Page 49 of Up in Smoke

It was like someone had taken a knife and twisted it in my chest in an attempt to put me out of my misery but only making the wound bigger without finishing me off.

“She knew. Her heart hadn’t been doing well anyway. Shortly after you left and I found out she’d survived, she suffered through a heart attack, but she survived it. I’d gotten lucky and Mr. Mansfield let her into the hospital after the doctors confirmed it wouldn’t take all that much to make sure she pulled through. But her prognosis hadn’t been good. She had severe heart disease. She’d run out of time, and she had wanted to go out to a storm rather than waiting for her heart to fail. She said it was time, and she’d been waiting a long time to go see her husband again.” Brent leaned against the bar, looking out over the empty tables. “It’ll be nice when this place is back in operation, though. It’ll be different, but it’ll be nice.”

Hope cropped up in the oddest places, and I would cling to what I could. “Think your alcohol supply will last six months?”

“It should. Mr. Mansfield’s bounty for unopened bottles brought out a lot of people looking for a quick buck, and somebody had an entire wine cellar. Everything in it was still good, so I’ve got a bunch of nice bottles of wine to go with the hard liquors. We’ve enough to keep things going a while even if it gets busy—and I expect it’ll get busy. There’s a limit until the train routes reopen, but it’s reasonable.”

“What counts as reasonable?”

“Two shots, two glasses of beer, or two glasses of wine per person per meal. Mr. Mansfield doesn’t want any problems starting up, and hardly anyone is going to get drunk off two of something—and it’ll keep the supplies viable until we can get new trains in.” Brent shrugged. “It’ll hurt the bottom line, I expect, but a hurt bottom line beats no bottom line.”

I bobbed my head. “And you have the supplies?”

“I got everything at a good rate, too, so I expect the restaurant will be around for a while, even if Tulsa recovers and there are fewer people who want to come down to Asylum. We’re getting a respite, but I doubt it’ll last long. It never does.”

I could only hope the Voodoo queens bought Tulsa more time while I worked with Sandro to uncover the truth. “Anything else I should know?”

“Actually, yes. Someone came around here the other day asking about you and your man. Shady fellow, although he seemed friendly enough for somebody who was skulking around. I told him I hadn’t heard anything beyond that your man was taking good care of you—which he has, from the looks of you.” Brent snorted a laugh. “Or at least from the looks of that tail of yours. I haven’t seen you whip that around like that in an age or two, and that was when I moved you to the regular waiting roster.”

“I was warm and needed the breeze,” I said in my most dignified tone.

“Whatever you say, Jade. Whatever you say. Come to the back, and I’ll get you the schedule so you can whip these new recruits into shape—and if you happen to know a bunch of people who can stir some trouble for them, do let me know.”

“How about a bunch of kids? If that isn’t chaotic enough, I don’t know what is—and I’m sure Sandro can find a few adults for them to practice handling the booze.”

Sandro grinned. “Well, now I can’t miss the fun if you’re going to bring the martial arts center over to teach the waiters how to handle some chaos. I’m sure I can find a few adults who can be picky about a meal, just tell me when.”

“I’ll clear a test run with Mr. Mansfield. This lot will need it, especially since I’ll be losing Jade.”

“It’ll be all right,” I promised Brent. Somehow, I’d make it be all right, even if it meant I had to play waitress for a while along with everything else I needed to do.

“You’re going to regret that later,” Sandro warned.

I would, so I shrugged and accepted I courted extra trouble to go with the rest of my problems. Rather than worry about it, I followed Brent to the back to get the schedule and discover what Frankie had left for me, my heart hurting that the old woman had been thinking of me in the days before her death.

Brent headed into a storage closet and brought two large cardboard boxes out, setting them on his desk, which lacked the usual flood of paperwork needed to run a restaurant. He set two sheets on the boxes. “There are two more where this comes from, and I’ll loan you a dolly to get it back to your place. The other two boxes are quite heavy. I’ve no idea what’s in them, but she had them flagged in her will, and she’d brought them down along with the documentation for them. I ain’t in the business of angering the dead, so nobody has touched them since she brought them in. I figure it’s her keepsakes, but Frankie had always managed to surprise me.”

Frankie would surprise me for a long time to come, reaching out from beyond the grave with her unexpected act of kindness. “Thanks, Brent. I’ll open them up at home and spare you the runny nose and pathetic wailing.”

“I figured you’d want some privacy. I won’t lie, I had my turn when I opened the box she’d left for me, too. I’ve one for Lora as well, if you can send that to her?”

“We can take it to her,” Sandro promised. “It’ll be a while until we can get it to her, but we’ll make sure it gets to the East and into her hands one day.”

Brent retrieved a fifth, small box, which he added to the pile along with a large envelope. “I did file the details of her will, but I didn’t read through it all that much. There’s a copy of it in there, since those boxes are yours and you were named. Truth be told, I mind my own business, so I only read the relevant parts.”

I understood; Brent would have struggled even more if he’d carried around the burden of the entire will. The document would have made her death all the more real, with each name listed and item given adding to the tragedy of her loss. “I’ll make Sandro read it for me, that way if you missed anything, he’ll know. And then that way, I won’t cry as much.”

“And as I don’t want you crying in my bar, off you go.” Brent added a few sheets of paper to the pile. “It’ll take me a few days to get approval for the test run of the staff, so take your time before you swing on by. Mr. Moretti? You take care of her.”

“I plan on it,” Sandro replied.

Thursday, June 25, 2043.

Asylum, Oklahoma.

The Alley.

Curiosity ate away at me,and I sat on the couch in the sitting room with Sandro while he recited a poem for me, one meant to remove any bugs that had been installed. Several pops informed us someone had been playing around in the house while we’d been gone.