After Nellie left, I phoned Connor, who sounded pretty down — as blue as he’d been when he read his homesick poem at open mic. He thanked me for the dinner invitation but declined, saying that his hound Finnegan was doing poorly so he didn’t want to leave him alone.
I suppose I should have taken his excuse as a way of saying “I don’t want to have dinner with you.” And I suppose I’m a little pushy because I more or less insisted that I bring veggies from my garden and cook dinner for him at his place. I felt like he needed better company than Finnegan. While I’m supposing, I guess I have to suppose that I see myself as better company than a dog. That may be the human conceit that often makes dogs better company than people.
In any case, I told him that I had a couple of garden tools that needed sharpening, and he said he’d be glad to do that. He sounded more enthusiastic about dealing with the tools than with me. I consoled myself with the thought that a dog wouldn’t bring him tools to sharpen. Dinner and tools — what could make for better company than that?
These things didn't put Connor in his happy place, however and I underestimated how down he was. He was in what my ex called bottomless funk or funk all the way down.
I promised myself I wouldn’t try to make him talk. While I fixed dinner, he sharpened my pruning sheers and edging tool.
Over dinner he suggested that I get one of those electric edgers. “It would save a lot of work,” he said.
“And make a lot of noise,” I said. “When I’m doing yard work, I’m happy doing the work. I wouldn’t give up my mower, but everything else needs to be quiet. And I got that edger from my daddy. Can’t give that up.”
“I wondered how old it was. It’ll need a new handle in a few years, but if it’s sharpened without taking too much edge off, it should last another 50, maybe 70 years.”
I told him that he was my man to sharpen it. Then I thought he said, “Or you could find someone good.” But he had mumbled in his heavy Irish accent with his head down as he got up and left the room.
I kicked myself under the table. The “sharpen my tool” thing must have been over the top. After he came back he apologized.
“Sorry,” he said. “Thought I heard Finnegan.” He sat down and went back to picking at his chicken creole.
“What’s wrong with Finnegan? Did you take him to the vet?”
“I know what’s wrong. Didn’t need the vet. Finnegan was poisoned.”
“No! Old Man Feazel’s dog was poisoned by Annie Simmerson,” I said.
“Who also poisoned Finnegan,” he said.
“Connor, that’s terrible. It’s unbelievable. How could a person do these things?”
He kept chewing a bite of chicken with his head down. I studied his wild mop of red hair. His might have been the only tousled head of hair I’ve never wanted to tame.
After a moment I realized he was struggling not to cry.
“Oh, Connor,” I said and went over to put my arms around him.
After a moment he echoed my words: “How could a person do these things?” He stopped chewing and took a gulp of water. “How could she do these things after she was so sweet to me? After we were so close?”
Huh? How close was that? I wanted to ask. Had Connor had a thing for sweet little Annie? Had she had a thing for big rough Connor? Had they had a thing together? I couldn’t help wondering what I might expect from a relationship with Connor if he was into things with women half my age.
I felt like hitting him. My daddy taught me that violence never solves anything, so I kissed the little balding spot on the top of Connor’s head instead. That made me feel stupid. I tried to think of something smart to do. Leave? Good grief! I'm like a walking doofus around this guy.
“We all thought Annie was sweet,” I said automatically. I straightened up and walked to the sink and started rattling dishes.
“August was never fooled,” he said. “She warned me that Annie was trouble.”
“So August knew?” Great, I thought, another girl half my age. Did Connor collect them?
“A long time ago,” Connor said. “And she told me over and over. So many times. If I’d listened to her back then, many bad things would not have happened.”
How could this man have been around August “so many times”? And what did “a long time ago” mean? Just a couple of years before, August had been in high school.
“Connor, do you know where August is? Betina doesn’t know where she is, and she’s worried about her.”
“Fehh,” Connor said. “Betina doesn’t know anything.”
“Connor! I work with Betina every day. What are you saying?”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. “I just mean that things have been going on in this town for so long, and nobody has been willing to see.”
“The things that Annie did?”
“Yes!”
“And Betina could have known?”
“Look,” Connor said, “I’m just saying that Betina doesn’t know everything she thinks she knows. And I’m saying that everyone should have seen what Annie was about.”
“Including you.”
“Yes.”
“And all the time August knew. And she was telling you and no one else. For some reason?”
He let out a breath. He looked stunned, like he’d finally realized what he’d been talking about. But what had he been talking about?
“Connor, I’d better get going. I’ll just say bye to Finnegan.”
I went around to the utility room where Finnegan was lying in his doggie bed. I’d wanted to walk straight out the door. I don’t know why I didn't. I felt like I didn’t want to see Connor again. I was so confused.
I sat on the floor and petted Finnegan for a couple of minutes while I collected my thoughts. Connor banged plates and pots in the kitchen. Finnegan wagged his tail in a feeble way. Poor baby.
As I stroked the dog’s head and tried to think straight, I noticed a flowery piece of clothing hanging behind the door. This was Connor’s laundry room, but this didn’t look like something Connor would wear.
I stood up and swung the door aside so I could see that it was exactly what it looked like: a little sun dress. And when I say little, I mean much shorter than anything Betina would wear, much shorter than any woman could conceivably wear in this town.
For a moment I thought it might be a child’s dress, but the neckline plunging nearly to the waist made it unmistakable. This was a slut dress.
Chapter 13
Monday morning was overcast, threatening rain. My thoughts were still in a whirl as I drove to the salon, but I’d calmed down about whatever was going on with Connor. He could mix it up with any young women who wanted to mix it up with him. It hurt my feelings and disappointed me, but it was none of my business.
Nellie helped calm me down when we talked on the phone Sunday night. She disagreed that what I’d found was a slut dress. She said, “If a woman wears it around the house, it’s not a slut dress, it’s lingerie.”
She had found the boys in the Tickfaw campground having a great time. They made friends with a family from Shreveport who were camping and nobody had any permanent injuries.
Her two older boys raised a ruckus over her assumption that they were all going back home. They told her their Internet connection at home sucked. “That’s the technical term for it, Ma: sucks.”
They were beside themselves trying to explain why the Tickfaw campground’s excellent Wi-Fi was so important until she told them that she knew about the moonshining. Then they exclaimed about how “vital” it was to “relaunch the product” and other activities that she didn’t understand. They said that their mother should not “squash their entrepreneurial spirit.”
At the end of the day, literally, she brought the youngest boy home and left the other two. That plan had not been popular either, but she avoided mutiny by promising to bring little Dale back to the campground the next weekend. It turned out he thought the weekend was coming up in a cou
ple of days, and Nellie didn’t correct the mistake. “It’s about time he learned what day of the week it is,” she said.
Now we were ready to cut hair on a Monday morning. We didn’t feel like we knew any more about Annie’s murderer, but we knew a lot more about everybody else. More than I wanted to know about some people.
First up for Betina was the Bald Eagle, who came in every Monday morning mainly to hear about whatever Betina had been up to over the weekend. While he enjoyed the gab fest, he would get a wash and trim, even though he didn’t have much left to trim.
The Eagle was up front about his missing hair. Each week Betina began by asking him if he wanted a Brazilian blow-out, to which the Eagle replied that he didn’t have time today, “Just a little off the sides, please.”
This week, as Betina shampooed his cranium, the Eagle was disappointed that she failed to begin with either date-night tales or the Brazilian blow-out line. Instead, she asked him, “Sanders, have you seen August lately? I don’t know where she is.”
Caught off guard, the Eagle answered, “Why would you think I know where August is?”
“Sanders, you live next door to her. You see her come and go, don’t you?”
“Right,” he confessed.
“Well, have you seen her lately?” Betina was massaging the shampoo around his head, which usually sent the Eagle into a state of suspended animation. She might have gotten better results if she’d waited until she had him under her scissors. As it was, he said he didn’t know anything about August or what she was up to, if anything.
It was an unusually slow Monday. Nellie and I were full of moonshining news that would inflate into amazing gossip in two shakes of a lamb’s tail if we dared talk about it. The need to maintain secrecy weighed heavily on us, so we hardly said anything all morning.
It didn’t help that the fishwife who lived out on the bayou was back in, the one who had theorized that aliens were behind all the window breaking and spray painting. She reported that she and her husband continued to see strange lights out on the southern end of the bayou. They heard strange aircraft noises too.
“Maybe it’s just people riding around in air boats,” Nellie suggested. I gave her my “Where are you going with that comment?” look, but she wouldn’t look at me. She smiled and continued cutting the woman’s hair.
The woman said, “As a matter of fact, we have seen people in air boats — if they are people. I don’t know what they could be doing. Why would aliens be riding around in air boats?”
A number of people professed complete ignorance of any practical knowledge of air boats and then speculated at length about how they might be used. Ugh! The morning crept by.
Betina, who was largely responsible for providing Monday-morning entertainment at the salon, had stayed home all weekend, “flipping through magazines, washing my hair, doing my nails, flipping out from boredom.”
“Anything new in Seventeen?” Pete asked, partly as a playful poke at her. At 22, Betina was still “flipping through” Seventeen every month.
“Dull, dull, dull,” she said. “Peyton Meyer, dull. Liam Hemsworth, dull. Dylan O’Brien, dull. Even Zac Efron, dull.”
“Betina, I thought you were nuts about those boys,” said Pete, who was a little nuts about those boys himself.
“They’re hot,” she admitted. “But they didn’t do a single interesting thing last month.”
Something about this conversation jogged my memory. Hadn’t Betina mentioned something about actors last week? Something that Investigator Woodley wanted to know about actors?
“I did see some fascinating facts about Botox in Nylon,” Betina was saying. “Did you know that Botox injections in your face can help treat depression?”
“My face is the reason I’m depressed,” said Paulette Strickland, who was at that moment getting a facial from Nellie. Paulette would not be considered beautiful by a casual observer unless she was smiling, which was often the case. She had the most radiant smile for miles around.
“Your face will not be depressing when I get done with it, Paulette,” said Nellie. “You’ll be smiling all the time.”
“Go ahead and shoot in some Botox while you’re at it,” Paulette said. “Can’t hurt.”
That led to a discussion of whether it was possible to smile if you had Botox injected in your face. Someone speculated about the frustration of seeing your own beautifully Botoxed face in a mirror and not being able to smile about it.
“I’d be willing to give it a shot,” Betina’s 11:15 said. “So to speak.”
Someone else wondered if anyone in Knockemstiff had ever gotten Botox injections. No one in the salon had. Or at least no one was willing to admit it.
Someone speculated that Dolores Pettigrew was the only person in town likely to have tried it. We agreed that we’d see if we could get her to talk about it. That got a laugh. If there was anything Dolores wasn’t willing to talk about, we hadn’t found it yet.
Betina also reported from the magazine article that Botox comes from botulism.
“Oh, I’ve had that,” Paulette said. She hadn't been careful about canning some quince jam a couple of years back, and she and her husband had gotten very sick. Dr. Cason had told them they were lucky to pull through. “I guess I should have smeared it on my face than put it in my mouth,” Paulette concluded.
Someone wondered if it would be possible to get Dr. Cason to visit the salon once a week for a Botox clinic. Of course that reminded everyone of Dr. Cason’s assistant — former assistant — Annie and the fact that she was a devil and had been murdered. After a few minutes of depressed silence in the salon, Paulette observed that we all needed Botox injections to cheer us up.
Nellie asked if anyone had seen Dr. Cason lately. He didn’t seem to be visible around town as much as usual. He was undoubtedly upset by the news about Annie, and without an assistant, he must be overworked. The last time anyone could recall seeing him, he was leaving his office with Connor O’Sullivan. They each had a sheaf of papers, and they drove off in opposite directions. I could only wonder what that was all about.
For the umpteenth time, someone posed the question of whether Annie didn’t deserve what she got. By now everyone was convinced that Annie had been a devil, but no one was willing to say out loud that she deserved to be shot.
By the time our late lunch time rolled around, everyone in the café area was happy enough to get out of the salon and move on to anything different. Pete went to the Grosri for something to eat, leaving Betina, Nellie and I huddled in the café area trying to think of something cheerful. Nellie was attacking her sandwich like she was starving.
After a few bites of my salad, I remembered why Betina’s comments about actors jogged my memory. She'd said the week before that Woodley asked what movie actors August liked. At the time this struck me as an odd question. I asked Betina if she knew why he wanted to know.
“He is so inquisitive,” she said. “He didn’t just want to know about August. He asked what I was interested in, too. He wanted to know about everything — movies, actors, magazines.” She nibbled on a carrot. “Sports, hobbies.” She nibbled the carrot some more. “Preferences in bed.” She laughed. “I told him I couldn’t tell him everything.”
Betina looked at me as she nibbled another carrot. “He also asked about you, by the way.”
“About my preferences in bed?” I asked warily.
“Not specifically,” she said. “Just general interests, like movies.”
“And you told him what?”
“Um, I think I said that you like regular chick flicks, rom coms, movies with strong mature men. Did I get that right?”
“Sure,” I said.
“He wanted to know what actors you like. I told him Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner, George Clooney, Brad Pitt sometimes. How’d I do?”
“Pretty good,” I said. Did I really prefer older men?
“You know,” Betina said, “I didn’t think about this at the time, but when Woodl
ey asked me what actors August likes, I listed off the same guys you like. Isn’t that funny?”
I didn’t answer because I was busy exchanging a “Did you hear what I heard?” look with Nellie. She put down the last bite of her sandwich.
“So August was interested in older guys?” Nellie asked Betina.
“Hmmm.” Betina thought hard about that one. “She liked older guys in movies. I never saw her go out with an older guy.”
“Betina, you’ve said you rarely saw her go out with younger guys,” Nellie observed.
“Say,” Betina almost whispered, as if someone might overhear, “Do you think she didn’t go out with young guys because she has a thing for older men?”
“It’s a theory,” Nellie said, giving me the side eye.
I looked at my watch. Ten minutes of lunch time was about enough for today.
“Nellie,” I said, “I have an inventory question for you.” I headed for the back room with Nellie right behind me.
“Harrison Ford’s a little old for you, isn’t he?”
“Just think how old he is for August,” I said. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean that the slut dress at Connor’s is hers.”
“Lingerie?” Nellie said.
“Let’s agree to call it slutty lingerie.”
“Don’t be a prude.”
“Do you think I’m a prude to think that August is a slut if she has a thing with Connor? Am I just jealous?”
“Both?” Nellie said. “It’s OK with me if August has a thing with any male older than eighteen. Except one, obviously.”
“Now who’s jealous?”
“Oh, come on,” Nellie said. “Rudy is my lawfully wedded boat anchor. You never had any sign from Connor that he was your thing.”
“He let me look after his dog,” I said defensively.
“The basis of a true and lasting relationship,” she said.
“Look, the important question is, ah, what?” I said. “What is the important question? Oh yeah! Does this have anything to do with Annie’s murder?”
A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 10