Read Online A Curious Affair by Melanie Jackson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Melanie Jackson
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businesses and having someone give the city the land. But the battle over whether to close the county hospital had raged for a decade. It was the spendthrift Hattfields versus the heartless McCoys, and those attending the public meetings semi-joked about sending for the National Guard to keep the peace every time it came up on the agenda. People were actually searched at the door for weapons.
Admittedly, the hospital was a money pit, a black hole in the bud get, a blot on the council family fiscalescutcheon. But, Cal argued, until there was universal health care for everyone in the county, the indigent needed somewhere to go other than the new for-profit hospital that, for a case of pneumonia or a broken leg, charged the uninsured roughly their entire yearly incomes. Cal had wrestled with this problem for months and tried for compromise and creative funding. But when push had finally come to shove and they had to vote yea or nay, he’d finally come down on the side of compassion rather than profit. Nolan didn’t agree, and set about once again blackening his name. This time he was more successful and the hospital closed. Cal was feeling truly ill by then and gave in without a great fight. He forgave Nolan. I didn’t. Cal got his treatments at the new hospital that had lots of high-tech and very little care.
It was because of this past that I kept my eyes turned away as I passed on the other side of the street. It meant bypassing the French bakery, but I had a bad feeling that if word got back to Nolan that I was insisting the town drug dealer was murdered—and maybe even got the story in the paper—that I would move to the top of his unpopular list. Of course, he’d probably find out what I thought eventually, one way or another. His brother-in-law ran a company called Good Riddance C.S. Clean Up and Septic. The tourists thought the black-and-red van parked outside the gaudy pink tin-roofed Victorian at the corner of Polk and Jackson cleaned out clogged sump pumps and the like—and Hinkley did do that, if the pump happened to be clogged with body parts. The C.S. in Good Riddance stood for crime scene . Hinkley was the man you called if Uncle Toby emptied a shotgun into his head and got his brain matter all over your authentic nineteenth-century paneling and fine Persian rugs. Or if you wanted to get a bloodstain from a triple homicide out of the roughwood flooring in a cabin. And if you didn’t call him, he would call you. He was worse than an ambulance chaser. Whoever inherited Irv’s cabin would need Hinkley’s kind of help—along with a lot of contractors to get it up to code—unless Tyler was right and the city just tore it down.
Not that I was afraid of Nolan, exactly. But I was cautious. I still had to be careful around him. Anger came at odd moments and the words or rage would rush out of my mouth, hurling themselves at people—like Nolan, who hadn’t visited Cal even once when he was dying—in a most unattractive form of emotional projectile vomiting. It made me seem, well…crazy. And I wouldn’t put it past Nolan to try and have me committed if I made him angry enough. He probably wouldn’t succeed, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory if I bankrupted myself fighting this battle.
I was walking quickly but, prompted by my stomach, I paused to read the daily slate of fare on the sidewalk outside Blend It. They were offering a Sunrise smoothie (mixed citrus), Old Faithful (lemon ice), and a Prune Typhoon that I heard from previous victims could cause an actually tsunami of the bowels. Shuddering, I backed away until I reached the door of Den of Thebes, our import shop that stocks some very questionable treasures from the Middle and Far East.
Something nudged me from behind, impeding my flight from the home of blended frozen fruit. I turned, already knowing who and what it was that had me hemmed in. There was only one person in town who regularly rear-ended me.
“Hi, Pinky. Nice flowers,” I added,
Admittedly, the hospital was a money pit, a black hole in the bud get, a blot on the council family fiscalescutcheon. But, Cal argued, until there was universal health care for everyone in the county, the indigent needed somewhere to go other than the new for-profit hospital that, for a case of pneumonia or a broken leg, charged the uninsured roughly their entire yearly incomes. Cal had wrestled with this problem for months and tried for compromise and creative funding. But when push had finally come to shove and they had to vote yea or nay, he’d finally come down on the side of compassion rather than profit. Nolan didn’t agree, and set about once again blackening his name. This time he was more successful and the hospital closed. Cal was feeling truly ill by then and gave in without a great fight. He forgave Nolan. I didn’t. Cal got his treatments at the new hospital that had lots of high-tech and very little care.
It was because of this past that I kept my eyes turned away as I passed on the other side of the street. It meant bypassing the French bakery, but I had a bad feeling that if word got back to Nolan that I was insisting the town drug dealer was murdered—and maybe even got the story in the paper—that I would move to the top of his unpopular list. Of course, he’d probably find out what I thought eventually, one way or another. His brother-in-law ran a company called Good Riddance C.S. Clean Up and Septic. The tourists thought the black-and-red van parked outside the gaudy pink tin-roofed Victorian at the corner of Polk and Jackson cleaned out clogged sump pumps and the like—and Hinkley did do that, if the pump happened to be clogged with body parts. The C.S. in Good Riddance stood for crime scene . Hinkley was the man you called if Uncle Toby emptied a shotgun into his head and got his brain matter all over your authentic nineteenth-century paneling and fine Persian rugs. Or if you wanted to get a bloodstain from a triple homicide out of the roughwood flooring in a cabin. And if you didn’t call him, he would call you. He was worse than an ambulance chaser. Whoever inherited Irv’s cabin would need Hinkley’s kind of help—along with a lot of contractors to get it up to code—unless Tyler was right and the city just tore it down.
Not that I was afraid of Nolan, exactly. But I was cautious. I still had to be careful around him. Anger came at odd moments and the words or rage would rush out of my mouth, hurling themselves at people—like Nolan, who hadn’t visited Cal even once when he was dying—in a most unattractive form of emotional projectile vomiting. It made me seem, well…crazy. And I wouldn’t put it past Nolan to try and have me committed if I made him angry enough. He probably wouldn’t succeed, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory if I bankrupted myself fighting this battle.
I was walking quickly but, prompted by my stomach, I paused to read the daily slate of fare on the sidewalk outside Blend It. They were offering a Sunrise smoothie (mixed citrus), Old Faithful (lemon ice), and a Prune Typhoon that I heard from previous victims could cause an actually tsunami of the bowels. Shuddering, I backed away until I reached the door of Den of Thebes, our import shop that stocks some very questionable treasures from the Middle and Far East.
Something nudged me from behind, impeding my flight from the home of blended frozen fruit. I turned, already knowing who and what it was that had me hemmed in. There was only one person in town who regularly rear-ended me.
“Hi, Pinky. Nice flowers,” I added,
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