Janet Evanovich - Wife for Hire

Maggie felt the breath catch in her chest. “A million dollars? Why on earth would anyone want to pay a million dollars for Aunt Kitty’s diary. I’ve read every word of it. It’s not worth a million dollars.”

“It is now,” Ed Kritch said. “Hey, we could give you some of the money to compensate for taking you away from the dance. We aren’t greedy. We don’t need the whole million. We could divide it up four ways instead of three.”

“I can’t give up Aunt Kitty’s diary,” Maggie said. “She entrusted it to me. I promised to make it into a book.”

“Bummer,” Ed Kritch said. “We didn’t count on that.”

“The way I see it,” Vern Walsh said, “is that your Aunt Kitty was a good old broad, and she’d probably like to help us all out. She’d be glad to know her diary was doing somebody some good.”

He turned into the driveway and gunned the car down the dirt road to Hank’s house. “If we get the diary real fast, then we can get back to the dance in time to see them crown the king and queen.”

Maggie crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes. “I’m not giving you the diary. It’s hidden and you’ll never find it. And have you considered the consequences of kidnapping me?”

“We’re real upstanding citizens,” Ed said. “We’ve never done anything wrong before. We thought we’d just lie like the dickens and folks would believe us.”

“Are you the ones who broke into the house last night and the night before?” Maggie asked.

“Nope. This is our first shot at it. I heard it was Lumpy Mooney who tried to get the diary last night. Word is he damn near broke his backside falling off the ladder.”

Everyone but Maggie got a good chuckle out of that.

Vern stopped a few feet back from the house. Two cars were parked in the driveway, and the lights to the house were blazing.

“Well, will you look at this!” he said. “That’s Slick Newman’s car. And the piece of junk in front of it belongs to that runt-nosed Purcell kid.”

“They’re after the diary,” Ed Kritch said. “Man, that really stinks. They broke right into Hank’s granny’s house. I tell you people in this town are going down the toilet. When I was a kid, you never had to worry about this sort of thing. You wouldn’t think of locking your front door when I was a kid.”

“So, what do you think?” Vern said. “You think we should get the sheriff?”

Ed chewed on his lower lip while he thought about it for a minute. “No,” he finally said. “The Purcell family’s hard up. Seven kids and old man Purcell’s been gimpy ever since Maynard Beasley mistook him for a deer and shot him in the knee. Why don’t we just go tell them it wasn’t polite to break in when nobody was home. Then we can all look for the diary and divide the money up. Hell, there’s enough to go around.”

A car pulled up behind them. Everyone turned around to squint into the headlights.

“Probably Hank,” Maggie said. “You’d better watch out. He’ll break every bone in your body when he gets hold of you.”

“Nah,” Ed said. “It’s not Hank. Hank drives a pickup, and these headlights are too low. Besides, Hank’s a good guy. He’d understand about us needing the money.”

The lights blinked off and several figures got out of the car. One of the men had a body slung over his shoulder. They approached Ed Kritch and looked in the window.

“It’s Spike,” Ed said, rolling down his window. “Hey, Spike, what are you doing here?”

“We got a hostage,” Spike said. “We come for the diary and we got someone who knows where it is!”

Ed opened the door and Spike dumped Elsie into the backseat alongside Maggie.

“I’ll never tell,” Elsie said. “Not in a million years. You could torture me, and I won’t tell you.”

“We don’t know any torture,” Spike said. “We were counting on you just helping out.”

“They had me trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey,” Elsie said. “Brought me here in a flour sack. Can you imagine that? After I paid sixteen dollars to have my hair done too.”

“It looks okay,” Spike said. “And we washed the flour sack out last night so it wouldn’t ruin your dress. We tried to think of everything.”

“You’d need a brain transplant before you could think of anything,” Elsie said.

Spike and Ed exchanged worried looks.

“What do we do now?” Spike asked. “How’re we gonna get the diary?”

Ed ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. Vern, you were in the army. You know any torture we could do on ladies?”

“I never learned how to torture ladies,” Vern said. “You had to be in special forces to learn stuff like that.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself for trying to terrorize a couple of defenseless women,” Elsie said.

“Defenseless, hah!” Spike said. “You just about broke Melvin Nielsen’s knee when he tried to help me jam you into the car. And you got a mean mouth on you too. Shame on you for even knowing those words.”

Elsie smoothed her skirt over her knees and set her black patent leather purse primly on her lap. “This has all been very upsetting,” she said. “You don’t mind if I get a hankie from my purse, do you?”

“No, ma’am,” Ed said. “You go right ahead and get your hankie.”

Elsie reached into her purse and pulled out the forty-five.

“Holy cow!” Ed Kritch said. “What the hell are you doing with a gun in your pocketbook? It isn’t loaded, is it?’

Elsie squinted down the barrel at him. “Of course it’s loaded, you ninny. And just because I’m an old lady, don’t think I won’t use this baby. I could shoot the eyelashes off a groundhog at forty feet.”

Ed had his hand on the door handle. “Maybe you should put the gun away. You wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.”

“Justifiable homocide,” Elsie said, pointing the gun at Spike. “You can’t go around kidnapping old ladies and planning to steal personal property without paying the price. And besides that, you ruined my evening. I probably missed the hokeypokey. Looks to me like you deserve what ever happens.”

Ed Kritch lunged for Elsie, knocking her arm aside, and the gun accidentally discharged in the scuffle. The noise rocked the car, and the bullet blew a gaping hole in the roof.

Ed Kritch, Vern, Ox, and Spike sat in stunned silence for a split second before letting out simultaneous screams and running for their lives. They all piled into Spike’s car and took off down the driveway.

“Bunch of wimps,” Elsie said. “I wasn’t really going to shoot any of them.”

Maggie pushed the hair back from her forehead with a shaky hand. “I knew that. I knew you were just putting a scare into them.”

She took a deep breath and put her hand to her chest to make sure her heart had resumed beating. “What do you think we should do about the men in the house?”

Elsie put the gun back in her pocketbook and snapped it closed. “They won’t find the diaries in a hundred years. We hid them real good. I say we go back to the dance, and if any of those guys makes a mess of the house, we get them to come back tomorrow and clean it up.”

It seemed like a better solution than sending Elsie in there with her six-shooter blazing, so Maggie agreed. She slid behind the wheel and turned the key to the ignition. Now she had to decide what to tell Hank. He’d been ready to duke it out with Henry Gooley over a wink. He wasn’t going to take news of a kidnapping calmly.

“I think I’ll wait awhile to tell Hank about this,” Maggie said to Elsie. “Maybe I’ll tell him on the ride home.”

“Good idea. I don’t want nothing to ruin the rest of my evening. I’ve got a lot of dancing to catch up on, and I hear they serve coffee and cake at twelve o’clock.”