Love Me If You Must

8

The brisk October wind blew cold fingers of air down the neck of my jacket, slowly cooling my boiling blood as I stomped two blocks down to the village offices. Lloyd’s reliability quotient had dropped to a solid zero. What was I paying him for? I should fire him and use the money on a one-way ticket to Fiji. I could renovate a grass hut as my next project.

Leaves danced circles around me, then piled up in exhausted heaps against the brick storefronts. I pushed open the heavy glass door to the Village of Rawlings headquarters and stepped into a workplace as hushed as a morgue. The smell of new paper and copy toner greeted me. Behind the reception counter, a woman was absorbed with a collating project that involved six or seven multicolored sheets and an electric stapler.

I crossed my arms and waited. She showed no sign of slowing. After a few moments, I cleared my throat.

Without looking up, the clerk droned, “I’ll be right with you.”

My fingers tapped the denim of my sleeves. The pile that consumed the woman’s attention hadn’t shrunk a millimeter since I’d been standing there. I wondered at what point she would decide to do her job and assist me.

“Uh-hmmm,” I said with more insistence.

The nameplate on the counter identified the woman as Laura Boyd. I was about to say her name in not-very-nice tones, when she huffed and laid down the papers overflowing her fingers. She gave me a sharp glance.

“Can I help . . .” Her voice petered off into stunned silence. From her goggle-eyed stare, I concluded my notorious twin had preceded me once again.

No time for flabbergasted clerks. I had a deadline.

“I need to apply for a permit.” I flopped my elbows on the counter and leaned toward her. “My name is Tish Amble and I’m at 302 South Main Street.”

“T . . . Tish Amble?”

“That’s my name.”

Ms. Boyd backed up into a desk, knocking over the pencil holder. She swung around, made a half-try to pick up the mess, then practically ran to a back office and shut the door.

I hoped that meant she was getting my application.

Her absence dragged on. An old-fashioned bell, the kind you ring for service, was sitting on top of a stack of last week’s local newspaper. My patience came to an end, and I gave the ringer a good workout. The ding, ding, ding, ding lowered my frustration level considerably, though whether it had the power to procure my application was yet to be seen.

From the direction of the back office, bobbing between bookshelves and file cabinets, came a head shaved smooth as a plum. I had only a moment to wonder if the owner used a double-blade or some kind of cream, before the man’s face, purple-veined with anger, wiped all curiosity from my mind.

“Laura tells me you need a permit.” His voice resonated off the plate-glass windows behind me and rattled my rib cage.

My body stiffened in defense. “That’s right.”

“At 302 South Main?” he asked.

“That’s correct.”

“For what?” The guy sounded like a grunting monkey.

“Removal of the cistern.”

“Nope. Can’t do it.” He thumped his fist on the counter.

“Pardon me?” My heels dug into the carpet.

“You heard me—302 falls in the Historic Preservation District along with the rest of Rawlings Township. Can’t touch the foundation.”

“Thankfully, the cistern isn’t part of the foundation.” I made my best attempt at a smile, but I’m sure it looked more like a grimace.

“It’s part of the original stonework. The committee won’t let you touch it. Believe me.” His head angled down and his brows angled up.

“Perhaps you could give me the chairperson’s name and I’ll check into it myself.” No village tyrant was going to deter me from reaching my goal.

“Sure. Martin Dietz.”

“Where would I find Mr. Dietz?”

“You’re looking at him.”

I drew a deep breath. First a cop for a neighbor, then a body in the cistern, now some demon-possessed zoning official. I needed to go home and ask God what I did to deserve all the potholes on my straight and narrow road.

“Mr. Dietz, what I need from you is the permit application. I’ll let the committee review it for themselves and make the final decision.”

Dietz flashed an evil smile. “It’ll be a waste of two hundred and fifty bucks, but suit yourself.”

He set the application between us on the counter. His look dared me to take it.

My fingers hesitated a bare instant before snatching up the triplicate form. He shouldn’t be so cocky. I’d faced officials with more hair and come out a winner. There was no way he could stop my project from going forward. I knew all the ins, outs, and secret passages of zoning laws. Completing the application and getting denied was a mere formality.

I gave him a final taut-lipped look and turned to go out. The coming victory would be one more notch in the holster of my staple gun. I couldn’t help but smile at the challenge ahead.

Lloyd the contractor arrived first thing the next day.

I greeted him with crossed arms and a tapping foot. I wasn’t about to let him off easy. “I couldn’t get the permit.”

“Permit? What permit?”

I rose up on my tiptoes to gain some height. “Hello? The permit for the removal of the cistern.”

“Huh?”

This guy was losing it. “You know. The one you told me to get when I called you yesterday.”

I couldn’t believe he’d forgotten our conversation already.

“I told you I would get the permit,” he said.

I wanted to knock on his cranium to jog his memory. “No. You told me to get the permit for today.”

His eyelids peeled back in a look of panic. “I said I would come by today. You went down to the village office?”

“Yeah. Why the big deal?”

“You saw Martin Dietz?”

“Yeah.”

Lloyd slapped himself in the temple. “You’ll never get the permit now.”

“What do you mean?” I was pretty sick of him raining on my renovation parade.

“I guarantee he took one look at you and decided you weren’t going to get a permit to flush the toilet, let alone remove a cistern.”

“Mr. Dietz is a public servant. He can’t deny me based on frivolous logic.”

“Mr. Dietz is a public tyrant. He’ll make your life so miserable, you’ll wish you were the one buried in the cistern.”

I stopped breathing. Did Lloyd think there was someone under the concrete in my basement?

He shifted his feet. “I don’t mean to say there’s a body in your cistern. I was just giving you fair warning. Don’t go after the permit. Box in the cistern and forget about it. Let it lie.”

My skin crept with déjà vu.

Let it lie. I’d heard those words before; three simple words that always rousted the rebel in me.

The cistern didn’t have a chance.