Goose in the Pond Read Online Free PDF Page B

was still sputtering, knowing I’d pay big time for that little bit of bravado. In our family there were two sets of rules—the Ten Commandments and Dove’s Rules of Order. I had just broken one of the biggies—cutting her off when she was in the middle of cajoling you to do something. When she didn’t call me right back, I knew I was really going to get it, that she was plotting big time. That meant I’d never see it coming.
    After a quick shower and change into clean Wranglers, a plain white T-shirt, and my old brown Ropers, I grabbed up Levi’s and a pale yellow polo shirt for Gabe. I pointed the pickup toward Blind Harry’s Bookstore and Coffeehouse in downtown San Celina. My best friend, Elvia Aragon, manager and head honcha of the bookstore, would most likely be there, even though Sunday was technically her day off. She’d kill me if I didn’t tell her about my morning’s activities before she heard it on the news. Grimacing at my poor choice of mental words, I maneuvered for a precious parking space in our already congested downtown shopping area. The influx of people moving into San Celina County and shopping downtown had been great for the merchants, but heck on the local residents, who were accustomed to finding a parking space on the first try. I pumped my last quarter into the meter, attempting to be a model, law-abiding citizen now that I was the police chief’s wife.
    Blind Harry’s Bookstore resided a block away in part of a two-story brick row building that once held the offices of San Celina Trust and Savings, an institution that bit the dust during the 1929 stock crash. Until six years ago, it had been a bookstore called simply San Celina Books and Stationery. Then Cameron McGarry, a mysterious Scottish man who owned casinos in Reno, a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and oil wells in Oklahoma, acquired it during a drive through town. He bought it as a whimsical tax write-off and hired my friend Elvia as the manager for peanuts, probably feeling very smug and politically correct for accommodating two minorities in one fell swoop. It warmed my heart to watch her blow his socks off. Under her fair but somewhat military-style management, she built Blind Harry’s into the most popular and profitable bookstore/coffeehouse between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her success story had been written up twice in the L.A. Times, once in the San Francisco Chronicle, and in numerous Latino newspapers.
    The basement coffeehouse, lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with used books free for the borrowing, was crowded for a Sunday. The antique mantel clock on the Hemingway shelf had both hands lifted in surrender, reminding me of my promise to bring Gabe lunch. I ordered an avocado, Jack cheese, and alfalfa sprout on cracked wheat bread and scanned the chattering crowd for Elvia. She sat in a back corner at one of the round oak tables, her dark head bent over three-inch thick sheaves of computer printouts. Though she had a beautiful office upstairs complete with French Country antique furniture, all the latest computer equipment, and soundproofing, she still preferred to do much of her paperwork downstairs in the coffeehouse. She claimed the noisy conversations relaxed her, that complete silence was too distracting after all those years living with six brothers.
    “No rest for the wicked, huh?” I flopped down on one of the oak ladder-back chairs she’d purchased for a song when they refurnished the new library. The only way you could tell it was her day off was she wasn’t wearing one of her many Chanel-Armani-Donna Karan power suits. Instead she wore black leggings, Italian leather flats, and a flowing café au lait silk blouse that probably cost more than my truck’s new clutch.
    “ Hermana gringa, you have no idea. What’s up? I thought you and tu esposo el chota were out building lung capacity this morning.”
    “I’ll have you know I jogged a whole mile and a half.”
    “And?” Her liquid