Polished Off

by Lila Dare

  I got hold of Stella at her mother’s house and explained the problem. “Maybe I can help,” she said. “Meet me at my house in fifteen minutes.”

  Darryl answered the door when Rachel and I knocked. He looked bleary-eyed and surprised to see us. No more surprised than I was to see him; I’d forgotten he was staying there. “Stella asked us to meet her here,” I explained.

  “Sure,” he said dully, pulling the door wider. “C’mon in. Is she coming over?” A flicker of hope lit his eyes.

  Stella’s car pulling up answered his question. He stood at the door, watching her come up the sidewalk, hunger and remorse and hope roiling in his expression. He leaned forward as if to kiss Stella’s cheek when she reached the stoop, but she ducked away.

  “We’ll just be here a minute, Darryl,” she said coolly. “We won’t bother you.”

  “It’s no bother,” he said. “This is your home.”

  Stella didn’t respond. She turned right down the hall and pushed open the door to a small bedroom. “In here,” she called. Rachel and I followed her. I, at least, felt the tension between Stella and Darryl like something that congealed the air, making it hard to reach the bedroom, a guest room with a double bed covered with a crazy quilt and a small chest of drawers. Stella was on tiptoe in front of a closet, hauling down a long, rectangular box.

  “I haven’t looked at this in ages,” she said, laying it gently on the bed. At the puzzled look in Rachel’s eyes, she asked, “Didn’t Grace tell you? This is the evening gown I bought for my one and only pageant appearance. If we shorten it, I think it will work on you.” She lifted the lid and unfolded a layer of tissue paper. A pink dress with a sweetheart neckline and padded shoulders—very ’80s—shimmered in the box. Stella lifted it out and the satin skirt cascaded to the carpet. “We could maybe cut out the pads, too,” Stella said, “and make it look more ‘now.’ Want to try it on?”

  Rachel nodded. I closed the door, catching a glimpse of Darryl still hovering in the foyer, and Rachel stripped down to bra and panties before slipping the dress over her head. Stella zipped it for her and stepped back.

  “Oh, Rachel,” she breathed. “You look just lovely.”

  She did look beautiful. The pink gave a pearly sheen to her skin and set off her dark hair dramatically. The expression on her face, though, detracted from the effect.

  “What?” I asked.

  She screwed up her face, staring at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. “It’s awfully sweet.”

  “It is sweet on you,” Stella said, apparently not understanding that Rachel didn’t mean it as a compliment. She dropped to her knees and fussed with the hem. “If you have a pair of three-or four-inch heels, I don’t even think we’ll need to hem it. Just be careful when you walk.”

  Indecision clouded Rachel’s face and I could see she didn’t want to hurt Stella’s feelings by telling her she didn’t like the dress. But the way she tugged at the bodice and ran a finger under the sleeve where it ended at her wrist told me she wasn’t comfortable in it.

  “I feel like Cinderella after the fairy godmother has, like, bippity-boppity-booed her,” she complained.

  “Exactly!” Stella said, clasping her hands together and gazing up at Rachel with admiring eyes.

  “What if Cinderella wanted a black dress?” Rachel asked.

  “She knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said warningly. I appreciated Rachel’s dilemma, but it was giving Stella pleasure to do something kind for the girl and to relive her own pageant days. Stella needed a lift, and I didn’t think it would kill Rachel to pretend she loved the dress.

  “You don’t like it?” Stella asked, hurt crumpling her face.

  “It’s fab,” Rachel said quickly. “I just, like, needed to get used to all the pink. I can absolutely win in this dress.”

  Stella’s face cleared and I gave Rachel an approving nod. She shrugged and gave me a half smile. “You’re a good kid,” I whispered as I unzipped the dress.

  We carefully refolded the gown and put it in the box. “Be careful when you iron it, or you might want to hang it in a steamy bathroom for a bit,” Stella suggested as we trooped back down the hall.

  Darryl appeared from the direction of the kitchen; he’d clearly been listening for us. He wiped his hands down his jeaned thighs. “Stel, can we talk?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said with a brittle smile. “I promised my mom I’d do the grocery shopping while she was gone and then I’ve got to get over to the theater.”

  “We need to talk,” he said, an edge creeping into his voice.

  “Actions speak louder than words,” she said sadly. She held up a hand to cut him off when he would have responded. “I’ve got to go. Come on, Rach, Grace.” She shepherded us out the door, carrying the dress box as if it were full of Ming dynasty porcelain.

  I PICKED UP MARTY OUTSIDE THE OGLETHORPE and drove to The Pirate for lunch. At the far south end of the boardwalk, The Roving Pirate had a deck with beautiful sea views and the marsh stretching out behind it. It’s too far from the center of town to be a real tourist haunt, so locals tend to congregate there. At one o’clock on a Friday afternoon, we had the place to ourselves except for two men in work clothes and boots watching a Braves game at the bar.

  We sat by the windows—it was way too hot to eat on the deck—and I ordered a tuna salad sandwich while Marty got crab patties.

  “So, what did you think?” I asked around a mouthful of sandwich.

  “About?”

  “The pageant. Jodi. Everything.”

  He watched a pair of gulls wheeling outside the window. “That Jodi’s a piece of work. Talk about organized! But she is wound way too tight over this pageant—she seems to think that if anything bad happens on her watch—”

  “Like more murders?”

  “—that her career with the Miss American Blossom organization will be kaput. She’s bound and determined to earn a spot on the national board. If I were the prankster—whoever it is ripping up gowns and leaving roadkill around—I’d be watching my back. I get the feeling Ms. Jodi Keen takes no prisoners when it comes to climbing the career ladder.” He ripped a bite from his crab patty and chewed, possibly to demonstrate what would happen to anyone who got in Jodi’s way.

  “You said ‘prankster,’ not murderer. You don’t think they’re the same person?”

  He shook his head, still chewing. “Hell, no,” he mumbled.

  I waited, thinking about it, until he swallowed. “Audrey’s murder is way out of line in terms of seriousness with the sabotage incidents, isn’t it?” I asked. “There was the screwup with the advertising materials, then the sprinkler ruining a few dresses, then Kiley’s mats being cut.”

  “I just can’t see someone leaping from those penny-ante acts to murder,” Marty agreed.

  “Unless maybe Audrey caught whoever in the act? And he or she overreacted and stabbed her with Stella’s file?”

  “I suppose that’s possible, but then why go back to tricks like booby-trapping the swimsuit—pun intended—and hacking up the dresses? Personally, if I’d murdered someone without meaning to, I’d be lying low. Like in Honduras, say.”

  “It’d be even hotter and muggier there than it is here. If I become a fugitive, I’m heading north.”

  “Noted.” He grinned and leaned over the table to wipe a crumb from the corner of my mouth.

  His touch distracted me for a moment, but I got back on track. “So, maybe what we’re dealing with is a saboteur who has a grudge against beauty pageants and a murderer with a grudge against Audrey Faye.”

  “That’s my best guess,” Marty said. “But it feels to me like the saboteur is escalating. The way those dresses were hacked up was kind of scary. He or she has gone from relatively benign things like sprinklers to poisoning the judges and going after things with scissors.”

  I shifted uneasily in my chair, wondering what the saboteur would come up with next. “You don�
�t think he’ll give up?”

  “Not unless or until the pageant gets shut down. I think the fact that he’s continuing with the sabotage even after Audrey got killed is proof of that. Any sane person would’ve backed off.”

  “You don’t think whoever it is is sane?” The thought of a lunatic wandering around gave me the creeps. Maybe I’d seen too many Friday the 13th movies as a teen.

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Well, they’re not thinking rationally. I’d say that whoever it is has a personal stake in this. It’s not just a generalized hatred of beauty pageants. If so, why pick on a rinky-dink pageant like Miss Magnolia Blossom?”

  “Rinky-dink!” I tried to sound affronted but couldn’t suppress a smile. “But you’ve got a point. Who could hate a beauty contest this much? The protestors? Maybe they’re all in on it.”

  “Doubtful. But you might want to have a word with that Dr. Yarrow you asked me to research. Real name Charles Alfred Yarrow, by the way. He came up with the Kwasi about fifteen years ago after a trip to Africa.”

  Clanging metal from the kitchen and a loud “Shit!” told me someone had dropped pots and pans. The guys at the bar didn’t even look up from their baseball game.

  “What else did you find out about him?” Changing one’s name from Chuck to Kwasi wasn’t too heinous.

  “He allegedly plagiarized part of his dissertation, so Berkeley never granted him his PhD.”

  Ooh. Now we were getting into murkier territory. “So he’s not really Dr. Yarrow?”

  “Not unless he picked up the degree online or someplace.”

  “So how’d he get the job at Georgia Coastal College?”

  “Inflating one’s résumé is not exactly unheard of,” Marty said cynically. “And HR folks don’t always take time to cross their t’s and dot their i’s when they hire someone.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got about two hours’ work to get done on a story before I do the judging shtick, so I’ve got to run. Don’t go poking your pretty nose”—he kissed the nose in question—“into any dark corners until we’ve had a chance to hash through this a bit more. There’s a murderer and a potential psycho running around. I don’t want you pissing either of them off.”

  I had no intention of pissing anyone off, but I also had no intention of sitting on my hands while Stella’s husband got convicted for a murder he didn’t commit or a whackjob with a grudge against beauty pageants laid plans that might end up hurting Rachel or Marty. I had to admit I was coming over to Mom’s way of thinking … cancelling the pageant might be the best move.

  I said as much to Jodi when I ran her to earth at the theater, supervising Marv as he rehearsed the lighting for the night’s contest.

  “Absolutely not.” She barely spared me a glance as we stood in the middle of the stage looking up toward the lighting booth. “Aim that spot a bit left,” she called to Marv.

  “Someone could get seriously hurt,” I said. “Look what happened to the judges—we’re just lucky that it was ipecac and not cyanide and no one died.”

  She gave me a scathing look. “Cyanide? Get real. This isn’t Arsenic and Old Lace. The pranks are just someone’s warped idea of a joke.”

  “Whoever’s doing this won’t stop until the pageant gets cancelled.”

  “Or until we crown the new Miss Magnolia Blossom,” Jodi said triumphantly. “Then what will they do? Try blue.”

  “You got it,” Marv said.

  A haze of purply blue lighting turned the stage to twilight. “I don’t know. Shoot the winner?”

  The words leaped out of my mouth and gave us both pause.

  “No way,” Jodi said, shaking her head. “What would be the point?”

  To discourage girls and young women from entering pageants? To get revenge for some wrong—real or imagined—in the past? I didn’t know and I didn’t want to find out. “Look, you’ve been involved with this pageant—”

  “I’ve run it.”

  “—for several years. Can you think of anyone who thought they were a shoo-in but lost, or anyone who had a really bad experience?”

  “They all think they’re going to win, honey, and most of them lose,” Jodi said. “Some of them take it harder than others. And sometimes the girls can be mean to each other. There was one girl a couple of years ago who was a bit heavyset. The other girls were vicious about her weight and she ended up withdrawing. Her parents tried to sue the pageant, but nothing came of it. It’s not our fault if their daughter ate too many donuts and couldn’t find her way to the gym with a GPS.” Her story and the condemnation in her voice made me wonder if Kwasi Yarrow didn’t have a point: maybe pageants were evil.

  “What’s her name?”

  “You expect me to remember?” Her brows arched up. “Erin or Erica … something like that. I have no clue what her last name was.”

  “Do you have records?”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to dig them out for you.” She gave me her full attention for a moment, shaking the clipboard for emphasis. “Look, just leave it alone. The girls have all picked up their gowns and costumes and are keeping them at their homes. There’s nothing left here for the practical joker to get at. We’ll crown the winner tomorrow night and we’ll move on. Don’t go looking for trouble.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I WASN’T LOOKING FOR TROUBLE; I WAS LOOKING for answers. Jodi’s story about the overweight girl getting run out of the pageant haunted me. If she wouldn’t give me a list of the contestants, how could I get the girl’s name? Maybe the newspaper? They usually published a story or two about the pageant. I didn’t want to trek down to the Gazette’s offices and burrow through the morgue so I sat on the steps outside the theater and called my friend Addie McGowan. In her mid-sixties, Addie had been a reporter for the Gazette but now spent most of her time running the newspaper’s morgue, only returning to reporting if a story caught her fancy.

  “McGowan,” she answered on the first ring, her raspy voice testifying to her years as a smoker.

  “Addie! It’s Grace. You busy?” I explained what I was after.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. An audible exhalation told me she was sneaking cigarettes at her basement desk again. “Back issues that recent are actually online. Hold a mo and I’ll pull them up.”

  I listened to keyboard clickings for several minutes. A thin green caterpillar inched past me on the concrete and I wondered why nature made him move in such an awkward way: hunch up, stretch out.

  “Okay,” she finally said, just when I was going to suggest I call her back later. “There were no Ericas or Erins in last year’s pageant or the year before’s, but here’s a group photo on the first day of the pageant three years ago and one of the girls is called Eryca M. Smith. Eryca with a Y.”

  “Does she look a little chubby?”

  “More Rubens than Modigliani.”

  Her name would have to be Smith. How was I supposed to find someone named Smith? “I don’t suppose there’s anything else about her?” I asked.

  “Daughter of Ezekiel and Carol Smith of Harriets Bluff. Wanted to major in fine arts at Florida State when she graduated. Which should have been”—she paused to calculate—“two years ago.”

  The Ezekiel cheered me. Smith was common but Ezekiel stood out. “Thanks, Addie,” I said.

  “Is there a story in this?” Addie asked. I could almost see her pointed nose quivering.

  “You mean beyond the fact two people have been killed?”

  A long, indrawn breath told me she was lighting a cigarette. “Murder by itself doesn’t get my storytelling juices flowing anymore,” she said. “It’s the whys and wherefores that make a good story. Someone kills her cheating hubby—hell, it happens every day. Some gangbanger shoots a 7-Eleven clerk to rob the till—ditto. Now, some overambitious mama kills a cheerleader so her daughter can make the squad or does away with a pageant contestant that stands in her daughter’s way, now that’s a story. Or a drug lord infiltrates a beauty pageant to sneak more coke
into the country—”

  “How would a beauty pageant help a drug smuggler?” I interrupted.

  “I’m just making this up as I go along,” Addie said with a laugh that turned into a cough. “But you get my drift?”

  I got it. And as I hung up, I wondered if there might well be an Addie-type story behind the Miss Magnolia Blossom murders.

  A COUNTY PHONE BOOK SHOWED NO EZEKIEL SMITHS. On impulse, I ran my finger down all the Smiths and came across Zeke at the end. Good enough. I dialed the number and, when a woman answered, asked for Eryca.

  “Why, bless you, Eryca doesn’t live here anymore,” the woman said. “Not for going on three years. She and her brother share an apartment up in Brunswick.” She obligingly rattled off an address. “One-two-three Tara Street—like in Gone with the Wind. Apartment one-two-three. Isn’t that the easiest? I can’t remember her cell phone number to save my life. If you see her, you tell her her mama’s going to forget what her pretty face looks like if she doesn’t come visit soon.”

  I promised I would. Brunswick was twenty minutes north. Doable.

  HALF AN HOUR LATER I WAS KNOCKING ON A DOOR IN a pretty apartment complex on the southern edge of Brunswick. The buildings were two story, with tiny balconies or porches. Many had grills or bicycles chained to the rails, and flowers spilling out of window boxes. Set in a rectangle, the apartments ringed an aquamarine pool with a slide. Eight or ten kids splashed and Marco Poloed in the pool while a small group of mothers huddled around the one table with an umbrella and chatted. A lone man lay prone on a lounger, baking his skin to a mahogany shade that promised carcinomas as he aged.

  I knocked again when no one answered and tried to peer in the narrow window beside the door. Mini blinds blocked my view. I wiped sweat off my forehead and lifted my hair off my neck. It was too dang hot. Pawing in my purse for a pen and a scrap of paper—an old receipt would do—to leave a note with, I jumped when a voice spoke behind me.

  “Looking for Mick?”

  I turned to see a young woman of twenty-two or so with long blond hair in a braid over her shoulder and a basket of folded laundry in her arms. The scent of fabric softener wafted off it. Boy, was I glad my days of popping quarters in a dryer at a Laundromat or pulling someone else’s wet jockstraps out of a washer to run a load were over. My carriage-house apartment had a stackable washer and dryer just off the kitchen. The young woman stood behind me on the sidewalk, balancing the basket on her hip while she pulled keys from her cutoff jeans pocket.