A Bad Day for Romance (3 page)

“Cracked his head and bled all over creation, and he was out for a little while. And they don’t mess around with that no more. Nowadays they treat every concussion like it’s some big thing.”

“But he’s okay now?”

“Oh sure, sure, his head’s just fine. They put a stitch or two in it, from what I’m told. The bigger problem is he did something to his back when he went down, some old sports injury of his. Something I imagine Stella might could tell us all about.”

“
Me?
Why’s that?” Stella didn’t miss Irene’s signature facial expression, one drawn-on ebony eyebrow lifted heavenward while the other bore down over her left eye, managing to convey lascivious speculation.

Before Irene could answer, Dotty’s cell phone trilled. “It’s Tilly,” she said, squinting at the display. “I best take it in the other room, the way y’all are carrying on. But I want to hear everything when I get back.”

“I think that’s so cool, Tilly doing the service and all,” Chrissy said as Dotty disappeared into the suite’s sitting room and pulled the French doors shut behind her. “Did she pass her finals, or whatever?”

“I don’t think they have finals, exactly,” Stella said. “But Tilly’s out of the seminary and she’s got her official license from the state of Missouri, so it’s legal. And this is going to be her first wedding. What were you saying about BJ, Irene?”

“Well, I hear his pain flares up when he’s
on his back
. You see what I’m sayin’.”

“I certainly do
not
.” Stella, who was generally not easily embarrassed, found that the notion of a septuagenarian speculating on the positions in which BJ and she might be engaged during coitus, when in actuality he had only gotten as far as gently tugging at the sturdy elastic of her Maidenform Custom Lift Hi Cut Brief once or twice, was simply too much to bear. The fact that she’d expected to have him in just such a pose by tomorrow night, having had no prior knowledge of his delicacy in that position, was a matter of concern as well.

“Mmmm. Well, BJ’s looking at some physical therapy down the line but they’re saying he can’t get out of bed for a week.”

“What about the sheriff?” Chrissy demanded.

“Oh, that… well, everyone was carryin’ on so bad it was hard to hear over the pager, but Ian showed up and took one look at BJ laid out on the floor and figured Goat was the one done it to him, and you know how Ian can be a touch quick to jump to conclusions, and Goat wasn’t exactly defending himself. Fact is he’d poured him a big old jigger of Knob Creek and was settin’ on a stool all by himself in the back. Well, Ian got the cuffs on him so fast Sheriff didn’t have a minute to explain himself. They’re still getting it ironed out over at the office now.”

“Tell me Ian wasn’t going to put him in the Dumpster!”

The Dumpster was the nickname of the holding cell where the accused cooled their heels before being shipped up to the county jail in Fayette. It had received the nickname because it was built on the site of the old Hardee’s trash enclosure, the Hardee’s having been converted into the Prosper Municipal Annex.

“Hardly,” Irene said. “When I left they’d got Mike talked into being their designated driver and they was sitting out on the curb draining Burt’s old bottle of Colonel Lee, after they drank everything else.”

“Wow,” Stella said. Sheriff Burt Knoll, Goat’s predecessor, had passed away more than three years ago. Beloved by all, he’d been known for his fondness for rotgut bourbon in addition to his Solomonlike wisdom. “They must have been desperate to drink that shit.”

“This has gone far enough, Stella,” Chrissy said glumly. “It ain’t just your good times at stake now, he had to go and get Ian involved.”

Ian was due to arrive tomorrow for the rehearsal dinner as well, Stella knew. A lesser-known fact was that Chrissy had purchased a special ensemble for the weekend, one that would rival anything in Dotty’s lingerie haul.

“I’m not in charge of that man,” Stella said hotly. “He don’t answer to my call.”

“At the moment he ain’t answering to any call at all that don’t come out of the bottom of a bottle,” Irene murmured, taking a sip of the refill Chrissy had poured for her.

The French doors burst open and Dotty tottered through them, her face pale and her expression crestfallen.

“Dotty, honey, what’s wrong?” Stella said, rushing to take her arm and guide her to the sofa.

“I just don’t know what to do. Tilly says Divinity’s gone missing and she has to go help them search for her and I might ought to start hunting up another preacher.”

Half an hour and a tab of Xanax later, Dotty was propped up in an upholstered chair in the Ha Ha Tonka party room in front of a huge pile of gifts.

The last anyone had heard, Divinity Flycock had gone camping with her fiancé, Bryant Molder, in nearby Bennett Spring State Park. She’d been due back that morning, and no one had heard from her or Bryant.

After a round of questioning and several phone calls revealed nothing further about Divinity’s disappearance, Stella convinced Dotty that there was nothing more to be done tonight and she might just as well let the shower proceed as planned. As a crowd of female relatives and friends and future in-laws crowded around—Rashita and Soorat turned out to be quite enthusiastic about the shower—Stella managed to sneak Chrissy off to a corner of the room, carrying a pilfered bottle of wine and a plateful of hot appetizers.

“This isn’t Indian, is it?” Chrissy said, nibbling at the corner of a triangular pastry. “I’d call it more Greek maybe. What with the spinach and all. Or maybe it’s that—what do you call it?—fusion business.”

“Can you please stop stuffing your face for one minute and focus?”

Chrissy widened her lovely violet eyes as she chewed. “Really, Stella? You’re gonna tell
me
to focus? When the whole time you were in the ladies’ room trying to get Goat to answer his cell phone, I was doing
research
?”

She dug into her purse and pulled out her little tablet computer. Ian had recently surprised Chrissy with a pair of ruby earrings that she promptly and unapologetically returned, using the cash to buy herself the new tech toy, and she’d taught herself all its secrets in no time.

“Okay, what did you find?”

“Well, the park cut back their services so much, it was real hard to get a fix on where Divinity and Bryant might even have gone. But I found a few trail closures. There’s a footbridge out over the creek, and a rock-slide area along a ridge. The thing is, Bryant had appointments scheduled this morning that he didn’t show for—I talked to his assistant.”

“But there could be a dozen reasons why. They haven’t even been missing twenty-four hours. Couldn’t they just have decided to stay an extra night? I mean, I doubt a girl that age would be all that excited to party like it’s 1985 with a bunch of her aunt’s friends.”

“The whole reason they were going Tuesday and Wednesday wasn’t just so Divinity could get back for the shower tonight. Tilly said she wanted to rest up her voice for Saturday. She and some friend of hers are going to sing ‘Ave Maria’ at the wedding.”

“Well, she could rest it in a tent as good as in a hotel room, couldn’t she?”

“And that’s probably all it is, and Divinity can’t call ’cause there’s no service out in the forest, but I guess her mom’s real worried anyway.”

“Oh, Taffy was always a terrible drama queen,” Stella sighed. “The torment she used to put us through when we were kids!”

“Explain that whole family tree to me one more time, Stella.” Chrissy kicked off her high-heeled sandals and got comfy on the couch they’d taken over.

“Well, you know Dotty and me were the same year in school. Taffy and Tilly are her first cousins, and they were three years ahead of us. But they lived nearby, so our folks would send us all out to play together. Dotty and the twins got sent to the same summer camp and Sunday School, and they spent every holiday and family vacation together.”

“Are Taffy and Tilly identical twins?”

Stella snorted. “Lookswise, I guess, only they were so different temperamentally you never would’ve known it. Tilly was the wild one, you should have seen her in her big-hair stage—her greatest ambition was to follow Foreigner around.”

“What foreigner?” Chrissy said, looking interested.

“The band?
Foreigner
?” When Chrissy still looked blank, Stella sighed in exasperation. This was the biggest problem with having a partner twenty years younger than you—she had no comprehension at all of twentieth-century culture before 1985. “ ‘Hot Blooded,’ ‘Juke Box Hero’? ‘Feels Like the First Time’?”

Chrissy shrugged. “Okay. So somewhere along the way Tilly put her wild ways aside and became a minister—”

“Well, you left out the part where she met Curt, accidentally got knocked up young, popped out three more kids, spent twenty-some years taking care of that bunch, and got the calling about the same time she started having hot flashes, but that’s basically it.”

“And Taffy?”

“She was the do-gooder. Had a real martyr thing going. Every time Tilly got in trouble, Taffy would figure out some new way to shine her own halo up bright. Tilly got kicked out of choir for making out with the student teacher, next thing you knew Taffy’d win the candy drive to send them to state finals. Or Tilly’d get caught cheating on her math test and Taffy’d volunteer to tutor her.” Stella paused, remembering. “We never could stand her, actually. Tilly was way more fun.”

“How’d that work out for Taffy in adulthood, anyway?” Chrissy said, helping herself to an onion fritter.

Stella grimaced. “She met Marty at Bible School and married him before he had a chance to think twice. They had one perfect child, as I suppose you’ve heard more than once this weekend. Marty figured out there wasn’t a whole lot of money to be made in preaching and went into real estate. They sent Divinity out on the pageant circuit and to hear her and Marty tell it, they had to finally stop because it wasn’t fair to all the other little girls, she was just that exquisite. And then there was all them voice lessons and acting lessons, and supposedly Divinity lit out for Branson to sing on stage. Taffy and them weren’t real clear on how that was going, but Divinity stuck it out for a year or so before she came back a month or two ago to rest up her voice. Brought Bryant with her, and Taffy just can’t stop talking about all the singers he’s launched and the ring he bought Divinity and how they’re headed for Nashville any second now.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Chrissy sounded skeptical. “I knew Divinity a little. My mom had me in the pageants for a while when Pop thought that was how we were going to make the family fortune. Divinity was a lot younger than me, four years old or so, and even then she could sing. But her mama had her tricked out in this froufrou satin dress with her hair done up like a drag queen, only Divinity wasn’t having any of it. She bit her mama on the arm and called the chaperone something so bad nobody would repeat it, and then she lay down on the floor and threw a fit like you never did see.”

“Interesting,” Stella said, wondering if any of this would help explain why the gal was blowing off her aunt’s lingerie shower in favor of stomping around in a forest. “I bet
you
sure were adorable, though.”

“Yeah, I was.” Chrissy grinned, dimples blooming on both her cheeks. “The lady running it told my mama I needed to shed a few pounds if I wanted to compete, and my mama said if they didn’t know quality when they saw it then they could just keep their goddamn tiaras. She let me wear my pageant dress to school every day for a month and when I ripped up the skirt on the playground she said it didn’t matter, any kind of a real princess was bound to get into a scrape or two taking care of royal business.”

“Your mama sure did a few things right,” Stella said, admiringly.

“I know it. They all thought I was dumb as a stump, and mama didn’t have any more ambition for me than she could measure in a thimble, but she loved the heck outta me, and she’d tell anyone who’d listen that I was the prettiest girl in town.”

“Well, that’s not a bad way to grow up, now is it?”

“Time to get this party started!” a drunken voice shouted. Stella and Chrissy turned to see one of Dotty’s friends from work clamber up on the coffee table. “Everybody ready to see what Dotty’s gonna be wearing on her wedding night?”

There was a volley of cheers as Dotty held up a pair of generously sized, frill-edged black bikini panties that was missing most of the crotch, and Stella fervently hoped that the mess with Divinity would be sorted out soon, so Dotty and Kam could enjoy themselves under the banner of legal matrimony.

CHAPTER THREE

BY TEN O’CLOCK THE FOLLOWING MORNING,
everything had gone south.

Stella had planned to call BJ to wish him a speedy recovery, but he beat her to the punch—at six in the morning, well before Stella intended to be awake. Evidently his pain meds didn’t make him particularly sleepy. Flat on his back in his apartment above the garage behind BJ’s Bar, he was being cared for by his assistant manager, Jorge, who was also singlehandedly running the bar.

“I can’t keep eating all that Mexican food, Stella,” BJ confided. “My digestive system just can’t take it. And there’s something wrong with my Comcast. I can’t get but the regular channels, my Showtime ain’t coming in at all.”

Stella had banished the fleeting thought that if she’d been in town, it would be
her
waiting on BJ, cooking his meals and fixing his shows for him—as well as the disturbingly strong sense of relief that she had dodged a bullet.

“I’ve had Jorge’s chuletas,” she said lightly. “I could eat that every night. Traded him some of my persimmon jam for it. Are you doing okay otherwise?”

“Oh sure. Except I’ve got this itch on my one ankle, and there’s just no way I can reach it without it aggravatin’ my back,” BJ said. “I can’t even tell you how bad I wish I could reach on down there and scratch, and when you get a thought like that in your head, why, you just can’t get it out again.”

Stella stayed silent, figuring she’d rather sew Dotty a whole new gown than sign up for nursemaid duty, and then she wondered what was wrong with her, especially since BJ was always so sweet to her.