Persian Penalty

This time Charles was the one to blush mightily.

Octo-Cat’s muffled voice rose to meet my ears. “And here I thought you were the only one crazy enough to join the UpChuck fan club,” he said around a mouth full of food. “Looks like you aren’t even the president, anymore.”

This was getting ridiculous. I wasn’t threatened in the least, but I still scooted closer to Charles on the bed and rested my head on his shoulder.

“You are a lucky, lucky girl, Angie Russo,” Sharon said. “Now don’t you forget to invite me to the wedding. It is my new life mission to land myself an uncle or a cousin. If they’re half as perfect as your Charles, I’ll die a happy woman… Now let me see that beautiful ring of yours again.”

“Um, actually, it disappeared while I was taking a nap,” I admitted with a frown.

“It’s missing?” Sharon’s eyes widened and she let out a huff. “Well, it’s got to be around here somewhere. Want me to help you look?” she offered, sliding off the bed and onto her feet.

I stood, too. “Yeah, we searched everywhere, but—”

Sharon nodded sympathetically, then glanced toward the digital clock that hung on the wall opposite. “Oh, shoot! I can’t stay to help, or I’ll be late! Call me later! We’ll find that ring—and that grandmother—yet. Don’t you fret!”

And then Sharon ran off so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.

14

“That was weird,” I said, watching as the glass door bounced back open following Sharon’s sudden departure.

“You don’t think she…?” Charles let his words trail away as he got up to push the door shut as best he could.

I tilted my head and scowled at him. “Are you actually suggesting she stole my ring?”

“She doesn’t seem to have a problem entering without permission, and well…” His words fell away again, and he shrugged.

“She has a big, fat crush on you. Is that what you wanted to say? That she is so smitten for you that she stole the ring so she can fantasize about being your bride?”

“Smitten with,” Charles corrected with a sigh. “And, well, it sounds stupid when you say it like that, but it’s not like we have any other leads to go on.”

“Sharon is my friend,” I reminded him. “If anyone stole my ring, it’s that nasty Millicent.” True, Sharon had only been my friend for a week, but she’d made up for her bad first impression, unlike the owner of this bed-and-breakfast who just kept making things worse every time we ran into her.

Charles sat back on the bed and placed an arm around my shoulders. “We’ll find it. I promise, but let’s try to figure this thing out with your grandma first, okay?”

I nodded. “You’re right. One thing at a time.”

“Exactly.” He got up to retrieve his work bag.

“So, I guess, you see what you can learn from what Sharon gave you, and I’ll check her social media.”

“Mommy!” Paisley let out a sharp bark to get my attention. “May I please go outside to play?”

“Right, okay.” I opened the door for her and watched her frolic toward the sandy beach. “I think I’ll go out, too. Keep an eye on her,” I told Charles. “Come get me when you’re ready to head back out?”

He gave me a hearty thumbs-up. He’d already pulled his laptop out and situated it onto his lap. You can take the guy out of the office, but getting the office out of the guy was a whole different story. Charles’s lawyer skills had come in handy many times before, and they just might be the thing to save the day now.

I’d be gutted if we had to leave Katahdin without ever meeting my grandmother. We just had to find her. We had to, and we would.

I approached the lake and found Paisley digging a hole in the sand. She didn’t even notice me as I approached.

“What’s that?” I asked when she pulled her head out with a small, black object in her mouth.

“It’s a pretty rock,” she mumbled, accidentally dropping her prize when she did. She yipped in surprise, grabbed it back up, and ran off with tail wagging. I was fairly certain my nan’s dog had just unearthed a clam but had no idea what she was actually doing with it. It’s not like she’d be able to crack open the hard shell and get at the meat inside.

I shrugged and continued cutting a path toward the dock. Well, whatever Paisley was up to, at least she was happy about it. Sometimes I envied her, how easy it was for her to see the best in every situation.

Me, on the other hand, I had a hard time not worrying about what would come next. Especially now.

I’d told Charles I would check Grandma Marilyn’s social media. Mostly it was because I’d have felt guilty if he dug deep into research while I sat around twiddling my thumbs.

Of course, I’d already checked her social media as soon as I knew her current name and location. I’d tried to find her before last night, but Jones wasn’t exactly an uncommon surname. I finally managed to find the correct profile yesterday evening while I was supposed to be relaxing in the tub.

Unfortunately, my grandmother hadn’t posted a single photo of herself during all her years on the site, assigning a simple stock-image daisy to serve as her profile picture.

She also rarely updated her status. When I checked last night, the most recent one had been made about eight months ago—commentary on some TV show she’d just started watching on some cable channel I’d never heard of.

I navigated to her profile now, expecting to see the exact same feed.

But no.

My grandma had posted an update less than an hour ago. We’d probably just left her neighborhood at the time. Whoa.

“Nothing beats sunny skies and sandy beaches! Hello, San Francisco!” she’d captioned a photo of the Golden Gate bridge.

Wow. Was she really clear on the other side of the country?

What dumb luck.

Of course, California made sense. Her phone had a Cali area code. Hey, maybe she was planning to move back and change her name again.

Then I’d never find her.

I scrolled through my newsfeed idly, completely frustrated with this turn of events and wondering how I would break it to Charles, especially considering that we’d lost my engagement ring because of our trip out here. And it hadn’t even been a full week since he’d proposed.

Ugh. I was the worst fiancée ever.

Tears stung at the edges of my eyes, and I didn’t try to hold them back. Stupid San Francisco, I thought, looking for someone to blame other than myself.

Then, for whatever reason, I navigated back to my grandmother’s profile to look at that picture again. Perhaps it was just to wallow in my dumb luck, or maybe I’d subconsciously realized that something didn’t quite add up.

That’s when I saw it. She’d checked in when she posted the photo, not at the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, but at the Golden Wok in Katahdin, Maine.

Oh my gosh.

She was here—here and lying about it.

When she’d tried to pull up the Golden Gate bridge, the social media site must have brought up nearby establishments with similar names. My grandmother hadn’t noticed that the geo-tag gave her away.

But why would she lie about being out of town?

“Hi, Mommy!” Paisley called as she rushed past me, then dipped her head and picked up a pink shell, only to immediately take off running again.

“Hi,” I called back distractedly. My grandmother was here, and she knew I was looking for her.

She wanted to put me off her scent, but I refused to go home without meeting her first. Maybe she’d never want to see me again after—and that possibility hurt me deeply—but, still, I at least had to try.

I’d rather meet her and have it go badly than never get the chance at all.

Now I just had to tell Charles what I’d found, and we could figure out our next steps from there.

15

When I shared my discovery about the failed social media check-in with Charles, I may have mentioned how much I wished Pringle was there to help us make a plan.

And Octo-Cat took the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

“The dog and I are better than that raccoon fraud could ever hope to be,” he growled and then insisted he could handle things from here.

We drove back out to the condominium complex, and I watched as the pets tore away from the car to begin their top-secret recon mission. Octo-Cat had declared the details of the operation to be on a need-to-know basis and then had proceeded to explain that I did not need to know.

Charles reached over and squeezed my knee.

With growing trepidation, I closed the door so that he could drive us around the corner and out of sight.

The part of the plan that I’d been privy to involved Charles and me circling the block slowly while the animals followed through with their mission to track down my missing grandmother.

“Am I wrong for kind of wishing the raccoon was with us?” Charles asked later with a snort. “At least he keeps things interesting.”

By this point, we’d driven around the neighborhood at least a dozen times, and the residents had noticed. If we kept this up much longer, we’d soon have a cop car on our tail.

“You know I only brought up Pringle to get Octo-Cat to think helping us was his idea, right?” I reminded him with a laugh. “So, yes, you are very wrong for thinking Pringle’s presence would improve anything. You don’t have to listen to him prattle on the way the rest of us do. Do you know during our last trip, he decided to pick up trucker lingo?”

Charles burst out laughing. “You’re kidding. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“I’ve tried my best to block it out, honestly. He was going on and on about Smokeys and ten fours and whatever else. I couldn’t manage to understand the half of it.”

“Huh. Makes me wonder if you could understand animals speaking a foreign language. Like—”

“Stop the car!” I shouted as I spotted the waggy black blur of Paisley rushing down the sidewalk barking at us.

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” I heard her crying as soon as the door opened.

“I’ll park the car and catch up,” Charles called as I jumped out of the car.

“What’s going on, Paisley?” The little dog leapt into my arms and frantically licked my face.

“We found her! We found your grandmama,” the Chihuahua yipped excitedly. “Follow me!”

She leapt from my arms and began sprinting at full tilt. I glanced back to make sure Charles was coming before I started running after the quivering bullet of a dog.

I sprinted after Paisley, thankful for the time Nan had forced me to work out with her friend’s dog Cujo for a time. Of course, the husky had moved at a steady, even clip, unlike the wildly darting mini-dog I was attempting to follow now.

My current canine guide also didn’t seem to worry much about the obstacles I was having trouble getting around, over, and under. The first thing I tripped over was a sprinkler, and it sent me crashing down onto the same lawn that belonged to that grumpy guy we’d met earlier. Why? Just why?

Staggering back to my feet, very little time passed before I crashed headlong into a raspberry bush.

Meanwhile, Paisley remained blissfully unaware of my challenges and of how far I’d fallen behind. The little dog’s legs were almost invisible with her sprinting, hopping gait.

Trying to focus on Paisley meant not paying enough attention to the road ahead of me, and I thumped into a set of garbage cans, then jammed my knee into a fence post.

Maybe we should have followed her in the car. Too late for that now, I guessed.

Off-balance and disoriented, I was overwhelmed when I saw that Paisley was no longer surging forward. She now ran tight circles behind one of the condos.

“Mommy! Mommy!” she yelled. “It’s right here! This is the place!”

And there was my grandmother, sitting at a small patio table with Octo-Cat, who was happily munching on a shrimp cocktail. I stood there, woozily, my mouth opening and closing without any sound coming out. It would so leave the wrong impression if I threw up now.

Octo-Cat looked up at me and yawned before licking the sauce off his paw.

“Angela,” he purred. “This is your grandma Lyn. Lyn, Angela.”

“Hello, Angela,” Lyn said, almost as if she were responding to Octo-Cat. “Sorry for giving you the runaround, dear. I’m… Well, I was afraid you’d be disappointed, and I couldn’t stand the thought of you rejecting me.”

My heart felt like it was breaking for her. She had been just as worried about meeting me as I’d been about meeting her.

But before I could find something to say, she continued. “I was tipped off that you were heading my way when your friend… Um, what was her name again?”

“Sharon,” Octo-Cat replied.

“Ah, Sharon,” Lyn said as if prompted by Octo-Cat. “The reality star that was looking into me wasn’t the subtlest of people. So I knew you were coming here. When I saw you and your fellow sitting out in your car for so long, I knew it just had to be you.”

She poured more iced tea into her glass and added a few more shrimp to Octo-Cat’s cocktail.

“Of course, the moment you got out, I knew for certain. The family genes are extremely strong. You look so much like my sister did when we were growing up. But I’m sure that’s not why you made the trip out here.”

“Of course not,” Octo-Cat said, polishing off another shrimp. “We were here to find out why your husband decided to take your child and make a run for it.”

I winced at Octo-Cat’s bluntness.

“Relax, Angela. I understand how cats can be,” Lyn said, clucking her tongue and shaking her head. “And for the record, you’re right, Octavius. I lost my dear little Laura because her father didn’t believe me when I told him I could talk to animals. Such a shame.”

Whoa. I still hadn’t even said so much as hello, and already my grandmother had told me her big secret.

It was a secret we shared.

Did this mean…? Could I talk to animals because she could? I couldn’t wait to hear more.

16

A few minutes later, Lyn handed me an old photograph and a fresh glass of iced tea. She handed a second glass to Charles, settled back into her chair, and pulled Octo-Cat onto her lap.

I expected him to object, but he simply curled up and began purring.

“That’s your mother,” she said wistfully. “It was the only picture I had of her for so many years until I found her on the news. There’s so much I missed from all of your lives. But I guess I understand. Your grandfather wasn’t a bad man. He was just scared.”

I nodded along. Gosh, I just loved listening to her voice. She could talk forever, and I’d be her willing captive.

“It all started when I was working at the diner to pay my way through college,” Grandma Marilyn continued. “Jimmy, the owner, was a good enough guy, but he was also a cheapskate.” She glanced at me over the edge of her glasses, and I laughed. “He wanted to fix every last little thing himself. Said repair shops were all a scam to bilk the working man out of his hard-earned money.

“So when the power cord to our industrial sized coffee maker got frayed, Jimmy fixed it. It didn’t work that well, but cheap was better than good, if you asked him. As for me, I ended up taking quite a shock. When I woke up, I found the world a lot noisier than it had been.”

“Me, too!” I squealed, standing up and jabbing my thumb into my chest. “Oh my gosh, it was the exact same!”

Grandma Marilyn laughed. “Yes, Every animal was talking and the problem was that only I could understand what they were saying. I tried to keep it secret for as long as I could, but when animals know you can talk to them, they won’t leave you alone. I’m sure you understand that.

“William tried to be understanding. After all, we’d been together a short time and he thought maybe it was just overwork or some sort of ‘female thing’ that was causing me to think I could understand animals. And the doctors, they agreed with him. Claimed it was some sort of pregnancy-induced hysteria. Times were different back then. I didn’t have many rights as a young, unwed mother-to-be. William had done right by me and proposed. Our wedding wasn’t far off, either, until I started talking to cats and dogs. Then he found one reason after another to delay. And then with the doctors involved, I wound up on bed rest and drugged out of my mind on who knows what kind of drugs.

“I barely remember giving birth to Laura. In fact, for a time, William convinced me that I’d never been pregnant in the first place. I can’t really be mad at him. He thought he was helping me. If he didn’t really love me, I’m sure he would’ve just had me committed and taken off. But, though we never did make it official via marriage, he stuck with me through it all. Trying to fix me. Trying to get rid of the voices in my head.”

I squeezed Charles’s hand under the table.

My Grandma continued on, her eyes dry. As tragic as this tale was, she’d lived it. She’d already come to terms with how her life had turned out.

“For ten years I was in and out of institutions. Bouncing from one diagnosis to another. Schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, psychosis, detachment from reality. They threw everything at the wall to see what stuck.

“We ended up out in California of all places when I managed to talk to a desert cottontail. He was very different from any of the animals I’d spoken to before, and it sort of clicked in my mind that I wasn’t crazy, no matter how long doctors and my beau had been trying to convince me otherwise.

“I broke out of the hospital and went on the run. It was much easier in those days. No cell phones, no electronic credit card monitoring. It took actual phone calls and detective work to track down someone that didn’t want to be found.

“Sure, I hit a few speed bumps along the way, a couple of arrests and some close calls with my abilities, but I learned how to hide it from everyone, and I tried to appear normal for a time. Not much of a life, I know, but I was at least out of the hospitals.

“Of course, old William felt guilty and eventually tracked me down to a small town near the Florida-Georgia border. Gave me this picture of Laura, thanked me for letting him go so that he could find someone else. He said he still loved me, but that we weren’t any good for each other.

“I never saw him again after that. But knowing that your mother was out there, I had at last found a purpose. I drifted from town to town, doing whatever work I could find and making friends with any animals that might be able to help me track down my daughter.

“That’s actually why I’ve got such a large collection of flamingos out front. Each one represents a close friend I’ve made along the way. Of course, wild flamingos only live to be about twenty, so sadly, that display is more like a memorial.”