Madison hated to admit it, but so far, George Gail’s assumptions of an affair seemed to be correct, especially when the blue pickup pulled into the parking lot of the Bumble Bee Hotel.
Madison parked across the street, where she had a clear shot of Curtis Burton as he carried the flowers up the front steps of the old mansion-turned-hotel and disappeared inside. She snapped off a few pictures, zooming in on the small bouquet he held in his hands and the look of anticipation upon his face. She was a bit surprised to discover Curtis was still a very handsome man.
Madison soon grew bored as she waited for Curtis to come out. How long could an afternoon liaison take, anyway? She finished her lunch, listened to the entire Bryan Adams Tracks of My Years CD two times through, filed her nails, and sent a dozen or more text messages as she sat in the car.
Staring at the hotel once again, Madison willed the door to open. You could only stare at a yellow and black house for so long, she decided, before your eyes began to cross and your stomach felt nauseous. Her skin was even beginning to itch and there was a humming in her head, as surely as if there were bees buzzing about.
Except for the bright color scheme, Naomi Randolph’s old home looked identical to the Big House. But like their original owners, the houses were as different as the sisters themselves. Juliet’s pristine white mansion had always been haughty and elegant, cool and inaccessible except for formal invitations to visit. The Big House now stood vacant and empty, echoing the life of the lonely woman who once lived inside.
Across the railroad track, Naomi’s old home was still vibrant and alive. Long before her death, she had painted the house a robust yellow trimmed in black and opened it to the public. Now her granddaughter ran The Bumble Bee Hotel, a three-story structure that featured community rooms on the bottom floor, lodging on the second, and two extravagant suites on the third floor. The grounds served as an outdoor venue for weddings, parties and family reunions.
There was little activity, however, on this Wednesday afternoon in early February. Madison was getting a crick in her neck from staring in one direction for so long. She was considering giving up when the front door finally opened, and Curtis Burton stepped outside.
She snapped off a few more photos, documenting the time of his departure. Instead of a bouquet, he carried a piece of paper in his hands and wore a satisfied smile on his rugged but handsome face. He reminded Madison of a movie star from an old western, tall and thin with a long handlebar mustache and the air of timeless strength and virility. Judging from the hour and twenty minutes he had been inside, she decided he was definitely virile.
Madison ducked as he pulled out of the parking lot and drove past her. A good five minutes passed before a woman came out of the hotel, carrying a bulky leather bag and a familiar bouquet of flowers.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Madison mumbled aloud. She took several pictures of the small woman in the fur-lined leather jacket. Even though the weather was sunny and mild, she wore the coat cinched at her tiny waist with matching fur-lined boots beneath black leggings. A fur bubble hat sat smartly upon her coiffed head.
Madison felt a stab of sympathy for her client. This woman was everything George Gail was not: small, dainty, and fashionable.
Who am I kidding? I’m none of those things, either, Madison thought wryly.
At five foot seven inches, Madison’s arms and legs were too long and thin to ever be considered ‘dainty’. She might be slim, but she was hardly small. She had broad shoulders and ‘a good understanding in life’, which was Granny Bert’s way of saying she had big feet. And fashionable? Madison refused to glance down at her own sad wardrobe, not after taking in the other woman’s appearance.
As she zoomed in on the woman’s face, she saw that the smartly dressed home-wrecker was not a day under sixty.
The woman gracefully tucked her petite form behind the wheel of a late model Lincoln. She took a moment to slide on designer eyeglasses and to adjust her seatbelt before putting the car into gear. Jotting down the license plate number and car details, Madison noted the window sticker on the back glass. There were no trendy women’s gyms here in The Sisters, but the franchised brand might be found in Bryan-College Station or Waco; even Houston was within easy driving distance.
Judging from the woman’s attire and overall aura of sophistication, Madison guessed she was not a local. She must be meeting Curtis here from out of town.
“Well this poses a problem.” Madison spoke aloud to herself as she trailed behind the white Lincoln through the streets of Naomi, heading toward the highway. She had enough gas to follow the car all the way to Houston, but did she have the time? The kids would be home from school soon. She promised to take Bethani to a friend’s house to practice for cheerleader try-outs, and Blake would undoubtedly be starved after baseball practice.
On the other hand, if she let the car out of her sight she might never find whom it belonged to. She couldn’t very well ask Chief of Police Brash deCordova to run the license plate number, not after he made it clear she should not be “playing junior detective”.
Deciding to follow at least long enough to know which direction it turned, Madison kept back at a safe distance.
The highway by-pass was another new addition to The Sisters since Madison moved away. The handy overpass sailed right over the railroad and the towns spreading out on either side; newly constructed double lanes raced off in either direction, eager to offer an escape route. For most towns, a new highway meant new growth, new businesses popping up alongside the roadways, even when that growth often meant the death of the old downtowns. But here in The Sisters, the land bordering the highway was still controlled by deCordovas and the estates of Juliet Blakely and Naomi Randolph. By rare mutual agreement, only two businesses were allowed access to the highway trade: one on the southbound side of Juliet, the other on the northbound side of Naomi.
To Madison’s surprise, the car crossed the highway and immediately took the Juliet exit on the other side of the highway, pulling into the convenience store’s parking lot. Was I that obvious? she worried. Does she know I’m following her?
Madison parked several spaces down from the Lincoln and gave the woman time to go inside before she opened her car door. Maybe she could get in line behind the woman at the register and get a peek at her driver’s license when she opened her wallet, or overhear someone calling her by name. If she was meeting Curtis Burton at their ‘usual place’, she may have been in here before. It was worth a try, especially if it kept Madison from following her all the way to another town.
The fashionable woman was nowhere to be seen along the aisles of the small convenience store, nor at the back counter where questionable-quality pizza was offered. That left only the restroom.
Madison stepped inside the ladies’ room, just in time to see the middle stall door closing. She caught the tail end of the woman’s conversation.
“No, the wife doesn’t suspect a thing!” she laughed merrily.
She’s bragging about her affair? For the sake of George Gail, herself, and unsuspecting wives the world over, Madison felt a rush of fury at the woman’s cavalier attitude. Unbelievable!
“Okay, I had to make a pit stop. You know my bladder’s not what it used to be,” the woman chirped into her cell phone. “I’ll meet you there in about forty minutes. Tootles.”
Madison flinched as the woman carelessly tossed her fur-lined coat over the top of the stall’s door. She resisted the urge to barricade the hussy—as George Gail called her—inside the stall. The woman may have looked dignified, but obviously she was no better than the trollop George Gail accused her to be.
A soft thump suggested the trollop hung her purse from the hook on the other side of the door.
Unbidden, an old story Granny Bert told Madison years ago came to mind. According to her grandmother, a woman’s purse was stolen from a similar hook, keys and wallet still inside. A good Samaritan called the next day to report finding the purse and arrange
d a meeting to return it. As the story went, while the grateful woman was gone the thief used her own house key to go inside the house and steal her blind. To this day, Madison always took the time to wrap her purse strap around the hook or to stash her bag elsewhere.
A wicked idea slipped inside Madison’s mind. George Gail had paid her a thousand dollars to learn the woman’s identity, but even if she followed the Lincoln all the way to another town, there was no guarantee of success. But there was another way.
And Granny Bert had suggested a diversion.
Ignoring her conscience, Madison dug into her pocket and found a roll of breath mints. She swiped a piece of toilet tissue from the adjacent stall and wrapped it around the mints several time, leaving a long twisted ‘tail’ sticking up. She waited until she heard another rustle of clothes and was certain the home-wrecking woman was otherwise occupied, then rolled the mints along the floor beneath the middle stall.
In what she hoped sounded like a frightened voice, Madison squealed. “Oh my Gosh! What is that? It that a rat?”
The home-wrecker immediately shrieked. Madison’s hand slipped over the door, snagging the purse as she heard the commotion on the other side. She could just imagine the woman jumping to her feet, black tights tangled around her knees, frantically dancing around the tiny space and scanning the back wall for a glimpse of the rodent.
“Oh, it is a rat!” Madison cried again, even as her hand made quick work of jerking the wallet from the designer purse. A silver compact came out alongside the expensive wallet and clattered to the floor, adding to the noise and confusion. As it rolled into the stall, Madison added urgently, “Watch out, there it goes again!”
Obviously terrified, the woman inside blubbered incoherently. Her heels tapped out a frantic tempo on the tile floor as she hopped from one foot to the other. By now, she was in actual sobs.
Tamping down feelings of remorse, Madison flicked the wallet open and quickly scanned the driver’s license inside.
Claudette Ellingsworth
562 North River Oaks
Naomi, Texas
She’s a local? From right here in Naomi? Madison absorbed the surprise as she quickly slipped the wallet back inside the purse, yelled another warning that the rat was along the wall, and quickly dropped the purse over the stall door. Not bothering to find out if the strap snagged on the holder, she headed for the exit.
“I’ll call for the manager!” she assured the frightened woman as she hurried out.
By the time she reached the front of the store, guilt washed over Madison. That had been a cruel trick to pull. What if the woman was so frightened she had a heart attack, or got tangled in her state of un-dress, fell, and broke a leg?
She’s breaking up a home and George Gail’s heart, a stubborn little voice reminded her.
Still, Madison stopped at the cash register and reported there was a woman in the restroom in obvious distress. Madison quickly left the store, her conscious feeling somewhat better.
And then, as Granny Bert would say, she left Claudette Ellingsworth to her rat killing.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Madison?”
The voice on the other end of the line was scratchy and low. Madison scowled, pulling her phone away to check the name on the caller ID through sleep-blurred eyes. “George Gail? Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Why do you sound so odd? Are you all right?” For a brief moment, Madison considered the possibility Curtis Burton discovered his wife’s suspicions and had done something to harm her. A crazy thought, she knew, but what did you expect at one o’clock in the morning? She peered at the clock to confirm the time.
Beside her, Bethani rolled over in bed and grumbled a sleepy, “Is that another alarm?”
“No, honey, go back to sleep,” Madison purred. One of the many downsides to her previous job at the commercial chicken houses had been the automated alarms at all hours of the night. If feed lines emptied out or temperatures changed too drastically, the computer called with an alarm and she was required to go out to the farm to manually reset it.
Madison twisted away best she could and hissed into the phone, “Do you know what time it is?”
She could all but hear George Gail nodding her head, fleshy cheeks jangling. “1:18.”
“Why do you sound so muffled?”
“So Curtis won’t hear me. I’m in the hall closet, standing between his hunting jackets. I couldn’t sleep, not without knowing what you found out today.”
You won’t sleep once you find out, either, Madison thought sympathetically. She lumbered out of the bed and moved into her own closet, so that she would not disturb Bethani or the other two occupants of the house. “George Gail, I just started my surveillance today,” she reminded her client.
“Yes, I know, and you followed him. Did you see who he met?”
“Look, it’s one in the morning. Can’t this conversation wait, at least until daylight?”
“You know, don’t you? You know who my husband is seeing, and you don’t want to tell me!” the other woman correctly guessed. “Is it Lou Ann Shellburger? She’s always flirting with him in church!”
“What? No.” Madison had trouble imagining the timid second grade teacher flirting with any man, much less a married one, and right under his wife’s nose.
“Denise Adams? She called here the other day, claiming to have a question about selling her mother’s cows. It’s her, isn’t it?”
“No.”
George Gail guessed at least four more women before she made a desperate accusation. “I bet it’s Genesis Baker! I know she’s your friend and all, but Curtis is always at her café. He carries on about how delicious everything is, and how she’s added a red velvet cupcake to her line, his very favorite kind! It’s her, I know it is!”
“Oh for Heaven’s sake, it is not Genesis!”
“Then who is it?” George Gail demanded.
“It’s Claudette Ellingsworth!” The words no sooner left her mouth than she tried to recall them, but of course, it was too late. Madison clamped her hand over her loose lips, horrified to have allowed sleep deprivation and exasperation to make her blurt out the truth in such a fashion. Where was her compassion? Her professionalism?
“Caress?” George Gail breathed in dismay. “Beautiful, dainty little Caress, the movie star?”
“I thought her driver’s license said Claudette.” She had read the name upside down, so perhaps she had it wrong; the description sounded right, though.
“The DMV may know her as Claudette, but the world knows her as Caress.” George Gail’s voice was borderline reverent. With the next breath, it turned bitter. “And now she has her claws in my husband, that back-stabbing hussy! I’d like to give her a taste of her own medicine!”
“I-I don’t know for certain if anything is going on between her and your husband, George Gail. I just know that they met.”
“Where? Where did they meet?”
“In-In Naomi.”
“Where in Naomi?” the other woman insisted.
She would have to tell her sooner or later. “At the Bumble Bee,” Madison admitted grudgingly.
George Gail gasped. “I-I …” She stuttered an incoherent thought before quickly mumbling, “I’m sorry to have wakened you. Good night.”
“George Ga-” The phone clicked off before Madison could finish.
Pushing fingers through her hair, Madison lamented breaking the news to the shattered wife in such a heartless fashion and in the middle of the night, but the damage had been done.
Now they would both have a restless night.
***
Madison did not look good in dark circles, but there they were, smudged beneath her eyes.
After hanging up with George Gail, sleep was evasive. Around three a.m. she gave up all pretenses and got up to start her day. Luckily for her, the internet was open twenty-four hours and welcomed her on-line presence as she searched for a cheaper cell-phone plan.
As soon as the client was out the door, Genesis slid into his recently vacated seat. “Penny for your thoughts.”
Madison pretended offense. “As badly as I need money, and you only offer a penny?”
“What if I throw in a cup of coffee and Gennydoodle cookies?” she asked, motioning to the very items in her hand.
“Sold!” Madison laughed. “What would you like to know?”
“Why the long face? You looked pretty forlorn when I walked up, despite the fact you just signed a new client.” At her friend’s inquisitive expression, Genesis explained, “I saw you whip out the contract. So who was he and what did he want?”
“His name is Murray Archer and he’s a private investigator from the Houston area. He’s working for an insurance company and needs ‘eyes and ears’ on a local level. Basically he wants me to do all the legwork for a paltry little sum, while he rakes in the big bucks and claims all the glory.”
“So of course you took the job,” Genesis guessed.
“Of course. Even a paltry sum is better than no sum at all.”
When the Stars Fall (The Sisters, Texas Mystery Series Book 2) Page 3