Wrapped in Rain(99)

"Yeah, buddy," I said, catching Katie's eyes.

"Will you throw with me?"





Chapter 46


"GOOOOD MORNING!" THE KID SCREAMED FROM THE driver's seat and hopped back to his window. I had heard the loudspeaker when he turned down the driveway. Actually, most of southern Alabama heard it, so I left my office and met him at the base of the steps about the time he circled the drive.

"Little early today, aren't we?" I asked. It was 7:00 a.m.

He rubbed his hands together like he was starting a fire and said, "Naw, it's never too early for ice cream. Where's that family of yours?"

I liked the sound of that. "They're inside sleeping."

He glanced behind me and pointed. "Not anymore."

Jase slammed the front door, ran down the steps, and repeated his rehearsed performance at the window. Mutt walked in circles, eyeing the truck and looking over the mechanicals. His head was spinning. Calculating is more like it. Katie stood at the top of the steps, nursing a cup of coffee and giving me hand signals to buy a bottle of bubbles for Jase.

I turned to the kid. "How much you take for this whole thing?" I waved my hand from the front bumper to back, getting Mutt's attention in the process.

The kid tried to look surprised, but he had been fishing for this all along. "What? You want to buy my truck? Buy my business? Buy my very means of existence?"

He was laying it on pretty thick. "I want to buy your absence on my driveway." I smiled. "And if I own this truck, I'll want a guarantee that you'll never drive down it again-in anything."



The kid's eyes flitted around the truck like he was adding up all the numbers. I'm no dummy. He knew his number before he ever drove down the drive. "Nothing less than five."

"You're dreaming. I'll give you three and pay you cost plus 20 percent for all your inventory." The kid narrowed his eyes and communicated his disgust. "You think you're going to get a better offer today?"

He leaned through the window, and I could already hear him investing the money. He took off his wig, scratched his head, stuck his hand through the window, and said, "Deal."

I pointed at his outfit. "Suit too?"

"It's yours."

"Move over." To Katie's wide-eyed amazement, Jase, Mutt, and I loaded up and drove across town to the kid's house. I wrote him a check for $3,500, signed the title over to Mutt, and handed him the keys.

"Here, you drive." Mutt's eyes lit up like he had found the Holy Grail. He slipped on the red wig, pinned the red bulb nose onto his, punched the play button for "The Entertainer," and eased off on the clutch. His smile alone was worth $3,500. We drove all morning while Mutt got on the intercom and said, "Under new management! All ice cream today is free!" That really got people's attention, and by ten in the morning, we had given away everything Jase hadn't eaten.

Back in the driveway, Jase hopped down, ran to Katie, and pointed back at the truck. "Look, Mom, it's our own rolling confession stand." Two weeks had passed since the Trevor incident, and I had been spending enough time now with Jase that I could interpret most of his language. This one stumped me, and Katie noticed the quizzical look on my face.



Katie wiped the ice cream off Jase's lips and said, "Put a r in place of the f."

"Ohhhhhh."





Chapter 47


KATIE FILED CHARGES, AND THE COUNTY COURT JUDGE sentenced Trevor to five years in prison, but he wouldn't get to serve them until after he served thirty-five years in New York for fraud, embezzlement, and falsified tax returns.

Since Mutt's return, he had transformed Waverly. The outside glistened like new construction. He had chlorinated and pressure washed the entire outside of the house twice. Even the weeping mortar had come clean. The slate roof glistened, and the copper drainpipes looked handpolished. Much of the exterior trim had been replaced, primed, caulked, and repainted. The front porch had been regrouted, most of the windows had been scraped and caulked, and many of the exterior doors had been replaced because the bottoms had become swollen in the rain. Mutt installed new lights outside, including several spotlights in the trees around the house. He replaced the railing across the entire front porch, refinished the porch furniture, and painted it with an exterior semigloss that glistened in the early morning dew or midnight moonlight. Somehow, he had used the tractor and a few come-alongs to raise the front gate so that it no longer looked like a circus tent. He planted camellias, repaired the sprinkler system that wound down the drive, fed water to the weeping willows and live oaks, and trimmed the Leyland cypress surrounding the front drive. He even polished the brass lion's head door knocker.

And to say the inside of Waverly was clean would have been an understatement. We could have eaten off the bottom of the trash can. Every corner of the house had been washed down, dusted, and if need be, sanded, stained, repainted, or repaired. Lights, fans, door locks, and burners that hadn't worked in a decade now did. I knew Mutt had made real progress when, for the first time in almost a decade, the old grandfather clock shook the house at 7:00 a.m.



Mose couldn't believe it either. He kept walking around the house, shaking his head, murmuring to himself, and smiling. He looked at me and said, "Tuck, my sister wouldn't have believed this."