Deadly Sweet Tooth

by Kaye George

  Molly finally unfroze and handed her tray of Mary Janes to Tally, still unable to take her eyes off Shiny’s ring.

  Lily, having stocked a shelf and gone back for more merchandise, came through the kitchen door with another pile of boxed goods to arrange. Shiny had stopped sticking her left arm out, but was holding her hand up, ostentatiously displaying the ring to herself.

  Molly nudged Lily and whispered, “Get a load of that.”

  Lily didn’t say anything and she continued her task, but wore an expression of disbelief.

  Tally wondered if either of them had ever seen a diamond that large. She certainly hadn’t. It looked to be at least ten carats. If it was real, Tally wondered how much it had cost Lennie. Had he gotten insurance money from Fran’s death already? No, he surely couldn’t have. Could he? Maybe someone gave him credit on the hope he would get it. At any rate, would buying her this ring and thereby cementing the relationship, presumably, be a good motive to murder his wife? Maybe there was enough motive without the ring. Shiny was an attractive woman, a real catch. Tally wasn’t sure what Shiny saw in Lennie. He was not only older, but rough around the edges compared to her.

  Tally drummed her fingers in thought, again stopping when her nails clicked on the glass display case. Lennie wasn’t that bad-looking for his age, she had to admit. She probably thought of him negatively because she closely associated him with Fran—two old, wrinkled people. Lennie still had a lot of hair on his head, if one liked that. He was also robust and strong and didn’t have too much of a potbelly. He was older than Shiny by thirty, maybe forty years. That was a lot, but it happened all the time. If she were thinking cynically, she knew some women liked to snare older men because they wouldn’t last that long.

  “Did Randy give that to you?” Lily asked.

  Tally whirled to stare at Lily. Who was Randy?

  Shiny took a step back and her expression soured. “No. This is from Lennie.”

  “What about Randy?” Lily persisted.

  Tally realized Lily had been out of the room when Shiny said she was engaged to Len.

  “Nothing about Randy,” Shiny snapped. “He doesn’t know about this yet. You’d better not tell him, either. Tally, I think I’d like to have two-dozen chocolate-covered caramels, a dozen Mary Janes, and a pound of mint fudge.” She pointedly turned her back to Lily and waited while Tally wrapped her purchases.

  After Shiny paid and stalked out, Tally had to ask. “Who’s Randy?” she said to Lily.

  “That’s her boyfriend. They’ve been seeing each other for at least a year.”

  Interesting. She wondered if Randy was the man who had been helping her walk along the sidewalk yesterday, propping her up, when Shiny was so drunk. Yolanda hadn’t mentioned that a man had been with her at lunch, but he was soon after that.

  Chapter 16

  During a midmorning lull, Tally remembered her mother telling her about the family of the man who died in the fire Wendell set in the hardware store, about how Lennie promised them he would take care of them as well as the Samson family, but couldn’t provide for any of them because they didn’t have insurance. It was a long time ago, but she wondered what had happened to the family of the man who perished. Wouldn’t they have a great deal of animosity against Lennie, and probably Fran and her parents, too? She wanted to find out more about the backgrounds of her employees. Did it make sense that one of them would seek employment with her in order to get at her parents? Maybe it did. They were all initially hired to help at the reception, which she had told them was for her parents. Would they know that Fran and Lennie would be there, too? Probably not, since even she hadn’t known they would be coming.

  Unless…one of her employees was the daughter of that poor family and decided to make sure the Abrahams would be there. That wouldn’t be hard to do. Lily knew them from dancing at the theater. Greer or Molly could have made sure to get the word to them…somehow.

  “What’s that noise?” a customer asked, looking around in Tally’s direction.

  Darn, she was drumming her nails again. She plunged her hands into her smock pockets.

  She took a break midafternoon and went to her office to search online for news of the old fire. The local paper had archived editions, but the organization wasn’t ideal. She knew the approximate year and was able to give some date parameters in searching the files. Eventually, she found the initial story with a picture of the burned structure. It was almost leveled. One brick wall stood—the rest of the place had collapsed. She shuddered to think that a person had lost his life there.

  The accounts didn’t release the name of the deceased until several days later: Owen Herd. It didn’t list any relatives. So she started searching the obituaries to see who the surviving family members were.

  “Ms. Holt,” called Lily, rapping on her closed office door. “Can you help out?”

  Tally closed down her computer and rushed to the front to help cut through the chaos of a suddenly extremely crowded store. A glance through the window explained the rush. A tour bus was parked directly in front, idling at the curb, and the bus tourists were hurrying to make purchases and get on their way.

  It gave Tally a lift to realize that her shop was on a tour! She made a mental note of the company, Texas Treasure Tours, so she could contact them to ask if this would be a regular thing and, if it would, maybe they could give her a schedule. For the time being, she was afraid her place would sell out before everyone was satisfied.

  After the crowd climbed back into the bus and it puffed away, the display cases were decimated. The refrigerator was, too.

  “I’ll run back and start making more…what should I make first?” Lily asked.

  Tally surveyed the shelves and decided that she should concentrate on Mallomars, Twinkies, and Clark Bars. All the Mallomars were gone and there were less than a half dozen of the other two.

  Tally didn’t get back to her online research until the shop closed at seven. No sooner did she open her computer than her cell phone rang.

  “Tally?” Yolanda sounded stressed. “I need to talk. Are y’all still at work?”

  Yolanda was in her own shop, so Tally closed hers up and walked over to Bella’s Baskets.

  She found Yolanda on the verge of tears, twisting one of her dark brown curls tightly, over and over until Tally was afraid she would yank it out.

  * * * *

  Yolanda was happy to see her best friend. She’d had such a horrid day. Tally held out her arms and the two women hugged for a long time.

  “It’s your parents again, I assume?” Tally said.

  Yolanda nodded, sure she would burst into sobs if she tried to speak. She pointed to her flower cooler, where they both knew there was always a bottle of white wine chilling. Tally fetched the wine and two stemmed glasses from one of her supply cupboards.

  By the time Tally had poured the wine and Yolanda had had a sip, she was able to talk. “Vi and Eden want to come up tomorrow and my parents don’t even want them to stay at the house.”

  Tomorrow would be Saturday, not a day off for Yolanda or for Tally, but her parents would be relaxing at home, probably swimming and having their usual cookout. A perfect setup for hosting friends of their daughter. Unless Yolanda was terribly busy and had a good excuse, she was always expected for dinner on Saturday night. Whenever Violetta was in town, she was expected also.

  “Vi has never stayed anywhere but at our house when she visits. That’s just mean to exclude Eden.”

  “What did they say, exactly? That Vi can stay there, but Eden can’t?”

  “No,” wailed Yolanda. “They don’t want either one of them at the house. Not even for dinner. Papa said they could come for either cocktails or dessert.”

  “What? That’s crazy.”

  “It’s mean. It’s cruel. It’s like they’re disowning their daughter.” Yolanda, in her mind was
going to say “their favorite daughter,” but didn’t want to bring that up just now.

  Over the last few days, since Vi had had her coming out, Yolanda felt the fierce sibling rivalry she had always held onto toward her sister becoming less and less important, fading to the background of the more dramatic, current events in Vi’s life.

  “Is your sister still going to come to Fredericksburg?” Tally asked. “I don’t think I would.”

  “Vi asked me what to do. I’ll tell her that. To not come. They’ll eventually have to accept that she’s gay. Won’t they?”

  “I hope so.”

  “I mean, they know she’s gay. They’ll have to accept her as she is.”

  “I’m so sorry about all this,” Tally said and they hugged some more.

  After Tally left, Yolanda sat, immobile, for ten minutes. Then she decided. She wasn’t going to show up, either. She would eat at her own home. Or go out. If her place were bigger, she would tell Vi to bring Eden and stay with her, but it would be too crowded. Now, should she tell her parents she wouldn’t be there? Or just let them find out when she didn’t show up?

  Chapter 17

  It wasn’t yet eight o’clock and the library would be open another hour, on summer hours, so Tally headed there from Yolanda’s. Singing tree frogs and chattering cicadas accompanied her on the three-block walk through the dense, warm air. The sun was setting, turning the fronts of the quaint buildings a brilliant pinking orange. Could there be a more beautiful place to live? she wondered, slowing to enjoy her short walk.

  She ambled up the long sidewalk to the ancient brick building that always reminded her, a bit, of the Alamo in San Antonio. They both had the same pale, tan stone walls and similar rooflines with peaks and an elevated round center hump in the middle of the front.

  When she got inside the library, she filled out a form for the friendly, smiling librarian and waited to receive permission to search the old newspaper articles. Now that she knew what she was looking for, and the dates, it should be fairly easy to find the obituary and, she hoped, some family members’ names. And much easier in the library archives than online, she hoped.

  She sat and scoured the pages, at last finding a short death notice on Owen Herd. He was survived by his parents—that was sad—and his wife and four children. That was even sadder. They were all named Herd, of course. His wife was Nancy, the same as Tally’s mother. The four children all had G names: Grace, George, Gina, and Geoff.

  What would she find out if she kept searching? Would there be articles about them? She covered a month’s worth of issues before the library began to close up, without finding an article about any of the rest of the Herd family. After a slow walk home through the darkening streets, she continued her quest on her home computer. When she came up empty, she started looking for information about the arsonist, Wendell Samson. She found his trial was covered extensively. One mention was made of the Herd family, and that was that they had moved out of town. There was no mention of where they had moved to. She had hit a dead end on the Herds.

  It was late. Nigel had dozed off after trying to disturb Tally’s searching as hard as he could. After he’d been fed, he brought a stuffed mouse toy to Tally, wanting her to play. He even leaped onto her keyboard with it in his mouth at one point. She was concentrating so hard that she didn’t even realize he’d given up, but he was snoozing on the couch now.

  Tally realized she was ravenous. She slapped together a sandwich, sank onto the couch next to Nigel, and flicked on the TV, to munch and watch something mindless.

  Her brain strayed from the inane comedy, though. She couldn’t help but want to keep trying to explore the trail. It was true, she had hit a dead end, but the family was somewhere. They couldn’t have vanished. What if they had moved away, then moved back? What if they had changed their names? Or what if one of them had changed her name? Maybe from Grace to…Greer? That driver’s license had to be altered.

  Maybe her parents knew what had happened to them. Why hadn’t she thought of asking them before she spent all that time on useless research? It was late now. She would talk to them tomorrow.

  In the morning, Tally called her mother before she set out for the shop. Nancy Holt had known their names all along.

  “We contacted them a couple of times right after the fire,” Nancy said. “Bob and Len both tried to offer them some financial assistance, but Mrs. Herd turned it down. I thought, myself, that our offers weren’t nearly enough money to make any difference to them. I don’t think I would have taken it, either.”

  “When did they move? Do you know where they went?”

  “One day they were just gone, Mrs. Herd and all the children. A few years later, when Bob and I started making money on our tours, your dad hired a private detective to try to find them, but there was no trace. We wanted to finally make things right for them. We never could. That has bothered me for years.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Why do you want to know all this? What are you thinking?”

  Tally heard her dad’s voice in the background and a door closing.

  “Just set it there, Bob,” her mother said. “We can eat in a minute. I’m talking to Tally.”

  He had probably gone out and gotten them breakfast, Tally thought.

  “Mom, I just thought—maybe, well, is it possible that Mrs. Herd or, more likely, one of the children, decided to even the score finally?”

  “You mean… You mean you think one of them killed Fran?”

  “And tried to kill the rest of you.”

  “How could that be? Wouldn’t we know they were back? Wouldn’t Len and Fran know?”

  “Do you think you would recognize any of the children, grown up?”

  “I know all their names.”

  “Names can be changed.”

  “So they can,” her mother agreed.

  Her mother admitted, before Tally ended the call, that she probably wouldn’t know any of the Herd children on sight. She might not even recognize Mrs. Herd now.

  Around midmorning, Lily begged Tally to call Greer. “We really need her, Ms. Holt. I’ve seen two customers get impatient and leave because I was too busy to wait on them.”

  Greer was supposed to work Saturdays, the way Tally had set things up originally, when Molly and Greer were sharing the part-time responsibilities. Tally hadn’t rescheduled Molly for additional time when she fired Greer. One Lily equaled one Molly, plus one Greer, Tally knew, but those were who she had to work with, unless she hired more help. She gave in and called Greer. To her surprise, she reached her right away. Greer sounded delighted to be coming back to work. To Tally’s amazement, she was at the shop within half an hour.

  Greer worked hard and she and Lily made an efficient team, for once. Maybe that was what Greer had needed, the scare of losing her job. Tally wouldn’t count on her being on time every day, but she admitted it might start happening.

  All through that day at work, Tally tried not to look at her employees suspiciously, but it was hard. She was suspicious. By the end of the day, she had decided she would have to be methodical. She would have to delve deeply into the lives of each young woman, one at a time. Lily would be first.

  Tally didn’t want to stay in her office late again, so she stuck all the employee application paperwork into a grocery bag that sugar and flour had been delivered in and took them home.

  Nigel was thrilled to see her. He ran to greet his mistress almost like a puppy dog.

  “You’re a fun little guy, you know that?” She leaned down and rubbed between his soft ears, setting off a roaring purr. “Do you love me or do you just want food? I’ll probably never know.”

  She fed the cat, made herself a salad, and dumped the applications onto her kitchen table. She had decided to start with Lily Vale, so she looked at hers first. Lily was fresh out of high school, but had an employment history
, nevertheless. She’d worked summers since she was sixteen, two waitress jobs and a clerk in a fast-food store. There was nothing about her dancing in her résumé, but she had said she danced at the theater for musicals that Fran had put on and seemed to know quite a bit about Fran and Lennie. They would have been together for weeks of rehearsals.

  Lily was local, having lived in Fredericksburg and gone to school in town her whole short life. Only two addresses were listed. The first was, presumably, her parents’ house. Tally looked up the second. It was an apartment, she was surprised to see. Tally would have expected her to still live with her parents. She was young to be living on her own. Maybe she had a roommate or something. There was no way of telling.

  Tally pondered the rest of the scanty information she had on Lily. Nothing pointed to her being a Herd child, unless the first address was false. When she looked it up online, it was a pleasant three-bedroom house that hadn’t changed hands, according to the real estate sites, in more than twenty years. How could she find out if the Vales lived there?

  There was a knock on her door, as if in answer to her question. It turned out that it was the answer.

  Mrs. Gerg stepped into Tally’s living room as she handed over a small bag.

  “This looks brand-new, doesn’t it? Look, there’s even a price tag.”

  Tally drew a double strand of pearls from the bag. Nothing she would ever wear, but they could have been valuable. The tag had the name of a national jewelry chain store and the amount of…$659. Tally stared at Mrs. Gerg after seeing the tag. She didn’t want to accept such an expensive item from her.