Lavender Lies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  The Whiz gave me a curious look. “Are you going to call him McQuaid even after you’re married to him?”

  “Yep,” I said. I was a criminal attorney and he was a cop when we met, and our friendship began on a last-name basis. He could call me China if he wanted to, but to me, he’d always be McQuaid. “I intend to keep my own name too,” I added. “I may be getting married, but I’m not losing my self.”

  Ruby turned my hand over. “Now, about the heart line.”

  “Does she have one?” the Whiz asked. She propped her feet up on the porch railing, leaned back in her chair, and clasped her hands behind her head. “I’ve always thought of China in terms of head, not heart.”

  “Of course she has a heart. It’s right there.” Ruby pointed with a gorgeous, gold-painted nail. “See that line? It ends between the middle and index fingers, which indicates a realistic approach to relationships. She’s not exactly a romantic.”

  “Tell us something we don’t already know,” the Whiz said. “China does not have one ounce of romance in her soul. How McQuaid ever persuaded her to marry him, I don’t know.”

  “It was the other way round,” Ruby replied, before I could open my mouth. “China was the one who decided it was time to get married, after all those years of saying no every time he asked her. And McQuaid was the one who—” She stopped, biting her lip. “Who said yes,” she went on. “See? Right there? That’s the marriage line.”

  Ruby’s general outline was okay as far as it went, but it left out eight months of painful detail. McQuaid had gotten involved with a young, pretty law enforcement officer just about the time he accepted a temporary assignment with the Texas Rangers. He ended their brief relationship before I discovered it, but the job with the Rangers nearly ended him. In February he was badly wounded in a gunfight with a carload of dope dealers on a deserted South Texas highway. At first, the doctors were afraid that he might not make it—and then that the injury to his spine would leave him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

  But an indomitable will and a therapist who is as stubborn as a Texas mule enabled him, at last, to stand and walk. He wears a brace on his left leg and uses a pair of lightweight aluminum canes, but he came home from the convalescent center in August. He has even accepted an interim appointment as Acting Police Chief of Pecan Springs—Bubba Harris had been the chief until he got mad and quit in June. McQuaid gets around slowly and he tires easily, but being back in law enforcement (he’s a former homicide detective) has been good for his morale, and things are definitely looking up. When you total up all the pain we’ve been through, add the months McQuaid was out of commission, and factor in my six miserable weeks in an uncomfortable cast, it hasn’t exactly been the Best Year of Our Lives. But it has taught us that we want to spend the rest of it together, and that’s got to be worth something.

  The Whiz made a skeptical noise. “So what does China’s marriage line have to say about her future with McQuaid?”

  “It says ... It says—” Ruby scrutinized my palm. “Actually, it doesn’t say much. It’s a pretty short line. Not very definite, either.” She frowned. “Which is not to suggest that—I mean, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that—”

  “That our marriage is doomed?” I asked. “That the wedding might not come off?”

  “Ridiculous,” the Whiz said. “Don’t be a nervous Nellie. Of course the wedding will come off.” She looked at her watch. “In exactly six days and one hour, you’ll be taking McQuaid for better or worse. Until death do you part. Which is not to say,” she added judiciously, “that the marriage will be a success. Into every marriage a little rain must fall.”

  “Good grief,” I said.

  But Justine was right about the nerves. While I loved McQuaid without qualification, the jury was still out on marriage. After all, we didn’t require the blessing of the State of Texas to live together comfortably (we’d been doing that for over a year), and no marriage certificate under the sun is going to make me a better mother to McQuaid’s son, Brian. I’ve been doing that more or less well already—although he’s discovered girls now, and all bets are off. But McQuaid and I had finally persuaded one another that we were in this for the long haul and that it was time to make a stronger and more binding commitment. So it was too late for second or third thoughts. There was no way I could back out now, even if I wanted to. Which was only between the hours of midnight and four A.M., five or six nights a week. Well, maybe seven.

  “Only six days left?” Ruby cried. She turned anxiously to me. “Have you heard from Betsy and Bertha? When are they coming?” She gestured toward the box of lavender hearts. “When we get done with these, there are the sachets to make and the greens to cut and the bows to make.” Her voice rose. “And that isn’t even considering the flowers and food and—”

  “Relax, Ruby,” I said. “They’ll be here on Wednesday, and the Merryweathers have agreed to help them.”

  Bertha Reppert and Betsy Williams have written books on herbal weddings and both were in Texas for a meeting of the Texas Herb Growers and Marketers Association—which I had to miss because I already had my hands full. When they heard that McQuaid and I were getting married, Betsy offered to help with the flowers, Bertha agreed to supervise the table decorations, and the entire membership of the Myra Merryweather Herb Guild volunteered to be their assistants. The Merryweathers promised to bring baskets of fresh flowers form their gardens to supplement mine, and Holly and Merry Christmas, who operate the Christmas Flower Farm near New Braunfels, offered to let us come and pick what we needed at the last moment. Justine produced the invitation list on her computer and Sheila Dawson was taking care of the music. Ruby was putting the final touches on the garden and the tearoom, where the wedding was scheduled to take place. Theoretically, all McQuaid and I had to do was show up.

  “They won’t be here until Wednesday?” Ruby fretted.

  “That ought to be plenty of time,” Justine said. She doesn’t do teamwork any better than I do. If it had been her wedding, she would have planned it with the efficiency of a quartermaster and conducted it with the aplomb of Leonard Bernstein—all by herself. I doubt that the groom would have been asked to do anything but say “I do.”

  “It may seem like plenty of time to you,” Ruby said, “but not to me. Between this wedding and the opening of the tearoom, I’m a nervous wreck.” She glanced at her watch. “In fact, I should be at the shop this very minute, checking on the painters. They’re finishing up this afternoon. And after that, the pantry shelves have to be installed before the inspector can come out and tell us we’re legal.”

  “If you’ll recall, you were the one who wanted to have the grand opening two weeks after the wedding,” I pointed out self-righteously. “You were also the one who kept adding on to the guest list. I was the one who suggested that McQuaid and I could ask Maude to marry us at her house.” Maude Porterfield has been a JP in Pecan Springs for over forty years and still leads a busy life marrying people, holding traffic court, and signing death certificates.

  “Oh, hush,” Ruby said. “Do you think I’d let you sneak off and get married in Maude’s back parlor? No way. We are all going to enjoy your wedding. Then you can go on your honeymoon, and when you get back we’ll have the grand opening to look forward to.” She glanced up as a red Ford Explorer pulled into the circular drive. “Oh, look—it’s Sheila.”

  Sheila Dawson, a.k.a. Smart Cookie, was slim, blond, and gorgeously chic in her working clothes: silky red blouse, smart navy blazer and skirt, medium heels, and gold jewelry. But while Sheila might look like Miss Dallas, I wouldn’t mess with her. She’s an experienced cop with ten years of law enforcement, culminating in her current position as chief of security at Central Texas State University. Smart Cookie is also one of the three candidates the City Council is considering for Bubba’s job as Pecan Springs’s police chief, the position McQuaid is temporarily filling. The Council was supposed to make a decision on the chief’s position several weeks ago, b
ut it’s apparently in no great hurry to make up its collective mind. Several members have said privately that chief of police is an unsuitable job for a woman and have been pressuring McQuaid to accept a permanent appointment. McQuaid has already told them that he intends to go back to his teaching job in the Criminal Justice Department at Central Texas State, and after that gunfight in February, I am definitely opposed to being a police chief’s wife. But listening between the lines when he talks about what’s going on at headquarters, I think I hear a hankering after his old calling. I hope not. Anyway, I’m rooting for Sheila.

  As Sheila came up the steps, there was a unanimous chorus of hi’s followed by a round of “Did you bring the CDs for the reception?” (from Ruby); “Are you still in line for the chiefs job?” (Justine); and “How’s everything going?” (me).

  Sheila dropped into a chair. “What are you doing out on the porch? Isn’t it cooler inside?” Howard Cosell, who is madly in love with her, rose from his reclining position and licked her calf, mooning up at her with his big, sad eyes. She patted him on the head, handed Ruby a stack of CDs, and took a newspaper out of her large bag. “Have y’all seen today’s Enterprise?”

  “Celtic,” Ruby noted approvingly, shuffling the CDs. “Perfect.”

  “Wonderful,” the Whiz said. China’s marriage may be doomed, but the wedding reception is shaping up nicely. “Have a bride’s cookie,” she offered, and passed Sheila the plate. “They’re flavored with mace.”

  Sheila blinked. “Mace?”

  “Tiny shavings of the wooden staff carried by figures of authority,” the Whiz replied. “Symbolic of female dominance over the male, which is the appropriate distribution of power in a marriage.”

  “Ignore her,” Ruby told Sheila. “She’s showing off. Mace is a spice, sort of like nutmeg, only sweeter. There are chopped pecans in the cookies too, but no shavings. No splinters, either.” She looked down at the CDs. “These are fine for the reception, Sheila, but what about the music before and after the ceremony?”

  “I was thinking maybe Pachelbel’s Canon,” Sheila said. “Then the Bridal Chorus and the Wedding March at the end.”

  “That’s a heavy dose of classical,” Ruby said. “How about some contemporary love songs? How about ‘All I Ask,’ from Phantom of the Opera? I love that line about let me be your freedom.” She sniffled. “It always makes me cry.”

  “Of course it does,” I said firmly. “It should. That song isn’t about love, it’s about co-dependency.”

  “I told you,” the Whiz said, shaking her head. “Not an ounce of romance. How about ‘The Wind Beneath My Wings’?”

  “ ‘To Dream the Impossible Dream’?” I suggested. The Whiz grinned and Ruby shuddered. I turned to Sheila. “What’s in the newspaper? One of my articles?”

  A few months ago, Hark Hibler, the managing editor of the Enterprise, talked me into editing the paper’s weekly Home and Garden page, which consists of a few recipes, some gardening tips, and an article or two. I certainly don’t do it for the money, which is just about enough to pay for the Wednesday Special at Bean’s Bar & Grill. But I figure that the publicity will bring customers into the shop and help to spread the word about our classes, which always helps to attract new people. And with the chain stores getting into herbs in a major way, Thyme and Seasons needs all the advertising it can get. I’m even thinking about putting up a web site.

  “Nope, it’s not your article,” Sheila said, and opened the paper. “Look at this.” She pointed.

  “ ‘Edgar Coleman Dead in Bloody Garage Murder,’ ” the Whiz read out loud. She looked questioningly at Sheila. “So who’s Edgar Coleman?”

  “Edgar Coleman,” Ruby said, “is a local real estate shark.” She glanced at the paper. “To tell the unvarnished truth, the only thing surprising about this murder is that it hasn’t happened before now. Edgar definitely had a karma problem.”

  “Ruby,” I tch-tched, “how you talk.”

  She tossed her head. “Well, it’s true. He’s made hundreds of enemies over that annexation proposal. Read the Letters to the Editor, if you want to know how people feel about him.”

  “Annexation proposal?” the Whiz asked.

  “Blessing Ranch,” Sheila told her. “Five hundred acres west of town. A classic example of bad development. Coleman carved it up into five-acre parcels, stuck big, fancy houses on the land, and promised roads and a water system. But he didn’t make good on his promises. Instead, he’s been pushing the Council to annex the development as part of Pecan Springs’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, and he’s sweetened the pot by offering to throw in some choice land along Pecan Creek, right next to the city park. But the deal is highly controversial. The Blessing Ranch residents want a reliable water supply and paved roads, but they don’t want to pay city taxes. The Council wants to expand the tax base and there are a couple of prime commercial properties involved. But Pecan Springs doesn’t have the money to extend water and sewer lines to all those residents. And while lots of people want to see Pecan Park expanded, they know that annexing the Blessing Ranch subdivision won’t bring in enough taxes to pay for the utilities.”

  “That land should never have been developed in the first place,” I said, “at least, not the way Coleman did it. That’s fragile land out there, and he pretty well ruined the wildlife habitat. Not to mention that he cleared off several large building sites on the slope of Lookout Mountain without paying any attention to erosion control. He hasn’t sold the lots yet, and every time it rains, another piece of the hillside slides down.”

  “Ah,” the Whiz said wisely. “So it was the Sierra Club that offed him.”

  “Or Greenpeace,” Ruby said in a serious tone. “If you ask me, somebody took out a contract on him.” At my skeptical look, she added, heatedly, “Well, it happens. People hire hit men all the time. And don’t tell me I ought to feel sorry for that jerk. I don’t, not one bit.”

  “Letty Coleman is the one I feel sorry for,” I said. “She’s nothing like her husband.” I turned to Sheila. “McQuaid didn’t know about Coleman’s murder when he went to work this morning, so it must have just happened. I wonder how Hark got it into the paper so fast—and how he got that headline past Arlene and her red pencil.”

  The Whiz looked at the headline. “What’s wrong with it?”

  Ruby laughed. “Three things. ‘Dead,’ ‘bloody,’ and ‘murder.’ Arlene wouldn’t approve.”

  “That’s the old Arlene,” I said. “Now that it’s her turn to worry about the bottom line, it’s a different newspaper.”

  When Arlene Seidensticker took over the weekly Enterprise from her father, Arnold, she turned it into a daily. Arnold’s idea of hard copy was the police blotter at the bottom of page 20, which reported such criminal events as old Mr. Spitzer getting picked up for drunk and disorderly again, or Mrs. Sampson’s goats jumping their fence and terrorizing the neighborhood. If you wanted the nitty-gritty details of the $200,000 embezzlement in the Adams County Hospital accounting office or the assault on the ten-year-old girl who was on her way home from choir practice, you had to catch it on the local grapevine. It wasn’t that we didn’t have crime in Pecan Springs—it was just that Arnold Seidensticker didn’t believe in telling anybody about it. Traditionally, Pecan Springs washed its dirty laundry in secret, and it was clean and sweet-smelling by the time the Enterprise hung it out to dry. The times are changing, though. For better or worse, Arlene’s daily is tougher, grittier, and does a better job of covering the news than her father’s old weekly.

  “Coleman’s wife found the body about seven this morning,” Sheila said. “Hark was driving past the house when the first police car showed up. He got to see the crime scene before they closed it off.”

  Hark Hibler is the latest in Ruby’s long string of boyfriends. I like him very much, although I’m not sure the two of them are a good match. Ruby is wonderfully wild and exotic, like eating mango ice cream naked between satin sheets. Hark is down-home Texas, chicken f
ried steak with mashed potatoes and canned green beans. Separately, they’re fine. Together ... well, it’s a weird combination.

  The Whiz took her feet off the porch rail. “Who dun-nit?” she asked. “Any arrests yet?”

  “I have no idea,” Sheila said. “China will have to ask McQuaid.”

  “Sure,” I said amiably. “I’ll snoop around and get the lowdown for you. Then the next time you run into a Council member, you can casually toss out some of the details of the investigation, thereby appearing to have an inside track and enhancing your chances of—”

  Sheila bopped my shoulder with her fist. She does weight training, and her bop was not gentle.

  “Okay.” I rubbed my shoulder. “You can appear ignorant and uninformed and blow your chance at the job. But Howard Cosell will still love you.”

  “Personally, I like the idea, Sheila.” Ruby began to braid another lavender heart. “Why don’t you volunteer to help with the investigation? The Council will see what you can do, and the turkeys who keep saying women don’t have what it takes will have to eat shit and die.”

  “Absolutely not,” Sheila said firmly. “This is McQuaid’s case, and he won’t welcome any help.” She patted my arm. “I hope I didn’t hurt you, China. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”

  McQuaid’s case, huh? I didn’t like the sound of that. To comfort myself, I reached for another cookie.

  “There’s a bright side to this,” Ruby observed thoughtfully, adding a white bow to her lavender heart. “With Coleman dead, the Council can stop arguing about the annexation proposal, at least for now. They can get busy and hire a chief of police.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Sheila said. “Anyway,” she added glumly, “I’m not sure I want the job.”

  “Oh, yeah?” The Whiz was curious. “How come? Is the university upping the ante?” Central Texas State was not happy when they heard that their female chief of security was on the Council’s short list. I wouldn’t be surprised if they offered her a nice raise.