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“Usually, depending on if the customer had dessert or a drink, but this Toompas always ordered extra garlic bread, too. That’s another dollar.”
“Doris, I need to pick up that receipt box again.”
It took three evenings, two hours each, to go through all the remaining loose receipts. Fortunately, Greta had wrapped the ones she’d already checked in rubber bands as packets. She found eight more $15.31 bills spaced over an eight-month period.
Assuming these were all Toompas’s, why would he be in Pacific City? It wasn’t directly on 101, and the food at Doris’s wasn’t so good that anyone would drive the extra miles after turning off 101. The couple of people Greta had interviewed who lived in Pacific City didn’t seem like the type that Toompas had regular visits with. Something to do with drugs? Selling or picking up?
She spent hours over the next couple of days trying to get a grip on those specific dates. However, nothing gelled, and her flight to Missouri was in two days for a family Christmas week. She had mixed feelings about the planned visit. It had been seventeen months since she’d seen her family. The weekly calls kept her abreast of major events, but time and distance had begun to blur the feelings. She missed seeing her father and her sister Jeanine regularly. But as much as she hated to admit it, she would just as soon never see her older sister, Heather, if it weren’t for the sibling connection. Greta’s mother was a more complex case. She was the mother. No matter what else, that fact trumped much but not everything. Greta recognized that she was torn between an ingrained desire to please her mother and dread to be around her. She had accepted long ago that her mother was probably clueless about fostering and feeding feelings of inferiority in her middle daughter. The mother had never accepted that Greta didn’t fit her image of a young girl.
Over the years, Greta had come oh so close several times to screaming at her mother to shut up about poor Greta. Such big feet. Discouraging ballet class for the four-year-old because she was too big to be graceful. Why play sports, when all that sweating makes her look even more like a man? Worrying that she didn’t know whether poor Greta would find a good husband. Advising Greta to use more makeup to make her features seem smaller. Telling her not to move so quick because people would notice her more. On and on.
Greta couldn’t have explained the relationship to anyone, including herself. It wasn’t quite love/hate. Something less or more. Not quite love and not quite hate. Whatever the dynamic, Greta had an almost instinctual need to see her mother, although not for too long.
With the trip coming up, Greta thought through the Toompas case once more before she mentally put it aside until after the holiday. The lack of leads among the victim’s acquaintances made the idea resurface that the killer might be someone new to the area or passing through. If the latter, they might never solve the case, although, if the killer had arrived recently in Tillamook, that could be checked. Later. It could wait until after she returned from Missouri.
CHAPTER 13
Christmas was neither as bad as she’d feared nor better than she’d hoped. It started with a longer-than-planned eastward trip. She drove the two hours to Portland, parked in an off-airport lot, and arrived at her gate an hour early. She waited four hours because a Denver storm delayed flights. Yet somehow her connecting flight to St. Louis left Denver on time, so she missed it. As a result, she sat in the Denver airport another six hours before a plane with the next available seat headed east, but to Kansas City, instead of St. Louis. The change added an hour to the final leg, the drive to Nixa, Missouri.
She arrived at her family home at two in the morning. She had been up and traveling almost twenty hours. Everyone was asleep, so she used the key the family had left hidden in the backyard to let herself in.
It wasn’t the homecoming she had visualized after being gone seventeen months. Carrying her bags, she tiptoed upstairs to her old room. Everything was as she’d left it. The next morning, she slept until almost eleven and came downstairs to an empty house. Her father was at the pharmacy, her mother shopping, Jeanine at school, and Heather . . . who knew? Greta had an hour to herself and used it to wander around the house and the yard, which had been home until she moved to Oregon. She still had a residual trace of that connection, though she felt, strongly for the first time, that if she had a home now, it was more in Oregon than Missouri.
She fell asleep on top of her old bed without undressing and slept into the afternoon. When she rose, the house was empty—family members at work, school, or elsewhere. In the daylight, she found that her room wasn’t exactly as she had left it seventeen months earlier. It seemed somehow . . . smaller. She lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to pretend the previous months had just been a dream and she still lived at home. The image wouldn’t come in focus. She opened drawers and closets. Clothes she hadn’t taken with her, dresses she didn’t think she would ever wear, sweats that maybe she would take back with her, older shoes that were still serviceable but that she didn’t like, books and p
apers, picture albums she might take back, trophies and medals from basketball and track, and . . . stuffed animals. Those were the items that struck the best chord and, to a lesser degree, the sports memorabilia. She would take back as many of her old animal friends as would fit in her suitcase and carryon.
The yard hadn’t changed: the rusting swing set that her father had said he would take down when his youngest child quit playing on it; a badminton set with the poles listing and the net rotted through in places; the apple tree she had fallen from when she was eight years old—her father had told her how brave she was when the doctor set her arm—and the white picket fence surrounding the property, about due for the repainting her father did every four years.
She felt an ache in her chest as she re-immersed in her earlier life, not with regret for something lost, but with melancholy for something that would never come again. It was never clearer to her than at that moment. She had moved on. Here was where she had lived, but Oregon was where she lived. It might not always be Tillamook County, Oregon, but it wasn’t here.
She walked the neighborhood, remembering events—playing with a friend here, nervous about trick-or-treating at a dilapidated Victorian there, walking the four blocks to the grammar school and its memories—then continued to the downtown. The look and feel of the businesses were just as when she’d left. She couldn’t remember the last time a new building had gone up downtown, certainly not since the big shopping mall with the Walmart anchor store that opened just outside the city limits. For a while, her father worried that the mall would completely kill the old downtown. However, many of the older businesses adjusted or were replaced by others.
Her father had owned and run a small pharmacy in Nixa until a Walgreens opened with prices he couldn’t match. He would always resent the company, yet to Greta’s mind it hadn’t been all bad. He closed out the business without taking losses on the merchandise, and because he owned the building, he had made money when he sold it. After hesitating, he acceded to reality and applied for a job at the new Walgreens. The company, showing surprising astuteness, hired him as the store’s pharmacy manager, thereby reassuring customers, many of whom had come to her father and grandfather’s family pharmacy for decades.
Her mother substitute-taught in all the local schools. She had been asked many times to come on full time, but the family didn’t absolutely need more income. She was content with her other commitments—her husband and three daughters, church, and community volunteer activities.
Greta walked back home and saw her mother’s green Dodge in the driveway next to the house. Her parents bought only American cars. Her father said it was to support American-made products, but her mother said she didn’t trust the workmanship of any foreign car. Greta pointed out that for many years, American cars lagged far behind those from foreign companies, but this logic made no impression on what her mother knew to be true.
The car door was open, and plastic grocery bags filled the back seat. Greta picked up six by the straps, three with each hand, and walked up the back steps to the kitchen.
“Why there you are, dear. Hope I didn’t wake you earlier when I was vacuuming.”
Greta set down the bags on the counter, and mother and daughter hugged. For her mother, it meant putting her arms around her daughter’s waist, while Greta reached down to embrace her mother’s shoulders. Her mother had been shorter than Greta by the time she was ten. Now, she seemed even shorter. Not frailer, just . . . shorter.
“Now, I told you not to fly Southwest, dear. Your Aunt Martha flew them once and said they were rude. I always say United is the best. If you have to fly, of course, which I don’t. But that’s what you get for moving so far away.”
Well, Greta thought. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed. Mom can’t open her mouth without telling me I did something wrong
“But that’s all right, dear. You’re here now, even if for only a short visit. Last Christmas just wasn’t the same for everyone since you weren’t here.”
Greta groaned to herself. Right on schedule. She excuses me for coming late and adds jabs about the weeklong visit being short and how guilty I should feel for spoiling everyone’s Christmas last year. I wonder how long her list is and when she will recycle back to the beginning?
The answers to Greta’s questions were delayed by Jeanine getting home from school. The first clue was a shriek and Greta being attacked from behind by someone jumping on her back and wrapping arms around her neck. There being only one member of the family who would treat her this way, Greta deduced it was Jeanine. She shrugged off her younger sister and whirled to engulf her in a hug. The first thing she noticed was that her sister was the wrong size. Greta pushed her back to hold her at arm’s length.
“My God. Where’s my little sister, and what’ve you done with her?” The face was the same, especially the eyes and the mouth, but the skinny pre-pubescent sister had been replaced by a young woman.
“I’m growing up, you ninny!” laughed Jeanine. “It’s been almost a year and a half, you know.”
