“Great balls of fire! Tell her to count you in, Sparky, so she can stop pouting and we can get this over with.” Annabelle glanced at her watch. “We’ve got brunch at eleven, and I’d like to have Cissy . . . er, Miriam settled before the church shuttles start returnin’ and this place turns into Grand Central Station.”
Coercion was such an ugly thing to witness.
“Okay, what if I agree,” I said, coming frighteningly close to relenting. “What am I supposed to do, huh? Follow her around? Like that won’t look suspicious. Besides, maybe no one paid attention to Mother at the reception yesterday, but I got cornered by a woman named Mabel, who’d spot me in a pinch.”
“Mabel Pinkston?” Annabelle’s chin came up.
“Yes, and I mentioned I was at the reception with my mother, so won’t she be suspicious if suddenly my ‘distant relative’ moves in?”
“Why’s that suspicious?” she asked, but sounded nervous. “Look, we’ll make up a back story to cover your tracks. Something about Miriam being a poor relation from Arkansas whom your mother’s taken pity on. So she’s your honorary auntie.”
“Yes, your auntie,” Cissy chimed in.
Why weren’t they listening to me?
“What if someone decides to Google the name ‘Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson,’ discovers she was a Texas governor in the nineteen twenties and can’t be alive unless she’s been resurrected!” I screeched at them, sounding remarkably like a squawking seagull.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be such a chicken,” Cissy said, drawing a lipstick from an oversized rhinestone-encrusted purse and touching up her burnt-umber lips. “It’s not like folks haven’t been named after dead people for centuries. Besides, every good Southern family has crazy aunts they hide in their attics. No one will think twice about where Miriam hails from.”
“But what about Mabel . . .”
“It’s all right, Andy,” Annabelle said, though I noted slim furrows of concern between her eyes. “She’s been with me for a long time. If she has any questions, she’ll come straight to me. Besides, she doesn’t live on the grounds. She rents some rooms over a garage in Garland, even though I offered her an apartment here.”
“An independent sort, is she?” Mother remarked.
Annabelle nodded, frowning. “She volunteers as much as she works, because she has to watch what she earns, else she’ll get kicked off Medicaid”—Annabelle tugged an earlobe, her distress obvious—“but that’s her choice, isn’t it? She won’t let me help her.”
“What does she do exactly?” I dared to inquire.
“She’s something of a floater, working wherever we need her, delivering meds from the pharmacy, taking books back and forth from our library, sometimes she carries meals to folks who are sick or bedridden.”
Speaking of the sick. “What about Dr. Finch and Patsy?” I continued my attack. “They definitely saw me at Sarah Lee Sewell’s house with Mother, so they’re aware of our connection . . . and the connection between Mother and Sarah Lee.”
“Hell’s bells, Andy, you’re making too much of things.” Annabelle tossed the pen down on her desk and leaned back in her chair. “So they saw you with Cissy? Whoop-de-do. That has nothing to do with Miriam Ferguson. Her, they won’t know from Eve. Besides, you’ll be working here, so you’ll have a reason to be on the grounds besides visiting your aunt.”
Wait a minute. Back up the bus.
Working? I absolutely hated the sound of that, dreading to hear what else these designing women had cooked up for me. I swallowed before I asked. “What kind of job did you have in mind for me?”
Without skipping a beat, Annabelle said, “I’ve arranged for you to volunteer in our library, since you’ve always been such a bookworm. It’s the perfect cover.” She picked up an envelope from her desk and shoved it at me, so I reached forward and took it. “Your key’s in there, and a name badge, which gives you staff privileges, like access to most everywhere on the grounds.”
“What’ll that entail, exactly?” I asked as I jammed the envelope into my purse.
“We have a well-stocked library, Andy, full of novels and nonfiction, as well as reference books and online computers.” Annabelle glanced at her watch and fidgeted. “Just show up and give Mildred a break now and then. I think you can handle that.”
“Of course, she can.” Mother added her two cents’ worth.
Wow. I was stunned. The pair of them should win the Nobel Sneak Prize for teamwork. I’d been outgunned, and I knew it.
So I figured I might as well grin and bear it.
“That takes care of that, huh?” I said, playing along. “You all have an answer to everything, don’t you? You think you’ve got this all figured out, except for one very important thing.”
“What thing, Andy?” Annabelle looked suspicious.
“What did we miss, darling?”
Heck, if I couldn’t beat them, I might as well do a running cannonball and jump right in.
“How about some very vital stuff, like do I get a fake name?” I commented. “And what about a disguise? Shouldn’t I have more of a cover than saying I’m Miriam Amanda Wallace Ferguson’s honorary niece? Can’t I call myself something like Arletha Lynn or Daisy Duke and dress in platform boots and have fake body piercings?”
“No!” they cried in unison.
I sank back in my chair, giving them as dirty a look as I could muster. “Geez, always the bridesmaid, aren’t I?”
“Does that mean we can count on you, Sparky?” Annabelle asked, wide-eyed, ready to get this over with.
I glanced at Mother, peering beyond her outlandish getup, and reading the hopefulness in her face, and I realized the choice wasn’t mine to make. “I’m in,” I said, much as it pained me.
Cissy’s lips shaped the words, “Thank you.”
I blushed and glanced down at the floor and my green-painted toes.
“Good, then it’s settled,” Annabelle said, slapping a palm on her desk as a judge would a gavel. “And just in the nick of time, because I’ve got some paperwork to finish before brunch. So if you wouldn’t mind . . .”
“Yes, we’ll get out of your hair,” I said, taking the supersized hint. “You ready, Moth . . . er, Aunt Miriam?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” My mother stood, giving me my first full-length view of her new persona from wigged-out head to her black lizard boots loaded with rhinestones, more blinding than her beaded sweat suit.
Good grief, I mused and realized this would take some getting used to.
Annabelle seemed to be doing her best to ignore us, rifling through the papers atop her blotter, opening and closing the desk drawers.
I slowly pulled myself up from the wing chair, as Mother sashayed her way toward the door, calling over her shoulder in Miriam’s deeply twanged tone, “Do grab my suitcase for me, would you, sugar? I’ll meet you out at the car and lead you over to Bebe’s.”
Like I had anything better to do.
From the sound of things, for the next few days, I’d be babysitting her.
“Right behind you,” I said.
As she disappeared from the room, I went for the Tumi and clutched its raised handle, barely dragging it two feet before Annabelle came whipping round her desk, lunged in front of me and slammed the door before I could reach it. She flung her curvy, pink cashmere-draped body against the wood panels, clasping something dark against the ropes of pearls at her full bosom. And then I recognized my black shoes.
“Geez, AB, what’s with you?”
“Well,” she said, catching her breath, “I didn’t want you to forget anything.”
“You could have just handed them over. Blocking my exit was a wee bit overly dramatic, don’t you think?” Although everything that had happened in the last twenty minutes had bordered on histrionics, so it fit with the program.
“Okay, okay, I needed to talk to you. In private,” she whispered, though no one could hear us unless her office was bugged.
I set the suitcase up
right and reached out for the shoes, which she promptly turned over. I crammed them down into my oversized purse, praying it wouldn’t split down the seams.
“So talk,” I said, hoping this wouldn’t take long, not with Mother on her way out to the parking lot, antsy to start this undercover operation of hers.
Annabelle did a bit of chewing on her lower lip before she started with, “I’m getting a weird feeling about this, Andy. I was up all night thinking about Bebe and Sarah Lee, and wondering if maybe your mother’s not so crazy after all.” I noticed the puffiness beneath her eyes that even her makeup didn’t quite cover from this close a distance.
“What do you mean, ‘if’ my mother’s not so crazy? Did you see her in that costume? She’s wearing enough carats of CZ to strangle Bugs Bunny, and I thought she was allergic. Maybe her skin will turn green.”
“I’m serious, Andy.”
“So am I.”
She tipped her head, her features screwed up with confusion. “I thought she was nuts, asking me all those questions after Bebe died. But then Sarah Lee passed so close behind, and I couldn’t help connecting them.”
“Connecting them how?” Annabelle had been freaking out about Mother’s wild accusations when she’d called the night before, so it was hard to believe she’d had a sudden change of heart. “Don’t tell me Cissy’s gotten to you?”
“No,” she said, “It’s something else. I’m only saying this because I trust you, Andy. I haven’t spoken a word of it to anyone.”
“Why the mystery?” I said. She was making me nervous. “What’s going on, Annabelle?” My stomach flip-flopped frantically, like Mary Lou Retton on meth.
“Maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there, like your mother, but I want your opinion. You always see things so clearly.”
I do? That was news to me. “Spit it out, AB.”
She nodded, wiping her palms on her pink and gray plaid skirt. Sweat shone on her upper lip, despite the constant hum of the air conditioner. “It all started a few months ago, when Mrs. Sewell moved in, and she and Bebe hooked up through the bridge group on Wednesday. They were nice ladies, I’m not saying they weren’t, but”—her chin came up, and her brown eyes pled for my understanding—“they were so hard to please, Andy. They were like Goldilocks with OCD. Nothing was ever just right. They didn’t like the color of paint on their walls, so we changed it. They hated the carpeting, so we replaced it. The thermostat wasn’t accurate, the house was too hot or too cold, or the trash trucks were too noisy and came too early. Every time I picked up the phone, they were calling to bitch. It went on for weeks.”
Yep, sounded like Mother’s demanding friends, I thought, nearly asking Annabelle what she’d expected when she’d marketed Belle Meade to the aging Dallas jet set; but I could see she wasn’t in the mood for teasing. She was using the sleeve of her pink cashmere sweater to blot her damp forehead.
“You want to sit down?” I suggested, because she had that “Oh, Rhett, I’m about to swoon” paleness to her cheeks.
She tipped her head back against the door and rolled it side to side. “No, I’m fine. I’m almost finished.”
If Annabelle fell over in the forest and no one heard her, would she still be fine?
Sometimes I hated that word for being so benign.
Just in case, I braced my legs and kept my arms loose, ready to catch her if she started to topple.
She drew in a deep breath and slowly exhaled, before she continued. “I tried so hard to pacify those women, really I did. They had the staff working overtime, everyone going nuts, and I finally told each of them that they could leave if they didn’t like it here. We have plenty of names on the waiting list of people who’d love to reside at Belle Meade, and who wouldn’t make noise about every last thing. I’d begun to wish they’d never moved in.”
“How’d they take it when you threatened to kick them out?”
She paused to tuck her brown tresses carefully behind her ears, and I caught the tremor in her hands. “They threatened to sue me, and they were dead serious.”
“Lawsuits? You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish.” She stubbed the toe of a shiny patent leather pump against the carpet. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that. That we could keep the lawyers out of it.” She wet her lips. “But then, I don’t have to worry any more, do I?”
“Not unless they can file a suit from beyond the grave,” I said quietly, considering Bebe Kent was six feet under at the Sparkman Hillcrest cemetery, and Sarah Lee Sewell was next in line.
“They sure saved us all a lot of trouble by, um, dying.” She gnawed on her lip again.
I honestly thought she was making too much of this, but asked anyway, “Who knew about their threats, Annabelle?”
“The lawyers for the corporation, of course. Some of the staff I worked most closely with, like Patsy and Arnold Finch.” She shifted from one foot to the other. “I might’ve told a few others, but only because they smelled trouble. They’ve been with me from the beginning. Belle Meade means as much to them as it does to me.”
From the beginning?
“The Finches worked with you in Austin, Annabelle?”
“Yes, Andy, but they’re not the only ones. I couldn’t have opened in Dallas without their help . . . them and Mabel, of course . . . and Donna Morgan, our fitness director . . . Alice Ann Carpenter, our head physical therapist . . . Rory Flynn, our program director. They came at my request,” she assured me. “It’s not like they had anything to do with”—she paused—“what happened.”
She was making about as much sense as my mother. “Then why did you tell me any of this? You don’t think one of them could have . . .”
“No, I don’t,” she stated firmly, though her gaze fluttered up to the ceiling
Hmm, so why not look me in the eye?
This was nuts. I hoped I still had Tums in my purse.
“You didn’t share this with my mother, did you?”
Annabelle brought her gaze back down from the light fixture and vigorously shook her head. “Oh, no, not a word. It would only have set her off worse.”
Like a rocket, I mused.
“I couldn’t keep it from you, though. I thought you should know. But, please, keep it to yourself. It’s nothing, I’m sure, just more coincidences.”
Why was I her sounding board? I was hardly a good judge of the situation, considering my own flesh and blood wanted to pin the tail on the murderer.
“Annabelle, if you have any doubts about this . . . if any part of you believes that someone on your staff would harm two people to protect Belle Meade from lawsuits, I think we should call the police right this minute . . .”
She fell away from the door, hands clasped beneath her chin, pearls swinging from her neck. “No, Andy, no! I would trust anyone on my staff with my life . . . really, I would! They wouldn’t hurt anyone any more than I could.”
All right. That was more like it.
“Besides,” she reminded me, “there were no signs of struggle. No bruises on the bodies. Nothing. It wouldn’t make sense unless they died in their sleep, just like Finch said.”
That’s what I’d been telling Mother, and what I’d firmly believed from the get-go. No evidence, no crime. If those police officers had seen anything suspicious at Sarah Lee Sewell’s, they’d be investigating. Right?
To think otherwise meant I’d be jumping on Cissy’s bandwagon, buying her conspiracy theory, when I needed to stay calm and be the voice of reason, and not just for Mother’s sake. Annabelle was hardly acting like the Rock of Gibraltar . . . or any other rock, for that matter. She used to bend with the breeze, and she was doing it again.
“You still don’t believe it was murder, do you?” Annabelle practically stood on tiptoe, so obviously waiting for me to say something. Her fingers worked her pearls like a rosary.
“No, I don’t,” I reassured her, and maybe myself as well. “Whatever connections you think there may be—that my mother thinks she
sees—they’re coincidence. They have to be. You run retirement communities, Annabelle, so losing people now and then has to be expected, because human beings don’t live forever, much as we’d wish some of them could. I’m sure you’ve had others complain, and they haven’t ended up dead, have they?”
“Not all of them, no,” she said, brightening.
“Well, there you go,” I replied, because it was logical and rational. “You can’t start looking for nefarious explanations where none exist, or you’ll drive yourself bonkers.”
And end up dressing in a wig and lizard boots with rhinestones, pretending to be someone you weren’t.
After a pause and much blinking, Annabelle let out a weighty sigh, ruffling my bangs as well as hers. “You’re right, Andy. You’re absolutely right all around. Just like at camp. You were always the one who had explanations for the scary sounds in the woods.”
Oh, joy. Now I wouldn’t have to come up with my own epitaph.
“Good, I’m glad we’re on the same page.” I grabbed hold of the Tumi’s handle, wanting to be on my way.
“Thank you, Andy.” Relief oozed from her pores like perfume—okay, maybe more like perspiration. “I think I’ve been talking to your mother too much. I’ll put this silliness out of my head. I’ve got a business to run.”
“Speaking of silliness, I’ve got to chase after Cissy before someone grabs her with a butterfly net.”
She leaned forward and gave me a quick hug, the suitcase between us, before she turned and opened the door, allowing my exit.
“You keep an eye on her, Andy,” she said as I passed, pulling the Tumi over the threshold. “Because I’d hate for anything to happen to Cissy . . . or to you.”
“We’ll be fine,” I tossed back, doing a solid impression of nonchalant. “We Kendricks women can take care of ourselves. We’ve been doing a pretty good job of it since Plymouth Rock, so I don’t think a few days in a retirement community are gonna kill us.”
That finished between us, Annabelle shut her office door, closing me off. I stared ahead at the long hallway, telling myself, I feel calm, I feel calm, I feel calm.
Aw, who was I kidding?
The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club: A Debutante Dropout Mystery Page 14