Karen MacInerney - Margie Peterson 01 - Mother's Day Out Read online

  “No,” I said, trying not to wrinkle my nose at the smell. The place screamed for Lysol. “I’m here to apply for the job.”

  She cast an eye over my navy blue suit, which was secretly safety-pinned in the back, and snorted. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No.” I swallowed and straightened my spine, glancing at the yellowed stacks of paper strewn around the office. A few dead doodlebugs littered the dirty gray carpet. Whatever Peaches was, she wasn’t a tidy housekeeper. If she was hiring for a filing position, the pay had better be impressive. “What exactly is the job?”

  “Sweetheart, this isn’t the type of work you’re looking for.” She leaned forward over the scarred desk, giving me a view of her breasts, which nestled together like cantaloupes in her stretchy red top. Peaches looked to be on the far side of forty, but she hadn’t stopped shopping in the Juniors department.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m looking for an investigator. This isn’t an office gig.”

  An investigator? It was better than a maid, but I’d never pictured myself as an investigator. I couldn’t even find my car keys, much less track things down for other people. I was about to say No thank you when something stopped me. What the heck? At least it didn’t require washing dishes. I could at least try it out. “Sounds interesting,” I said, pulling my resume from the leather portfolio I had dug out of the back of my closet and putting on my best professional look. “I don’t have any direct experience, but I’m a fast learner.”

  She ran an eye over the cream-colored paper and raised a penciled eyebrow. “Marigold Peterson. You’re named after a flower?”

  At least I wasn’t named after a fruit. “My friends call me Margie.”

  She cocked a penciled eyebrow in disbelief. “Contributor to the Green Meadows Day School Newsletter?”

  “It could be considered investigative reporting.”

  “Yeah, right. Big, in-depth articles on potty-training.” She scanned it again. “Account Executive for BDS&M?” She pushed my resume toward me. “Honey, the kind of research we do isn’t like writing a fancy-schmancy press release, or tracking down the best chocolate cake recipe. We do some pretty ugly work here. I need someone with grit.”

  Ugly work? I’d seen diapers that would make a biker gang blanch. Grit? I’d survived staying home with my children for five years, hadn’t I?

  The look of disdain on Peaches’ face sparked something in me. What was with people these days? They thought that just because a woman had kids and stayed home, the only excitement in her life should come from attending driveway-stenciling classes at the local library. Even Blake had changed since I had Elsie. We used to have conversations about politics, ethics, the state of the world. Now we talked about the state of his sock drawer.

  I took a deep breath. Just because I’d spent the last five years of my life dealing with diapers and dirty dishes didn’t mean my brain had turned into Gerber’s Fruit’n’Oatmeal.

  The safety pin on the back of my skirt strained as I leaned forward. “I know I can do it,” I said. “Please let me give it a shot.”

  Peaches leaned back and adjusted her cleavage. “Honey, why do you want to? This is nasty stuff. These people aren’t exactly nursery school teachers, you know. Some of them are downright dangerous.” The look of disdain faded, replaced by something like pity. “You look like a nice lady, you’re not hurting for money. Why don’t you stick to something safe, like the PTA?”

  This lady clearly hadn’t met the parents at Green Meadows Day School. Give me a gang of delinquents over a group of frustrated MBA mothers with their hearts set on Harvard for their offspring any day.

  Margie Peterson, Private Investigator.

  It had a ring to it.

  I pushed the resume back toward Peaches and looked her in the eye. “Give me one case. If I get it right, you pay me. If I don’t, my time is free.”

  She held my stare for a minute, then sighed and reached behind her for a battered manila folder. She shoved it across the desk. “All right. Since no one else has turned up, I’ll give you one chance. Infidelity case. Plumbing salesman. If you don’t get the proof, you don’t get the money. And I still think you’re in over your head.” My fingers tingled with anticipation as I grabbed the folder. Peaches pulled a packet of Ultra Slims from her top drawer. “Christ,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

  I straightened my shoulders. “What do I need to do?”

  She flicked her lighter, and an orange flame leapt up. “Follow him and get a picture of him doing something he shouldn’t be doing.”

  “Is there any training?”

  “Can you drive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a camera?”

  “Yes.”

  She took a deep drag from her Ultra Slim and whirled around in her chair. “Consider yourself trained.”

  TWO

  That had been just over a week ago. Today, as I rolled into Green Meadows Day School twenty minutes late, I was feeling a little less excited about the whole P.I. thing. Sure, I’d gotten the shot. At least I thought I had. But now I was short one fry phone and had probably made myself a prime target for Attila the Bunn.

  My suspicions were confirmed the moment I opened the office door and met the disapproving gaze of the headmistress. Except for the absence of green skin, she was a dead ringer for the Wicked Witch of the West in her later, plumper years.

  The kids rushed toward me, and I knelt to hug them, burying my nose in Nick’s hair and breathing in his puppy-dog-apple-juice-Watermelon-Blast-Shampoo smell. Elsie was wearing the yellow skirt and purple sparkly top she had chosen that morning, but Nick’s fire truck shorts had been replaced by a pink skirt decorated with overblown cabbage roses. I gave the kids a squeeze and stood up, my hand resting on Elsie’s black curly head. Mrs. Bunn tapped a pointy-shoed toe and narrowed her eyes at me.

  “You’re late.”

  I put on my best concerned-parent look. “I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  She handed me the missive of the day—there were always missives of the day at Green Meadows Day School—with all the pomp and circumstance of the Pope delivering the latest Bull. Then her steely eyes focused on Nick, whose chubby toddler body was wrapped around my leg. “Nick had another accident. There were no spare clothes in his cubby, so we had to put him in Elsie’s.” That explained the skirt.

  “Well, I’ve always tried to have a gender-neutral household.”

  She harrumphed, sending a jiggle through her jowls. “I’d like to have a meeting with you, Mrs. Peterson, to discuss some issues regarding parental involvement at the school and proper nutrition for the children. There’s also a behavior issue I’d like to address…” She cocked a bushy eyebrow at Elsie.

  I’d been through the nutrition lecture before, and was more than familiar with the litany of my sins. Using Jif peanut butter instead of the natural and unsweetened variety, white bread instead of whole wheat…

  But a behavior issue? I looked down at Elsie’s black curls and decided it was probably something minor. After all, Mrs. Bunn considered failing to put a napkin on your lap at snack time to be a major lapse of decorum.

  “We need to talk, Mrs. Peterson.”

  My mind cast about for a redeeming topic, something that would reinforce my commitment to Green Meadows Day School and get me out of the office. Should I offer to trim the hedges? Scrub the floors with a toothbrush later in the week? Then I remembered the newsletter. “I’d love to talk about it—I’ll call you, maybe we can set something up for next Monday—but I’m on my way to upload the pictures from the class picnic. I need to have them ready for the school newsletter tomorrow.”

  Her gaze slackened a bit, and I took the opportunity to whisk the kids through the door. “Thanks so much, Mrs. Bunn. See you tomorrow!”

  #

  I pulled into our cracked driveway ten minutes later and made a mental note to ask Blake to cut the grass. Our ne
ighbor’s lawns looked like golf course greens; ours resembled something you’d see on a National Geographic special on the Wilds of the Serengeti.

  I kicked over a dandelion that was almost as tall as I was and opened the van doors for the kids. The state of the yard was a little surprising, actually. Faucets might drip for months before Blake got around to fixing them, but he generally worked to keep the outside of the house, a stone cottage built in the late 1920s, looking good. My husband had inherited his mother’s Martha Stewart-ish obsession. I, on the other hand, was a little more laissez-faire in the domestic department. Needless to say, our first years together had been an adjustment. With time, though, I managed to come to terms with my husband’s quirks, figuring that if color-coded towel organization strategies were all I had to complain about, I was a lucky woman.

  As the kids tumbled from the Caravan and tripped up the front walk to the house, my eyes swept the flowerbeds—my one domestic pet project—with satisfaction. The Mexican Bush Sage had exploded into bloom at the end of the driveway, and a drift of pink and purple impatiens bloomed beside the wood ferns. If the grass were shorter, it would even be visible from the street.

  The house itself was one of those properties listed as “having great potential.” In fact, that was how the agent had sold it to us seven years ago. We’d spent the first six months drawing up plans for major renovations and expansion. Then I’d gotten pregnant with Elsie and quit my job at the advertising agency to stay home, and the grand plans had been downsized to a fresh paint job on the trim. A paint job that needed to be done again, I thought as I unlocked the door; the door’s original lime green was threatening to overtake the brick red we had covered it with. I shook my head. I was sure we’d hear about it from his mother soon.

  Still, I thought as I closed the door behind me and dumped my keys next to a stack of unopened mail, it could be worse. I was happy here. More importantly, so were the kids. My own childhood had taken place in a series of rundown apartments, and although having a swimming pool on the grounds had been fun for the first few years, the novelty had worn off. My mother had done the best she could—after my father left us for another woman just after my third birthday, she supported us by taking a series of jobs as an apartment manager—but I had spent my school years burning with jealousy of my friends’ houses, which all seemed to be in real neighborhoods and featured both a mom and a dad. Cheery maternal comments, such as “You are so lucky. Most kids have their own back yards, not a community play area!” just didn’t cut it.

  I looked at our tiny kitchen with its ancient white stove and slightly rust-stained sink with affection. Rufus, our Siamese pound kitty, rubbed himself against my legs, and I reached down to scratch his ears. So what if our house would never be picked as the cover feature of Town and Country? So what if Nick occasionally wet his pants waiting for Elsie to vacate the house’s one bathroom? At least it was ours.

  The answering machine was blinking furiously. I hit play, and my mother’s voice burbled out of the machine. “Hi, Marigold, I was just calling to see if you’d tried that St. John’s Wort tea I sent you.” I rolled my eyes. Most people had outgrown the hippie movement in the sixties, but my mother had never gotten over it. Last month it was yoga. Now she was dating an herbalist named Karma, and I had started receiving packets of strange-looking green stuff in the mail. “Give me a call when you get a chance, and give my sweethearts a hug!”

  I hit delete. I’d call her back after I’d gotten the kids to bed and had a glass of wine. Maybe two. Then Elsie came up behind me and hugged my leg. “I’m hungry, Mommy.”

  “You guys ready for a snack?” I asked.

  “Cupcakes!” Nick declared.

  “How about Oreos?” Elsie suggested.

  “How about cheese sticks and apple slices?” After my run-in with Attila, I felt the need to be virtuous.

  They groaned, but two minutes later they were at the kitchen table, squabbling over whose apple slices were bigger.

  As the kids bickered, I pulled a package of chicken breasts out of the refrigerator and thought about this morning’s job. All in all, I decided, it had gone okay. Sure, I’d lost the fry phone, but I had something to show to Peaches. At least I hoped I did; I wouldn’t get the film back till later that afternoon. I put aside thoughts of my daughter’s screams when she discovered the fry phone was gone and allowed myself a moment of satisfaction. It was nice to take on a task other than the laundry and get it done.

  The kids finished their apple slices and wandered into the living room, leaving the table littered with bits of red peel. Two seconds later the sound of four thousand Legos hitting the hardwood floor echoed through the house. “You need to clean that up!” I called.

  “We will, Mommy.”

  Yeah, right. “Cleaning up” consisted of each child contributing one Lego to the box, then dropping to the floor in exhaustion. The other 3,998 were mine to deal with.

  I chose to ignore the sounds of chaos for now and focus on the yogurt marinade I was mixing up for the chicken breasts. Blake’s doctor had recently announced that my husband’s cholesterol was dangerously high, and I’d started cooking low-fat dinners and dragging him out of the house for walks. I didn’t like the idea of losing him to an early cardiac arrest, but with the hours he’d been putting in lately and the attendant stress, it wouldn’t be a shock if he keeled over into his cornflakes one morning. Besides, it was good for me too. I made sure the kids ate a relatively balanced diet, but either the clothing manufacturers were making things smaller or my chocolate habit was edging me into muu-muu territory.

  As I stirred lemon juice into the yogurt, I thought about Mrs. Pence. Did she cook low-fat meals for her husband? From what I’d seen this morning, I was guessing not. How would she feel when she saw the photo of her shrink-wrapped husband? She must have known something was up—otherwise she wouldn’t have hired a private investigator—but seeing the proof would still be a shock. Particularly a photo like the one in my camera.

  I covered the chicken with Saran Wrap and winced at the spices dotting the pale slabs of flesh. They looked kind of like Pence’s buttocks. Just a whole lot smaller. Would it be appropriate to send Mrs. Pence a sympathy card, I wondered? Probably not. Odds were good that Hallmark didn’t have a Sorry your husband was sharing his Saran Wrap fetish with a hooker card anyway.

  I had just slid the chicken into the refrigerator when the phone rang. I rinsed my hands and picked it up before it went to the answering machine.

  “Hello?”

  “Margie?”

  I recognized my husband’s voice. “Blake! How are you? You’re not going to believe what happened this morning…”

  “I’m sorry, Honey, I don’t have time to talk. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve got a meeting with a client tonight, so I won’t be home for dinner.”

  So much for the chicken. “Again? You’ve been working way too hard lately.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just this case I’m putting together.”

  I sighed. Maybe we’d do hot dogs and macaroni and cheese, and save the chicken for tomorrow. “Well, we’ll miss you. Want me to save you some dinner?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll pick something up. Gotta run… give the kids a kiss.”

  And then he was gone.

  I hung up the phone and scowled, wishing I could expense all of the uneaten dinners I’d prepared lately to Jones McEwan, the law firm that was holding my husband in indentured servitude. “It’s just till I make partner,” he always said. “Then I can relax a little, and we can work on the house a bit.” Yeah, right. It had been four years now, and despite the fact that he worked sixty-hour weeks on a regular basis, he was still an associate.

  I had just pulled a package of hot dogs out of the freezer when Elsie appeared in the doorway, blue eyes wide. “Can I have my fry phone?”

  I swallowed. How was I going to tell her an obese plastic-clad adulterer had swiped her love object? I adopted a casual tone. �
�You know, honey, I don’t know where it is right now. I’m sure it will turn up, though.” I guided her through the Lego-strewn living room to the TV. “Why don’t I put Lady and the Tramp on?”

  Tears welled in her eyes. “But I want my fry phone!”

  “Honey, I don’t know where it is right now.”

  “You mean it’s gone? Forever?”

  “No, sweetie, not forever. I’m sure it’ll turn up.” I stroked her curls and sat through fifteen minutes of Lady and her perfect household until the snuffling had receded to an occasional sniff. Then retreated to computer desk, where I pulled up eBay and typed in Fry phone. Nothing. Ditto for McDonald’s fry phone, French fry phone, Happy Meal phone, and Freedom fry phone. Damn.

  Why had I taken this job?

  I shut off the computer and picked up the phone. Peaches answered on the third ring.

  “It’s Margie,” I said. “I got a photo of Pence.”

  “You’re shitting me.” I could hear the surprise in her pack-a-day voice. “When can you bring it in?”

  “I’ll e-mail it to you,” I said. I paused to clear my throat. “I accidentally left something outside the motel room, though, and I was wondering if you could ask Mrs. Pence to see if she can find it for me. Her husband picked it up.”

  “You left something outside of the room?”

  “Yeah.” I lowered my voice. “A McDonald’s fry phone.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. A McDonald’s fry phone? Like one of those Happy Meal toys? You want me to tell Mrs. Pence that her husband is cheating on her, and then ask her if she can find a McDonald’s fry phone my investigator accidentally left behind?”

  “I know, I know… It was an accident. But it’s my daughter’s favorite toy.”

  “A fry phone. Whatever happened to teddy bears? Jesus. How the hell did you lose…no. I won’t ask. I don’t want to know.” I could hear the intake of breath as she took a drag from a cigarette. “You need to write a report. Should be a breeze for you, what with all your big reporting jobs for the nursery school newsletter.”