by Jessa Archer
She nodded. “I mean, I couldn’t see the entire thing because it was in the cup holder. But yeah, I remember the name. Tessa said it was called Pacific Boost. Where did you find that?”
“At the yard sale,” I said. “Did either of you see a can like this at the factory?”
Julissa looked confused. “No. She thought it was gross. I said that he drank it. Not Tessa.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s not a lot to go on, but it’s something.”
I walked down the stairs to the bookstore level and went out the back, as Cassie had suggested. The first thing I saw was Blevins, leaning against his car. “Well, there you are. Cassie said she hadn’t seen you. Imagine that.”
“Just popped in and she said you were looking for me. Not hard to spot a big old police car through the back window. Did you need something?”
“I need you to keep away from potential witnesses, first of all.”
“Witnesses to what?” I asked. “A practical joke that someone played on me? Because that’s all it is, right?”
“We’re going to give it until tomorrow morning. Jeff Martin says she’s taken off without telling anyone before, and I’m less inclined to spook the tourists than you are. That’s actually not why I’m here, though. Two women stopped by the office and claimed that you attacked one of them. Ripped her purse. Said there were witnesses. And you seemed in a pretty combative mood when I saw you over there this morning, so I thought it might merit a little conversation about personal space and disorderly conduct.”
“There were witnesses to her trying to steal Wren’s property, too,” I said. “I’m sure Wren would be delighted to tell you all about it if you’d like to walk over?”
“Who steals from a yard sale?” he asked as he got back into his car.
“That’s an excellent question. Maybe you should ask Ms. Tucker?”
“Nope,” he said through the open window. “I’ve got better things to do than intervene in cat fights and sort out Ed Shelton’s love life. Just keep away from the woman, Ruth. She’ll be gone in a few days, and you’ll have your man all to yourself again.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
He smirked and began to roll up the window.
“Hey, Blevins? If you’re actually interested in finding out how Tessa died, maybe you should see if there are any prints other than yours and mine on that Pacific Boost can we picked up at the factory last night. And maybe compare it to this one that someone left at Wren’s yard sale this morning.” I reached into my purse to pull out the baggie with the second can and tossed it through the window into his lap.
The trademark Blevins smirk was entirely gone when he drove off, kicking up gravel in his wake.
✰ Chapter Twelve ✰
Ed had gotten a late start writing after spending the morning at the sheriff’s office with Kate and Sherry, so he sent me a text saying he’d meet me at the diner at six. His response to my earlier text asking how Kate’s meeting with Blevins had gone had been brief and to the point—I’ll tell you all about it at dinner—but over the past few months, I’d learned not to read anything into a brusque reply if Ed was in the middle of his writing session. I could even sympathize, since I hated interruptions when I was working on a news story.
Most days, Ed stopped by the Star’s office at the end of his walk, sometime between five and five thirty. That was my cue to stop work for the day and discuss what we wanted to do for dinner, unless I was running behind on getting the weekly edition of the paper to the printer, in which case Ed usually grabbed some takeout and brought it back to the office. This was the pattern we’d fallen into naturally a few months back. Most of the time, it was just the two of us, since Dean and Cassie were at The Buzz from the time the store opened until the doors were locked at night. Some nights we cooked together, usually at my place, and others we ate out. During the summer months, we had been enjoying the luxury of having four or five food trucks lining the park at the end of the block. Summer was nearly over, though. A couple of the trucks might stay open at lunchtime or on weekends for a month or so after the tourists left, but once winter set in, our options would pretty much be home cooking or Pat’s Diner.
That said, the diner offered a fairly extensive menu. It wasn’t exactly haute cuisine, but it was filling, featured almost every comfort food you could imagine, and wouldn’t bust the budget. We ate there at least a few times a week and would probably have done so more often if we were still at an age where our arteries could take that sort of punishment.
At a few minutes before six, I closed up shop and walked down the block to the diner, glad to have made some progress on this week’s edition of the Star. The story about Ed’s book signing and the grand opening of The Buzz was finished and available online, and I had almost all of the copy for the print edition ready as well. I’d kept half of the front page open. The only question now was which story would be below the fold. I’d squeezed things together a bit on page seven as well, which was where the obituaries are printed. Unless a miracle happened and Tessa Martin showed up alive and well, the story about her disappearance would be the main headline, and I’d have to go through the cases in the back to pick out a special font for Tessa’s obituary.
When I reached the diner, I pushed the door open and stepped inside, braving a fierce blast of arctic air from the AC, which was putting in some serious overtime today. At five minutes before six, the temperature was still close to ninety.
Tourists who visited Thistlewood probably thought Pat’s Diner was designed to capitalize on 1950s nostalgia. From the chrome ceilings to the personal jukeboxes at each booth to the waitresses’ uniforms, the place certainly gave off a Happy Days vibe. But the diner was actually opened in 1959 by the father of the current owner, Patsy Grimes, and it looked this way, at least in part, because no one had ever bothered to update the decor. Pretty much the only concession to changing times was the addition of a few vegetarian and, more recently, gluten-free items to the menu. The two old coots currently parked on stools at the counter—Jesse Yarnell and his buddy, Mac—regularly teased Patsy about that, saying she’d gone big city, which was one of their worst insults. The nature of her rebuttal to that or any of their other insults depended entirely on the season. During the winter, when it was just us Thistlewooders hanging out, Patsy would cut loose with language that would curl your hair. But she tried to keep things to at least a PG rating when there were tourists around. I strongly suspected this arrangement was the result of a little chat with other members of the Thistlewood Chamber of Commerce at some point in the past, but this has never been confirmed.
The message board just in front of the door was filled with the usual array of info about music lessons, yard sales, ads for house cleaners, painters, and so forth. I’d planned to remove the poster for Wren’s yard sale, but it was no longer visible. Another poster had been pinned on top. It was the same one I’d noticed illegally plastered to the lampposts outside the night before. A bright-red braided rope formed the border of the poster, which proclaimed:
REVIVAL
This week only!
Church of Divine Signs
Rev. Abel Davenport
Pender’s Gap, Tennessee
Come as you are!
Bring Your Faith and We Will Move the Mountain!
I had to hand it to Davenport. That last line was kind of catchy.
“You goin’?”
The question came from Teresa Grimes, Patsy’s elderly mother. She’d officially retired years ago, but she still hung out at the diner most days, occasionally taking a shift at the register if the regular cashier needed to head home early.
“To the revival?” I laughed. “No. I don’t think I’d be welcome. Reverend Davenport called me a heathen earlier today.”
She cackled. “Abel Davenport calls ever’body a heathen. Don’t mean he won’t take your offering if you show up. And…I’m tellin’ you, he puts on a show just at a regular service. I can only imagine what he does when
cameras are rolling.”
“Cameras?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s got some documentary guy up there tonight. They’re makin’ one of them pilots, hopin’ to sell it to cable. He did a little sales pitch to the diner when he was hangin’ up that flyer earlier, before Patsy told him to scoot.”
I was about to ask her why a documentary maker would be interested in some little mountain church, but she turned away to ring up two men who were at the counter with their checks. I could ask her later.
Patsy breezed over to fill my coffee cup as I was browsing the menu. “Why are you lookin’ at a menu, girl? You oughta have that thing memorized by now.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said, handing her the menu. I’d already decided exactly what I wanted before I even locked up the office. My stomach had been grumbling miserably for the past hour, and I realized that, with the exception of a few cookies and an apple I’d grabbed at Wren’s, I hadn’t eaten all day. “Western omelet, hash browns, and raisin toast for me. And Ed wants the bacon cheeseburger with fries, no tomato, and A-1 instead of ketchup.”
Jesse chuckled and elbowed Mac. “Well, I guess we know who wears the pants in that relationship. She’s already deciding what he eats for dinner.”
Patsy rolled her eyes.
“Or maybe Ed sent me a text,” I told him. “You know, so we could eat and get out of here without having to listen to too much of your charming social commentary.”
That earned me a high-five from Patsy, who leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Guessin’ you already heard about Tessa Martin?”
When I nodded, she added, “Jesse said Billy Thorpe told him they were treating it as a missing person. That he thinks Tessa’s playing some sort of prank. But one of my customers who was over at…that other place said Ed’s niece painted a different picture when she came running in last night.”
Patsy had yet to refer to The Buzz by its actual name. Either it was that other place or that Starbucks wannabe or, in one moment of candor, the competition. I’d been worried about this sort of reaction as soon as Dean mentioned his idea for the place. Pat’s Diner was packed from wall to shiny wall in the middle of summer, and they often had to put up a sign saying Takeout Orders Only to handle the crowds. Still, she had always viewed any other restaurant as a usurper. I hadn’t been back in Thistlewood yet when the food trucks started operating around the park, but Wren said Patsy had entirely quit speaking to Annie Spencer—a woman she had known all her life—when Annie and her daughter bought a truck and started serving up barbecue. Patsy hadn’t gone to quite that extreme with Dean and Cassie, probably because they served a very limited menu of drinks and baked goods, and because Wren, Ed, and I were regular customers, even during the lean season. But I could still tell that her nose was out of joint about the whole thing.
“Rumor also has it that you and Cassie rode over to the factory to check it out,” she added.
“We did,” I said, trying to skirt around the full truth. “And I called Blevins. But there was no body to be found when he arrived.”
All true. Not a single lie in anything I said, although there was one pretty sizeable one lying there between the words.
“Have you heard anything else?” Patsy asked.
“No,” I told her, which was again true. “Was kind of hoping you might have heard something.”
She shook her head. “Elvis was in here this afternoon to get his milkshake, just like always. But I couldn’t get a peep out of him.”
I snorted at the nickname. “You do know Blevins looks nothing like Elvis, right?”
“Don’t care,” she said. “You order a peanut butter and banana milkshake nearly every day and strut around like you’re the king of Woodward County, and I’ll start callin’ you Elvis, too. He was in fine form today. Had some guy in here with him taking publicity shots. Must be gearing up for the next election already.”
The front door opened, and Ed stepped inside. Patsy smiled. “Now that’s the guy who should still be sheriff if you ask me. I’ll be back with y’all’s order in a few, okay?”
Ed dropped onto the opposite bench with a relieved thud and mopped his brow with a napkin. “I waited until almost dark, cut my walk in half, and I still feel like I should go back home and shower in order to be fit company.”
I laughed. “It’s okay. We’ll be grungy together. I was ready to go stretch out in the funeral home’s deep freeze to cool off by the time Wren’s yard sale was over.”
“I’ll bet.” A sly smile spread across his face. “Maybe you and Wren should ask your preacher friend to pray for a break from this heat. Maybe he could do a little snake dance and send some rain our way.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by the last part, and my return smile was a bit wary, because I was wondering whether he’d also heard about my altercation with Meredith Tucker. “So…you heard about Davenport?”
“Yeah, I…” Ed stopped, casting an annoyed look over at the counter. Once Jesse Yarnell got hold of information, it spread through the town like a virus, often mutating along the way as it passed from person to person. The man was actually tilting his head to better catch what we were saying. If he leaned back any further, he was going to fall off the stool.
Luckily, there was an easy fix for his overactive ears. I reached into my purse and pulled out two quarters. This wasn’t the first time we’d had to cover our conversation from the diner’s resident eavesdropper, so I punched in the numbers from memory—“Do You Want to Know a Secret?” by the Beatles and Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine.” I wasn’t sure if Jesse was smart enough to get the coded message. He probably just assumed those were my all-time favorite songs.
Ed picked out the last two tunes, and once the music began, he leaned forward and said, “Blevins told Billy he pulled up just as you and Wren were about to go Old Testament on the reverend, but he didn’t know why.”
“He was planning to have a bonfire with Wren’s old comic books. DVDs, too. Called us heathens.”
“Did he now?” Ed said with a laugh. “Davenport’s a real piece of work. So was his uncle. Probably inevitable that his boy ended up in trouble.”
“You mean Elijah?” I asked.
“Yeah, although I think his dad’s the only one who calls him by his biblical name. Do you know him?”
“Not exactly. He was with his dad at the yard sale today, and he’s not too happy with me and Wren right now. I’ll give you the full blow-by-blow account in a minute, but first, tell me how it went with Kate this morning? When Blevins pulled up at the yard sale, I figured he was there to read me the riot act for not telling him she was at the factory last night.”
“I’m a little surprised he didn’t,” Ed admitted. “I certainly got an earful about it. Maybe he got another call and had to take off. Anyway, Blevins asked for the names of the other two kids, as we expected he would. Kate feels like she betrayed them, but…she really didn’t have any choice, and they shouldn’t have taken off like they did. Anyway, he told her they should have called to report it, shouldn’t have been trespassing, and so on. Exactly what I would have said, so I can’t fault him there. She was in tears the entire time.”
“Yeah. I talked to Julissa and Sawyer over at The Buzz earlier. They were having a hard time holding it together, too. Sawyer had already told his parents. Said his dad called Blevins and thought he was probably right about Tessa punking everyone. Julissa was going to tell her mom this afternoon. They’re both convinced that she was on something. Do you think Blevins is going to file charges for them not reporting last night?”
“Not at this time,” Ed said, putting the phrase into air quotes. “But then, he’s still going on the assumption that this is a prank and Tessa is holed up somewhere laughing her head off. I’m just not sure what’s going to happen a day or so down the pike, however, when he has to start looking at this as something more serious than a possible prank.”
“Why isn’t he taking it more seriously already
?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Kate told him that she saw Tessa dead. So that’s three eyewitnesses to the body now—me, Cassie, and Kate. Five, if Sawyer and Julissa actually did what they said they were going to do. Does he think we’re all lying or just easily fooled?”
“I don’t know,” Ed said. “Except…you’re all three connected to me. Plus, Blevins hasn’t exactly come out looking like the sharpest tool in the drawer on two different cases thanks to your reporting.”
“I didn’t purposefully paint him in a bad light,” I said, a little defensively. “He was just…wrong. Both times.”
Ed grinned. “You don’t have to set out to make the guy look stupid. Anyway, add to all of that the fact that Kate told him the same thing she told us about them hearing a loud noise and someone yelling for them to get out. To be fair, that sounds exactly like something kids would do if they were playing a trick on someone. But Blevins’s problem is that he’s always testing the winds of public opinion. I don’t think it’s going to be long before this whole situation just explodes on him. Folks are already starting to talk. Once people suspect she’s actually dead and they find that Blevins is dragging his feet on getting to the bottom of why that happened…well, he’s going to pay for that in the next election.”
“That might be the only silver lining in this entire mess,” I said.
Ed nodded. “True. Billy also said something about you finding a drink can?”
I smacked my forehead with my palm. “And…I completely forgot to tell you about that part. It was an energy drink. Something called Pacific Boost. Wouldn’t have seemed weird to me, except Cassie and I didn’t notice it when the body was still in the room. And it was still cool when I picked it up. That factory was an oven last night. I really don’t think it would have been cool to the touch if it had sat in there the entire time we were waiting for Blevins. And get this…I found a second, identical can in the recycling bin at the yard sale today. I showed it to Sawyer and Julissa, and she remembered seeing one in Tessa’s car. Said it belonged to the guy she was dating. And that he had to special order it, because he couldn’t get it around here.”