“I hope you didn’t make too many,” Betty said, taking the plate that Brandy slid across the counter. “On account of the rest of the ladies decided to stop off at the doughnut shop instead of coming here.”
“But the bus picks you guys up here,” Brandy reminded the woman.
“Not today. Our driver is anxious to try this new French thing the doughnut shop is doing called a beignet. It’s all the rage in New Orleans. Since Missy Stevens’s grandma relocated here after Katrina, she’s been teaching Susie Mae all her Cajun baking secrets. That’s where the habanero jelly came from. Anyhow, they was handing out samples this morning during Sunday school, so a whole mess of us decided to go over after church. The driver, too, on account of his grandma is Bernice Vernon, who’s the one leading the switch from muffins to doughnuts. I swear the woman ain’t got no loyalty.” She glanced behind her at the windows and the pair of old men who hobbled past. “See there? Headed after one of them fancy beignets. It’s shameful, I tell you. Downright shameful.”
“That’s what’s wrong with men today,” Eliza chimed in. “Always wanting something fancy when they could have what’s right in front of them.”
“Don’t mind her,” Betty added when her companion turned and headed for a nearby table. “She’s just upset because Wayland likes Genevieve Flowers. She’s that woman from Austin. Moved here with her grandkids until she got too old to get around by herself and now she’s at the senior center. She wears a fresh daisy tucked behind her ear every Sunday to church. Drives the men wild on account of it masks the mothball smell and makes her downright irresistible.”
“That would do it,” Brandy said, turning to fill a cup of coffee for Betty.
“None for me, sugar,” the old woman waved an arthritic hand. “Not on account of I’m sweet on anybody. The stuff just don’t sit well on my stomach anymore. Why, I used to have a cast-iron constitution. Could eat those fellas at the VFW under the table when it came to chili night. One time I ate six bowls in a row of Merle Jaggart’s Chile From Hell. Washed it down with an entire glass of your daddy’s hooch, too. Now I can’t even eat a can of Wolf Brand. And don’t even get me started on what I can’t drink. It’s a good thing all that brew died with your grandpa, bless his soul. It did, didn’t it?” she asked, one penciled-in eyebrow arching ever so slightly. “You and your sisters aren’t taking over the family business, are you?”
“Not at all, Miss Betty. I’ve got my hands full here.”
“Of course you do. And it’s a good thing, too. I’d hate to see any one of you girls blow yourself up like that James Harlin. And speaking of blowing”—she touched her stomach—“I think I need to use your little girls’ room. That tapioca I ate this morning is grumbling like Old Faithful.”
When Brandy motioned toward the small restroom near the door to the storeroom, Betty shook her head. “Saw Melvin Abercrombie waltz straight in there right as we come in. Based on the fact that he went back for double tapioca, I’m sure he’s going to be a little while.”
“You can use the employee restroom just on the other side of the kitchen.”
“This way?” Betty asked as she followed Brandy’s directions and rounded the counter. “My, my, it’s something back here what with all the cakes and pies. Why, it’s like I’ve died and gone to that great big Dolly Madison in the sky…” Her words faded as she disappeared into the back room.
Brandy turned back in time to see yet another handful of seniors stroll past the bakery, headed down the street to Brandy’s competition.
While she’d seen the breakfast rush slowly dissipate, watching the same thing happen to her Sunday brunch bunch made her feel even worse.
And that much more determined to get her mash into the hands of Kenny Roy’s moonshine connection before her meeting with Foggy Bottom Distillers on Friday.
After Betty returned and Brandy got her set up with a cup of tea, a blueberry muffin, and two Tums, she spent the next few hours dealing with the handful of customers that found their way into the bakery.
It seemed the girls’ choir wasn’t half as excited about the chocolate cupcakes as they were to try the chocolate-filled doughnuts down the street. Ditto for the men’s prayer circle, who traded their usual apple bread to stroll past toward the doughnut shop. Brandy fought down the anxiety and tried to keep her thoughts positive, but by the time she handed over things to Ellie and grabbed her keys and purse, she was sucking down a few Tums herself.
Forget waiting around for Kenny Roy to call her. She needed to make something happen. And she needed to do it now.
* * *
“Do you know what time it is?” Kenny Roy demanded when he hauled open the door and found Brandy standing on his doorstep.
“Three o’clock on Sunday afternoon,” she told him, her gaze shooting past to the dim interior of the house and the shadow stretched out on his living room couch.
“You have to be shittin’ me,” he growled, glancing up and shielding his eyes from the sun that blazed overhead. “Where do you get off banging on a man’s door at all hours of the morning?”
“Again, it’s not morning and I wouldn’t have to bang if you had opened the first hundred times that I knocked.”
“Damn nut job,” he muttered, moving to close the door.
But Brandy was quicker. She shoved her foot in the open doorway and bit back a wince when the wood hit her big toe. “We need to talk.”
“I told you I’d get back to you.”
“That’s not good enough.” She pushed her foot even more firmly in place, and Kenny Roy frowned.
“You know I could call the cops.”
“Please do. I’m sure they’d be very interested in that garden in your bathtub,” she murmured, remembering Tyler’s words from the night before. “Listen, all I want is a name. You don’t even have to talk to them for me. I’ll do that myself. I just need to know who.” When he hesitated, she added, “They’ll never know I heard it from you.”
“Really? And how do you figure that?”
“It’s a small town. I come from a long line of moonshiners. I could have gotten their name from my granddad. He knew every moonshiner in the county, and then some. He could have given me the name and I just so happened to track them down myself.”
“That’s real weak.”
“True, but it could work.”
He seemed to think. “And if it doesn’t?”
“They still won’t know it’s you. My lips are sealed. I swear.”
He wiped a hand over his bleary eyes and she knew he was at least considering it.
“You like muffins?” she added, desperate to tip the scale in her favor.
He seemed to think. “I could eat a muffin every now and then,” he finally said.
“What if I can guarantee you free muffins every day for an entire month?”
“Throw in a few of those triple chunk brownies and you’ve got yourself a deal.” She nodded and he added, “The Silver Dollar.”
“That’s a bar, not a person.”
“It’s all I got. My connection makes a delivery at the Silver Dollar out on Route Six every Sunday afternoon just before sundown. The bar’s closed then, but the back door is open. He stops off and drops off. He’s the only guy I know personally in the operation. You talk to him and he can hook you up.” He eyed her. “That, or mess you up. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Don’t worry about me.” It’s not as if she meant to go in with guns blazing. No, she was just going to watch and gather some information. Then she would pick and choose a time to approach and plead her case.
“That was some really good hooch you came up with,” he added. “I hope it’s worth all the trouble you’re about to find yourself in.”
“Me, too,” Brandy murmured as she descended the porch steps, walked over to old Bertha, and headed back to the bakery.
She spent the next few hours closing down shop for the day, prepping for Monday morning and listening to Ellie talk about how she wasn�
��t in any way attracted to Tyler McCall’s hot-looking rodeo buddy.
She’d finally broken down and mentioned that her hookup had been none other than the cowboy they’d seen with Tyler at Kenny Roy’s that first night.
“I mean, I knew he was good looking, but he was even hotter when I got an up-close-and-personal look,” Ellie said. “I was like, wow you’re something, and he was like, wow, so are you, and bam, the next thing I know we were going at it like a couple of rabbits.”
“Too much information,” Brandy told the woman, placing a tray of bread loaves in the warmer before checking the timer on the oven.
“I know, I know. I don’t usually kiss and tell, but this is different. I just can’t help myself. Do you know I even mentioned him to Betty when she was poking around back here looking for the bathroom? Spent ten minutes listening to her tell me what a hellcat she used to be back in the day before her stomach started acting up and she got bunions.” Ellie shook her head. “What bunions have to do with a sex drive, I’ll never know, but Miss Betty seemed convinced there is a direct correlation.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Exactly, which shows you just what a number this guy is doing on me. I was actually taking pointers from Miss Betty. I don’t know, I just feel like the more I talk it out, the more I can understand why I can’t stop talking about him.”
“Maybe you’re talking about him because you like him.”
“Are you freaking serious?” Ellie gave her a horrified look. “I don’t even know him. It was just a one-night stand.”
Sometimes that’s all it takes.
The thought floated through her mind before she could stop it. A ludicrous notion because it most certainly took more than one night of sex—or even a few dozen—to really know someone.
It took talking, connecting.
Which she’d done last night with Tyler McCall.
“I really need to get out of here,” she blurted. To get her mind on something more productive. “Lock up for me?” she asked Ellie.
“You know it. Say, maybe I can see what Lila thinks.” She turned toward the back room where the short, squat woman stood icing coffee cakes for the following morning. Lila was a no-frills kind of girl when it came to looks. Her hair lay straight and limp, her face free of makeup. “Not that she has lots of experience, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.” Ellie headed for the kitchen, and Brandy grabbed her purse.
She pushed Tyler to the farthest corner of her mind and walked out to her car.
The sun was just shy of dropping below the horizon when she pulled up to the Silver Dollar Bar & Grill.
CHAPTER 16
The parking lot was all but empty with the exception of an old red pickup truck parked off to the side and a small Ford Fusion that sat next to it.
She pulled into the spot next to the Fusion and busied herself looking at her phone, as if waiting for someone. Seconds turned to minutes and minutes to half an hour before she heard the rumble of an engine and saw an old rusted-out silver pickup truck pull into the parking lot.
She sank lower in her seat and stared through the slats in the steering wheel as the vehicle pulled around the back and disappeared.
Fifteen minutes passed painfully slow before the truck reappeared. It rumbled past and she strained her eyes to see the driver. It wasn’t a face she recognized and she knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as discovering that it was, indeed, someone she already knew. She was going to have to go to a lot more trouble if she wanted to find out the man’s identity.
The truck pulled out of the drive and headed down the road. Brandy counted to five and then she started the car and followed. She stayed a decent way back as the truck neared the interstate and prayed that he wouldn’t get on and haul ass.
He didn’t.
Instead, he pulled into a small convenience store that sat on the left. She felt a surge of victory.
She swerved into a parking spot while the man eased up to a gas pump, killed the engine, and climbed out. Sure enough, she’d never seen him before. He was tall, with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, a jaw that was three days past a five o’clock shadow, and dark-brown eyes. Tall. Attractive even, if Brandy had been looking to hook up.
She wasn’t.
She needed a name. An identity.
She watched him walk inside. The glass door rocked shut behind him. A few minutes later, he strolled back out, a bottled Coke in one hand and his wallet in the other. He climbed into the old rusted-out truck, gunned the engine, and then pulled out. A few seconds later, he hit the entrance to the interstate and disappeared down the highway.
Brandy drew a deep breath, climbed out of Bertha, and walked inside. While she might not know the driver, she most certainly knew the clerk standing behind the counter at the Pac-n-Save.
Ivy Earline Sawyer-Hilstead had bright-red hair teased into a perfectly coiffed beehive that had gone out of style decades ago, along with her cat’s-eye glasses hanging from a gold chain around her neck. But since she was just this side of seventy, no one had enlightened her to that all-important fact. The glasses slid down her nose, revealing bright-blue shadow and heavily rimmed eyes.
“Well, lookee who we have here,” Ivy said. “If it ain’t Brandy Tucker.”
“Hi, Miss Ivy.”
“Stopped by your place a few days ago and had one of them brownies. Wasn’t nearly as good as the ones I make at home, mind you, but I guess it’ll do for most folks around these parts that ain’t never had a decent batch.”
Ivy wasn’t just old, she was mean, too. Add a heavy dose of snobbiness courtesy of her last name and the one-hundred-year-old feud that had been raging between the Tuckers and the Sawyers, and to say Ivy was unpleasant would have been a huge understatement.
Still, the woman was old. That is, just this side of heaven and so Brandy minded her p’s and q’s even though she wanted to tell Ivy that a box of Betty Crocker Fudge Brownie Supreme couldn’t hold a candle to her award-winning chocolate nirvana brownies.
“I’m sure you could teach me a thing or two,” she told Ivy. “You’ve got so many years of baking on me, after all. A lot of years.” The emphasis on lot wasn’t lost on the woman and she stiffened. “But I didn’t come to swap tips,” Brandy added. “That gentleman, the one who was just here in that old pickup truck, he lost something on the road back there,” she blurted out—the first thing she could think of. “A blanket flew out of the bed and fell on the side of the road. I grabbed it. I was hoping to return it but he pulled out of here before I could stop him.”
“A blanket?”
“A horse blanket,” Brandy nodded, feeding the lie with an ease that actually surprised her. “You know how expensive those things are. I’d hate for him to get to wherever it is that he’s going and realize it just blew away. If you knew his name, I could get it back to him.”
“Ain’t got time to play the Good Samaritan, little girl. I got work to do.” Ivy indicated the half-answered crossword puzzle on the counter next to her. “Find out yourself.”
“Okay, if you’re not interested in a reward, then I guess I’ll just figure it out on my own—”
“Reward? What reward?”
“The one I’m offering for information.”
“And why would you offer a reward just to return a smelly old horse blanket?”
“Because I don’t want to be saddled with someone else’s belongings.” When Ivy didn’t seem the least bit convinced, Brandy added, “That, and he’s awful cute.”
“So now we get to the real reason.” The old woman swept a glance from Brandy’s head to the sizable chest pressing against her bakery T-shirt. “I should have known what you were up to the moment I saw you.”
The dig sliced through Brandy, but she wasn’t about to flinch. It didn’t matter what Ivy thought. What anyone thought for that matter. She knew the truth. She knew she wasn’t the slut that everyone believed her to be.
But if playing the part now would help get her that much clo
ser to Kenny Roy’s moonshine connection …
“What do you say? You don’t want to stand in the way of true lust, do you?”
The woman’s gaze narrowed. “What’s in it for me?”
“I’d offer brownies, but yours are so much better—”
“I’ll take ’em. Not ’cause they’re better than mine, mind you. But I’m so tired after being on my feet all day that I don’t get much time to whip up any. They’re a damn sight better than store-bought, I suppose.”
“Great. Stop by tomorrow and I’ll have a dozen waiting for you.”
“Make it two and you’ve got yourself a deal.” Brandy nodded and Ivy added, “Never seen him before.” She turned toward the register. “But he used a credit card. Let me see…” She licked her finger and started picking through the small stack of receipts. “Here we go. Name’s Ryder Jax.”
The name echoed in Brandy’s head, pushing and pulling at her memory. He was one of the bootleggers her grandfather had done business with on occasion and part of the infamous trio of moonshine runners who delivered from here to Houston, and every county in between.
While she’d never seen the man firsthand, she’d heard his name mentioned more than once by her gramps. Ryder and his buddies were local legends, and more than a little dangerous. But then, that was the nature of the business. “Thanks, Miss Ivy,” Brandy said as she turned to walk out of the store.
“Don’t thank me,” the woman called after her. “Just make sure my brownies are boxed and ready by two.”
* * *
She had a name.
While it wasn’t much, it was enough to fuel her hope despite the crappy day at the bakery. She made one last stop at Sweet Somethings to box up some muffins before leaving them on Kenny Roy’s doorstep and heading home.
Home, she vowed. She’d spent two nights with Tyler already. It was time for a break.
She held tight to her decision as she started down Main Street. Besides, it was way too early. Barely eight o’clock. She couldn’t very well show up now.
That’s what she told herself. No way did her reluctance have anything to do with the fact that she was starting to like Tyler McCall. Instead, she turned left and hit the road toward home.
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