Chapter 25

Saturday Mid-morning …

D oreen gathered her animals, getting ready to go to Nan’s place, when Mack phoned her. “Hey,” she greeted him. “I guess you had a fine morning, with Nan on the rampage.”

“ Not ,” he snapped. “After failing to talk anybody into releasing him, your grandmother posted bail for the guy.”

“I know. She just told me. I’m about to head to Rosemoor to see her. Apparently she’s invited him for tea.”

“You’re what?”

“I know. I know, and you don’t want me to go see him, I’m sure.”

“No, I don’t,” he roared. Then he sighed. “Absolutely no point in trying to talk you out of it either, is there? You or Nan.”

She winced. “We won’t get into trouble.”

“Yes, you will.”

She groaned. “No, we’re not trouble. We’re just more complicated. But you like complicated, right?”

He growled now. “Apparently, though I must need my head examined. I can’t believe you’re willfully going down to see this guy.”

“I wanted to confirm that Nan was okay because I don’t trust Jethro. However, she wants me to meet him under different circumstances , so I know that he’s okay.… I guess that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

“No, it doesn’t. None of this makes any sense at all,” he snapped. “At least call me when you’re down there and let me know that everything is okay. And please stay in touch. I don’t want another scenario like yesterday.”

“If he kidnaps Nan again, you can lock him up and throw away the key.”

“ Great . That’s like shutting the door after you let the horses out of the barn.” With a loud sigh, he disconnected.

She stepped into her backyard with her animals, still considering the madam living nearby. Would she entertain clients there? Yet why not? She lived there. “It makes sense. Why would you pay for a hotel or another location?” she asked herself, as she walked to the creek.

Maybe Richard knew something. She stopped at the corner of Richard’s fence and called out to him. “Richard, are you there?” She looked around the side just in time to see Richard’s head pop out over on her side of the garden. She called to him and walked up closer. “Hey, do you know anything about your neighbors down there?”

He frowned at her. “Which neighbors?”

She sighed. “Yeah, that would help, wouldn’t it?” She just nodded and muttered to herself, “It sure would.”

“What’s going on with you?” Richard frowned.

“You missed all the excitement yesterday.” She quickly filled him in, and he sighed, shaking his head.

“Yeah, Jethro lost his wife a few years back. I heard at one point he was pursuing some other woman rather heavily.”

“Yeah, apparently that may have been my grandmother.”

He stared at her and then laughed. “Wouldn’t that be justice?”

“What would be so just about it?” she asked.

He smirked. “Everything has a way of coming back to you, it seems.”

“Hey, not on purpose though. It’s not my fault.”

He glared at her. “To hear you tell it, you’re not at fault, and you don’t have anything to do with other people’s lives… ever.”

“That’s not fair,” she said. “Up until now, everything had been independent of Nan’s personal life.”

He shrugged at that. “I’m not sure you can really say that,” he pointed out.

“Whatever. But regardless, is Jethro dangerous or not?”

At that, Richard immediately shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t say so. He’s pretty harmless. He’s just been very lonely. However, this sounds a little over-the-top, even for him.” Richard shrugged. “But maybe not. I’ve noticed a bit more noise from down there myself, but I just ignored it. After all, living next to you has made me immune to crazy happenings at all hours.”

“I haven’t heard anything at all,” she muttered as she looked down in the direction of those homes. She talked to Richard a little bit more, not learning anything else of value, so she waved off. She immediately picked up her pace and headed down the greenway. The animals got into the spirit of things again and raced down to Nan’s.

As Doreen got closer to the potential madam’s home again, she wondered at a lifestyle like that. It wasn’t for Doreen, but if Julie had found some sense of control in it, who was Doreen to argue? It wasn’t legal in Canada, but there were definitely lots of places in the world where it was. She wondered at the woman’s decision to continue working, always on the wrong side of the law, where you had to look over your shoulder all the time. That couldn’t be terribly comfortable for anyone. Most people didn’t see the law as being anything to worry about, but, as Doreen had discovered, an awful lot of people were looking over their shoulders on a constant basis.

She had never tried to make law enforcement look foolish, and she’d certainly done her best to give them the credit when she could, but it had also been an eye-opener to understand just how much crime happened in Kelowna, and how little of it law enforcement could stay on top of.

The first problem was the lack of manpower. The second problem was just the lack of time available to properly handle each and every case. She also knew from Mack just how frustrating that was for the department as well.

She felt sorry for them sometimes because they did so much. Then, out of the blue, something else went wrong, and somebody had to work late, even after they’d already worked all day. She had thought maybe she could become a cop or a detective, but now she knew better. From time to time she even considered becoming a lawyer, but she wasn’t really up for that either. She sighed.

“Honestly, Doreen, it sounds as if you’re just lazy,” she mumbled to herself. And yet that wasn’t right either because she wasn’t lazy, though she did have to be motivated. So whatever her goal, it had to be big enough that it really mattered, and, in her life, solving these crimes really mattered to her. The fact that she appeared to be decent at it was just an added bonus.

Mack had mentioned a couple times that the way she thought and processed information was unique. While she wasn’t sure about that, so far it had worked out to everybody’s advantage, so she was good with it. Besides, it was nice—after years of feeling completely ineffective and useless—to realize she had some redeeming value and something to offer society. Not conventional in any way, shape, or form, yet, for all the families she had helped, surely she would get a pass for some of the things she’d done wrong. And, if she got a pass, maybe others, like Jethro, should get a pass too. She groaned at that.

“Fine,” she muttered, as she approached Nan’s home at Rosemoor. “Maybe he’ll get a pass, but I’m not so ready to say that yet.”

As she walked over to the patio, her normal spot had already been taken by Jethro, and Nan?… Darned if she wasn’t primping in front of him. Doreen sighed as she walked up. When she caught Nan’s eye, her grandmother immediately bounced to her feet and beamed at her.

“You did come,” she exclaimed. “When you took so long, I was afraid you’d changed your mind.”

Doreen shrugged. “It’s not that I changed my mind, more that I was waylaid on the way.” Nan looked at her with an inquisitive expression, but Doreen just shook her head. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Oh good,” Nan said, “we have enough things to worry about.”

Doreen gave an eye roll at that. “Yeah, ya think ?” Then she turned and gave Jethro a good frown.

He stood up and stumbled, almost falling over, yet trying to recover. He reached out with a hand to shake hers, even though she hadn’t offered her own. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

She glared at him. “Thank me for what? I still want to give you a swift kick for what you did to Nan. You kidnapped the only family I had, and you pointed a gun at her. Do you know how freaked out I was for all that time? Plus my animals were missing too.”

Jethro looked at her, then at Nan and shrugged. “She knew I would never hurt her.”

“Maybe. Did she know your gun was fake? I don’t think so. Not for a long time. I sure didn’t. I didn’t know that at all.”

At that, understanding crossed his face. “You were worried about her, weren’t you?”

“Of course I was worried about her. Nan is very special to me. I don’t like it when people come in and take her, even with fake guns. You say you weren’t planning on hurting her, but I had no way of knowing that. I don’t even know you.”

“No, of course not,” he agreed, then grinned bashfully. “She’s always been a real good friend of mine.”

“If that were truly the case, you wouldn’t have done what you did.”

He shrugged, sat down again, and nodded. “That was yesterday, and, at our age, yesterday is over, and we’re already onto the next thing.”

“Is that because you lost your memory already or because you figured out that life is too short, and you want to move on and try something new?”

“Both,” he replied, looking at her with a nod of understanding. “I see that you do understand.”

“It doesn’t make me very happy, but I do understand.”

Nan burst out laughing at that. “Doreen is very, very good,” she declared, patting Jethro’s hand. “She’ll solve your problem, so don’t you worry too much.”

Doreen glared at Nan. “Maybe I’ll solve his problem, and maybe not.”

Nan just waved her hand, as if to completely dismiss Doreen’s concerns. But the conversation was so completely normal for the two of them that Doreen was dragged into a weird sense of normalcy very quickly. Finally she sighed, sipped her tea, and said, “If you want me to solve this, you need to tell me more.”

At that, Nan crowed. “See? I told you, Jethro.”

Doreen glared at her grandmother again. “ No promises .”

Jethro looked at her with so much gratitude that it felt as if she’d been kicking a puppy up until now. She sighed heavily. “What noises have you heard? What time of night does this happen, and have you actually seen anything?”

He shook his head. “I’m not the kind to stand out there and watch,” he noted stiffly.

She nodded. “That’s too bad because, if we had some idea of what she was doing, maybe we would have a way to stop whatever it is that’s bothering you. Because just being noisy won’t be nearly enough to make that happen.”

He frowned at her, and she frowned right back. After a moment, he sighed. “Your grandmother already said as much to me.”

“Good, I’m glad to hear that she’s trying to talk some sense into you,” she muttered. She looked from Nan and back to him again. “Just because whoever lives in that house now is causing some noise—and the neighborhood has gone to the dogs or whatever, as far as you’re concerned—it doesn’t mean that it comes to a stop just because you say so.”

He nodded. “I get that. I really do, but the noises I’m hearing are not the same.”

“Then you need to tell me about them.”

He hesitated. “Muffled voices, banging, and sounds of people grunting, as if they’re moving heavy items.”

She nodded. “What else?”

“Phones ringing, like all night long.”

“But the creek is a pathway,” she pointed out, “so people could be walking back and forth, using it as a way to get wherever they want to go.”

He stared at her. “But, as you well know, there aren’t a whole lot of places to go along my stretch of the creek. Just houses, not businesses.”

“That’s true,” she muttered. “I walk along the creek all the time, but I can’t say I’ve seen or heard any of that commotion. However, I am walking in the daytime.”

“The disturbances are relatively new,” Jethro added.

“Like in the last what? Day? Week? Month? Year?”

He thought about it for a moment. “The last month maybe? It just started to get really bad recently.”

“That time line certainly fits with the woman moving in about a month ago, but it doesn’t mean that this woman had anything to do with the traffic or the noises or that she was doing anything wrong.”

As Doreen started to realize, just by being close to Mack, people could do all kinds of things that others didn’t like, yet were still legal. They weren’t in trouble over it at all just because someone didn’t like it. That didn’t give them the right to try to put a stop to freedoms that we all had. Complaining was one thing, but actively doing something constructive to change the scenario and in such a way that was illegal was a whole different story. Like drawing a gun on Nan.

As Doreen sat here sipping her tea, she thought about anything else she might ask. “Have you ever seen her?”

“No.… That’s another thing I thought was weird. Is she hiding on purpose?”

“What about at the front of the house?”

He shrugged. “It’s not really my street.”

At that, she studied him, then realization dawned. “Right, it’s another cul-de-sac, like on my street. You’re just farther down. So I get that your view out the front isn’t the same as hers would be,” she muttered. As she sat here, quiet once again, the others just let her stew away in her own thoughts for a few minutes.

Finally Nan asked her, “What’s the verdict?”

She glared at her. “The verdict is that the whole thing is ridiculous.”

Nan laughed at her. “Doesn’t mean that something isn’t there.”

“Sure, probably something is there, but solving this one isn’t quite so simple.”

“Why not?” Nan asked.

“Because, so far, we don’t know that Julie is doing anything wrong. You may like to dance all night long, but just because somebody else doesn’t like it, doesn’t mean that you have to stop dancing or that it is illegal.”

“Of course not.” Nan stared at her in astonishment. “Why would anybody not want me dancing?”

“It’s not about the dancing.… That’s the point,” Doreen reminded her. “It’s the fact that other people may be offended by it. We don’t know for sure that this Julie woman is doing anything wrong—or that she’s the one making all the noises and encouraging all the nighttime foot traffic on the creek either. Plus, just because Jethro doesn’t like what she’s doing or what whoever is doing, that isn’t enough justification for us to step up and try to stop it.”

Jethro looked at her and nodded slowly. “That’s fine, and I understand your point, but maybe she could stop all the late-night comings and goings and maybe keep the noise level down a bit.”

“That’s the interesting part,” Doreen murmured. “That’s the part I want to know more about.”

He looked at her hopefully. “Does that mean you’ll take the case?”

She frowned at him. “I’m not really in any legitimate position to be taking on cases anyway,” she explained.

He shrugged. “Nan says you can.”

“Of course she does,” Doreen grumbled with a sigh, looking over at her grandmother with affection. “Nan thinks I can move the stars and the moon sometimes.”

“You can,” Nan declared. “You’re the only person I know who has made as much happen in this town as you have.”

Doreen smiled. “That may well be, but that still doesn’t mean that all of this will work out the way you want it to,” she reminded her.

Nan had the grace to back off slightly and admitted, “That’s true. We don’t always get everything we want, do we?”

“No, we sure don’t.” Doreen faced Jethro. “However, if you haven’t seen any of the goings-on, and you can’t identify any of the people or the reason for the noise, and you haven’t seen the Julie person in question, what is it you expect me to do?”

He looked as if she had just brought up something he hadn’t even considered. He let out a slow, heavy breath. “I guess that does make it a little harder, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely it does,” she agreed, with a nod. “It doesn’t make it impossible, but we do need more information in order to figure out what’s really going on.” Reaching for her phone, she tapped on it for a moment. “Now, Jethro, do you recognize these people at all? Have you ever seen them nearby?” She held up her phone with a couple of the photos she had gotten of Jed and Tammy. “Have you seen either of these people?” Then she brought up one of Frankie.

Jethro stared at them all and slowly shook his head. “Do you think they’re connected?” he asked evenly.

“I’m not sure about that,” she shared, “but it is something that I needed to ask.” She stared at the photo of Frankie for a long moment. “I’m particularly wondering about this one.”

He looked at it again and shrugged. “I mean, it’s possible, and I can’t say that I’ve never seen him, but I’m not getting an Oh yeah, I know that guy feeling.”

“Right, and that is important.”

Nan also looked at the photos and shrugged. “They’re not the greatest photos either, child.”

“Of course not,” Doreen conceded. “It’s not easy to get clear shots sometimes, especially on the sly.” She studied the photos and then put away her phone. “I just wondered if they were connected to Julie somehow.”

“Oh, it’s quite possible, I’m sure,” Jethro noted. “Somebody is coming and going at all hours. She hasn’t been there all that long either. Just enough to cause chaos,” he muttered.

“This neighbor’s house, who actually owns it?”

“That’s the Griffins,” he replied. “They live in a senior facility not far from where their son is. They’re getting on in years now, so I imagine they’ll probably sell it soon.”

“So, they just rented it out then?”

“I’m not sure that they’ve got anything to do with it anymore. It’s quite possible that the son was taking care of all of that for them.”

“So, he would have been working in a property manager role for them then?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t really know.”

“Do you happen to know his name?” She pulled out her phone and tapped in the name, so she wouldn’t forget. “Okay, now at least I have a name to start with.”

“Oh good,” Jethro said in delight. He looked over at Nan, then rubbed his hands together and added, “Maybe we can get this solved after all.”

Doreen sighed. “Don’t count on it.” As she looked for her animals, she found Goliath in his usual place in the flower bed, but she saw no sign of Mugs. She hesitated, looking around. “Nan, did you see where Mugs went?”

Nan pointed underneath her chair. Sure enough, Mugs was sound asleep below her.

Doreen groaned. “These animals,” she muttered. “This is like their second home.” And of course it was, just like it was hers.