Careful What You Wish For Read online

  I angrily turned over and punched my pillow into a mound, then buried my face in it. I told myself there was no such thing as a genie, and Gene couldn’t possibly be real. I would wake up in the morning and find out it was all a dream. Right?

  Wrong. The first thing I did the next morning before Brady woke up was to slip as quietly as possible into the kitchen and carefully open the cabinet door. Crap! The amber bottle sat right where I had left it. I could see Gene inside waving at me and pointing at the cork. I shook my head no and slammed the door shut.

  Even after two cups of strong black coffee and a shower, I was out of sorts when my mother showed up to take care of Brady. Before she arrived I hid the genie’s bottle behind the cereal boxes in the cupboard, ignoring Gene’s tapping on the side of the glass while I was doing it. I refused to look at him at all. I shoved the bottle behind the Cheerios. But from the moment I shut the door on him, I began suffering from pangs of guilt for keeping him imprisoned in there, in the dark. And I had no reason to feel guilty, did I?

  “You’re looking nice today,” my mother said.

  This morning I had put on a fawn-colored suede skirt with a matching jacket, one I used to wear at my law office. It was the first time in about a year that I hadn’t worn maternity clothes or a pair of comfortable jeans. My hair was clean, and I had used the curling iron to give it some body. I made myself a mental note to call Freddi to make an appointment for a good cut. I needed to call Freddi anyway—to impress on her the importance of keeping the genie secret, even from her husband, Bobby.

  Despite the weirdness of the last twenty-four hours, I felt pretty doggone good. I was looking forward to the day ahead for a change, not daydreaming and looking backward to a past I could never recapture.

  I pulled my Beemer out of the driveway and began the three-mile drive to Jade Meadow Farm. The sun was out, the sky was blue, the air was cold. As I drove, I wondered what had made a young Japanese couple come so far from their home to settle in this rural community. Perhaps they saw the beauty of the region the same way I did: the dark green pines that lined the winding roads; the narrow valleys tucked between low rounded hills; and the ever-present sound of shallow, icy water murmuring over the rocks of the area’s myriad creeks. But as I passed pastures and woods without seeing a single house, a wave of sadness washed over me. I wondered how long this beautiful landscape would be here. Would Brady ever see it or would the pastures be replaced by ticky-tacky town houses and condos?

  My fears were very real, based on the changes I had seen in this rural valley. Fast, cheap housing had transformed the nearby town of Harveys Lake from a lazy summer boating resort into a crowded, busy suburb. The transformation had started a couple of years back when a developer bought the Picnic Grounds, an old amusement park. Now row after row of new apartments stood where we had once ridden the roller coaster and merry-go-round.

  Around the lake itself, the cottages had disappeared one by one to be replaced by McMansions. Condos had gone up next to Grotto’s Pizza at the end of the lake called Sunset Beach. The wealthy newcomers took over the city council, and soon the original homeowners could no longer afford the taxes and were forced to sell out. Long-time residents shook their heads about it, but nobody had been able to stop it.

  On the other hand, Noxen, the object of so many sneers and snickers, had remained unchanged for the past hundred years. There was something special and rare to be treasured in that stability. I looked around me as I drove. At that moment I was passing a true, original Noxen institution, Torchy’s Bar. Torchy’s occupied a decrepit one-story wooden building in the middle of town, its neon signs for Rolling Rock and Budweiser glowing red behind grimy widows. A handwritten sign saying SUNDAYS WE ARE CLOSED GO

  AROUND THE BACK was nailed crookedly on the weathered clapboard.

  I personally had never set foot in Torchy’s. My aunts always spoke of it in voices laden with disapproval: Did you hear about Percy, Ray’s boy? He left Torchy’s staggering and the next thing we knew a report came over the police scanner that his car was down the bank with its front end in Bowman’s Creek. And do you remember Durlyn Rayce? He spent the whole weekend at Torchy’s and drank up his disability check. His poor wife didn’t even have money for milk for the children on Monday.

  Without any other kind of recreation available in Noxen—unless you count church suppers—Torchy’s had provided beer and a place to drink it for as far back as anyone could remember. Legendary throughout the region for downright seediness, Torchy’s was familiar and authentic, and so far had not been bulldozed and replaced by an Olive Garden restaurant or Outback Steakhouse.

  Those were my thoughts that morning before I pulled into the gravel-covered parking area behind the neatly kept, two-story B and B called Jade Meadow Farm. A brisk wind blew through withered cornstalks in the fields surrounding the house. A lone crow appeared as an inky silhouette against the azure sky. When I opened my car door, a flock of fifteen or twenty Rhode Island Reds came running over to greet me, clucking and crowding close to my feet when I got out. I guessed that the chickens were treated more like pets than farm animals. Three nanny goats stood up in their corral on the edge of the parking area and called out with their disturbingly humanlike cry of maaa maaaa maaa, vying for my attention.

  A slightly built Asian man opened the front door before I reached it. Dressed in jeans and a sweater, he greeted me with a respectful bow as I entered. Then he indicated where I could take off my shoes. “I am Ken Kato. This is my wife, Mihoko,” he said, turning toward a delicate, pretty woman who was coming toward me with small steps and a shy smile. I introduced myself, and we all walked into the great room beyond the entrance hall and sat upon cushions on the floor. Ken and Mihoko kept smiling and nodding at me expectantly.

  “Ah, hmmm.” I cleared my throat to break the ice. “My mother said you wanted to talk to me?”

  Both Ken and Mihoko nodded vigorously. “We would like to hire you,” Ken said. “As our lawyer.”

  “Why? I mean, why do you feel you need a lawyer?”

  “We told your mother about our hen. She said we should call you,” Ken replied, looking at me hopefully. “We have this for you.” He leaned over and put a pale blue rice-paper envelope in my hand. I opened it. Inside was a check made out to me for a hundred dollars. “It is a retainer. For your services,” Ken explained. “Okay?”

  “Yes, it’s fine, but I’m not sure what you are hiring me to do.”

  Mihoko turned her eyes away from me and I thought I saw tears on her lashes. “Our hen was attacked.”

  “My mother told me that. She said it was nearly struck by a pickup truck. I’m not sure why you need a lawyer, though,” I said.

  “I need to explain better, I think,” Ken began.

  In her light, high voice Mihoko broke in, her words coming fast. “Mishi wasn’t even in the road. She was on the lawn. The man in the truck swerved off the asphalt to run her down. We were working outside and saw it. If she hadn’t screeched and jumped into the air, he would have killed her deliberately. He left tire marks in the grass and he drove away very fast.”

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Last Saturday,” Ken answered.

  “Did you get a good look at the man? Can you describe him?”

  “Oh yes,” Mihoko said, clasping her hands so tightly together that her fingertips had turned pink. “We saw him most clearly. He had a cap on his head and wore a long beard.”

  “And a dog was riding in the passenger seat. We couldn’t see the dog very well, but we could hear him barking,” Ken added.

  I sighed. At least half the men in Noxen wore long beards, drove pickup trucks, and had dogs riding around with them. “What about the truck? What color was it? Do you know the make or model?”

  “It was brown and old,” Ken said.

  “And very noisy,” Mihoko added.

  “Was the back of the truck open or did it have a cap on it?”

  “It was open.”
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  “Did you get the license number?”

  “Oh, we wanted to. We thought of it right away, but the license plate was covered with mud. We couldn’t see the number. But we would know the truck because of the picture,” Ken said, brightening.

  “Picture?”

  “Yes. These were tombstones painted on it. They had writing on them, but I couldn’t see what they said. They were on the tailgate of the truck,” he added.

  “That should make the truck easy to find if it’s local. But what do you want me to do?”

  “We want to find the man,” Mihoko said, her voice so low I had to strain to hear her. “To talk to him. What he did was wrong, but maybe he doesn’t understand, you know. That animals have feelings too. They have souls. And we want to know why he tried to kill her.”

  I could only shake my head. These two were total innocents. They didn’t realize that hunting was the statewide pastime in Pennsylvania. People who worried about animals’ feelings were few and far between. I had no doubt the driver was drunk and trying to hit the hen on purpose—for the fun of killing it. But I didn’t say that. I said, “I understand your feelings, but I think the best we can do is to find the driver and ask him to pay to repair the damage to the lawn. That might more effectively deter him from hitting another animal than trying to appeal to his conscience, because he probably doesn’t have one. I’m not trying to discourage you, but I still don’t see why you need a lawyer.”

  “We do not explain well, I know.” Ken sighed and glanced down at his hands. He looked up at me then, his face earnest. “We do not want to sell our B and B. It is a beautiful house, a beautiful farm. Very good energy. We think trying to hit the hen was to scare us. To make us want to leave.”

  “Have there been other threats? If there have been, you should call the police, the state police,” I said sternly. Noxen was too small to have a police force of its own, and the staties handled crimes and complaints.

  A look passed between Mihoko and Ken as if one was warning the other to keep silent. Finally Ken said, “It is hard to say what is a threat and what isn’t a threat. It depends on what makes one feel afraid, you understand? Someone complained to the board of health about our inn. We got a notice that they will come for an inspection. It is second time. Last month, same thing. A chicken had wandered into the kitchen when he was there. The inspector threatened to close us down. Then we could not have our retreats. We would have no income. We think…we are afraid there will be more complaints. We want you to help us stop it. To find out who is doing this. To stop them. The negative energy, being afraid, it isn’t good for the spirit. You understand?”

  I said I did and asked Ken to let me take the notice from the health department with me. I didn’t know if the hen incident and the complaints to the health department were connected, but I could see that Ken and Mihoko thought they were. And I knew there was something they weren’t telling me. I retrieved my shoes and after we all bowed, I told them I’d be in touch with them soon. The flock of happy hens rushed over and accompanied me back to my car.

  As I drove toward home, I had to admit I was taking the attempted hen murder more seriously than I expected. In fact, I had the gut feeling that real trouble was headed Ken and Mihoko’s way unless I found out what was going on.

  Just then an elusive thought battered like a moth against a window in my mind. I couldn’t quite grasp it. I had seen a truck with tombstones painted on it, but I couldn’t remember where.

  When I arrived in “downtown” Noxen, which consists of a stop sign where the only two roads through town intersect, I pulled into the Pump ’n’ Pantry, the twenty-four-hour gas station/convenience store next to the Lutheran church’s social hall. When I went in, I brushed by one of the Dallas police officers walking out with a coffee. He nodded and smiled.

  Peggy Sue Osterhaupt sat behind the counter watching soap operas on a portable television. Her long, colorless hair hung down lankly, and her face was haggard with fatigue or troubles. Although she wasn’t much older than I was, Peggy Sue, a second cousin once removed, seemed to be falling fast without a parachute into middle age. She also didn’t have any upper teeth. I never asked what happened to them or why she didn’t get implants or wear false teeth. It was none of my business and I figured she’d tell me if she wanted me to know.

  “Hey, Peggy Sue,” I said while I grabbed a local paper from a rack and brought it to the register.

  “Hiya, Ravine,” she answered. “Cold out today?”

  “Not too bad,” I said as we began the ritualized weather conversation everybody in town holds to be polite. “At least it’s not snowing.”

  “Vince on Channel 28 says we got a monster storm coming in this weekend. Din’t ya hear? Better get your bread and milk, Ravine. We’ll be all sold out by tomorrey.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I answered and grabbed some two-percent milk from the cooler and a loaf of white bread from the shelves. I brought them up to the register, and while she rang up my items, I asked, “Peggy Sue, who-all around here has a brown pickup with tombstones painted on the tailgate?”

  “Shoot, Ravine, everybody knows who that is. Your total is four seventy-nine,” she said as she put my things in a plastic bag.

  I pulled out a five and handed it to her, keeping my voice light as I responded, “I guess I’m not everybody, Peggy Sue, ’cause I don’t know. Who is it?”

  “It’s Scabby Hoyt, a-course.”

  My hand raking in my change froze. Scabby Hoyt. That wasn’t good news at all.

  Chapter 5

  The best word to describe Alvin, aka “Scabby,” Hoyt was mean. Scrawny of build, his face pockmarked from adolescent acne and a rampant case of childhood impetigo, Scabby was a binge drinker and a schemer. He was the kind of guy who sat on his front porch with a .22 rifle on his lap hoping a neighbor’s dog would wander onto his property so he had an excuse to shoot it. Worse, Scabby had a running feud with the Pattons. It started decades ago when his grandfather Perry Traver had a falling-out with my grandfather Tom Patton, and although they lived within a stone’s throw of each other, they never exchanged a word for forty years.

  When the cow incident occurred last year, Scabby’s inherited dislike of my extended family blossomed into open hostility.

  As I had heard it told—several times—the cow incident went something like this. Last summer, Scabby had planted half his fields in sweet corn and the other half in field corn. Come August, his sweet corn started disappearing before he could pick it. He blamed the missing corn on my Aunt Milldred’s cows. He swaggered onto her front porch “a-yelling,” as they’d say in these parts, threatening that if he ever caught her cows in his field, he’d shoot them.

  Aunt Mill came flying out of her front door with a broom in her hand and whacked him with it four or five times while she told him to get the hell off her porch. In their younger days the Patton girls—there were eight of them in my father’s immediate family—had a reputation of being able to “hit like mules,” meaning they could use their fists as hard as a mule could kick. Faced with a superior fighting force, Scabby hightailed it out of there. Aunt Mill knew—and so did everybody but Scabby—that his own nephews were stealing the corn after the sun went down and selling it the next day, but Pattons didn’t tattle.

  A few weeks later, one Saturday around dinnertime, Scabby was driving home from an afternoon of beer drinking at Torchy’s when he saw that a herd of cows had broken through a pasture fence. The sweet Jersey cows with their big brown eyes stood placidly in the road in front of my Aunt Mill’s farmhouse. Being a mean man, Scabby decided to get his revenge on “those goshdarn cows.” He pressed the accelerator to the floor and was going to ram his pickup right into the herd.

  Fortunately for the cows, the truck fishtailed, Scabby lost control, and he missed every single cow as he ran off the asphalt road onto the berm. What he did hit was a whole row of roadside mailboxes—about twelve of them altogether, which included his own.

  By nig
htfall, the whole town was laughing and talking about Scabby trying to ram the cows, not because he missed them but because they were actually Scabby’s own cows that had gotten out, not Aunt Mill’s! Not only did Scabby have to cough up some big bucks to pay for the mailboxes and his DUI citation, but he was also the object of ridicule for weeks. He couldn’t step foot out of his pickup without somebody yelling, “Hey Scabby, kill any mailboxes today?” Or, “Hey Scabby, you want me to turn your cows loose so you can play demolition derby?”

  Scabby’s pockmarked face got redder and redder as the anger built up inside him. He started frequenting the Dew Drop Inn over at Harveys Lake and stayed away from Torchy’s for a few weeks until the talk died down. He blamed Aunt Mill and everybody related to her for his own stupidity. I had no doubt Scabby Hoyt would have wanted to run down the Buddhists’ hen just for fun, but he was also somebody who’d do anything for a fast dollar. I figured it was time to go talk to him, and I didn’t look forward to the encounter.

  Having made up my mind to pay Scabby a visit, a plan formed in my mind. Instead of going straight home, I drove out to the Wal-Mart in the nearby town of Tunkhannock and bought a few things.

  The big digital clock in front of the bank at Bowman’s Creek was flashing 12:00 before I got back to Noxen. When I walked into the kitchen, a wave of warmth greeted me. My mother had started a fire in the old coal stove that sits in the corner and was finishing giving Brady his lunch. I picked my son up in my arms, gave him a kiss and a hug, and asked him if he had missed me. Being a wriggle worm, he was squirming and wanting to get down, so I put him into his ExerSaucer, the new play station that he loves. That got me a big smile. He’d be ready for a nap soon, but meanwhile he was occupied and happy.

  I thanked my mother for babysitting and much to her disappointment, I’m sure, I didn’t tell her anything except that I had met with the Katos and would try to help them out. Fortunately, considering what I had in mind to do, she said she had a lunch date and quickly gathered up her things.