by Angie Fox
“I’m beginning to see Ellis’s point,” Frankie said, flinging his hands out like an Italian grandmother. “You don’t know when to stay away from things that aren’t good for you.”
Said the drinking, gambling, chain-smoking gangster who gave up our secret to the shoeshine boy.
“That place is a menace,” Frankie insisted, holding his palms faceup. “Look at my hands. They’re fading from the stress. I need to be on my game when we intercept Lou tonight.”
Between his issue with Lou and the strange environment at the church, our regular ghost-hunting activity was draining Frankie of energy at an alarming rate. My ghost had a lot on his plate.
“Why don’t you get some rest?” I suggested. “Maybe head off to the ether?” It was an in-between where ghosts went to recharge. I had a few things I wanted to take care of anyway.
Frankie gave me a suspicious glance and slowly faded from sight.
I steered toward town.
With any luck, I could get a little work done while he rested. Knowing someone had purposely burned the photo Jorie had tried to give me at the fundraiser made me even more eager to discover what was so special about it.
I turned on to Magnolia street and headed toward downtown.
So what did a picture of two ladies from a wedding in 1955 have to do with a modern-day death? One thing was certain. I needed to see more pictures from that wedding.
I pulled over in front of a lovely powder blue bungalow with a wide stone porch and made my call for reinforcements.
“MayBelle?” I asked, bracing a hand against the steering wheel. “I was with Pastor Mike this morning, going through Jorie’s pictures. I’d hoped to find a few of the wedding, but there weren’t any. Do you know anyone who might have some?”
“Like the one I showed you?” she asked, her voice crackling over the connection.
“Exactly.” Although MayBelle’s photo of that day had been wonderful—and very similar to the photo that had been burned—there hadn’t been anything unusual about it.
I rested my head against my arm. Maybe I was barking up the wrong tree. Maybe I wouldn’t find a surprising element in any of the photos from that day, but the photo I’d almost received was the closest thing I had to a clue. I had to look to be sure.
“I smell what you’re cooking,” she said. “Meet me in front of the senior apartments in twenty.”
“Thank you.” MayBelle had come through for me before. Hopefully, she would again.
I found a parking spot across the street from the senior apartments and had almost made it to the covered entryway when I caught sight of MayBelle crossing Main Street from downtown. She wore black yoga pants with a fluttery pink wrap sweater and could have passed for a ballerina if not for her wide-brimmed straw sun hat. And the fanny pack.
“Dancing?” I asked, by way of greeting.
“Naked yoga and then lunch,” she said. “Come on.” She continued down the sidewalk. “I’ll drive.”
Wait. “You’re kidding about the naked part, right?” I asked, catching up. Barely. The woman walked fast.
“Yeah,” she said regretfully. “I’ve taught hot yoga. I’ve taught Hatha to Vinyasa to Senior Stretch—with cursing allowed because, face it, that’s relaxing to some people.” She reached into her fanny pack and drew out a cigarette case and a slim silver lighter. “But I think Sugarland would draw the line at naked.”
“One would assume,” I said, watching her tap out a smoke on the top of the cigarette case. “Um, is smoking allowed in yoga?” I asked as she lit up.
She took a drag and blew it away from me. “There are no rules in yoga.”
Ah, well, no wonder she liked it. “So,” I said as we crossed to the residents’ parking lot at the side of the building, “did you find us some wedding pictures?”
“I think so,” she said, pointing her smoke at me. “We’ll know for sure in a few minutes.” She pulled a key from her fanny pack inserted it into the door of a red 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible a few cars up.
“Oh, tell me this is yours,” I said, admiring the taillights and the whitewall tires. My late father would have had a heart attack on the spot. He’d always wanted one of those cars.
“Been driving it since it rolled off the line,” she said, balancing her smoke on her lip and tossing her hat into the back. She grabbed a purple silk wrap skirt and fastened it around her waist. “It’s my baby.”
“I have my Grandma’s 1978 Cadillac,” I told her. “We should start a vintage car club.”
“Sure,” she said, with manufactured enthusiasm. Maybe she wasn’t a joiner.
Too bad for her it would take a jackhammer to get me out of her passenger seat. I slid onto the springy white leather seat. “I love this car.”
“That makes two of us, babe.” She pulled a few pins from her hair, her black bob swinging as she settled into the driver’s seat. “Buckle up,” she ordered, stubbing out the cigarette in the car’s ashtray before whipping the black wig right off her head.
She was bald! As bald as Ray.
I tried not to stare as MayBelle tossed her wig into the back seat and began to pull the car out.
“It’ll blow off when I drive,” she said as if it were obvious.
I had a million questions, but my manners were too good to ask any of them as she pulled out of the lot and began hurtling down Second Street toward Main. “Where are we going?” I asked, settling on a safe one.
“The Sugarland Heritage Society,” she yelled above the engine and the wind. “Five years ago, they had a bunch of the pictures you want as part of a display on wedding dress styles over the years.”
But that was five years ago.
“Archived,” she said as if she could see the question swirling. “Trust me.”
I did. At least on this. MayBelle had been in the Sugarland Heritage Society for longer than I’d been alive.
We drove west through town and then out Wilson’s Creek Road and past the old Southern Spirits distillery. Ellis had recently opened a small restaurant in the historic building and he’d been picking up extra shifts at the police station to help afford a chef and a manager. Business was growing, slowly but surely. I’d have to treat Lauralee to lunch once little Hiram recovered.
About a mile down the road, we reached the two-story clapboard headquarters for the heritage society.
It was originally a home for widows and orphans, or so the story went. I’d learned an entirely new, very unofficial history of the house on an earlier adventure.
While MayBelle retrieved her wig from the back, I admired the woodland hyacinths out front. If I still had Frankie’s powers, I might have even sought out a ghost. Molly had provided valuable assistance on a murder case I’d solved here, and she’d fallen for Frankie at the same time. She used to come around often, and I credited her relationship with Frankie for keeping up the ghostly energy I relied on to do my work. He hadn’t experienced much energy drain since they became an item, and I was beginning to wonder whether they were on the outs. I hadn’t seen her at the house in a while, and he had been dealing with an energy lag lately. Maybe it didn’t have everything to do with Lou.
“Ready?” MayBelle asked, straightening her hair.
“Always,” I said, heading up to the white painted porch and opening the door for her. “Was your mother in the society?”
“It was practically a requirement, seeing as my grandfather set up the foundation that runs this place.”
Of course he did.
She breezed on in, and we were greeted rather sweetly by Eudora Louise Markam, one of the ladies I’d seen at the fundraiser where Jorie had died.
“How are you doing?” she asked, giving me a big hug. “I heard you made Lowell Sanders’s one-man-show last night. How awful was it?”
“It was different,” I admitted.
“For the man whose claim to fame is being an extra in a “We Are the World” video, he sure is high and mighty,” she said. “He could even be
lying. He knows there’s no way we can tell if that little dot is him.”
MayBelle inserted herself between us. “Hi. We came to the heritage society because we’d like to look at a collection.”
“Right,” Eudora said brightly. “We’re not just here to chitchat.”
“You could have fooled me,” MayBelle said, then sent Eudora off to fetch the wedding display archives.
“Found them!” Eudora said a few minutes later, wheeling in a small cart with museum-quality albums. “Come on. Let’s set you two up.” She ushered us to a table in the society president’s office off the main lobby.
“You do pull some weight here,” I said to my companion. A large wooden desk stood in the center of the room in front of an original fireplace.
“Actually, I’m just nice,” Eudora said, lingering in the doorway.
We took seats in white dining chairs at the heavy round table. Several glass pitchers crowded the table, one decorated with a pink polka-dot design, another in bubbled glass with a thick green handle, both etched to commemorate various years of tea-themed luncheons.
“My mother never joined the heritage society,” I said, folding my hands in my lap as Eudora carried the albums over. “She’s outgoing but prefers small groups. I suppose your mother didn’t have that luxury, as a pastor’s wife, I mean.”
MayBelle gave me the side-eye.
“Yes, I’m fishing,” I admitted. “Rather clumsily, I might add. But I just want to know more about you,” I said quite honestly. “Pastor Bob wouldn’t stop going on about your father the other night. I was just curious what kind of lady stood with him.”
“My mother,” she said wryly, “was the exact opposite of me.”
Before I could think of what to say about that, Eudora carefully opened a white leather photo album on the table in front of me. “All of our 1955 brides are in this one,” she said. “Preserved on acid-free paper. I’ve brought you gloves, although we ask that you do not touch the photographs directly.”
“Thank you,” I said, taking a pair of white silk gloves and handing the other pair to MayBelle.
Eudora stood at a polite distance, watching us as we handled the album.
No doubt ready to listen as well.
I glanced back, flustering her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m not allowed to let that album out of my sight.”
It was awfully inconvenient, but at the same time, it heartened me to know they were taking such good care of the collection.
We paged through dozens of giddy, happy, nervous brides. Some things never changed. They wore sweetheart necklines, full skirts, and I even saw a hat made to look like a bow. “I could definitely get married in the ’50s,” I gushed.
“I couldn’t,” MayBelle countered.
“Check out the pearls,” Eudora stage-whispered before making a show of silently buttoning her lip.
Only I knew better than to think the lips in Sugarland could stay zipped for long.
MayBelle turned the page, and there it was—a photo of Jorie and my grandmother smiling together outside the church near the old oak tree, their eyes dancing with happiness.
And in a split second, I saw exactly what the killer had wanted to hide.
Chapter Twenty-One
I’ve never had a good poker face. MayBelle knew right away I’d found something.
“So,” she prodded, the lines on her face deepening, “tell me. What do you see?”
The picture before me captured Jorie and my grandmother in a moment of radiant happiness. Unfortunately, I’d caught a glimpse of some people I recognized in the background. People I didn’t expect to see at the wedding of my grandmother’s friend.
The Three Angels gravedigger.
I’d met that man’s ghost in the bell tower.
The gravedigger stood dour faced, shovel at the ready, as he watched Pastor Delmore Clemens in a frantic discussion with the mobster I’d met in the back of the flower shop—Mr. Peony himself.
A few other guys in suits stood in a separate cluster nearby, smoking cigarettes and eyeing the ground in front of the trio.
I flipped to the next page to see if there were any more like it, if any other mobsters might have enjoyed an acquaintance with the saintly Pastor Delmore Clemens.
But the next spread in the book featured a different pair of smiling newlyweds posing on the courthouse steps.
“Verity,” MayBelle pressed.
“I’m still trying to figure out what this means,” I murmured, turning the page again. More wedding pictures. More smiling faces. None at the Three Angels. I barely noticed the rest of them.
“Did you find the one of Fannie Brewster releasing doves?” Eudora asked before zipping her lip again.
We definitely had an audience.
“You’re hiding something,” MayBelle insisted, subtle as an ox. She snatched the album from me and turned back to the page in question. “What is it?” She studied the photo. “Jorie and Delia, my dad, a worker, and some wedding guests. What?”
I watched the woman who had called Jorie and Delia her friends scan the photograph, not recognizing what was now so plain to me.
Although perhaps that was the issue—MayBelle had focused on the radiant, smiling women in the foreground.
And to be fair, she didn’t hang out with Frankie like I did.
I wished I could share my find with MayBelle. She’d led me here, after all. Perhaps she regretted it now, or if not now, then she would. Because from what I saw, I had a feeling I shouldn’t trust her anymore.
“I think that wraps it up,” I said, pushing back from the table. “Thanks so much for your time, Eudora, but we ought to be getting back.”
“No.” MayBelle stared at the page that had changed everything for me. “Not until I figure this out.”
Eudora bent over her shoulder. “Oh, what a lovely picture of Jorie.”
“Can it, sister.” She waved off Eudora before looking to me. “Dang it, Verity. Help me on this.”
“There’s nothing to help with.” Not anymore. “I told you, I need to get back. Lucy has an appointment,” I fibbed.
“I’ll bet,” she said, reluctantly pushing back from the table.
I closed the album and handed it to a smiling Eudora to be placed back in the archives.
“But you did find what you were looking for?” she asked sweetly.
“Unfortunately, no,” I told her, “but at least we’ve scratched something off our list.”
“Good,” she said, smiling. I could see why she’d been elected Hospitality Chair.
MayBelle practically bored a hole in the side of my head with her stare as we exited. “Are you going to tell me what just happened in there? You ought to thank me for not making a scene.”
If that was her holding back, I didn’t want to see her go for the gusto.
“Thank you,” I said, holding the door open for her.
I realized I was acting out of character. My default tended to be talking, sharing—and if Frankie were to be believed, overexplaining. But if I told MayBelle what the photograph led me to believe about her father’s past, not to mention the motive for Jorie’s murder, the evidence might vanish before Ellis arrived with the police.
For the time being, it would be relatively safe in the archives.
We couldn’t afford for another photograph to be destroyed. This could be the only one left with the evidence I needed.
“She was my friend, too,” MayBelle said, sliding into the driver’s seat.
“I’d been hoping to see something in the photographs, and I didn’t,” I told her. Well, it had been missing from all but one.
MayBelle whipped off her wig and tossed it into the back seat. “And I’m Stella McCartney.” She clenched her jaw as she started the engine. “So what’s next?”
Ellis and the police station.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I told her. “Thanks for driving me out.”
She rolled her eyes and
set off for home.
I didn’t chat much on the way back. The convertible made it hard to talk, anyway. MayBelle wanted some sort of explanation. Unfortunately, I didn’t have one for her. I’d have to work on that part of my investigation technique—the cover-up.
“I think I’m going to streak the town square,” MayBelle said as we pulled up to the boulevard stop at Second Street and Main. “Want to come?”
“Maybe next time,” I said, not really listening. “Have fun.”
“Um-hum,” she said, crossing the four-way intersection.
Soon I’d be back at my car and on the phone with Ellis.
MayBelle and I said our polite goodbyes, and I could feel her stare on my back as I crossed the street to where I’d parked the land yacht. I slid inside, locked the door behind me, and dialed up Ellis.
He didn’t answer.
I left him an urgent message to call me back.
He was working today, so I drove south on Main and over a few blocks to the Sugarland Police Department. It stood on the corner of a commercial block, across from Roan’s Hardware.
The Sugarland PD was housed in the same quaint two-story brick building it had occupied for the last fifty years at least, and I could probably say the same about more than half of the businesses in that section of town.
There was plenty of street parking. I found a spot just down from the hardware store, in front of J&B Meat, the butcher shop I’d loved as a kid because Mr. Bates kept a giant roll of candy buttons for us kids. He’d tear off a strip and it was like a lottery to see if I got pink or yellow or teal or blue. My favorites were the one with the mix as the dot colors changed.
It was a special bonus surprise to get the fun dots, as my sister and I had called them.
I wished adulthood came with more fun surprises.
I shut off the car and retrieved my bag with Frankie’s urn. Perhaps the gangster had been right when he told me I needed to learn how to lie. I didn’t think I’d ever be the type to want to mislead anyone else, but MayBelle’s suspicion earlier was dangerous.