by Tonya Kappes
“No,” I whispered. “I need to be with my friends. But Fifi.”
“Dottie said she’d get Fifi and bring her here.” Abby always thought of everything. “You’re shaking. Let’s get you inside and out of that shirt. Get you into something warm.”
I did what she told me to do and got out of the car. I let her guide me inside of the Laundry Club where the smell of the freshly brewed coffee from the coffee bar perked me right up.
“Mae, what on earth is that?” Dottie’s nose curled. “Is that blood?” she shrieked.
“Oh, Mae.” Betts Hager rushed over, setting down the cup of coffee on the card table just inside of the door. The cup was probably meant for me, but not to enjoy with a bloody shirt.
“Move it.” Queenie pushed through the door and past us.
“Queenie, don’t be so rude,” Betts scolded her. “She’s been through a lot over the past couple of days. Haven’t you any compassion.”
Since Betts was the preacher’s wife, she always tried to be kind and use nice words around this group of women who let anything and everything come out of their mouth.
“What are you doing?” Betts rushed over to Queenie, who was doing a great job at ignoring her. “That’s not your laundry.”
Queenie jerked open the door of one of the dryers and dumped the clothes into one of the rolling baskets.
“Nope, but it’s been sitting in this dryer all day long.” She pulled up different pieces of clothing before she settled on a long-sleeved shirt with the state of Texas printed on the front. “If they are going to leave it here and not come back, then they deserve to have it used for the greater good.”
“And what is the greater good?” Betts wanted to know and she had the right to know. After all, she did own The Laundry Club and she would have to explain to the customer why they were missing their favorite Texas shirt, if it were their favorite.
“Look at Mae.” Queenie shoved past Betts. “If this isn’t for the greater good, then I’m not sure what is.”
Betts looked me up and down.
“Is that…?” she asked me and pointed.
“Blood. Alison Gilbert’s blood from the gunshot to her head. The back of her head.” I suddenly snapped out of the shock. “She didn’t kill herself.” I looked at each one of my friends. “She was killed. If she shot herself in the head, her head would be half missing. I mean, it’s what it shows in the movies. But her face.” The images of her perfectly put together face joined the hamster wheel image of her lifeless body. “Someone shot her from afar and it came out the back of her head or neck.” I blinked, not fully knowing where the blood had come from, but according to the images in my head of my holding her, I’d held her head up to my shirt.
“Okay, let’s get this off and get you warmed up.” Queenie peeled off Hank’s suit coat from my shoulders. “Is this Detective Hank’s?” There was a change in her tone that was excited. “Mmmhhhh,” she brought the coat up to her nose, “it’s his smell alright. Delish.”
“Stop that.” Abby jerked the jacket from her. “Just change her shirt.”
The two of them worked on getting me out of my shirt. Queenie handed it off to Abby, who rushed over to one of the washing machines to wash it. Queenie tugged the customer’s shirt she stole out of the dryer over my head and on instinct, I pushed my arms into the sleeves.
Queenie guided me over to the area where we had our book club, near the bookshelf filled with books to be read by the customers who came in to do their laundry.
“Wait.” I stopped and looked around. The walls of the laundry room had been painted a nice red and the chairs had been upgraded from metal chairs to a few large, cotton red ones that accented the wall color and a couple of new leather couches. A new coffee table positioned in front of the television. “When did you redo all of this?”
“We have been helping out a few young people who had to do some community service. The furniture was delivered this morning.” Betts patted for me to sit in one of the chairs and they took their places around me. “Lester has a soft spot and thinks he can just rehab all of them.”
“That’s nice.” Even though the tension about what happened to Alison earlier was hanging in the air, it was nice to think about something different and kind for even just a second.
“Yeah, well, one of the ones we truly thought was going to go out and do great things after he was released from jail did really good the other day when we went into the park and picked up trash.” Betts sighed.
“Can you believe people just throw their trash all over like that?” Abby growled.
“What about the kid?” I asked getting back to Betts’s story, because if we weren’t careful, we would trail off in a completely different direction.
“We went back yesterday morning to finish up and after a couple of hours of collecting trash, he just darted off. Lester ran after him, but this kid was fast,” Betts said.
Dottie Swaggert walked into the laundromat and let Fifi down after my sweet pup noticed me. Fifi’s belly swayed back and forth as she waddled over to me. I bent down and picked her up, placing her and her belly full of babies in my lap. She looked up with those pitiful, help me get these out of me eyes. I gave her kissy lips and she licked me.
“You mean to tell me he escaped?” Queenie’s head jerked up and she had a scowl on her face. “These youngins’, I just don’t get them.”
“Me neither.” Dottie groaned, as she caught the tail end of the conversation. “Yesterday this kid was hiking and ran off the Red Fox Trail like some sort of crazy kid. He was hooting and hollering. It look like the devil himself got into that kid. He’s probably on some sort of drugs.”
“Stop.” I pointed to Dottie and then looked at Betts. “You said this was yesterday morning?”
“Yes. Why?” She became instantly wide awake. “No,” she gasped and threw her hand over her mouth. “You don’t think he had anything to do with. . .” her voice trailed off. “We were near the campground.” She blinked back the same thoughts I was having.
“Were you all in the same area picking up trash?” I asked her. I had a nigglin’ suspicion this kid knew something or saw something. Or was he the killer?
“Stop right there.” Abby jumped up and ran over to the Laundry Club office, emerging with a pad of paper and a pen. “I think we need to write this all down. Kinda like what Mae did when Tammy Jo was the suspect in the murder of Fifi’s nanny.”
She made a good point. I did write everything down, from suspect to motive, and it seemed to help sort out the puzzles pieces. We continued to talk while Abby scribbled down notes.
“We were spread out on the trail. We parked in the parking lot of the public picnic area where the Red Fox Trail starts on Park Drive. We were instructed to stay on that trail since it is one of the most popular for tourists to see all the color changes of the season.”
Red Fox Trail had every part of autumn. There was a nice creek that bubbled over the rocks with a soothing sound, where I wanted to end up with Ty that day. The sun rose and set perfectly over the trail as the days grew shorter. The trees were the perfect colors of the season and hung down just enough to give light and shade.
“Lester had gone to the courthouse to see if there were any inmates that needed community service hours. The mayor said she’d gather some because she’d been on the Red Fox Trail earlier in the week and noticed a bunch of trash.” Betts shrugged.
“What time did he run?” I weeded out through the other parts of her story to get to the point.
“It was around eleven when Lester started rounding all the inmates up.” She lifted her chin, she waved her hand. “I mean, this is a long shot. We told the police immediately and they said they’d send someone.”
My mouth dried. Hank had said the coroner’s initial report noted Corbin’s time of death was around eleven a.m. Ty and I weren’t there until after 1 p.m.
“Do you think they sent Corbin to find him?” Abby asked a great question.
“Nope,” Dottie chimed in. “I’d called the park ranger’s office because we have a camper missing.”
“I’m sending out an alert.” Abby began to put out on social media about a lost camper. “It’s no different than an Amber Alert.”
“Corbin went on the trail to look for our camper and it was the last time I’d seen him.” Dottie finished her story.
“Dottie,” I said and turned towards her. “Do you remember what this person looked like that ran out of the woods?”
“You know I wasn’t paying attention to what they looked like. I was paying attention to the flailing and carryin’ on like a crazy person on drugs,” she said.
“You can’t remember nothing?” I gave her the “come on” look. “It could be important.”
“I know they are criminals, but they are white-collar criminals,” Betts reminded me of the offenses that had landed them into the county jail. “They stole things from Deters, or they skipped paying for gas at Grassel’s. Not killed anyone.”
“Did you offer any sort of food with peanuts in it?” I asked.
“We always offer some food that’s prepared by the Bible Thumpers,” she referred to the women in the church that made food for everything. “But yesterday, we did stop by the Cookie Crumble and let them pick out the cookies they wanted.”
“Oh, no,” I groaned. “The coroner’s initial report said Corbin’s time of death was around 11 a.m. and he died of anaphylactic shock due to his peanut allergy.”
“He did say he was allergic to peanuts when I offered him a peanut butter cookie at the campground party,” Betts recalled.
“Maybe Corbin’s death was an accident.” Queenie pointed out.
“How so?” Abby questioned.
“What if Corbin was on the trail looking for this crazy kid after Lester had called the police. When Corbin found him on the trail, maybe the kid offered him one of his cookies and dropped dead. The kid freaked out and ran, figuring he’d be in trouble for the death of Corbin.” That was probably the smartest thing I’d ever heard Queenie say.
“That sounds all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t explain Alison Gilbert,” Abby played the devil’s advocate.
“She may have killed herself, though I don’t think she did. When I was there, her death hadn’t been ruled a homicide yet,” I wanted to make it very clear. “She could’ve thought he was killed over her article.”
It was a long stretch, but I was hoping for anything that would tell my soul there wasn’t a killer on the loose.
My phone chirped a text. It was from Hank.
“Mae?” Dottie said my name, but it was like I was in a fog. “Are you okay? Your face is as white as a sheet.”
My eyes slid up and gazed at her. Sheer panic swept through me.
My soul was right.
NINE
Hank’s text, I’d gotten at the Laundry Club, confirmed Alison was murdered. The trajectory of the bullet had actually come from outside the window. Alison didn’t see it coming. My only hope was that she felt no pain and died fast.
“Coward,” I whispered in anger as I thought of how cowardly the killer was.
After the news had come, the girls and I had made a laundry list - no pun intended - of suspects. There was one person not on the list that I’d kept to myself. We’d decided at the end of the night that we’d keep our eyes and ears open and report back on anything out of the ordinary.
I reached over and rubbed the pad of paper Abby had been writing on. I took it home with me because I knew I wanted to go over it over and over again. I dragged it across the small kitchen table in my camper and started to read through it after I’d gotten Fifi settled down for the night. Or at least I’d thought I’d gotten her settled down for the night.
The knock at the door startled me and took me out of my train of thought.
“Mae, are you home?” Ty asked from the other side of the door.
“Just a minute,” I hollered back and took a quick glance at my reflection in the microwave door.
Listen, space was limited in a camper and I had to do with what I had. The black door on the microwave was going to have to be my mirror. My curly hair was now a bush around my head, springing up all over the place. I wrapped my hands around it like I was putting it in a ponytail to see if the sweat from my hands would tame it, but it sprung right back out after I let go.
The metal door of the camper swung out wide. He caught it before it swung back and slammed shut. He put one foot up on the step.
“Hey, there.” I took a step back to make some room. “Come on in.”
“I brought beer.” He lifted up a six pack of brew. “I heard about Alison and figured you could use something to help you sleep.”
He stepped up in to my camper. My skin prickled pleasurably as his arm brushed up against mine on the way in.
“Hey, girl,” Ty’s voice quickly changed into his Fifi voice. She was no longer settled as she shook her tail. “You are about to bust.” There was some empathy in his voice. “How much longer?” He glanced behind his shoulder at me with sad eyes.
“Soon.” I’d not really kept an exact count, though I could go back and count the days since it was at the summer solstice party where Roscoe, the pug, put her under his spell. “I guess I could call the doctor and have her check Fifi out.”
“I’m sure she’s fine. If there’s not been any problems, I guess nature will take its course.” He gave her another couple of good scratches and then stood back up.
He slipped two beers from the six-pack sleeve. He twisted the top off before he handed me mine. It was that whole southern gentleman thing that made me melt. If this was Hank, I’d had to twist off my own top.
“What on earth are you working on here?” He took a drink of his beer and looked down at the pad of paper. “Mayor MacKenzie?” He looked at me.
“Here are the things I know.” I pointed to the diagram Abby had started and I was working on. “There was an inmate missing from his community service duties at the same time Corbin had eaten the cookie.”
“Inmate? Cookie?” He’d obviously not heard all the gossip.
I quickly explained to him the initial autopsy report of Corbin’s cause of death and how Lester had taken a few of the local inmates to do some of their community service hours on the Red Fox Trail at the time of Corbin’s death. I also told him how the bus with the inmates stopped by the Cookie Crumble.
“What doesn’t make sense is why did Corbin eat the cookie? Did the inmate have a peanut butter cookie? The first answer that would lead me to the rest of these answers were going to come from Christine Watson at the Cookie Crumble.” I clicked the pen to expose the tip and circled Christine’s name a few times.
“Do you think she’s going to remember what they ordered?” He asked.
“She will remember what cookies she’d baked. I’d asked her how she decided what cookies to display and she said that she only baked a couple different types of cookies a day. She’ll know what cookies and possibly how many were gone or maybe who bought what.” It was a long shot worth checking out.
“Do you know what the inmate looks like? Or his name?” Ty was good at playing devil’s advocate, which made me only want to figure this out more.
“No, but I do know that I can get on Jailtracker.com and see if I can pull him up.” I made a quick note next to the inmate’s motive, which I wrote down as wanting to escape and Corbin tried to stop him and added a trip to the library to do some research on Abby’s work computer. Maybe after my hair appointment.
“That’s a great idea, if you knew his name.” Ty dragged the bottle up to his lips and took a drink. “Do you think Alison’s murder is related?”
“Well, if Corbin’s death was accidental and he did eat the cookie, my thought about the inmate was that he happened upon the body and took off because he didn’t want anyone to think he’d killed him, which makes his death not related to Alison.” I continued to point the tip of the pen back and forth between the tw
o.
“You’ve done a lot of thinking on this.” Ty smiled.
“I talked to Alison outside of the police station. She said that she’d found out some information and Corbin had threatened her. Something about if she continued to snoop into the drought thing and ran an article, he’d get the paper shut down. How could he do that?” I asked and thought that was a good question to research so I wrote that down next to Alison’s name. “Which makes me think,” I tapped my temple, “whoever killed Alison knew she had some information and wanted to keep her silent, tying the two deaths together.”
“Really we only know of one murder. Alison.” There he went again with common sense and true facts.
“Yes.” I took a drink of the beer and continued to ponder the list of suspects in front of me.
“Alison had a file with a bunch of information in it.”
“I guess you want that file.” He inhaled sharply.
“I do.” I wondered if Hank had it.
“Don’t forget William Hinson is missing and he had the major confrontation with Corbin the day before Corbin’s death, found out his fiancée was having an affair with his best friend right before their wedding, and he went missing around the time Corbin’s death occurred. This might be a long shot, but I’d think William would be Hank’s number one suspect in at least Corbin’s murder.” I talked so fast, Ty was blinking rapidly trying to keep up.
“That’s a mouthful.” He took another deep breath. “How is the mayor fitting into all this?” He circled his beer around the top of the paper.
“Lester got the idea to have the inmates clean the trail from the Mayor. I wonder if she had something with to do with Corbin dragging his feet on the shutdown of the park due to the drought. He certainly couldn’t shut it down if he was dead.”
“Dragging his feet?” Ty asked.
“Yeah, it was something Alison said to me. She said that Corbin had been dragging his feet and she had this list of shutdowns Corbin had done. It included the time between when the drought threat to the park was determined to the shutdown. There were only hours between them, but not this drought. There’s been several weeks that’ve gone by since he first reported shutting down because of the drought.” I looked back down at the list.