by Tegan Maher
"Well," Coralee said, "somebody will, though. I suppose now that she's gone, Felix gets the house back."
"Oh yeah," Belle said, pressing her lips together. "I'd forgotten about that."
Coralee snorted. "I don't know how. It was the dirtiest divorce of the decade. The screamin' match outside the courthouse when it was over was epic. Even worse than the Great Hank Debacle."
Now my curiosity was piqued. When Hank died, Anna Mae and Cheri Lynn had a knockdown drag-out on the courthouse lawn, and if something was bigger than that, then I wanted to hear about it.
"Do tell," I said, all ears. I justified my nosiness by filing it under investigating. After all, gathering dirt was included in the price of the haircut.
"Right after the divorce was over," Coralee said in the tone she used for the juiciest stuff, "they had a screamin' match right there on the courthouse steps. I don't remember the whole fight, but the last thing Ida said was I told you you'd get that house over my dead body! Then she shook the hot-off-the press divorce papers at him. And she was literally right. She didn't get the house outright; she only got lifetime rights, which is all she cared about anyway."
"So who gets it now that she's dead?" I asked as Coralee squirted a baseball-sized glob of mousse into her palm then worked it through my hair.
Belle stroked her chin, a speculative gleam in her eye. "I reckon Felix does. I mean, I have no doubt if Rose needed a place, he'd let her have it, but she has a house of her own. From what I hear, she’s got it mortgaged to her eyeballs, but at least she’s keeping a roof over her own head. And Felix just retired. Regardless of what Ida thought when she married him, he was land-rich but money-poor. Not payin' rent will make his life a whole lot easier."
I chewed on that as Coralee scrunched and dried my hair. As I paid, I remembered my visit from Rose and related it. Hearing she had a huge mortgage made me feel bad for her though. Before I got the money from Hank, it about gave me ulcers just seeing the light bill in the mailbox. If I’d had a mortgage, we’d have been living at Aunt Beth’s, so the stress of that had to be incredible.
"Poor lamb," Coralee said, drawing my attention back to her as she handed me my change. "This can't be easy for her. I'm glad you're goin' with her."
"Me too," I said, and was surprised to realize I meant it.
As I pushed out into the sunshine, I thought about what I'd learned and decided it was time to meet up with Hunter. Something told me I'd made at least as much progress in the investigation this morning as he had.
CHAPTER 10
SINCE I'D STAYED TO talk to Rose and missed the chance to take him a coffee, I swung back by Brew to get a couple iced coffees and two chicken-salad sandwiches. Raeann made it from scratch just like she did all her food and used grapes and pecans as well as the traditional ingredients.
It was hellfire hot outside, and I was tempted to drive even though it was only a couple blocks. In the end, I resisted the temptation and decided I needed to walk off the bear claw from that morning.
While I was walking, Angus Small and his girlfriend Trouble popped in and floated beside me. Angus was Keyhole's former town sobriety-impaired citizen who had died a couple winters before. That hadn’t let him give up living, though.
"Hey, Noe," he said, "What's doin'? We popped by your shop but Erol said you hadn't been in yet."
"Yeah," Trouble added, "and he didn't say it in the most charitable of tones, either."
I pulled in a deep breath and released it. Erol was the ghost of the man who owned my building before I did, and he had a much different view of professional behavior than I did.
"I can't imagine he did," I said. "It's a good thing he's not able to have a stroke because if he were, I have no doubt I'd have given him one by now."
"Yeah, but don't worry about him," Angus said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "He's grown to love ya in his own way and just fusses over ya because it gives him something to do. I wish he'd get out more with us."
"I know," I said, wishing the same thing. I worried about him keeping himself closed off as much as he did. "I've tried to get him to go do more things, too. He likes the movie nights, but that's about it."
"He does like to watch TV, in any form," Trouble said. "We had one when I was a kid, but it didn't get very many channels. We were always outside playing or doing something, anyway, so it didn't much matter. Since I've been back, I just haven't gotten in the habit of watching. Too many other things to do," she said, reaching out and taking Angus's hand and smiling.
"I'm the same way," I said. "Don't get me wrong—I love me some Netflix, but in moderation."
By that time, I'd reached the courthouse and glanced up the wide staircase that circled around the front of the building. Normally, I found the building graceful and dignified. Today, the wraparound staircase in the front made me tired just looking at it. It seemed like there were about three hundred steps to the front doors.
I trudged up them, the humidity and my lack of restful sleep making my feet feel like sledge hammers by the time I made it to the top. When I crossed between the massive Greek columns and stepped into the shade of the wide veranda, it felt like the temperature dropped ten degrees.
Angus and Trouble had floated along beside me, chatting about the upcoming Halloween festivities. I was looking forward to them myself; Halloween tied with Christmas as my favorite holiday, and not just because I was a witch.
"We're headin' to the lake," he said when I reached for the handle to one of the double doors, "but we wanted to check in and make sure you were doin' okay. We hadn't seen you in a couple days. If we hadn’t run into ya here, we were gonna pop out to the farm tonight."
"Thanks, guys,” I said, warmed by their concern. “I'm good. Just been busy, and things have been a little choppy for us lately what with the murder and all. Have fun."
They waved as they faded out, and I was grateful once again that they'd reunited. It surprised me that they liked to spend so much time at the lake considering Trouble had drowned in it, but they said that didn't matter. Some of their best memories from when they were living had been made there, and they still spent quite a bit of time in a little cove only the locals knew about.
I made my way to the back of the building where the sheriff's office was and smiled at Peggy Sue, the receptionist and all-around keeper of the town's records. If anybody bought or sold property, got married or divorced, died or had a baby, she knew about it.
"Hey, Noelle! How are you today, sweetie?" She looked up from the paperwork she was filing and smiled at me over the readers perched on the end of her nose.
"Good, Peggy Sue, how 'bout you?"
"I'm doin' great. Just gettin' this year's property taxes ready to send out, and for the first time ever, I don’t feel slimy about doin' it."
For years, Peggy Sue had lived under Hank's thumb and it had been her job to send out the grossly inflated property tax bills. Her cornflower-blue eyes glittered in her round face, and her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.
"Not only are many folks gettin' a pass 'cause they were overcharged for years, but Hank's old cronies ain't doin' so good. As you well know, Butch Davies and Ronnie Dean"—Hank's two main henchmen—"are in prison, and if there's any kinda Karma, they're gonna lose their places for taxes."
She gave me a wink and a smile to rival the cat that ate the cream. "It's a shame they both owe eight years' worth of back taxes 'cause Hank never made 'em pay. Same with Jim Simpson, Judge Calloway, Dan Greene, and a whole list of other upstandin' citizens Hank was in cahoots with. With any luck, we'll be havin' quite the sale on the courthouse steps come the first of the year. That is, if the bank don't take 'em first."
That made me happy as a pig in mud, which was an apt phrase considering we were discussing swine. Not only were the good folks getting what was due them, the bad guys were too.
Jim Simpson was a sleaze ball who owned the local gentlemen's club where Cheri Lynn had worked, along with a bunch of other shady
businesses. Judge—excuse me, former Judge—Calloway had swept things under the rug when Hank needed him to and slapped outrageous fines on regular citizens to line his own and Hank's pockets.
One good example: He fined Hazel Heater, who was eighty-three years old, two hundred dollars for jaywalking from Coralee's to Dr. Helmick's office right across the street because her son had refused to pay his extra "business tax" that month.
I smirked at the thought of the good judge losing his property. Bless his shriveled little black heart. It was about time Karma got around to dealing with him, but I cut her some slack because to be fair, she had a lot to do around our town.
Dan Greene had been cut from the same cloth. He was a local real estate attorney who'd advised innocent folks to sell their properties at below fair market value for a number of reasons that all had one thing in common: Dan and Hank made a boatload of money off the deals.
"So you're saying they're paying for their deeds ... with their deeds?" I couldn't help it—I gave an evil giggle.
She rolled her eyes but smiled. "I couldn't have said it better myself." Eyeballing the bags in my hand, she pointed toward them with her chin. "There's not, by chance, somethin' in one of those for me is there?"
I grinned. "Of course. I wouldn't dare come without bearing gifts." I'd grabbed a couple of blueberry danishes for her along with the sandwiches and bear claws I’d gotten for Hunter and me. She had a sweet tooth, and after all she'd done for me, a couple pastries two or three times a week were nothing at all.
Setting one of the bags on her desk, I pointed toward Hunter's office with my chin. "Is he in? I didn't think to text before I came."
She nodded as she pulled a danish out of the bag. "He just got back. Go on. He's not with anybody."
I circled around her desk, then pecked on the doorframe of his office. The door was open, and he was studying the top sheet of a stack of papers. "Lunch delivery," I said. "Caffeine blast, no extra charge."
He smiled and motioned me in, then leaned back and stretched in his chair.
"Any progress?" I asked, pulling the chair in front of his desk closer so I could open the bags.
"Not that you'd notice," he replied. "I've talked to the ladies in Ida's reading group, but none of them seemed to know much about her other than superficial stuff."
He took a long pull off his iced coffee. "One of them did tell me she wasn't speaking to her daughter, and another said she'd gotten into it with a woman who'd recently moved back to town. Apparently, the woman had old films of when they were kids, and when she suggested they get together and watch them, Ida had a fit."
Knowing what I now did about her childhood, I could understand why, but it seemed to me she could have found a better way to decline than blowing her cork.
He squeezed the bridge of his nose as if warding off an impending headache. I pulled the sandwiches out of the bag and handed him one, figuring at least part of his problem was that he probably hadn't had anything to eat. If it weren't for the heat, we would have gone to the little park in the town square in front of the courthouse. As it was, I was content to eat in the AC. Late August in southern Georgia was brutal; summer always went down fighting.
"So, I got my hair cut a little bit ago," I said.
Raising a brow, he grinned. He knew by now that more often than not, that was code for Guess what I heard.
"So what did you learn?" he asked. "Please tell me it was something good that will give me an edge to pick at."
"It just may," I answered, taking a bite of my sandwich. I explained the situation with the house to him.
"Interesting," he said when I was finished. "The ex had drifted to the bottom of the list since they'd been divorced for so long, and he appears to have moved on."
"What do you mean, moved on?" I asked. Since I'd lost track of Rose for the most part, I had no idea what her dad had been up to.
"Felix just got remarried." He took a bite of his chicken sandwich and chewed. "Some woman from Atlanta he met while he was at the fishing tournament. She was here to cheer a friend on, or so she said."
Odd that Coralee hadn't mentioned that. Was it possible something was going on in Keyhole that she didn't know about? It must be new enough to have not made the circuits yet, but I was going to make it a point to text her because it was a rare thing indeed to get the gossip drop on her.
"Hmm," I said, crinkling my forehead. "Wonder what the new wife thinks about wife number one living in that big fancy farmhouse. Does she have her own place?"
He ran his tongue over his teeth to clear away the bread, then took a drink of coffee. "I'm not sure yet. All I've heard about either of them, I heard from Peggy Sue. I was on my way to talk to him myself, but it was just to cover the bases. Now I think it might be a good idea to talk to them both."
"Sure would,” I said around a mouthful of sandwich, “but I’m not sure if he’s in town. I had coffee with Rose and she said he was in Atlanta when she called to tell him about her mom.”
“I have plenty to do between now and then, anyway,” he replied. “I have to go talk to the ladies at the auxiliary because she’d been at a meeting the evening before. Jim’s taking a look at the samples on his own time tonight so we can figure out what type of poison was used.”
Jim Sanders was a Keyhole native and a forensic scientist who worked for the State of Georgia, but still lived in Keyhole when he wasn’t on a case somewhere. His folks were getting up there in age and he didn't want to lose time with them or not be there if they needed him.
He had access to all the fancy equipment in the Atlanta crime lab and did what he could when something came up here. Something like ... speeding up tests when somebody gets poisoned.
“That’s good of him,” I said. “Plus I’m sure the ladies at the auxiliary will know more about this mystery woman. Maybe Ida knew about her and said something. You've got a few different motives all wrapped up in one place right there."
"Right," he said, snorting. "Because it's always that easy around here."
That was a valid point.
CHAPTER 11
WHEN I LEFT, I FIGURED it was time for me to go to work before Erol had a meltdown. He didn't understand why I didn't keep regular hours. Since the place had been a sandwich shop when he’d owned it—I'd just gotten rid of the faint pickle smell—it didn't make sense to him why I didn't have set, nine-to-five hours. With the way I ran my business, I didn't really have to.
For one, I sold most of my pieces by word of mouth or via my website. That meant I had the luxury of setting my own hours and working at will. And despite what he seemed to think, I put in plenty of hours. I'd taken two of my favorite shows—American Pickers and Flea Market Flip—and combined them. I went to estate sales, yard sales, flea markets ... anywhere I thought I may find something good for a decent price, then brought it back and either refurbished it or combined it with other pieces I picked up to make entirely new items.
I also worked on projects in the back of our second barn-turned-garage at the farm, so just because he didn't see me working didn't mean I wasn't. Telling him that was like talking to a wall, though.
Currently, I was working on a set of freestanding lamps that I was making out of old metal buckets. Rather than clean them back up to new, I'd decided to leave most of the patina on them because it gave them a great rustic feel.
A few days back, I'd started cutting star patterns out of the buckets and figured I'd use old wrought-iron bed posts that I'd salvaged for the posts. I hadn't decided yet what to use for the bases. I was satisfied so far, but needed to finish cutting the patterns out of the buckets, then line them with thin pieces of colored Plexiglas.
When I'd first started the business, it was hard not to keep every piece I made because I ended up falling in love with them. When I realized what people were willing to pay, it didn’t take me long to decide I could always make another for myself.
Before I'd even unlocked the door to the place, Erol floated through and gave m
e the look.
"It's noon," he stated flatly.
"I’m aware," I said, keeping my voice neutral. By now, his censure was water off a duck's back.
He hmphed and grumbled a little as I let myself in and slid my purse behind the counter.
"Is there anything in particular you want to watch on TV, or are you good?" I asked in an attempt to bring him back around.
Once we'd figured out he'd been murdered rather than just run out of town, we'd managed to get most of his personal belongings back—that's another story that's intense on a few different levels—and his 55-inch smart TV was among them. Since I'd gotten his shop for practically nothing, the one thing he'd asked for was the right to stay there and for me to mount his TV and keep it on channels he wanted to watch. I figured that was fair, and I'd have done it for him regardless of how much I'd paid for the place.
"Yeah," he said, relenting on the whole time thing. "Master Chef is coming on. Can you flip it for me?"
I picked up the remote and changed the channel, then gave Norman, our black and white pet rat, a handful of crackers. He gave me a toothy grin and nodded his thanks. His girlfriend, whom we'd named Sammie with her approval, stayed back a little. She was still getting used to the whole being friends with people thing, but she was coming around. I just laid her crackers on the counter and gave her some space.
I'd turned the space Erol had used for storage into a workshop and transformed the seating space into a display area. As always, when I walked into the working half, I pulled in a deep breath and smiled. It may sound strange, but the faint smells of paint, varnish, and old wood were soothing and put me in my Zen state, sort of like my baking did.
Once I got into the rhythm of sanding or cutting or painting, my mind was free to wander. I did my best thinking when I was in that state, and often came up with some great ideas for projects or solutions to problems when I was in the zone. It also infused a little of my magic into each piece, adding just a little extra something to them.