When the radio alarm went off two hours later, I opened my eyes in the early morning light to find myself fully dressed right down to my slightly muddy shoes. The steely calm was gone, and like a punch in the gut I recalled what I’d overheard the night before. One of the sheriff’s deputies was crouched in the grass by Annie with bright lights shining from several directions. He looked up at the man in the rumpled sport coat and said, “Looks like maybe a thirty-ought-six. From just a few feet away.” The deputy had made another sound that was something like “Awghh,” stood up, and walked quickly away.
So I knew that Annie had been shot, maybe by a .30-06, which was an easy guess because approximately everybody in Richwater Parish had one of these rifles. I had one myself, inherited from my daddy. I’d never had any use for it or any expectation that I might decide to go deer hunting. I hung onto it for emotional reasons, a steel and wood reminder of my father that I kept locked in a closet.
A hot shower woke me out of my daze a little. I stood under the water for a long time. As I was getting dressed, I decided to drive to the salon today rather than walk. My house is only four tenths of a mile from the salon, but I couldn’t picture myself walking along Tennessee Street.
In fact, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone in my house on Tennessee Street after dark. That's how shook up I was -- I’ve never been afraid of living alone before. My parents raised me to be self-reliant, expected me to be capable of taking care of whatever needed doing, and I guess their expectations stuck.
It helped that Knockemstiff had always been a quiet, safe, charmingly boring little town. Now it didn’t seem any of those things. By the time I was getting in my little Ford Escort for the drive to the salon, I’d decided to ask Betina if she’d come stay for a few nights. She had stayed with me once before after a hurricane knocked out power to the tiny little cottage her parents had set her up in before they left for Alaska.
A solid line of traffic was inching its way along Tennessee Street toward “downtown.” Somebody politely let me into the line of cars and pickup trucks, and I could see the yellow police tape along the side of the road. They had put out sawhorses to block traffic from that side of the street. An officer was allowing traffic in one direction to pass around the sawhorses and then traffic in the other direction.
I waited my turn. Walking would have been faster. Rush hour in Knockemstiff usually consisted of a couple of dozen pickups and several minivans crossing through town at about the same time. Today, half the people in town wanted to see the crime scene.
As I rolled past the scene, keeping my eyes straight ahead, the officer directing traffic motioned for me to stop. I saw it was Digby Hayes, a friend of my parents and a member of the tiny under worked Knockemstiff police force since before I was born. He walked over, and I rolled down my window.
“Morning, Savannah,” he said, touching his hat.
“Morning, Digby,” I said.
He inclined his head toward the side of the road. “Sorry you had to see that,” he said. “Hope you’re OK.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Tired.”
He patted my shoulder. “You take it easy. And be careful, you hear?”
“Yep. I’ll ask somebody to stay at my place for a while.”
He squeezed my shoulder and stepped back, waving traffic on again.
The cars ahead of me were still inching their way past the yellow police tape draped over the sawhorses. I turned on the radio and pressed one station button after the other, looking for a decent song. Nothing sounded good. By the time I got to the last button, I was past the yellow tape.
At the front door of the salon, I went to put my key in the lock and found that the door was already open. Nellie, Betina and Pete were there ahead of me. They are never there ahead of me.
When I came in, they were sitting in the café area. They stopped talking and looked at me. After a couple of seconds, Nellie jumped up. Betina and Pete stood up too. Nellie said, “I made coffee, Savannah. Come have a cup.”
Pete said, “We heard you didn’t sleep so good last night. I picked up some leftover beignets from Claude at the Bacon Up.” He held out a white cardboard carton.
I took a beignet and sat down.
Nellie handed me a cup of coffee. “Why don’t you take the day off, Savannah? We can handle everything.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me to stay home. By myself. “I’m in a mood to cut some hair,” I said.
None of them so much as raised an eyebrow.
“Did you get any sleep at all?” Betina asked.
I told them about how I’d woken up twisted in the sheets still wearing my clothes. “There’s something about sleeping with your shoes on that’s not restful,” I observed. “It will have to do.”
The day started slowly, even though the salon was full of people by 10:00 am. Nellie had brought in several folding chairs for the extra people she knew would show up.
Gossip in the salon was like a hot air balloon that went up with a little heat from this and a little heat from that. An actual tragedy this close to home punctured the balloon.
People murmured to one another quietly. The phrase most often heard across the room was “Poor Annie.” We would all nod, and the room would be quiet for a while. Even Dolores Pettigrew was reduced to repeating “Poor Annie” and “I can’t believe it,” separated by long dramatic pauses.
I didn’t say anything in particular. I cut hair and juggled the facts in my mind every way I could think of. Could the spray painting, broken windows and Annie’s death be related? Surely they were related, but how?
I continued clipping with my scissors. At some point I noticed that I’d been cutting the hair on the left side of Margaret Simpson’s head for a very long time. I stopped and looked up. Margaret was staring at me in the mirror with an expression that managed to mix concern with amusement. She said, “I was thinking about wearing my hair a little shorter for summer.”
“You probably want both sides a little shorter then,” I said, moving around to her right side. I rolled my eyes at myself. “This cut’s on me.”
“Seems like if you cut twice as much as usual I should owe you double,” she said.
I stepped around to her left side and surveyed the cut as it stood so far. “I could stop there, and you would just owe the regular amount.”
She turned her head from side to side, looking into the mirror. “I could do a comb-over.”
“Or I could even it up and give you a fleet rate on the whole thing. How about that?” I proposed.
“Go for it,” she said. “I’ll wake you up when you’ve cut enough off the right side.”
The murmuring continued in the salon, with “Poor Annie” rising up and falling back again like a wave. Eventually, a distressed woman in Betina’s chair trying to put a good face on events said loudly, “It was just a terrible accident. People have accidents with guns all the time.” Several people recalled hunting accidents. Pete said that his father had accidentally shot his mother in the thigh while cleaning his gun, thinking that the gun was not loaded. (“I’m pretty sure it was an accident,” he said quietly to the woman in his chair.) Someone quoted the wisdom “There’s nothing more dangerous than an unloaded gun.” People were chiming in with observations about being careful with guns.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I said.
The salon went quiet.
“What?” said Nellie.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I repeated. This was news that everyone knew, and no one had wanted to say.
“Did the sheriff say that?” asked Nellie.
“She was shot from a few feet away. I heard a sheriff’s deputy say that. Nobody was cleaning his “unloaded” gun in the dark by the side of the road when Annie happened to walk by. Nobody accidentally aimed a rifle at Annie’s heart and accidentally pulled the trigger and accidentally walked away without telling anyone about it. That just doesn’t make sense.”
If the salon had been quiet before, it was now quieter
than it had ever been, as quiet as a room can be when it’s full of people whose hearts are racing. Everyone realized they were holding their breath at the same time and exhaled with a gasp. The room erupted into animated chatter.
“A murder in our quiet little town?”
“Surely not!”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Who would do such a thing?”
“Why would anyone hurt Annie, when everyone loves her?”
Then the speculation began. Nellie’s contribution was, “It’s probably that creepy old guy with no teeth who lives in the cabin at the swampy end of the bayou.”
Dolores Pettigrew said, “I saw him in town just the other day, walking along with a gunny sack. That’s suspicious, isn’t it?”
“It could be if he hadn’t been carrying that gunny sack everywhere he’s gone for the past decade or two,” said Pete.
But Dolores had moved on with her speculation. “You know, people often do these things for money. Do you think the Grosri owed Annie money?”
Other people named possible culprits. Reasons were given, mostly based on bad character. The more people offered ideas, the more clear it became that nobody knew anything.
At the Teasen and Pleasen Salon, we generally work through lunchtime, and then take a break at 1:30. On slow days, we’ve been known to take most of the afternoon off for siesta. This was not a slow day. I was looking forward to whatever part of an hour we could get. Nellie and Pete managed to shoo everyone out of the café area by 1:45.
When Nellie, Pete and Betina got their brown-bag lunches out of the back room I remembered that I had forgotten to bring a lunch. “I’m going to dash down to the Grosri and pick up a sandwich,” I said.
“Ham and cheese?” Pete asked, holding out a sandwich. “I got it on my second run to the Grosri for pastries this morning.” He had noticed I hadn’t brought lunch.
“Pete, you’re a dear.” I kissed him on the cheek.
“Aw, shucks,” he said. He handed me the sandwich and an RC Cola.
We all sat down in the café area.
“My brain isn’t at the top of its game today,” I said. “I keep thinking that all the events we’ve been seeing are related, but I can’t think how that could be.”
“Got me swinging,” said Nellie. “You think the same person who painted and smashed windows killed Annie?”
“Maybe.”
“How else could they be related?”
“What if the murderer hadn’t actually intended to kill Annie?” asked Betina. “Like everybody’s been saying, who would want to kill Annie? What if there’s a predator on the loose? He bumped into Annie, tried to assault her, she resisted, and he shot her?”
“It could have been more or less random,” mused Nellie.
“Except that he’s preying on women!” said Betina. “Savannah, he could be in your neighborhood, on your street.”
“Now, Betina,” I said. “We don’t know anything like that.”
“But Savannah, just to be safe, why don’t you come stay with me for a while?”
“Well, actually, I was going to…” invite you to come stay at my place, I was going to say. How thoughtless would that be? I managed to finish with something else: “…just barricade the doors and ‘shelter in place,’ as the disaster people call it.”
“Savannah, really?” said Betina.
“You’re welcome to stay with us,” said Nellie. “But I can’t guarantee your safety at my house. Or that you’d get any sleep.”
I was shaking my head as Pete added, “You would also be welcome to stay at my place if the Widdah Jenkins would allow.” The Widdah Jenkins was what everyone called Dafny Jenkins since her basset hound Buster had died, leaving her feeling alone in the big house she’d inherited from her grandfather. She rented rooms to a couple of young men and strictly forbade visitors, since it startled her to see anyone she wasn’t used to having in the house.
I stopped shaking my head. “Thank you for your concern. I’ll be fine.” I took a long pull at my soda and swallowed. “Maybe I can get Connor to look in on me from time to time.”
That plan met with general acclaim. They all knew that I liked Connor and would like to be able to like him better. Betina in particular had long been of the opinion that Connor O’Sullivan was a catch that just needed a bit of reeling in – an interesting opinion from a girl who played hard to get. I had no doubt that when she finally located exactly the man she was looking for, she would reel him in without delay.
Chapter 5
The rest of the afternoon passed in a whirl of speculation. By 4:00 pm I was out on my feet. My three salon cohorts finally prevailed on me to give it up. Nellie referred to possible “permanent damage” I’d inflicted on Lucille Braxton’s A-line bob. Perhaps I would want to avoid further carnage? “Go home,” she told me. “Now.”
I didn’t care to pass by the crime scene again, so I decided to walk home by a route that took me around the area. That would let me come up Tennessee Street toward home from the opposite direction.
This route took me past Annie’s house, where I saw chief Tanner in the driveway talking with the man in the rumpled sport coat who had asked me questions the night before. The man was clearly a police detective. I wished I’d been able to understand him when he’d told me his name. James something?
Sheriff's deputies were carrying clear plastic bags out of the house. I could see that some of the bags contained spray cans. One bag contained clothes that obviously had red paint sprayed on them. Yet another bag contained half a dozen gold-colored objects that puzzled me until I realized what they must be: brass paperweights.
The deputies dumped the bags in the back of a police car. One of them said, “All done,” to Tanner and the detective. When they looked around, they saw me standing in the street, staring with my mouth hanging open like a hick who’d never seen a driveway before. Tanner smiled and waved in a way that said “Wait a minute.” He said one more thing to the detective, who nodded and stood eyeing me suspiciously.
Tanner walked over to where I was standing. “You headed home? Let me give you a lift.”
“Thank you, Tanner. That’s awfully nice of you,” I said. It was while we were walking toward his ancient police car that I remembered I’d driven to the salon that morning. I stopped in mid-stride. “Uh, Tanner.”
He turned and looked my way with his hand on the car door handle.
“I just remembered I drove to work this morning. I need to go back and get my car.” I motioned back toward the salon and started to turn around.
He laughed. “Hop in,” he said. “I’ll drop you off at the salon.”
As I sighed and got in the car, I couldn’t help looking over at the detective, whose suspicious look was now mingled with a rough guess that I was an idiot – possibly a dangerous idiot.
“You worked all day?” Tanner asked me.
I nodded. “A couple of my clients’ heads will look unusually bare for a while, I’m afraid.”
“This would have been a good day for me to come in for my crew cut,” he observed.
“Tanner, Annie was the one who broke the windows and did the spray painting, wasn’t she?”
“Looks that way,” he said. “There’s nothing in her house painted red, so she was painting something else.”
We had arrived at my car. Before I got out of the police car, I told him about the painted letters on Mr. Keshian’s window that Nellie and I had found. He already knew about the painting of the Paramabets’ window.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “It’s all for the parish investigator to sort out, not me.”
“The guy in the sport coat?” I asked.
“That’s him. Investigator James Woodley.”
“Does he seem like a man who’s going to be able to sort this out?”
“He seems like a man who doesn’t care if anybody thinks he’s able to sort this out. He seems like a man who would rather be back in the Big Easy
listening to jazz and drinking rum cocktails.” Tanner gave me a wry smile. “So maybe he’s a man who’ll solve this boring little swamp-town case in a hurry so he can get outta here.”
I got out of the car and thanked him.
“Digby said you’ve got somebody to stay with you for a while there on Tennessee Street?” Tanner asked.
“Yeah, well, I think my company might not arrive right away. I’ll be alright.”
“Mmm. Digby will be around there a lot, and the deputies are coming and going. Just be careful, OK? And get some rest.”
“Will do.”
I made an even bigger circle around town so I could avoid both the crime scene and Annie’s house on my way home. I didn’t want to risk seeing Investigator James Woodley again. Or having him see me.
Back at home, I made sure all the doors and windows were locked. I was tempted to fall into bed fully clothed again, minus shoes this time, but I made myself take a shower to wash off the hair clippings that seem to go everywhere.
I had a few bites of some microwaved Italian thing and settled thankfully into bed long before dark. And lay there awake. And lay there.
Figures. You get perfectly exhausted, and the last thing you can do is sleep.
I got a beer and some peach yogurt out of the fridge and plopped in front of the TV.
The next thing I knew somebody was screaming. Somebody else was shouting my name. There was a struggle.
I found myself staring up into Nellie’s face. It turned out that she was the somebody shouting my name. To quote her precisely: “Savannah, you dimwit, it’s me.”
She found the remote and turned off the TV. I got a glimpse of Godzilla smashing buildings before the TV went dark, which plunged the room into complete darkness. Nellie turned the TV back on so she could find a light, and the smashing and screaming resumed.
Eventually, the table lamp was on, the TV off again, and Nellie stood in front of me. I was so confused, I looked at her like an idiot. I was getting good at that.
A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 4