Spare Change (Wyattsville #1)(21)

Benjamin began crying and pleading like a man afraid for his life, “It wasn’t my fault,” he sobbed, “it was her…she was the one…always saying she was gonna leave…always talking about how she was going to New York…”

Perhaps it was the mention of New York, perhaps it was knowing that Susanna was leaving to spend the rest of her life with him; there’s no telling what finally caused Scooter to snap—but he suddenly lifted Susanna’s husband into the air and hurled him through the plate glass window. Not even the sight of Benjamin lying on the front lawn, a spear of glass rammed through his shoulder and his face covered in blood, was enough to quell Scooter’s rage. He stormed outside like an angry bull and stomped on the man’s head, time and time and time again until the left side of Benjamin’s skull cracked open and his face was no longer recognizable. Scooter Cobb then got into his white Cadillac and drove off.

Ethan saw it all. He heard the screams and cries. He tasted blood trickling down his own throat, the same as his daddy. He felt a stream of urine run down his leg; yet through it all, he stood there too petrified to move. Ethan wanted to make himself small, so small he could burrow into the ground like an ant or a beetle bug, small enough that Scooter Cobb would forget he ever existed. He curled himself into a ball, rolled under the wisteria and stayed there for hours after the white Cadillac’s headlights had faded from view.





Olivia Doyle

Some people think superstitions are pure nonsense, but I say they give a person fair warning; if you choose to pay them no heed, then stand back because all hell is likely to break loose. I know in my heart, if I’d taken that opal necklace and thrown it into the ocean the very second Charlie gave it to me, he’d still be alive today.

I suppose happiness can make you blind to reality. That’s what happened to me. I was so busy focusing on my blessings that I glossed right over the significance of our being in Miami for eleven days; me—a woman who has lifelong knowledge of the tragedies hovering around the eleventh of anything. I still remember when I turned eleven—in that one year I had whooping cough, measles, mumps and chicken pox. Then I was left back to spend another year in the sixth grade, which resulted in my being the tallest, gangliest girl in Miss Munroe’s class. Being called Wall-Tall-Westerly leaves its mark on you! It makes you have a keen eye for avoiding any sort of eleven. Why, I’d no more eat eleven jelly beans than take off flying, yet, I wasn’t all that watchful of poor Charlie on the eleventh day of our Miami Beach honeymoon.

Letting down my guard as I did, I suppose I could say I deserve what I got—but, the thing is it happened to Charlie, not me. I’d have been better off if it had happened to me—being dead all over is far better than walking around with just a dead heart inside of you.





Spare Change

Olivia, a blushing bride just twenty-two days ago, was now a widow. Not just a widow, but a widow stranded over a thousand miles from home. And as if that weren’t bad enough, there was also the problem of transporting the powder blue convertible and Charlie’s body back to Virginia. Olivia did the only thing she could think of at the moment—she had Charlie cremated so that he’d be a somewhat smaller package and she locked herself in the room at the Fontainebleau and cried for five days straight. She cried till her heart was as hollowed out as jack-o-lantern and her arms too heavy to lift, and still she kept right on sobbing. She’d close her eyes to sleep but there, on the inside of her eyelids, was the picture of Charlie, face down in the lobster bisque— dead before he landed, according to a doctor who’d left his wife on the dance floor and rushed over. No matter what she tried to concentrate on, she couldn’t erase that image.

Olivia felt certain Charlie’s untimely death was her fault. She had a number of jinxes that followed her around, attached themselves like fleas to a dog; then when it was least expected, jumped over to take a chomp out of someone close by. It wasn’t just the number eleven that was unlucky, it was any multiple or divisor of eleven. She’d been on the lookout for trouble on the eleventh day of their marriage, but she’d slacked off on her watchfulness when they’d been in Miami for eleven days. Then, there was the matter of the opal—Lord knows she should have expected the worst from a thing such as that!

The hotel manager who’d told Olivia there’d be no charge for her room and she could stay for long as need be, began to show concern when day after day went by and she didn’t so much as stick her nose out into the hallway. He sent pots of tea and platters of croissants to her room, but the trays remained outside her door, untouched. On the third day, Olivia’s sobbing became so loud that a couple at the far end of the hall asked to be moved to another floor. When on the fifth day Charlie’s ashes arrived from the crematorium, the manager feared the worst, and justifiably so. That night Olivia’s sobbing was louder than it had ever been before. She held his remains in her arms and howled like the wind of a hurricane. Throughout the night she remained in front of the window watching a black and stormy ocean; when morning came, she packed her bags and left. “This is no place for us,” she said, “we’re going home.” She placed the silver urn alongside of her in the front seat of the convertible and drove off. On the first day of her trip home she had to stop thirty-seven times to wipe the blur of tears from her eyes because every time she thought of Charlie bottled up as he was, she’d start crying all over again.