Authors: Laura Ellen Scott

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Historical, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Suspense, #Historical Fiction

The Juliet (40 page)

He grabbed the spatula and went back for Mittens. The removal process wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected; once eased from the shelf, she remained in one piece as Rigg tumbled her into the bag. He leaned into the cabinet and held his breath as he swept the shelf with his gloved hand, gritting his teeth when he bumped against hard shapes stacked against the back. Deep inside the cabinet was a tidy collection of medicine bottles and bathroom sundries all huddled together like a little German village. He scraped them forward and let them fall onto Mittens’ body.

There were a couple of tiny corked bottles with murky contents, a satin pillow sachet, a piece of soap shaped like a bear without a head, a brown prescription bottle with the word
NO
scrawled on an otherwise unreadable label, an owl-shaped jar of old brown bath beads, and a full bottle of Hai Karate, “Oriental Spice” scent.

The old bottles were probably worth something, and he was tempted to keep the cologne, but Rigg was done collecting. It was better to think of these things as Mittens’ personal effects. They should go with her, wherever she was going. He dropped his glove and the spatula in the bag and pulled the plastic string tight before carrying it out to the Jeep. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before he had a full load to take out to the dump.

Budge didn’t strike him as a cat person, but he was definitely a Hai Karate man. For a while, Rigg had been a Hai Karate
man too, or so Deb had thought. She was only six when she gave him a set of the cheap colognes for Christmas. Stuff made your eyes water and your skin burn. As for the rest of the junk in the cabinet…again, the remnants of several generations, like the stuff in the kitchen drawer. Maybe there’d been a kid that lived here once upon a time. There’d been a lady for sure. She must have been pissed on move-in day—no tub for her precious bath beads.

An owl jar behind a dead cat.
The owl and the pussycat went to sea…
Crazy, crazy old Budge.

It took a couple of afternoon beers before it dawned on him. Rigg was only clever after the alcohol loosened him up a bit. Of the two coherent thoughts that Budge had expressed that sad day in the hospice, one was a line from a kid’s poem, and the other was, “Juliet lives in The Mystery House.”

Rigg bolted through the front door and climbed into the Jeep, tearing open the black plastic garbage bag. Cereal flew out, some of it hovering before drifting to the ground. He found the owl-shaped jar and muttered, not to himself but to the memory of Budge Lange: “This better be it.” The alternative, that Mittens herself was some kind of grisly safe, was too disgusting to consider. He wrenched off the grime-covered metal lid. The oil beads were mottled, brown and black on the surfaces that never saw light, but on the inside some of the original green was still visible. Emerald green.

Rigg laughed. It was funny. He should have noticed that the weight of the Avon gewgaw was unusually substantial. The beads had hardened and congealed, so he had to claw them out using the tire gauge from the glove box. The first layer of beads came out like a pancake, all stuck together, and then the gauge struck a hard, crystalline surface.

Rigg had dug graves in five movies. There was always that corny scene where the spade hits the top of the coffin—
thunk
—and everyone gets excited. As if the last thing anyone expected to find was a coffin in the grave.

Rigg tapped.
Tink-tink.
No thunk. Metal against rock this time.

“Well, Goddamn.”

He had her already. He found The Juliet.

He pried the stone out of the hardened gel. Crusty from the bath beads, The Juliet still gleamed in the palm of his hand. She warmed and channeled the beat of his pulse, and she felt alive, ready to hatch.

The emerald looked nothing like the illustration on the Nuggetz box. Rigg jammed the stone in his front jeans pocket, his head full of noise. When he re-entered the house, the map pieces fluttered hello.

He sat down in the vermin-spoiled chair that he should have tossed out already. He fished out the emerald to look at it again.

The Goddamned Juliet.

This moment right here
.

The last important moment of his life. The cosmos should have made a comment by now.

And then it came: a distant, celestial growl.

* * *

The rains came. The ones they had warned him about. The Valley became inundated with torrential, record-breaking rains. People died in those storms, swept away in flash floods that roared through the narrow canyons. And though The Mystery House sat on high ground, the runoff from even higher up the canyon pushed open the back door and flowed on through, trickling into Centenary below.

The gullies filled and disappeared. Frothy, desert-colored water reached the crossing bar of Lily Joy’s grave marker before it heaved out of the ground and was swept away with other debris.

Rigg let it go. Rigg let everything go.

A drowning desert was damned near biblical. It didn’t matter. Rigg had The Juliet, so he was happy.

No more pain, he realized. He had everything he wanted. So he took out another page from the notebook. It was time to write another letter. This one would be for the world, and he would carry it everywhere. Just in case.

The End

About the Author

Laura Ellen Scott’s mother claims that she saw her daughter struggling to copy letters and words from a dictionary before she could even read. When asked what she was doing, Laura explained, “I’m writing a book,” marking the first and last time she would be eligible for
The New Yorker’s
Writers Under 40 list. Raised in the tiny Northern Ohio township of Brimfield, she was suspended twice for ditching high school so she could hang out at nearby Kent State University’s twelve-story library, but despite her poor performance as a student, Laura was allowed to graduate in her junior year to start at KSU where she excelled at writing and playing cards. It took her more than five years to complete her BA, so only by marrying very well did she manage to weasel her way into graduate school in Louisiana and later Northern Virginia, and immediately upon graduation she was offered her first and only full-time job. She is now a Term Full Professor in the English Department of George Mason University, where she has taught creative writing since 1993.

For decades, Laura wrote short stories that were published in places like
Ploughshares
,
Pank
,
Mississippi Review
, and
Wigleaf
, but it wasn’t until she received an out-of-the-blue email from the great Dorothy Allison (
Bastard Out of Carolina)
that she started writing novels. That email said, among other things: “
Damn you are good. You are just seriously satisfyingly good.”
Eventually Allison would blurb Laura’s first novel,
Death Wishing
, a comic fantasy set in post-Katrina New Orleans, launching her debut at a time when other writers would be considered “mid-career.”

For Laura, writing novels offers her the chance to revisit the places that have affected her most deeply. For example,
Death Wishing
is about her favorite city. Her second novel,
The Juliet
, is a western about the search for a cursed emerald in Death Valley during the great wildflower bloom of 2006, and it seems especially fortuitous that the book’s publication occurs during the midst of another great bloom. The
New Royal Mysteries
series is set in a fictional college/prison town in Ohio, a sort of fusion between her hometown of Brimfield and Athens, Ohio, where she and her husband spent the early years of their marriage while he attended graduate school. The first New Royal Mystery is
The Mean Bone in Her Body
, and it is slated for release by Pandamoon Publishing in late 2016.

Thank you for purchasing this copy of
The Juliet
by Laura Ellen Scott. If you enjoyed this book by Laura, please let her know by posting a review. If you purchased this book through Amazon, it is eligible for a free Kindle Match.

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