Key Weird 03; Key Witch Read online

  Josephine pulled in her winnings and ignored her sister. She smiled and said in a dreamy voice, “Ben.”

  ♦

  Which would be me, Benozzagamii, your typical eight-inch-tall space traveler from Zertron III, the garden planet of the universe. Everyone calls me Ben.

  You may wonder how I came to be stranded on a lower-tier planet like earth. I don’t blame you, I often wonder myself. All I can say is, if you buy a deeply discounted ticket for a luxury vacation cruise of the universe, be sure to read the fine print. And if you don’t read the fine print and find yourself winning really big at star scrabble with the mutant crew of a Kardonian glob freighter, don’t drink the green wine.

  Anyway, after several months of trying to figure out a way off this primitive rock, I met Josephine. For some reason she was the only human who could see or hear me, so we started hanging out and keeping each other company. Since her sisters couldn’t see me, they said I was an ‘imaginary friend’. I certainly wasn’t imaginary to Josephine.

  It wasn’t long before we were more than just friends, and though I am only eight inches tall, we’ve enjoyed some very intimate times together. This was due in no small part to Josephine’s passionate nature and creative mind. The mango tongue baths helped too.

  Anyway, my Josephine was the winner that night at poker, so we spent a thoroughly enjoyable day in the park lying in the sun having a great picnic lunch and catching insects.

  A few days later the sisters packed up a big rental truck with all their stuff and we spent the next five days driving to the other end of the country to start a new life.

  ∨ Key Witch ∧

  2

  Key West

  The storm clouds came in like schoolyard bullies. They stole the sun’s lunch money and started throwing raindrops as big as marbles at everyone on the island.

  A short, chubby, bald man was frantically trying to stuff two bags of garbage into an already full trashcan outside a small hotel in Key West. He was getting wet. There was a can across the street, and he made a run for it. The bags were throwing off his balance and the rain made everything slick. The low stone wall in front of the house that the can belonged to broke his fall.

  He was surprised to find himself unhurt. He was more surprised to find out he had seriously upset a colony of honeybees who had just recently taken up residence in the wall.

  ♦

  “It’s raining again.”

  Lydia was looking out the window while sitting behind the front desk in the small lobby of their new hotel and home. She’d been going over some paperwork. Josephine had just come in from the garden with some flowers. She put them in a vase on a table. They were beautiful.

  “They’re beautiful, Josey. We’ve only been here two weeks and you’ve got that garden looking like something out of a magazine already.” Josephine looked up from arranging the flowers and gave her big sister a smile.

  “Th-thanks.” She stood back, checked out the flower arrangement, then took out one of the yellow trumpet-shaped flowers and ate it in two bites. Lydia wrinkled her nose.

  “Bon appetite.”

  The rain started coming down hard. Lydia looked out the window again.

  “I think she goes out to run when it’s about to storm just so we’ll worry about her.”

  There was a flash of lightning close by, followed immediately by a huge clap of thunder that shook the windows of the hotel. The front door flew open and a soaking wet little bald man stumbled in screaming.

  “Bees! Killer fucking bees! Get ‘em off of me!” The man collapsed on the floor of the lobby, writhing in pain and swatting at the air. His words became incoherent except for the occasional expletive. The two women stood over the hysterical figure on the floor.

  “Geez. It’s always something with this guy! I’ll get the mop, see if you can find out what’s wrong with him, Jos.”

  While Lydia went off for a mop to clean up the floor, Josephine crouched down for a closer look at the welts on the squirming man’s face and hands.

  “B-b-bees.”

  ♦

  When Josephine got back from her room, the little man was sitting in a different place on the floor. Lydia was mopping up the wet spot. The man was still in a lot of pain and whimpering when the front door flew open and Consuelo stomped in.

  “What a rush! I saw lightning hit a tree! There were smoking pigeons everywhere!” She started pulling off the layers of sweatshirts and pants she wore on her daily runs around the island.

  Lydia gave her a stern look. “Wet shoes too.”

  Consuelo saluted her mop-bearing sister and got down to shorts and a T-shirt. She noticed Josephine trying to put salve on the man’s bee stings.

  “H-hold s-s-st…”

  “What have we here? Somebody got a boo-boo again?” She walked over to have a look. The little man was wiggling around trying to avoid Josephine’s concoction. A glance up and Consuelo was pointing a threatening finger. He became still instantly. The man was wary of the other two, but terrified of the cute little blonde. He had seen what she could do, and he definitely didn’t want any of that.

  With her patient holding stock still, Josephine finished up quickly, pulled off her rubber gloves, and stood back to admire her work. The man had big purple blotches all over his face, arms, and legs now. The salve burned a little and was starting to itch. The pain was completely gone, but it would be days before the purple stains from the homemade salve wore off.

  “B-better?”

  Jeremy Donner looked up from the floor at his three employers standing before him and smiled carefully. He wondered how he always seemed to end up working for really sexy, but really scary, women.

  “Uh, yeah. Thanks.” He looked at the purple blotches on his arms and legs. He thought about his face.

  “This stuff does wash off, right?”

  ♦

  After Jeremy had gone to his little room in back and Consuelo had showered, the sisters had a meeting at the front desk.

  “Okay, other than the recurring problems with our accident-prone employee, we’ve got the hotel pretty much under control.” Lydia took out a folder from under the desk. Josephine was leisurely filing her nails. Consuelo was biting hers, and looked up from picking her nose.

  “I say we can the little worm. We took care of the Majestic by ourselves all right.” She produced something from her nose and showed it to Josephine, who handed her a tissue without looking up.

  “You know the deal Consuelo, he gets to stay on for at least six months. It was part of the agreement when we bought this place. You can’t expect to buy a hotel like this without a few unusual clauses in the contract.”

  All three sisters smiled at that. It wasn’t easy, but they’d found almost exactly what they were looking for – an old two-story hotel in the heart of Key West in good repair. Almost, in that they would have preferred waterfront, but you could at least see the ocean if you climbed up on the roof. Also, a genuine haunted hotel would have been nice. With all the ghost stories floating around the island, they were disappointed their new home was without notoriety. Especially when they found out the hotel just down the street had not only a Hemingway room, but an occasional ghost named Robert.

  Robert, a mysterious guest, had supposedly blown off the widow’s walk during a hurricane seventy years ago and was never found. The story from the local ghost tour had him showing up every few years. The realtor did tell them though that Jimmy Buffett was rumored to have stopped in their hotel for a minute once back in the 70s looking for a salt shaker.

  But something else had brought the sisters to the island besides the great weather, relaxed atmosphere, interesting people, and the possibility of supernatural phenomena.

  “It’s time we got serious with our search.” Lydia took a computer-printed picture from the folder and set it on the front desk. “We’ll make some copies of this to show around. I think Josey did a pretty good job.” Consuelo gave the picture a hard look.

  Lydi
a took the old picture they had seen so many times over the years out of the folder and laid it on the desk. It was the ‘before’ picture, a young woman with a big bleached-blond Mohawk and her eyes closed for the camera. Writing from an ink pen on her eyelids. “Of course, she might still have the blond Mohawk hair-do and ‘EAT SHIT’ written on her eyelids. But I kind of doubt it.”

  Consuelo looked at the second picture, pushed her blond hair up from the sides with her palms, closed her eyes, and asked, “What do you think? Any family resemblance?”

  ♦

  Except for Consuelo with her daily runs, the sisters had been so busy with the hotel that they hadn’t been out around town much other than shopping and checking out a couple of bars. There had been a lot to do the first couple of weeks.

  Their search was an ongoing thing. In over a year the only lead had been from a shady LA private eye – a one-way ticket plane ticket had been purchased to Key West within the last few months with the right name.

  It was time to hit the streets. Maybe get lucky, at least get a feel for their new town and check out the local color.

  ♦

  Hey, I think the new place is great! My Josephine is happy to be outside in the garden and there’s a big mango tree full of fruit right across the street. The only creepy thing I found so far is the sneaky little guy who works as a handyman at the hotel.

  Key West is an expensive place to live, especially for earthlings. Buying the hotel took most of their money, but Josey says she’s confident if they work really hard they’ll make it as tropical hoteliers. I doubt I could get a job in Key West. Not much work for a small, invisible being with experience as a toll booth operator on a worm-hole bypass. I’d probably have to move to Miami and get a job in politics as a lobbyist.

  The hotel is a very old place, but there’s modern air-conditioning duct running above the ceilings. Not only does that keep the hotel cool, it’s a really nice way for someone only eight inches tall to keep an eye on the whole place without having to worry about getting stepped on.

  ∨ Key Witch ∧

  3

  Local Color

  The sun came up like a big cop walking into a crowded poolhall on a Saturday night. Shifty-eyed puddles left from the rain the day before did their best to look inconspicuous. They quickly evaporated into the crowd of humidity milling about the island.

  Orange Dali stood in the shade in front of the Margaritaville Café, peeling an orange. He was on his third orange of the morning. There was a place on the concrete next to the bike rack where he had traced a rectangle two feet by three feet with some orange chalk. The thin, dark-haired young man leaned against the tree in front of the bar for a moment looking down, then carefully placed peel inside the border as he took it off the orange.

  “Frank, look at this!” A woman tourist wearing a surprised look and a half-bottle of sun-block stopped when she saw what the young man next to the tree was doing.

  “That’s amazing! Look at it, Frank! You got to get a picture of this!” Frank was wearing the look of vacation constipation, and the other half of the bottle of sun-block. He came partially out of his daze and started snapping pictures.

  Orange Dali was creating another of his works of art, literally on the streets of Key West. The middle-aged tourist couple’s gawking had drawn others from the early shift of wanderers on Duval Street. Inside the chalk frame the young man with the wild eyes and dirty plastic orange cape had placed orange peel, sand, leaves, twigs, gum wrappers, and bottle caps. He’d created a stunning artwork of soft watches hanging from a tree limb. There were even black specks on the faces of the watches for numbers. The specks were dead flies.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that before! It looks…so real!” Orange Dali ignored the woman and the others around him. He pulled off the last piece of peel and put the orange in the pocket of his baggy shorts. He absently twisted his long waxed mustache as he walked slowly around his creation. After a moment of close up inspection, he broke the peel into tiny pieces and used them with some sand to create a shadow for one of the watches. The onlookers gasped.

  The artist stepped back and regarded his audience for a moment, took off his felt fedora, bowed deeply to the crowd, and dropped the hat to the sidewalk in front of the people. As he posed kneeling beside his latest masterpiece, cameras clicked and money dropped into the hat. When he could see some green sticking up out of the hat, he produced a brush and quickly swept the artwork onto a piece of cardboard and dumped it in a trash can. Several stunned tourists stared at the place on the sidewalk where only a smudged orange chalk frame remained.

  Orange Dali walked down Duval Street eating his orange, singing about cheeseburgers in paradise, and telling people “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.”

  ♦

  The Key West Manor Hotel was only a block over from Duval Street, the main drag in Old Town, and Lydia planned on showing the picture to people working in the shops and bars there. But as she came out the front door of the hotel, she noticed the man who lived in the house across the street was outside. She’d hoped for a chance to meet him, and since he was standing on a stepladder in the front yard, she went for it. As she came through the gate in the low stone wall, she yelled a hello to the man bending over into a tree. She stopped a few feet behind a great-looking butt at eye level.

  “Be right with you!”

  The man was hammering a piece of tin on the trunk of the tree.

  “No hurry!”

  Lydia turned her head a little to the side and struck a thoughtful pose. If the rest is as good as this part of him.

  “There!” He turned around and smiled at her. “Wanted to get that squirrel-guard put on my tree. My mangos have been disappearing lately.”

  “That so?” At least as good. She hadn’t gotten a clear look at him from the hotel before. He was gorgeous. Sandy hair, great smile, dressed like he just stepped out of a fashion magazine for tropical casual wear.

  “You’re the new owner of the hotel, aren’t you? Brad’s the name.” He held out a hand as he stepped off the ladder.

  “Lydia. Nice to meet you, Brad.” He had the damnedest soft blue eyes she had ever seen. Just give herself a second to look into those eyes. Okay, maybe several seconds.

  “So Lydia, if you let go of my hand, we could go inside and I could offer you something to drink.” He was grinning now. Lydia snapped out of it.

  “Oh, uh, sorry. Sure.” Lydia blushed and followed her new neighbor inside.

  It wasn’t a big house, but very open and airy. Big windows, ceiling fans, wicker furniture, hardwood floor, bookcase. She checked the books while he went into the kitchen for the drinks. Novels and several cookbooks. He reads and cooks. Lydia put her hand on her chest to steady herself. Brad called out from the kitchen.

  “You have someone helping you run the hotel? I’ve noticed a marked increase in the number of attractive young women over there lately.”

  “Oh, those are just my sisters, my little sisters. They’re actually quite helpless without me.” Well, maybe not totally helpless, though she didn’t know what they’d do without her to keep them out of trouble. Brad was back.

  “Have a seat. It’s limeade, made with Key Limes from my tree out back. The squirrels don’t seem to be interested in my limes.” That smile again.

  Lydia sat on the sofa and laid the folder with the pictures in it on the low coffee table. She squirmed a little and looked uncomfortable as she took a sip of her drink.

  “Thank you, it’s very good.” She squirmed again, and reached behind her and pulled out the hammer he’d been using outside. “Here, you might need this.” She set the hammer on the table in front of her confused host. “Might need these too.” She leaned to one side and pulled out the little jar of nails he’d left on the ladder. She smiled innocently.

  “How did you do that?” He stared at his hammer and nails sitting on the table.

  “Oh, I learned a few magic tricks from a friend
of our mother’s.” She was enjoying it.

  He looked up from the table, giving her his full attention and a wistful smile.

  “Do you do card tricks too?”

  Lydia snapped her fingers in front of her face, then slowly pulled the Queen of Hearts from her mouth. He watched her hand him the card across the table, then looked at her again. “That was pretty cool, how…” Lydia held her hand up and pointed to the card he was holding. When he looked back at the card it was the King of Hearts. His jaw dropped just a little. Lydia decided to go for the big question.

  “You’re not gay by any chance are you?” She bit her lower lip.

  Brad regained his composure, “Like a three dollar bill!”

  Lydia countered his mischievous grin with a sour frown.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance…”

  “I don’t think so Lydia. I’m quite comfortable and happy with my lifestyle choices.” He was having much too good of a time with this. “But you didn’t come over to discuss my sexual orientation, did you?”

  Lydia sighed. She bet he was a great cook too. She reached in the folder.

  “No, I wanted to show you this picture. My sisters and I are looking for this person. She may have come to Key West a few months ago.”

  Brad sipped at his limeaide and looked at the picture.

  “My sister Josephine changed the hair and eyes on the computer. The original picture is several years old, and the eyes were closed so she used another picture to get the eyes right. It should be close.” Brad handed the picture back to her. It was a picture of the most average-looking young woman you could imagine.

  “Sorry, if I’ve seen her, I don’t remember. Who is she?”

  “My sister, my older sister. She ran away from home years ago. We heard she was somewhere in southern California, but we could never find her. Before our mother died just over a year ago, she told us to find her, that we should all be together, even if it was only for a little while.” Lydia was surprised she was talking to a stranger like this.