by Shannon West
I took a threatening step forward. “She’s not testifying, damn it! You can’t object. And somebody better start talking before Mr. Whatley has some new customers to take care of tonight!”
“I don’t actually think…” Whatley said, looking at me nervously.
“Oh my,” the lady in dark brown clutched at her chest and fell back into Willie Whatley’s arms. He got a panicky look on his face, and the deputy quickly came over to take her arm.
“Oh, I think I’m having a spell,” the lady cried. “My Nick is going to make such a fuss over this.”
I held back the urge to roll my eyes, closing them instead in tandem with a long sigh. “You’re not having a spell, Mrs…uh,” I waved my hand, at a loss as to what her name was, although that “my Nick” comment had certainly given me pause. Was this—could this be—Nick Moody’s grandmother? Fuck my life. I hadn’t seen the lady in years, but if she was Nick’s grandmother, my morning had just gotten exponentially worse. I gestured for my own gran to sit down before turning toward the deputy.
“Would it be okay if I spoke to them privately for just a minute? To try to get to the bottom of this thing?”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “I guess it would be all right. They’re not under arrest. Not yet, anyway.”
My heart sank a little at the “not yet” part of that statement, but at least he had the lady, who was probably Nick’s grandmother, seated in a chair by now, so he and Mr. Whatley moved just outside the door.
“All right, ladies,” I growled, “explain to me what’s going on. What in the hell happened at the funeral home tonight? I thought you and Ms. Millican were friends. Sort of. Why on earth would you do such a thing, Grandmother?”
After a brief exchange of glances, Pearl gave a disgruntled shake of her head. “Go ahead and tell him, Rose.”
“Well, dear…” Rose said softly, her voice conspiritorial. “You know that your grandmother, along with Emma Mae Millican and I and all the ladies of our book club, really, have entered the County bake-off every Fall for the past thirty-seven years, and for all that time, Emma Mae’s cherry pie has won the blue ribbon. Imagine that. Every single year since 1983.”
“Okay, so?” I was unsure of where she was going with this, but I nodded and motioned impatiently for her to continue. “Well, we’ve all been trying to get ahold of that recipe since Reagan was the president, but she keeps…” Rose darted her eyes over to Gran and then back to mine. “She kept it locked up tighter than Dick’s hatband.”
My grandmother chimed in. “Tighter than Fort Knox. Tighter than a bull’s butthole in fly season. Tighter than a nun’s…”
“I got it, Gran! Jeez! Go on, please.”
“Well, Emma Mae always said she would take the recipe with her to the grave, so some of us in the book club got to talking about what a shame that would be if she did actually try it.”
“Especially considering she stole the dang thing from me in the first place!”
“Gran, please. Go on, Rose.”
“One thing kind of led to another, and—”
“Hold up.” I flashed a hand in the air. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that the three of you broke in the funeral home in a harebrained attempt to steal a cherry pie recipe?”
“No. Well, kind of. And Claudia Moody was trying to help so she followed us here and came in through the back. Anyway, she scared the bejesus out of me when she poked her head through the window. That’s when the casket got knocked off the pedestal.”
“‘Got knocked off,’ huh? You knocked it off!”
“What’s your point?”
“My point! My point is you’re all crazy! Do you honestly think that poor lady had a recipe in the casket with her? And even if she did, that was no way to go about getting it!”
“Not just the recipe, Noah. The recipe book. With very old handwritten recipes. It was really mine to start with, but through a series of unfortunate circumstances, Emma Mae got her grubby little hands on it and wouldn’t give it back. It’s one of a kind, and it would have been an actual crime and a shame if we hadn’t tried to rescue it and put it back where it belongs. Really, if you think about it, I was only doing my civic duty.”
“This is ridiculous!” I groaned, burying my face in my hands.
“Hush, dear, you’re getting loud. And besides, have you ever had Emma Mae’s cherry pie?”
Actually, I had, and it was damn good, but this wasn’t the time or place to admit that.
“Are you kidding me?” Hearing the sound of my voice echoing through the room, I realized too late that I was yelling again. “Are you —” I took in a deep breath and glanced over my shoulder to see Willie Whatley and the deputy very conspicuously not looking in our direction. I lowered my voice to a harsh whisper. “Are you freaking kidding me? What the hell were you people thinking?”
“By the way, there’s no book in her casket,” Willie Whatley put in, leaning through the doorway, effectively erasing any idea I might have had of privacy. “Though some people do ask for photographs or momentos to be put in before we close the lid. Not any books, though, that I recall.”
Pearl scowled, crossing her arms. “Maybe not, then. But we needed to take a look and see. Claudia here,” she gestured toward the unknown lady who gave me a sweet smile and a little wave, “She went around the back and was climbing in the window, as we went in the front. If she hadn’t scared me half to death, popping her big head in the window like that—no offense, Claudie.”
“None taken, Pearl. It’s that bouffant ‘do’ my hairdresser gave me this morning. She said I’d look like Dolly Parton.”
“More like Don King,” Gran muttered under her breath. “Anyway, if it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have fallen against the casket. And Emma Mae always said…”
“Hush, Gran. Enough. We just need to see if we can get out of here, or if they want to press charges.”
Claudia nodded. “My grandson will be here any minute now, and we can ask him.”
“Ms. Moody’s grandson is the sheriff,” Whatley called out from door again.
I rubbed at the vein that was popping out on my forehead. Great. Just fucking fabulous.
“This gets better and better. What do you say we continue this conversation at home?” I didn’t add ‘before he gets here’ but I was sure thinking it.
“Deputy Harrison, would that be possible? For us to go home?”
The deputy and Mr. Whatley stepped back inside. “That’s not my call, Mr. Smith. That’s gonna be up to the sheriff. These ladies did commit a crime by breaking and entering.”
“Hearsay!” my grandmother bellowed in my ear. “Hearsay! You got no proof of anything!”
“Gran, let me handle this, please.” I turned back to Deputy Harrison. “Sir, I’m so sorry for what’s happened tonight. Obviously, my grandmother and my aunt were overcome with grief from the loss of their very dear friend and acted extremely inappropriately. But seeing as how the sheriff’s grandmother was involved too, I’m sure he’s not going to want to make a big deal out of all this. I mean, was it really a crime? Really? Clearly, this was all a misunderstanding. An accident. We’d be happy to pay for any damages, if Mr. Whatley here will agree to drop the charges. Right now, I really think my grandmother and my aunt need to go home and rest. All this has been very trying for them at their age.”
“Well, I suppose I could send you a bill to cover any damages,” Whatley said. “As a gesture of good will to these nice little ladies.” He glanced over at them speculatively, and I wondered if he was sizing them up as future customers.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief and nodded, just catching the quick glance that Pearl cut to Rose and then the one they both gave Claudia. “I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that we deeply apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.” I didn’t trust those looks they were all three giving each other, but I’d have to deal with that later.
He nodded, his eyes glazing over a bit. Based on
his expression, I knew that Willie Whatley was unlikely to ever forget the night that a corpse was dumped out onto his funeral home floor by three elderly ladies, but might be willing to try if I greased his palm sufficiently.
“Well…” he stammered, his eyes darting repeatedly to my gran, who was now very obviously trying to look like the innocent little old lady she most certainly was not. Whatley teetered for a moment longer, and then nodded his head. “Yes, forgetting all this is probably best.” He glanced over in my direction. “As I said, Ms. Moody is the sheriff’s grandmother.” The side of his lip curled up in what appeared to be his attempt at a smile. He was obviously a man unaccustomed to the action, and I found the end result pretty…well, creepy. “And I don’t suppose Ms. Emma Mae Millican is likely to make any objections.”
“Thank you,” I said, more to the world at large than Willie Whatley. For once, it seemed, there might be a quick and easy end to my grandmother’s antics. I glanced in her direction just in time to catch a triumphant twinkle in the old woman’s eyes.
“Although, of course, Ms. Millican’s niece may have a different take on things.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Miss Millican’s next of kin,” Whatley repeated, as Pearl’s smile faltered. “She may wish to press charges.”
I stifled a groan. So much for quick and easy.
“What next of kin?” Rose asked. “I didn’t think Emma Mae had any close relatives left.”
“I didn’t know that either,” my grandmother said. “Did she say where she comes from? Because as far as I know, Emma Mae didn’t have any next of kin except for a sister-in-law she didn’t much like. Don’t you remember all those times Emma Mae came to the house so we could, uh, have iced tea together? Why, she used to tell me all the time how alone she was in the world.”
On the chance that lightning was about to strike, I glanced uneasily at the window. Emma Mae and my grandmother had been bitter rivals for as long as I could remember, although they were members of many of the same clubs and even one church group. Emma Mae Millican had never come to our house, to my knowledge, and my grandmother never drank tea, iced or otherwise. Whiskey shots, yes, but not tea.
Suddenly a familiar, growly voice—one that I not only recognized but still heard sometimes in my damn dreams—boomed from the doorway. “What do you mean she broke in the damn funeral home?” At the sound of this new actor in our little drama, we all turned to see the sheriff in the doorway, talking to his deputy and occasionally glancing in at us incredulously.
He narrowed his eyes and came charging into the room. “Just what in the…the heck is going on here, Grandmother?”
Whatever I had intended to say was lost as I gazed at the best looking specimen of manhood in all of Indian Springs and more than likely the entire state of Alabama. It was Nick Moody, all right, Claudia’s grandson, and the man who had ripped out my heart and stomped it flat when I was nineteen years old.
To be fair, I don’t think he meant to, not that it helped me feel any better about it. And not that it mended any fences. Since I’d reopened the shop, he came in most every morning with his deputies to have doughnuts and drink coffee, but never once had he really spoken to me except to give me his order. Nor had he even so much as glanced in my direction if he hadn’t been looking for a refill for his coffee cup. He acted as if he’d never known me. Had never made sweet, sweet love to me and promised me we’d have a life together.
Okay, slight exaggeration—it had only been a blow job, and the promises had all been on my side, but nonetheless.
I found myself looking up into livid, sapphire blue eyes that held an expression somewhere between extremely pissed off and just short of ballistic. In a romance novel, those eyes would have been described as stormy. As Fuck.
The face that went along with them was perfectly chiseled with high cheekbones and just a hint of a sexy dimple in his chin. What hair I could see peeking out from under the black baseball cap emblazoned with “Creek County Sheriff Dept” across the front was almost the shade of the chocolate on the doughnuts I served him most mornings for breakfast. He was, in two words—fucking gorgeous.
I heard a quick whisper from behind me, and then my grandmother was bounding forward, nearly bowling Willie Whatley and Deputy Harrison over as she pushed past them, with Rose and Claudia hot on her heels. “Sheriff, we can explain,” she said, looking up at him. At probably six-foot-two, he towered over my little gran.
“I can only imagine what you’re thinking right now,” she blundered on, completely oblivious to the look on his face. “But you’ll understand when I explain it to you.”
One dark eyebrow arched as he gazed down at her coldly. “Well, that would make a nice change, Ms. Smith. Why don’t you just do that?”
“Now hon,” Claudia spoke up, scurrying around Pearl to get to his side and putting a small hand on his chest. “Don’t you lose your temper.”
He glanced down at his grandmother before gently patting and then removing her hand and drawing her slightly behind him. “I’d just like to hear what Ms. Smith has to say, Nana.”
That made two of us. I closed my eyes. It was like watching a train wreck. I knew what was about to happen, and I knew it was going to be bad. The only question was how bad. We all, except for Sheriff Moody, held our breath, waiting to see what she’d come up with.
“Yes, indeed.” My gran nodded her head. “Let me explain. Well, uh... Well, I’m actually embarrassed to say this.”
“Oh, come now, Ms. Smith,” the sheriff drawled, crossing his arms over his manly chest and making his biceps bulge impressively. “I’m sure we’re all just waiting with bated breath to hear what you have to say. Please…go ahead.”
I cleared my throat and got to my feet, and the sheriff shifted his gaze in my direction. His eyes narrowed even further until they were mere slits in his handsome face. I was self-conscious under his regard and shuffled from one foot to the other. When I ran out of the house, I had literally thrown on the clothes that I’d tossed in a chair the night before, except in the darkness of my bedroom, I’d mistaken the too tight cut-offs I wore to wash the car for my jeans and a wife beater for my T shirt.
It was early March in Alabama, and the weather was a strange combination of cold as hell evenings and warm days. Yesterday, the sun was out and the temperature had warmed up to an unseasonable eighty-four degrees. Hence the cut-offs and the wife beater. It didn’t, however, account for the fact I was wearing flip flops. The temperature outside currently was about forty-five, with a stiff wind, but they were the first thing I’d managed to find in my closet and jam my feet into on my way out the door in the middle of the night.
I knew I looked scruffy, wrinkled and disreputable standing there in my faded Alabama shirt and afore-mentioned flip flops, my long, still-damp hair stuffed up under a baseball cap, with a few long, blond tendrils trailing down from under my cap. I tucked them behind my ears self-consciously. Did I mention the cut-offs were so short that the pockets were hanging down on my thighs and the crotch had a hole practically worn all the way through it? It was hanging on by threads and clearly showed my underwear underneath—bright red underwear that a guy I knew in college bought me as a joke and which featured little stethoscopes with the words Love Doctor stamped all over them. The red hem was hanging down past my cut-offs too, just to make everything perfect.
The sheriff looked me up and down, either unimpressed or disbelieving what he saw and lingered for a long moment on the near hole in my crotch before traveling down to my feet in those flip flops. I scrunched my toes in embarraassment, because earlier the day before when I’d driven my gran and Rose to the nail salon, they’d talked me into getting a pedicure. It was my first time, and I’d been alternately horrified and amused when they suggested it. Rose said, “Come on, honey, you have such pretty feet for a man. Most boys have those big old, knuckly toes. Yours are cute.”
I had rolled my eyes at that, but there was nobody else in the shop th
at morning, and Lord knows soaking my feet in the hot water, not to mention the toe-curling leg massage the attendant gave me afterward felt wonderful. After cutting and buffing my toenails, they even talked me into a pale blue polish, though I was now bitterly regretting that choice. As we both looked down at my toes, the light actually twinkled off their polished surfaces.
I saw the sheriff’s eyebrows raise as he got a load of them and his incredulous gaze traveled back up to my face, lingered for a second or two and then he frowned. That’s when my grandma spoke up, diverting his attention back to her.
“Rose and I have just been beside ourselves with grief ever since Emma Mae’s passing, and we wanted to pay our last respects to her, you see. Your nana did too.”
The sheriff cast his attention momentarily down to his grandmother and then back at Pearl. “I don’t think I understand. Y’all do realize what time it is? The funeral home closed at eight o’clock last night.”
“So it did…” Undaunted, Pearl continued on. “So it did…yes, well…you see, Rose here has a touch of dementia.”
“I do?” Frowning, Rose cocked her head. She got an elbow in her side for her trouble and she jumped. “Oh yes, yes, I do. Terrible dementia. Just awful.” The sheriff narrowed his eyes.
With a slow shake of her head, Pearl patted Rose on the shoulder. “You see? The poor thing gets confused so easily.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you. What does that have to do with your being inside the funeral home at this ungodly hour of the morning?”
“Oh, you see, Rose sometimes has spells. You know how some people get that ‘sundowners’ in the evenings? Well, Rose has it too, but she has hers earlier in the day—in the mornings. We call it ‘sunrisers.’ She slipped out of the house early this morning, probably because she woke up thinking of poor Emma Mae, and she went inside to view her. So I had to come after her. I called your nana to come help me.”
“Hold up just a minute. How did she—how did any of you get in?”
“These two came in the front window,” Whatley helpfully supplied, pointing at Gran and Rose. Then he indicated Nick Moody’s grandmother. “She climbed in the back window.”