Death of a Six-Foot Teddy Bear Read online

  The number 29 on a lighted pole showed where she and Earl and the girls should be right now: making sure the stuffed bear was angled to look threatening, lining up the Pepper Lights to create an eye-catching display. She rested her forehead against the glass. Earl was probably wandering around the hotel distraught. Could she even hope that he would come back to their hotel room?

  Victoria pulled a pitcher of orange juice out of the refrigerator. “Did you spot him?” Cold steam billowed out of the freezer when she retrieved a bag of ice. Little Vicky certainly knew her way around Dustin’s place.

  Ginger shook her head. “Thank you for letting me look.” She sighed and looked toward the door.

  “I wonder where Dustin is.” Victoria pounded the bag of ice on the countertop with vicious intensity, then she grabbed a pick from a utensil canister and stabbed at it. “He knew this meeting was important to me.”

  Ginger took one final look out on the convention floor. Six, maybe seven, people still wandered around the floor, and four of them had carpet sweepers and vacuums. Victoria continued to attack the ice, allowing pieces to fly across the counter. She unzipped her velour sweat jacket and hung it on a stool. Her sleeveless camisole revealed muscular upper arms.

  She must have noticed Ginger staring. She touched her bicep and said, “Tae Bo and weightlifting.”

  “I do water aerobics myself. We’d have to get a microscope to see my muscles.”

  “I have to soak in a hot tub after my workout,” she confessed. Ice cascaded into her glass.

  The two women shared an ain’t-getting-older-fun laugh.

  “I have a private spa room in the hotel fitness center. You should join me sometime for a workout and massage.”

  The invitation took Ginger by surprise. Maybe being the resident celebrity got lonely sometimes. “That sounds like fun. I’ll have to take you up on that before we leave.” She turned her attention back to the convention floor.

  Victoria tossed ice into the blender on the counter. “Would you like a smoothie? I make them for Dustin all the time.”

  That explained why she knew her way around Dustin’s kitchen. Maybe Victoria wasn’t so strange. “Sure, that sounds good.” She wasn’t in a hurry anymore. After she called the front desk to report her missing cat, she would just have to wait in the room. Earl would have to come to her.

  Ginger walked over to the wall of glass, her attention now drawn to a booth that had a snake in an aquarium. The words The Reptile Catcher written in hot pink were displayed next to a picture of what looked like a spoon with rounded claws on it. Talk about a limited market. Pet-store owners and kids with lizards.

  Ginger’s breath caught in her throat. She leaned a little closer to the window. “Do you have some binoculars?”

  Victoria took a gulp of smoothie. “There’s a pair on that stool by the elevator. Dustin likes to watch the convention floor.”

  Ginger grabbed the binoculars. Her heart pounded. Phoebe strutted toward the reptile display as if she owned the convention floor. Most of the cleaning crew had on headphones or were moving with a rhythm that suggested music fed through ear buds, so they did not notice the cat on the hunt. Phoebe stopped in front of a cage that probably had snake food in it, live mice. She flicked her tail.

  “I think I’ll skip that smoothie.”

  Ginger rested her open hand on her ever-tightening chest. A deep breath would be nice. Phoebe jumped on the counter that contained the mice and then up on a railing where a bushy-tailed water-skier rested.

  “I need to get down to that convention floor fast.”

  Commander Laughlin looked up from his Sudoku puzzle. His nineteen-year-old niece stood in the doorway of his office looking like she was biting her lips off. She held a single piece of paper in her limp hand.

  “Problem?” He put his pencil down. His chest ached with a sensation somewhere between heartburn and firecrackers going off. He had been dealing with the pain since he hired his niece.

  Ashley crossed and uncrossed her arms. The paper she held fluttered. “I just got a call from the Wind-Up Hotel—”

  “And?”

  “I’ve been looking at the list of dispatch codes you gave me to follow, and there is no number that goes with what the call is about.” Ashley studied the paper. So deep was the furrow in her brow that he feared her face would crack, splintering off into a million pieces and revealing the empty space inside. “I was thinking it fell somewhere between a lost dog and a kidnapping. So I thought maybe I should just make something up. You know, a new code.”

  The commander took a sip of cold oversweetened coffee to push the scream traveling up his throat back down into his stomach. He had promised his sister he wouldn’t shout at her daughter. Megan had explained that Ashley was a sensitive girl. “This is not a creative writing exercise. The dispatched officer won’t know what you’re talking about if you give them a code that doesn’t exist.”

  The teenager stared at the ceiling. “Well, what am I supposed to say:

  “What was the nature of the call?”

  Ashley gnawed on a fingernail. “Somebody at the Wind-Up phoned and said that a squirrel has been stolen … or kidnapped.”

  Laughlin rubbed his bubbling stomach. There was only so much shouting he could swallow before he got another ulcer. “A squirrel? For real?”

  “I thought I would send Officer Drake. I looked at the map and that’s his patrol area. There was a call earlier from the Wind-Up about stolen jewelry. Officer Spurgen was on duty then.”

  Two calls in one night from the Wind-Up. For Calamity, that was a crime wave. Weird that they were both coming from the same hotel.

  “I just don’t know what the procedure is for a squirrel-napping.” Ashley nibbled on her fingernail with focused intensity. Maybe he should offer her some salt.

  Laughlin batted his pencil around the desk with coffee stirrers. So many choices here. Do you even treat a call like this seriously? He decided two things. First, they weren’t busy. And second, sending his best detectives on such a call would be the source of much humor at company picnics. He cleared his throat and spoke in his best Dragnet voice. “For a kidnapping, you want to send the detectives right out there. The sisters are on duty tonight, dispatch them, you don’t have to give it a number, just tell them what’s going on.”

  “The sisters?”

  His niece was too new to know about the department joke. “Detectives Mallory and Jacobson are both named Cindy. Well, Mallory goes by Cynthia. You know, with a Y. So we call them the sisters or the Cindys.”

  “Oh.” Ashley nodded like she understood. Then she gripped the trim on the doorway and leaned into his office. “So are they sisters?”

  Laughlin clenched his teeth. Nepotism was almost always a bad idea.

  Ashley turned so he saw her in profile. She fingered the piece of paper. Again, she snacked on her lower lip.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Uncle Glen, I don’t think I’m right for this job.” She pivoted on the balls of her feet.

  Glen Laughlin suppressed a hallelujah yelp. Ashley would be gone, and he would still be invited over to Megan’s for Christmas dinner.

  “I’ve been thinking I would be more suited for aeronautical engineering.”

  Laughlin slapped his hand on the desk. “Now that’s something to think about, Ashley.”

  On a bench outside the Gap outlet, Kindra slumped against Suzanne. Shopping bags surrounded them. A small crowd milled down the hallway. Arleta sat in the coffee shop across the corridor with the laptop open. “What do you suppose she’s going to blog about?”

  Suzanne shrugged. “We need to post something. We haven’t made an entry since we left Montana. Ginger had the laptop open, but she didn’t post.”

  “You notice how every piece of clothing Arleta buys is shiny?”

  Suzanne wiggled on the bench. “Don’t go giving her a hard time. She spent all those years being the professor’s wife wearing safe colors, gray and navy. I’m
glad she found her inner showgirl. The woman is entitled to a hot-pink-and-sequins phase.”

  Kindra pulled her blond hair out of its ponytail. “I just hope I’m that feisty when I’m her age.” Even at this distance and through the coffee shop window, Arleta’s blouse glistened.

  “I don’t think feisty is the word for it. The woman has better marksmanship skills than a marine sniper. Would you take a shooting class when you were seventy-five?”

  “I hope so.” Kindra kicked one of her shopping bags. “Shopping isn’t as much fun without Ginger.”

  Suzanne pulled out her cell phone. “I don’t know if Ginger is going to feel like shopping at all … considering.”

  Kindra leaned close to Suzanne to see what she was looking at on her phone. Suzanne flipped through pictures of her four kids. “We got this long tunnel filled with stores of marked-down stuff. How many times in a life does that happen, and we can’t even enjoy it because of everything that’s gone wrong.”

  Suzanne touched the picture of her baby, one-year-old Natasha. “This is my first vacation since I started having kids. The whole time I was packing and they were dragging things out of my suitcase and getting chocolate stains on my silk blouses, I couldn’t wait to get on that plane. Now that I’m here, all that I can think about is them.” Her voice faltered.

  “Don’t be sad.” Kindra scooted a little closer.

  “I’m okay.” Suzanne rested her head against the wall. “I just didn’t think I would miss my babies so much. I’m not usually this emotional. The lack of sleep is catching up with me.”

  “Me too. I hope Ginger was able to rest.” Kindra wrapped her arm around her friend. “We might have to sleep in shifts if we don’t get another room.”

  “It would be nice if we could all get on the same body clock before we left. The trip certainly isn’t matching up to what I thought it would be.”

  “You make plans and God makes plans; guess who has seniority in the planning department.” Kindra pulled a white T-shirt out of one of her bags and held it up.

  A bear walked by on the other side of the hallway that divided the stores. Kindra jumped to her feet. “Hey, it’s Xabier.” Earlier, a toy soldier and a showgirl with a headdress and tail feathers had gone into the coffee shop. Nobody craned their neck at the bear. Weird was the new normal around the Wind-Up.

  Suzanne rearranged her bags around her. “Xabier?”

  “This cute actor Ginger and I met earlier. He invited me to get together with him later.” Kindra waved and bounced on her heels. “Hey, Xabier.” He wasn’t more than twenty feet away. Why wasn’t he responding? “Xabier. Hey.”

  The bear turned in the direction of the shouting and then turned away. Kindra’s hand fell limp at her side. He had looked right at her and not waved. So much for blossoming romance.

  “He kind of ignored you.” Suzanne tucked a strand of wayward brown, curly hair behind her ear. “Are you still keeping your date?”

  “It’s not a date.” Already her heart was sinking to the vicinity of her loafers. “Okay, it’s kinda sorta a date. Of course I’m going. At the very least, he has to tell me why he just treated me like I was invisible.”

  The bear glanced behind him. His shoulders jerked up. He took big strides. Again, he craned his neck and then ran down the corridor.

  Kindra slumped back down. “Maybe he didn’t hear me.”

  “Everyone in Calamity heard you.” Suzanne rested her head against the wall again.

  Kindra crossed her arms and slipped even farther down on the bench. “That means Xabier did hear me and didn’t want to say hi to me. Not the option I wanted to pick. If he doesn’t like me, why would he invite me up to the rooftop garden?”

  “You like him?”

  “He seemed kind of sweet. His eyes were all warm when he looked at me.”

  “Is he a believer?”

  “I only talked to him for like five minutes. He didn’t take the bait when I mentioned God, but how do you know? Unless you meet a guy in church or on the mission field, it’s not like the first thing you bring up.”

  Suzanne touched Kindra’s arm. “Check out those two.”

  Two men dressed in sports coats and slacks strode through the corridor. One of them was short, middle-aged with a paunch. The other bore a resemblance to Frankenstein: tall, square shoulders, square features. They wove through the tunnel peering in shop windows, each working a different side of the hallway. They looked at each other and nodded, some signal passing between them.

  “It must still be seventy degrees above ground. Those guys could use a tank top and shorts.” Just watching them made Kindra sweat.

  The middle-aged man lifted his chin, indicating something in front of him to Frankenstein. They increased their pace but did not break into a run. Even with their attempt at nonchalance, they stood out like a hot pink suit among navy and gray. They were on some kind of focused mission. Everyone else was wandering.

  Suzanne whispered in her ear. “Kindra dear, you can’t hide a gun with a tank top.”

  Kindra inhaled a sharp gasp of air. “No way.”

  “Didn’t you see the bulge?” Suzanne patted her hip. “This may not be Vegas, but it is Nevada.”

  Kindra stood up and peered down the curving concrete corridor. “You don’t think they’re chasing after the cute teddy bear, do you?” She massaged the back of her neck, attempting to ward off the rising anxiety.

  “He was the only one running.”

  Kindra slumped back on the bench. What kind of trouble was Xabier in?

  “Do you mind if I sit here?”

  Arleta looked up from her laptop at a woman whose primary feature was big, brown eyes. Even slightly shadowed by a leather beret the woman wore, the penetrating intensity of the eyes was the first thing Arleta noticed. “Oh sure, dear. I’m just blogging.” She liked saying that word. Blog, blog, blogging. It made her feel hip and with it. Hanging out with Kindra and Suzanne did that for her.

  The coffee shop buzzed with late-night activity. The seat beside her was the last unoccupied one in the house. Through the window, she could see Suzanne and Kindra resting on a bench, surrounded by shopping bags.

  Arleta looked at the woman over the top of her glasses. She had had twenty-twenty vision all her life, and now at seventy-six, she had to break down and get these geezer glasses. She took comfort in the fact that the spectacles were just for reading and that they had jewels on them.

  The woman slumped into the chair beside Arleta. Her leather jacket had a patch on it that made reference to a Christian motorcycle organization. “I like your glasses.”

  Arleta touched the rhinestones on her cats-eye frame. “If you’re going to go blind, you might as well go blind in style.”

  “I won’t bother you for long.” The woman angled her head to get a better view of the counter. “They’re a little backed up. I’m just waiting for my hot tea and Italian soda. I get tired if I stand too long.” The woman took her hat off. The clarity in her eyes overpowered her distorted features. The effect was subtle, but it looked as though her skin had been pulled and stretched over her skull.

  The woman touched Arleta’s wrist. Her fingers were puffy and blue. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out. I have a disease that causes my skin to thicken and my hair to get thinner.” Her lips seemed frozen.

  “You didn’t—” She must have shrunk back from the woman without realizing it. “Okay, you did freak me out … a little.”

  The woman laughed a sort of trilling laugh, like birds singing. “I’ve been looking at this face in the mirror for a while. I forget that it shocks other people.” She put the hat back on. “So are you from Calamity?”

  “Just visiting. We came for the outlet shopping, and one of my friends has a husband who was supposed to do the Inventor’s Expo.”

  “I live in northern Nevada. Came here to have a talk with my ex-husband about our son. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” The woman shifted slightly in her chair.
“I don’t know anyone else in this town, and you have a kind face. I have to have one of those difficult talks with my ex. I’m meeting him at a bench out by the gondolas. This place is so busy all the time. He said it would be quieter out by the lake. I’m sorry, I am babbling because I’m nervous.”

  Arleta patted her hand. “It’s all right.”

  The woman traced the grain of the wood in the table. Her finger moved in slow hypnotic circles. “I suppose it all happens for a reason, even these difficult talks. It all works together for good. That’s what God says, anyway.”

  Arleta straightened in her chair. “That God guy again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You ever feel like God has your phone number, and He just keeps hitting redial?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  A man behind the counter yelled, “Number sixty-four, Italian soda and mint tea.”

  “That’s my order.” The woman rose to her feet. “It was nice talking with you—”

  “Arleta, Arleta McQuire.”

  “I’m Gloria. Gloria Clydell. Maybe I’ll see you around the Wind-Up. My ex-husband is the owner.” She held out her hand.

  Arleta opted out of giving her opinion about Dustin Clydell. There was probably a good reason she was his ex-wife. Gloria’s handshake was like a vapor passing over Arleta’s palm. “Is it fatal, what you have?”

  “It can be. It’s spread to my lungs, the thick skin, so I have to be careful.” She leaned a little closer to Arleta. “Don’t look so glum. I’ve had scleroderma for fourteen years. The pain was awful at first, but it has sort of evened out.”

  Arleta felt like she’d just run a long way in a hailstorm. Her skin tingled with cold and pain, and she didn’t know why. “I’m sorry, I—I don’t know what made me ask that.”

  Gloria’s gaze did not flicker. Such kind eyes.

  Gloria negotiated her way through the crowd to the counter. She emerged a few seconds later holding one plastic cup and one foam cup and returned to Arleta’s table. She wrapped the Italian soda in napkins. “Cold irritates the swelling in my hands. The napkins help. You have fun blogging.” She turned toward the door and then pivoted back around. “You might want to pick up that phone the next time it rings. You know, the God phone.”