Isabel Puddles Abroad Read online

Isabel barely avoided a coffee spit take. Frances had been prying into her business since kindergarten and showed no signs of letting up. “Yes, that’s one thing I’ve always loved about you, Frances. You’re so good about minding your own business.”

  Frances ignored the remark. “When do you plan on leaving? And how long will you be gone?”

  “I’ll be gone the first two weeks of May. I told Freddie I’d be back in time to help him get ready for our Memorial Day sale.”

  “And the dogs?” Frances asked, searching for a hitch in the plan.

  “Ginny and Grady are coming to stay at the lake and dog-sit for me. And they’re taking me to the airport. So everything is squared away.” Ginny was Isabel’s cousin, and Grady, once the Kentwater County sheriff, was her new husband.

  The front door jingled. Isabel, Frances, and Kayla all turned to look and were immediately stunned into silence. Harold Stover and his wife had just walked in the door. Harold smiled and waved. “Yes, ladies, it’s me! I’m still on the right side of the dirt!” Nobody said a word. “They’ve got a new fella doing the obits down at the Gazette. He had me mixed up with ol’ Harold Stater, who passed a day or two ago.”

  “Oh, no.” Isabel said sadly. “Harry Stater died? He was such a lovely man. That’s a shame.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Isabel!” Harold laughed as he pulled a chair out for his wife, who seemed quite disinterested in the conversation.

  Frances leaned forward and whispered to Isabel. “You want to see disappointed, take a look at the wife.”

  Isabel smiled at Harold. “That’s not what I meant, Harold. I’m thrilled you’re still alive. But poor Harry Stater.”

  “Well, he was ninety-seven. It gets a lot of ’em, Iz,” Harold said as he casually opened the menu.

  After Isabel and Frances finished their breakfast, they paid their checks, waved goodbye to Kayla, and congratulated Harold on their way out for still being alive.

  “And where are you off to now, Mrs. Spitler?” Isabel asked, as she opened her tote bag and began fishing for her keys.

  “I’ve got to take my mother-in-law grocery shopping,” Frances answered with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

  “Well, that’s very nice of you,” Isabel replied, still digging for her keys.

  “I didn’t volunteer. I’d rather be put to death. But Hank seems to think we need to keep the old gal fed. And what about you, Mrs. Puddles?”

  “I’m off to the hardware,” Isabel replied after finally locating her keys. Isabel was still working part-time at her cousin Freddie’s hardware store, which was less a job than it was a family tradition. She’d been working at the store on and off since high school; first for her uncle Handy, and now for his son, Freddie, who was more like a brother to her. “I’ll catch up with you later, Frances,” Isabel said as she climbed into her van, then yelled back, “and be nice to your mother-in-law, Frances! Someone’s going to have to keep you fed in your old age too!” Frances just rolled her eyes and waved her off.

  Although she still had her office above the store—one that Freddie was nice enough to redo for her when she received her private investigator’s license—today the Isabel Puddles Private Investigation Agency was pretty much defunct. All that was left to do was scratch the lettering off the frosted-glass door. After successfully closing the Bachmeier case, Isabel had decided, in a moment of clarity, that private investigating was not a career path she wanted to travel any longer. And although she had been encouraged to go back to college after solving the Jonasson murder case to pursue a degree in criminal justice, she had officially stepped off that path too. Yes, she did seem to have a flair for solving crimes, and murders did seem to be her sweet spot, but she had come to find it all just too depressing. Waiting around for a murder to solve seemed like a pretty ghoulish way to earn a living.

  When Isabel and her late husband, Carl, went away to college together, just out of high school, her plan was to study literature and get her teaching degree. But that plan was put on hold when Carly came along. And after Charlie was born, the plan was never re-implemented. It may have taken a while, but after a few decades she was finally back on track. Today she was taking classes online and pursuing a degree in literary studies at Michigan State, the university she had gone to those first two years. No more classes in bullet-wound analysis or crime-scene technology or blood-spatter patterns or looking at gruesome photographs of murder victims. Although she did find her criminal psychology classes interesting, Isabel now felt she knew everything she needed or wanted to know about the criminal mind.

  The moment she made the final decision to leave the criminal justice program, Isabel felt a tremendous sense of relief, but she was still determined to complete her college degree. So in only a matter of weeks she was a student again, and was now studying something that left her feeling happy and hopeful about human nature, instead of disheartened and disillusioned about how evil people could sometimes be.

  The world of literature—English and American, mostly—had always been a passion for her. Reading classic literary works provided her with a window into history, another passion of hers, and it exposed her to a whole world outside Gull Harbor without her ever needing a passport. But Isabel Puddles was a woman who knew her limits. Many of the other “great works”—in her mind, a subjective term if ever there was one—left her scratching her head. Her decision to take an ancient literature class was a particular disaster. Bring up Homer and The Iliad or The Odyssey, and she practically broke into hives. After slogging through as much of it as she could endure, and understanding none of it, she finally dropped the class. “I’m not a quitter,” she told her kids in their weekly phone chat, “but I’m not a masochist either.”

  Carly supported her mother’s decision to drop the class and reminded her about the time she had supported her when she walked out of tenth-grade biology after refusing to dissect a frog. Charlie then took his mother back to her unwillingness to support his efforts to drop eleventh-grade shop class when the curriculum turned to fixing automobile transmissions. “The likelihood of me ever fixing a transmission was about the same as Carly ever having to do emergency surgery on a frog. I thought it was a pretty egregious double standard at the time, and I still do today.”

  Isabel laughed. “You’re absolutely right. I was being selfish, and I’m sorry for that. I just remember thinking at the time that having a kid who could fix a transmission would be a lot handier than having one who could extract a frog’s liver. But I do think it’s time to let it go, honey.”

  Chapter 2

  When Teddy’s last letter arrived, gently reminding Isabel that his invitation to visit him was still standing, she happened to have just completed a literary history class on eighteenth-century English writers. It had to be a sign, she told herself. So before talking herself out of it, and before Frances caught the scent and talked her out of it, she immediately wrote Teddy back, thanked him for his gracious invitation, and accepted.

  The whole time the letter sat in her mailbox with the red flag up, alerting her mailman, Barney, that she had outgoing mail, she wrestled with her decision. More than once when she looked out her kitchen window and saw the flag still up, she stopped herself from running out and grabbing it. But after leashing up Jackpot and Corky to take them for a lunchtime walk, she opened the front door to see that the red flag was down. Barney had come and gone, and Isabel Puddles was going abroad.

  One of her lifetime dreams—to visit England—was about to come true, and she could hardly believe it. From that day forward she teetered between excitement and anxiousness. This was the most adventurous thing Isabel had ever done in her life, and she was doing it alone. But Teddy would be waiting for her at the other end, so she knew she was in good hands.

  When she walked into the hardware, Isabel found Cousin Freddie in a particularly chatty mood while ringing up a customer she didn’t recognize. After quietly walking behind the counter and grabbing her red apron, she pulled it over her h
ead, tied it up, and got busy with her ritual straightening of the counter while waiting for Freddie to finish the transaction. “Who was that?” she asked after the front door closed behind the man.

  “I have no idea,” Freddie answered with an odd lilt in his voice, closing the cash register drawer with a flourish. “How are you today, Cousin?” Freddie asked, grabbing her in a bear hug.

  After he released her, Isabel looked up at him somewhat suspiciously. “Why are you in such a good mood today, Freddie? I’ve never seen you so excited about selling a pair of fifteen-dollar garden sheers.”

  “Oh, it’s not that! Although fifteen bucks is better than a kick in the teeth. I’ll tell you why I’m so excited. I just found out Frank has appendicitis! He’s going in for surgery in a couple days and he’ll be laid up for the next month or two! Three, knowing Frank!”

  Isabel was taken aback by her normally kindhearted cousin’s callousness regarding the illness of the stock boy who had worked for him for two decades. Despite Frank’s never coming close to attaining the status of being “a keeper” in her opinion, Freddie continued to keep him. But that was a personnel matter, so she stayed out of it. She knew Freddie must have his reasons for keeping him around, although, again, in her view there were plenty more reasons not to. Frank was lazy, grumpy, showed zero initiative, and did nothing unless he was asked, and he usually had to be asked twice. And when he finally did do it, he never did it very well, so Isabel or Freddie would end up having to redo it. Freddie once grumbled, “It’s like having a milk cow in the barn you have to feed every day but it never gives you any milk.” Isabel thought it was a pretty apt analogy. But what bugged her most about Frank was the man’s chronic negativity. Make a passing comment to him about what a beautiful sunny day it was, and twenty seconds later you’d be talking about some uncle of his losing an ear to skin cancer. Still, whatever her personal feelings were, she would never wish serious illness and major surgery on him.

  “That’s not even the best part!” Freddie continued gleefully.

  “Good Lord, Freddie! Listen to yourself! What, are his kidneys failing too? Is that what has you so giddy?”

  “Oh, Isabel, stop being ridiculous,” Freddie chuckled. “No! Not five minutes after I got off the phone with Frank’s mother, who called to share this terrible news—”

  “The term terrible news is not, as a rule, accompanied by an ear-to-ear grin!” Isabel scolded.

  Freddie took a breath. “As I was saying, not five minutes later, who do you think called, but Andy! He wants to come back to work for the summer!”

  Andy was the college student and stock clerk extraordinaire who had worked at the store the summer before. Not that Frank needed anybody to make him look bad, because he did a pretty great job of that himself, but Andy hammered the final nail into that coffin. Andy knew right where to find that hammer and nail too, whereas Frank still wouldn’t be able to tell you what aisle hammers or nails were on after twenty years. He could, however, rattle off about a dozen different spots within the store and in lawn and garden where you could hide out and take a nap.

  Isabel couldn’t help herself. She smiled. “Well, it’s not like appendicitis is a death sentence. Pretty simple surgery, really. And he could probably do with a nice long convalescence.”

  Freddie laughed and clapped his hands together. “I would think Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend would be sufficient, wouldn’t you, Iz?”

  “That sounds about right,” she agreed. “Don’t want to rush these things.” Having Andy back in the store for the summer would make her life a whole lot easier, and she adored the boy, so this was indeed a happy development.

  Business was slow, so Isabel left early to go home and continue her packing. The closer she got to her departure date, the more nervous she was getting about her first trip outside the United States, and so were her dogs, Jackpot and Corky. They knew some serious change was coming, and they were not happy about it. That morning she made the mistake of leaving her half-packed suitcase out on her bed, returning to find they had expressed their opinion about her upcoming trip by pulling everything out, piling it in the middle of the floor, and then, based on the amount of fur she found, napping on it.

  Isabel looked at her empty suitcase on the bed and felt a pang of embarrassment. She’d had the old hard-case American Tourister for at least twenty years and it was in pretty ratty condition. The color was hard to call but it looked like it was trying to be yellow, which was likely just another sign of age. It was time to upgrade. She called Frances to see if she wanted to go shopping, knowing she would say yes, because Frances lived to shop, in fact she counted it as exercise. And the way she shopped, it was.

  After Frances picked her up, and because she never missed an opportunity of late to try to convince Isabel to change her mind about the trip, she regaled her with a story she claimed to have heard on the news about a lonely American widow who flew to Amsterdam to meet a man she had been corresponding with online. Two weeks later she was found dead, floating in a canal. It was Frances’s version of a helpful cautionary tale. But at breakfast the next morning she had to update the story, and with some measure of disappointment. It seems the woman had not in fact been murdered by her new Dutch lover but had tripped into the canal trying on a pair of newly purchased wooden clogs. “Clop, clop, clop, splash!” Frances laughed. Ghoulish, inappropriate jokes were Frances Spitler’s specialty, and she never missed an opportunity.

  Easter dinner came and went, and Frances, thankfully, had dropped the whole pheasant idea and decided to stick with ham. They did, however, plan to prepare the pheasant for what would be Isabel’s last Sunday dinner before leaving for England. Freddie and Carol, Ginny and Grady, Frances and Hank, and Isabel, all sat down to a beautiful dinner of roasted pheasant with a cherry-and-balsamic sauce she had prepared, and an assortment of delicious sides prepared by her guests, mindful that Isabel had too much on her plate to spend the whole day in the kitchen.

  As they sat down to enjoy the homemade cheesecake Frances brought for dessert, Isabel looked around the table and was suddenly reminded of her singleness, and felt a pang of loneliness, which was unusual for her. After a twenty-three-year marriage that started out as promising and ended up as tolerable, becoming a truly independent woman—albeit by way of widowhood—was something she was not only proud of but also something she had grown quite used to. She had never really experienced true independence before. Isabel would freely admit to having been fairly sheltered growing up as an only child with two wonderfully devoted parents who showered her with love and attention. And although there were many times she felt completely alone in her marriage to Carl, technically she wasn’t. But tonight she found herself wondering what it would be like to be part of a couple again.

  Ginny and Grady seemed very happy together, and if they weren’t, Isabel would have heard about it, but they were still newlyweds. She and Carl were happy once too. Freddie and Carol had been together since junior high and were as devoted to each other as any couple Isabel had ever known. When it came to Frances and Hank? Well, theirs was a marriage that had its ups and downs—and Isabel had been through all of them—but there was no doubt the love was still there.

  Isabel even went on to wonder if perhaps, even subconsciously, her trip to England was more about spending time with Teddy than it was about visiting the United Kingdom. But she quickly shook that notion out of her head. For one thing, Teddy had given her no indication that he was interested in anything beyond a friendship. If romance was on his mind, he was doing a good job of hiding it. And how would a romance between them work anyway, with them living on opposite sides of the Atlantic? No, it was silly to even ponder. Isabel was merely going to spend time with a new friend who lived in a country that had captured her imagination when she first saw Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady as a little girl. She had never stopped imagining what it would be like to visit, and now it was actually happening.

  After her guests left, Isabel ma
de a cup of chamomile tea and sat down with her knitting. When the phone rang, she knew it was the kids. They almost always called on Sundays after dinnertime, and they had some way by which they could call their mother together, and then all three of them could talk. It was always the highlight of her week. They had recently talked about some means by which they could talk and see one another at the same time, but Isabel told them she would need some time to ease into that. There were limits to her embrace of modern technology, and in her mind, that was something Jane Jetson might do, but not Isabel Puddles.

  Carly began with inquiries about the new clothes they had picked out for her trip. Had everything arrived? Did everything fit? “Yes, honey, everything has arrived, and, yes, it all fits. But it feels so, I don’t know, too sophisticated for me maybe?”

  “Mom, you’re traveling to one of the world’s most sophisticated cities. You don’t want to look like some frumpy American tourist with no taste.”

  “Well, I like to think I do have taste, but I am a frumpy American tourist. And it’s not like I’ll be having tea with the queen. And, by the way, she’s a little on the frumpy side too, so I’m in good company.”

  “She’s the queen, Mom. She gets to be frumpy. You don’t have that luxury,” Carly said in her usual matter-of-fact way.

  “Well, I’ve got everything packed, and I appreciate all the effort you put into helping me shop, I really do, but I’m packing my duck boots, my big sweaters, and my mom jeans for Cornwall. I understand it can get chilly there so close to the sea.”

  “You do you, Mom,” Carly replied, slightly exasperated.

  Now it was Charlie’s turn to enter the fray. “First of all, you aren’t frumpy, Mom.”

  “Thank you, honey.”

  “I’d say you’re more dowdy,” he added.

  Isabel laughed. “Is that a step above or below frumpy?”

  “I think it goes drab, frumpy, dowdy. But Carly’s right. You have to bring your fashion A game because I’ve booked you into a very fancy hotel. It’s called the Tottenham. I stayed there on my last visit to London. It’s very near Buckingham Palace. Maybe you can drop in on Her Majesty.”