Bitty was bustling around the house tending to the food, fussing over me, bringing me a blanket from my parents’ room. There are times my scatterbrained, self-centered cousin is anything but that. She can be the only thing that keeps me sane in a crisis.
“Here,” said Bitty, and handed me a plate with lasagna, a chunk of French bread, and a small salad on it. “Tea or Coke?”
I opted for sweet tea. There’s always a pitcher of tea in the refrigerator, two in warm weather. Since two dogs instantly became my best friends when I had a plate of lasagna in my lap, I decided to eat in the kitchen. Bitty fixed herself a plate, too, and we sat at the table where I’d eaten my childhood meals. My two brothers—both killed in the last days of Vietnam so many years ago—and my twin sister and I had fought over the last pork chop at this table, squabbled over who got the most ice cream, helped blow out candles on birthday cakes. It had seen years of Truevines. To think that my parents might never again sit at this table was wrenching. It had only been three days since they’d left. Would I ever see them again?
When I looked up I met Bitty’s gaze and knew she was thinking the same thing. She stretched her arm out to me, and we clasped hands wordlessly, each knowing what the other felt. Bitty had spent a lot of time at this table, too, during our childhood. We’d been inseparable since we were six. Even my years away from Holly Springs had faded the instant we were together again. It’d seemed like we’d never been apart.
Bitty’s cell phone rang, startling us both, and my fork dropped to the china plate with a clatter. It could be Jackson Lee, was all I was thinking, calling to tell me my parents were gone. I felt frozen in time as I waited for Bitty to relay his message.
“Are you sure?” she said into the phone after a very brief discussion; then she looked at me and smiled. “They’re both okay. Alive, well, not even wet. That’s great. As always, sugar, you saved the day. Yes, I’ll tell her right now. She’s looking at me like she’s about to grab the phone anyway, so—”
That was when I reached across the table and grabbed the phone. I had to hear for myself, make sure Jackson Lee wasn’t just being cautious and saying what he thought would calm me.
“Tell me,” I said, and he chuckled.
“Everything is fine, Trinket. They weren’t on the Costanza Regencia but MSC Preziosa. They knew you’d worry, so they’ve been trying to call you, but with all the chaos over there it was difficult for them to get to a landline. They’ll be back as scheduled in two weeks and said to be at the airport to pick them up. They’ll call when they get back to their hotel in Italy just to let you know if any plans have changed.”
I felt giddy with relief. “Thank you, Jackson Lee,” I said, “from the bottom of my heart. I didn’t know what to do. You’re amazing.” When we hung up I sagged in my chair and put my face in my palms. I was still shaking but not for the same reason.
“Trinket? Are you okay?” Bitty sounded concerned, and I nodded, then looked up at her.
“I’m better than okay. Now I just feel so terrible for those people on the Costanza Regencia. And their families—oh, I cannot imagine getting awful news. I hope everyone got off the ship okay.”
Bitty licked tomato sauce off her fingers. “Well, I think you’re psychic. You knew something bad was going to happen. Maybe you got the name wrong, but you did get it right about the ship.”
“Not completely. I suspected pirates. Fire. Storms. I never thought the ship would run totally out of power.”
“No, you were too worried about icebergs. Well, I still say you have a sixth sense about things. So tell me what’s going to happen to Dixie Lee Forsythe. Is someone going to murder her? Is the movie going to be a flop and she’ll lose all her money?”
“How would I know? I’m not a psychic. I’m just a compulsive worrier.”
Bitty sighed. “A pity. It’d be nice to be able to see the future. Especially if Dixie Lee is going to lose all her money. Or get run over with a power mower. I rather like that idea.”
I gazed fondly at my cousin. She’s so predictable. While she rises to the occasion when there’s a necessity, she’s still Bitty. That’s a good thing. Beneath her blonde helmet—now charred black in places from the pizza fire—she may be occasionally selfish and a bit vindictive, but she does try to do the right thing for people. She’s one of the most generous people I know. She supports any number of charities, and not just in Holly Springs, either.
“So long as you’re not the one hitting Dixie Lee with a mower I don’t care either way,” I said. “I don’t want you to end up decorating a cell in the Marshall County Jail. I’m not sure your designer drapes would be appreciated.”
“I agree. I’ll just have to let someone else do it for me.” She put a hand up to touch her hair, then gave me a rueful smile. “I’ll be up early in the morning to get what’s left of my hair fixed. Do you think it can be trimmed without leaving me bald?”
“It’s a good thing your entire head didn’t go up in flames. You wear so much hairspray I would have thought it’d explode instead of just catch on fire.”
“That was lucky, wasn’t it?” Bitty agreed. She patted a blonde curl into place over her ear while gazing at me thoughtfully. “You know, you’d look so much better if you got your hair cut in layers. Tease it up on top—no, maybe that last isn’t a good idea. You don’t need anything to make you look any taller. But you could get all those dead ends trimmed off and have it styled. It’d be such a nice improvement.”
I smiled. This was familiar footing. The crisis was over, and we could go back to insulting each other. How lovely.
Chapter 4
“I’VE NARROWED IT down to these three people,” said Rayna as she put the short list of names on the table.
We were sitting in Budgie’s café having coffee and pie. The real name of the place is the French Market Café, but since it used to belong to Budgie before she had to sell it to pay for her mother’s nursing home bills, we still call it Budgie’s. The new owner was savvy enough to keep Budgie on as manager, so it’s worked out for all of them.
Since I had my mouth full of chess pie, it was Bitty who asked the obvious question: “Which one do you think sent the death threats?”
“Your name is absent,” Gaynelle pointed out, “so my best guess is Billy Joe or his wife.”
“That’s what I think,” agreed Rayna. “And Billy Joe has access to a lot of different cars since he has his own mechanic shop, so he could have used any of them to try to run down Dixie Lee.”
By that time I’d swallowed my pie, so I asked, “What are these other two names in the book?” I recognized the next name. Johnny Payne was once Dixie Lee’s fiancé many years ago. When she broke it off with him he’d gone a little crazy and kidnapped her for three days. Of course, he’d had to release her eventually, and after Dixie Lee’s daddy caught Johnny out on his own and beat the tar out of him, he’d pressed charges against him for kidnapping. At the time, police pretended not to notice all the bruises and cuts on their new prisoner, and Johnny’s claims of assault were ignored. A lot of them were fathers and sympathized with Mr. Forsythe. If it had been their daughter taken off by some boy, they might have done the same thing.
“Johnny is Jimmy Patterson in the book,” said Bitty. “Dixie Lee wrote that he was devastated over losing the most beautiful girl in all of Mississippi—as if that were true—and despaired of ever finding true love so he cut his wrists and died.”
“That’s probably what she wished had happened,” Gaynelle observed. “It was a pretty big scandal back then. He’d taken her to some cheap motel up in Memphis, and everyone whispered behind her back that she was ruined. High school girls just weren’t supposed to have that happen. Not back then.”
“Johnny did three years in prison for his moment of insanity. Now he’s living down in Hickory Flat with his wife, two kids, and three grandkid
s,” said Rayna.
“Grandkids,” exclaimed Bitty. “I know Johnny is a year or two ahead of us, but grandkids?”
“Your boys are twenty-one,” I said to her, “and you didn’t have them until you were almost thirty. Late in life by most standards. They’re old enough to have kids, just too smart to fall into that trap while they’re still in school.”
Bitty’s twin boys, Brandon and Clayton, attend Ole Miss and are her greatest accomplishment. She basically raised them alone from the time they were eleven, due to their father’s going to jail for a pyramid scheme that netted him a lot of money and fifteen to twenty years in a Tennessee prison. He’d be out by now if it wasn’t for him figuring out a way to run another financial swindle from behind bars. He is very smart but very dishonest. Thank heavens Bitty’s boys inherited none of Frank Caldwell’s criminal genes.
Gaynelle pointed to the next name on the list, successfully rerouting Bitty’s attention away from the fact we weren’t getting younger and back to the discussion of death threats. “Maybelle Greer. I hadn’t thought of the possibility it’d be a woman who hated her enough to want to kill her, but present company included, I’m sure there are plenty of women who feel that way.”
The “present company” lifted her brows, smoothed what was left of her blonde bangs from her forehead, and said, “If it was me I wouldn’t give her any warning. I’d just do it. I wouldn’t run her down with a car, though. Too many possible witnesses.”
I looked curiously at my homicidal cousin. “How would you kill her, Bitty?”
“I’d rather shoot her, but it’d have to be under circumstances where I wouldn’t get caught. As you have suggested on numerous occasions, I wouldn’t do well in prison. So I’d probably use poison or some other method where I couldn’t be convicted. Like knock her out and push her car off a cliff. Something that couldn’t be traced or proven in court.”
We all gazed at Bitty for several moments. She seemed oblivious to our focus and daintily ate another bite of buttermilk pie.
“Well, we don’t have any cliffs here,” Gaynelle said practically. “Some pretty big hills though. If she’s found at the bottom of one in her car, we’ll all pretend we never heard this.”
Bitty smiled. “Thank you, Gaynelle.”
“Okay,” I said, “what’s Maybelle Greer’s grudge against Dixie Lee?”
“You missed so many good moments in your years traipsing around the country,” said Bitty. “It was right after Dixie Lee’s divorce from her first husband, Nathan Forrest. His daddy claims kinship to General Nathan Bedford Forrest, you know, although I think he just made all that up. Anyway, Dixie Lee and Maybelle had been friends while at that girl’s school down in Blue Mountain, and even after that. So after their divorce, Nathan called Maybelle and asked her out on a date. Well, when Dixie Lee found out about it she had a come-apart like you wouldn’t believe. Maybelle said since they were divorced it should not matter one bit about who he dated. Dixie Lee didn’t see it that way. So she set out to get back at her.”
When she paused for a sip of coffee and another bite of pie I glanced around at the others. Rayna was nodding her head like she remembered, and Gaynelle looked pensive. This was going to be good.
Bitty dabbed her mouth with a napkin and continued, “So Dixie Lee went out with Maybelle’s daddy.”
My eyes probably bugged out of my head. “Her daddy? Are you kidding me?”
“As I live and breathe, that’s the truth. Maybelle just idolized her daddy. Her mother had died when she was still in elementary school, and she was an only child, so it was just the two of them. The sun rose and set at his direction as far as she was concerned.”
I sat back in my chair, amazed. “How long did they see each other?”
“Right up until two weeks after Maybelle stopped sleeping with Nathan Forrest. Then Dixie Lee went on a European tour to forget how heartbroken she was over her divorce, and by the time she came back it was pretty much all over with Mr. Greer. What was his first name? Do you remember, Gaynelle?”
“David, I think. That was so long ago. He died about eight or nine years back.”
“So where’s Maybelle now?” I asked.
Bitty smiled. “She lives with her husband over on Chulahoma. One of those newer houses built in the sixties.”
“What did Dixie Lee write about that?” I asked. “She didn’t tell everything, I imagine.”
“Oh, she told everything, all right, but she had some other character doing it all, not the main character who is supposed to be so sweet and beautiful. And we’re supposed to believe that’s Dixie Lee. Talk about fantasy fiction.” After a last bite of buttermilk pie Bitty added, “You really need to read the entire book, Trinket. From cover to cover. You’ll learn things your mama never told you, I bet on that.”
“So it seems. May I borrow your copy?”
“Remind me to give it to you when we get back to my house. I wish I hadn’t spent the money on it now. It just galls me to think Dixie Lee will profit from writing such trash.”
“So we have three viable suspects who may have written those death threats to Dixie Lee,” said Gaynelle. “What next?”
“I say we just go talk to them,” Rayna suggested. “Sometimes you can tell who’s lying and who isn’t when you catch people off-guard.”
“That’s true,” Gaynelle agreed. “We might as well start today, before something happens.”
“Count me out,” said Bitty. “I don’t really care who’s writing her those letters. I’m surprised she hasn’t gotten a whole sack full of death threats.”
“Well, she has certainly managed to alienate a large portion of the town,” Gaynelle said. “It was unwise of her to use real events that can still hurt people. It’d be different if all this happened a hundred years ago.”
Bitty looked at her. “Why, of course it would, Gaynelle. A hundred years ago Dixie Lee would have had to wear a scarlet letter on the front of her dress. Or she’d be dunked in a pond or put in stocks. That’s what they call those things where you put your head through a hole in the wood and someone locks it down so you can’t get out. I’d be the first one there with a dozen eggs to throw at her. Pelting her with rotten vegetables would be fun, too.”
I rolled my eyes. “We know what stocks are, Bitty. They weren’t in use a hundred years ago, either. Besides, if you’d been alive back then you might be locked up right next to her.”
“Trinket Truevine, that’s a mean thing to say to me.”
“Don’t take it personally. I’d probably be beside you. Divorced women weren’t that common. It was supposed to be shameful. And of course, it was rarely the fault of the husband. He could play around all he wanted, but it’d be the woman’s fault if there was a divorce.”
“Look at Wallis Simpson,” Gaynelle said. “King Edward lost his throne for marrying a divorced woman. Now Prince Charles is married to a divorced woman, and he’s still going to be king one day.”
“I just can’t believe Charles would prefer that cow-faced woman to Princess Di,” said Bitty, who had cried for a week after Diana’s tragic death.
“It’s not always about looks,” said Rayna. “Diana was beautiful, sweet, and kind, but if Charles only married her for children and not love, then it would never have been a happy marriage whether the other woman was there or not. Diana just had the misfortune to be caught in the middle.”
“I remember getting up before daylight just to watch the wedding on TV,” I said. “It was such a fairytale come true. Or so we thought.”
“Sometimes dreams that come true end up as nightmares we can’t escape,” said Gaynelle. “It’d be interesting to know if Dixie Lee regrets writing about all those events just to sell a book. Now she’s getting death threats, and old friends won’t even talk to her.”
“Well, I say she deserves it,” Bi
tty remarked as she gathered up her purse and took out her wallet. “She should have been nicer. Y’all tell me how it turns out after you’ve talked to half the town to find out who wants to kill her. If I’m not already in a nursing home somewhere gumming my food, I might care enough to listen.”
I laughed. “Are you suggesting this might take a while, Bitty?”
“I’m saying y’all never should have agreed to find out who’s sending death threats. There are too many people who’d like to see Dixie Lee dead. I’m going home, but you all just go right on.”
“Well,” said Rayna after Bitty left and we paid our bill, “who should we talk to first?”
“Billy Joe Cramer,” Gaynelle answered immediately. “He’s the likeliest suspect.”
“What are we going to say?” I asked as we went to Rayna’s SUV parked at the curb. It was cold, a bitter wind blowing clouds from the west. I pulled my warm wool coat more tightly around me.
“Maybe we should start off with some kind of pretense about our reason for asking questions,” Rayna suggested. “After all, we can’t just go in there and ask if he’s been sending Dixie Lee death threats without making him mad right off the bat. We need to work our way around to it.”
By the time we got to the machine shop Billy Joe owns with his partner, it had been decided that Gaynelle was our designated speaker. She’d tutored Billy Joe in English when he was in high school so he could graduate. He’d barely squeaked past, she said, even with a seven point grade curve.
When we arrived, Billy Joe was in his office. He came out, a tall, lanky man with gray hair, a permanent squint, and the black-oil encrusted fingernails of his profession. He wore a dingy thermal shirt under his coveralls and thick boots that were so scuffed the original color was uncertain. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to see us.
Divas Do Tell Page 5