[Separate ,Pleasures ,Daintily ,Important ,Rotten]

  It feels like forever, I’m seated in my favorite chair. In my favorite bookstore, my own, ‘Genres’. Which is located in my house, with a delightful view of Mirror Lake. I’m about to re-read my favorite book, The Lord of the Rings, for the very first time in fifty years. Up to a week ago I could tell you word for word the text of the story. But a blow to the head and my eidetic memory turned fuzzy to all the prior details.

  I still have my eidetic memory. If you remember phone books, I could read through a page and when asked for the number of a particular John Smith 5 Elm St. I could and still can rattle off the number with ease. But like I said the stuff before the blow to the head is now fuzzy, post blow memory everything is as clear as it can be.

  I could be upset that sixty five years of knowledge was now out of focus. But as a matter of fact, I’d long wished for the ability that most other people just take for granted. They can forget things. Christopher Lee could read the Lord of the Rings every Christmas with fresh eyes, because he didn’t know it word for word. I’m sure there are passages of the text that he did know precisely as they were written. Still enough of it was new enough to him that the book never grew stale in his eyes.

  Now was my chance to experience what I’d so long wished for. I was also worried that before I got to experience this joy, my eidetic memory would just pop back on and ruin it. I’d completely cleared the day, Lucy was manning the register and promised to wait on every customer that came through the door. I had a cup of tea, if I smoked, I would have lit up a pipe, the one vice I know that Tolkien enjoyed. Now was the time, I’d been waiting fifty years for this moment. I was almost too nervous with anticipation to begin, but, begin I did.

  “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would

  shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of

  special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in

  Hobbiton.”

  When it suddenly came crashing down.

  “Laura, your cousin the chief of police is here to see you.”

  I slammed the book close, come on. One sentence, and what did August want. I was still pretty peeved over the actions of the Lake Placid police department. I was still waiting for the official apology not for myself but for Monique who through police incompetence had been arrested for a murder she did not commit.

  I walked over to the register, prepared to receive the apology on Monique’s behalf. I was going to try and be gracious. Not make further fun of the incompetents that worked under his command. I put on a smile.

  “Hello August, I assume you are here to deliver a formal apology.”

  “No, Laura, I am not. You know that the town attorney would never allow that. If I offered an official formal apology, the town would then be wide open to a lawsuit. The mayor already offered a very generous settlement to Ms Miller.”

  “A few lousy thousands of dollars, you think that makes up for two nights in jail where the poor girl rightly feared that she would spend the rest of her life. Oh that’s supposed to just make up for the dereliction of duty and cowardice. When my attorney begged Jones to arrest me so she could rip him apart in court, did he man up and do it. No, he arrested the weakest, most vulnerable person on the property in an attempt to get back at me, because he knew that he couldn’t touch me.”

  “Look Laura, ma wouldn’t want us to be fighting about this.”

  “No, she wanted you to take over the store and the collective, which you refused to do. So don’t tell me what my aunt wanted. I know exactly what she would have wanted. She’d demand an apology for the affront to common decency and she wouldn’t have accepted less, along with any record of arresting Monique be completely and utterly destroyed.”

  “That’s not even possible, once an arrest is made an arrest report is generated and it is automatically added to the Criminal Justice Database in Albany. I can’t erase a record on the state database.”

  “Yes, it's a very simple thing to do. You call Albany and you tell them that I’m a big stupid local police chief who hired an even dumber politician's son, who I then allowed to arrest an innocent girl. Please delete the record, before my very angry cousin sues us all, the head of Criminal Justice all the way down to the idiot cop who made the arrest. If the state was stupid enough to build a database, where a mistake can not be corrected, I think the people who paid to have that database built have a right to know. Thank you August for now providing me with material for my fifth essay to send to the gazette. I think the wire services will pick this one up for sure. Police Chief admits New York State database flawed, state paid millions for a computer system that has no delete key. Your tax dollars at work.”

  “Laura, when you are like this you are impossible to talk to. I came over here to tell you that we fired Jones, he’s gone. Done finished. Just like you wanted. So you are welcome. Tell Ms Miller that, it may be a little comfort for the time that she spent in jail, as now Jones has no means of livelihood.”

  “So we are now supposed to feel sorry for Jones, because he lost his job. How could someone so stupid get the job in the first place, oh yeah. I already have the answer to that one, his father the county executive, the main subject of essay number three. I’m sure all the county voters will be happy to learn how he spends his working hours assuring that his son has a cushy job somewhere. Well I’m going to find out where and when Jones gets hired and if it’s in the county, I don’t care if the town gives Monique a million dollars. I will make it my business to find every slimly little thing that the county exec has done since being elected. So get Monique’s name out of any and all databases and come back here with an apology you’ve got five more days before I send the first one to the gazette, August. You can let the mayor know that this week the mystery book club will be talking about true crime and true incompetence, he should join his wife, she's the head of the club. I’m sure the whole bookclub will find it enlightening. The good boy network is alive and well in Essex county.”

  “You are just like my mother, no wonder you’re running the place. She always did just whatever the hell she wanted to. Well we can fight dirty too, Laura. How would business be if we didn’t let buses down this residential street anymore.”

  “So now cousin, you are threatening me. Isn’t that always the way, a man fights with his intellect until he discovers he’s outmatched, then it’s straight to threats and physical violence. Well, I’ll tell you how business would be for the two biggest inns in town if suddenly the chief of police closed bus traffic off to their inns because he was having a squabble with his cousin. It’d be pretty poor, all of the business affected might just join together to do something about it. So you go right ahead cousin, because you are so impotent that you can’t get a wrongful arrest removed from a database and so scared of the town’s attorney that you can’t apologize to a young girl that your department has wronged. You go ahead and close the street. Close the whole damn town if it makes you happy, August. I guess it’s the one thing you can actually accomplish.”

  “Fine, I’ll get the arrest expunged, if you promise to erase that essay.”

  “You, go upstairs and apologize to Monique, no one has to know that you did it, except you and her, get her out of any and all databases and I won’t send that essay. But if I hear that Jones is a cop in this county, you know that I will write a pretty scathing essay, about the job he did here and I’ll make it my business to find out why the sheriff fired him. So just tell the mayor to call his good buddy the county exec and tell him not to get his son another job as a cop or the whole county will know the who’s how’s and why’s of the situation.”

  “Fine, which room is Monique’s, unofficially I’ll apologize to the girl. If it hadn't been my day off, she never would have been arrested anyway. So I guess that she deserves to hear it from me.”

  “Thank you August, I knew you’d do the right thing.”

  I told him the room, and up he went. He could always be irritating but in the end he usually did the right thing. Even if you had to hit him with an oar to get him to do it. An apology would be cold comfort, for what Monique had endured but it was a start.

  “Come on out Lucy, I know you are lurking back there in the stock room.”

  “Sorry, Laura. I thought he had you there when he threatened to close the street. I guess he forgot, you weren’t the only business on the street.”

  “Lucy, people in power always think they can get what they want. Because they think they can control you, by denying you your desires. But they don’t know just what exactly you do desire. If you desire the right things, they don’t have it in their power to deny you anything. Have you read civil disobedience by Thoreau yet?”

  “No.”

  “You definitely should read it. They locked him up for refusing to pay his taxes which he refused to pay because that money helped support slavery and a war in Mexico. Both of which he thought were wrong. He’d still be sitting in jail sitting on his principles unless someone else had paid the tax for him. But in reality you could put a man like Thoreau’s body in jail but you could never confine his mind there. They thought they could bully him into paying, but they didn’t understand that Thoreau desired a free and clear conscience above his physical freedom. So when August threatened closing the street he didn’t realize that it wouldn’t have bothered me at all. Sure we’d lose a little business for the few days it was closed. But just think how glorious it’d be if he did close the street for a few days. I could read twenty four seven until I dropped from exhaustion. Plenty of free time to read the Lord of the Ring’s which I’m going to get back to. I only got the first sentence read before he arrived.”

  “I didn’t know he was your cousin, why didn’t you go to him earlier, about Jones.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t have been right. No one else who was being hassled by Jones could go to their cousin, the chief of police, because he only has one first cousin, me. I only went to him, after the threat came in and you received it. By the time Jones had arrested Monique, which was a complete surprise to me, it was too late for police intervention. By then only the district attorney had the power to dismiss the charges. But when I saw how upset you were with that idle threat, I thought it was time to act.”

  “Thanks Laura, but I wasn’t scared.”

  “I know honey, but Harry ruined something special to you. Project Marginalia, so we couldn’t just take that lying down.”

  August was coming down the stairs from Monique’s room when he asked? “Laura, you got me so upset before I forgot I have to ask some questions about Monique’s identification, she claimed it was a woman that killed the drug dealer. Harry confessed but did he have an accomplice? We haven’t caught yet?”

  “No, August, the first time I heard Monique’s story about the killing, she was still in jail. But I knew something was wrong with the story, I mean she was only three years old. She said she saw just two people, a man and a woman in a clearing and that the woman hit the man with a hatchet. Then the woman saw her and ran after her. She found a good hiding spot and had. But she heard a man calling for her, not a woman. So I suspected that the three year old girl had seen a man with long hair and mistook him for her. I showed her Harry’s picture when he still had long hair and asked her to identify them. She remembered the face and the hair and did correctly identify him but as a her. I’ll bet if you question Harry he’ll admit to cutting his hair shortly after the murder to make it harder to identify him.”

  “Well, why didn’t you tell us all that the other day?”

  “Because I thought it’d be obvious to everyone, that this is what had happened.”

  “Now I have to amend my report, because no, it was not obvious. I missed it completely; it was the assistant district attorney that questioned me on the discrepancy. The next time you solve a murder case, do the denouncement properly will you. You’ve read enough mysteries haven’t you.”

  “The mysteries I read do not go into minutia like that, they expect the careful reader has already come to the same conclusion and wouldn’t want to be lectured to like they were a pack of simpletons. You are the chief of police, these sorts of connections should just leap out at you.”

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “Fine, fine, Laura, I don’t want to argue any more. I hope you are satisfied, Monique got her apology and was very gracious about it. For my part I’m sorry that anything like this has happened to her. But, you too deserve some of the blame, I’ve been telling you for years to vet these writers before inviting them into your home.”

  “Yes you have, and I was already feeling guilty about it. But one bad apple in fifty years, that’s pretty good. I’m not going to start invading people’s privacy because one person did something wrong. Instead, once they arrive I’ll remain vigilant. It’s better to see what a person is like than to hear what a person is like. Do I need to vet every officer in your department, now, based on the actions of Jones?”

  “No, please don't, they are a good group of boys.”

  “Maybe that’s your problem right there, a group of boys. Perhaps adding some women to the mix would help.”

  “It’s just an expression, Laura, just an expression. I have some very talented female officers.”

  “Good, glad to hear it.”

  “Lucy, you are in charge, I’m going to start the Fellowship.”

  “I’ve got you Laura, enjoy.”

  I went back to the stores reading nook and my favorite chair, with my favorite book of the trilogy, everything was perfect. I began to read.

  “Laura, Amy is here for you.”

  I had only made it one sentence into the novel when Lucy had called for me. I daren’t ignore Amy. I had done it enough in high school as I read one trilogy after another. I was obsessed with finding another book as good as Tolkien's masterpiece. I mean there are millions of books in the world, what are the odds that I would read one of the best so early in life. Miniscule that what they are. So like a heroin user chasing the dragon, I jumped from trilogy to trilogy. None were close to the perfection that Tolkien achieved. Of course none of them had put in the time and the effort that he had either.

  I put the book down and went over to the sales counter. Amy stood there, her eyes brimming with tears.

  “Amy, Amy, what’s wrong, what’s happened, what can I do?”

  “I’m sorry, Laura, I didn’t think I’d get this emotional. I’m just so grateful that you’ve given me a job.“

  “A job? But what about dispatch, you love dispatch?”

  “I was politely asked to leave to make room for a new generation. I’ve been training him for the past month. Lovely boy, but dumb as a box of rocks. But I wrote him a whole binder full of notes. So he should be fine.”

  “I didn’t know that you were planning on retiring.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it. I was going to work another two and a half years until I can take my full social security, until then, I just have to live on my pension and my savings. That is until Bianca offered me the job as the new cook.”

  “I didn’t know you liked to cook, Amy.”

  “I don’t like to cook, but I had nothing else to do, you don’t want me to sit in that horrid little house all day by myself do you?”

  “No of course I don’t, I want you to be happy. But shouldn’t we be fighting to get you your job back.”

  “No, they were very clear that once I signed the retirement papers, there was no way to ever go back. If I kept the job, I was just keeping some young person from their opportunity to help the community like I did for thirty years.”

  She looked like she was ready to cry, so I wanted to get her someplace private and give her a little privacy.

  “Come on with me Amy, I’ll make you a cup of tea and a cookie.”

  This brightened her up a little bit. We went to the kitchen and I put the kettle on and opened a new box of cookies. We sat and chatted and she seemed a little calmer.

  “Laura what am I supposed to make for supper?”

  “I don’t know Amy, umm, what would you make if you were home cooking for yourself.”

  “Well I never fuss just for myself, I might make spaghetti with butter. Or maybe spaghetti with butter and garlic and sometimes I make spaghetti with olive oil and garlic and parmesan cheese, if I want something special.”

  “I didn’t know that you were such a fan of spaghetti, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you order it when we’ve been out to supper.”

  “Well, no Laura, I eat it almost every night at home. Why would I want to order it when I go out, that would just be crazy.”

  “You are right Amy, that would be crazy. Why don’t we look and see what’s in the fridge, then you and I can make something together that will be fun right?”

  “I didn’t think you could cook Laura.”

  “Well I’m not really very great at it, no but between the two of us we can whip something up. I’ll get my laptop and we’ll get started.”

  “What do you want your laptop for?”

  “For real kitchen magic, Amy. It’s the first thing I learned when I was editing a book on search engines.”

  I ran back to my room and grabbed my laptop, and hurried back to the kitchen.

  “Okay Amy, open the refrigerator door, and just tell me what’s in there.”

  “Um, let’s see, ground beef, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese.”

  “Now check this out, Am.”

  She came over and watched me type in all the ingredients she had listed, then add the word recipe at the end then hit enter to search. This gave us a list of things that we could make with the ingredients that we had on hand, along with pictures and instructions to make it.

  “Why didn’t you use google Laura?”

  “Because is just amazing, plus they don’t track you. Best search engine in the world, plus they make it really easy to search other sites too. If you don’t like the results from Duck. Just put your cursor back in with the search terms you already typed then just add !G and viola it search’s goggle for you. That’s called a bang. You can search tons of other sites with bangs too. Google can’t or most likely won’t do that. So which one looks good to you Amy?”

  “Let’s make Creamy Mushroom & Ground Beef Casserole Bake, the picture looks great. I hope ours comes out that good.”

  “What do you want me to do Amy?”

  “Just sit there and keep me company, I’m the new house cook. I was just nervous before, it’s been thirty years since I started a new job. I’ll bake some fresh bread to go with this. That is, if you have any yeast, do you have any yeast?”

  “I’ll check, if we don’t I’ll go buy some, I haven’t watched anyone bake bread since my aunt passed away. I used to love sitting in here reading and watching her cook.”

  “Who do you think taught me how to bake bread? Your Aunt is who.”

  I checked the fridge and the cabinet but no yeast was to be found.

  “I’ll be back in just a little bit with the yeast Amy.”

  “Make sure, you get as big a jar as they have, I plan to do a lot of baking in here.”

  “The writers are going to be so glad that you retired Amy. I know I am.”

  While I was in the market, I picked up some flour, sugar and salt, just in case we didn’t have enough. I was really panicking when she listed her fourth way to cook spaghetti. I thought the writers are a generally patient lot of people but four days of spaghetti variations would probably put them over the edge.

  When I got back, Amy had my laptop playing lofi focus music and moved around the kitchen like she had worked in it for thirty years, not thirty minutes.

  “I’ll bring my own laptop tomorrow, Laura. I want to rearrange all these cabinets too and tomorrow I need to go shopping after I finish cooking breakfast.”

  “Whatever you want to do Em. This is your kitchen, but you’ll need to keep an eye on your cleanup staff and make sure they put the stuff back where you want it, not where they are used to putting it.”

  “Bianca said she was renovating the third floor, and there would be a bedroom up there for me if I wanted it. Would it put a strain on our friendship if I took her up on that Laura?”

  “No way, Amy, I’d love that. High school sleepovers with you were the best, I hated to see the weekend end and for you to go home.”

  “Me too Laura, me too. Alright I’m going to start baking the bread, so you go get your book. You don’t actually have to talk, just you sitting there reading makes me feel like home.”

  “Are you sure Amy? We can chat if you want to.”

  “Nope, all is right with the world, August said I’d get used to being retired. I just don’t think he knew just how fast it would happen.”

  I walked down to get my book, I loved sitting in the reading nook with my book, but now I had a second favorite place to read. THe kitchen while Amy calmly walked around cooking or baking and true to her word we didn’t say a word to each other. She was busy cooking and baking and I was busy reading. Life couldn’t be any better.