Bubbles Ablaze by Sarah Strohmeyer Read Free Book Online Page A

promises. As soon as you make them, you want to break them. “Pinky promise,” I reluctantly agreed, hooking my pinky in hers.
    â€œStinky discovered that after he left the cartography division of McMullen Coal, the maps of the Number Nine mine had been tampered with. They hadn’t been updated since the mine reopened briefly earlier this year.”
    I dropped her pinky. “Is that a big deal?”
    â€œIf they didn’t update the maps intentionally, it is. It could mean McMullen was trying to rob coal.” Roxanne stirred the coffee slowly. “Stinky told his supervisors at McMullen that fudging maps could get miners killed and he demanded they correct them. He even threatened to tell the state if they didn’t. But despite all the promises from the supervisors that the maps would be updated, last month Stinky checked the records and found out that no maps had been changed. Then he went into the Number Nine mine and found out that more coal was gone.”
    My internal alarmed beeped so loudly Roxanne could’ve heard it. News story. News story. Ding. Ding. Ding . I glanced at my pinky. Drat that pinky.
    â€œSo he quit. And then things got really nuts.” She poured a half a carton of Lehigh Valley Dairy milk in our coffee. “The day Stinky left his job, he came home from the hardware store with a bag of locks. Put new deadbolts on all the doors and windows.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBeats me.” She slid me my cup of coffee. “He spent those first few days doing nothing but writing letters to the state and following me around the house ranting and raving about spheric trigonometry and the CMIS and interlobate moraine.”
    â€œI buzz cut an interlobate moraine once,” I said. “For a tip, he gave me advice.”
    â€œI think interlobate moraine is some kind of dense rock, Bubbles,” Roxanne suggested.
    â€œSo was he.”
    I thought that was pretty funny, but Roxanne didn’t crack a smile. “I was so eager to get him out of the house and out of my hair that I let him go with his buddy up to the Hole, a bar on the north side of town.”
    Roxanne sipped her coffee and I recalled what Donohue had said about the fax coming from a pay phone outside the Hole. Score one for my theory that our intended killer was really the Stinkster.
    â€œNext thing I know,” she continued, “Stinky stopped complaining about McMullen Coal and was spending every night at the Hole and every day in the basement, hammering and sawing and drilling. Wouldn’t let me come down to see what he was up to. And then they stopped calling.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œMy clients, of course.” Roxanne said this as though I hadn’t been following along. “Ten women whose hair I’ve been cutting for two decades suddenly don’t show. They were such regulars I mentally referred to them by their time slots. You know how that is. Tuesday at one. Friday at four. That kind of thing.”
    Regulars that regular don’t simply quit a salon without some drama. Two women in a spat might stop coming so they won’t run into each other. One woman might leave because she had a fight with a stylist, but ten? No way. Not without rumors of legionnaires in the air conditioner or bubonic plague on the toilet seat. A prized Friday at two would be hard-pressed to no-show should a nuclear war be imminent.
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œStinky and his practical jokes is what happened.” Roxanne rolled her eyes. “Get this. The first client I telephoned, Thursday at ten, said Stinky had left a message on her answering machine saying that if she didn’t pay him fifty dollars, he’d tell her husband, Joe, that she was really a size sixteen, not a ten like Joe thought, and that she had no intention of going on a diet like he wanted. Cookie?” She handed me a half-eaten box of Shop Rite oatmeal raisin frosted.
    I thought about the size