Tippy Toe Murder (5 page)

No chewing gum.

“For goodness sake, Franny, watch what you’re
doing!” Startled by her mother’s voice, Franny looked up from the morning
newspaper she had been so absorbed in, and realized she had poured too much
milk on her Cheerios.

“Never mind, Mom,” she said as her mother
leaped for the roll of paper towels. “I’ll clean it up.”

She was too late. Her mother, Irma,
efficiently mopped up the overflow and reduced Franny to preschool status in
one deft motion. “If only you would be a bit more careful, Franny,” she
commented.

“I was just looking to see if they’ve found
Caro, but there isn’t anything.”

“There’s more to that than meets the eye, I’ll
bet,” said Irma over the rim of her coffee mug.

“What’s your theory?” asked Franny. She
knew her mother loved to gossip and spent most of the day on the telephone,
chatting with a large circle of friends.

“It’s shocking, that’s what it is. A woman
disappearing in broad daylight like that. Makes you wonder if any of us are
safe. I’m calling Niemann the Key Man first thing this morning and getting all
the locks changed. And Franny, I want you to be extra careful. No more leaving
the car unlocked—or the house, for that matter.”

“But, Mom, we’ve never bothered with
locking the door,” protested Franny. “I know I’ll end up locking myself out.” “We
never had to till now. But I’m not taking any chances. They got Caro, and that
dog didn’t even bark.”

“Who got her?”

Irma looked carefully over both shoulders,
then leaned forward over the table and whispered to Franny, “Satanists.” “What?”
Franny nearly choked on a mouthful of cereal. “It’s more widespread than you
think,” said the older woman, nodding. “Didn’t you read those articles Ted
Stillings wrote last summer? Young people go off in the woods and, well, all
sorts of obscene nonsense goes on. The police over in Gilead found the evidence
in the woods. Altars, bloodstains, carvings on trees.”

“It’s a fad, Mom. That’s all it is. The
kids see these rock videos and experiment a little.”

“They sacrifice things, Franny. The story
said there was blood.”

“Animal blood, Mom. It’s not right, but
kids have always done stuff like that. Blowing up frogs with firecrackers,
taking potshots at squirrels and birds, even strangling cats.”

“I’m not such an old fuddy-duddy that I don’t
know the difference between a little boy with a BB gun and a Satanic ritual,”
insisted the older woman.

“Ben at the store wears a Satan T-shirt,”
said Franny thoughtfully.

“There!” crowed Irma.

“You don’t really think he had anything to
do with Caro’s disappearance, do you?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Irma,
getting up and running water into the kitchen sink. “There are supposed to be
ways you can tell. Some of them have three sixes tattooed under their hair, or
other symbols. Does Ben have any tattoos?”

“Not that I know of,” said Franny.

“I bet some hunter will find whatever’s
left of poor Caro out in the woods somewhere, all carved up and tied to a tree,
or laid out on some altar.” She turned, and Franny was shocked at the intensity
of her expression.

“Honestly, Mom, I don’t think we have too
much to worry about. I’m gonna be late if I don’t hustle.” Franny gave her
mother a quick peck on the cheek, grabbed her purse, and dashed out the door.
Sometimes Mom was just too much, she thought as she drove to the store. She
wanted to get the video camera set up before Mr. Slack arrived.

There was no sign of him, however, when she
arrived and unlocked the door as usual. The cheap electric clock that he had
put up when he sold the old Regulator to a shrewd antique dealer indicated it
was only a quarter to nine. She knew she had fifteen minutes before Mr. Slack
arrived, precisely on the hour.

Hauling out a rickety old ladder, Franny
climbed up and set the camera behind a dusty advertising cutout that had stood
on top of a display cabinet for as long as she could remember. She climbed
down, studied the faded image of the earth dripping with red house paint, and
satisfied herself that it concealed the camera. She grabbed an X-acto knife
from a rack, went back up, and cut out the center of the “o” in the “Cover the
Earth” printed along the bottom. She angled the display a bit so the camera had
a clear view of the cash register, pushed the on button, and stepped carefully
down.

She had barely gotten the ladder put away
when she heard the bell on the door jangle. Mr. Slack had arrived.

“Franny, I believe we’re expecting a
delivery today.”

“That’s right.”

“Be sure and let me know when the truck
arrives,” he told her, marching stiffly into his office and shutting the door.
A minute later he reappeared with the cash envelope for the register. “There’s
exactly seventy-seven dollars and fifty cents in that envelope,” he informed
Franny.

“I know,” she nodded in agreement. Every
morning for the past fifteen years she’d started the day with one roll each of
pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, twenty-five singles, five five-dollar
bills, and one ten. “What was the old man trying to prove?” she wondered.

Franny set up the cash drawer, changed the
date on the printer, and checked to see that the sign in the door read
open.
There
were no customers, so she took the feather duster out of the broom closet and
began dusting the merchandise. She had worked her way through the pots and
pans, the dishes, and the vacuum cleaner bags all the way to the electric
drills when the Hasco truck signaled its arrival with a sharp squeal of its
brakes.

“The truck’s here,” she told Mr. Slack. He
pulled himself shakily to his feet, and Franny watched anxiously until he had
his legs firmly beneath him. Then he marched stiffly to the front of the store,
where he surprised Stan, the Hasco driver, by greeting him cordially for the
first time in the eight years he’d been driving the route.

“Good day to you, Mr. Slack,” answered
Stan, casting a curious glance at Franny.

“Stan, I think it will be just fine if you
put the boxes along that wall. I’ll be checking the invoices myself today,”
said Slack.

“No problem,” answered Stan, handing the
old man a thick sheaf of computer printouts. He went back out to the truck but
soon returned, wheeling in a dolly loaded with boxes.

“I’ll count the items in the boxes and you
check them off, okay?” Franny asked Mr. Slack.

“That will be fine,” he answered, carefully
unscrewing his fountain pen.

“What have we got here?” murmured Franny,
opening the first box. “Okay. Six Phillips-head screwdrivers, six-inch, item
number one-six-oh-nine-six, and six more eight-inch, number
one-six-oh-nine-eight. Got that?”

Mr. Slack began looking through the papers,
but soon shook his head in frustration.

“I need my other glasses, Franny. I’ll be
right back.” While he made his way back to the office, Franny found the correct
sheet and put it on top of the pile of papers. When he returned she showed him
where the screwdrivers were listed, and the old man carefully checked them off.

“Now we’ve got hex wrenches, six assorted
on a card, item number one-seven-oh-one-six. Got that?”

“You’re going much too fast, Franny. Haste
makes waste, you know. Now what was that number?”

“One-seven-oh-one-six,” repeated Franny
slowly.

“It’s not here.”

Franny glanced at the invoice, found the
notation, and pointed it out to him. Then she went back to the carton.

“A dozen half-inch steel tape measures,
twelve-foot, item one-five-oh-one-two, and a dozen half-inch tapes,
twenty-four- foot, one-five-oh-two-four, and six three-quarter-inch tapes,
twenty-four-foot, one-seven-five-two-four. “

“You’ll have to repeat that, Franny,” said
Mr. Slack.

Franny looked at the wall of cartons Stan
was building along the side of the store and sighed. She could do this much
faster herself, but Mr. Slack would never let her. He didn’t trust her and he
had to assure himself the invoices were correct.

“I’ll try to go slower,” she said, looking
up as Stan reappeared carrying a clipboard.

“Would you sign this, Mr. Slack?”

Slack took the clipboard and began reading
the attached papers.

“You don’t have to read it,” advised Stan. “Just
sign it.”

Mr. Slack’s bristly gray eyebrows shot up. “I
never sign anything without reading it.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, except that I
was here and you took the delivery. If there are any problems, you can sort it
out over the phone. Isn’t that right, Franny?” he demanded impatiently.

“Oh. So Franny has been signing the papers
without reading them?” The old man sounded like a prosecution lawyer asking the
crucial question, the one that would condemn the defendant beyond any
reasonable doubt.

“Sure, everybody does,” affirmed Stan.

Another nail in my coffin, thought Franny. “Why
don’t you get a cup of coffee, Stan? I’m sure Mr. Slack will have signed the
papers by the time you get back.”

“Okay. I usually stop at Jake’s anyway. But
I gotta be back on the road by ten-thirty.”

“Mr. Slack, we’ll never be able to check
all these boxes in ten minutes. Why don’t you write a qualifier? Something
like, ‘Delivery received, contents unverified,’ and sign it?”

“That’s a good idea, Franny,” he said.
Truth be told, his rheumatism was acting up and he wanted to sit down. He took
the clipboard into his office and sat down at the desk. When Stan returned he
raised an eyebrow at the beautifully penned statement, complete with Slack’s
stylized Palmer-method signature.

“ ‘Bye, now,” said Franny. She smiled. “See
you in two weeks.”

Turning to Air. Slack, she offered a
suggestion.

“Mr. Slack, we could save time if you told
me the items and I checked them off. I’m a lot more familiar with the invoice
codes, and you could sit on this little stool.”

Using Franny’s method, they worked much
faster, mostly because Franny looked over Mr. Slack’s shoulder to see the
contents and checked off each box while the old man hunted for the numbers on
one or two items. What makes old people so slow, wondered Franny, struggling to
keep her impatience in check. Someday she would be old, no doubt, and would
appreciate the tolerance of young folks. By noontime the old man was clearly
exhausted. He usually spent the morning at his desk going over the figures,
slipping in a few catnaps between the columns. He hadn’t been this active in
years.

He went home for lunch promptly at
noontime. A little later Ben wandered in. Franny grabbed her purse and was out
the door in a flash. She had only a half hour before she had to go back, a
stingy thirty minutes of freedom.

She drove her car down to the fish pier and
parked there to eat the egg salad sandwich her mother had packed for her. The
sky was white with clouds, and without any breeze the cove was a flat, oily
gray that matched her mood. The oppressive weather didn’t seem to bother the
gulls, greedy as ever as they squabbled over bits of old bait, then flew off to
follow a rusty old lobster boat as it chugged out into the bay to check traps.
Glancing at her watch, she realized with a start that her half hour was almost
gone.

Back at the store, the afternoon dragged by
slowly. Mr. Slack turned over the job of checking the merchandise to Ben, and
he and Franny made short work of the remaining cartons. Then Franny began
stocking the shelves with the new merchandise, making sure she stayed out of
Ben’s way as much as possible. She wanted to give him every chance to
incriminate himself while the camera was rolling.

As the afternoon grew closer to three o’clock,
Franny began to worry. The tape was good for only six hours, she knew, and she
wanted to turn the camera off before it began recording over the previously
taped images. It was just a little after three, however, when Ben announced he “had
to see some guys” and left the store. Franny wasted no time in dragging out the
ladder and climbing up to retrieve the camera.

She started guiltily, nearly falling off
the ladder, when she heard Slack’s voice demand, “What are you doing, Franny?”

“You almost gave me a heart attack,” she
stammered, turning to face him and nervously patting her chest with a
fluttering hand. “This display is so old and dusty, I was just looking to see
if I could spruce it up a little bit.”

The old man studied the sagging cardboard
poster. “Take it down,” he ordered.

“What?” Franny was horrified. If she moved
the poster, the camera would be revealed before she had a chance to view the
tape. And while she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong in setting up the
camera, she was sure Slack wouldn’t see it that way. “Why don’t we wait until
the paint rep can give us a new one,” she suggested, casting about desperately
for an escape. “Don’t you think the store will look bare without it?”