Bubbles Ablaze by Sarah Strohmeyer Read Free Book Online Page B

sixteen. “No thanks.”
    â€œTo each her own.” Roxanne bit into an iced oatmeal and continued. “Wednesday at six-thirty said Stinky vowed to show up at a PTA meeting and announce that her kids had lice and couldn’t get rid of them ’cause she cared more for her job than her family. And Saturday at eight said Stinky knew all about her pregnancy scare and how miraculous it was since Mr. Saturday at eight had undergone a vasectomy years before.”
    â€œOops.”
    Roxanne played with her pink leatherette cigarette case while I stared at the sugar-laden coffee. Then it dawned on me. The worst that can ever befall a hairdresser had happened to my cousin. She’d been bugged.
    â€œHe’d been eavesdropping on the salon,” I blurted. “Stinky was listening from the basement.”
    â€œAin’t that a pisser?” Roxanne said, slipping into Pennsylvania vernacular. “What a sense of humor that clown has.”
    â€œDid you ask him if he’d been eavesdropping?”
    â€œSee now, there’s the worst part. I got so mad at him that I broke my promise and went down to the basement. You wouldn’t believe what I found. Wires. Tubes. All these canisters and—this is the strangest part—blow-dryers.”
    â€œBlow-dryers?”
    â€œI counted twenty of them, though others were in pieces.”
    â€œDid you ask him what he was doing with all those blow-dryers?”
    Roxanne shook her head. “Didn’t have a chance. I was too mad. When Stinky came home from the Hole, I was waiting with that stuff in a pile and his bags packed at my feet. Then I read him the riot act. Cuz, I really went to town.”
    She started tearing up again. “I told him it was bad enough, the years of fake dog doo and the nut jars with springing snakes. I didn’t like his little pranks. Still, I had tolerated them. But this, listening in on clients and then pretending to blackmail them, this was too much. It wasn’t just tasteless and cruel, it stood to ruin my business.”
    â€œYou were right, Roxanne,” I said, handing her a tissue from a box on the counter. Your business has been ruined, I caught myself from adding.
    â€œI wasn’t right. I was wrong. I lost my husband and now I’m alone. I was stupid.” She dabbed her eyes. “How could I have been so stupid?”
    I rubbed circles on her back. “Roxanne, I do something stupid every day.”
    â€œYeah, but you can’t help it,” she said. “You’re Bubbles. You bleached your eyebrows in junior high school and ended up in the emergency room.”
    I dropped my hand. Perfectly innocent mistake. How was I to know Clorox could make you blind? Wasn’t bleach, bleach? “So what was his response?”
    â€œHe was stunned.” Roxanne blew her nose. “He was so . . . crushed. Stinky took his bags and left. He said, ‘I should have left a long time ago.’ That was the last I heard from him. Until Donohue called me this morning and said you’d seen his Lexus at the Number Nine mine.”
    I twirled the glass ashtray, thinking of Stinky. Then a bell rang in what some people consider a very large space between my ears. “Hold on. What buddy did he meet at the Hole?”
    â€œBud.”
    â€œOkay.” Let’s try it again. “What bud?”
    â€œThat was his name, Bud. He was a car salesman, I think.”
    A mouthful of supersweet coffee log-jammed in my throat. With great effort I swallowed it and said, “Bud Price?”
    Roxanne’s eyes opened wide. “You know him?”
    Even though I was a tad sketchy on Bud myself, I related what Stiletto had told me and Roxanne snapped her fingers. She slid off the stool and skipped over to the magazines on the coffee table, pulling out a copy of yesterday’s Slagville Sentinel newspaper. She opened it to a feature on Bud Price and a picture of him