Six
What were the chances Joey was playing a prank on her? Eliza couldn’t stop thinking about it.
It’d be like one of those 90s teen movies her mom had made her watch. Joey was the handsome, popular guy and Eliza was the nerd he’d made a bet to woo. He’d let her hair down and whip off her glasses and suddenly, the rest of the world would be blown away by her inside-out stunning beauty.
There were a few problems with this theory. First, Eliza put her hair down all the time, even while simultaneously taking off her glasses, and no one had ever stopped her in the street to sign her for a modeling contract.
She was no beauty. That much was true, but it didn’t bother her. Elizabeth Bennet was always second to her sister in beauty, and it didn’t matter. She had her books and her wit – and she’d ended up with Mr. Darcy!
Not that Eliza thought of herself as Elizabeth Bennet. She wouldn’t dare to. As much as she loved Pride and Prejudice, and as close as their last name Dennet was to Bennet, they were short one sister, and every conversation ended with the girls arguing over who had to be Mary.
Eliza wouldn’t admit it out loud, but she knew she was the Mary. Studious but tedious, aspirational but too plain and awkward to be effective.
It didn’t matter how hunky Joey was – and he was plenty hunky – he couldn’t turn a Mary into anything but a slightly spruced-up Mary.
That was the second problem with the 90s prank theory. Why would someone place a bet on a boring Mary? And why would Joey agree to take the bet?
Eliza kept her head down for the rest of the week, making tea, baking scones, and avoiding indulging in any grandiose thinking.
Then the entirety of Saturday came and went without any sign of him.
As she got ready to close the shop, Eliza realized he had probably been messing with her from the start.
Then, ten minutes before closing time, the front door bell jingled.
“Got any leftover cupcakes you were planning to throw away? Because I’d be happy to take them off your hands.”
Eliza peeked up from behind the cash register. He stood there, hands in his coat pocket, grinning at her.
She stood, smoothing her apron. “I usually take our leftovers to the food bank, but if you’d like to steal a cupcake from a baby, sure, I can grab you one.”
He paused, then flashed a smile, dimple engaged. “Yeah, forget those kids. Hand over the cupcakes.”
Eliza laughed and he rushed to add, “I’m just kidding. Please don’t give me one. I wasn’t aware of that and now I’ll probably never eat one again.”
“What about something else? I made a batch of ham and cheese scones that aren’t up to par. You could have them.”
“Now there’s a deal.” He stuck out his hand, palm up. “Scone, please.”
Eliza smiled and waved for him to follow, leading him into the kitchen and pointing at the plate of misshapen scones. The edges of each scone were lined with char. “Have at it. Sorry they’re terrible.”
Without a word, he stuffed half a scone into his mouth. “This is so good.”
She shook her head. “It’s burnt.”
“Is it?” Joey chewed slowly. “Nah. It’s good.”
She rolled her eyes and packed the rejected scones into a bag for him.
He accepted it. “Thank you. Are you in a hurry? I’m sorry I’m here so late. I had lots of flights today, but I was hoping we could still sit down and talk out a plan.”
“I never agreed to be part of your scheme.”
“You’re here, though, aren’t you? Waiting to get the rest of my pitch?”
“I work here.” She crossed her arms. Hopefully her ears weren’t glowing red, betraying her. “I wasn’t waiting for you.”
“Aw, man. You’re not even a little bit curious?” He frowned. “You’re putting me out here. I was really hoping to get that money so I could buy my own plane.”
Eliza turned, picking up the tea kettle and hiding a smile. “Do you want some tea?”
“I don’t want to make you work off the clock.”
“Tea is never work.” She pulled the lid off of a tea tin. “Another pot of the hot cinnamon spice?”
“Yes, please!”
She made up a teapot and gathered a pair of her favorite cups.
“I can carry that,” Joey offered, then added, “Whoa, these are nice.”
“Thanks. They’re Granny’s, for personal use only. She got them when she was living in Japan.”
“When did she live in Japan?”
Eliza led the way to a table and Joey followed, carrying the teacups. “She lived all over the place growing up. Her dad was in the army.”
“Have you been?”
She took a seat and looked up at him. “To Japan? No. Have you?”
He nodded. “I worked in a factory in Tokyo for six months.”
“What? When?”
“When I was young and dumb.” He smiled and rolled his eyes. “I wanted to see Japan and I thought I could get hired as a pilot. Turns out it’s not that easy, so I ended up at the factory.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was awesome. Japan, I mean. The factory, not so much, but I got to travel a lot. Osaka, Sapporo, Niigata, Kyoto – there’s so much to see.”
“But you didn’t stay.”
“I missed flying.” He shrugged. “Missed it so much I took a sketchy job in Ghana.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, right. You mentioned that.”
“Yeah. I played pilot for this guy who ran a bunch of cocoa farms. I’m not a hundred percent sure he wasn’t a criminal. He seemed to like bribing people.”
Eliza poured tea into his cup, then her own. “You’ve led a more exciting life than I have.”
“I just get a lot of bad ideas. The worst ideas, actually.”
“Like trying to catch a bank robber.”
Joey squinted at her, a smile on his lips. “That’s not one of them.”
“Luckily, we aren’t going to find him.” Eliza took a sip, the cinnamon filling her cheeks, then held the cup in front of her. The cup and saucer were tiffany blue with tiny pink roses bursting from the handle and inside the rim.
“We’re going to,” he said. “I believe in us.”
She stared at him. He seemed, at least, to be sincere.
Why wouldn’t he be? While he was off exploring the world, she’d been locked in her bedroom, going over all the things she should be doing but was completely unable to do, trapped in a cycle of doubt and anxiety, dipped in self-hatred.
It wasn’t even like she’d failed at one thing. That wouldn’t have been so bad. Lots of people failed at something.
But Eliza had failed in a much bigger way. She’d failed to become anything. All these years, all this promise, and she was nothing. No one.
Steam rose from the teacup sitting in front of him. He met her gaze and kept it.
He was better off searching for the bank robber on his own, and she might’ve told him that if she didn’t find it so hard to look away from that smile of his…
“Where would you start?” she asked.
He took a deep breath and pulled out a pen and a notebook. “Okay, so first, tell me everything you remember about the robbery. No detail is too small.”
“Are you sure? The ATF agent got annoyed with me when she asked for my story.”
“Why?”
Eliza sighed and set her teacup down. “When she interviewed me, all she said was, ‘Tell me about your day.’ I said, ‘My day?’ And she said ‘yeah.’ So I did, starting from when my alarm went off, how I brushed my teeth and skipped breakfast, how I rushed to the bank, and how I thought about stopping at the coffee shop but I didn’t –”
Joey laughed. “She thought you were stalling? Or obfuscating somehow?”
Was that even a word? Eliza had never heard it said out loud, so she said, “I guess.”
“I mean it.” He stared at her, a pen poised in his hand. “No detail is too small.”
She had to look away from him. That dimple. That stare. He was too much. “I’ll start with getting to the bank. I pulled into the parking lot and noticed the pickup truck right away, because it was parked on the sidewalk blocking the ATM.”
He nodded, writing on his notepad.
“It was a white Toyota Tacoma, at least ten years old, with Goodyear tires. The license plate started with MAC, I don’t remember the numbers, though.”
“M-A-C,” he repeated.
“The back was loaded with stuff and a cover was partially pulled away. The robber was pulling things out. I heard him grunting and came over to help.”
“Was he in the wheelchair at this point?”
“Yeah. I know it was dumb to not think how odd it was for someone to drive a truck, get out, and get into a wheelchair.” She stole a glance at him. It was one of the many things she’d been ridiculed for online – not recognizing that the robber didn’t need a wheelchair.
“He might’ve just needed it for mobility,” Joey said. “Don’t let people’s comments get to you. They weren’t there.”
She breathed, releasing the tension in her shoulders. “That’s true.” Eliza leaned in, her speech picking up speed. “The wheelchair was that blue pleather material, like the kind you see in hospitals. There were stickers on the back, and I was staring at them before he turned around. One was for Harbor Coffee – they’re in town. Another was a sticker from Olympia National Park. There were two stickers from Orcas Island, and one from this souvenir shop in town called Whale Gifts. The left armrest of the wheelchair was broken, but the right handle was normal.”
Joey furiously scribbled everything she’d said, drawing a big star next to the word wheelchair.
Eliza waited for him to stop writing before continuing. “The guy had a brown wool cowboy hat with a pink-and-gold band around it, and a tassel with gold thread at the end. I thought it looked like a lady’s hat. A little small on him, too. Most of his face was covered by a blue surgical mask, but his beard was sticking out from underneath.” She paused. “Thinking about it, it was probably a fake beard, because it was really dark and a different color than his hair, and the texture was just weird. Stiff. Plastic-y.”
“Interesting.”
“There was a tuft of his hair sticking out from the hat. That was a light brown, kind of like your hair, but the beard was black.” She thought for a moment. “Yeah, the beard was fake. He had pretty eyes. It was sunny, and I could really see them – dark green, with flecks of brown and blue, with gold around the pupil. His skin was pale, kind of like mine, but with a cooler tone than mine.”
“Cooler tone,” he mumbled, then looked up. “How old was he?”
“It’s hard to say. I would guess anywhere from thirty to fifty.”
Joey nodded, adding this to a page titled “Suspect.”
“He was wearing a black leather jacket, really loose, with a red-trimmed zipper and golden buttons. He had blue jeans – Levi’s. I saw them when he stood up. He didn’t have a wallet in his back pocket or anything. Oh – I guess you can see what he was wearing in the video.”
“It’s still good to know.”
“The jacket was too big for him. It made him look overweight, but I don’t think he is overweight. When he stood up, he was tall – definitely taller than me, about your height.”
Joey leaned back and looked at her. “Wow. You remember a lot of detail about this guy. Do you have a photographic memory or something?”
Eliza shook her head. “Not exactly. There’s no such thing as a photographic memory. I have a good memory, but…”
She stopped herself. There was no need for him to know about her boring self. Before she’d realized how good her memory was, she thought she was smart. Then she’d gotten to college and met actual smart people.
That was the story of her life. The shame of being smart, but never smart enough.
“This is amazing.” Joey scanned the page before flipping to a blank one. “Is there anything else you remember?”
Eliza described his cowboy boots and the curve of his nose. She talked about his coat, the smell coming off him – mint gum and cheap aftershave. She described everything he was wearing down to the mud on his left boot.
“What did he sound like when he was talking to you?” Joey asked.
“His voice was raspy, like he was lowering it or something. I felt like I was talking to the Batman.”
Joey burst into a laugh. “Yeah, sounds like Bruce Wayne.”
Eliza laughed too, but stopped herself. “He wasn’t Batman, though. And I helped him rob a bank.”
He stopped writing and looked up at her. “How were you supposed to know he was going to rob the bank?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because he insisted on coming in with two bank-robbing bags?” Eliza put her hands over her face and groaned. “It’s so embarrassing I didn’t catch onto any of it – the beard, the voice, the bags – as being suspicious.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said firmly. “You thought you were helping a man in a wheelchair have an easier day at the bank. You didn’t question him because you’re a nice person. That’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
He seemed to believe that. Eliza picked up her teacup and sat back. “Then we went into the bank and the rest is history.”
Joey held the pen at the corner of his mouth, scrawled something, then tapped it on the desk. “I think we have a good start. Lots of details. There’s an answer here. I can feel it.”
That was kind of him. When she’d told this story before, the ATF agent had told her to “stop trying to come up with a list of useless details.”
She cleared her throat. “I’m glad you’re optimistic, because I’m not.”
“I’m always optimistic.” He flipped through the pages. “How about we figure out where he got that wheelchair? It seems like it was local, don’t you think? With all those stickers?”
She leaned in. “Huh. Yeah, you’re probably right. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”
“You’re too busy memorizing every single detail around you all the time. It’s amazing.”
“Thanks,” she said sheepishly. It had been a long time since her power of observation was actually useful.
If this could be considered useful.
“Are you ready?” he asked, standing from the table. “We’re going to change your life, Eliza.”
She looked around. There wasn’t anything else to clean, and she didn’t have any other plans. “Sure. Why not.”