Act Two

by Denise Grover Swank

  We went through the customary insurance and personal information questions. I made up most of the information, but gave her my real phone number. When I hung up, I realized Ava was watching me from the doorway.

  Oh shit. She definitely looked unhappy. Had Mabel told her that she’d caught me snooping?

  “Are you ill?” she asked, sounding disgusted by the thought.

  I forced a pleasant smile. “No. I was making a dentist appointment.”

  She gave me a blank look.

  I shrugged, trying to play it off. “I’m due for a cleaning, and now that I’m settled, I figured there was no time like the present.”

  “I see.” She brushed imaginary lint off the front of her skirt. “I would appreciate it if you held your personal calls until after you leave.”

  I almost pointed out that she’d refused to let me out of my cage to finish cleaning up the rest of the food, but that didn’t seem prudent at the moment. “Yes, ma’am. It won’t happen again.”

  “The Bible study is over, so you’re free to clean up the remaining refreshments.”

  I hurried into the dining room, eager to finish so I could get out of here and think about everything I’d learned.

  What mess had Walter Frey been involved in? Probably something illegal if his wife had quit their gossip group. If they were all about appearances, they couldn’t have a criminal’s wife in their ranks—even though I suspected not all their husbands were squeaky clean. But had he and my father been involved in the same mess, or was this something new? And if the “Bible study” group had discovered what Walter was up to a year ago, what predicament had Ava taken care of two years ago? Did it have anything to do with the recent murders? Then it occurred to me: Colt had started to spend time with Ava two years ago, and he said he’d helped her out. But what had he done, and what two issues had popped up after she’d “handled” the situation they’d discussed at the meeting?

  One thing was certain—Walter Frey didn’t die from a robbery. Despite my promise to my mother, I was going to find out what happened.

  Chapter 13

  Colt’s truck was in the parking lot when I got off work at the shop. Alvin had quizzed me mercilessly about Miss Ava’s Bible study, but I had kept my lips sealed. It didn’t take a genius to deduce that getting on Ava Milton’s bad side was a very bad idea, and besides, I was hoping to get more information next week.

  When I climbed into the cab of Colt’s truck, he looked me over from head to toe. “Well, well, you made it out alive.” His grin lit up his eyes.

  “It’s a wonder. I thought Alvin was going to have a coronary when I refused to tell him anything.”

  Colt pulled out of the parking space and headed for the exit. “I was referring to Miss Ava, but now that you mention it, I’ve heard Alvin’s relentless. It’s a wonder he didn’t tie you up in the basement and hold you there until you told him what he wanted to know.”

  The blood rushed from my head. Colt’s suggestion hit far too close to what had happened in the basement of that abandoned house ten years ago.

  “Jesus, Maggie,” Colt said in alarm. “Are you okay?”

  Try to act normal, Magnolia. “Yeah.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “It’s the heat is all.”

  He stopped at the exit of the parking lot, ignoring the car honking behind him. “It’s not that hot.”

  I forced a smile, something I’d done a lot of these past few days. “I feel hot. I bet my blood sugar’s low. I haven’t eaten anything today.” Not a lie, and now that I thought about it, my stomach rumbled in protest.

  “It’s after two o’clock.”

  I waved him off. “I’ll be fine once I eat.”

  “We’ll stop and get something on the way to your mother’s.”

  He went through a McDonald’s drive-through and got us both lunch, which we ate on the way to my family home.

  He parked in the driveway as we finished. Momma’s car was gone, and I felt like I was trespassing, even though she’d given me her permission via text to come check out the car.

  “You feeling better?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said with a grimace, irritated with myself for my overreaction. But his offhanded remark had caught me by surprise. I needed to congratulate myself on my quick recovery. “Sorry I got all weird earlier.”

  He reached over and took my hand in his, looking into my eyes. “I care about you, Maggie. You have to know that by now.”

  I glanced down, suddenly worried where this conversation was going. “I do. And I hope you know how much I appreciate having you for a friend.” I looked up into his uncharacteristically serious blue eyes. “It’s nice to know I have a friend I can count on.”

  A sly grin spread across his face. “You think you said the word friend enough?” I grimaced, but he only laughed. “I was going to say the same thing to you. I usually just sleep with the women in my life and move on. It’s kind of nice to have a friend who’s a girl to hang out with, no expectations.”

  “Expectations?” I teased as relief rushed through me. “Is the reputation of your sexual prowess so widespread you feel performance anxiety?”

  He leaned back, his eyes full of mock outrage, and pointed his finger at me. “Hey! Watch it now. You don’t want to get left here with a busted car.”

  I laughed. “I’d take it back, but I’m genuinely curious about the answer.”

  Still laughing, we got out of the truck. Even though Colt had the garage code, I used the front door key Momma had finally given me a couple of weeks before. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the floor or an object out of place as we made our way through the dining room to the kitchen, then through the door to the garage. That’s where the cleanliness stopped.

  Colt let out a low groan as he walked down the two steps. “Jesus. I still can’t believe Lila let this happen.”

  I could see his point. The garage was stuffed with boxes and furniture that my brother had insisted on putting in my mother’s garage. But it meant that she couldn’t park in it anymore, and my old car was completely blocked in.

  “Where did all this shit come from?” he asked as he edged around a leather sofa.

  “Roy.”

  “Why doesn’t the bastard rent a storage unit? God knows he can afford it.”

  “I don’t know, and I haven’t asked. I’m guessing this is stuff from the bachelor pad he had before he married Belinda.”

  Colt shot me a quizzical look. “He never had a bachelor pad.”

  I blinked in surprise. “What?”

  “He moved in with your mother after he left college, then moved in with a friend before he and Belinda moved in together. How do you not know any of this?”

  I shot him an irritated look. “How do you?”

  “I’ve worked for Southern Belles for three years,” he said with a shrug. “I hear things.”

  “You’re as gossipy as the women at Miss Ava’s Bible study,” I said, using air quotes.

  “So you did hear some gossip?” Colt asked with a grin.

  “Nothing I’m going to repeat.” Ava knew Colt. What if he was testing me and reporting back to her? Sure, he was my friend, but it was obvious he’d known her longer.

  “So, if this isn’t Roy’s furniture,” I said as I pushed the button to lift the garage door behind my car, “then who does it belong to?”

  “That is a damn good question, Maggie Mae.” He studied it with more interest than I’d expected.

  “You’ve been here before. Didn’t you ever wonder about this?” With a flourish worthy of a Price is Right Showcase Showdown, I gestured with both hands to a dresser that was wedged next to a dark wood headboard.

  “Nope.”

  That I didn’t believe, but Colt interrupted me before I could call him on it.

  “Do you know where the keys are?”

  “In the ignition. I tried to start it a couple of weeks ago, after I decided to stay, but I left the keys in the car once I rea
lized it wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “I need to pop the hood, but there’s too much crap crammed around it. Let’s move some of it into the driveway.”

  “Okay.”

  I checked my phone and was relieved to find a text from Belinda. Alvin and I had finally discussed my schedule, and I’d sent her a message letting her know I was free for lunch on Friday. That had been a couple of hours ago, though, and I’d started to get worried.

  Sounds good. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.

  Part of me wanted to call her now, but I was up to my elbows with my own issues.

  My pink dress and heels weren’t moving-friendly, but I wasn’t about to complain. We had a path cleared out in ten minutes, but it had required us to move multiple boxes and miscellaneous pieces of furniture.

  “Who do you think it belonged to?” I asked again, handing Colt a bottle of water as we stared at the mess.

  He shrugged, focusing his attention on unscrewing the bottle cap. “Beats the hell out of me.”

  I moved closer and waded into the piles. “It’s the contents of an apartment,” I said. “One bedroom. Definitely a guy.”

  “How can you know that?” he asked after gulping half the bottle.

  I picked up a lamp shaped like a rifle, but it was in good taste. Like something from a Restoration Hardware catalog. “Exhibit A.”

  He laughed. “Good point.” After he finished the rest of the bottle, he popped open the car’s hood and looked the engine over. “Like I said, my guess is that you need a new battery, but we can try backing it out into the driveway and jumping it first.”

  “Do you think it could be that easy?” I asked hopefully.

  He grinned. “With your luck, no. But let’s try it anyway.”

  I got inside and put the car in neutral. Colt pushed on the front end while I steered the car to make sure it didn’t back into his truck. Then I put the car into park and hopped out to watch him hook up the jumper cables.

  “You seem to be studying this pretty intently,” he said, laughing.

  “I want to know how to do it, should the need ever arise.”

  “You’ve never jumped a car before?”

  “I told you that I hadn’t driven in ten years. Why would I need to jump-start a car?”

  “Good point.” So he told me what he was doing and why. But when I tried to start the engine, nothing happened.

  “Okay,” Colt said, unhooking the cords. “That’s what I was afraid of. We’ll have to get you a new battery and go from there.”

  “And if that’s not the problem?”

  “Let’s not borrow trouble.”

  We decided to leave the car in the driveway until we figured out the problem, so we started to haul all the stuff back into the garage.

  “Why would my mother agree to keep someone else’s things?” I asked while dragging what looked to be the contents of someone’s kitchen back inside. “She hates clutter.”

  “Probably because your brother asked her to keep it here.”

  “Obviously she loves him more than she dislikes the mess.” I couldn’t help my petulant tone.

  “She probably rarely goes in there,” he said with a shrug. “She parks in the driveway.”

  “Yeah.” But I wasn’t buying it. I noticed a ceramic three-foot-tall Dalmatian sitting on its haunches. “This doesn’t exactly fit in with the aesthetic, does it?” Then a memory clicked into place, and I gasped in surprise. “Wait. My father had one exactly like this. I bought it for him for his birthday when I was ten.”

  Colt stopped mid-step with a box in his arms. “What? You’re kidding.”

  I looked up at him in horror. “How many of these things do you think they sold?”

  “I don’t know.” He scrunched up his nose in distaste. “I sure as hell hope there aren’t too many. What are you getting at?”

  I tore into one of the boxes next to me, finding a bunch of stainless steel pots and pans. Then I moved on to the next: DVDs and CDs of Broadway musicals and jazz.

  “Maggie, what’re you doing?”

  “Seeing if this was my dad’s stuff.”

  “You think your dad had an apartment? What for?” He sucked in a breath. “Oh. God. His affair.”

  “He did not have an affair!” I shouted, then said more dejectedly, “But it’s not his stuff.” I waved a hand toward the box of DVDs and CDs. “He hated musicals, and he was a classic rock guy. Not jazz.”

  Tears stung my eyes, but I had no idea why. It was obviously a good thing that they weren’t his belongings.

  Colt was right. Why would my father have needed an apartment unless he’d been having an affair? But I was so desperate for solid information about his disappearance—hell, even an ambiguous clue would do—that I couldn’t help being disappointed.

  Colt watched me for a moment, then set the box down and gathered me into his arms. He held me for several seconds before he said, “I know you want answers, but have you ever considered that maybe you already have them? You just don’t like what you see?”

  I sniffed and pulled away, wiping a stray tear from the corner of my eye. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  His mouth pressed into a frown. “Fine. Play it that way, but I think you need to accept that he ran off. He loved you—from everything Tilly has said, there’s no denying it—but for whatever reason, he took off. Your mother has accepted it, and so has your brother. Now you need to.”

  Colt was wrong about one thing. They hadn’t accepted it. Momma was hiding something, and Roy damn sure knew something too, judging from his visit. I just needed to keep digging.

  I reached up on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “You would make a great older brother.”

  He pressed both hands to his chest and staggered backward with a goofy grin on his face. “That was a mortal blow, Magnolia Steele. An older brother? I’m a good two years younger than you.”

  My eyes flew open, and a deep belly laugh bubbled out of me. “You liar!”

  He’d never confessed his age, and neither had I, but he’d known my mother for several years. He was privy to a lot more of my past than I was of his.

  We finished putting everything back in the garage, but I gave the dog statue a long look.

  Colt walked over and picked it up, grunting as he carried it out and shut the garage door.

  “What are you doing?” I asked

  He hefted it up with a loud groan, then set it in the bed of his truck. “This thing might be ugly as sin and as heavy as a stack of bricks, but it reminds you of your dad, and it’s just sitting in your mother’s garage. You should have it.”

  The gesture shouldn’t have meant so much to me—Colt was right; it was pretty darn ugly—yet it did. “Thanks.”

  We went by the auto parts store for a new battery. I needed to be at the catering business a half hour before Colt, so he dropped me off and said he’d install the new battery before his shift.

  I expected Momma to give me the third degree, but she just gave me a long look before returning to the prep of her famous garlic potatoes.

  Tonight the Belles were catering an awards dinner for one hundred people, so it was all hands on deck. Tilly put me to work stirring pesto sauce as she and the other employees prepared all the food to be loaded into the vans.

  When I was a teenager, I had found Momma’s catering work boring and monotonous. The only part I’d enjoyed was serving, especially at fancy events where I could imagine myself as one of the guests. But now I was stuck loading and unloading pans, washing up, and doing the grunt work.

  My mother expected me to take over her share of the catering business after she died, but it felt like a death sentence of my own.

  Colt arrived five minutes late, but Momma didn’t even chew him out—she just glanced at the clock on the wall, muttered under her breath, and continued with her task.

  Colt glanced at me and shook his head. “No bueno, Mags.”

  I groaned, and Tilly looked up from her p
ot. “What’s the problem?”

  “I take it you can’t get your Audi running?” Momma asked, her tone nicer than I’d expected. “It ran a couple of years ago when I had the oil changed.”

  Colt shot me a maybe she’s coming around glance, then turned to my mother. “We replaced the battery, but it still won’t start. I’ll try to replace the spark plugs tomorrow.”

  Which meant I wouldn’t have a car to drive into Nashville in the morning. I decided to be honest. Mostly. “I have a dentist appointment tomorrow.”

  All three of them looked shocked.

  “Why?” Momma asked. “You hate the dentist.”

  “I hated the dentist when I was ten years old. I’m an adult now. Besides, it’s called dental hygiene.”

  “Did you make an appointment with Dr. Murphy?” Momma asked.

  I had hoped to avoid this. “No,” I said, drawing it out and scrounging for a reason. “Dr. Murphy smells like mothballs.”

  “Magnolia,” Momma scolded. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “What does it matter who I’m seeing? All that matters is that I need a car.”

  “Stay at my house tonight,” Momma said. “And I’ll take you.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I’m a little old for my mother to take me to the dentist. Besides, it’s in Nashville at eight. You hate traffic.”

  Tilly’s head bobbed in agreement. “She has a point.”

  Then Momma asked the inevitable question. “Why on earth are you going to Nashville anyway? There are more than enough dentists who don’t smell like mothballs here in Franklin.”

  “This dentist has a reputation,” I said on the fly. “He works with country music artists. He understands the needs of a celebrity.”

  “Why do you need a special dentist when it’s your tits that are famous?” my mother asked, always the voice of reason.

  Colt burst out laughing and Tilly’s cheeks turned pink.

  I gave her a tight smile. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.” Not that I would have understood either. It was a ridiculous excuse. I should have come up with a better one before bringing it up.