The Complete Honey Huckleberry Box Set

by Margaret Moseley

  She glanced at her watch. “Oops, gotta run. I told the woman minding the store I’d be back before school was out so she could pick up her kids.”

  I checked the time on my watch. “Well, you’re not going to make it. It will be way after three by the time you make it home.” The town of West, Texas, was a little over an hour from Fort Worth.

  “I gave her a key to Pages so she’ll just have locked up and gone on, but I do need to get back. I want to be home for the early news. To see what they say about Twyman’s murder.”

  I grinned. Janie, enamored with her mystery books, would make a mystery out of an anthill. We had been business acquaintances for a few years: Pages was one of the small-town bookstores where I stopped on my route to do inventory and promote the list I carried for several small presses. It was only the recent past circumstances that made the two of us become closer than just a professional relationship. Having faced a murderer in our midst had certainly altered both our lives.

  The faux diamond was forgotten on the dining room table as Janie bustled about, gathering up her purse and goodie-bag loot. For a small, rotund woman, she certainly stirred a stream of energy in her path. But I remembered that when she faded, she went downhill fast. “Drive carefully,” I admonished. I hated it, but I always seemed to have to say all the cautionary warnings my mother had extolled to me. It was like a mantra. If I didn’t say them, something bad was sure to happen.

  Janie was always tickled when I went into my motherly mode. “Yes’m,” she said and blew me a kiss as she hastened down the walk to her car.

  I watched her affectionately as she drove off.

  Some people might call her naive. But since I had a patent on the appellation, I genuinely delighted in her innocent enthusiasm about everything that crossed her path. It was like seeing the world through new eyes to be around Janie for very long. Take, for instance, her obstinacy in declaring Twyman a murder victim. All I had seen was an overweight, middle-aged man who had succumbed to the stress and excesses of his successful writing career. Janie had seen a murder plot.

  The author of only three books in his lifetime, Twyman had been a true minimalist. Every word in his books counted and was inestimable. His fame was truly deserved and his talent unquestionable. That his manners left something to be desired could be excused. Geniuses were seldom appreciated in their reality, but it didn’t matter. Just their creative outpourings were enough.

  Which was good for the deceased, because in real life he had been a real … I searched for a word that wouldn’t offend the wisps of my mother’s ghostly ears. I came up with horse‘s patootie. Okay, a little old-fashioned. I smiled. Twyman would have loved that one. It would have killed him.

  FIVE

  Once or twice a month, I meet with my personal financial planner and accountant to go over my figures. This was a dutiful routine I had assumed since my parents had died—within a day of each other—when I was eighteen. Steven Bondesky had not presumed to undertake a parental role, and our relationship was one of love and hate and give and take that had altered considerably when I had accused him wrongly of murder earlier in the year.

  He had spent some time in the Tarrant County Jail at my behest and, although he wasn’t guilty of the homicide of my friend Steven Miller or his friend Jimmy, he had been investigated for other odd aspects of his business. He had forgiven me for the false accusation but still glowered over the intrusion into his professional life.

  Tired as I was from the morning and early afternoon excitement, I was too aroused to take a nap or curl up with a new book.

  So, since I was wired for action anyway, I headed off to visit the bear in his den.

  There had been some changes in the west side building that Bondesky called his office and, for all I knew, his home. Fresh black asphalt poured out onto the street, giving the appearance of a parking lot. Since there were some gray dusty tracks of car wheels on it, I decided it was ready to receive my Plymouth Voyager and parked in the three-car-wide space.

  On the new aluminum screen door was a five-inch brass plate announcing Bondesky Financial Services, and a concrete urn by the entrance sprouted freshly planted purple petunias. “Bondesky,” I thought, “I hardly know ye.”

  The front office was just as much a surprise. There was an actual desk with a live secretarial-type woman sitting there. You coulda knocked me over with a feather. The usual riffraff of upchucked derelicts was absent and Muzak was playing over a recently installed speaker bolted high on the wall. There was even a picture on the wall: a three-by-five-foot print of Ophelia down by the riverside.

  “How may I help you?” asked the perfectly coiffed, silver-haired woman at the desk.

  “Uh, I’m here to see Bondesky,” I replied.

  “May I tell him who is calling? And the purpose of your visit?”

  “Uh, Honey Huckleberry. And … er … on business.”

  She rose, showing off shapely legs and a tiny waist in her navy-blue cotton suit.

  “One moment, Miss Huckleberry. I’ll see if Mr. Bondesky is available.” She picked up her memo pad and pen and headed toward the closed office door behind her desk.

  I pinched myself to make sure I was in the right place. Where was the dirty linoleum? The grungy coffeepot with the hangers-on? The cops who always stopped by for free donuts and a pee break? For God’s sake, there were magazines on the table next to upholstered chairs. I crossed the freshly laid blue carpet and checked them out. U.S. News and World Report? Money Magazine? And they were current issues.

  “Ahem, Miss Huckleberry? Mr. Bondesky asked that you wait for a few minutes. Is that convenient for you?” Miss Perfect Secretary quietly closed the inner door and slipped back into her desk slot.

  “Wait? Well, yes, I guess I could wait.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “May I get you some coffee?”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

  We smiled at one another and listened to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, “Pathétique,” over the speaker. At least that’s what the erudite announcer’s voice said we were going to be enjoying.

  “My favorite,” I said.

  “You, too?” she responded. In surprise.

  “I don’t know your name,” I told her as the promised music pleasured our ears.

  “Evelyn Potter. My nameplate”—and she gestured to the waiting spot on her desk—“hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “Ah.”

  There was a subtle buzz from somewhere on her desk.

  “You may go in now, Miss Huckleberry. Are you sure I can’t get you some coffee? A soft drink? Tea?”

  “No, thank you. And it’s been a pleasure, Ms. Potter.”

  The final straw in this made-for-TV pageant was that Bondesky was wearing a tie, albeit a poorly tied one; blue with a huge rainbow trout leaping for the ultimate lure, which rested somewhere in the loosened collar of his shirt.

  “Where’s your eyeshade?” I asked.

  “I got a new light. Don’t need it.”

  I looked up. “Right Where’s the card table?”

  “I got this office module. Computer fits it better.”

  “Right.”

  He looked defensive. I looked belligerent. I’m not into changes much.

  I was used to going into a tough-girl act when I was with Bondesky. He was the one who had taught me the value of sarcasm: like Epsom salts, it toughened my soul. This patina of legitimacy was doing me in. It was like when I was a little girl and I cleaned up my playroom by putting my mother’s old evening gowns over the mess. The room sparkled with net and glitter, but the mess was still underneath. She had praised me anyhow.

  “Looks great,” I told Bondesky. I always remember my mother’s lessons.

  We coulda gone on pretending, but underneath it all, Bondesky and I shared the same weird sense of humor. We did a chicken stare-down for a few seconds and then both burst into laughter.

  The laughter was healing. It wiped away all the guilt I felt and all the resentmen
t he harbored.

  Bondesky bobbed his head and motioned me closer.

  “Ain’t this something?”

  “Absolutely. Why did you do it?”

  “Well, my lawyer told me if my joint had looked more respectable, I wouldn’t have had to stay in jail so long. They thought I was doing something illegal here.”

  “No. Imagine that.”

  “Yep. Hard to believe. Me. Doing something illegal. When everyone knows I was just keeping overhead down to better serve my clients.”

  “Bondesky?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are we whispering?”

  “It’s her.”

  “That Ms. Patton? I mean Potter. She just acts like Patton.”

  “Yes, she’s so … so … I don’t know the word.”

  “Professional?”

  “Yeah, that, too.”

  I straightened from my stoop over the desk. “Bondesky, what happened to the boys?”

  “Aw, Huckleberry, I wouldn’t forget my boys.” Bondesky reverted to normal tones, too. Let her listen seemed to be an unspoken motto we assumed. “I built them a prefab place out back. You ought to see it. Got me a pool table and real coffee machine. The guys love it. They call it Jimmy’s Place.”

  We smiled in remembrance of the man who had died to protect me; a derelict Bondesky had nursed since the mentally injured man had returned from Vietnam. “He would have liked that,” I said.

  The momentary mist that clouded the old man’s eyes lifted as he cleared his froggy throat and asked, “So, what can I do for you?”

  “I want to buy a computer.”

  Bondesky got excited. Now that he didn’t wear the old green eyeshade, I could usually see emotions in his pale blue eyes. “Now you’re talking.” He reached across the desk to shake my hand. “Welcome to the twentieth century, Huckleberry.”

  As old as he was, Bondesky had been on the cutting edge of the computer revolution, using it for business long before others. The equipment had changed shape and function over the years, but it seemed to me that he had always had some kind of monitor glowing in the background. Even when I used to come with my father to visit.

  He took out a pen. “Whadda you want?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, what do you want it to do for you?”

  “Keep my schedule? Client list? Addresses?”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “I don’t know. What else is there? I’ve never had one before, remember.”

  “Expenses would be good,” said the accountant in him.

  “Yes, starting with all that, what do I need?”

  He churched his pudgy fingers together, rubbing the steeple part over his shiny nose, thinking.

  “Might as well start with the best. I’ll special order a Dell for you from Austin. Get customized programs. You’ll have to get a second phone line. And we’ll get you a laptop from Mike Dell, too. For the road.” He pressed a button on his phone. She showed up, memo pad in hand.

  “Miz Patton. I have a job for you.” Bondesky sounded happy to have found some work for her. He rattled off names and numbers to her that she almost wrote down before he said them. She was really fast.

  “And we send the bill to Miss Huckleberry? How will she be paying?”

  “Any way she wants to,” he said. “But probably with cash?” He raised a bushy eyebrow in my direction.

  “Probably.” I smiled.

  Maybe Bondesky would make it in the real world. He dismissed Ms. Secretary and leaned forward. I inched toward the desk. I sensed another whisper session.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got to do something about the money.”

  “It’s safe.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “Lightning does not strike twice. No one knows about the money. Except you. And Steven Hyatt.”

  “I worry about that part. But I also worry about you not putting it into investments. Four million dollars won’t last forever, Huckleberry. Especially not the way you’re spending it.”

  “What do you mean? So, I bought a dishwasher. A few things for the house. I haven’t gone to Hawaii yet,” I protested.

  “Nah, I mean like the jewelry.”

  “Hey, I buy my earrings at Claire’s.”

  Bondesky pointed toward my hand. “You didn’t buy that at no boutique. Or maybe it’s a gift? From one of your hordes of boyfriends? Let me guess. I know it ain’t Steven Hyatt. So … the guy from Italy or the one from the valley? The one with the dog.”

  I looked down in surprise. When I left the house, I had picked up the ring from Twyman’s goodie bag, intending to put it in the catchall drawer of the dining room breakfront, but instead, I had slipped it on my finger for transportation purposes as I collected my purse and my keys. Then I had forgotten to leave it in the drawer. I had noticed it on my drive over, the sun reflecting colorful sparkly rainbows onto the interior of the van. During my visit with Bondesky, unused to wearing a ring, I had twisted it around my finger.

  “Oh, the ring,” I exclaimed. “It’s not real. I found it. Sorta. Which reminds me. I’m going to be on the six o’clock news. But don’t worry. It wasn’t murder, no matter what Janie thinks. He was just a glutton. And a real horse’s patootie.” I blushed. Lord, my language was deteriorating.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Huckleberry. Who died this time?” He stood up and reached across the desk to catch my hand. His short, rough fingers turned the ring right side up on my finger. “I do know this, though. This here ring is real.”

  SIX

  “This has been a strange day,” I muttered to myself as I inched through the Taco Bell drive-through on my way home. I gave my taco salad order and tapped my fingers on the wheel. The only ring I had on my hand flashed in the glare of a late-afternoon sun and the interior of the car lit up like the Roseland Ballroom. If what Bondesky had said was true, I was wearing several hundred thousands of dollars on my ring finger.

  I had settled a hip on Bondesky’s new desk and told him about my very strange day. Beginning with the luncheon with Twyman, I simply and factually told about the author’s death at my elbow, the goodie bags, and the ring. Oh, and the television interview.

  He didn’t blink a beady eye. Took a new death in my life as normal, but did surprise me when he said he knew Twyman. Had known Twyman. “He was a skinny twerp back then. Eager like a puppy dog. Strange look in his eyes. Never did know what Clover saw in him. Why she married him.”

  I thought of the corpulent man who had died today. It was hard to imagine Twyman as ever young or skinny. “Who’s Clover?”

  “His first wife. Clover Medlock. Ask me, and I’ll say that he took her for a ride. Told her so at the time. I’d have married her myself, but he was smarter. Better looking. I wasn’t as successful or as distinguished looking then like I am now.”

  I let that one go.

  “I seem to remember from the bios. He started out here, right?”

  “Yeah, was a half-baked reporter from Weatherford. Did a big story on Clover and got on her good side. Then romanced her. He was a writer. Knew those romance words.” Bondesky had grimaced. Romance to him was the glow of his computer monitor.

  “What was the story about?”

  “You ain’t heard of Clover Medlock? She’s the one who developed a new breed of cattle. Some kind of Brangus or some such. All by herself. Well, sir, it was a big story all right. Little pretty lady ranching and driving her tractor all over the place. Down near Granbury. Know the area?”

  “Yes, I have a client there. Small bookstore I visit. Is she still alive then?”

  He had smiled an old rogue smile. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.”

  Before I ate the taco salad with the extra sour cream, I remembered to call Silas. He was the only other one I worried about hearing my name or seeing me on the news associated with another deceased body.

  I noticed Bondesky had left Silas Sampson off the boyfriend list, and it was an accurat
e call. Silas was a policeman, detective actually, and while we had flirted with the idea of what Bondesky called romancing, we had never progressed beyond the eyelash-fluttering stage.

  Silas wasn’t in, but I left a message on his voice mail. “Silas, Honey. Don’t worry. It was natural causes.” And I had added, “I’m sure.”

  So with a glass of iced tea and my cardboard box plate from Taco Bell, I settled in front of the television in the living room. This was new to me, eating in the living room. But it was getting close to 5:30 and I thought the death of someone of Twyman’s stature would probably make the national news.

  I was right. Not only did they mention his death, but they also showed videos of him with all four of his ex-wives. Wow. They were all celebrities, too, although I only recognized the movie star, Babe.

  It was on the local 6 o’clock news that I was mentioned. Oh, there had been a white-faced glimpse of me on the national news, but no one knew me, so who would notice?

  Steven Hyatt, of course.

  Since I now have caller ID, I could see it was him calling. I could answer or I could watch the local news. Steven Hyatt was my best friend ever, so I picked up the insistently ringing phone and said, “Georgie Porgie, Puddin’ and Pie. I’ll call you right back.” And hung up.

  Abby Gardenia was almost breathless with her excitement on getting to report Twyman’s death. Since it happened in Fort Worth, there was a sure bet the report was getting a national feed and would be rebroadcast from coast to coast. It was interesting watching her audition her stuff. Until she came to me.

  You’re supposed to look ten pounds heavier on television, so I reckon I am really skinny. I looked like an orange-headed, frizzy wraith next to Ms. Gardenia’s full-flown Italian coloring. Or was it makeup? I moved closer to the big screen to check.

  “Yes, I was sitting next to Mr. Towerie.”

  “And what was the conversation?”

  “He was very pleasant. We really only exchanged a few words about the luncheon. How we hoped it would raise money for the Arlington Library.”

  “Was he in distress? Did you know he was going to die? Did he?”