as last year’s, as the entrants include Gastronia Creepalot, a.k.a. Steve Felson, Mayor Dot Felson’s husband; Slimerita Rivera, a.k.a. Sheldon Normal, former owner of The Hemp Pot Smoke Shop; and Queen Slugabeth II, a.k.a. June Ness, a teacher at Edison Elementary School.

Tickets to the event can be purchased at the Newsome Center ticket window and online through August 25th. The pageant will be held Saturday, as part of the Skinner Days weekend of events.”

Callie laughed. “When you said comic beauty pageant, you weren’t kidding!”

Jeremy said, “Do you think you could do it?”

“Truly something like this is no different than any other event I’ve worked on. It’s all just a process. Define your goals, examine your resources, create a plan and follow it through, then evaluate. There’s no event that can’t be done with those steps. “ Callie knew she was glossing over the hundreds of steps that depending on the event might lay within those large basic categories, but if it could be put on a list and checked off, she knew she could do it. “I’m joining this one in the middle, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”

“At the committee meeting, you’ll be brought up to speed as to where we are in the plan. The mayor will be there along with folks leading the entertainment, parade and marketing committees. They all have larger committees they report back to, but for today it will just be the small managing group.”

“What role do you play?” asked Callie.

“I’m coordinating sponsorship and I head that committee. Cloudburst Pub is the lead sponsor, and I wanted to protect our investment, as it were. The pageant is a key event to the success of the weekend and when Polly, the previous organizer, had to quit, I was a bit nervous about the whole thing going off well. It was a lucky day for me when you came into the Cloudburst.”

Callie smiled at him. “I hope so.”

They finished their coffee and cinnamon roll and left the shop to walk the few blocks to the Newsome Center. The center had been built in the mid ‘80’s and had become a hub for the fine arts, housing both the Skinner Symphony and the Skinner Opera. Traveling Broadway shows often stopped there, as well as traditional homegrown events, like the Nutcracker and local children’s art performances. Some might think of the center and theaters as a community theater, but she realized what Skinner had was much larger than the traditional small town one theater center.

The construction on the outside of the building was dated, clearly pointing to the 1980’s, but the inside was timeless, as antiseptic and carpeted as any conference center Callie had ever been in.

Most conference centers had a particular institutional feel. She was always fascinated by the wide variety of carpets in them. They were usually custom made. She didn’t know if there was a design goal to the carpets because they were usually a mix of swirling flowers and geometric patterns. Maybe they were created to lead the eye into ignoring any spills or fooling you into imagining the space looked larger than it really was.

The air inside the average conference center always seemed stale and smelled of nothing. There were two exceptions. There were centers in high humidity areas such as New Orleans where most of the indoors seemed to smell like sweaty gym shoes to Callie. She assumed that was caused by the inability to remove all mold from the air systems. The second exception was the very upscale properties and they seemed to always smell of eucalyptus. Callie wasn’t sure if that was a purposeful scent or something that spilled over from the on-site spas all upscale properties had.

The conference center in the Newsome, attached to the downtown Hilton, had neither of these scents. Callie breathed in the heavily air conditioned and processed air. She felt as if it were like water running through the gills of a fish and it invigorated her.

They were the last arrivals at the committee meeting. Jeremy introduced her to the mayor. “Dot, this is Callie. I think she’s going to be able to fill in for Polly. Callie, this is Dot Felson.” Dot’s piercing blue eyes looked Callie up and down. Her short blonde hair was cut in a sleek bob that hugged her sharp chin.

“At least her name is similar. That will make it easy to remember.” Callie was familiar with a certain level of fashion and although the mayor’s clothes were styled in the typical loose Skinnerton style, she knew the materials and tailoring were of the highest quality. Although Callie might not be able to name the exact designer of the clothing the mayor had on, she knew the shoes were the season’s latest Ferragamo pump. Callie wondered if the mayor were independently wealthy as she assumed the salary of the mayor of Skinner would not cover many purchases in that price range.