They started arguing again about a paint set as the little girl took the box she’d found to her mother. The woman’s eyes sparkled with interest. “How much is this?” she asked a man sitting in a lawn chair.
“I’ll take two and a quarter.”
“Two and a quarter?” Vera yelled, rocketing out of her melancholy. She shook a fist at the man. “I’ll give you an even five square in the jaw. How’s that?”
“Don’t get your hackles up,” Maddy said, eyeing her elder sister.
Vera cupped her ear and leaned forward. “What?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Vera Dawn, you can hear me just fine, now. We’re dead.”
“What?”
Tilda shook her head and looked over at me. “She does that to annoy us.”
I laughed softly and scanned the small crowd to make sure no one was paying too close attention. “Would you like to cross?” I asked them.
“Goodness, no,” Maddy said. “We’re waiting for our sister. We all want to cross together.”
That was new.
“That sounds nice. You know where I’ll be when you’re ready.”
“Sure do,” Vera said. “You’re kind of hard to miss.”
I spotted an old piece of equipment sitting lopsided on a card table. “What is that?” I asked, my eyes glossing over in fascination.
“Not really sure,” the man in the lawn chair said.
“Maddy, your grandson always was a dirty scoundrel.” She looked at me. “His poor mother hasn’t been in the nursing home a week, and he’s selling everything she ever owned.”
“Everything any of us ever owned,” Tilda said. “And that’s a lie detector. Our father worked for Hoover, don’t cha know.”
“That Hoover was an odd man,” Vera said, her nose crinkling in distaste.
Maddy frowned at her. “How come you can suddenly hear?”
Vera cupped her ear again. “What?”
I stifled a giggle. “A polygraph machine? For real?”
“What?” This time it was the dirty scoundrel of a grandson who’d asked.
“Does it work?”
“No idea,” he said before lifting a beer.
“Does it work?” Maddy asked as though I’d offended her. “It works like a dream. I used it on Tilda once when she went out with my boyfriend behind my back.”
“That wasn’t me, Maddy. That was Esther. And because you had no clue what you were doing, the results were inconclusive.”
“How much?” I asked the man.
He shrugged. “I’ll take twenty for it.”
“Sold.”
“Twenty? Twenty dollars? That should be in a museum, not in a yard sale. That boy needs his hide tanned something fierce.”
I paid the guy, then walked back over to them. “I agree. If this is original FBI equipment, I bet I can get it to the right people.”
“You can do that?” Maddy asked.
“I can try,” I said with a shrug.
“Thank you,” Vera said.
I nodded and took my prize.
“I did too know what I was doing,” Maddy said as I walked off. “I just chose to be the bigger person.”
Tilda snorted and the arguments began again. I almost felt sorry for their sister Esther. She had a lot of baggage waiting for her when she passed.
I decided to drop off the polygraph machine at home before checking in at the office. If Agent Carson and I were still friends, I would give it to her with explicit instructions to get it to the right people. Surely there was an FBI museum somewhere, and it could earn me brownie points. I was a firm believer in brownie points. They were like Cheez-Its. And Oreos. And mocha lattes. One could never have too many.
As I was driving home, however, an elderly woman appeared out of nowhere in the street ahead of me. Reflexes being what they were, I swerved to the right, narrowly missing a herd of parked bikes and sideswiping Misery against a streetlamp.
I screeched to a halt, hitting my forehead on the steering wheel
The woman had been in a paper-thin nightgown, both the gown and her hair a soft baby blue. Though I’d only seen her a second, it was enough to register the fear on her face, in her fragile shoulders. She looked nothing like Aunt Lil, but I couldn’t help but compare the two. If Lil was scared and lost, I would search the world over for her. That was the impression I’d gotten from this woman.
Thankfully, the area I was in at the moment wasn’t super busy. No one noticed my little mishap. I glanced over to check on Mr. Andrulis. He was still staring straight ahead, nary a care in the world, so I scanned the area for the woman. She was gone.
Left with no other choice, I pulled back onto the street and started for home again, only to have the woman appear again. In the middle of the road.