A Parfait Murder

by Wendy Lyn Watson

  I snorted. “I’m not like Bree. Or even Alice. I’m not that tough.”

  Peachy hummed a little assent. “You’re right about that. That’s a good thing. See, all that independence has a downside. The Decker girls make dumb-ass mistakes, are too proud to admit it, and way too proud to ask for help. You’re just a little softer than the rest of us, Tally. Soft enough to bend without breaking.”

  “I don’t know,” I hedged.

  “I do. Now, you had your little pity party, and you were entitled. Today, you have to put your big girl pants on and help Alice through this.”

  I cut my eyes to the side to see Peachy’s face. “Bree told her?”

  “Of course. I made her do it. Told her Alice deserved to be the first person to know.” Peachy frowned. “Alice pitched a royal fit. But she understands that this hurts her mother’s legal situation pretty bad. If the authorities find out Bree really had something to hide—that Sonny was right to challenge his paternity of Alice—then it seems even more plausible she would kill to keep it quiet. I told her she needs to keep her mouth shut for now, and she gets it.”

  Peachy patted my knee again. “Look at me, Tallulah.”

  I did as she ordered, turning my head to face my grandma. The diffuse morning light blended away some of the lines in her face, softened her, but there was no mistaking the rock-hard resolve in her eyes.

  “The same goes for you, my child. You, Alice, Bree, and I know about those DNA results—”

  “And Finn. He was with me when Bree called.”

  Peachy’s mouth tightened at the corners. “Well, the five of us are the only folks in Dalliance who know that Sonny isn’t Alice’s daddy. And it’s going to stay that way until we get this murder charge against your cousin dropped. You hear?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “That means you and Finn Harper are going to keep on keepin’ on, just as lovey-dovey as you have been. No one’s going to suspect a thing.”

  The thought of spending time with Finn, maintaining a pretense that all was well, made me die a little inside. But I’d been raised to do what Peachy said.

  “Yes’m.”

  “Huh.” Peachy laughed, a rasping deep in her smoker’s lungs. “I see that look in your eyes. You want to give that boy what-for. Well, if you want a big blow-out with Finn Harper, you better set your mind to getting Bree out of trouble. The sooner you get her off the hook, the sooner you can rip him a new one.”

  Peachy was right. My relationship with Finn was definitely in jeopardy, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could ever trust Bree again. But I loved my family—Bree included—and I knew we’d never recover if Bree went to prison for killing Kristen. The DNA results were another nail in Bree’s coffin, evidence that Bree had a strong incentive to put the kibosh on the lawsuit, and I needed to start prying up some boards if I was going to save us all.

  chapter 18

  I decided to start with the one person who seemed to want to talk about Kristen: Neck DeWinter.

  He scared the ever-living bejesus out of me, but Neck seemed legitimately broken up about Kristen’s death, and I figured maybe he would be willing to open up about her life a bit.

  When I’m right, I’m right.

  After a quick call to Jason Arbaugh, I had no trouble tracking Neck to the Bar None. He was slouched over a pint of something that looked more like blackstrap molasses than beer. Even at midday, the interior of the Bar None was dim, but Neck’s eyes were hidden behind his shades.

  “Can I join you?” I asked, half hoping he’d say no.

  He nodded sullenly.

  “How are you holding up, Neck?”

  He took a pull on his beer by way of answer.

  “That bad, huh? Would it help to talk about her?”

  His beefy shoulders inched up. Was that a yes?

  “How long did you know Kristen?”

  He sighed. “I didn’t meet her in person until two years ago. Best day of my life.”

  “In person? Did you meet her online before that?”

  He laughed, a short, brittle bark. “Huh. Yeah, I did.”

  I didn’t see what was so funny about meeting her online. I was pretty old-school, but I knew lots of folks who’d used online dating services. Some of them even ended up marrying the people they met.

  “She was so beautiful,” he said, a river of raw ache running through his voice.

  “She certainly was. I heard she had a mess of crowns from the pageants she won.”

  He tilted his head slightly to the side. I really wished I could read his eyes, but the movement made me think I’d confused him a bit.

  “The crowns?”

  “Yeah, crowns from beauty pageants. Those are tough to come by.”

  “eBay.”

  I know I’m not brilliant like Alice, but I fancy myself reasonably intelligent. But talking to Neck, I felt like an idiot. He was saying words—I heard them come out of his mouth—and they were English words, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of them. Not at all.

  “Excuse me?” I said, trying to keep the thread of annoyance out of my voice.

  “eBay. Those crowns are easy to find on eBay.”

  “But, I mean, the titles. Those are hard to come by.”

  “She deserved more,” he said. “She won runner-up for Miss Am-Cam in 1995, but she was the best. The most beautiful ever.”

  It occurred to me then that Neck was loaded. It was only eleven forty-five in the morning, and he was steady as a rock as he sat in his booth, but he was totally tanked. That was the only way I could explain his lack of coherence. After all, Cookie had said Kristen had lots of pageant titles, including some big one. Miss American Spirit? No, Miss American Pride. But Neck was acting as if Kristen had only been an also-ran.

  I took a deep breath to steel my nerves and reached across to pat his hand gently.

  “I’m real sorry for your loss, Neck,” I said. “If you ever want to talk more, you just let me know.”

  I scooted back to the A-la-mode, where I found Kyle manning the store, sitting on my lovely marble counter, kicking his dirty sneakers against the polished oak wainscoting.

  “Down,” I ordered. “And where is everyone?”

  He slid off the counter without a fuss. “Beth took her kid clothes shopping. Grandma and Bree are at the fairgrounds. Alice went off to have lunch with Mr. Harper.”

  If Kyle thought it was weird that Alice and Finn had a lunch date, he didn’t let on.

  My own response to the news was tough to untangle. On the one hand, Alice had never had a dad before. Now she had one, and he was, at heart, a good man. She deserved an opportunity to build a relationship with him. But, selfishly, I felt a stab of anxiety at the notion of Finn having a permanent seat at the family table, whether I liked it or not. Or, worse, Finn, Alice, and Bree building some sort of nuclear family. . . one that didn’t include me.

  It was out of my hands, though. Peachy’s reminder that I needed to put on my big girl pants echoed in my mind, and I mentally shook it off.

  “Kyle, my boy, do you have your laptop with you?”

  “Always.”

  Kyle was a troublemaker with a capital T, but we’d learned that he had a very definite skill set. Specifically, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of sports statistics and an amazing ability with computers, both to dig around in the guts of the machines themselves and to use the machines to navigate the vast network of digital information called the Internet.

  “And can you still get online through McKlesky and Howard’s network?”

  At the beginning of the summer, we’d also discovered that the law firm next door didn’t have its Wi-Fi network password-protected. I maintained that using their network without their permission was a form of stealing, but I’d been labeled “old-fashioned” and “out of touch” and “downright backward” by everyone else . . . Kyle, Alice, Bree, Finn, and even Grandma Peachy (who liked to play euchre online).

  Kyle was pulling his beat-up laptop out o
f its equally beat-up case. “We can still surf for free. You need me to look something up?”

  “Yeah. I want you to look up the Miss American Pride Pageant.”

  Kyle snorted. “You thinking of entering.”

  “No, smarty-pants. I’m not. Just hush up and do what I tell you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  His fingers flew over his keyboard in a crazed sort of hunt-and-peck, the savantlike movements of someone who’d never been taught to type but was remarkably well self-taught.

  “Miss American Pride,” he said. “Held every April in Missoula, Montana.”

  Montana? I thought Kristen was from Galveston. But maybe girls from all over the country could enter.

  “Is there a list of winners?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I tried to remember when Cookie said Kristen had won. Sometime in the early 2000s.

  “Read me the winners starting in, say, 1997.”

  Kyle heaved a put-upon sigh, but he obliged. “Nineteen ninety-seven—Anna Hooper. Ninety-eight—Marie Cavendish. Ninety-nine—Tonya Ortiz. Two thousand—Cindy Lou Phillips. Cindy Lou? Really?”

  “No editorializing. Just read.”

  “Two thousand one—Megan Tyler. Two thousand two—Alisha Thomas. Two thousand three—Ashley Tyler. I wonder if Ashley and Megan are sisters.” He sounded a bit wistful at the notion of sibling beauty queens.

  “No Kristen Ver Steeg?”

  “Kristen? No. Maybe she was a runner-up?”

  I didn’t think so. A runner-up wouldn’t have a crown. “Check,” I said. “And look for anyone named Kristen. Maybe she had a marriage somewhere in there, her name changed.”

  Kyle’s fingers danced across the keys. “Only Kristen I see was a second runner-up in 1989. Here’s her picture.”

  He turned the laptop around so I could see the screen. A color picture filled the screen, a young woman with a freakishly white smile, a spiral perm, and a poofy hot-pink taffeta dress. Definitely not Kristen Ver Steeg, who would have been in middle school in 1989.

  I was pretty sure Cookie had said the Miss American Pride crown was from 2001, the year Megan Tyler—one of the beauty queen sisters—won the title. So how did Kristen get the crown?

  Then it clicked.

  “eBay.”

  “What?” Kyle asked.

  “Can you see stuff that used to be on eBay? Like stuff that sold a while ago?”

  “Sure,” Kyle said. “Once something’s on the Internet, it’s basically just out there. Forever.”

  I didn’t want to stop to think too much about that horrifying thought. “See if you can find a listing for a Miss American Pride crown on eBay.”

  He started typing again, and then paused. “Are we investigating a murder?”

  “Officially? Like what you tell your mama? No, we’re indulging your boss’s idle curiosity. But off the books, yeah, we’re investigating a murder.”

  A smug smile spread across his face. “Cool.”

  He tapped away for a while, and finally said, “Got it. The 2001 Miss American Pride crown sold last year, in November, for thirty-two fifty. Picture’s total crap, by the way.”

  “Let me guess. Kristen Ver Steeg won the auction?”

  “Ms. Tally, people don’t use their real names on eBay. But I don’t think Kristen won the auction. The person used the handle ‘Wildcatter-ninety.’”

  Wildcatter. As in the Dalliance High School Wildcatters, maybe? And 1990 was the year ahead of me. Neck DeWinter’s year.

  The picture that was forming broke my heart: Neck DeWinter, big oaf, buying secondhand pageant crowns for his own personal beauty queen.

  Jeez.

  There was just one nagging little detail I wanted to check out. Neck had said Kristen did place in one pageant.

  “Okay. One more search, kiddo. Miss Am-Cam.”

  “Is that all one word? Like the name of a town?”

  I hoped so, because maybe it would give us a better sense of where Kristen came from. “I’m not sure. Use your imagination.”

  While Kyle typed, I fetched us each a can of soda from the back. By the time I returned to the front of the store, Kyle had his laptop closed and his face had drained of color.

  “What’s up?” I asked, alarmed by the freaked-out expression on his face.

  “Just remember, you asked me to look this up, right? It’s not my fault.”

  “What’s not your fault?”

  Kyle pried up the lid of his laptop, waking it up. Immediately, the sound of moaning and panting filled the air.

  “Sweet Jesus. What is that?”

  Mortified color suffused Kyle’s face. “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think it’s the clip that won Miss Am-Cam 2009 her title.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Miss Am-Cam is Miss Amateur Camera. It’s, uh, an award for homemade Internet porn.”

  I was torn. On the one hand, I definitely wanted more information now. On the other hand, I didn’t feel good about using Kyle to get it. I mean, he was technically an adult, almost nineteen, but still . . .

  “First, can you turn the sound off on your computer?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He scrambled to comply.

  “Okay, is there some way you can get a list of, uh, winners? Without cuing any more videos,” I rushed to add.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  With his eyes studiously on his keyboard, only glancing at the screen ever so briefly, Kyle poked around.

  “Here’s a list of the winners and runners-up for the last twenty years, since the contest was created.”

  Neck had said Kristen was runner-up in 1995. “Look at 1995.”

  “Um, oh, jeez.” Kyle cleared his throat and sat up a little straighter, clearly trying to be adult about this. “The winner was someone named . . . Here.” He spun the computer around so I could read the screen, then shoved away from the table and grabbed his soda. “I’m gonna do the dishes,” he said as he popped the top on his can.

  I let him go and looked at the list. The names were, um, colorful. Clearly not the names these young women had been christened with.

  Oh my.

  The runner-up was not listed as Kristen Ver Steeg, but I recognized her face in the still shot next to the name. Either the lighting was really bad or her hair was darker, the color of English toffee. But the delicate lines of her face were unmistakable, even though they were contorted in a very unladylike expression.

  Next to her pseudonym and the still shot, there was a short bio line. This Lonestar lovely gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “deep in the heart of Texas.” Want more? Catch her IRL at the Pony Up Gentlemen’s Club.

  “Kyle,” I yelled.

  “What?”

  “What does I-R-L mean?”

  “In real life,” he shouted back.

  The text of the club name was in another color, and I knew that meant it was a link to another Web site. With a good deal of trepidation, I used the laptop’s track pad to guide the cursor over the link, and then pressed it.

  Turns out the Pony Up was right up the road in Fort Worth. A strip club.

  The bits of information were flying through my mind at a dizzying speed. The Kristen Ver Steeg I’d met had been pristine, icy, professional. But apparently she came from more humble beginnings, making a living stripping and performing sex acts on the Internet.

  Proving once again that people were rarely what they seemed to be.

  chapter 19

  I tried to leave all thought of Kirsten and her sordid past behind when I made my pilgrimage to the fairgrounds that afternoon. But it seemed as if everywhere I turned, I ran into another reminder of Kristen and her murder.

  It started when I went to get supper.

  “Three chef’s salads. I’ve got a pint for each of them.”

  The curly-haired girl working the Prickly Pear Café’s fair booth looked over her shoulder to silently consult with her two college-age colleagues. The other two girls each nodded, and the curly-hair
ed one turned back to me, her eyes narrowed as though she were far more shrewd than her button-bedecked vest would lead one to believe.

  “Deal,” she said.

  I handed over the cooler containing three pints of the A-la-mode’s ice cream, my part of our hastily arranged barter agreement, then found a chair beneath their meager awning to await my order.

  The mood in the A-la-mode booth at the fairgrounds had been tense all afternoon. Bree and I circled each other like a couple of wary cats, and Alice periodically broke down in tears for no apparent reason. I suppose it would have been more practical to keep us all separated for a bit longer, but Kyle needed to spend a few hours with his family; Peachy had met up with a gaggle of women from Tarleton Ranch for a tour of the fair’s quilt exhibit; and Beth didn’t have a babysitter, so she had to work in the store, where she could keep an eye on her child.

  When dinnertime rolled around, I eagerly volunteered to go get us all some food. Bree had begged for something that hadn’t been deep-fried, as she was taking the stage later in the evening for the much-anticipated karaoke competition. She didn’t want a bloat when she squeezed into her tight black satin capris to sing “Before He Cheats.”

  I had just taken a deep breath when someone tapped me on my shoulder.

  I turned in my seat to find Jason Arbaugh and his wife, Crystal, Deena’s daughter. Jason held Crystal tight around the waist and she leaned into him, snuggling despite the return of the oppressive heat.

  “Hey, kids,” I said. Technically, I was still a little young to be a mom to the twenty-five-year-old Jason, but both he and Crystal were firmly on the other side of a generational divide. “Enjoying the fair?”

  “Trying to,” Jason said with a wistful smile. “It’s about as close to a night on the town as we’re gonna get for a while.”

  “Still no luck finding a permanent job?” I guessed.

  “Ha! At this point, no job at all,” he said.

  Crystal bonked her head against his shoulder. “You did the right thing, leaving.” Her soft features glowed as she stared up into his face, alight with the unquestioning adoration of young love.

  “You quit Jackson and Ver Steeg?” I asked.