“Good night, Miz Jefferies.” She said. She hefted the rifle into her arms, being careful to keep it pointed at the ground a foot or so in front of her, and marched off toward the apartment building.
“Sweet dreams, Sarah.”
Time for me to catch up with a bath tub and that plastic container of étouffée.
But the day that began with Sarah and then Annie would end with Sarah and then Annie. Standing against the mulberry tree at the far corner of my backyard, I saw Annie talking into a smart phone. I could only see her because the phone was lighting her face.
This behavior might have been strange in another town. In Knockemstiff, cell phone reception was so spotty that most people did not bother to own one. I got a smart phone years ago because I thought it would allow me to run errands and stay in touch with the salon. But I didn’t have coverage around my house, at least not anywhere closer than the mulberry tree, and couldn’t get a reliable signal in very many other places, so I rarely turned the phone on.
People who did use cell phones in Knockemstiff could be seen wandering in random directions with their phones held aloft to catch a stray signal. I had once seen someone else standing by my mulberry tree with a phone, so I knew it must be a spot where the signal usually came through. Do mulberries attract cell phone signals?
The strange thing about it was the time. It was nearly midnight, so I was curious about who she could be yakking with at this hour. I think of myself as curious rather than snoopy, so it didn’t occur to me to sneak over and eavesdrop. In any case, sneaking up on people is impractical when you smell like a dumpster. If only I had heard what was going on, things might have turned out differently.
Chapter 3
No one saw August on Monday or Tuesday. She called in sick at the Marshé Grosri food mart, according to the cashier who filled in for her. (This store with the Creole name was founded by a Cajun family, possibly back when the river still flowed by here.)
Betina managed to get August on the phone once. August refused to go shopping — either on or off the Internet — or come to the salon for a manicure, the two most therapeutic activities Betina could think of. Betina said that August mostly said things like “What must my mother think of me?” and “Who would do such a thing?”
When Betina told us about the conversation, she reported matter of factly that she had told August, “Being a slut doesn’t seem so bad. Why, after high school, I thought of moving to Baton Rouge and giving it a try myself. Just the thought of wearing tiny little skirts and having men trailing along behind me with their tongues hanging out makes me want to go out and buy new shoes.”
Apparently that didn't help. “In fact,” Betina said, “that was when she started to cry.”
Betina sighed and looked down at the floor. “I guess I’m not a very good counselor.” She went back to cutting hair, completely oblivious to the mouths that had fallen open at her casual admission she had entertained the thought of going for a slut lifestyle.
It’s funny that until then, none of us (with the possible exception of the Bald Eagle) had thought of Betina that way. She wore little sexy dresses, but they weren’t that little, and they weren’t that sexy. Mostly. OK, now that Betina had opened the topic, some of her outfits were leaning up against slutty the way she leaned up against some of her clients. All in good fun, right? Eaashhh!
The salon crowd would have liked to discuss the slut concept in much greater detail but felt constrained by Betina’s presence. I don’t think they needed to feel constrained, since Betina was so forthright about her thoughts on the subject.
I was just as glad to drop the discussion, and made a mental note to have a chat with Betina about the way she came across. Not everyone would think it was all in good fun. As my daddy used to tell me, “When you cast your lure in the bayou, you catch whatever bites.”
He meant this as a warning to me, an overview of his philosophy of life, and a come-on for my mother. If my mother was around when he said this, she would say something like, “I caught you by the bayou, didn’t I? Let this be a lesson to you, Savannah. Be real careful where you cast your lure. You might catch something you don’t want to invite home to dinner.” Then she would pretend to cast a lure in my daddy’s direction, and he would pretend to be reeled in until she netted him in her arms and subdued his fishy wiggles with wiggles of her own and a series of increasingly affectionate kisses. The fishy wiggles would become a dance around the room.
When I was little, I would roll my eyes at this performance and hope with all my might that none of my neighborhood friends would see it. Then one day when I was about Sarah’s age my worst fears were realized. My parents launched into their fishing pantomime, and I could not distract the little friend who was sitting on the floor of our living room. She held the doll we had been playing with and gaped at the performance.
I knew that life as I had known it was over. I was mentally packing my belongings in preparation for running away to Paudy. My parents’ performance reached its inevitable conclusion, in which they disappeared down the hall. My friend and I heard the bedroom door close.
Before I could bury my head under a sofa pillow, my friend threw her head back and said, “Savannah! Your parents are so sweet! You are so lucky.”
I think I said something clever like “Really?”
“My parents act like they hardly know each other. At least, that’s how they act when they’re getting along. It’s hard to understand how my daddy ever got close enough to my mama to plant the seed that made me.”
I’m sure I blushed down to my toes, back up to the top of my head, and down to my toes again. My parents were open in their affections, yet I was embarrassed by them. My friend’s parents rarely showed affection, yet she was an avid admirer of “the whole birds-and-bees thing,” as she called it.
I eventually came around to my friend’s point of view, but I always remembered the cautionary aspect of my father’s words. “When you cast your lure in the bayou, you catch whatever bites.”
Now I wondered what Betina would make of his country wisdom. Betina seemed to think of herself as a city girl who’s in a country bubble that will eventually pop, and she’ll magically find herself living in a town large enough to have a shopping mall. In the meantime, she floated above the surface of Knockemstiff without letting much of it get on her.
Betina had thought of me as a sort of substitute mother since her own parents left to homestead in Alaska. A couple of days after Betina graduated from high school, her parents drove off in their over-loaded SUV. She wasn’t sure whenever she might see them again.
When Nellie’s husband Rudy heard about this move to Alaska, he thought it was the best idea he'd ever heard of. He wanted to load up their truck right now and go. He thought the wilderness would be perfect for them. By that he meant a different wilderness than the one they already lived in.
Rudy raved about Alaska endlessly and even began reading books about how to tan the hides of small mammals and make jerky. Nellie found this remarkable because “Rudy has not read more than a half dozen books in his entire life.” She let him play out his Alaska fascination for a while without much comment. Then one day when Rudy’s mother was visiting, Nellie mentioned offhandedly to Mrs. Phlint that Alaska seemed like a good option for the family since alcohol would be hard to come by. Rudy’s Alaska ambitions quietly faded away. No doubt Momma had something to do with that.
In the salon, we had more people than usual hanging around in the café area. Pete was going to the Marshé Grosri two or three times a day to restock our pastry supply.
Everyone wanted to discuss August. Everyone knew August, of course. She had grown up in Knockemstiff and been Betina’s shadow since grade school. As I said, the two girls were always about equally attractive, but where Betina’s figure was dramatic and her personality outgoing, August was willowy and shy. As Betina began dating in high school and became a cheerleader, August mostly watched her friend’s romantic adventures from the si
delines.
All day we talked about ways to convince August that the situation was not as bad as she seemed to think. We tried to come up with some way to convince her to consider the SLUT painting a bad joke. Someone said we should tell her that whoever painted her windshield was badly in need of psychiatric care and “some of those psychoprofen meds.”
Everybody thought the meds idea was good.
“August’s the one who needs the meds,” someone added. “How about some happy pills for her?”
“Aw, August just needs to knock back a couple of stiff drinks and forget about it,” said another tongue waggler.
In its own way, this comment got to the heart of the matter. Whichever way we looked at it, August’s reaction seemed overdone, even for a shy, conservative person. The truth was that we couldn't understand why she was taking it so hard.
Along with the August SLUT issue as a topic of conversation, people in the salon talked about who could have done the spray painting and broken the two shop windows. Hour by hour, as people came and went, this discussion always went through the following points in this order:
1. Who could have done such a thing?
2. Maybe someone doesn’t like people who seem foreign.
3. But August isn’t foreign.
4. Who could have done such a thing?
It was always the same, over and over, which became a little wearing for those of us who worked in the salon. Gossip around the salon generally tended to be repetitive, but this was a little harder to take because we knew it weighed on Betina.
For better or worse, by Tuesday afternoon the gossip and theories had gone completely wild. Someone came up with the novel idea that maybe the Paramabets, Mr. Keshian, and August were NSA agents, and the bad guys had located them here and were trying to draw attention to them. This theory did, at least, raise some new questions for people to bat around, not least among them: what would NSA agents be looking for in Knockemstiff?
The discussion was finally put to rest when someone asked, “Do you really think anyone in the NSA could make tacos as well as the Paramabets?” No one thought that sounded plausible. And no one asked how people from Delhi could make tacos that good. For people who grew up in Knockemstiff, it just made sense.
The next theory was space aliens. This idea was proposed in all seriousness by a fishwife who lived out by the bayou. “We see funny things out there,” she said. Given the amount of cheap gin that was consumed along the bayou, this revelation came as no surprise.
The aliens may or may not have abducted the fishwife and experimented on her, but they certainly lifted the mood of people in the salon, aside from one or two who worried that the aliens might abduct and experiment on them. I suppose aliens are out there in the universe somewhere, and it’s easy to believe that they are hundreds of times smarter than us on earth. Let’s face it, human beings don’t seem all that smart some days.
In any case, I’ve never been able to think of any earthly reason (or unearthly reason) why aliens could possibly be interested in me. I’m just not that interesting. If I were more interesting, maybe I’d have a steady boyfriend.
I thought about being interesting and having a steady boyfriend, mostly the latter, as I locked up the salon for the day and walked over to the Bacon Up Diner. Most Tuesday evenings I join friends at the Bacon Up for dinner, conversation, and a beer. If I felt extravagant, I’d have a glass of wine. Tonight was definitely a beer night.
As its name suggests, the Bacon Up specializes in putting bacon on or in nearly anything you can eat, if you can call that specializing. Try the bacon gumbo, hushpuppies with bacon bits, bacon beignets, or bacon-n-grits. Claude, the owner, said, frequently, “Bacon never hurt nothin’.” Some of us thought to ourselves “except one’s arteries.”
Honestly, though, I don’t worry too much about that sort of thing, which is probably why I’m not quite svelte. Technically, I average about a pound overweight, maybe two pounds after dinner at the Bacon Up. As my mama used to say, unknowingly quoting Oscar Wilde, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” I would add, “especially at the Bacon Up.”
It’s interesting to note that back when scientific research proved that the road to heart disease was paved with saturated fat, the news did not seem to decrease business at the Bacon Up. Nor did the Bacon Up see more business when scientific research eventually proved that saturated fat isn’t much worse for you than unsaturated veggie oil.
It wasn’t that the people of Knockemstiff are unimpressed by science. People here are largely admirers of the scientific method, just as they might admire a Massey Ferguson model 35 tractor that’s still running or a person who can reliably tell a good joke.
No, the lack of a response to saturated fat was not due to a disrespect for science. It had more to do with the slow pace of life here. The decade or two after the onset of the saturated fat scare was simply not sufficient for people to come to terms with a new diet. By the time they had started to figure out what items in their diet to eliminate and what items to add and how to add those items, the whole thing was over, whoosh. As far as people in Knockemstiff were concerned, they might as well have been trying to catch a bullet in their teeth. Sorry, I do tend to get carried away with my own brand of banter.
On this particular Tuesday night, I decided to catch one of Claude’s homemade boudin sausages in my teeth with a side of collards-n-bacon. Also the hushpuppies.
Although my friends found the theories about NSA agents and space aliens entertaining if unconvincing, nobody had anything better to offer. The general consensus was that some teenager was bored and decided to mix things up a bit. The whole matter would probably fade away in a week or two. August would convince her mother that she was not a slut. Life would return to normal.
For now, the events of the week had been a little trying, so it was a two-beer night for me. Two is about my limit — enough to make me glad I was walking home rather than driving.
I do weave just a little when I walk on two beers. Yes, I'm a lightweight.
I was one of the last to leave the Bacon Up, weaving goodbye. Knockemstiff has only one street light, which is in front of the post office, so I carried a flashlight in my purse. I don’t use it when I walk familiar streets on a clear night, though. When my eyes adjust to the dark, I can see better by moonlight or just starlight. I get a better sense of what’s around me. My daddy taught me that.
The heat of the day had ebbed by now. The usual afternoon showers had held off until evening. While I’d been in the diner, we'd had a couple of little thunder boomers that had rattled the windows but dumped most of their rain elsewhere. The sky had cleared, it was a pleasant evening, and I walked along the tree-lined street toward home thinking about something other than smashed and painted windows.
News I’d heard over dinner weaved through my thoughts. Jimmy and Lucile Pageant’s daughter was expecting a boy. Lucile was making a quilt. The Emersons were adding a room onto their house.
As I turned onto Tennessee Street, my thoughts turned to home. My garden had been neglected lately, so if the showers held off over the weekend, I needed to do some serious weeding. I’d have some good tomatoes by now, along with the snap beans and okra. The crowder peas might not be producing much. The summer squash were already promising to bear multitudes.
Thinking about produce, I decided to invite Connor O’Sullivan to dinner. I’m not much of a Cajun cook, but he liked what I made or did a very convincing job of pretending to like it. I wondered if I was interesting enough to interest Connor. He created his own conversational whirl that carried me along. I always wondered if this effortless Irish craic, as he called it, indicated that he particularly enjoyed my company or he was just like that with everyone. Some people can’t help but be interesting.
One positive point about my prospects with Connor was that when work took him out of town, he trusted me to take care of his dog, an old blue tick hound named Finnegan. This was an honest tribute on the part o
f any man in Louisiana.
I was 50 yards from my house on Tennessee Street, thinking about the dinner with Connor, when I saw the shape of a person lying on the grassy verge by the side of the road. The form was small, and I thought about Sarah sleeping on the lawn, but this person was bigger than that. And they were twisted in an unnatural way.
I rushed over and knelt down, took the person’s shoulders in my hands and almost shouted, “Are you all right?” But I knew immediately that this person was not alright, not alright at all.
I fumbled in my purse for my flashlight, and it seemed like forever before I finally felt the familiar shape. When I switched on the light, I could see it was Annie Simmerson in her charcoal blazer. I could also see the blood, and I immediately stood upright with a pang of fear, shining the flashlight around me.
Annie was pretty clearly dead. Whoever or whatever had killed her might still be around. And if she wasn’t dead she needed help that I couldn’t give. I ran the rest of the way home and called the police, woke somebody up, who woke up our old police chief Tanner, who woke up the parish sheriff and lots of other people, who all arrived eventually at my little clapboard house and the grassy verge where Annie lay dead.
Chapter 4
When terrible things happen to me or around me, I get alarmed and then quickly settle into a steely calm. Well, settle is not the right word, because I feel like I’m watching events from somewhere high above everything. I’ve always found this experience remarkable and mysterious in retrospect. I seem to remember the sights and sounds of everything that happened, without remembering anything about how I felt at the time.
The rest of the night consisted of flashing lights, voices on police radios, questions from chief Tanner, and questions from a man in a rumpled sport coat who mumbled his name. After hours of lights and voices and little procedural details, I fell into bed and instantly passed from steely calm to dreamless sleep.
A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 3