Three Blonde Mice

by Jane Heller

  “Yeah, it’s called Bounty Fest, and they’re having pig roasts and hayrides and quilting,” said Alex. “Very Americana. Oh and they’re having a bunch of country bands playing all day, which you would love. I still can’t believe you’re a fan of country. It’s so not you. Right, right, you should go,” Alex said. “I need to get back to my friends anyway.” She laughed again. “Yeah, I made friends here. These women call themselves the Three Blonde Mice, would you believe. Picture the types who go to Vegas for girlfriend trips, do shots until they can’t see straight, get laid, and act like they don’t remember it the next morning.”

  The nerve! She was making fun of Jackie, Pat, and me, to her fiancé—and after we went out of our way to befriend her! She had pretended to befriend us too, pretending to befriend Jackie most of all. Talk about a mean girl. I was tempted to come charging out of the bathroom, wielding the can of the Bumble and Bumble Full Form Mousse that was in the shower and spraying it right into her eyeballs.

  Simon couldn’t miss how mad I was. He squeezed my cheeks closed so my lips were immobilized and I couldn’t blurt out anything stupid. It didn’t keep me from wondering whether being a mean girl meant being a murderer. We didn’t find anything that tied her directly to Chef Hill other than that she wanted to interview him for her screenplay, but was she faking that part, too? Did she have another, more sinister reason for wanting to get him alone? I couldn’t dismiss her completely as the letter writer, but it was more likely that she was just one of those women who latched onto other women when their men weren’t around and dumped them as soon as they were no longer placeholders.

  “Okay, bye, babe,” she said as I fumed. “Yup, definitely. Love you.”

  Alex left the cottage within minutes of ending her call to Rick. She did not come into the bathroom. She did not know we were in her shower. She did not know I had just heard her trash Jackie, Pat and me. She wasn’t a Boho chick. She was a Boho bitch.

  Simon and I waited a reasonable period of time before leaving her cottage. While he went back to the kitchen to join the others, I sprinted to the housekeeping barn to return the keys. Unfortunately I sprinted right into Rebecca, and she did not look happy to see me.

  24

  “I want all three of you off the premises,” Rebecca huffed, flicking her Willie Nelson braids behind her. Jackie and Pat were sitting on little stools in the housekeeping barn, a bare space with nothing but lockers and a wall mirror. They were wearing hangdog expressions, as if they were children just put in time-out by their teacher. I remained standing, defiant.

  “Why?” I asked. “Because we caught you and Wes, and you’re afraid we’ll tell his wife?”

  “How I spend my downtime is none of your business,” she said. “It’s about your behavior, not mine. All three of you.”

  Rebecca went on a rant about how we’d harassed Chef Hill, harassed the other guests, and harassed her. “You even harassed Sonia, one of our housekeepers,” she said, pointing at me. “You’re not the sort of people we want at Whitley.”

  “But you can’t kick us out,” said Jackie. “We paid for the whole week, and it’s only Friday. Checkout is noon on Sunday.”

  “I can and I am,” said Rebecca, her cheeks flushing with anger. She may not have had Willie Nelson’s beard and mustache, but she did have the fuzz that plagues women of a certain age. It starts with a single stray hair on the chin, and the next thing you know, you’ve become a furry animal. “As per our policy of dismissing guests who don’t live up to our code of conduct, you will leave Whitley within the hour.”

  “Please don’t make us miss Bounty Fest,” Pat pleaded, as if she’d just been told she had to skip Christmas. “We have to be there.”

  She was right about that. We had to save Chef Hill’s life at Bounty Fest, whether he thought we were harassing him or not.

  “Look, Rebecca,” I said, taking a calmer tone with her, a more conciliatory tone. “We’re sorry for causing problems. We’ll be paragons of virtue from here on. Just let us stay through the festival tomorrow?”

  “No, I meant what I said.” She wasn’t budging.

  I wracked my brain for a way to convince her to let us stay, and then it hit me. “As you may be aware,” I began, “one of our group members, Simon Purdys, is the editor of Away from It All magazine. If we tell him we’ve been treated badly, it’ll wind up in a very negative article about the resort. You wouldn’t want bad PR for Whitley, would you, Rebecca?” I smiled, congratulating myself on what I thought was a brilliant stab at blackmail.

  She crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m not worried. The publisher of Away from It All is my first cousin.”

  “Larry’s your cousin?” Simon’s boss didn’t look anything like this harpy.

  “Yes,” she said triumphantly. “On my father’s side. Now, if we’re finished here, the front desk clerk is expecting you and will have your bills all ready upon checkout. Have a safe trip home.”

  And off she went, probably to the dairy barn for another round with Wes.

  I took a stool, sat next to my friends and stewed silently.

  “You tried,” said Pat.

  “You did,” said Jackie. “But are we supposed to just leave Simon with this whole fucking mess?”

  “We can’t,” said Pat. “We have to finish what we started. We have to find a way to stay no matter what.”

  “Simon,” I said, another idea forming.

  “What about him?” said Jackie.

  “He’ll put us up for the night in his cottage,” I said. “We’ll pack our stuff, check out at the front desk, make Rebecca think we left, and then spend the night at Simon’s and be at Bounty Fest tomorrow to make sure Chef Hill doesn’t get offed.”

  “But she’ll see us there,” said Pat.

  “Not with the crowds they’re expecting,” I said. “We’ll blend right in, and she’ll never be the wiser.”

  “Okay, but what are the sleeping arrangements?” asked Jackie. “There’s only one bed.”

  “It’ll be tight, but the three of us will fit,” I said. “It’s a king.”

  “What about Simon?” Pat asked.

  “He loves hammocks,” I said. “Luckily, there’s one on the front porch. Meanwhile, how come you two didn’t keep Alex busy during the chocolate orgy? She showed up at her cottage while Simon and I were there—a very close call.”

  “I turned around to talk to her, and she was gone,” said Jackie.

  “Yeah, well thank God she didn’t have a full bladder,” I said.

  “Why? Were you hiding in her bathroom?” asked Pat.

  I told them what happened, including Alex’s conversation with her fiancé. Jackie was furious when I got to the part about Alex not giving a shit about us.

  “Who cares if her fiancé has a nice brother?” she steamed. “I wouldn’t want her for a sister-in-law.”

  “Our hurt feelings aside, I doubt she wrote the letter,” I said and gave them a rundown on Connie’s x on Jason Hill’s photo, Ronnie’s hit list of chefs, Lake and Gabriel’s fast food restaurant lease, Beatrice’s voice mail message from the chef, and Jonathan’s plagiarism indignities.

  “Jason Hill is a douchebag,” said Jackie. “Almost everybody seems to want him dead.”

  “I’m going with Connie,” said Pat. “She’s the only one who admitted she’s mad at him.”

  “True, but the letter wasn’t written in her voice at all,” I said. “It just doesn’t sound like her. It doesn’t sound like Ronnie either.”

  “I think Lake wrote it,” said Jackie. “I’m not as gung ho as she is about this farm-to-table business, but even I’m pissed off that Chef Hill is doing a burger chain. Maybe she and Gabriel are planning to kill him together, or maybe Gabriel won’t go along with it. Remember how she said he was too conventional? Maybe she’s doing it by herself.”

  “Or it’s Beatrice,” I said. “She must be panicked that Chef Hill might steal Jonathan away from her.”

/>   “I hate to say it, but Jonathan could have a motive too,” said Jackie. “If Chef Hill had been lifting my recipes and taking all the credit, I’d go berserk.”

  “Yeah, but you’d sue him, not kill him, and you’d probably lose,” I said. “According to my publishing client, you can’t copyright a recipe. You can only copyright the way it’s described, as in the text in the cookbook that represents the author’s style of expression.”

  “All the more reason for Jonathan to be pissed,” said Jackie. “He’s a lawyer, so he knows about the copyright thing. Maybe he tried scaring Chef Hill with the letter, and when he didn’t get a response he decided to go ahead with the murder tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow.” Pat shuddered. “How are we going to stop this from happening when we don’t know which one of them is planning to do it?”

  We still couldn’t come to a consensus about the letter writer, so we went back to our cottages and started packing.

  I was stuffing clothes into my suitcase when I realized I hadn’t checked my e-mail in hours—too many distractions. There in my inbox was one from Olivia Martindale, my British colleague in Pearson & Strulley’s Palm Beach office, the one I’d written to about Jonathan. She apologized for the delay in responding and had this to say about him:

  Big-time lawyer. Big-time philanthropist. Big-time player.

  Big-time player? Jonathan?

  If your interest in him is personal, Elaine, avoid at all costs. First wife, a doctor, caught him in bed with a stripper. Second wife, a realtor, caught him in bed with the neighbor. Incapable of keeping his trousers on. All he cares about is shagging women. Total arse, sorry.

  I was standing when I read the e-mail and now I had to sit down to digest it, such was the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. So Jonathan was an arse. I mean ass. I hadn’t seen that coming, I really hadn’t. Olivia’s version of his marital infidelities was the opposite of his version in which he’d been the aggrieved party, and I had no reason to doubt her. What a liar he was! What a creep! He and his mommy were both creeps! She probably hounded him about the women he’d married and how they weren’t good enough for him, and he probably took out his twisted feelings for her on them. And to think I’d let him touch me! To think I’d considered him boyfriend material! To think I’d contemplated a future with him! Clearly, my judgment about people was as reliable as my cooking skills.

  Well, now I had to take a fresh look at Jonathan as a suspect. Maybe Jackie was right and he was our letter writer. He had motive. He had opportunity. And he had a way with words.

  I resumed my packing with a vengeance. I couldn’t wait to get back to the city, where the murderers acted like murderers.

  Day Six:

  Saturday, July 20

  25

  Bounty Fest didn’t open until 10:00 a.m., but when Simon, Jackie, Pat, and I got there at 9:30, we had to fight our way onto the grounds. Whitley was already overrun with at least 300 people from the community and beyond—families with small children who’d come for the hayrides and chicken races, Manhattanites with weekend country houses who’d come for seminars in beekeeping and composting, and hungry, curious locals who’d come to sample the farmer’s market offerings. I had no idea how we could possibly pick the murderer out of the crowd, let alone from the members of our agritourism group, but we’d have to try.

  “Coffee,” Jackie groaned. “Someone steer me to the right kiosk so I can wake up.”

  “Me too,” said Pat, as the four of us squeezed past sweaty body after sweaty body to get to the Grind Your Own Coffee Beans stand.

  “I didn’t get ten minutes of sleep,” I complained. “I forgot you both snore.”

  “I slept like a baby in the hammock,” said Simon, the only one of us whose eyes weren’t puffy. “I’m up for another sleepover whenever you guys are.”

  “No thanks,” said Jackie, after she’d taken her first sip of her Jackie Gault Natural Vanilla Bean Latte (they gave you a cup with the name of your personal brand on it).

  “Once we’re fully caffeinated,” I said, “I think we should head over to the chef’s tent so we’ll be on top of things before Chef Hill gets there. According to the activities sheet, he does forty minutes on pickling vegetables, takes a twenty-minute break, comes back for another forty minutes on using farm eggs, then takes another twenty-minute break, and comes back for the final forty minutes on six ways to incorporate Swiss chard into your life.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Jackie, who was so sleep deprived that she spilled coffee on her jeans. We all swabbed at her legs with napkins until she was dry.

  “Uh-oh,” said Pat. “I think I see Rebecca. What if she throws us out?”

  “Just keep your head down, everybody,” I said. “And move fast.”

  There were more than 200 people waiting for Chef Hill to show up inside a large tent erected for his demos. Bales of hay had been strategically placed in rows for everybody to sit on. Live country music was playing at an ear-splitting volume from a nearby bandstand, making it difficult for us to hear one another.

  “I think we should wait in the back so we can see who comes and goes,” I shouted as the four of us surveyed the scene.

  Chef Hill entered the tent looking very “hopped up,” as my mother would say. His coke habit had to be pretty bad if he couldn’t perform at a simple farm demo without a few pre-show snorts.

  “Here comes our cast of suspects,” said Simon.

  We all turned to look. Lake and Gabriel wore annoyed expressions, as if they were being dragged to the funeral of someone they couldn’t stand. Connie and Ronnie didn’t seem happy either; her mouth was set in an angry line, and he was glowering as he stuffed his face with a muffin. Beatrice and Jonathan arrived together, but awkwardly; he strode in ahead of her instead of holding her arm as he usually did, and she struggled to catch up to him, her eyes pleading with him not to be left behind.

  “I wonder where Alex is?” said Jackie.

  No sooner did she utter the name of our fake friend than we saw Alex approaching the entrance to the tent. She was in one of her flowing outfits, bandana and all, and carrying her Whitley tote bag—and she was not alone. She was with a brown man. I don’t mean the color of his skin. I mean that he had brown hair, a brown sunhat, a brown Polo shirt, and brown slacks.

  “Elaine, isn’t that Eric?” Pat said, pointing at Alex and her escort.

  I couldn’t speak. The closer he got, the more my brain shorted out. It was one thing when Simon showed up at Whitley unexpectedly. That was heart attack worthy enough, but at least he’d come with my friends’ blessing, besides which I loved him. But Eric? Eric Zucker? My dreaded ex-husband? The man who alphabetized the prescription drugs in his medicine cabinet and organized the food items in his refrigerator according to their sell-by dates and actually had one of those scented deodorizer trees hanging from the rearview mirror in his car? The man who cheated on me with Lola, makeup artist to the stiffs? That Eric? What the hell was he doing with Alex Langer at Bounty Fest?

  “Hey, everyone,” she greeted us. “Meet my fiancé, Rick Zucker. He took the day off and came up here a day early. Say hi to the Three Blonde Mice, Rick.”

  Rick? She called Eric Rick? All this time when she’d been going on and on about her wonderful, generous, diamond-ring-gifting fiancé, the guy to whom she was always giving blow jobs, she’d meant Eric? He did have a brother who was a lot nicer than he was, but not nearly nice enough to fix up with Jackie.

  “Hello, Elaine,” he said with the monotone of the undertaker he was. “What an unfortunate coincidence.”

  “Hello, Rick,” I said. “So you’re finally remarrying. I never thought you’d find a woman willing to put up with you. Are you still lining up the spices in the kitchen by color? I could never figure out which went first among the reds—paprika, cayenne, or chili powder—but I guess Alex is better at it.”

  “What did you say, Elaine?” Alex shouted. “I missed that. This band is loud!”

&nb
sp; “Elaine was just reminiscing,” Eric told her. “Try not to laugh, sweetie, but she’s the ex-wife I’m always talking about—the one that gives me those nightmares when I wake up in a cold sweat.”

  “This is Eric?” Simon said to me. “Your Eric?”

  “He’s not my Eric,” I said indignantly and pointed at Alex. “He’s all hers.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said to her fiancé with a stunned giggle. “You and Elaine? Seriously?”

  “As serious as cancer,” I said. “When’s the wedding? You two have been making plans, right?”

  “You’re misinformed as usual. We haven’t even set a date,” said Eric.

  “We only know we want to be together in the near future.” Alex hooked her arm through his and gave it a squeeze.

  How odd. When they were on the phone the night before, it sure had sounded like the plans were in motion.

  “Are you interested in Chef Hill’s farm-to-table cooking?” I asked him, still trying to reconcile what I’d overheard with what they were saying now. “Or did you just come to keep Alex company, Rick?” I enjoyed using her name for him. He was so not a Rick.

  “I wouldn’t know Chef Hill from Jonah Hill,” he said. “Food is food to me. Well, except Mexican, as you may remember, Elaine. Can’t stand it.”

  I started to give him a smart-mouthed answer about how I’d blocked out most of the gory details of our marriage, but I did remember that when he and Alex were on the phone she had specifically mentioned enchiladas because he’d asked if Chef Hill had taught her how to cook them. Something didn’t add up.

  “Are you staying for the whole festival today?” I asked Eric, deciding to test the theory that was taking shape in my head. “If so, you’d better buy some earplugs. You can’t stand country music almost as much as you can’t stand Mexican food, not even guacamole.” I turned to the others and laughed. “Who in their right mind doesn’t like guacamole except this guy here?”