If Mashed Potatoes Could Dance

by Paige Shelton

  “No, thanks. I’ll be all right,” he said too bravely.

  Jake was on the other side of the booth from me and Cliff. Cliff leaned forward and said, “The tail is already on you, Jake. Jim didn’t want me to tell you, but know that you’ll be under surveillance until this is solved.”

  I hoped that our idea of being so out in the open that we couldn’t possibly look like we were sharing secrets with each other was working. There were places in town whose front walls weren’t made up entirely of glass. Were we being boldly brave or boldly stupid?

  I knew that Jake didn’t want to show relief, but his entire body relaxed. “Oh. Okay, then. That’s probably good.”

  I didn’t hear it, but Cliff reached for the cell phone on his belt and excused himself to take a call. I was abnormally curious about the call and wished he hadn’t taken the phone out to the parking lot. I could see him talking, but I wasn’t good at reading lips.

  “Betts, I’m so sorry I got you involved in this,” Jake said as he saw the concern I wasn’t good at hiding.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the note said I shouldn’t contact the police, I shouldn’t have contacted you either. It wasn’t good to get you involved.”

  “I’d have been so angry if you hadn’t,” I said truthfully. “This is what we do. We share the ups and the downs. Yep, I definitely would have been angry.”

  Though Jake looked relieved at my words, a wave of exhaustion seemed to roll over him as he leaned back against the booth. Whoever had been handing out the dark circles had invisibly snuck into Bunny’s and placed some under his eyes. “Look, Cliff’s on his way back in. I’m going home,” he said. “You two have a few minutes without my drama, okay? I wanted to ask him about the Monroe House, but you’ll have to do it for me.”

  “You don’t have to go.”

  “I know.” He stood wearily.

  “I’ll ask him.”

  “Thanks. Tomorrow,” he said as he bent over my side of the booth and kissed my cheek. I was worried about him, but pleased that he had someone watching over him.

  Jake said good-bye to Cliff in the parking lot as Bunny padded up to the booth and started in on one of our mini heart–to–hearts.

  Bunny was the toughest, hardest-working restaurant owner in the state of Missouri. Her diner was open twenty-four/seven, and she lived in a trailer behind it. She was short and wide with a mustache that got so out of control sometimes, her least-sensitive customers would remind her she needed to shave.

  “Jake okay?” she asked as she filled my coffee cup even though I’d already told her I didn’t need any more coffee.

  “Fine. Kidnapping, murders, scary stuff, you know.”

  “I do know, but I have every confidence that Jim will find the other two before they’re…well…”

  “Me, too.”

  “Was that the bus driver of the tour with the people? You know? The guy who sat with you before Cliff.”

  “Yes. Leroy.”

  “What about the blond pretty one? You know who I’m talking about?”

  “I think so.”

  “She’s up to no good,” Bunny said. She was a woman of few words and even fewer opinions. Everyone was a potential customer. She was good at being Switzerland neutral. She was also genuinely kind and didn’t talk badly about people. Her comment about Cece was so out of character, I wondered for a moment if she was trying to set me up; for what, I didn’t know, but it was unusual.

  “What do you mean?” I asked as I took a sip of the coffee I hadn’t wanted.

  “She was in earlier for lunch. She was just starving, so I fed her. She liked the food, so that’s not it. But she was asking questions about you, Miz, and Teddy.”

  I nodded. “She thought Teddy was cute.”

  “Everyone thinks Teddy’s cute. Girls ask about him all the time, but they’re more silly about it. I thought her curiosity was too much. She seemed to be digging for dirt of some sort.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That you and Miz were upstanding citizens and Teddy had too many girlfriends as it was.”

  I laughed. “Thanks. Did she leave you with any other impressions?”

  “Welcome. No, but keep an eye on her. Got it?” Bunny was done with this conversation. She had other things to do; she always had other things to do. She hurried off as the coffeepot led her, like a divining rod, to empty mugs.

  “Yes. Thanks, Bunny,” I said to her back.

  As I sipped some more, I wondered how capable Cece might be of kidnapping and murder. It didn’t fit. She was obnoxious, but she didn’t seem violent. However, if I remembered correctly, she was the one who’d discovered that the three people in her group had gone missing. Maybe that had been too convenient. But still, she was a pain, not a killer, I didn’t think.

  “Betts,” Cliff said as he scooted into the side of the booth that Jake had just vacated.

  “Hey. Alone again, except for Bunny and her customers.” I smiled. The restaurant wasn’t packed, but a respectable number of the booths were filled.

  Cliff smiled, too. It was nice to see the strain fall away, even if only for an instant.

  “What was the call, if you don’t mind me not minding my own business?”

  “It was me making a call. I faked that I received one.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw how scared Jake was. Jim wasn’t going to put any protection on him until tomorrow. I saw how nervous he was, so I asked if it could be taken care of tonight.”

  “That was observant and kind of you.”

  Cliff shrugged. “I’d do it myself, but Jim and I will be working all night anyway.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to sound too disappointed. I cleared my throat to try to cover. I was sorry about the murder and kidnappings of course, but I was also sorry we wouldn’t be able to spend the evening together. However, things between us were still tentative enough that I wasn’t yet sure what spending time together in the evenings really meant.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “There’ll be other nights.”

  “I do have about a half hour. If you’d like to eat more, have more coffee, or watch me eat a sandwich, I’d love for you to stay.”

  “You eat very politely. I’d be happy to be your audience.”

  “Thank you.” Cliff laughed.

  I watched him eat a BLT. And I hadn’t been falsely complimentary; he was a polite eater, always had been. He got a crumb or two on his chin but always wiped it away quickly. As he ate, he switched the subject away from kidnapping and murder.

  Cliff had moved into his grandmother’s old house. She died shortly before his return to Broken Rope, and he called living there an “adventure in lace doilies,” but he had enjoyed looking through all the things she’d kept stored in the attic. He had recently found a box of her recipes. She’d been known for her amazing bread pudding; even Gram admitted that Granny Sebastian’s bread pudding could best anyone’s. Cliff had had the small handwritten recipe card framed for me. Right there, right in the middle of Bunny’s, on our thirty-minute date and while I watched him eat a BLT, he gave me the gift.

  He said I could decide if I wanted to share it with Gram or just bake it and wow her every once in a while.

  By the time he had to get back to work, I’d had more coffee than I needed, Cliff had managed to get something in his stomach, I’d received probably the best gift I’d ever gotten, and I felt like we’d both moved another step closer to what we’d had in high school, or maybe a step forward in a parallel universe, where perhaps we were moving down a more grown–up path.

  It was all quite wonderful, and sort of scary. And I forgot all about the task I’d told Jake I would accomplish.

  Chapter 14

  For the second morning in a row, Sally awakened me with the idea that it was a good time to spend more time talking about her. I didn’t readily admit that I was interested enough in Edgar O’Brien’s notes to hope she’d show up, but I w
as.

  I didn’t believe that her diary existed, but learning about her life via Edgar O’Brien’s notes was fascinating. It was like having my own live version of the History Channel, which was about the only way I found history intriguing enough to pay attention.

  Once awake, I grabbed some coffee and we took our spots on my bed again as I began reading.

  “So, it says that you had pigeons, Sally,” I said as I interpreted one of the notes.

  She thought a long minute and finally said, “I did! I loved those birds. I kept them in the barn in the backyard. Oh, now I remember the barn really clearly. My pigeons were kept there, but my father used it mostly for storage. The birds were on the top level. I spent a lot of time there. Oh, Betts, I don’t think I’ve ever remembered that as well as I’m remembering now. Thank you!”

  “Well, you might not thank me after I tell you the next part.”

  “Go on.”

  “Your father set the birds free. Edgar says that the prosecution used this fact as one of the reasons you were angry enough to kill him.”

  “No! I mean, I don’t…something about that doesn’t sound right. I can’t pinpoint what’s right and what’s wrong, but something’s not making sense.”

  “Think about it. Maybe it’ll come back.”

  “I’ll try. But setting birds free wouldn’t have been enough to make me commit murder, I know that much. Particularly kill my father. Betts, I know that I wasn’t always happy, no one in my family was particularly cheery, but I don’t remember any hatred. I would surely remember hatred, wouldn’t I? What else? Tell me whatever you can.”

  “You were ill during the trial, very ill it seems,” I said.

  Sally put her hand on the right side of her stomach. “Yes, I was. I felt terrible. The doctors said I was lying about feeling ill, or simply suffering from a nervous stomach.”

  “Your stomach?”

  “Yes, right here.” She still had her hand on the right side of her midsection. “But it was unlike any sour stomach I’d ever had. It was a sharp pain.”

  “Are you sure it was on that side.” I remembered that she had died of some sort of heart condition.

  “Positive. It was very painful. Though I don’t remember the pain exactly, I remember how the most comfortable position was bent over, and my attorneys kept making me sit up straight.”

  I looked at the spot she touched. I didn’t think that an oncoming heart condition would cause pain there, but I’d research it a little. The two ailments might not have been related anyway. Maybe she had been faking her illness; there was no way to know for sure.

  I glanced down at the book. I didn’t quite understand the next few lines of notes, so I moved my finger slowly over them as I read them a few times before saying them out loud.

  “Sally, I’m not sure if I’ve got the words right because there’s some sort of stain over the page, but there’s something here that might be referring to skulls, your parents’ specifically.”

  Sally’s eyes flashed, presumably back in time if that’s the way this sort of thing worked. “Oh my,” she said to the memory.

  “What?”

  “It was truly horrible. The prosecution presented the skulls of my parents, right at the start of the trial.”

  I was literally struck speechless for an instant, but then I said, “No, not their skulls. He was using some props, something.” I scanned O’Brien’s writing again to be sure I hadn’t missed some detail.

  “No, Betts, it was their skulls. It was ghastly.”

  I looked back up. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “And, yes, the presentation of their skulls did sicken me, but that wasn’t what caused the pain in my gut,” Sally said.

  I couldn’t get my own head around the fact that Sally’s parents’ skulls had been presented by the prosecution. How was that even possible? Beyond the grisly technical considerations regarding body decay and such, who would do that? Suddenly, I was caught between anger and a sick stomach myself. Even though I’d never made it to the practicing-attorney part that came after law school, I couldn’t imagine using such theatrics. I suddenly didn’t know if I wanted to read more. I knew that if someone in charge of the Sally show at the old courthouse got a hold of this book, they’d add that horrible tidbit to the performance. In fact, I was surprised someone didn’t already know and it hadn’t already been added. I didn’t want that to happen.

  While I sat trying to adjust to this new world where skulls were gruesomely displayed at trials, Sally was apparently ruminating on her own thoughts because suddenly she exclaimed, “Oh, Betts!”

  “What?”

  “Something happened right before the murders, something with my sister and our father…oh, what was it?”

  “I’d love to know,” I said sincerely, hoping for anything to take my mind off skulls.

  “Maybe there are some notes in there about that?” Sally said. “I think I remember that Jane and I were angry, but I don’t think we were angry at Daddy. I think we were angry at each other, or at someone else altogether.”

  Edgar’s notes weren’t organized. I’d been reading them in the order that he’d written them. He’d scratched dates on a few pages, but the entries weren’t arranged according to the chronology of the trial—probably so they’d be difficult to understand if they were stolen. I knew that before computers came into use, journalists typically used codes and shorthand to protect their scoops. I’d heard of one old-time St. Louis newspaper reporter who created his own language so no one could figure out what he’d uncovered about any given story.

  “I haven’t seen anything about that yet,” I said. “But there are a lot of notes here. Maybe we’ll come across it. The next entry I see isn’t about the skulls, though, and it might be interesting. It says: ‘Sally’s hair was clean when the police arrived. No one is talking about that.’”

  “No, no one talked about that at all, I don’t think. I wonder how Edgar knew my hair was clean.”

  “I can answer that—he says it was one of the questions he asked the police. He asked them if your hair was clean when you were arrested. The police said it was.”

  “That’s good! Right. Clean hair, no blood?”

  “Or maybe they thought you shampooed after you committed the crimes.”

  “My hair would have been wet if that was the case. Yes, it still would have been wet when the police arrived. Think about it. If I had done such a grizzly thing, my hair would have been spotted with blood, not clean and not wet.”

  “You could have dried…of course, you didn’t have blow-dryers. Good point, except that maybe it was hot enough that your hair dried quickly. I don’t know.” At the time of Sally’s parents’ murders, the police didn’t have the know-how, let alone the ability, to test for trace evidence, DNA, or even the tiniest, almost-but-not-quite invisible drops of blood. Sally had a point, but I wasn’t ready to conclude that the observation of clean, dry hair might somehow prove her innocence. She could have worn a hat of some sort, gloves, too. Or the police might not have looked closely enough.

  Still, these notes and conversations were making me wonder. Could Sally Swarthmore have been innocent? Probably not—that seemed a huge stretch—but it was beginning to at least sound like her trial had been more of a circus than a valid legal battle. A small part of me thought that if she truly was guilty, the level of integrity used during her trial didn’t matter much. But the larger and far nobler part of me had a respect for the law that couldn’t be shaken. I thought integrity should be the number one code that attorneys-at-law lived by. Could her diary prove she was railroaded, or used as a scapegoat? Would it hold any significance at all? I knew, however, that Sally’s diary would document her words only—she could have written anything she wanted in it.

  As if reading my mind, she said, “Can you please ask that actress if she has my diary? She just portrays me so well. I have to wonder.”

  I didn’t want to ask Opie anything unless it was what day I could
expect her to leave Broken Rope and never return, but I had another idea.

  “I have to meet Gram and Teddy at the school. I’ll ask Teddy if he’ll do some snooping around her house.”

  “I’ve looked myself, and saw the room devoted to me, but of course I can’t open drawers and the like. Do you think he’ll help?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s worth asking.”

  I hurried and pulled myself together. This time I dried my hair and added a little makeup. The only person who’d noted my lack of attention to detail yesterday had been Opie; it bugged me that it bugged me that she’d said something. As I dabbed on a little eye shadow, I told myself it had nothing to do with her. It was just that I had a few extra minutes to primp.

  Of course, since I’d taken the time, I was sure not to see her. I didn’t think Teddy or Gram paid any attention to whether or not I wore makeup, and they didn’t care anyway.

  I’d been informed of a meeting between the three of us via a text message from Gram that she’d sent sometime during the night. Teddy and I had shown her how to text, and she’d taken to it like whipped cream to strawberries. The entire family received text messages from Gram, which meant that any time she had something she wanted to say or plan, she texted it to whomever needed to know. This meant I had been called to a number of meetings via late-evening messages. I was curious about her inclusion of Teddy this time.

  I followed my brother’s truck into the school’s parking lot at 8:58 A.M. Sally had popped over already, and I saw her following Gram as they walked the edge of the small parking lot next to the cemetery. Gram, dressed in a Pittsburgh State T–shirt and jeans, looked at the ground as if she was either searching for something or pretending to search for something so Sally would think she was busy.

  “Teddy,” I said as we both got out of our vehicles and moved toward the school. “I have something I need to talk to you about when we’re done with whatever Gram needs us to do.”

  His eyebrows rose. “What’d I do?”