Chapter 9: Tigger Surprise

Long shadows stretched across the broad canyon of the Yankee Girl site; the pines and spruce trees cast grotesquely extended shadows across the grounds like distorted giants. It was two hours before sundown but darkness would come early. In the high mountains and river canyons the sun sinks behind high barriers to leave everything below in deep shadow hours before twilight.

They’d eaten and now sat chatting, facing the massive downstairs fireplace. Buck and Gran had grown very close. Both scarcely remembered the solitary hours they’d lived before Gran came to stay.

Little Lucella, ‘Bug’ came bouncing across, jumping up on the fireplace hearth to dance, spinning around, swinging her precious stuffed “Tigger” around by its tail. Gran glanced up and noticed a bit of stuffing poking out of its belly seam.

“Hold on there, Bug. It looks to me that Tigger’s got a tummy ache. Have you been poking things into his tum-tum?” Gran asked.

“No, never,” Bug protested, facing Gran shyly, twisting herself from side to side and clutching Tigger tight to her chest.

“Well come here and let me take a look. Maybe Tigger needs a checkup, okay?”

“Okay, Gran,” and she bounced over, holding Tigger out for Gran, then bounced herself onto Buck’s lap. She squirmed sideways into place and watched Gran who held Tigger with his belly seam up.

“What’s this...?” Gran mumbled, seeing several broken stitches and a clump of stuffing poking out. The thread was different, not matching the other seams. And it was irregular, hand-stitched. She could see a few remnants of the original machine stitching that hadn’t been pulled out, with different-colored hand-stitched thread running raggedly down the seam.

“This will have to be pulled out and replaced. The stitching’s broken in three places.”

Gran jogged up the stairs to her room to get her sewing kit, then settled back into place beside Buck and Bug. Before starting with her small darning scissors to cut and pull the old threads, she turned to Bug and said, “Sweetheart, I’m going to operate on Tigger, to make his tummy well again. Is that okay?”

“Yes, Gran. But please be careful. I think he’s got a bad swelling in his tummy. It’s something hard that didn’t used to be there. Can you fix that, too?”

Buck turned his head to gaze down at Gran’s lap, his interest piqued by Bug’s odd comment.

“Let me just poke and squeeze a little like the doctor would do if you had a tummy-ache, Bug. Now let me ... that’s odd. There’s something wrong here... “ Gran snipped threads and pulled them loose to open the belly seam. That done, she carefully began to remove layers of stuffing, placing each wad on the side table beside her.

“Be careful, Gran!” Bug protested. “You’re pulling his whole insides out!” She started to sniffle.

“Of course I’ll be careful, Snugglebug,” Gran reassured her. “See here? I’m being real careful to save every last piece. It will ALL go back, just as soon as we can see ... Oh my God! Buck?”

Gran had reached under the last layer of stuffing and gripping it by one end, she pulled out a wrapped bundle of hundred-dollar bills. Bug stared and started crying; Buck’s mouth dropped open. Gran slapped the first bundle down and reached inside to pull out another bundle of wrapped mint-fresh $100 bills.

“Oh, dear Lord!” Buck swore. “I recognize those. That’s $20,000! Each bundle holds 100 bills, for $10,000.”

Gran stared at him for a shocked minute, then hearing Bug starting to wail that her Tigger was dying, she grabbed her off Buck’s lap to reassure her that her precious Tigger was in no danger.

“Buck, you’d better go get Reese. We’ve got a problem!”

Gran removed the broken stitching. She carefully replaced the stuffing to restore Tigger’s rounded belly contour and sewed it neatly closed with orange carpet thread. She presented it to Bug with assurances that her precious friend was ‘all better’ and wouldn’t be having any more tummy aches as long as she was careful not to be too rough or accidentally drop him in a mud puddle. The little four-year-old pulled herself up on Gran’s lap and kissed her cheek, mumbling ‘thanks, Gran’ and she raced away with Tigger bouncing behind her, gripped by the tail, to show her sisters that he was ‘all better again.’

Reese, Diane, and Buck sat at the main dining room table, coffee mugs in hand, with worried expressions on their faces, waiting for Gran to come sit with them. The two money bundles sat in the middle of the table between them.

“So, Gran ... again. Your daughter said nothing about these?” Reese asked. “Did she say anything about why they were running? Except that remark that her boyfriend told her that they were in some sort of trouble?”

“Not a damned word,” Gran swore. “That daughter of mine, when it came to men, didn’t have the brains God gave a goose! None of those kids, except the twins, have got the same father. From the little bit she’s told me over the years I know that Juanita came from her first and only husband, Ernesto Lopez. Melody dropped out of school and ran off with him to Las Vegas. He never held a steady job and she worked as a casino floor girl. Later, he was convicted of a gang killing and is serving a life sentence in the Nevada state prison. While she was working nights and he was home alone with the girl ... well, let’s not go there. Right now he’s where he belongs except he’d be better off dead.

“Then she hooked up with a hard-rock driller, Tony O’Connor, but she never married him. She got pregnant and had the twins. Turns out he’s an abusive alcoholic. He took up with Nita where Ernesto left off and he messed with the twins, too. Nita complained to Melody and Tony must have got scared. He ran away. The twins were three and neither Melody or the law have seen him since.

“And...” Gran took a deep breath and sighed, staring down at the table and shaking her head in disgust, “she moved back to Vegas to her floor girl job and she took up with a black casino security guard named Louis ‘Shoo’ Johnson. He got her pregnant and that’s how Lucella Louise came along.