“Did you unplug your phone?” she demanded.
I admitted that I had.
“What if someone had called to warn you of something?”
“Maybe to warn me that you were coming to scare the wits out of me?”
“Good example. I tried to call several times over the course of an hour and finally figured you must be unplugged or dead.”
“I didn’t want any well-meaning concerned people calling and waking me up.”
“Even if that meant a murderer could sneak up on you?”
“Well, if he killed me without waking me up, that would be OK.”
“That’s not funny,” Nellie said.
“I didn’t actually mean it to be funny,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in my easy chair.
“You can’t help being funny, can you?”
“I feel funny, now that you raise the topic,” I said. I’d spilled half the peach yogurt in my lap. Luckily, we hadn’t knocked over the beer in our little scuffle. I handed it to Nellie.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, trying to stand up at an angle that would keep the yogurt from running off my PJs.
“It was Rudy’s idea,” she explained.
“Rudy suggested that you come over and terrify me?” I asked over my shoulder as I slouched into the bathroom to shower off the yogurt – my third shower of the day.
“Right,” she called around the corner. “He said, ‘Since Savannah can’t ask Betina to stay with her, why don’t you go terrify her for a while? The boys and I will go camping over on the Tickfaw River.’ That river has advantages over the swamp next to our house that include the presence of both alligators and crocodiles.”
“So Rudy figured out that I was going to ask Betina to stay with me but couldn’t on account of Betina was already terrified?”
“Right again,” Nellie said. “You’re smarter than you look, Savannah.”
“I’ve been looking like a ditz lately.” As I dried off and put on clean PJs, I told her about seeing Tanner and the detective at Annie’s house and forgetting I had driven to work. “I’m sure that detective thinks I’m an idiot.”
“Well, he came by the salon as I was locking up and wanted to talk to you. Maybe he enjoys idiotic chats.”
“I’ll bet Tanner told him what we found on Mr. Keshian’s window when we went dumpster diving.”
“Talk about idiotic things,” Nellie reflected. “Anyway, I told him you had gone home to get some sleep, and could he come back tomorrow to talk to you. He said he would.” She took a gulp of the beer and handed it to me. “Then Rudy decided I should come over here to make sure you sleep well.”
“I was sleeping like a baby,” I observed.
“Why were you watching that Godzilla movie?” she asked.
“I was exactly not watching that Godzilla movie,” I said. “Did you not notice that my eyes were closed? Or did you assume I was watching my eyelids?”
“I noticed that I knocked on the door for a long time, and you didn’t answer the door. I could hear the TV going, so I knew you were in here. When I finally used your spare key and found you sitting there unconscious, I thought I’d better wake you up to make sure you weren’t dead.”
“Thank you for coming,” I said somewhat seriously.
“I’ll thank Rudy for you,” she said politely.
“Rudy decided they will stay safe in the swamp without you?”
“Yeah, at some point I figure I’ve got to let them take care of themselves. The oldest boy is more careful than his father. He can get them all out if they have a problem. Probably.”
“Aubrey is 14?”
“He is 14, yes, and he can drive the truck and fix things and shoot an alligator, if necessary. Most importantly, he knows how to not shoot things.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” I lied cheerfully. “Let me make up the bed in the guest room for you.”
“You go on back to sleep. I can find everything I need.”
Chapter 6
I have heard that some people track their sleep with little electronic devices. Doesn’t this tracking activity cut into the time they have for sleep?
My primary interest in sleep is sleeping. I find sleeping highly rewarding and do it every night if I possibly can.
I woke on Thursday morning to the sound of rain pouring down. I listened to it for a minute or two and fell asleep for another hour. This time when I woke up I could hear sizzling in the kitchen, and then my alarm went off.
Nellie was frying a big breakfast. “I saw what was left of what you ate last night and figured you needed to eat this morning,” she said. She was right.
Over breakfast we talked about Annie’s spray cans and paperweights.
“So is it logical to think that somebody killed Annie because she spray-painted and/or broke their window?” asked Nellie.
“It doesn’t seem much of a motivation, does it,” I said. “Even the SLUT thing is a thin reason to kill somebody.” I chewed a bite of Jimmy Dean sausage. “Were you serious about the old guy on the bayou being the perp? The one with no teeth?”
“I kinda was. I wanted to put it out there to see if anybody else had anything to say about him.”
“Dolores saw him the day Annie was killed?”
“That’s what she said, yeah. She’s suspicious of everybody, so ordinarily I wouldn’t take her suspicions to mean much.”
“Why are you suspicious then? Aren’t you actually related to those people at the south end of the bayou?”
“Mmmm. I am. Thank you for remembering,” she said. “I think of the old guy who lives alone in the shack as a very distant relation, but he’s Rudy’s grandfather.”
“The toothless guy?”
“The toothless guy, yes.” She looked at me with slight vexation. “If we’re judging perp-worthiness based on oral hygiene, he’s gotta be the most likely suspect.”
“Sorry. I guess anybody can lose their teeth. I had no idea he was Rudy’s grandfather. You suspect him, though?”
“I’ve been wary of him for a long time. He’s just scary. One minute he’s telling stories of working on barges along the Atchafalaya, talking about cheating at cards and fighting — boasting about fighting dirty. Then he’s screaming about some guy who fired him and cutting the air with a wicked-looking knife. Even Rudy learned early on to keep out of knife range.”
“If Annie had been killed with a knife, we’d know who to look for.”
“The thing is, Dolores was right about him being in town that day, only she didn’t notice that he had something bigger than usual in his gunny sack.”
“As big as a rifle?” I asked.
“Just about,” she said. “I only noticed because he was barging along in front of the hardware store with it and banged into Annie.”
“Really? You mean, physically bumped into her?”
“Knocked that gunny sack into her leg as he went past. She said something to him, and it must have been a choice comment because he started yelling at her. I can’t imagine what she said. He gets riled about things that happened in the past, but if anybody slights him nowadays, he says, ‘Ohhhhhh,’ in a singsongy way. Then he laughs and walks away. He wasn’t laughing that day. And he wasn’t walking away, but I don’t think he pulled his knife. Annie walked away, and he didn’t follow her. That was all I could see. I was driving by with the boys.”
“Goodness. You think he’s really capable of killing her?”
“I wouldn’t call him harmless. He is Rudy’s grandfather, though, so I’m not eager to sic the police on him.”
“We could go talk to him, see if we can find out anything.”
“Mmm, ‘talk to him.’ That makes it sound so simple.” She stood up from the table and started clearing away the dishes. “We need to get you to the salon so you can talk to the inspector.”
“Investigator.”
“Whatever,” she said.
“We might as well cut some hair so long as we’re there.”
* * *
The rain had slacked off to a moderate downpour, which didn’t keep people from filling up the salon. The news that Annie had done the spray-painting and window smashing shocked everyone. Or almost everyone.
A woman that we didn’t normally see in the salon came in around 11:00 am. Her hair was a little ragged, and her cotton dress wasn't much better. Nellie recognized her as the mother of a boy who sometimes played with her three sons and called out, “Hey Jewel.” The woman bobbed her head and sat in the café area.
“Something going on there,” Nellie whispered to me. “She lives on a dirt road out along the swamp that borders our house. I don’t think I’ve exchanged a dozen words with her in all the years I’ve known her.”
Jewel sat quietly in the café area and listened intently as everyone talked about the shocking news that Annie must have done the recent mischief in town.
“Did she not get along with the Paramabets?”
“Everybody gets along with them.”
“Even if she didn’t get along with them, why smash their window?”
“And Mr. Keshian’s?”
“And what could she possibly have against August?”
“Even if she was jealous of August or something like that, why spray-paint her windshield? That’s so childish.”
“This vandalism just don’t sound like anything Annie would do,” said Pete. “It makes me wonder if someone is trying to set her up. Annie was a sweet soul who wouldn’t harm anyone.”
“That is not acc’rate,” Jewel said quietly.
Nellie’s head snapped around to face Jewel. Betina, who hadn’t heard Jewel, was agreeing with Pete.
Nellie spoke over Betina, “What did you say, Jewel?”
“I said, that is not acc’rate.” She was sitting with her fists clinched, looking down at the floor. “That is not right ‘bout Annie bein’ a sweet soul. She was a devil, that one.”
The salon had gone quiet. Nellie put down her scissors and comb. She walked over to where Jewel was sitting and knelt down beside her.
“Tell me,” she said.
Jewel closed her eyes. “When I went to Dr. Cason near about two year ago with the terrible pain in mah gut, Annie tole me after I saw the doctor that he had found a malignancy, and there weren’t nothin’ anybody could do about it. I was a-goin’ to die.”
Jewel opened her eyes and looked at Nellie. “That’s what she said to me. ‘Miz Laborde, you’re gonna die. You might as well go home and make your peace.’ That’s what she said.”
Nobody in the salon moved a muscle. I wondered if this was the most this reclusive woman had ever said in her life. Jewel looked down at the floor and wrung her hands.
“Franklin, my husband, was tore up about it,” she said. “We tried to think how the family would get on when I was no longer there. It was hard to do.” Jewel looked around at people in the room. “Whenever I did anything, I was always thinkin’ Who’s a-goin’ to do this when I’m gone?”
She made a short gesture with her hand — time passing. “A few months went on. Mah pain got better, but I was all knotted up inside like a bramble. One day Franklin was in town and runned into Dr. Cason, and said couldn’t he do something about my malignancy, please, and Dr. Cason was surprised, and said What’s this you say?, and he related that he had found not a thing wrong with me but something bad I musta ate. He tole Franklin that I musta misunderstood what Annie said.”
Jewel looked at Nellie, then looked around at all the people staring at her. “I did not misunderstand nothin’. That woman was bein’ a devil. And I never done nothin’ to her, nothin’. I went back to that doctor office and axed her why. She look at me and just smiled. ‘That was just a mistake,’ she says.”
Jewel stood up. “You wonder why that woman smash winders and paint everything?” she said. “I come to tell you why. Pure meanness. She was a devil.”
She walked out of the salon with Nellie right behind her.
For the second time in a week, the salon was completely quiet. When Nellie came back a few minutes later, she said she’d got Mrs. Ourso at the feed store to take her lunch break early and drive Jewel home.
What was left of the morning passed slowly. The people in the café area drifted out, shaking their heads. When 1:30 rolled around, the last remaining customer paid for her perm and left.
We sat down to eat our late lunch. Nellie unwrapped the sandwiches she’d made for us.
I looked at her. “So did Jewel kill Annie?”
“I asked her,” Nellie said. “I hated to, but I had to. I didn’t want to have that investigator go out there to plague her.” Nellie put down her sandwich. “He’ll plague her anyway.” She shook her head. “When I asked her if she shot Annie, Jewel looked me in the eye and told me, ‘I never did. That would make me a devil, too.’”
We ate our lunch wondering if there were two Annie's in our town.
* * *
By 3:00 pm the salon was once again full of people. Word of Jewel’s story had gotten around town, and people came in to talk about it. None of us who had heard the story first hand were all that eager to talk about it. We let the newcomers who didn’t know anything do all the talking.
While other people talked, I cut hair and thought about evil.
It was tempting to think that people did evil deeds because they were idiots, as little Sarah would say. In her world, anyone who did bad things just didn’t understand the consequences, so they must be stupid.
My daddy taught me that people do things because they want something. It’s just not always clear what they want.
I remember a November day when I was maybe 10. I was slopping the hogs toward the end of the day. I remember it was November because Thanksgiving was coming up soon. It was late enough in the year so that the weather was cool, and it had been spitting rain on and off all day.
We didn’t live on a farm, but we had a few chickens and pigs. One of my chores was to feed the pigs. Some of them were cute little porkers that were born in the spring, but we had one big old sow that was scary. She could be aggressive. And all that grunting did not seem friendly.
Since I was a little afraid of the sow, and even the little pigs could get wild when food was in sight, Daddy had set up a feed trough in a fenced enclosure that kept the pigs out until I was ready for them. I’d dump a bushel of corn into the trough along with whatever table scraps Mama had sent out. Then I left the enclosure before reaching over the fence to unlatch the gate that let in the pigs. The latch was a metal rocker that was easy to hit with the heel of my hand.
All the pigs would be standing at the gate, watching my every move, grunting impatiently, ready to shove the gate open. The instant I banged the gate latch open, the stampede started, with the sow in the lead and the little porkers jostling behind her, squealing.
On this particular day, one of our dogs — a big black mutt named Collier — had gone into the enclosure with me and stayed in there when I left. I guess he was sniffing for table scraps, but Mama hadn’t sent out anything a dog would want to eat. Collier could easily jump out of the enclosure, so I left him standing in the trough, sniffing. I walked around to the gate where the pigs were waiting and hit the latch.
The stampede went nowhere. The pigs stood outside the gate shuffling back and forth, looking at Collier and looking at me and looking back at Collier, who had stopped sniffing and stood looking at the pigs. I don’t know why I didn’t shoo Collier out of the trough. I was cold and wet and ready to go inside. I guess I was curious about what would happen.
Finally, the sow couldn’t stand it anymore and shoved open the gate, but she still wasn’t willing to get close to the trough. Collier barked at her, wagged his tail, sat down, barked again. He looked like he was enjoying himself rather a lot. He barked a couple more times. He looked over at me and raised his head with an expression indicating that he clearly was pleased with himself.
At that point, Daddy came around the corner of the house and saw Collier in the trough a
nd the pigs slobbering and grunting by the gate. It suddenly dawned on me that I’d been standing there allowing Collier to keep the pigs from eating – poor pigs! It was like a whole new point of view had walked around the house and into my own head.
I thought Daddy would yell at Collier to get out of the feed trough, but he didn’t say anything right away. He walked over to where I was standing and said, “What do you suppose Collier wants?”
“He wants to sit in the trough?” I said.
“Apparently. And what does he want to get by sitting in the trough?”
“Well, I’ve never seen a dog eat ears of corn,” I thought out loud. “And there’s no scraps a dog would want.”
“So he doesn’t want what’s in the trough. Do you think he knows that the pigs want what’s in the trough?”
“He looks like he does. So he wants to keep the pigs from eating?”
“Sure looks like he does.” Daddy shifted into his falsetto school marm voice. “And what does he get from that?”
“He gets to sit there like king of the hill.”
“Yep. Most people would say he’s not getting anything out of having that trough. But he thinks he’s in charge. Top dog.” He turned to the dog. “Don’t you feel good about that?”
Collier wagged his tail slightly, but something about Daddy’s tone of voice was not convincing. Daddy motioned the dog to come away as he said in a low voice, “Get on down, you sorry mutt.”
At Daddy’s dismissive tone, the dog’s ears drooped and he lowered his head. Daddy snapped his fingers, and Collier slunk out of the feed trough, hopped the fence, and trotted away.
As the pigs stampeded to their dinner, he and I walked back to the house for our dinner. “Some people are like that,” he said. “They feel like they’ve got something great when they get to lord it over others.”
“But why do they feel that way, Daddy?”
“Don’t you like being in charge, my little princess?” He began a mincing walk like a princess with her nose in the air. I’d seen this before.
I swatted his arm.
“Everybody wants to be in charge,” he said in his school marm voice, which was now a princess voice. He stopped prancing, opened the back door of the house, and bowed me in like a royal page. “Nothing wrong with being a princess,” he said, “but don’t keep the pigs from the trough.”
A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 5