“Possibly.”
“But who?”
“I don’t know.”
Jed paused in thought. “Susan Thompson … You think her mama might be Cynthia Thompson? The one who lives over on Cypress?”
“According to Opha Mae Shaw, yes.”
“But she must be in her eighties by now. I doubt she could’ve killed Patrick.”
Harley did not mention the fact Susan’s baby had been in the car with her, a baby that had never been found, a baby that might be Beau Arson. And she would not mention it, not until she had more evidence.
“Interesting theories.” Jed rose from the bar stool and drew his car keys from his pocket. “Call me if you think of anything else. And stay out of trouble. You’re still on Alveda Hamilton’s naughty list.”
45
Granny Drawers
“You owe me fifty bucks.”
Harley turned to find the livestock manager pointing his dirty index finger at her. She stood outside Matilda’s pen, feeding the pig her lunch. She shoved one of Aunt Wilma’s Little Debbies through the pen’s wires and watched as Matilda chewed it.
“Sir?”
“That pig of yours chewed a hole through her pen last night, trying to get at a candy apple some kid dropped on the ground.”
He pointed to a small section of Matilda’s pen that had been patched up with duct tape.
“I apologize,” Harley said, “but fifty dollars for a piece of duct tape?”
“Forty-nine of that’s for the inconvenience.”
Harley could feel Matilda pulling at her dress through the pen’s wires, and she tried to shoo the pig away with her hand. “Just a minute, Matilda. Let me finish my conversation.”
“Judges say if she does it again, she’ll be disqualified.”
Harley was about to concede when she looked down in horror to see Matilda had chewed a hole in her dress, a huge hole.
“I can see your granny drawers,” the livestock manager said, grinning with his three teeth.
“What?”
“Your granny drawers.”
Harley looked down at her dress again and shrieked. Indeed, through the gaping hole, you could see her cotton panties. To make matters worse, the panties were a pair Aunt Wilma had given her for Christmas the year before, with a slogan that read: No Peeking Until Christmas.
Her gaze shot up to the livestock manager in embarrassment. How much of her had he seen?
He held up his hand in a solemn swear, and in a sarcastic tone, he said, “Now, don’t you worry none. I was somehow, by the grace of God, able to forgo temptation.”
Harley made a face, then grabbed her dress and bunched it together in the middle, closing the hole. She needed to find something, anything to cover it. Her gaze darted about the festival grounds, searching for a solution.
Deciding one of Tina’s aprons would do, she hurried toward Tina’s Treats on Main Street, leaving the livestock manager at Matilda’s pen. Behind her, she could feel his eyes smiling into her back.
“And I promise,” he said, snickering, “I won’t peek ’til Christmas.”
Pushing her way through crowds of festival goers, Harley wondered what else could happen, how she could be humiliated any more. Then, her chest collided with Eric Winston’s, and she received her answer. A smiling Eric, impeccably handsome and tailored and barbered in a cashmere sweater and jeans, grabbed her by the elbows to keep her from falling.
“Harley?” He rebalanced her body on the pavement and smiled. “What a pleasant surprise.”
She clamped her hand over her crotch before he could notice the hole and the granny panties. “Eric …” She forced a smile. She was so embarrassed and nervous, she found herself dancing back and forth on the pavement as she held her crotch.
“Everything okay?” he asked, searching her face with concern. “You look rather …”
She labored to think of an excuse, any excuse. “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling away from him, “but I have to … I have to … pee.”
Hurrying back through the crowds, she berated herself, wondering why she couldn’t have thought of something better. I have to pee had been worse than the hole in her dress and the granny panties.
At last, she made her way to the sidewalk and then to Tina’s Treats. To her surprise, she found Uncle Tater’s antique toilet stationed outside the shop, and Opha Mae Shaw standing beside it, adding water to the flowers in the bowl.
“Well, howdy there, Harley!” Opha Mae said, raising her watering can from the bowl.
Opha Mae noticed Harley had her hand clamped over her dress, and raised her brows. “You all right, darlin’? Why you got your hands over your no-no spot? You gotta go potty or somethin’?” Opha Mae looked down at the toilet bowl in consideration, then back at Harley again. “Well, I reckon I could just let you go in here, but my flares, you see.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” Harley said, rushing past the old woman and her toilet. “I think I can make it.”
Inside Tina’s shop, a crowd of people was lined up behind the bakery case, gaping at the assortment of cookies and cakes and pies as they pondered their selections. Tina stood behind the counter, grinning, as she pulled desserts from the case with gloved hands and wrapped them in parchment.
“Tina!” Harley said, waving from the front door. “Tina, I need you for a second.”
Tina handed a bag of baked goods to a departing customer and headed in Harley’s direction. “What’s wrong?” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “You look constipated or somethin’.”
“I don’t have to go the bathroom in any way. I have a problem.”
Tina motioned for Harley to follow her to the bakery’s back room, which housed the kitchen.
There, among the prep tables and ovens and stand mixers, Harley removed her hands from her dress and let Tina assess the damage.
She squealed with laughter. “Let me guess,” she said. “Matilda.”
“Yes.”
“And those awful panties! They’re like man repeller.”
“They’re comfortable.”
“Well,” Tina said, still giggling, “I’m sorry, but I don’t really see how I can help you.”
“I need one of your aprons.”
She considered. “Well, I’ve got a load of ’em in the washer right now, but they won’t be dry for a while. Let me go look in the linen closet.” She walked to the back corner of the kitchen and then to a wardrobe by one of the sinks. She removed an apron from the wardrobe and returned to Harley.
“Here you go.”
Harley’s glimmer of hope diminished. The apron was hot pink and lined with black lace. A giant crocheted bun smiled from its center with a slogan beneath it that read: Bakers Knead Hot Buns.
“And you’re sure you don’t have any other clean ones?”
“Sorry, sweetie. It’s this or the granny panties.”
And what was worse, she was about to pay a visit to Beau Arson.
46
A Song of Mourning
Within the hour, Harley arrived at Muscadine Farms only to find the resort wholly deserted. Not one car filled the large parking lot and Boonie Davenport’s blockade was dismantled. She remembered Stevie having said Beau had sent their entourage away. By the appearance of things, the order still stood. She wondered where Stevie and Marcus had disappeared to, and thought at least they would have been there to keep an eye on Beau. But everything seemed deserted.
Harley parked her truck in front of the inn and made her way inside. Entering the dining room was like entering a cave, the entire room veiled in darkness. The crystal chandelier was dark in the shadows of the vaulted ceiling, and the only source of light came from small candles in the room’s center, gathered around something, someone.
Beau was seated with his back turned and his head bowed, dark waves of hair shrouding his face and his bare chest as he embraced his electric guitar, transfixed by a resonant, soul-filled melody of sustained notes, with decidedly classical
undertones.
Harley watched him from the back of the room, listening to the song’s beauty. It was a song of yearning, of sadness, sounding like a love letter or a prayer. Beau’s back moved in time with the slow rhythms, the golden flesh exposing a pair of wings, wings of deep indigo, flickering in the candlelight, extending the entire width of his shoulders, the feathers tapering down toward the small of this back.
As if he sensed Harley’s presence, knew she was watching him, he looked over his shoulder and the two locked eyes. He lowered his head once more, his body melding into the guitar, the music climbing to a crescendo before it at last filtered down to a soft melody, slowly dying to silence.
Harley Henrickson stood in wonder, her emotions still roused by the hauntingly beautiful song. How could something so beautiful, so ethereal, as if written by angels, come from such a rough-hewn man: dark, flawed, and human. Beau Arson had been given a gift of supernatural proportions, but what power had bestowed that gift?
Quietly, she approached the room’s center and stood over his still-bowed head. Though his face remained shrouded by waves of dark hair, she could see he had been mourning Patrick Middleton, and he now hid his face in embarrassment from having expressed an emotion he rarely felt but was too exhausted to conceal.
“Harley Henrickson,” he said, his whiskey-and-cigar voice deepened by grief. He raised his reddened eyes from his guitar and met hers.
He was like a grizzly bear in a cave, one that had been awakened from a long, deep sleep in mid-winter, weeks before he was ready.
“I … I, um, need to speak with you about something,” she muttered. “I mean if that’s okay.”
47
The Phoenix
Beau lowered his gaze back to his guitar, then ran his calloused fingers along the spine. “What’d you think?”
“Think?”
“The music.”
Harley paused. Beau Arson always seemed to surprise her. She never knew what to expect of him, what he would say, what he would do, how he would react. She could not read him, could not predict him like she could so many others, and it left her unsettled. “It was beautiful,” she said in truth, though she would have been afraid to say anything otherwise. “Did you write it?”
He slid the guitar from his lap and placed it on a stand beside his chair. “I did. Just now.”
Harley raised her brows. She assumed the piece had taken him months to compose, as it had sounded so technically challenging and seamlessly performed. And it probably would take most people that long, she thought, if they could even create something of that caliber.
But, of course, this was not the case with Beau Arson. It came naturally to him, almost by rote, just as the average person brushed their teeth, combed their hair, or tied their shoes each day. Beau Arson picked up a guitar and he created, every day of his life. She wondered if the pain and sadness he carried inside him, had carried inside him since he was a child, fueled his creativity, acting as a muse, lifting his art to heights not otherwise reached.
He rose from his chair, and as he rose, his body extending to its full height, she seemed to lessen in his presence, cowering, if not physically, then at least internally. He stood over her, guiding his arms through the sleeves of his shirt, and though she was not as susceptible to temptations of the flesh as others were, she could see, at least theoretically, the attraction women felt for Beau Arson, the spell as Jed put it, he cast upon them. It wasn’t just that his body was physically beautiful and powerful, but there was something of the animal about him, a virility that spoke to primitive, forbidden desires.
“You bake?” he said, buttoning his shirt to the chest.
“Huh?”
He gestured to the apron Tina had loaned her that morning.
“Oh.” She felt her cheeks color. “Yes. That. Well, um, Matilda—my pig—she kind of ate a hole in my dress at the festival this morning, and you could see my granny panties—I mean my underwear through the hole—so I borrowed this apron from a friend of mine who’s a baker.”
He released a gravelly chuckle. “Harley Henrickson, you never cease to surprise me. So,” he said, clearly amused, “you get any takers?”
“Pardon?” Then she realized he was referring to the apron’s logo: Bakers Knead Hot Buns. “Oh,” she said, in serious consideration, “well, there was a drunk guy on Main Street this morning. He said I could knead his hot buns anytime.”
He smiled. “There you go.”
“I don’t know,” Harley said. “It didn’t look like he had many teeth. He probably can’t eat much but buns.”
A roar of laughter rolled from Beau Arson, one that surprised Harley, not only because it came from him, but because she hadn’t been trying to be funny. Realizing the ridiculousness of it all, she began laughing, too.
When the amusement had settled, and the two had returned to a comfortable silence, Harley approached the purpose of her visit. “Beau, there really is something I need to speak with you about.”
Registering the seriousness of her request, he drew a chair from a nearby table and gestured toward it. “Please,” he said with kindness, “have a seat. And would you like something to drink? I can make a pretty decent cocktail, but probably nothing compared to yours.”
“I’ll just have a scotch. Neat.” She didn’t usually drink during the day, but she needed something to help her through the impending conversation.
Beau filled two glasses with shots of scotch and returned, handing one to Harley. “So what is it you’d like to talk to me about?” He returned to his seat.
Harley took a sip of scotch and savored the smokiness as it burned down her throat. She drew in a breath and in a soft voice, said, “Beau, I know about Patrick. I know what he did to you—to your mother.”
Beau swirled his scotch, watching it collect on the sides of the glass. “You do?”
“Yes. I know that he killed your mother.”
Sadness fell over his face, and his expression regained that haunted look. “How’d you find out?”
“Let’s just say I pieced it together.”
“All those years,” he said, shaking his head. “All those years, I’d always wondered why he’d taken an interest in me, why he was always helping me out. Nobody else sure as heck ever did. It was so strange. He just seemed to appear out of nowhere one day when I was kid, started showing up at the Boys and Girls Club after school, volunteering in the afternoons, tutoring me, mentoring me.
“I had no idea at the time that he’d already set up a trust fund for me, that if anything were to ever happen to him, I’d be taken care of, financially anyway. I asked him one time why he did all of it, why he helped me out. He said he’d lost a son once, and he wanted to help out another boy who would’ve been about his son’s age. He even said he wanted to adopt me, at one point, but being a single guy who never planned to remarry, it wasn’t appropriate. So he became like a benefactor to me instead.”
“And you never knew the truth until he was diagnosed with cancer?”
“No. He said he was dying and that he wanted to confess the truth to me before he died. That he hoped I could forgive him, that maybe his kindness to me over the years would somehow make amends for what he’d done.” His voice trailed off, and he added, “It didn’t.” He took a sip of scotch, and after rolling it around his mouth in thought, and swallowing, he said, “I’m not even mad anymore, I’m just …”
“Sad?”
“Yeah.”
At that moment, the back door swung open and Marcus appeared, a bandage taped across the bridge of his nose. He looked as if he were about to ask Beau a question, then stopped when he spotted Harley.
“Oh, it’s you.” He glared at Harley. “What’re you doing here?”
“Leave us, Marcus,” Beau said quietly.
Marcus turned to Beau and began apologizing. “I’m sorry, Beau. I mean, I don’t know how she got in here. We thought the doors were all locked, I swear. She must’ve broken in somewhere.” He return
ed his attention to Harley and made a face. “And gosh, Deliverance, you look even more hideous than usual.”
Like a grizzly bear, Beau rose from his seat, his anger hurling like a fist across the room at Marcus. “I said leave us!”
Marcus stood stunned, his eyes moving from Beau to Harley, then back to Beau again. His look of surprise cowered to hurt, and he retreated through the open door, closing it quietly behind him.
“I apologize.” Beau returned to his seat and worked to calm his anger. “I care for Marcus. I do. We have a long history, but he tries my patience sometimes.” He turned to Harley, and with an expression of compassion in his eyes, he said, “And he can be cruel—cruel to those who deserve it the least.”
He returned to his glass of scotch. “Now, where was I?” He gathered his thoughts and continued. “Yeah, so when I was growing up, Patrick was the only person except …” He stopped himself mid-sentence and decided to take another course. “He was the only guy who ever gave a crap about me. And the fact that he lied to me about something so important, so crucial to my very existence, is just unforgivable.”
He rested the glass on the table beside him and ran his fingers through the dark waves that fell across his forehead. “I knew nothing about my mother until he told me about her the other day. He said that when it happened, he’d just moved to Notchey Creek after losing his wife and baby, that he was deeply depressed, and that he’d been drinking at one of the bars in town that night.
“As he was driving home, he rounded a curve on Maple Bluff. He cut the curve too close, he said, and before he had time to throw on the brakes, he hit a car that was parked on the edge of the cliff. His head must’ve hit the steering wheel with the impact, he said, and he blacked out for a bit. When he came to, the car he hit was on fire, and the front end was dangling off the edge of the bluff. He ran over and saw that there was a woman inside, a woman he said was my mother. She was already dead from the crash, but I was in the back, crying in my car seat. The doors were locked, so he broke the rear window with a rock and pulled me from the car before it careened down the bluff and exploded.
Murder Comes to Notchey Creek Page 17