“Gee, I’d love to, but—”
“Please, Benni.” A small sniffle came over the line. “I don’t have anyone else to talk to.” Another sniffle. Louder this time. Then she brought out the big guns. “You’re family .”
I curled my toes in frustration and gave in. “How about meeting me at Blind Harry’s in a half hour? You can walk there from the house.”
“Walk?” she squealed. I jerked the phone away from my ear. “Can’t you pick me up?”
“No,” I said firmly, determined at least to have a modicum of control. “It’s only about a half mile. You did it fine last night.”
“I wasn’t alone last night. Walking is so boring.”
“It’s great for stress.”
“I’ll tell you what’ll relieve my stress,” she snapped. “A quick divorce. That lyin’ son—”
“Rita, hold that thought for Blind Harry’s.”
“Not there,” she said peevishly. “That Mexican friend of yours, Elena What’s-her-name, always gives me sour looks. I can’t enjoy my lunch if someone’s glaring at me the whole time.”
“It’s Elvia,” I corrected for the millionth time. But I caught her not so subtle drift. Elvia couldn’t abide Rita and made no bones about showing it. “Okay, there’s a new cafe around the corner from Blind Harry’s. It’s called Eudora’s Front Porch. It’s on the corner of Alvarez and Elm. You’ll like it. The menu reads like one of Aunt Garnet’s Sunday dinners.”
Since I was driving, I reached Eudora’s in five minutes, which gave me time to relax before being bombarded with Rita’s marital woes. Ash had done an incredible job in carving a niche for Eudora’s in a town already close to the saturation point with restaurants and coffeehouses. He’d taken an old two-story Victorian house and transformed it into a popular meeting place for local musicians and artists as well as attracting a large clientele for his authentic Southern menu. The house was painted a pale butter yellow with white trim, the wraparound porch crowded with white wicker furniture. Inside the spacious house, the living room, now the main dining room, was filled with artfully mismatched antique chairs and resin-coated oak tables. On the walls were framed copies of all of Eudora Welty’s book covers and black-and-white prints from her photo essay of Depression-era Mississippi. In the center of each table were glazed widemouth pots made by one of his regular customers. Inside the pots were small tablets and freshly sharpened pencils. “We don’t ever want a brilliant idea or image to go unrecorded,” Ash was fond of saying. To the right was a coffee bar where drinks and food could be ordered. At the end of the bar sat an antique brass cash register that made that satisfying brriing when it swallowed your money, making you feel as if business was still being conducted, sans computers, in a civilized person-to-person way. Elvia told me that Ash had talked three very prestigious citizens into investing in Eudora’s on the strength of his personality alone. One of them was Constance Sinclair herself. Recalling how Jillian looked at Ash, it wasn’t hard to guess how he’d accomplished getting Constance’s money.
Each of the three main rooms was named for a famous Mississippian. As was expected, the writers and storytellers claimed the Bill Faulkner room, the musicians occupied the Elvis Aaron room, and the visual artists and photographers the Marie Hull room. I ordered an Italian cream soda and told them I would wait for my lunch companion in the Elvis room. I preferred this small but airy back room not because it was usually filled with musicians, as pleasant as their impromptu harmonica and guitar concerts could be, but because it looked out over Ash’s colorful backyard garden of roses, peonies, impatiens, and geraniums.
I grabbed an abandoned Freedom Press newspaper, and like everyone else in San Celina, after scanning the front page of the weekly paper—this week a story about whether coyotes were friends or predators—I compulsively turned to page five to see who the Tattler had skewered this time. The anonymously written column the paper had been running for eight or nine months now and had become the hot topic among hometown folks. The columnist respected no boundaries about whom he attacked—politicians, longtime residents, merchants, local artists, community activists, conservatives, liberals. The Tattler was a nonpartisan gossipmonger. No names were ever mentioned, so thus far the Freedom Press had avoided any lawsuits. More than any column in the newspaper it garnered angry and virulent letters to the editor. Everyone compulsively read and discussed it with the sick obsession of freeway gawkers at a bloody car wreck. This week the Tattler was attacking a local garden club’s benefit dinner/dance to raise money for the planting of a community rose garden in front of the county courthouse honoring their longtime president, a local society matron whose husband was a popular divorce attorney and gentleman rancher.
The Tattler wrote: How inspired and blessed the homeless will be when they gaze upon the splendor of a perfect Sterling Silver Beauty as they dig through the trash bins for their morning meals. Then he went on to chastise a local liberal bookstore for refusing to carry Rush Limbaugh books and then turned around and lambasted Rush for writing such ridiculous claptrap to begin with.
After a quick scan of Elvia’s book review of a storytelling book on special this week at Blind Harry’s, I set the paper down. My eyes rested on the pale peach roses in Ash’s garden, and I mentally ran over my day’s schedule. Listen to Rita and find out her plans, sign my statement at the police station, go to the stable, then back to museum to see how things were faring. Then home and a continuation of last night’s standoff. Remembering Gabe’s request for the festival committee members’ names, I pulled one of the small tablets from the pot in front of me and jotted them down. Peter Grant. Gabe had obviously remembered him and had one of the detectives get in touch with him this morning. Roy Hudson, Grace Winter, Evangeline Boudreaux, Ashley Stanhill, Dolores Ayala, Jillian Sinclair. I scratched my cheek with the tip of the eraser then added Michel “D-Daddy” Boudreaux, though he certainly wasn’t a suspect. D-Daddy, for all his blustering, wouldn’t hurt a fly, I was sure of it.
So who else could want her dead? Except for her storytelling friends, I knew Nora had always been a bit of a loner and that it had gotten worse since her son died a year ago. He’d been in a coma for months after a car hit him while he was riding home from school on his bicycle. Her life, according to Nick, had become a vigil of sitting day after day next to her son’s bed—sometimes twelve and fourteen hours at a time. Gradually her few friends dropped away, Roy left her, and so when her son finally died, she had no one except Nick left in her life.
Maybe it was someone she worked with at the library. I thought about the two children’s librarians, whom I knew casually. Both appeared to be normal, middle-aged women with husbands, children, and mortgages. Maybe a clerk or a page she aggravated? I couldn’t imagine any of the employees I’d seen at the library putting a rope around Nora’s neck, squeezing the life out of her, then dragging the body down to the lake. It took an awful lot of determination . . . and hate to drive a person to those measures. Then again, as I’d slowly learned over the last few years, perhaps everyone was capable of murder if put in the right circumstances. The why. That was always the most frightening, yet intriguing part of a murder, and as Gabe said, the unknowable part. He’d often said to me we can know the physical circumstances that lead up to and cause one human to take the life of another, but what we can never know is why this particular time, under these particular circumstances, the abused woman finally decides to fight back and kill her abuser, the younger brother who has suffered his older brother’s taunting insults for years decides to stab him, the robber decides that this time he’ll kill the convenience-store clerk for a bottle of wine and two packs of Camels.
“Be careful now, darlin’.” Ash’s smooth voice startled me. Before I could move away, his thumb brushed over the space between my eyebrows. “Concentratin’ like you are is going to put some ugly ole frown lines between those pretty little hazel eyes of yours.” He sat down in the padded mahogany chair across from me and crossed his legs. H
e wore tasseled leather loafers, a sand-colored silk shirt, and khaki wool slacks in a baggy forties style reminiscent of Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart. A strand of hair fell rakishly across one amused blue eye, and I resisted the urge to reach over and brush it back. As obvious as his cocky posturing was, there was something about him that made a woman want to experience that intimate this-is-between-you-and-me half smile he bestowed like a coveted Mardi Gras doubloon on whoever struck his fancy. Guys like him made me want to chew glass, especially when I felt the magnetic pull to react like every other woman.
“I’m waiting for my cousin,” I said. “She’s from Arkansas, so I thought she’d enjoy the food here.”
He nodded. “Try the Brunswick Stew. It’s my grandmama’s recipe. And there’s Mississippi mud pie on the dessert menu today.” He flashed me a white smile.
“Sounds good.” I rubbed my thumb over the notebook in front of me.
“What brilliant thoughts are we recording today?” he asked, snatching the notebook from under my hand.
“Nothing important,” I said, grabbing for it a second too late.
He just grinned and flipped it open. I watched his face as he read the list. Thank goodness I hadn’t gone with my first inclination and listed reasons I thought each person could be guilty next to their names. His face slowly turned serious. He tossed the tablet on the table.
“What’s the list for?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, shrugging, trying to appear nonchalant. “I’m just making notes for—” My mind went blank. I carefully ripped the pages out of the notebook trying to come up with something. Survival brain cells kicked in. “My opening speech Friday night. I’m going to thank all the people who served on the festival committee.” I was saved from further explanation by the lovely sound of Rita’s whiny drawl.
“Lordy, I’m about ready to melt clean away,” she complained, tip-tapping across the glossy wood floor wearing tiny white shorts, a matching cropped tank top with a red sequin heart over her right breast, and strappy backless sandals. “Thank heavens for that sweet ole gentleman next door who was kindly enough to give me a lift.”
“Mr. Treton?” I asked, amazed. “You talked Mr. Treton into giving you a ride?” My neighbor, as diligent as he was about watching over my place when I wasn’t there, never did anything out of the kindness of his heart. As always, I’d underestimated the power of Rita’s hormonal persuasion.
Ash jumped up and held out his chair. “Please, darlin’, take my seat and let me get you a cool drink.” He called out to a busboy cleaning off a table. “Jimmie, fetch us a couple of iced teas.” He turned to Rita. “Sweetened or unsweetened?”
“Why, sweetened, of course,” she said, tossing her big, curly hair and bestowing her most adoring smile on him. He threw one back at her as he grabbed a chair from another table, flipped it around, and straddled it, his eyes never leaving Rita’s face. Oh, geez, I thought. Now I knew why Ash irritated me so much, he was a male version of Rita. I watched, amazed, as the two of them threw each other flirting glances like cards in a poker game—I’ll see your wink and raise you a cute little ole flick of a tongue.
Their games continued through the meal, which Ash insisted was on the house just as he insisted on joining us. As I ate my Brunswick stew and picked at my corn bread, I tuned out their voices, and though I tried to fight it, my thoughts drifted back to the puzzle of Nora Cooper’s death. I glanced at Ash and wondered if he and Nora had ever been an item. I couldn’t imagine it. She didn’t seem to be his type. Then again, anything that had the XX chromosome seemed to be his type.
Ash walked us out and brazenly kissed Rita’s hand before helping her up into the passenger side of my truck. I gunned the engine in an attempt to drown out her annoying giggle.
“Thank you for a lovely lunch, ladies,” Ash said. “We must do it again sometime.” He stuck his head through Rita’s open window and called to me over the engine’s roar. “See you at the meeting Wednesday night.” He looked up at Rita, his eyes speaking volumes. “And, darlin’, I’ll be seeing more of you later.”
“Absolutely,” she said.
“What does he mean by that?” I asked as we drove down Lopez Street. It was two o’clock, and downtown was already crowded with students and shoppers. A long red-and-white banner advertising the San Celina Storytelling Festival stretched out over the busy street and flapped in the breeze. I waited patiently while ahead of me an electric blue Nissan pickup truck double-parked so six teenagers could scramble out of the bed.
“We have a date!” she practically crowed. She sat back against the bench seat and sighed contentedly. “I’m really starting to feel better, Benni. Thanks for being there for me.”
I flexed my fingers on the steering wheel. “Rita, what about Skeeter? You know, your husband. The one you promised to love, honor, and cherish.”
She flipped the sunshade down, searching for a mirror, slapping it back up when she didn’t find one. She pushed her bright pink bottom lip out in a pout. “That two-timing jerk. As far as I’m concerned, we aren’t married anymore. For all I care, his next bull can gore him in his precious coconuts.”
“I think I better warn you. Ash is not known around these parts for being, shall we say, particular or consistent in his female companionship.”
She turned wide eyes on me. “Benni, you aren’t my mother.”
“Fine, just don’t come crying to me when he tosses you aside like a used tissue.”
“Have I ever?”
Considering that was exactly why she was now sleeping in my guest room, I almost let her have it. Instead, I decided to fight back with an even dirtier weapon.
“Guess who’s flying in today?” I asked, making my voice as chipper as a flight attendant’s.
“I haven’t the foggiest.” She opened her little white purse and rummaged around, pulling out a plastic tube of lipstick. She twisted it open and inspected the tip.
“Aunt Garnet.”
The lipstick froze halfway up to her lips. “Oh, shit.”
Aunt Garnet tended to inspire that feeling in many people.
“Does she know I’m here?” Rita asked, her voice desperate.
“Not yet,” I said cheerfully. “But you know the grapevine in this town.”
She quickly retouched her lips and threw the gold tube back in her purse. “She’s going to pitch a fit when she hears about me and Skeeter. Lordy, I hate it when that woman is right. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Just thought I’d warn you. Where would you like to be dropped off? I’ve got a million things to do today, so I don’t have time to goof off.”
“Don’t take me back to your house. I ’bout dropped dead of boredom there.” She glanced out the window. “Just leave me off anywhere. I’ll shop around. Maybe I’ll buy a new outfit for my date with Ash tonight.”
“If you’re interested, Sam’s cooking dinner tonight.”
“He’s such a sweet boy,” she said, twisting a finger around a reddish-blond curl. I idled the truck in front of the new Gap store.
“Emphasis on the boy part. He’s Gabe’s son, Rita. Lay off, okay?”
She feigned a shocked look and opened the truck door. “Benni, I’m just crushed. You know I’d never do anything to hurt your new little family.”
Why didn’t her reassurance make me feel better?
It was only after she was waving me a cheery good-bye that I realized she’d escaped before I could ask her about her long-term plans.
At the police station, Maggie, Gabe’s secretary, informed me he was in a meeting with the city manager but would be finished in a half hour.
“The Grand Poohbah left orders for you to give your official statement to Detective Ryan and then wait for him.” Her smile was warm and generous as she stuck a yellow pencil in her dark upswept hair. In her tailored plum business suit and leather pumps, a sedate twin of Natalie Cole, you’d never guess she was a better cowboy than most of the hands Daddy had ever hired. What�
�s more, she was one of the few people who wasn’t rattled by Gabe’s stern manner. She treated him like a sweet, rather slow younger brother even though he was twenty years her senior. Surprisingly, he not only tolerated it, but also seemed to like her assertive control over his schedule.
After agreeing to be recorded, I followed Detective Ryan, a large-bellied man with a prickly broom of a mustache, into the windowless, tan interrogation room and gave my version of discovering Nora’s body.
“Any leads yet?” I asked playfully when he turned off the recorder.
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, torn between not wanting to offend either the boss’s wife or the boss.
“That’s okay,” I said, rescuing him. “I’ll ask Gabe.”
“Thanks,” he said gratefully, and escorted me back to Maggie’s desk.
“Give it to me,” she said to the detective, holding out her hand for the cassette. “It’ll take forever for one of the clerks to type it, and there’s no need for Benni to make two trips.” She slipped the cassette into her Dictaphone machine. “His Royal Highness is free now,” she said to me, slipping on the headphones. “I’ll transcribe this while you two lovebirds coo in there, and it’ll be ready for you to sign when you’re through.”
I smiled. “You know, Maggie, with your efficiency, you’re going to be giving the King Ranch a run for their money someday.” Her goal, one we’d talked about many times, was to utilize her degree in ranch management and buy her own ranch using her great-grandfather’s cattle brand.
She grinned back at me. “Honey, you can hang your hat on that one.”
Gabe stood next to his window, hands in his pockets, looking out at the maintenance yard. He turned around and smiled when he saw me.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said, coming across the room and pulling me into a bear hug.
“How are things going?” I asked.
“Lousy,” he said, nuzzling the top of my head. “Have you seen the Tribune today?”
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