We sat quietly, as quietly as two people can sit in a humming hospital.
“Did anyone find the money?” Clone asked. “Did anyone figure out what happened to the money?”
Yes, I told her. Megan hid the money in Lost and Found with every intention of wiring it to the rightful recipient after she secured her son and mother. I told Clone it didn’t work out exactly as Megan had planned, but in the end, the money was where it belonged.
“Is she okay?” Clone asked. “Is her baby okay? Is the old woman’s cat okay?”
Yes, yes, and maybe, I told her.
“If she’d handed over the money like she was supposed to, none of this would have happened. Why, why, why didn’t she give Sara the money?”
“She was trying to do the right thing,” I said.
“That’s me,” Clone said. “The minute I get out of here, I’m hitting Right Thing Road. With seven toes.”
I gave her my contact information, assured her the Bellissimo would pick up her hospital tab, and told her I’d need to talk to her about everything again in detail when she felt up to it.
“No disrespect, but don’t hold your breath.”
I understood.
She thanked me for coming to see her. And for the coffee.
At the door, and though I couldn’t wait to get out of the hospital and back to my family, I asked one last question. “What was the butler’s real name?” A lingering question we had yet to answer.
“The Penthouse butler? The deranged, unhinged, psychotic monster who left me in a freezer to die?”
Until that exact moment, I’d have bet good money it was Sara Z. or her brother, Nathan Z., who’d left Clone in a freezer to die as punishment for not delivering the five million dollars.
“I don’t know his name,” she said.
How could she not know Lurch’s name?
“You never heard Sara call him by his name?”
“I never heard her speak to him,” Clone said, “much less call him by his name. He worked for Bianca.”
But he didn’t.
“His job was to spy on us.”
But it wasn’t.
“Bianca would know his name.”
But she didn’t.
And just like that, it wasn’t over. What I suspected and what no one else would listen to was true. Lurch, a dead man whose fingerprints had yet to return results, a man who’d helped himself to the Sanders’ home, right above my head, for eight long months, did not come to the Bellissimo via Sara Z. Stone.
I stepped out of her hospital room in half a state of shock. I turned the corner, and there was my husband in a chair to the left of the nurse’s station. I fell into him and stayed there.
TWENTY-FOUR
My ex-ex-husband, Eddie Crawford, was an entirely different flavor of nightmare than his mother, Bea. While they both had the raised-by-wolves gene, the bull-in-a-china-shop gene, and the couldn’t-shut-up-to-save-their-own-lives gene, she was easier for me to take. And by easier for me to take, I meant that if given the choice of jumping off a cliff or jumping off a bridge, I’d pick the bridge, but only because it might be a softer death. And truth be told, I had to swallow Bea. She was my mother’s lifelong friend. There was no getting around the occasional Bea. Or maybe it was because I hadn’t accidentally married Bea twice. (My marriages to her son were technically, in sum total, less than a year, and many, many, many years earlier, when I didn’t know myself, much less him, and the ugly story was best told over a large bottle of tequila.) (With my ex-ex-husband being the worm at the bottom of the bottle in the story.) And that was who my father brought with him Sunday when he came to pick up my mother. Daddy was dropping off Eddie to stay with Bea Crawford until her hospital vacation, as she called it, was over, and neither one of them should have been there at all. Biloxi Memorial was about to get a big dose of their favorite patient’s feral offspring. And they thought she was trouble.
Daddy parked Eddie-the-Worm at the Holiday Inn Express on Beach Boulevard, three miles east of the Bellissimo, way too close for comfort.
“Punkin’?” What my father had called me all my life. “What happened here?”
He was examining the space where my kitchen ceiling should’ve been.
“It’s been a long week, Daddy.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s not my fault, Samuel,” Mother said from the stove where she was preparing all Daddy’s favorites: chicken and dumplings, country-fried steak, stuffed cabbage rolls, sweet potatoes, white beans, green beans, pinto beans, jalapeño cornbread muffins, a mile-high coconut cake, and her famous eight-layer summer salad, but that day, it was a seven-layer summer salad. She’d skipped the tomatoes. We weren’t ready for tomatoes. We might never be ready for tomatoes. “You know good and well I raised her right.” Mother whipped around. “I set the right example for you, Davis.” She shook her wooden spoon at me. “That you turned out to be the homemaker you aren’t isn’t my fault.”
Daddy barely winked at me.
He understood that there were times you had to take out your own kitchen ceiling.
My phone dinged with a Security alert. Bianca Sanders, in the Penthouse above us, was reporting yet another foul odor. I turned to my mother. “There’s no ceiling. Please stop boiling cabbage, Mother. The smell is going straight upstairs.”
“I’m not boiling cabbage, Davis. I’m blanching cabbage.”
I was about to engage my calm-down breathing technique—in four, hold seven, exhale eight—when Daddy said, “We’ll need to leave right after dinner, Punkin’.”
With another teeny wink.
It wasn’t that I wanted Daddy’s visit cut short. It was that we needed some normal. Whatever normal was in a deconstructed home.
We gathered around the table in our somewhat intact dining room.
Mother gave thanks.
“Lord, bless this food to our bodies and our bodies to your service and the hands that prepared it. Those would be my hands, Lord, just mine, because my daughter wasn’t blessed with gifts of the kitchen.”
Then we dove in to all that food, except Daddy, who could barely eat, with Bexley on one knee and Quinn on the other. We shared the events of the past week with him. The ones we could share in front of the twins. Bexley told the pigeon story. Mother told the Black Kow story. I told the wedding cake story. Bradley told the he’d-never-go-to-Vegas-again-without-me story and followed it up with a might-never-leave-me-alone-again epilogue. Mother asked if I’d be dressing up like a Jezebel and prancing around for Bianca again. I told her we hadn’t gotten that far. Daddy asked if we’d had any luck identifying the Penthouse butler. And while we shouldn’t have discussed it in front of the girls, we did. Gently. I told him it was my team’s top priority Monday morning, to know who he was, to know how he infiltrated the Bellissimo, to put to rest the mystery of Lurch.
I dropped my fork first.
Every other fork at the table followed.
All jaws dropped.
Goldendoodle Candy shot out from under the table and my mother burst into tears when Quinn, our silent baby, opened her mouth to say very clearly, succinctly, and loud enough for all to hear, “Ask the Birdy lady.”
It took me forever to find my own voice, and when I did, it was unrecognizable. “What, Quinny?”
She did it again. She spoke again. And the second time, she almost didn’t stop. “The Birdy lady is the mean man’s aunt and I know that because he called her Aunt Birdy when I heard them talking about the bad suitcase at Banca’s house and he was very mad at the Birdy lady and called her dumb and told her she was too old and she needed to go out to the pasture and when he saw me listening he looked at me so mean he scared me and told me not to tell anyone and I didn’t because he said if I told anyone I’d be in big T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”
And there was our Shreveport connection. Not e
xactly Shreveport, but throw-a-rock-and-hit-it Bossier City. Where Birdy James was between Hurricane Kevin and the Bellissimo’s reopening. At her sister’s. And Lurch was her nephew, Malcom, who’d shuttled Birdy back and forth pumping information out of her.
Quinn scanned our stunned faces.
“Am I in big T-R-O-U-B-L-E?” she asked.
No, she was not.
About the Author
Gretchen Archer is a Tennessee housewife who began writing when her three children, seeking higher educations, ran off and left her. She lives on Lookout Mountain with her husband. Double Trouble is the ninth Davis Way Crime Caper. You can visit her at www.gretchenarcher.com.
The Davis Way Crime Caper Series
by Gretchen Archer
Novels
DOUBLE WHAMMY (#1)
DOUBLE DIP (#2)
DOUBLE STRIKE (#3)
DOUBLE MINT (#4)
DOUBLE KNOT (#5)
DOUBLE UP (#6)
DOUBLE DOG DARE (#7)
DOUBLE AGENT (#8)
DOUBLE TROUBLE (#9)
Bellissimo Casino Crime Caper Short Stories
DOUBLE JINX
DOUBLE DECK THE HALLS
Henery Press Mystery Books
And finally, before you go...
Here are a few other mysteries
you might enjoy:
BOARD STIFF
Kendel Lynn
An Elliott Lisbon Mystery (#1)
As director of the Ballantyne Foundation on Sea Pine Island, SC, Elliott Lisbon scratches her detective itch by performing discreet inquiries for Foundation donors. Usually nothing more serious than retrieving a pilfered Pomeranian. Until Jane Hatting, Ballantyne board chair, is accused of murder. The Ballantyne’s reputation tanks, Jane’s headed to a jail cell, and Elliott’s sexy ex is the new lieutenant in town.
Armed with moxie and her Mini Coop, Elliott uncovers a trail of blackmail schemes, gambling debts, illicit affairs, and investment scams. But the deeper she digs to clear Jane’s name, the guiltier Jane looks. The closer she gets to the truth, the more treacherous her investigation becomes. With victims piling up faster than shells at a clambake, Elliott realizes she’s next on the killer’s list.
Read all about it—plus all the books, authors, series, and sales you need to find your next favorite read!
CLICK FOR HENERY PRESS
PUMPKINS IN PARADISE
Kathi Daley
A Tj Jensen Mystery (#1)
Between volunteering for the annual pumpkin festival and coaching her girls to the state soccer finals, high school teacher Tj Jensen finds her good friend Zachary Collins dead in his favorite chair.
When the handsome new deputy closes the case without so much as a “why” or “how,” Tj turns her attention from chili cook-offs and pumpkin carving to complex puzzles, prophetic riddles, and a decades-old secret she seems destined to unravel.
Read all about it—plus all the books, authors, series, and sales you need to find your next favorite read!
CLICK FOR HENERY PRESS
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