“Now. Let’s get back to this business of Grady and his big influence.” She put her hands on her hip and gave me the stink eye.
“You know as much as I do,” I tried to tell her through the mouthful of donut. “I heard it just like you at the nursing home salon.” My head jerked up. “Did you know Jenny Franklin is doing hair there now?”
Iris Peabody was a loyal customer to Jenny and had been for years.
“Old Alvie. The older he gets, the crabbier he gets.” Iris rolled her eyes. “The last time I was there, he started hem-hawing around about the hair getting in the filter of the house and how he’s having to change filters more often, which costs him money. I told her that I wouldn’t put up with his bull-malarkey, no way, no how.”
And Iris wouldn’t. In fact, Iris had created her business, Pie in the Face, after she’d caught Bobby Peters, her now ex-husband, cheating on her in their own bed. Not only were he and Piddy Satterly all snuggled up in Iris’s bed, they’d been eating Iris’s homemade pie right out of the pie plate.
Forget he was cheating; Iris never let anyone eat out of the pie plate. Bad manners. So she grabbed that plate and tossed it right into Bobby Peters’s and Piddy Satterly’s faces. Now when Bobby had to go to work in the morning, he had to pass the bakery, which was a stark reminder of what he’d done to Iris.
Piddy, well, she was married, too, and I’m not sure I’d ever seen her since. Rumor had it that Piddy steered clear of Iris because she was afraid to this day that Iris was going to call Elton, her husband. But Iris never did.
My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out of my cardigan.
“It’s Grady.” I slid my finger over the phone and unlocked it to get to my text messages. “I can’t believe I had that much influence on Stella Jane. Did you see the interview? I need to see it,” I read out loud.
“Don’t worry. Grandpa has it on DVR, and he keeps playing it over and over at the diner. I’m so proud of you,” I said out loud as I texted so Iris could hear me.
Instead of her butting in like she normally did and telling me to text something from her, she eased down into the small café chair we were still standing next to at the door.
“I’m taking my ten-thirty class to the opening of the bookstore and then a picnic lunch. Will I see you there?” he texted me back.
“Of course you will.” I ended the text with a heart emoji. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked Iris and slipped the phone back into my cardigan pocket.
“I’ve got a bad feeling, Bernadette.” She looked up at me with a strange and faintly familiar look in her eyes.
Chapter 4
“Walk with me,” I told her just as Geraldine walked in the door. “If this has to do with Grady, I want to know what the feeling is. And I’ve got to get this mail delivered so I can go to the bookstore’s opening at eleven. Which means you’re going too.”
And the day was going so good too.
I’d never experienced the feeling Iris was talking about. Did you ever hear someone say to you how they were thinking about you that morning and ran into you that day, when you’d not seen them in years?
That was Iris, but her ability to feel something was much deeper than thinking of someone. She’d get feelings of things that might happen that were bad. Maybe they weren’t accurate, but they were pretty close.
The morning my husband was killed in a car wreck, she told me she had a feeling. What I’ve found out, Iris’s feelings were only feelings and that it was practically impossible to decode them to stop whatever was going to happen.
“I’ll be back.” Iris grabbed her sweatshirt and pulled it over her head when she told Geraldine to hold down the shop.
“Okay,” she said.
We walked side by side, going in and out of the next few stores without talking to anyone in them. Just dropped off the mail and picked up the outgoing. “We need to figure out what the feeling is and who it’s about so we can stop whatever it is you’re trying to say is going to happen.”
“You mean like solve the problem before the problem occurs?” she questioned me in a very vague way.
“Let’s face it.” We took a left on Short Street, and I pulled the mail-carrier bag to the front of my body and reached in to grab the baggie of duck pellets to give to my duck friend who waited for me under the bridge that allowed walkers to cross over Little Creek. “Every time you’ve had this so-called feeling over the past year, it’s not been a good outcome.”
“Murder,” she gasped and grabbed the baggie, flinging all the duck food into the creek. She grabbed my arm and started dragging me over the bridge.
“Sorry, buddy, I won’t see you at the end of the road,” I called to my little duck friend since we usually had a little snack. Then he’d swim down to the end of the Little Creek Road where I used that bridge to walk back over to the post office to get my third loop of the day.
Not today. I wasn’t going to go that far down the road since that was my house, and I wasn’t letting Buster out or checking in on Rowena because I had the time constraint.
“He’s a duck,” Iris chirped with sarcasm. “This is a life-or-death conversation we need to have.”
“You’re right. And it worries me that you only got the feeling when Grady texted.” We took a left on Little Creek Road, walked past Mac’s house, and stopped outside of Harriette Pearl’s house.
Facing the other side of the street, which was all Little Creek, Iris stared at me with a fear on her face that made chills crawl up my spine.
“I have a bad feeling about that book.” She was able to pinpoint the item, but what was the feeling?
“Bad as in not a good book? Not going to sell well?” I questioned her and ignored the clearing of throats coming from Harriette’s porch.
“I don’t know. I just know it’s about the book, and since Grady is who the book is dedicated to, I think it makes me extra sensitive to the feeling.” Iris gnawed on her bottom lip and curled a gray strand of her hair around her finger.
“Come on. We don’t got all day to stand around.” Harriette had gotten up from her porch swing and stood at the top of the concrete steps leading up to the covered front porch. “We’ve got a bookstore opening to get to.”
Iris opened the gate leading into Harriette’s yard and left me on the sidewalk with my mouth gaping open.
How could she just leave me standing there after she told me she had a feeling, and it clearly was concerning Grady?
“Bernadette? You coming?” Iris turned around, holding the gate open.
“You are not off the hook,” I warned and walked past her. “Hello again, neighbors.”
“Do you have something for me?” Millie stuck out her hand.
“You know I do.” I loved how they were the typical cliché of the older-woman mentality that they could say or do anything without any regards to manners, but if I tried to pull that line on one of them, they’d knock me back in my place even though I was fifty years old. “I think they were baked fresh this morning.”
I set my mailbag on the top step and opened it to take out the fried hand pies my mom had made for her.