A Bad Day for Pretty

by Sophie Littlefield

  Only Ian managed much of a greeting. “Mornin’, Miz Hardesty,” he said, touching the brim of his black-and-yellow Sawyer County Sheriff’s Department baseball cap, which Stella happened to know was not a bona fide part of the uniform, but a freebie the department had made up several years back when Sheriff Burt Knoll was still alive. Sheriff Knoll had gone in for swag in a big way, especially at Christmastime, when the town’s most upstanding citizens, as well as a few of his favorite reformed criminals, received an ashtray or a pen or some other useful item with the department logo embroidered, emblazoned, or otherwise affixed to it.

  “Good morning, Ian. Mike. Neb.” She nodded to each man in turn. Then she turned and faced Goat, forcing her gaze up as far as his chin. “Goat.”

  “What are you doing here, Stella?” he demanded.

  Well, so much for worrying about letting the man down easy. There was about as much warmth in Goat’s voice as in a freezer-burned Eggo waffle. Still, it was Stella’s job—since she was present on behalf of Neb—to play it cool.

  “Well, I heard on the radio that the shack blew over, yesterday when I was—” On my way to your place, Stella had been about to say. “—when I was out,” she amended. “Didn’t have much going on this morning so I thought I’d come and see if I could lend a hand.”

  “Is that right. What were you thinking to do, stitch it back together with your sewing machine? Maybe donate a big hank of yarn to tie the bleachers up with?”

  Stella blinked. If there had been any doubt as to his mood, the way his brows knit together as he fixed her with an extra-searing stare, sparks practically flying from those ice-blue eyes, even paler than usual under the bright September sky, laid it to rest.

  The man was not one bit happy with her.

  Well, what the fuck? Hadn’t he been the one to unleash an unreported spouse right in the middle of what had the potential to be a pretty damn romantic dinner? Hadn’t he been the one to have married a brassy-haired, big-titted, vavoom-hipped, gap-toothed man-stealing kind of woman in the first place?

  That thought ratcheted through Stella’s brain so quickly and unexpectedly that she found her bottom lip was hanging open without a single thought to justify putting into words. She hadn’t realized how much Brandy’s big entrance last night had upset her until just this moment, when the woman’s parting grin intruded on her vision like a big stop sign while the clouds gathered on Goat’s sharp-planed features. He made mad look good, she had to admit; there was something about that generous mouth set in a firm line above that equally firm jaw that gave her an extra shiver even as she felt her back go up defensively.

  Well, hell. Goat Jones might be hot, but Stella Hardesty didn’t put up with unprovoked meanness from anyone. Never again would she volunteer for the receiving end of a man’s bad mood. Not even Viggo Mortensen could treat her like this—on a morning when not only had she done nothing wrong, but also hadn’t managed a single cup of coffee—and get away with it.

  “I’m sure I could come up with something,” she said, meeting Goat’s scowl dead-on with her own, “I’m finding I can do just about anything on my own as good as it can be done by committee. Especially these days, when you never know what-all you’re gonna get when you go bringing in outside help.”

  Goat opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again. Noises behind Stella let her know why—she turned and saw that the crime scene unit had arrived. There were two men and a woman, the men dressed in navy long-sleeved shirts that would soon be much too hot as the sun rose in the sky. The woman strode quickly in the lead and the men struggled to keep up, dragging their gear in wheeled duffles. One of the men had a serious-looking camera slung around his neck. The overall effect was of badly dressed tourists who’d accidentally become separated from their tour group and were racing to make it back to the harbor before the cruise ship departed without them.

  “Sheriff,” the woman said, nodding at the group. “Good to see you again. So where’s this mummy you all turned up?”

  FIVE

  Stella blinked in the bright sun of the storm-scoured morning and gave the woman from the crime scene unit her full attention. A little taller than Stella’s five feet six inches, the gal was as thin and leathery as a strip of beef jerky, and dressed in an overlarge wrinkled pale pink canvas blazer that looked like it used to be white until it had a laundry accident. She looked like she’d busted plenty of balls in her day, and Stella figured they ought to get along fine, except the woman was staring at her like the remains of a bug squashed on her shoe. Stella squinted at the laminated ID on a chain around her neck, and made out the Detective insignia. detective simmons.

  “Mummy?” Stella asked politely.

  “Who’s she?” Simmons replied, poking out her chin in Stella’s direction.

  Goat squared his shoulders and, ignoring the question, stepped forward and offered his hand. Simmons met him head-on with a strong grip of her own. “Daphne,” he said. “It’s been too long.” Then he shook with the other two men, murmuring a polite greeting.

  Stella figured he was hesitating his way out of having to introduce her, so she stepped right in behind him and did her own shaking and helloing. “I’m Stella Hardesty,” she said, “very dear friend of Neb here.”

  Simmons’s handshake was unenthusiastic, and Stella quickly passed to the two men, leaning in to read the lettering on their gold name tag pins. “Officer Hewson,” she said. “Officer Long.”

  “It’s just Harvey and Chuck, ma’am,” the shorter one said.

  “Well, and you can call me Stella,” she said smoothly, stepping between the techs and their boss. A quick glance at Neb revealed that he hadn’t shifted from his spot, and he wasn’t looking any less likely to hurl. If anything, he looked even more uneasy. She gave him a quick glare, a get-your-shit-together kind of look, but if he got her meaning, he didn’t show it.

  “It’s just terrible, all this devastation and destruction,” she continued, wondering if she could distract them long enough to pluck Neb out of his makeshift seat and get him home. As curious as she was to see what the mummy was all about, Stella’s first duty was to remove Neb from this atmosphere of unbridled suspicion. The equation that was forming in her mind was not to her liking. Presence of sheriff plus visiting crime-scene-solvers plus some sort of mummified body plus pale and quaking civilian on overturned cabinet did not, in her professional experience, bode well for the civilian.

  Besides, whenever Stella was faced with a new and unknown enforcer of the law, caution was her byword. Especially when one of her clients was involved; then she became as protective as a feral cat when a chicken hawk gets between her and her kittens. And while Neb wasn’t a typical client, she’d grown fond of the man, and she wasn’t about to let anyone ride roughshod over him.

  “It sure is good of you all to come all the way down to Prosper, but didn’t you all have any twisters of your own?” she said, taking two little steps to the right in order to block Simmons’s view of Neb. At the same time, she craned her neck toward the fissure that snaked through the concrete foundation. It widened to a debris-littered hole where the girder had ripped clear of its mooring.

  She saw a flash of blue—a bright, clear blue as though the sky over Prosper were being reflected in a mirror. She edged closer, stutter-stepping along in her clogs as discreetly as possible, knowing that any minute Goat or Detective Daphne Simmons was liable to yank her back.

  The blue was some sort of fabric, maybe a tarp or sheet. Dusty with concrete, it appeared to be stuck to some of the larger chunks, and in other places had pulled free from the wreckage. It was draped over a body-shaped lump, and Stella peered at the ends, trying to determine which way was up, and if any details—body parts, for example—were poking out where she could see them.

  “Ma’am, this is an official investigation,” Simmons said with about as much warmth as a ham hock in a meat locker. “Kindly back away from—”

  “Holy fuck,” Stella exclaimed, because a fina
l few shuffling sidesteps brought her close enough to get a full-on view of the near end of the lump, where the sheet had been pulled away—

  —revealing the vaguely facelike gray stretched mask of horror nestled in the blue folds with its protruding cheekbones and jaw wrapped in leathery skin and its stringy crumbling eyes and its horrible stained-tooth grin and freakishly preserved wig of perky blond hair in a cut that belonged on a housewife from a Kansas City suburb, not this Halloween nightmare—

  —and then Goat’s hand closed on her arm and gave her a good solid yank, dragging her back away from the hole. Instinctively, Stella wrenched away from him, but there was more power in Goat’s one-handed grip than Stella managed to churn up in a week’s worth of workouts on the Bowflex, and she was helpless to go any direction but the one Goat had picked out for her, which, as it turned out, was back toward Neb’s cabinet.

  Goat gave her a not-ungentle shove, which caused her ass end to make solid contact with the plywood surface, right next to Neb. It didn’t hurt anything other than her pride, and Stella considered jumping up and objecting, but one look at Goat’s face convinced her that this was one of those times that came along occasionally where every word you uttered dug you a little deeper into a mess of your own making.

  The mummified body in its blue shroud provided enough of a distraction for the visiting crime-fighters that they forgot Stella for a moment, crowding around the remains of the shack’s foundation and making all kinds of appreciative sounds.

  Stella tuned them out for a moment and turned to Neb. “That what I think it is?”

  “Yeah, Stella, if what you’re thinkin’ about is a nasty-lookin’ old rotted human body that’s been layin’ under my shack for three years,” he said glumly. “I think I’m gonna puke again.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I b’lieve that’s what they’re all trying to figure out.” Neb took a much-folded, none-too-fresh-looking handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped it across his face. The day was headed toward the hot side of warm, but the faint sheen on Neb’s pallid skin appeared to be a product of nerves and nausea.

  “Seems to me they might want to figure out who was here pouring that concrete,” Stella remarked, thinking back to three years ago, a time when she had been distracted from the town’s goings-on by what turned out to be a steady ramp-up to and subsequent sorting-out after her bout of murderous husband-eliminating rage.

  “Well, now, Goat already done that first thing,” Neb said. “He’s a sharp-enough one, I’d guess.”

  “No kidding?” Stella maneuvered her butt on the hard surface of their makeshift seat, trying to find a position that was a little easier on her hip and hoping to avoid splinters. “Well, who is it?”

  Neb watched her attempts to get comfortable with sympathy as he stuffed his handkerchief back into the pocket of his drawstring lounging trousers.

  “Funny enough,” he said in a tone that indicated any humor involved had long since frittered itself away, “that would be me.”

  Donna Donovan liked strawberries. A lot. The plague started in her front yard, where a large wooden strawberry that Neb had cut out with his scroll saw was nailed to a stake driven into a nest of sprawling pink impatiens. The Donovan’s was painted on it in a curlicue-style script, the overzealous and not strictly accurate apostrophe taking the form of a little green leaf on a tendril that twirled down from the cap of leaves on top.

  Stella passed by the sign and headed up to the door, which featured a wreath of plastic greenery and fuzzy faux strawberries, but she didn’t have time to knock before Donna herself flung the door open and swept Stella into the house, nearly tripping over a large yellow cat.

  “Oh, Stella, I don’t know what I’m going to do I’m so upset,” she said. “I can’t bear to call Bobby and Luther—why, this would just break their hearts.”

  Donna and Neb’s grown sons had left Prosper for more exotic locales: Bobby was studying forestry in Minnesota, and Luther was managing a sports bar in Saint Louis. Back in Neb’s drug-fancying days, and later when Stella was saving him from the lure of the straight and narrow path, Donna had insisted on keeping the boys in the dark. She didn’t want to worry her darlings, even though they were well into their twenties now.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Stella said noncommittally. Considering her track record with her own daughter, who had gone more than three years without speaking to Stella at all, she had a hard-and-fast rule against handing out parenting advice. If someone had come up with the one true way to get the job done right, Stella sure hadn’t heard about it.

  She evidently wasn’t following Donna through the tidy split-level house fast enough, because Donna slipped her hand into Stella’s and tugged, dragging her into the kitchen and nudging her toward a chair. The chair’s pad was waffle cotton stitched into a strawberry shape. As Stella sat herself down, setting her notebook and pen on the table, she noted that little had changed in the kitchen since her last visit: a wallpaper border of teapots and strawberry runners still graced the top of the red-painted cabinets. A row of porcelain canisters shaped like berry baskets lined the countertops. The theme played out on the red teapot on the stove, the tea towels hung on hooks, the tiles on the backsplash, and the ruffly curtains in the window. Even the magnets on the fridge were shaped like plump little berries.

  Stella thought an hour in the kitchen would make her vomit, but she kept her opinion to herself.

  “So what have they done with him?” Donna said, plopping into a chair across from Stella. She slid a platter of sliced coffee cake toward herself and started pinching off little pea-sized crumbs and nibbling at them. Stella was quite familiar with this coping technique, which basically entailed eating enough food for a large family in increments so small that it hardly seemed likely they could possibly contain any calories, and she helped herself to the other end of the cake.

  “Well, now, Donna, it’s all just information-gathering for now,” she said. “I expect the sheriff’ll give me a call just as soon as they’re ready to release Neb. I asked him to, as a courtesy, you know.”

  “Why didn’t you stay there with him? He needs someone on his side,” Donna fretted. A smudge of jam traced the corner of her mouth, and a hank of hair had escaped its barrette and hung over her cheek, clues that she was falling apart. Donna never, ever looked anything but her finest unless her world was well and truly crashing in on itself.

  She was one of those ladies who took seriously her mother’s admonishment to offer her best side to the world. Her hair was always done, her makeup carefully applied, and her clothes neat and pressed. For a bit of individual flair, Donna favored bright-colored separates that molded themselves to her curvy shape and generally found some creative way to let a bit of undergarment show, either at her cleavage or up the slit of her skirt or peeking out over her low waistband in the back. Thongs had been a happy discovery for Donna. She’d amassed a wardrobe of lingerie in every color, so the peep show was always nicely coordinated.

  But today she had on a lavender knit jacket over a stretched and gapping lime green camisole with plain beige bra straps showing. Her gray sweatpants came all the way up to her belly button and hinted at nothing more than a possible call to get on the StairMaster a bit more often. In short, she looked a mess.

  “Now, Donna,” Stella said gently, opening her notebook. It was a fresh one from the stack Stella kept in her hall closet. Every case got a new notebook, purchased in bulk from the Wal-Mart sale bins, and this one featured Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! at the Wuzzleburg Celebration. Stella didn’t know much about Wubbzy other than he was shaped like a yellow nine-volt battery with a snout, and she doubted kids found him all that entertaining, despite the fact that big lettering down the side declared him abso-hula-lutely hysterical—she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his creators had been impaired by OxyContin abuse themselves. “You know I’d be there if I could, but you need to remember I’m just a civilian. Those folks being down from Fayette and all, Sheriff’s got
to clamp down on procedures. That’s how they do.”

  Donna paled even further. “But, Stella,” she said hoarsely, her voice barely above a whisper, “you’ve got to make them understand it’s not the way it looks. Do you think I ought to call Priscilla?”

  Priscilla, Donna’s attorney niece, had just passed the bar exam over the summer and joined up as a junior associate at a firm in Joplin. Stella wasn’t convinced the girl was really the best choice to defend her uncle, if it came to that.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Stella said cautiously, “but if we decide … down the road … well, I have some names we could consider. You know, since Priscilla’s probably so busy getting settled in her new job and all.”

  “Oh, but no one can defend a person like family, Stella,” Donna said. “’Cause she would know he’s innocent.”

  “Uh, yeah.” Stella figured a change of conversation might be in order. “Tell me again about the snack shack. Help me out with a time line here.”

  As Neb had explained before Goat gave Stella the heave-ho, and Donna confirmed on the phone as Stella drove over to the Donovans’ house, he had indeed been a key player in the construction of the snack shack, but he had no memory of wrapping up any blond ladies in blue sheets and laying them out in the framed-out foundation before backing up the concrete mixer and covering up the whole mess with a fresh batch of Ready Mix.

  “Why, you remember,” Donna said. “It was after they redid the track. Got one season into it and everyone was so dang parched during the demolition derby. Don’t you recall? There was practically a riot in the stands when the Optimists ran out of lemonade.”