“What did you use it for?”
Felix chuckled. “Believe it or not, it was near the front door. A handy place to dump the mail that needed to be checked out later, or to drop my car keys.”
“Nice handy place you got there, Felix, worth about a half-million dollars.”
“What can I say?” he said, taking another sip. “Fortune sometimes favors the brave, the lucky, and those too dumb to know what they have.”
“Why didn’t you check it out on the Internet?”
“Didn’t you tell me once that nobody knows you’re a dog on the Internet? Same idea. Unlike you, I didn’t have the time nor patience to scroll through lots of pages, trying to figure out what’s what. Which is why I went to Maggie.”
“She say anything to you at first?”
“Maggie was busy looking for a cat hiding somewhere in that barn, told me she’d get back to me, and just drop it on her desk. Which is what I did.”
Out on the ocean a sailboat was doing an expert job, beating against the wind, nearly tipping over in the process but always moving on.
“Do you think that gang might have it?” I asked.
“They just might at that,” he said. “And I’m not going to stop until I retrieve it.”
“Especially since you found out its real value.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“No?”
He paused, held the wineglass in his two strong hands. “It doesn’t matter if it’s worth a half-million dollars or fifty cents. It’s mine. It belongs to me. And I won’t allow anyone to steal it and think they got away with stealing anything from me.”
“Where do you go from here?”
The sound of vacuuming and more yelling came through the sliding glass doors. I turned and the two Greek brothers were at work in my living room, one working the vacuum, the other with a bunch of books under his arms, both yelling at each other.
Felix said, “Once the Spic ’n’ Span lads wrap up, it’s a visit to my own personal doc to see how my arm is doing, and then it’s back to work. These guys, they tend to be bold and brave when they scamper off or go to ground, and for a couple of days, it’s hard to track them. But at some point they loosen up. They go back to their hangouts, their girlfriends, their social clubs. And once you find one, that’s all it takes.”
“You got friends down there in Lawrence and Lowell?”
“No,” Felix said, finishing off his wine. “But I have people I pay money to. In the long run, that’s more important.”
The sun felt good, and with the wine and big meal, I dozed off in the comfortable wooden chair, not minding the gentle scrape of the sliding glass door opening and closing, and some other sounds back there; I just slept some outside—for the first time in months, I was sure, and that’s how the rest of my afternoon went.
A screeching seagull nearby woke me up; I yawned and stretched, careful not to disturb my drains. I got up and spent an extra few minutes folding the blanket, which gave me a nice small sense of accomplishment. Last week I would have dumped it on the chair and left it there for Paula or Diane to fold up, or for any renegade seagulls to use as a bathroom.
I opened the door and went inside. In the kitchen, everything had been washed and put away, and the counter and stovetop had been wiped down. I washed my face and hands, thinking this was the best I had felt in some time. I limped out into the living room with cane in hand, and I saw the two brothers had done a great job. I have bachelor sensibilities and can go a long way without cleaning, but even I could tell how things were clean, how furniture and shelves had been dusted.
All in all, things looked pretty good, though I would probably shift some things around and put those two bookshelves over there and—
Something was odd about my books.
I gimped forward and couldn’t help myself.
I burst out laughing, for the two young men had carefully shelved every book—and it looked like each volume had been dusted beforehand—placing them not according to subject, title, or author. Nope, the hundreds of books I owned and displayed down here had been shelved according to the color of the book cover. Yellow, sliding into blue, sliding into gray.
“Well done, fellas,” I said. “Well done.”
Even though it looked like I was standing in the middle of a paper-made kaleidoscope, I had to give them credit for taking the time and puzzling it out.
A knock at the door.
I recalled what Mia, the nice waitress from across the street, had said. Maybe one of these days I’d install a doorbell. Lord knows I was getting tired of people knocking here.
But then again, I was here 24/7, so that meant when I could be mobile, I could stay away from my lovely home and the lovely beach for hours at a time, disappointing my visitors but cheering myself up.
Back to the front of the house, as the door knock was repeated.
I spared a glance through one of the windows. Young, dark-haired woman, standing by herself, holding what looked like a map or brochure in her hand.
Lost tourist or sightseer?
I’ve had my share of them before, but usually in the three months we laughingly called summer in this chilly state.
I opened the door and the woman, who looked Hispanic and about sixteen or seventeen, smiled at me, holding up a brochure from the Tyler Beach Chamber of Commerce.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said shyly, her voice having just a trace of a Spanish accent. “Do you think you could help me?”
“Sure,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
Then two large Hispanic men quickly
