Granny Bares It All Page 2

  “Yes, we will take a look into it,” I replied.

  Grimal got a pained look on his face, like his pants were too tight in all the wrong places.

  “This is a police matter,” he said, his voice quavering.

  “He tried to run me off the road. Or she. Mustn’t be sexist, even though the majority of murderers are men. When we catch him or her or it, I’d like to press charges for attempted murder.”

  Grimal nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll file the paperwork when we catch him. Or her.”

  He just didn’t get it, did he? All these little evasions would get him nowhere.

  I decided to let him think he had shaken me off. He could do his investigation and I’d do mine, and I’d call him when I needed him. He’d already been given a good talking to by the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, so he wouldn’t dare say no to me when the time came. In the meantime, I’d let him maintain a healthy blood pressure.

  It was time for me to get back to Pearl anyway. I wished him luck on his investigation and headed back to the car.

  When I got there, I found Pearl asleep, her chin resting on her bodice, snoring contentedly.

  Three

  I may be a sweet little old lady (at least superficially), but I try to keep up with the times as much as possible. So the first place I started my investigation was where everyone looks things up these days—the Internet. Clarissa Monell was an unusual enough name that she proved easy to track down. She had a Facebook account, which unfortunately was set on private, so I couldn’t see anything other than her profile photo. It showed her on a hill somewhere. There were grass and wildflowers all around, and she wore hiking boots, shorts, a T-shirt, and a small daypack. She stood with her face to the sun and her arms uplifted. The pose reminded me of the logo on that card in her wallet.

  Other than that, I found her on Yelp, which gave the address I already knew from her driver’s license, and some older pages that showed she had been a Parks and Recreation official upstate before she retired two years ago at age sixty. That might prove helpful. As she had been a state employee, there would be a lot more records on her. Perhaps they might hold a clue as to why someone would want to run over a Parks and Recreation employee who had opted for early retirement.

  Next I looked up Sunnydale Nature Resort and got a shock.

  It was a nudist colony. The website showed men and women swimming in a lake, playing volleyball, riding horses, and lounging by a pool, all without a stitch of clothing on.

  Cheerville had a nudist colony? I had begun to accept the fact that an inordinate number of people got murdered here and that it had been the location for a secret casino run by organized crime, but a nudist colony? My respectable, boring, mundane neighbors were baring it all and doing … what, exactly? I had a hard time believing people would join a special club just for the opportunity to get a sunburn in all the wrong places.

  I had to admit I didn’t know much about nudism, or naturism, or nakedism, or whatever you call it. It was also becoming apparent that I didn’t know much about sleepy middle-class commuter towns.

  For nearly thirty years, my husband and I had traveled the globe, hunting down enemies of the state and protecting our country. I’ve been to every continent except Antarctica, have a smattering of a dozen languages, and met everyone from narcotraffickers to double agents to Third World dictators. I’ve camped in the Himalayas, trekked through the Amazon, ridden a boat up the Nile, and snuck into Siberia. I thought I was worldly.

  Now I was beginning to realize there are different ways to be worldly. Perhaps it doesn’t surprise most people to hear that there’s a nudist colony near their town. It made me nearly fall off my chair.

  So Clarissa Monell had a weird hobby, if you can call it such. But that didn’t mean she got killed for it. This was just one aspect to her life, and I had to look into all of them.

  Next I looked up the gym she had belonged to—Suburban Fitness. It looked like your standard gym. Not one of those twenty-four-hour power-lifting places where pneumatically muscled men eat powdered protein and bench-press elephants at three o’clock in the morning but a regular gym for regular people. It even showed up in their marketing, with photos depicting a carefully chosen group of “gym members” of all ages and both sexes. They all had the same pasted-on grins. Nobody grins while running on a treadmill. I suspected they were models.

  Even so, I decided to check it out. I had planned to join a gym anyway.

  A seventy-year-old woman joining a gym? Some people might think I was too old, but you’re never too old to stay in shape. Seniors actually need to exercise as much as or even more than young people. During my CIA days, I had been in tip-top shape, but since retirement I had been letting myself slip a bit. Old battle injuries had begun to hurt again, and despite having been in tip-top shape for much of my life, my physical condition had deteriorated to an alarming degree. I had tried yoga at the Seniors’ Center, and besides getting a boyfriend out of it, I didn’t find it terribly interesting. A good jog and some weights are more my style.

  So I fed Dandelion, who stopped clawing the sofa to pieces to leap on the food, and headed out.

  Suburban Fitness was in a strip mall at the edge of town. It turned out to be one of those gyms where everyone wanted to show off how much they were exercising. The ground floor had floor-to-ceiling windows. Right behind the glass was a long line of treadmills and rowing machines. Sweaty men and women worked out in full view of the parking lot. It seemed a bit silly to me. No one looks good when they exercise. Well, not most people anyway. Most were middle-aged and looked like they desperately needed to be there. The only person in view who was young and fit was a lovely girl in black Spandex using one of the treadmills. She was quite shapely and had obviously forgotten to put on a sports bra judging from her, um, vertical movement. I spotted her from halfway across the parking lot.

  The two men on the treadmills to either side of her were getting a good view too. They weren’t even trying to hide their staring. Both had identical postures, running in place while their heads were turned toward her, angled ever so slightly in a fruitless attempt at subtlety, eyes straining in their sockets to look to the side in order to get as full a view as possible. A perfect triptych of male desire and female indifference.

  Because surely she realized the effect she was having? Did she really want the attentions of a pair of men old enough to be her father? As long as they looked and didn’t touch, I suppose she did.

  Entering the gym, I came to a front desk where two spectacularly muscled young men sat. One was tapping away at a computer. Another was tapping away at a cell phone. Neither looked like he was working.

  I stood in front of them, counting up to thirty seconds, waiting to be noticed. I decided not to clear my throat. I was curious how long it would take. Consider it a social experiment.

  It took a full minute.

  At last the guy on the phone looked away from his screen long enough to grab his coffee and noticed me.

  “Oh, hello, ma’am, can I help you?”

  “Yes, I wanted to ask about membership.”

  I half expected him to reply with, “Oh, for your son?” but to his credit he said, “What kind of workout are you looking for, ma’am?”

  “Basic maintenance. I’d like to stave off inevitable mortality for at least another decade.”

  He didn’t bat an eye. “Well, let me show you around.”

  When he stood, I saw he was even more impressively muscled than I’d thought, his chest and shoulders on show thanks to one of those cutoff T-shirts that look too drafty to really be called clothing. As he came around to my side of the counter, I also saw he had huge calves. This guy obviously did a lot of squats. I’m not sure why one would need huge calves in this modern world. Perhaps he thought it would attract women, although he had certainly gone too far. I knew Marines who did forced marches of fifty miles a day who didn’t have calves like that.

  I followed his calves, which look
ed like two hairy loaves of bread, as he gave me a tour of the facilities. They had a sizeable weight room with all new equipment, and the ladies’ room (Mr. Super Calves didn’t go in) had a sauna and steam room. It turned out the first impression I had gotten from the window was not entirely correct. There were a fair number of young people here, pulling and pushing and heaving and sweating. And flirting. Lots and lots of flirting. The flirting, however, was strictly divided by age. The twenty-somethings only flirted with other twenty-somethings, the thirty-somethings only flirted with other thirty-somethings, the middle-aged people only flirted with other middle-aged people while ogling the twenty-somethings, and the seniors focused on their workouts.

  “We also have classes,” Mr. Super Calves said, and led me to a pair of large back rooms with padded floors. One was not being used, while the other had three lines of people facing a wall entirely covered with a mirror. A female instructor up front bounced around while leading them in a series of kicks and punches as some awful electronic music thudded out a synthetic beat.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Muay Thai cardio kickboxing.”

  I chuckled. I’d learned some kickboxing as part of my hand-to-hand combat training. This wasn’t even recognizable as Muay Thai. It was too flashy and bouncy and in time with the beat. While the kids did look like they were getting a good cardio workout, I hoped they didn’t think they were learning how to fight. Most of them had their thumbs tucked inside their other fingers when they made a fist. That’s a good way to dislocate your thumb.

  “We also have seniors’ yoga,” he said.

  “I’ve tried that. It’s just like Muay Thai cardio kickboxing.”

  He cocked his head. “Really?”

  “Yes, the guys all take the back rows so they can see the women’s butts, and they can check out their fronts in the mirror.”

  “Um … ”

  “It’s all right. We’re used to it. I picked up a boyfriend at my last seniors’ yoga class. He always took the back row too.”

  Mr. Super Calves looked like my thirteen-year-old grandson any time I brought up adult topics. Mortified, in other words. People with gray hair were supposed to be asexual.

  We went back to the counter, and he showed me a list of the classes they offered. None of them interested me. What I needed was a moderate amount of jogging and some weight training. At my age, it’s important to get some cardiovascular exercise and a bit of muscle toning. Mr. Super Calves tried to get me a personal trainer, saying that “our senior clients can really benefit,” but I didn’t need one. I already knew all this stuff; I simply hadn’t been applying it for a few years.

  To be honest, I had let myself go a bit after my husband, James, died. He had been my lover, comrade-in-arms, and best friend for most of my adult life, and losing him felt like that life had been wiped out. For a couple of years, I had become more or less a couch potato, but then I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and strode back into life.

  All right, that’s an overstatement. I gently tugged on my bootstraps and tiptoed back into life. The first and best thing I did was move to Cheerville to be close to my son and his family. James’s death had left me profoundly alone, and I needed to be close to people I cared about. I still lived alone, however, so I had filled up that gap with a kitten. Then I filled out my social life by joining a reading group and starting to date again.

  Now I needed to work on the physical side. I hadn’t done much exercise since James passed, and when I saw that gym card in poor Clarissa Monell’s wallet, I realized that was the last aspect of life I needed to step back into.

  So I left the gym with the proud status of being the newest member of Suburban Fitness. At my age, it feels good to be the newest of anything. I felt like I was getting somewhere. I needed a gym membership anyway, and I’d be interested to see how the clients and staff reacted when Clarissa Monell’s death appeared in tomorrow’s papers.

  Hopefully I’d find some good leads, because the only other lead I had was a nudist colony, and I certainly wasn’t going to join that too. I needed to step back into life, but there were limits.

  Four

  After witnessing a cold-blooded murder, there’s nothing better than to sit down and have a nice dinner with your family.

  My son, Frederick, his wife, Alicia, and my thirteen-year-old grandson, Martin, lived in a lovely New England–style home with a white picket fence and a couple of trees in the yard. The house stood at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a fashionable part of town. Frederick worked in real estate and had gotten himself quite a deal. He’d gotten a good deal on his wife too. Alicia was one of the world’s leading particle physicists and spent much of her time working at the CERN reactor beneath the border of France and Switzerland. I didn’t really understand what she did for a living. That was OK, because ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the population didn’t understand it either.

  Luckily, Alicia was home that evening, so dinner would be edible. Frederick is a terrible cook, a trait he inherited from his parents. Taking his son out for hamburgers and fries is actually the healthier option.

  Frederick opened the door. My sweet little boy was now in his early forties, with a beer belly and a heavy step. While he had taken after James and me with the cooking, he had not followed our path to physical fitness. I worried about that sometimes. He gave me a hug.

  “Hey, Mom, come on in. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  A ready smile and a genuine happiness to see me—that was why I had moved to Cheerville.

  We walked into the living room and straight into a warzone.

  My grandson Martin was slouched on the couch, eyes nearly invisible under a mop of blond hair as he played Urban Slaughter V, which was “much, much better” than Urban Slaughter IV but “not as awesome but better graphics” than Shopping Mall Slaughter, Zombie Edition. “Just look at how the blood spatters on this wall.”

  The plots of all the Urban Slaughter series were as simple as they were bloody. You ran around the city gathering guns and ammo and shooting gang members, Islamic terrorists, invading Chinese soldiers, chainsaw-wielding serial killers, and crazed drug addicts. Yes, all of these enemies were at large in the city at the same time. Oddly, regular citizens went shopping, ran businesses, and drove on the roads as if nothing was happening. They only reacted if you shot them, then they screamed and you lost points.

  Even though Martin was an ace at video games, he never got a good score in Urban Slaughter because he shot too many civilians.

  “They’re funny when they scream,” he explained.

  I called out a hello to Alicia, who was bustling around the kitchen with her neck crooked to hold a cell phone while both her hands were busy with preparing the meal. Judging from the incomprehensible technobabble coming from her mouth, it was a work call.

  “I’ll go help her,” Frederick said.

  “Just wash the dishes,” I advised.

  My son rolled his eyes in a very teenaged fashion. “You’re one to talk.”

  Middle-aged son: one, Granny: zero.

  I sat on the sofa beside my grandson and tousled his unruly shock of blond hair.

  “You ruined my aim,” he grunted.

  “Watch the windows on your right flank. They make a good sniper position,” I told him.

  He ignored me. A terrorist popped up in one of the windows, ululated a poor imitation of Arabic (which I speak, thank you very much), and took out Martin with a headshot.

  “I told you,” I said.

  Martin gave me a funny look. He always did that when I let slip bits of knowledge grandmothers aren’t supposed to have. I bit my lip. All my life I have been very careful to hide my secret identity. Even my son has no idea what I and his father had done for a living. All he knew was that we had worked for the government in “foreign development” and that meant we traveled a lot.

  Somehow I had begun to slip with Martin. I suppose that was because he was still half a child, and the knowledge
of my past wasn’t as secret as it used to be. And, let’s be honest here, I wanted to impress him.

  “Dinner time!” Alicia’s voice cut off any further slaughter on the streets of America. It amused me to see these games. I had spent my whole life stopping this sort of thing from happening, and now kids pretended it really had. Perhaps I should have been a librarian. Then Martin could shoot terrorists and Latin American drug gangs for real. He could do it. In the course of my work, I’d come across soldiers younger than he was.

  He’d need to work on his situational awareness, though. He kept getting taken out by snipers who used the terrain better than he did.

  We gathered around the table to share the roast chicken Alicia had prepared, and I slipped into the easy, friendly conversation we shared at these times. This is something I had not gotten enough of when I was Frederick’s age, and I felt fortunate that I had a chance to catch up now.

  “I joined a gym today,” I announced. “Suburban Fitness.”

  Martin looked up from shoveling food into his mouth. “A gym? You?”

  I smiled at him. “Grandmas need to keep fit.”

  “You going to lift weights?” Martin said.

  “Of course. Give me a few weeks and we’ll have an arm-wrestling competition.”

  Martin snickered and went back to his meal.

  “I wish I had time to go,” Alicia said.

  “Any trips coming up?” I asked. There usually were with her.

  “Five days in L.A. at the end of the month. Ten days in Germany the next month. And I have to go to the city next week, but that’s only a one-day thing.”

  I nodded. That was actually a light travel schedule by her standards.

  Turning to my son, I asked, “Why don’t you join me in the gym?”

  Martin laughed. “You could spot Grandma. How much can you bench press, Grandma?”

  Three sets of ten reps of my own weight, when I was your father’s age, I remembered. Out loud I said, “Oh, I don’t know. It’s best to start small and work your way up.”