Salty blinked. “You’re kidding,” he said in a stilted voice.
Chrissy shot Stella a look of disgust, and Stella knew she wasn’t buying it either. “I’m afraid so. There was some trouble out at Liman’s the other night, apparently, while she was visiting, and now they’ve both disappeared.”
“I didn’t know she was in town,” Salty said hurriedly.
“No, I didn’t mean to imply that you did,” Stella said. “I think this was a last-minute trip.”
Salty swallowed. “Well, then, I bet she just turned around and went back home. You, uh, tried her there?”
“Oh, yes,” Stella lied. “I tried all her numbers. That’s what’s got me so concerned. Seein’ as you and she used to be close, we were wondering if you might be able to help us out with some ideas on where she might have gone. If, you know, she was in need of a little privacy, for instance.”
Salty appeared to be holding his breath. A variety of emotions duked it out on his face: alarm, doubt, and uncertainty—and not a little bit of fear. “Like I said, it’s been a while. Priss and me don’t keep up much. Um, if you don’t mind me asking, what are the two of you doing looking for her?”
Stella fixed him with an unblinking gaze. “I do a little … investigative work, on the side. Looking for things that folks have lost. You may have heard.”
Little beads of sweat appeared around Salty’s hairline, despite the rapidly plummeting temperature. He’d evidently heard something closer to the truth.
“Who hired you? If you can say.”
“Oh, I wish I could,” Stella said regretfully. “Only they got all these client confidentiality rules.”
“I ain’t bound by them rules,” Chrissy said. “I’m just the assistant. Only, I don’t
feel
like telling you. I think you know more about Priss than you’re saying.”
“Oh, Chrissy, can it,” Stella chided. She gave Salty an exasperated smile. “I apologize, Salty. Chrissy’s new to the investigatin’ business, and she hasn’t learned the number one rule yet. She’s just got all that youthful passion built up and sometimes she can’t hardly control it.”
Chrissy scowled and tugged her zipper down a little farther, and flicked her blond curls with her fingers. Then she heaved a huge sigh, throwing her shoulders back.
If Salty was put off by her irritability, he didn’t show it. “I sure wish I could help you,” he said, addressing her breasts.
“Just a couple more questions,” Stella said, “and then we’ll be on our way. Why did you leave Priss’s employ?”
“Why did I what? Oh, you mean why did I quit?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“It was … I didn’t…” A little twitch formed over Salty’s left eye, and he put a thumb to his mouth and gnawed at his nail for a moment before he added, “Difference of opinion, is what it was.”
“Opinion over what? Over your performance?”
Salty’s gaze darted to the left and the right, before coming to rest on his shoes. He stared intently, as though seeing if he could untie his shoelaces with his mind. “S’pose you could say that,” he finally muttered, and even Stella was surprised at the depth of the bitterness in his voice.
“What—you couldn’t mow a straight line?” Chrissy prodded him disdainfully.
Salty glanced at her nervously. The tic near his eye danced and throbbed in a fascinating manner that made it difficult for Stella not to stare.
“Couldn’t handle your trowel? The quality of your fertilizer didn’t impress her?” Chrissy took a step forward and jabbed a finger at him. “Didn’t do much for her blossoms? Couldn’t much navigate her patch? Huh?”
After a moment, Salty seemed to wilt. His shoulders slumped, and his chin ducked down toward his chest. “We had professional differences, and that’s all.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Stella said in a soothing tone. “You get much call to go up to Kansas City these days, Salty?”
“From time to time. I work for Doraleigh’s dad. We work with a few vendors up there, so sometimes I’ll have a meeting—you know, not real often.”
“Just how often would you say that happens?”
Salty shrugged. “Dunno—maybe one or two times a month. But don’t get any ideas. I don’t visit Priss or nothin’. She’s got her uptown life now, with her Mercedes and her country club membership and her fancy house. I mean, I got my pride.”
“What’s that mean?” Chrissy asked in a cruel, lilting tone. “What kind of pride we talkin’ ’bout?”
“You know—
man
pride,” Salty said, blushing.
On their way to the car a few minutes later, Stella shook her head in disgust.
Man pride.
What a concept. As if that half of humankind needed any more reason to feel superior.
She started the engine and drove slowly down the street, watching Salty setting up his ladder in the rearview mirror.
“So what is it, anyway?” Chrissy asked.
“What’s what?”
“The first rule of the detecting business.”
“Oh, that.” Stella smiled and turned up the heat. “Same as any other business, really. Something Ollie used to say: Screw them before they screw you first.”
Chapter Thirteen
By early afternoon, they were seated behind a couple of pulled pork sandwiches at the Pokey Pot. Binny Planche, the restaurant’s owner, had done a little unorthodox decorating for Easter; his oldest girl was studying art over in Rolla, and she’d got hold of the kind of paint that can be used on glass, but rather than the traditional rabbits and chicks and baskets of eggs, she’d gone for cavorting pigs with a nice assortment of holiday trimmings. Besides a little gal pig in what looked like a naughty bunny costume and high heels on her back hooves, there was a pair of porkers who looked like they were pelting each other with jelly beans and bellowing with rage; a large and dignified looking sow in regal pastoral vestments; and, most inexplicably, an almost photorealistic rendering of a Shelby Cobra that appeared to be roaring toward a trio of little piglets wearing crowns of thorns on their sweet little heads, possibly intending to flatten them into bacon.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Brittany do anything quite like this,” Stella said, licking sauce off her fingers. She and Chrissy had each ordered the Pokey Pot Baby, the smallest sandwich on the menu, which had about twelve pounds of delicious pork falling out of the bun.
“But remember when we had lunch here back in July—”
“Oh, yeah, that naughty Uncle Sam … forgot about him. With them little trousers of his…”
For a few moments they reminisced about their favorite painted tableaus, a feature of the restaurant since little Brittany Planche had been old enough to hold a brush. Her parents were proud of both their offspring, though only her big brother, Jeremy, had decided to follow in the family footsteps, working back in the kitchen.
“Whyn’t you fire up that laptop of yours,” Stella said when they were finished and had washed up at the trough the Planches had installed in the front of the restaurant and fitted with faucets, and refilled their iced teas. “Seein’ as it’s going to be the ruin of me, might as well get some use out of it.”
She was secretly pleased every time they had an opportunity to use the thing. It was a sporty little Mac model, the bottom of the line but no less impressive to Stella, who had taken to finding out where in town there was free Wi-Fi to be had since it still tickled her no end to watch Chrissy hack into the DMV or check out the sports scores from, say, the parking lot of the Calvary United Methodist Church.
“Don’t give me that, Stella Hardesty, you cheapskate. I’m the laughingstock over at the U-Pub. They all got Airs. Wouldn’t a cost you but a few hundred bucks more and it runs circles around this piece of junk.”
“What you get for hanging out over there—you ought to be embarrassed,” Stella teased. The University Pub, fifteen miles down the road in Harrisonville, was a hangout for grad students in the computer science program at the state college. After three decades of mostly dull-witted men, Chrissy had developed a fixation on geeks—particularly those who could teach her whole new ways to sneak around on the Internet.
By and large, they were—to a bespectacled and pocket-protected man—overjoyed to receive the attentions of a slightly older, far more worldly, and amply sexed lovely woman with curves and soft places to spare. After a couple of failed marriages, however, Chrissy was taking a break from the whole monogamy thing, and Stella feared the day would come when she’d made her way through the entire pack of young men who hung out at the U-Pub.
At least there was a fresh crop every semester.
“Don’t see why I should be embarrassed,” Chrissy said, staring intently at the screen, fingers flying, “when I can do this.”
She spun the laptop around and Stella dug in her purse for a pair of reading specs and slid them on her nose.
“Well, what the heck am I looking at?” she demanded. It was a bird’s-eye view of a cluster of tile-topped buildings surrounding a sparkling pool and a couple of angled tennis courts. “Time shares in Hawaii?”
“That ain’t Hawaii, Stella,” Chrissy exclaimed. “That’s Kansas City. Judge Marilu Carstairs’s condo, to be specific. Very swanky address.”
“How’d you—?” Stella began, but Chrissy’s fingers were flying over the keys again.
“She bought it in 2006 for two hundred thirty thousand,” she said. “Oooh, put thirty percent down, let’s see, looks like she probably still has a little bit of equity in it even after—oh, dang, tough luck, the rest of her investments ain’t done a whole lot for her. What d’you suppose a judge makes, anyway?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me momentarily,” Stella drawled, taking a healthy sip of her tea, “and her bra size and blood type, too.”
Chrissy, in the next half hour as they sat drinking tea and enjoying the Pokey Pot’s late afternoon lull, did not in fact find out Marilu Carstairs’s measurements. But she did find out her address and phone number and the convenient fact that Marilu’s condo featured a fenced side yard where a person, if she were to find herself wedged between the shrubs and a window, would have a nice view inside.
After all that, making reservations online at a Super 8 down the road from the condo seemed almost too easy.
* * *
They swung by Chrissy’s
parents’ place long enough to kiss Tucker and his swarm of little cousins and pick up a few things for an overnight trip. A handful of Lardner relatives lay about the house in various stages of recovery from the weekend’s strenuous schedule of celebrating. Chrissy’s mom, Loreen Lardner—a couple of years younger than Stella but well on her way to a stroke with an out-of-control carb habit and no exercise to speak of besides hollering at her kids and grandkids—asked Stella to show her a few of the tai chi moves she’d added to her exercise routine in physical therapy. Stella showed her the Part the Wild Horse’s Mane and White Crane Spreads Its Wings moves, and the two of them went through the motions a few times while Ralph Lardner looked on in astonishment.
“We’re sure glad Chrissy’s working for you,” he said when they were finished, laying a heavy hand on Stella’s shoulder and offering her a bracing nip from the flask he carried in his pants pocket as he and his wife walked them out to the Jeep. “Got to appreciate the good folks in your life. Why, you’re practically an honorary Lardner.”
There followed a confusing volley of boozy hugs from all the out-of-town Lardners.
On the drive to her own house, Stella told Chrissy how much she envied her that large extended family, since her only living blood relatives were Noelle and her sister, Gracellen, all the way in California.
“Hey, don’t get to envying me that bunch,” Chrissy said with more than a trace of disgust. “They’re fun and all, and I love every last one of them, but it does get a little old. They just can’t help butting into everyone’s business all the time.”
“Yeah, but…” Stella hesitated, then figured if she couldn’t say it to Chrissy, who could she? “You know how we were talking about Easter at lunch … well, holidays are different. They’re supposed to be about family.”
She didn’t add that the prior year, back when Noelle and she were still in their not-speaking-to-each other phase, she’d spent Easter Sunday with only Johnnie Walker Black for company, watching
Beaches
and sniffling and eating an entire package of Gardetto’s Roasted Garlic Rye Chips, and while that still beat any holiday she’d spent with Ollie, it wasn’t anything she cared to repeat.
“But, Stella,” Chrissy said, sounding genuinely surprised, “you got tons of people.
We’re
your family. We’ll all be together for Easter—I don’t think I got the starch to get through another big do with my folks so close to this one. I was kind of thinking I’d bring Tucker over and you and me and Noelle could go to church and then we could do, you know, the egg hunt and baskets and bake up a ham and all that at your house.”
Stella felt her heart lift up considerably. “That would be great,” she said, “especially since Noelle seems dead set on running off with that Joy gal—wouldn’t surprise me if she’d rather spend the day on her doorstep like a stray cat than with me, she’s so whipped.”
Chrissy giggled. “She
does
seem taken with her, don’t she? And that Joy’s not a
bad
-looking thing—bet she’s got her a figure under all them mousy clothes. Only I didn’t exactly think there was a whole ton of chemistry going on there the other night.”
“Really? How can you tell?”
“Well, I don’t know, it just seemed a little forced, but maybe it was just that Noelle was being so darn obvious about it. Might be better if she backed off a little. You know how it is, sometimes when a person plays hard to get, you just get more stuck on ’em. Kind of crazy, you ask me. Why, any fella I ever got sick of, those were the ones I couldn’t get shut of.”
“You and your suitors. It’s like you’re catnip to ’em. Why, if I had half of your natural appeal, I’d have my pick of the whole county.”
“Wouldn’t matter none,” Chrissy said, grinning. “You still wouldn’t have eyes for nobody but the sheriff.”
Stella tried to come up with a retort, but as she pulled in the drive, she noticed a vaguely familiar Dodge Challenger pulled up to the curb behind Noelle’s Prius.