Free Framed by Nancy Springer Page B

she should’ve said…oh, damn it all, what should she do now? Her mind was going like a hamster in a wheel, and dreams were trying to break in; the result was almost like hallucination. That woman’s body. Still unidentified. In pieces. Head, dead. Decomposed. Hands. With a callus just in that place. Little cuts. Short nails.
    She sat straight up in bed. Of course, her mind tried to tell her, the cop could have been thinking about something else entirely. Some other case. Some show he saw on TV. But instinctively she knew better. She felt sure to her core.
    “A framer,” she whispered. “The dead woman was a framer.”
    It was no use even trying to sleep after that.
    * * *
    The next day when Ronnie walked into the shop Lois dropped all her paperwork and hugged her.
    “Ron,” she wailed, “for God’s sake, why didn’t you just put the damn key in the lost and found?”
    “The cop was here?”
    “Yes. That dead woman in the mini-storage—”
    “I know.”
    “She was a framer.”
    “Yeah. So now I know how it feels to be framed,” Ronnie said. She’d never thought much about that expression, but now she understood to her bones what it meant: to be put in a false context that looked true, a picture complete with spotlight. “Everything’s pointing at me, and I don’t know why.”
    “That detective is cute!” called a blonde framer named Tiffany.
    “Too much attitude,” Ronnie told her.
    “I like ’em with ’tude!”
    “Did he beat you with a rubber hose?” Tim asked helpfully.
    “Ooooh!” Tiffany cooed. “Did he? Please say he did!”
    “Stop it, guys,” Lois ordered, still hugging Ronnie. “We’ve got to find out who originally framed that litho.”
    It should have been simple. The order was still in the computer. The paperwork was still in the bin. But nobody had signed off on it, and nobody had entered it in the log.
    “Ronnie, do you remember, did anybody sign the back?”
    “Crud. I didn’t notice.” And the brown paper had gone with the trash. Ronnie was feeling increasingly annoyed. No, face it: increasingly scared. “Lois. Did whatshisname, the detective—did he seem to think that I, you know, that I’m mixed up in—you know, the dead woman?”
    “Honey, like he’d tell me?”
    “Well, dammit, isn’t he going to look for the deadbeat? What’s his name, Tedder?”
    “Horace Tedder. Yeah, I guess. He was asking about him.”
    With angst that echoed Ronnie’s Tim said, “You’d think I’d remember a guy who ordered puce and fuchsia mats.” According to the initials on the order, he had taken it.
    Ronnie knew how hard it was to remember yesterday’s orders, let alone one taken six months ago. Nevertheless, she bleated, “You don’t remember a thing?”
    “No. I don’t even remember the litho.”
    “Who else was working then? Lois, do you still have the old work schedules?” It felt like time to grasp at straws.
    Lois grumbled, “It’s a good thing I save everything.” She rooted in the back of a file drawer and eventually pulled the schedule for the day the Tedder order was taken. “You.” Oh, goody. Detective Llewellyn was going to eat that up when he got around to asking, which he would. “Tim. Tiffany. And Melinda.” Melinda was the only one Ronnie didn’t know very well. Melinda hadn’t lasted very long.
    “Do you ever hear from Melinda?”
    “No. But why would I?” Some people were like that, and Melinda was one of them. One day she just hadn’t showed up for work, and nobody was surprised. Ronnie remembered Melinda saying that she had held jobs as a road construction flagger, a masseuse, a telemarketer, a nail tech, a cookie factory line feeder, a horse groomer, and an exotic dancer. Not the stay-with-it sort.
    “Did she pick up her last paycheck?”
    “No. It’s still sitting—” Lois broke off and stared at Ronnie. “What are you thinking?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “The check doesn’t amount to much. She probably just blew it off.”