Hair Extensions & Homicide / Supernatural Sinful Box Set

by Frankie Bow

  Aside from the safety announcement, class proceeded as usual. In the back rows, students played on their phones or dozed off; in the front row, the fat kid with the hat and the skinny one with the pimples kept derailing the class with topics that only they cared about. I had very little patience with people who asked questions not to get an actual answer, but simply to show off how smart they were. I’d seen way too much of that behavior at briefing meetings.

  After class Gertie, Ida Belle, and I met up in the parking lot. Mindful of the recent announcement, we carefully looked both ways as we crossed the lanes of the parking lot on the way to my Jeep. Ida Belle rode shotgun and Gertie climbed into the back seat.

  “So, anyone make any discoveries?” Ida Belle asked as I pulled out (cautiously, lest I unwittingly mow down any pedestrians). “Anything out of the ordinary? The only thing I found out was I should’ve enrolled in a more advanced auto shop class. The stuff they’re covering is really basic. Fortune?”

  “Nothing really relevant to our case. I was actually trying to pay attention and learn something, but these loudmouths in the front row kept interrupting and trying to show off how smart they were. It was kind of funny, actually. One of them tried to correct the professor about something, but he’d actually misread what she’d written on the board. So then his friend said, maybe if you…”

  “Maybe if you what?” Ida Belle prompted.

  “Nothing. It seemed funny at the time, but now I can’t remember it.”

  Maybe if you wore your glasses, was what had said. The story seemed a lot less entertaining when I remembered that Gertie’s refusal to wear her glasses may have cost Celia Arceneaux her life. I hoped it wasn’t true, but so far we had no alternate explanation.

  “Your turn, Gertie. How was drama class? I imagine the news about Celia’s gotten out. Anyone miss her?”

  “Dear me, no,” Gertie said. “Everyone’s already fighting over who’s going to take over the part of Blanche DuBois in the Student Showcase.”

  “Well, there’s a motive for Celia’s murder,” I said.

  “Yeah, now we’re talking.” Ida twisted around in her seat to face Gertie. “Think, Gertie. Was there anyone who wanted to play the part of Blanche bad enough to kill for it?”

  “Only every woman in the class and at least two of the men.”

  “What did the teacher do about all this?” I squinted at the short patch of asphalt illuminated by my headlights. This stretch of road between Mudbug and Sinful didn’t have street lights. “I hope she wasn’t encouraging it. It almost sounds like it’s…”

  “Unseemly,” Gertie offered.

  “I was thinking incitement to violence, but unseemly works too.”

  “You know I’m the last person to stick up for Celia Arceneaux,” Ida Belle added, “but even I think that’s a little disrespectful. At least wait till the woman’s in the ground before you start fighting over who’s gonna get her part in the school play. You’re right, Fortune, the teacher should’ve shut that down.”

  “Miss Tauzin wasn’t there tonight,” Gertie said. “I expected everyone to go home when she didn’t show up, but they all wanted to stay and practice their lines.”

  “That is a serious level of commitment,” I said. “Suspiciously serious. Good thing you’re embedded in the class, Gertie. You’ll need to keep a close eye on this.”

  “Speaking of eyes,” Ida Belle chimed in. “Maybe this would be a good time to start wearing your glasses.”

  “Gertie, did you just kick the back of the seat? I’m trying to drive here.”

  “Sorry, Fortune. That was meant for Ida Belle.”

  “Yeah, okay. Well, this is good as far as your case is concerned, Gertie. We found out something useful tonight. There’s a class full of people with a motive to murder Celia Arceneaux.”

  Chapter 9

  That night I drifted off to sleep feeling optimistic. There was a good chance we’d find Celia’s killer among Gertie’s classmates. It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized we had overlooked an obvious suspect.

  Marie.

  Marie was not only Ida Belle and Gertie’s good friend; she was also Celia Arceneaux’s challenger for the mayor’s office. With Celia dead, there was no need to continue the vote recount. Marie was in.

  I couldn’t imagine that the gentle Marie had resorted to foul play to get into the mayor’s office. Still, a good investigator follows every lead. Even—especially—if she finds it distasteful.

  As soon as I was done brushing my teeth, I called Ida Belle.

  “Fortune,” Ida Belle scolded me, “do you really think Marie is capable of running someone over with a car? I don’t think she’s any more capable of running down Celia Arceneaux than Gertie is.”

  “Less,” I heard Gertie shout in the background. “There’ve been a few times I’d have actually done it.”

  “She’s right,” Ida Belle said. “Marie wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “We should still talk to Marie,” I said. “I don't think she’s guilty either, but we need to be thorough. Besides, someone should tell her what’s been going on.”

  “Good point,” Ida Belle agreed. “Marie’s gonna end up mayor of Sinful now whether she likes it or not. She should get some warning.”

  Marie hadn’t heard the news about Celia’s death. She didn’t believe us at first. We sat her down, and let Gertie tell her the whole story, concluding with the fact that Gertie herself was now the prime suspect.

  Marie sat quietly, absorbing the news.

  “I didn’t want to win like this,” she said finally.

  “We know.” Gertie reached over and gave Marie a hug.

  “Well, where to now?” Ida Belle asked as soon as we were back outside. “That was a bust. Pretty obvious Marie didn't have anything to do with Celia's death.”

  “Well, I certainly didn’t kill Celia.” Gertie folded her arms. “Maybe a little more investigation into the victim is in order. Celia’s house isn’t far from here—”

  “Gertie, you’re in enough trouble,” Ida Belle scolded. “You wanna add B&E to your murder charge?”

  “Ida Belle’s right, Gertie. We really need to keep our noses clean on this one.”

  Yet somehow, without actually agreeing to anything, the three of us found ourselves detouring right past Celia Arceneaux’s house.

  Chapter 10

  We stood in the gathering dusk, gazing across the road to Celia’s dark house.

  “This is kind of spooky.” Gertie hugged herself.

  “It was your idea, Gertie,” Ida Belle said.

  “You wanted to come here too.”

  Something flickered in my peripheral vision.

  “Do you see that?” I interrupted the bickering septuagenarians. “Someone’s in the house.”

  We stared at the blank windows for a long time, and I wondered if I’d imagined it. And then, there it was.

  A greenish glow hovered briefly in the in the window and then flickered out.

  “Maybe we should go in and investigate?” Gertie sounded a lot less confident now that we were faced with an actual intruder.

  “What we should do is not be idiots.” Ida Belle dug out her phone and called 9-1-1.

  Apparently, the emergency dispatcher was not impressed.

  “I know it’s just a light in the window, but it’s a light in the window of a murder victim,” Ida Belle insisted. “Yes, it is an emergency! No, I don’t—”

  She swore at the dispatcher, who had already hung up on her.

  “How about the sheriff’s office?” Gertie suggested.

  Ida Belle furiously punched the number into her phone as the sky darkened above us. The light in Celia’s house trembled, disappeared, and then reappeared in a different window.

  “What do you mean, he’s gone for the day?” Ida Belle queried. “Well then, what about Deputy Breaux? No, not if he’s all the way out at the Swamp Bar. How about Carter Le Blanc? Really? Who are we supposed to call in an emergency, the
n? No, I just called 9-1-1. Okay, thanks, Myrtle. No, it’s fine.”

  Ida Belle sighed.

  “She doesn’t know where Carter is, hasn’t seen him for a few days. You know his home number?”

  I did. I recited it to Ida Belle.

  “No answer. Goes straight to voicemail. You wanna leave a message?” Ida Belle handed me her phone.

  No, I did not want to leave another message on Carter’s voicemail like some kind of pathetic stalker. I pressed the hang-up button and gave the phone back to Ida Belle.

  “What’s the point of leaving a message? The intruder’s not going to hang around until he calls back. We have to do something now.”

  Ida Belle and I went around the back of the house, leaving Gertie to stand watch in front. I had my phone on vibrate in my hand. If Gertie saw someone coming, she’d call and alert us. Also, holding the phone gave my fist a little more heft in case I needed to punch anyone.

  Fortunately, the back of Celia’s house was mostly in shadow. Better yet, the kitchen door was open a crack on its hinges. This was going to be less a “breaking and entering” than a “strolling in and looking around.”

  Ida Belle and I edged into the dark kitchen, paused, and listened. Sure enough, we heard floorboards creaking. The sound came closer. It sounded like someone walking slowly and dragging something. Ida Belle and I positioned ourselves on either side of the doorway.

  I felt the presence of the intruder before I saw anything, and my muscle memory took over. A blur of action and yelling, and the intruder was instantly on the ground, face-down and shrieking bloody murder. I was straddling her back, holding her arm locked in a disabling position. Ida Belle had her legs pinned so she couldn’t kick.

  Ida Belle was the first to realize that we might have been applying excessive force. She sprang up and dusted off her pants, and switched on the kitchen light.

  It took me a little longer. I released the arm and slowly rose to my feet, and then extended a helping hand.

  Mary-Alice Arceneaux gratefully reached out and stood up.

  “Mary-Alice!” I exclaimed. “You? You killed Celia?”

  “Killed her? Good heavens, I should say not.” She reached down and righted her suitcase, which had been knocked over in the scuffle. I spotted her reading glasses on the floor next to the stove. I picked them up and handed them to her, and she reattached them to the festive-looking chain draped around her neck.

  “Your glasses holder really does glow in the dark,” I said. “We saw the light through the window.”

  “Oh, my. I didn’t think of that.”

  “Fortune, watch her,” Ida Belle said. “I’m gonna call 9-1-1. And this time—”

  “Put the phone away.”

  Celia Arceneaux stood in the doorway.

  Chapter 11

  “What is going on here?” I looked from Mary-Alice to Celia and back to Mary-Alice. “Well?”

  “I don’t know what you all are doing in my home, but I’ll thank you to leave and keep your big fat mouths shut.”

  Gertie burst in through the back door.

  “Ida Belle, I saw the light come one. Are you—” she spotted Celia and her concern immediately turned to fury.

  “Celia Arceneaux! Why, you lying—”

  I placed a hand on Gertie’s arm to restrain her. We didn’t have time to stand around and wait for her to exhaust her (admittedly impressive) store of English and Cajun swear words.

  “You framed me!” Gertie shook my hand off her arm, red to the roots of her white hair. “You faked your death to get me in trouble.”

  “It wasn’t just to get you into trouble, Gertie,” Ida Belle glared at their nemesis. “This was a neat way to leave someone else holding the bag now that our town’s broke. Framing you for murder was just the icing on the cake.”

  “How dare you, Ida Belle!” Celia’s knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on the suitcase handle. “Come on, Mary-Alice. Let’s go.”

  “I promise it isn’t like that,” little Mary-Alice pleaded. I’d nearly forgotten she was still standing there.

  I studied Celia’s face. Behind her bravado, she was terrified.

  “Celia,” I said, “believe it or not, we want to help.”

  “You can’t help me,” she hissed. “Someone wants me dead.”

  “Yeah, that’s a convenient story,” Ida-Belle challenged. “I think you put on this big charade so people would forget about all the money that's disappeared from our town.”

  Celia marched into the kitchen and hefted her suitcase up onto the kitchen table. Then she unzipped the suitcase, pulled out her laptop, and started it up.

  “I thought you were in a big hurry,” Gertie goaded her.

  “It seems I have no choice but to prove myself to you people. Now I’m not going to read these messages again. They’re disgusting. But because you people don’t trust me…”

  Celia pulled up her email account and displayed the messages for us to read.

  She was right. The emails were disgusting. All of them had the same subject line: Your Days Are Numbered. Each contained a different, and explicit, description of the harm that would befall Celia if she didn’t “cooperate.”

  Little Mary-Alice averted her eyes and twisted her hands together.

  “Have you seen these messages?” I asked her. She nodded.

  “Drop what?” Ida Belle asked. “What is this about?”

  “You have to promise not to tell a soul. If this gets out, it’ll shake people’s faith in the town’s financial stability.”

  Gertie rolled her eyes. “Pretty sure that ship sailed when the town’s employees started getting IOUs instead of paychecks.”

  “Someone hacked into Sinful’s bank account. I’ve been doing what I can to keep it together, but the money’s just been drained away.”

  “Nice try, Celia,” Gertie said. “We all know this all happened because you can’t manage your way out of a—”

  “No, look. I’ll prove it,” Celia cut her off. She pulled up the Mudbug Credit Union website and navigated over to the city account. Sure enough, there were several withdrawals of $9,999. Just under the ten thousand dollars that would trigger mandatory reporting to the IRS.

  “How do we know you didn’t make those withdrawals?” Gertie persisted.

  Ida Belle rested her hand on Gertie’s shoulder to calm her.

  “Celia, if this is true, why didn’t you report it to someone?”

  “Because Celia is the thief,” Gertie fumed.

  “How is this related to the threats you’ve been getting?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t enough for them to empty our regular bank account. The thief wanted the Sinful employees’ pension fund too. I don’t know how they found out about it, but they did, and sent an email demanding the password. So I wrote back and said I hired a detective and we were going to find them out and hand them over to the police. That’s when the threats started. So don’t you three blab any of this to anyone. The thief thinks I’m dead, and that’s fine with me. Come along, Mary-Alice. I can’t stay here.”

  “Did you actually hire a detective?” I asked.

  Sudden banging on the door made all five of us jump.

  “Sheriff’s office! Open up!”

  Celia looked around wildly.

  “I called Myrtle again and talked her into calling Deputy Breaux back from the Swamp Bar,” Gertie said, looking innocent. “I convinced her that this was more important. There’ll always be another brawl at the Swamp Bar.”

  “In here!” Ida Belle shouted.

  Celia stood frozen with fear, but she didn’t look one-tenth as scared as Deputy Breaux. He stopped in his tracks when he spotted Celia. The color drained from his face, exactly as if he were seeing a ghost. He opened and closed his mouth several times before he was able to get any words out.

  “I think you should all come with me,” he stammered, finally.

  “I don’t think we’ll all fit in your car,” the ever-practical Ida Belle p
ointed out.

  I could see the wheels turning (slowly) as Breaux counted Celia, her accomplice Mary-Alice, and then Ida Belle, Gertie, and me.

  “I’m not sure you need to come, Miss Ida Belle.”

  “We’ll meet you at the station,” Ida Belle said. “Believe me, I want to get to the bottom of this.”

  In addition to scaring up Deputy Breaux, Myrtle had also managed to convince Sheriff Lee to stay up past his bedtime. Lee was at the station when we arrived, and we all crowded into the tiny interrogation room.

  Gertie, Ida Belle and I sat along one side of the rickety wooden table; Celia and her cousin Mary-Alice took their places on the opposite side. Celia managed to look bored and put-upon, like she had somewhere more important to be. Mary-Alice fidgeted like a little red-haired mouse; I half-expected her to start nibbling on a giant sunflower seed.

  Sheriff Lee took his seat at the head of the table. Deputy Breaux wasn’t in the room. This was apparently above his pay grade.

  “Well, Miss Celia.” Sheriff Lee settled back in the wooden chair and steepled his gnarled fingers. “You’ve certainly stirred up some trouble here. Now I gave Miss Gertie here quite a time about your demise, which in retrospect I realize was somewhat hasty of me. What with you being alive and well and all. Which brings me to the question, who’s the body Mudbug PD is holding?

  Like an exploding grenade, Celia Arceneaux abruptly burst into tears.

  Chapter 12

  “It was Miss Tauzin,” she sobbed. “They got Miss Tauzin.”

  “Our drama teacher?” Gertie exclaimed.

  Celia blubbered out the story in bits and pieces:

  Celia had gone to the sheriff’s office for help with the online thefts, and they told her they couldn’t do anything. (Here Sheriff Lee shifted uncomfortably in his chair but didn’t deny what Celia said.) She’d then contacted the FBI, but they told her they didn’t have the resources to pursue such a “small” infraction. They advised her to change her passwords and consider hiring a private investigator and a lawyer.