“I wouldn’t turn them in,” I said. “They never did anything to me.”
Another topic Linda hadn’t told us to avoid with our customers, or whatever you call them, was the Ashton Browning thing. As we went from house to house, I always mentioned how we were filling in for Ashton and followed that up with a couple of questions about what they thought of her. Surprisingly enough, many of them didn’t know she was missing. Either they didn’t pay attention to the news or they never knew her whole name and couldn’t see well enough to identify her picture on TV. But one thing was for sure—they all loved her.
“She had a real good sense of humor,” said one old-timer who came to the door in his bathrobe. “I’m a pretty good one with a joke myself, but she always came right back with one of her own.”
An old lady with lavender hair told us, “She was the only person who ever came up these front steps that my Mikey wouldn’t bark at.” Mikey was the homely dachshund who’d gone crazy barking at us when we knocked on the door.
“She used to go get my pills for me,” said another lady. “One time she even ran down to the store to get me some toilet paper, and believe you me, I needed it.”
I didn’t follow up with any more questions about that.
A couple of old ladies got to know Ashton especially well. Apparently, they didn’t like to go outside, not even onto the front porch. The first old lady, Miss Ockle, only cracked the front door to see who we were, but she was friendly enough and asked us to come in, unlike most of the others, who just grabbed their dinners and said goodbye before we could get much info.
“Yes, come on in, come on in,” said Miss Ockle. “If you’re friends of Ashton’s, I know my mother would love to see you.”
Her mother? This was a surprise since Miss Ockle appeared to be about a hundred years old herself. Her hair was dyed a faded gold, and her eyebrows were penciled on. She wore a shin-length flowered dress that could have doubled as a curtain. All in all, she looked like something from two universes away.
She led us into the cramped living room, where her mother sat hunched in an overstuffed chair, one of those walkers with tennis balls on the legs standing next to it. Her eyebrows matched her daughter’s, but she’d given up the dye job in favor of a natural yellowish-white color and wore an old nightgown instead of a dress. She had tubes leading from an oxygen tank stuffed into her nostrils. Obviously, she had trouble breathing, but that didn’t stop her from puffing on a cigarette.
After several tries, each louder than the one before, Miss Ockle got the idea across to Mrs. Ockle that we were friends of Ashton’s. A little smile bloomed beneath the nose tubes. Although Mrs. Ockle was only about the size of an adult pelican, her voice was a deep nicotine croak. “Ashton made better sandwiches than my own mother,” she said.
For a second, I feared that Mrs. Ockle’s mother—Miss Ockle’s grandmother—might be waiting somewhere in an even smaller room, but I remembered we only had two sandwiches for the household.
The subject of sandwiches propelled Mrs. Ockle into a story about peanut butter and jelly from her childhood, which threatened to throw us completely off schedule, so I cut in with a question about whether Ashton had ever talked about having any enemies.
“That girl?” Miss Ockle said. “Impossible.”
“Who?” croaked Mrs. Ockle.
“Ashton, Mama. Ashton. The sandwich girl.”
“That girl could sure make sandwiches.”
“Well,” I interrupted before the peanut-butter-and-jelly story cranked up again. “How about her brother? Did he have any enemies?”
Neither of the Ockle ladies seemed to know what I was talking about, so I explained that her brother had been the one helping her on her delivery route.
“Oh no,” said Miss Ockle. “That wasn’t her brother. He was her boyfriend.”
“Who?” asked Mrs. Ockle.
“Ashton’s boyfriend, Mama.” Then louder: “Ashton’s boyfriend.”
“So handsome,” Mrs. Ockle said dreamily. “He lived right next door.”
“No, Mama. He didn’t live next door. He just knew the people who lived next door.”
“He didn’t know the people who lived next door,” Mrs. Ockle argued. “Ashton knew the people who lived next door.”
“Oh, Mama. First you say her boyfriend lived next door, and then you say Ashton knew them. Make up your mind.”
“Who?”
Miss Ockle turned to us. “I do know one thing—the children on the street loved Ashton. I used to peek out the window and watch them run up to her, grinning like she was the Holy Mother herself come back to earth.”
By now it was pretty obvious we weren’t going to get a whole lot more useful information from the Ockle ladies, so I made an excuse to get out of there. Miss Ockle saw us to the door, but before we left, she touched my arm and peered into my eyes. “He really was her boyfriend,” she said. “I can tell those things. Just like I can tell that red-haired girl is your girlfriend.”
“Uh, enjoy your meal,” I said. That was all I could think of.
CHAPTER 23
On the front porch of the Ockle house, Trix burst out laughing. “I love those old ladies,” she said. “I want to be just like that when I’m a hundred.”
“I’ll turn your oxygen on for you,” Audrey said, and Trix was like, “Awesome.”
And that’s when I heard the kids laughing in the backyard next door.