Rust in Peace (A Giovanna Ferrari Repair-it-all Mystery Book 1) Read online

  RUST IN PEACE

  Giovanna Ferrari Repair-it-all Mystery #1

  By

  J. J. Murray

  Kinfolk Books

  Roanoke, VA

  Copyright © 2015 by J. J. Murray

  Cover created with GimpShop 2.8.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s warped imagination and experiences or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental … and extremely unfortunate.

  Verses from The King James Version of the Bible (1611) are in the public domain.

  Novels by J. J. Murray

  Available from Kensington Publishing:

  Renee and Jay (2001)

  Something Real (2002)

  Original Love (2005)

  I’m Your Girl (2006)

  Can’t Get Enough of Your Love (2007)

  Too Much of a Good Thing (2008)

  The Real Thing (2009)

  She’s The One (2010)

  I’ll Be Your Everything (2011)

  A Good Man (2012)

  You Give Good Love (2013)

  Until I Saw Your Smile (2014)

  I Can’t Believe It’s You (2015)

  No Ordinary Love (2016)

  Available from Kinfolk Books:

  Renee and Jay2 (2003)

  P&Q (2012)

  The Saint of the City (1986)

  Get Gritty: A Modern Guide to Writing Fiction (2014)

  Writing as H. M. Mann and available from Kinfolk Books:

  Jade Ed. (1997)

  Wan Yu and Tonya Save the World … Twice! (1998)

  Redemption (1999)

  Mistaken Identities (2001)

  Mrs. Mayor (2006)

  The Waking (2007)

  Paint (2008)

  Every Dog (2009)

  The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (2009)

  Needy Greedy Love (2009)

  Sisters of Grace (2012)

  Beside the Still Waters (2013)

  Billy (2014)

  “It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  Monday, June 5

  Chapter 1

  Ciao!

  I am Giovanna “Gio” Maria Ferrari, age forty-two, a five-six raven-haired Sicilian-African American with hazel eyes who is single and looking and has not been finding for the last twenty years.

  Even though I have a B.S. in elementary education from Radford University and might have become a decent schoolteacher in Gray County, Virginia (population 3,721), a county trapped between the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains and forgotten by time, interstate highways, cell phone companies, and high-speed Internet providers. I choose to do what I do best: I tinker, disassemble, repair, and reassemble for Ferrari Repair, the shop my ancestors established in Kingstown, Gray County’s only town, in 1911.

  And I have no regrets.

  None.

  Okay, sometimes I do.

  Like today.

  It’s almost too hot and sticky to function today. It’s so hot kudzu hides in the shade and cacti want to hitchhike back to the desert where it’s cooler.

  I’m driving from my cabin on Mott’s Creek, where it was eighty-four degrees in the shade of the porch at six a.m. I’m on my way to The Simmons Farm on the other side of the county while my boxer-Labrador-something mutt Lovie chases birds, moths, her tail, butterflies, field mice, chipmunks, rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs, her tail again, and an occasional gopher snake while harassing the buffalo in the field next to the cabin. On June fifth for the last fifty years, my grandfather Franco, whom I call “Nonno,” has driven through Gray Creek, the only entrance to The Simmons Farm, to Frederick “Tiny” Simmons’ dairy farm to make Mr. Simmons an offer he could refuse: “I will fix all of the broken tractors in your fields for free.”

  Mr. Simmons has refused my grandfather’s offer fifty times, and since Nonno isn’t feeling well today—sore hip and a new lady “friend” visiting the shop where he also lives—I’m going to hear Mr. Simmons’ fifty-first refusal as the mercury hits ninety degrees before nine a.m.

  Hey, it’s a living.

  Whenever any of Mr. Simmons’ tractors died over the last seventy years, he left them in his fields to rust. He’s not the only farmer to do this in Gray County, and I’m sure there are thousands of abandoned tractors rusting peacefully on American farms today. Pictures of Mr. Simmons’ six “eyesore” tractors, however, appear every now and then in the Gray County Current, which is anything but current, comes out every two weeks, and contains more recipes than news. Six rusting tractors hide under waving alfalfa, ryegrass, and orchard grass on Mr. Simmons’ two-thousand-acre spread that stretches from muddy Gray Creek to rocky Motts Mountain, and there are only a few dozen Brown Swiss cows scattered between the rusted metal and nonexistent fencing. Mr. Simmons’ cows rarely range more than a few feet into Gray Creek, and they’ve never wandered out onto Route 303. His cows evidently know their place.

  I have never learned mine.

  “Do not worry if Mr. Simmons resists your request, Giovanna,” my grandfather had warned before I left the shop this morning. “Be strong. Do not take no for an answer.”

  This from the man who had taken no for an answer fifty times.

  My grandfather is testardo—stubborn—and so am I.

  While other Gray County girls were learning how to cook, smoke, drink, and gossip, I learned how to tune up engines, tear down transmissions, weld, rewire lamps, replace drive belts in dryers, and rebuild carburetors. For my science fair project, I built a diesel engine with my papa’s help and modified it to run on used cooking oil from The Swinging Bridge, Gray County’s only sit-down restaurant. I placed first in the state and won a $3,000 prize in the International Science and Engineering Fair.

  I was famous in Gray County for about a week.

  I know I displaced at least two recipes in the Current that week.

  I used the prize money to buy and rebuild a four-wheel-drive white 1991 Jeep Wagoneer with REPAIRU on my license plates. I originally wanted DONNA SENSUALE (“sultry woman”), but it had too many letters. I keep my cell phone plugged into the lighter, but I often miss service calls because Gray County is in the one percent Verizon doesn’t completely cover. You can see us on that Verizon map on TV. We’re the white square along the Virginia-West Virginia line.

  My Jeep is a “woody” with real wood borders, a 360 V-8 that gets horrific gas mileage, titanium brakes, high performance pistons and rings, a custom ground performance camshaft, a bushed, sleeved, and jetted carburetor, and double roller timing chains and gears.

  Translation: My Jeep is a beast with some serious get-up-and-go and can devour every two-lane, gravel, dirt, and rutted road in this county. It may not look like much on the outside, but my ride is mechanically sound and extremely frisky.

  Like me.

  I wish I felt friskier today.

  On windy Route 303, I pass a lush goat farm where goats play king-of-the-hill on a mulch pile. After zipping by a mucky, muddy hog farm, I slow down to see a “farm” populated by one camel, one llama, and one longhorn steer. I have no explanation for that trio of animals. Call it “The Gray County Exotic Animal Park.”

  After eating the exhaust of a logging truck, which goes fifteen miles an hour uphill and seventy-five miles an hour downhill, I slow down to interrupt the meals of several crows trying
to clear rabbit, squirrel, raccoon, and possum road kill. Crows and turkey buzzards are extremely efficient, so I try not to hit them. I then dodge several skinny turkeys and a skinnier white-tailed deer before creeping behind Gray County’s version of a “tanning bed”—a pickup truck loaded with farm workers leering at me from lawn chairs on the bed of the truck. Fortunately, a few bugs splatter my windshield so I don’t have to look at all of them. I turn off 303 and take the gravel road down to Gray Creek, the unmistakable odor of skunk creeping past my air-conditioning.

  Mr. Deed, the wise proprietor of Deed’s General Store (“If we don’t have it, it hasn’t been invented yet!”), tells me skunks are rutting later than usual this year. He says a second mating occurs if skunks don’t find a mate the first time. I hope they’re successful this time. With their funk, this heat, and an extended drought, we could have a serious air pollution problem in Gray County.

  The Jeep plunges through Gray Creek with ease since the drought has reduced it from three feet to eighteen inches of slow-moving water. On the other side I bounce up an old cow path to Mr. Simmons, who stands in a field wearing faded blue overalls over a soiled white T-shirt, scuffed brown boots, and a red, sweat-stained Massey-Ferguson baseball cap. He had to get his boots special-ordered because they are at least a size twenty. I look at my boots (size seven), jeans (size none of your business), and light blue Oxford collar work shirt with our Carolina blue “thrashing” lion logo on the pocket. My papa got the lion idea from our family crest. New customers sometimes ask, “Are you a Detroit Lions fan?” It looks nothing like the football logo, but if it makes customers happy, I say, “Sure am.”

  I hope I have dressed “country girl conservative” enough for Mr. Simmons. I put on my green safari hat, the mosquito net tucked into the sweatband, and step out of the Jeep, the heat and humidity slapping my face like a thick, hot, wet sock.

  A sauna has to be kinder to the human body than Gray County, Virginia, in June.

  I look up at Mr. Simmons. “Hi.”

  He nods once, and his bulbous, pitted nose continues to bounce.

  I am so short. Frederick “Tiny” Simmons is at least six-eight and weighs 400 pounds. He’s a big-boned fifth of a ton of a man. He is truly abdominous. I think that’s a word, and if it isn’t, it should be. One of his hands is as big as my head. His white beard is older than I am. His ear hair is older than Nonno. He could pass for Robert E. Lee if General Lee really let himself go. Mr. Simmons had to start some of his facial wrinkles when Truman was president.

  But I am not intimidated. If my grandfather wasn’t afraid of “The Round Mound of Kingstown,” neither am I.

  “You lost?” Mr. Simmons asks, his voice gravelly, deep, and loud.

  There is an echo.

  “No, Mr. Simmons,” I say. “How are you today?”

  Mr. Simmons growls.

  Living alone has obviously eroded his social graces.

  “Well, who are you then?” he asks.

  “Giovanna Ferrari, but most people call me Gio.”

  Mr. Simmons squints. At least I think he does. His eyes disappear under the numerous folds of his craggy eyelids. “You’re Franco’s daughter?”

  “Granddaughter.”

  His eyelids rise like dusty Venetian blinds that are missing a few slats. “Yeah, he’s too old to be having a young thing like you.” He steps closer and provides me some shade. “Is it June fifth already?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Simmons peers into my Jeep. “Where’s Franco?”

  “Frank-oh” and “Gee-oh-van-uh.” No one says our names correctly around here. “His health isn’t so good, Mr. Simmons. His hip is giving him fits.”

  “Your grandpa is only eighty-two,” Mr. Simmons scowls. “I’m going to be a hundred in two years.”

  This goliath of a man is ninety-eight years old. It must be the fresh air out here, which isn’t that fresh today. I smell manure, loam, skunk rut, and something else. It might be feet. No …

  I smell armpits.

  Mr. Simmons’ armpit hair is older than I am and might even be longer than my hair.

  “There’s something I have to know,” he says. “Why are you so dang dark?”

  I grit my teeth. “I’m out in the sun a lot, Mr. Simmons. Not as much as you are, of course.”

  I’m dark olive-skinned, mainly in the summer. I have the Roman nose and the long dark black hair of a Sicilian signora, but the rest of me is all from my mama. I tan almost black in the summer, and I’m often darker than the three Hispanics at The Hemmingsford Buffalo Farm, the single black woman at a commune called Solitude, and the Japanese woman at The Swinging Bridge.

  But I don’t want to think about Mama today, and I don’t want to think about Kimiko because she stole my man.

  I am obviously in need of a second rut, too.

  “You Tallies sure are persistent,” Mr. Simmons says. “Never met no one like y’all.”

  That’s what some folks around here still call us. Some of the “nicer” Gray County High School girls called me “Tallie Whacker.” Some of the not-so-nice girls called me “Tallie Ho.”

  Only Chet Thomas ever called me the N-word.

  He still has a crooked nose, and I still have a little scar on the middle knuckle of my right hand.

  I truly enjoyed giving my valedictorian speech on the subject of prejudice, though I doubt anyone in my class understood a word I said.

  “Yes sir. My nonno sent me to ask you if—”

  “Your what?” Mr. Simmons interrupts.

  “My nonno, my grandfather, Franco. I call him Nonno.”

  “No-no. Ha! That’s a good name for him, cuz I know what he wants you to do, and I know how I’m gonna answer. That man’s been pestering me for fifty years to fix my tractors. If I won’t have no Tallie man do it, I won’t have no Tallie woman do it neither. The answer is no-no.”

  It’s pronounced “nah-no,” and I’m not taking no-no for an answer. “I was born here, Mr. Simmons. I’m as American as you are.”

  “You sure don’t look it,” he says.

  I watch Mr. Simmons’ massive Great Pyrenees chasing a calf near the creek while two donkeys stand guard on a hillside to ward off wolves. Farmers raise Great Pyrenees with the animals they will later tend and protect, and that dog acts more like a cow than a dog.

  “Mr. Simmons, you know I’m Gray County through and through. I was valedictorian of my class.” Of fifty-seven total students. Hey, it got me a full ride to Radford.

  “Then I won’t have no woman do it either. No … no.”

  I’m used to sexist men since the air seems to breed them in this county, but it still irks me. I have an outstanding reputation for repairing almost anything, and there isn’t a business in town that doesn’t have my cell number on speed dial.

  I look at the nearest tractor while tall, stiff, yellow grass waves around it. My grandfather had me memorize the schematics and specs of every tractor out here in case Mr. Simmons agreed to a restoration, and I can take apart and reassemble any of these tractors without a diagram. “That’s a 1950 Farmall Cub, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Simmons turns to look. “Uh-huh.”

  I move out of his shade and closer to the tractor. “Twelve-inch tires up front, twenty-four-inch tires in the back.” It’s orange with rust and might have been red once. “Made by International Harvester, right?”

  Mr. Simmons nods. “Yeah. So?”

  At least he’s not saying no-no now. “One liter four-cylinder three-speed with an L-head engine. Ten horsepower. No power steering. Wasn’t like the Farmall 1954 MT-A, was it? The tractor with one-finger driving.”

  “Couldn’t afford one of those,” he says. “You have to use both hands with that one. Got it in 1965. Had trouble with the clutch and the hydraulics. It could barely pull an empty wheelbarrow. It died right there in 1969. Worst investment I ever made.”

  “Did it die running?” I ask. This is vitally important.

  “Yeah,” he says, turn
ing to watch the donkeys braying at his dog. “Wouldn’t go into gear.”

  Clutch problem. An easy fix. “I could fix the clutch and have it running in no time.” Once I removed forty years of rust and replaced the breather tube, fuel lines, spark plug wires, and radiator hose. Time is not kind to rubber.

  “What would I need that tractor for? I have a Massey-Ferguson now.”

  “A four-fifty-one diesel,” I say. “Running okay?”

  “Better than that one ever did. There’s no use fixing that one.”

  That’s not necessarily a no. “People sell restored tractors to collectors all the time. What’d you pay, four, five hundred?”

  “Three hundred.”

  “Fixed up, it could easily sell for a thousand, maybe more.”

  Mr. Simmons seems to smile. It’s hard to tell, though. His cheek wrinkles go north while his lips stay east and west. “I don’t need the money.”

  “Well, you could show it off in the Fourth of July parade this year.”

  Mr. Simmons frowns. Again, I think he’s frowning. “I’ve seen them parades. Arrogance and snobbery on display. Look at what I’ve got. Look what I owe the bank for. Those people’s tractors have never done a decent day’s work, and they don’t even look like tractors anymore.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Simmons, but you know, that tractor would sure look good leading the parade this year.”

  Mr. Simmons shakes his head, his jowls creating quite a breeze. “They would never let me lead any parades in Kingstown. Not in a million years.”

  “I would, Mr. Simmons.”

  “I cost them millions.”

  “And I’m glad you didn’t sell this land to make a lake.”

  Back in the 1970s, the county commissioners pressured Mr. Simmons to sell his land so they could dam up Gray Creek and Motts Creek to make a lake that might have given a boost to Gray County’s economy. The commissioners were trying to duplicate the success of manmade Pine Lake two hours south of here.