Page 22 of The Bad Weather Friend

“Kablooey.”

“Yeah. I think whatever did this, it’s in the garage now.”

“‘It’?”

“That’s why I’m carrying the golf club. How long is Fat Bob going to take to get here?”

“Bob.”

“Yeah. Whatever did this, it’s probably back in its box, though I don’t think it’ll stay there. I braced the door with a chair, but that seems kind of lame.”

Harper Harper cocked her head and regarded him with a bemused expression. “The intruder is in a box in the garage?”

“Something like a casket. It came in a crate. I opened the crate. At first the casket, if it is a casket, was this streamlined steel container, very minimalist, you wouldn’t have liked it. Then it was carved and painted and ... weird. Colonel Clerkenwell shipped it from Boca Raton. He said there was nothing to be afraid of. Maybe I’m being judgmental, but I think the colonel is a liar. Something extraordinary is going on here, maybe supernatural. That sounds crazy. But if you think I’m crazy, you’re wrong.”

“You’re not crazy,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“I know crazy when I see it. You’re just stressed.”

“I’m very stressed. I lost my job, people don’t return my phone calls anymore, and my girlfriend left me.”

Putting her purse on one of the few clean counters, Harper said, “All of that’s just so much blah.”

“It’s what?”

“Blah. Life throws a lot of blah at us, and the mistake we make is taking it seriously.”

“No job, no prospects, no girlfriend. I take that seriously.”

“You see? Mistake. You’ll get another job, and it’ll be better than the one you lost, and a new girl will come along. You know what’s really stressing you?”

“You don’t remember the casket thing in the garage and what might be in it?”

“Blah. Maybe nothing’s in it.” She spread her arms wide to indicate the condition of the kitchen. “What’s really stressing you is this mess. If we clean it up together, you’ll feel a lot better.”

“What about Fat Bob?”

“Bob. This isn’t the kind of mess Bob cleans up.”

“But the mess is evidence. Isn’t it evidence?”

“No,” said Harper. “Where do you keep your cleaning supplies?”

He took her to the closet and opened the door.

She said, “Wow. You’ve got everything.”

“There are so many different kinds of dirt,” he said. “You need just the right product to deal with each of them.”

WAITING FOR BOB

Harper was right. Benny felt better once the kitchen was clean again, but there was too much white. That was confirmed for him now. He had gone overboard on white. Maybe his obsession with white decor had offended Handy Duroc, which was why he’d been asked to leave Surfside Realty.

“That makes no sense,” Harper said when he shared his white-decor theory of self-ruination.

As it was the only theory Benny had, he clung to it. “A lot of things in life don’t make sense.”

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