I tore open the sack the kolaches were in, and Janie brought out the coffee. Over this satisfying, cholesterol-laden breakfast, we caught up on what had happened in our lives for the last two months. I used to make only quarterly calls on clients, but a few years ago, I had started servicing them in between the big four catalogue seasons. This trip we would once again go over the summer line to see if Janie had any new orders in mind.
Today, as Janie droned on in her matter-of-fact way about how slow business had been since Christmas, I nodded and frowned, but my mind was on last night’s call. Making what I thought were appropriate noises, I mentally reviewed what I had done since awakening. I had changed the message on the answering machine, not saying I was Honey Huckleberry or even Lydia; only two Stevens knew me by that name, anyway, and one I knew was far away and the other one I hoped was. I couldn’t think of an appropriate message, so finally, after erasing several attempts, I just left the number. Steven X knew that, anyway.
Then I had stopped by Steven Miller’s for a last-minute check on my old reliable Chevy. We shared a cup of coffee, my first of the day, and he’d gone on about rising fuel prices. I didn’t know what he was griping about, I was the one paying the bill, but his main gripe was that if “something doesn’t happen soon” people would start being serious about alternate fuel. And where would that leave honest folks like him?
“I’m telling you, Honey, I’m going to be left with underground tanks of gasoline, and you’re going to be driving around on alcohol fumes or some such. Look at Saudi, Kuwait, and Iraq. This is a serious problem. The oil industry has got to settle down. You read something new about it every day in the paper, but nothing gets done. Just higher and higher prices.” The gentle man then spoke more softly but with equal conviction, “And not just money, either. Think of the Gulf War. Sometimes we pay with blood.”
I paid Steven Miller with a credit card whose statement would be mailed directly to Steven Bondesky and carelessly said what I always said, “Well, Steven, all I want is to get where I’m going. When my accountant tells me I can’t afford to go, I’ll just stay at home. In the meantime, I’m off.” Then I stopped and walked back into the station. “Steven, would you do me a favor? Anytime you’re over by the house, would you …” I stopped. What did I want him to do?
“Would you check out things?”
“What things, Honey?”
“Oh, if anything looks unusual. You know.”
When the doctors had built their complex around my house, after they had gotten over being mad at me for not selling my lot, I had introduced them to Steven Miller, and he’d started an account to take care of the clinic’s vehicles. He was at their offices several times a week, picking up or delivering their assorted cars and vans.
“I always check out your house, Honey. I thought you knew that.”
No. I hadn’t. I just breezed through my life more intent on keeping to my schedule than to what was going on around me. Now it seems that Steven Miller had been a guardian angel when I hadn’t known I needed one.
I was embarrassed.
“Anything special? Anything … wrong that I need to be looking out for?”
I was determined I wasn’t going to tell another soul about the phone calls. “No, I don’t know why I said that. Just seemed the right way to say good-bye today. I’ll see you in two weeks.” I gave the little man an impulsive hug and drove off in the early, chilled dawn where Steven Miller and I seemed to be the only ones awake.
“Then I cut off his balls and played tennis with them.”
I stared at Janie with wide eyes; I hadn’t heard her earlier words, but her last statement all but hit me over the head. “What! You did … what?”
She chuckled, satisfied with my reaction. “Just seeing if you were listening to me. Where were you, Honey? Your eyes looked a million miles away.”
So much for my resolve not to tell anyone else about the threats. So, I told her.
“I do love a good mystery.” Janie chuckled again and rubbed her hands together. “Now, first thing we’ve got to do is figure out who got killed. Then we’ll figure out the motive … then we’ll—”
“Then you do believe me?”
“Of course,” she said and her eyes left no doubt as to her sincerity, only surprise that I would question it. “Now, if this Steven called you on Saturday, it might have been in yesterday’s paper. And if it was a big enough hit, in today’s. I only have today’s paper here at the shop, but you can pick up Sunday’s over at the Quickie. You go get all the Sunday papers you can, and I’ll go over your list and check what I need so we can have business out of the way when you come back.”
I did what she said, but after more than an hour of skimming the Fort Worth and Dallas and Waco papers, we didn’t find anything that jumped out at us.
“I have to get on, Janie, but I’ll take these papers with me and look at them again before I go to bed tonight.” I gathered up the stack and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Remember—fall line when I come back.”
“Yes, I know. And not even good springtime yet. And Honey, I’ll be thinking about your case and all, and if I come on anything good, I’ll leave a message on your machine.”
SEVEN
Many hours and two stops later, I left Temple for my first overnighter of the trip, which was only a short stretch away at the Stagecoach Inn in Salado.
There had been lean pickings at Temple, my conservative customer had been reluctant to add to his order during the slow period, but I had cleaned up in Waco at Daphane’s which, as far as I was concerned, was the heart of that Junior League city. From books on glass paperweights to Birds of Africa, pound by pound, Waco had more coffee table books than even Dallas. Sometimes when I left Daphane’s I found myself wishing I owned a furniture store in Waco so I could specialize in coffee tables. Daphane’s esoteric customers kept me going during the lean times and added beaucoup profit during the regular season.
I hadn’t felt the least bit hypocritical putting on a light wool navy blazer and tying an expensive patterned scarf around my neck fastened with a gold circle pin before I had entered the posh chrome and glass showroom. It showed the right amount of respect for ultra chic and covered up my denim jumper and red T-shirt. And believe me, Daphane noticed. There were no greasy finger foods over her counter. First of all, there wasn’t a counter, only a conversation pit, and second, she only offered sherry.
I hadn’t felt the least bit tempted to share my personal death threats with Daphane. It would have seemed insignificant beside the news that her four “very best” friends were enjoying weekend partner swapping and she “hadn’t known one thing about it and would never have known about it, if they hadn’t had that unfortunate boating accident weekend last.”
I turned into the sanctuary of the Stagecoach Inn, and was so tired I could barely nod and sign my name for the desk clerk, someone I didn’t know but who was expecting me anyway.
Staring at the inviting, turned-down bed in my room, I felt my body arguing over whether it wanted sleep or food. The sleep side didn’t like it, but it was a sin to visit Salado and not go to the dining room. I think there are even rules about it written on the back of the door. At least the hours they served. Walking across the decked walk to the famous eatery, I remembered, as I did every time I stopped there, how embarrassed I had been the first time I visited. I knew there was a renowned restaurant at the Stagecoach Inn, but naturally I figured it was in the Inn. Only after the coffee shop waitress had looked shocked that I was actually going to order something to eat, and a cheeseburger at that, did I find out that the dining room was outside and over a ways.
“I knew that,” I told her and, “Yes, well, maybe I will go on over, after all.” That had been a long time ago, when I first charted my route through South Texas, and now I just shrugged back into my blazer (sometimes people from Waco eat there) and joined the other guests for the historic restaurant’s “no menu, but are you going to love this dinner.”
The turkey and dressing woke me up, and my favorite waitress brought me a side order of banana fritters, which were served only for lunch, but now available to me whenever I came. All the payment she wanted for that extra service was for me to listen to her gripes about her trucker boyfriend. Since she was fifty-two years old and had lived in nearby Belton all her life, I discounted her threats to move to Austin to experience big city life, and only murmured, “Well, well, think of that,” as I finished my dinner with real coffee and a strawberry kiss.
A slave to my own self-imposed routine—I don’t function at all without one—I went over the day’s orders before I tackled the newspapers I had lugged up to my room. I had even bought USA Today.
Finally, I shoved all the work papers back into my briefcase, and while I continued to towel-dry my hair, I began to once more go over the papers Janie and I had collected earlier that morning. I found a yellow legal pad in my briefcase and started a list of deaths, natural and un.
As my hair dried, bright red permed curls springing to life from beneath imprisoning moisture, the list grew. Even limiting the deaths to men over twenty-one not in the hospital or local nursing home, the number of lines on my pad grew long. Out of Texas was shorter, but as uninformative as the ones in.
What did I know about solving a murder?
About eleven o’clock, I threw the whole mess across the room and then had to get up and take a wet soapy washrag to the ink mark my pen had left when it struck the wall.
Back in bed, I said, “Murder, schumurder,” and reached for good old Prusilla to put me to sleep, but not even her ultimate sacrifice settled me, so I rooted around the foot of the bed for something else and came up with the unread business portion of USA Today.
“Ah, ha, Steven Miller would love this one,” I said aloud. It was an international story of how a formula for synthetic automotive fuel had blown up in Italy, ruining its inventor’s chances for the prestigious Dawson Prize in Chemistry. The originator of the concoction had been thought to be a shoo-in, and now the explosion proved that the stuff didn’t work.
I thought of Steven Miller shaking his head over the story, and then I thought of him watching my house, watching over me, and I fell asleep.
EIGHT
It was only when I called my home phone the next morning and punched in the secret code that allowed me to retrieve my messages that I realized I hadn’t called Detective Silas Sampson the day before. That wasn’t like me; if I promised to do something, I always followed through.
Now here was Silas’s voice telling me that I’d forgotten to check in with him on Monday. As the machine kept playing, he told me three times that I should call him as soon as possible, each message a little more anxious than the first.
I was put right through to him, and although he sounded upset, I thought he also sounded relieved to hear my voice. “I was worried about you, Honey.”
I was surprised. “Why? You had my itinerary. You knew where I’d be. Why didn’t you call me?” It sounded logical to me, but maybe not the man I still called “Peggy’s policeman” in my mind.
Silas paused before answering, “Oh, right. I forgot. You’re in …” I heard the sound of papers rustling. “In Salado. At the Stagecoach Inn.”
“Right. I’m always right where I say I’ll be.”
“When you didn’t call, I thought maybe something had happened to you. That your fourth Steven had caught up with you. That you were … in trouble.” He finished the sentence lamely.
“Why?” I asked again. “Did you find out something? Did you find out who Steven is? Who is he?”
“Nah, nothing like that. As a matter of fact, there’s been absolutely zip on everything. I ran the MO through channels. I interviewed your doctors at the clinic. They’re all crazy about you, by the way. Checked homicide for murders. And nothing. Zip, like I said.”
“So, Detective Sampson, what do we do now?”
“You do nothing. I’ll keep an eye out here and you go ahead and follow your schedule … er … itinerary for the next two weeks. It probably was a crank call … some kid playing a joke. And the similarity of the poems? Just a fluke on his part.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well, I’ll keep on checking on it, but like I said, there isn’t much to go on, and with you out of town and all, I don’t reckon there’ll be any danger to you if there was. By the time you get back, you’ll have forgotten all about it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But check in with me, or if I hear anything, I’ll call you.”
Pause.
“Okay, Honey? Honey? Are you there? Hello?”
I made a decision. “Yes, Silas. I’m here. I was just thinking. I want to apologize again.” Actually, I hadn’t apologized the first time. “For not calling you yesterday. I was working very hard and, of course, you’re right. If I can forget what happened in just one day, I’ll surely forget it for good while I’m on the road. But thank you for all your efforts.”
“I didn’t do much. The computers do all the work nowadays, but I’ll stay in touch. If that’s all right with you?”
“Of course, I’d appreciate that.” We hung up and I wondered if I’d just told him I appreciated the work he was doing for me or if I had thanked him for his apparent interest in me.
There were no other calls on my machine, so I left Saledo to work the rest of my territory. I had squashed all the newspapers into the motel dumpster before pulling out, but I kept the clipping on the alternate fuel explosion to show to Steven Miller when I got home.
I took with me a vague sense of guilt that I hadn’t told Silas about the second Steven call. Why hadn’t I told him? Was it because I thought he was incompetent or that I was still remembering the thrill of fear that crept over me when I had talked to Steven? Why did I feel this thing was just between Steven and me now?
Spring in the Texas hill country is like no other—no other I’d ever seen—and while that wasn’t much, Texas in its seasonal glory was.
I didn’t even put in a book-on-tape to “read” as I made my way through nature’s garden after my turnoff at San Marcos. Instead, I tuned to a classical music station and reveled in the combination of Beethoven crescendos and eye-stopping mounds of color.
The bluebonnets had to be the queen of the bunch, but the wild buttercups and poppies were an impressive court for the blue majesties. Just when you thought you couldn’t imagine a more astounding sight of color, another field would swing into view; a field of white Queen Anne’s lace at the foot of an incline of bluebonnets that descended into the next field over worn, split-rail fencing into a flush of pink wine cups before rushing back to reinstate the supremacy of the state’s treasured bloom.
I made my regular stops, drunk with the color and the music that filled my soul even as I filled in order blanks. And it was almost with relief that I finally began my descent into the bowels of the Texas Valley where green cotton fields and aloe vera farms relieved the strain of my always searching eyes as they obliged the signal from my brain to not miss even one isolated winecup by the side of the road.
Before I left the wildflowers behind, I wanted to stop the car and get out and wallow in the fields. I wanted to take off my shoes and feel the clover cool between my toes while the black-eyed Susans tickled my knees. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I succumbed only in my imagination as I passed the miles and miles of colorful (blue-blue-blue) quiet and secret places.
Having finished my first week, I was right on schedule as the Malibu ate up the miles on the straight road that ran down, down, down. As the car and I raced toward sea level, it was as if I was not the driver in control; rather the blue hunk and I were on an elevator that took us lower, using miles instead of floors to gauge our descent.
To clear my head, I rolled down the window and crunched into the onion-laden barbecue sandwich I had picked up at Cotton’s when I had turned off at Robstown. The warm breeze that filled the car was as full of the tantalizing aroma as m
y sandwich, which was so soggy and moist that I licked it from my fingers. I enjoyed the increasingly heavy air of the approaching Gulf as it first caressed the acres of onion fields before swirling around the curls on my forehead.
I took a swig of my real bottled Coke and put it back in the car caddy by the window. I felt so free. So carefree.
I arrived at South Padre Island at three o’clock, an hour ahead of schedule. After snaking across the Port Isabel Causeway, I came to my first stop on the island beside the median that held the statue of the old padre himself. “I’m back,” I whispered to him before it was my turn to go. I swung the car onto the main drag.
Because I was early, I turned off to a side street leading to the Gulf side and parked the car on the street beside the few remaining duned accesses to the beach. I locked the car, and with only my keys in my hand, I started up and across it. Tiny, transparent crabs scuttled out of the way of my approaching footfall, back into their miniature holes in the white sand where they turned and stared out, as if daring me to make a mistake in my next step. I followed the morning glory vine up the sandy hill, my sandaled feet kicking up little avalanches that held the blades of the sea oats for a minute before the hot, steady wind released them.
When I reached the top of the dune, I stopped and let the full impact of the Gulf breezes hit me in never-ending gusts. They evaporated the perspiration that had formed on my face on the upward trudge and filled the skirt of my flowered sundress before slapping the fabric against my legs. They wiped away the tears that formed at the corners of my eyes as I stared out at the sight that was always with me; waves rolling in to the shore as unceasingly as the wind that blew them to white-capped peaks. Their roar filled my head, and like every other slave to the oceans, I went down to meet them, shucking my sandals when I reached the previous high tide line that had wet and cooled the hot sand.
The Complete Honey Huckleberry Box Set Page 3