Dead Man Stalking (Barbara Marr Murder Mystery Series Book 5) Read online

  He took the bill. “I hate to take money from people,” he said, “but they don’t use this kind of currency in twenty-five twenty-five. That’s when I’m from. The year twenty-five twenty-five.”

  Just like the song. How convenient. “I understand,” I said in as sympathetic a voice as I could muster. “Just please, don’t spend it on alcohol. Use it for food.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t drink. We don’t have liquor products...” he lowered his voice to a whisper again, “...in the future.”

  “Outlawed?” I whispered back, remembering his comment about the cigars.

  “Nah. Just not around. It fogs the mind and kills the liver.”

  Okay, then.

  He dashed to the register and, unfortunately, came right back to the table with his sandwich and forty-seven cents in change. He handed me the change. “Whatcha reading?” he asked, unwrapping the egg sandwich.

  “Cecil’s book.”

  He stared at me intently and chewed with vigor. I think most of the coffee shop could hear him chomping. I grew uncomfortable with his staring and loud chewing. I sipped my coffee and tried to get back to the book, fully aware of Moyle’s eyes pinned on me.

  “You like it?” he asked finally.

  I nodded. “Um, yeah, actually. I’m surprised. He’s a good writer. I mean, I’m no expert. I don’t read a lot, but I can’t stop thinking about it when I put it down.”

  Moyle tore off another bite of sandwich and went at it again like a cow on its cud.

  I was torn. Part of me kind of liked this guy, but part of me was a little frightened by him. He reminded me of Uncle Fred Fenstermacher from Sheboygan. Or Fruity Fred as we called him lovingly. “Did you read it?” I asked Moyle.

  He swallowed. “I didn’t just read it, my friend, I lived it. I am Sam Storm.”

  Hm. I could kind of see it. Cecil’s description of Sam Storm was strikingly similar to Moyle’s physical traits. Of course, Sam wasn’t a mental patient, homeless man, or a time traveler.

  “Well...” Moyle added slowly, “it isn’t me exactly. He changed some of the circumstances and the time period, but what happens in that book happened to me in nineteen forty-four. During World War Two.” He nodded slowly. “That was an interesting twist.”

  He polished off the sandwich, crumpled the paper, threw it at a trash can across the room with amazing accuracy, and stood. “Okay, let’s go fix that air conditioner of yours.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  That’s right. Moyle Just Moyle—the homeless man who fantasized about traveling through time—that guy knew that my air conditioner was on the fritz. I scoured my brain trying to remember if I had mentioned it to him at all, but there hadn’t been time.

  Maybe he guessed my air conditioning was out, because I was having breakfast out? Nah. That was crazy.

  Moyle must have detected my concern.

  “You told me tomorrow,” he said, “but we didn’t have time to fix it then.”

  I scratched my nose and gave that statement some thought. I tapped my fingers on the table and thought some more on it. Fruity Uncle Fred might have said something like that when he was alive, but he was still a darn good plumber. Following that logic, maybe Moyle was nutty, but still a decent A/C technician.

  I gave Moyle a long hard look. “You can fix my air conditioning?” I was desperate. Vikki was coming home eventually.

  He nodded. “I twisted once and got stuck for a year and a half. Long story. Nineteen ninety-one to nineteen ninety-three.” He shook his head. “The nineties, those were some boring years, huh?” He shrugged. “Had to make money so I learned to repair heating and air conditioning units. Glad I’m not stuck there anymore. Come on.”

  So we went. Yes, I drove a complete stranger to my home. I said I was desperate. He said he’d fix it for the price of another sandwich. How could I refuse?

  On the short drive to my house, Moyle explained his theory on why Cecil Cleveland was killed. The story wasn’t as out there as I might have expected.

  “Lottery ticket,” said Moyle.

  “You mean, you think he’s the missing lottery winner?”

  “There’s a missing lottery winner?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re talking about?”

  “I don’t know, is it?”

  “Let’s try this again,” I said, making a slow turn since he seemed to be unaccustomed to cars. He white-knuckled the grab-handle every time I took a turn. “You think Cecil was killed because he had a winning lottery ticket?”

  “That’s it,” he said nodding. “Now you’re following me.”

  “Do you know for sure he won the lottery?”

  “Not for super sure. But I know he bought tickets. Lots of them.”

  “So why do you think he won?”

  “He left me a note.” Moyle dug into his clownish balloon pants pocket and retrieved a piece of paper. “I’m not always around, you know. I twist in from time to time because Cecil is a special man. A good friend. So he’d leave me notes under that statue in front of the library.” He read from the paper. “Let the revolution begin.”

  “Vikki mentioned the revolution thing,” I said. “He wanted a lot of money to bankroll an uprising or civil war.”

  “Between you and me,” Moyle said, grabbing the handle again as his eyes grew wide while I pulled into my driveway, “Cecil was a good friend, but he was a bit of an oddball.”

  “But you think he won the big jackpot and planned to use his winnings to move ahead with this revolution of his.”

  “Makes perfect sense to me, doesn’t it to you?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so. Kind of.” I was beginning to scare myself. And if Moyle was right, and Cecil had the winning lotto ticket, I was going to be very sad. I’d so hoped one of my lost tickets was the winner.

  Pulling my mace from the glove compartment, I led Moyle to my house for a closer inspection of the air conditioning unit.

  “What’s that?” he asked, looking at the nicely disguised mace spray can.

  “Breath spray.”

  “You have bad breath?”

  “No, because I take this with me everywhere I go.”

  I liked Moyle, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

  It didn’t take him long to decide that a twenty-dollar part from the hardware store would fix us up in no time. We drove to Home Express and Moyle found the part in about three minutes.

  I laughed when I saw what it was called. “A capacitor,” I said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Yeah,” he said innocently. “That’s it.”

  “Not a flux capacitor?”

  “Never heard of a flux capacitor.” He pulled it from the hook. “This ordinary one will do, though.”

  I eyed him suspiciously. “You’ve never seen Back to the Future?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A movie.”

  “Oh. Those. We don’t have those—”

  I finished his sentence for him. “In the year twenty-five twenty-five.”

  He shrugged. “We don’t. But I was in a movie once. Long story.”

  When we got in line to pay, Moyle excused himself to find a bathroom. Twenty minutes later, I was standing outside still waiting for Moyle to come out of the bathroom. Sweat dripped from every pore in my body and I swear I saw a vulture circling overhead just waiting for me to drop dead. Finally, I’d had enough of waiting and went to find him.

  First, I went to the men’s bathroom and asked a man going in to see if a man named Moyle was in there. Yes, the man looked at me strangely, but you do what you gotta do. He returned, saying the bathroom was empty.

  So I went back to where I had been waiting, thinking we’d crossed paths. No Moyle.

  Next, I went up and down e
very aisle and finally resorted to calling his name the way I did when I lost one of the girls in Target. “Moyle! Moyle!”

  Then I felt really stupid and realized he probably went to my car when he didn’t find me. So I went to my car. No Moyle.

  Moyle was gone.

  Then I felt really stupid when I wondered if he’d twisted to a different time.

  I needed a drink. An ear to bend would be helpful as well.

  There was no way I was going to tell Roz this story. She would think I’d finally lost all of my marbles. I would talk to Peggy. She readily admitted to having a few less marbles than most people anyway. I drove to Peggy’s with my capacitor and begged her for a glass of wine.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped. “What happened to your hair?”

  “Wine, Peggy, wine.”

  “But it’s not even noon yet,” she said. “Maybe you need a baseball hat...”

  “Half a glass. Just half a glass. I have the craziest story to tell you.”

  “Oh, I love crazy stories.”

  “I met a time traveler,” I sputtered. “His name is Moyle, and I don’t really think he’s a time traveler. I just think he’s a little off his rocker. You know, maybe too many drugs in the eighties or something. But he said he met me tomorrow and I told him to go to the coffee shop but he came yesterday and that I need my air conditioning fixed.”

  Peggy stared at me for a moment, then felt my forehead. “I think you’re coming down with something. You know there’s a summer flu going around.” She sat me down on the wing chair in her family room and came back with a glass of ice water, two aspirin, and a red baseball hat with horns. “No wine for you,” she said, patting my knee. “That’s the only baseball hat we have. Got it when we went to see the Devils play. Put it on anyway. Trust me, it won’t look as strange as your hair. We’ll have to fix up that mop later.”

  When I finished the water, I did feel a little better. Maybe I was suffering from heat stroke or something. A heat hallucination maybe.

  I nodded. “I should probably go home and lie down, huh?”

  “I think that’s a good idea. And I have to go in a minute anyway. Roz and I have our self-defense class.”

  “Don’t tell her about this, Peggy. Don’t. She’ll think I’ve gone over the deep end.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  “Promise me you won’t tell her. Peggy. Promise.”

  “I promise, I promise. Now you promise me you’ll go straight back to Vikki’s and rest in some nice air conditioning. I’d let you stay here, but Simon and the boys will be back any minute and then there’s no rest, trust me. Roz and I will stop by after our class. I’ll bring you lemonade and a chicken salad sandwich from Rustic Deli.”

  “Okay,” I said, fitting the hat over my hair. “Thank you.”

  She walked me to the door.

  “Peggy?” I asked her.

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”

  “Signora,” she said, “we’re all a little pazzo sometimes. It’s what makes life so interesting.”

  I felt better on my drive home. Maybe Moyle was a crazy man who just disappeared. Maybe he was a figment of my overheated imagination or maybe I’d just had too much wine the night before. Whatever it was, I had a twenty-dollar air conditioning capacitor, and now I needed to figure out who was going to install it. And I hadn’t talked to the girls yet or Howard. I’d get back to Vikki’s, let Puddles out, and start the day over the right way.

  If only Red Cigala’s car wasn’t parked on the other side of the street from Vikki’s house. Red’s eyes were trained on the house like a cat focused on its prey.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I pulled my van over to the curb, parked, and slid down in the seat. I’d keep an eye on Red to see what he was up to. This was beyond coincidence now. Red was up to something. Most likely connected to Cecil Cleveland. I considered Moyle’s concerns. Maybe he was right and Cecil had bought a lot of lottery tickets. Moyle also said that Red owned a cigar shop. Maybe the cigar shop sold lottery tickets. If that was the case, it wasn’t such a stretch to theorize that they were in some sort of collusion. Had Red and Cecil been working the system somehow? If Red’s store sold tickets, could he have rigged the machine to give them a winning ticket?

  No, that didn’t work. The winning ticket was sold at a liquor store in a strip mall near the Winslow Building.

  While I pondered the many possibilities of why Red Cigala was interested in sitting outside Vikki Cleveland’s house, he didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t even light up a cigar. I checked the clock on my dash. Forty-five minutes had passed.

  Meanwhile, the van was nearly out of gas. I couldn’t keep it running much longer, and I wasn’t going to continue to sit here in this heat without the A/C on. I could either head on in to Vikki’s house and pretend I didn’t see him, or just approach the man and ask him what he was doing.

  Years earlier I might have chosen the path of least resistance, but with time and age, I’ve grown a little gutsier. The day-to-day life of a stay-at-home mom lacks very little intrigue or danger. Yeah, there’s the occasional thrill when a cop pulls you over for neglecting to renew your registration, or the bad-girl titillation you experience when purposely throwing a glass bottle into the trash can instead of the recycle bin, but generally speaking, the days can be a bit dull and monotonous. I decided to take a direct approach and just ask Mr. Red Cigala what he was doing.

  I rehearsed my cool moves in my mind during the short drive from the curb to Vikki’s driveway. I slipped my sunglasses on for added coolness.

  I slid out of my minivan, clicked the fob to lock, and sauntered down the driveway, staring straight at the man in the red car. He looked taller in the driver’s seat than he had when he was standing at the funeral home the day before. When I reached his car I saw he was sitting on a cushion.

  I set my hand down on the door near the window intent on leaning in very Dirty Harry-like, but he must have waxed his car with twenty coats. My hand slipped. Instead of a slick-looking lean, I toppled over, scraping my hand on the asphalt road. There went my hopes of appearing smooth and in control. Then I spotted the horned baseball cap on the ground beside me and realized cool had never been on the agenda.

  Apparently, Red’s parents taught him that you should always help a klutzy woman when she falls on her face, because he was out of his car and offering me a hand faster than you can say, “How much are your Cubans?”

  “Hey, lady. Are you okay?” He wrapped a hand around my wrist and pulled.

  “Uh,” I managed through gritted teeth, searing pain tearing through my hand like a million tiny needles. “Uh, I’m sure nothing is broken. My pride maybe.”

  Forgetting that Red was smaller than myself, I relied a little too much on his body weight when I pulled on him to lift myself. He fell right on top of me.

  Yes, it was an awkward moment, but it gets worse.

  Not a nanosecond later, I heard the sound of screeching tires and women shouting. Not just any ol’ women, but Peggy and Roz.

  “Fight, Barb!” Peggy screamed. “Fight!”

  While pushing Red off of me, I could see Peggy and Roz tearing toward us. In the blink of an eye, Roz was there. She cuffed Red across both ears just as he was rising to one knee.

  “Take that!” she shouted.

  Red howled and grabbed his head.

  Not relenting, she took advantage of his vulnerability by kicking hard and fast right between his legs.

  He let out a shriek of pain so desperate that I nearly cried myself.

  Unfortunately, half of Vikki’s neighbors heard the bloodcurdling wail as well. A small crowd formed almost immediately.

  “Watch it, Mister!” Peggy shouted. “She knows how to put a two-hundred-pound man in
to a chokehold too!” Peggy offered me her hand and helped me up from the ground. “Are you okay?” she asked me.

  “Don’t worry, I’m dialing 911. Situation under control, folks!” Roz shouted with her phone to her ear.

  “No!” I shouted. “Roz! Don’t! He wasn’t trying to hurt me. He was helping me up from a fall.”

  I caught my breath. It had all happened so fast, and now we had an audience. Then I took a look at the broken man and wondered if Roz hadn’t done enough damage to require EMT assistance. “Sir?” I asked him, trying to push myself from the ground. “Should we call 911?”

  He shook his head, but held on to his coconuts for dear life. Finally he squeaked out a “no.”

  “We’re all good here,” I said to the audience. “I’m sorry for the noise. Everyone’s safe.”

  Roz hung up her phone, and Vikki’s neighbors retreated to their houses reluctantly. Finally it was just me, Peggy, Roz, Red Cigala, and my stinging hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” Roz told Red. “I thought you were hurting my friend.”

  “Your hand looks nasty,” Peggy said to me. “You need to clean that up and put some antibiotic on it.”

  “In a minute,” I said, wiping sweat off my face. The sun was really beating down on us. “I think we could all use a drink of water. Can I get you some, sir?”

  “Red,” he squeaked, standing nearly vertical. “Red Cigala.”

  I nodded. “I saw you yesterday at Cecil Cleveland’s viewing.”

  “He was a friend. I was just waiting for his daughter. I felt bad not introducing myself yesterday, and I admit to having a favor to ask her.”

  Gee. He seemed like a nice enough guy. If I invited him in for water and he tried anything, Roz had just proved she could defend all of us and maybe most of Rustic Woods. “She isn’t home right now,” I said, “but would you like to come in for a minute and get a glass of water?”