“Hey,” she exclaimed, “I believe that’s Joy’s car. What do you know—maybe things are going better than we thought.”
“Is that a good thing?”
Stella paused, her hand on the handle of the car door. “You know,” she said slowly, “there was probably a day I wouldn’t have known how to answer that question. Back when I figured everything ought to work out the way I planned it—you know, my daughter growing up to be a princess or at least ladylike—I sure wasn’t expecting those tattoos and I guess I figured on a bit more conservative hairdo … but nowadays I think plain old happy’s a good goal. Happy, and not getting beat on by anyone.”
Chrissy shot her a grin. “Some folks would say that’s settin’ the bar pretty low.”
“Well, some folks ain’t seen what I seen and done what I done. And don’t forget, sugar—happy’s more rare than folks like to think.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Chrissy agreed.
Stella gave the door a good hard knock just in case the girls were getting up to something amorous, and she was rewarded with a wet snuffling on the other side of the door, followed by a joyful bark.
Roxy nearly knocked her down when she opened the door. The black and white speckled mutt had come to live with her a couple of months earlier, a refugee from a series of tornadoes that had ripped a swath through central Missouri, and she had made herself at home and devoted herself to her new mistress with doggy abandon.
“Okay, okay,” Stella said, putting her hand down so Roxy could shove her cold wet snout into it, a greeting ritual she never seemed to tire of. Chrissy followed suit with a little less enthusiasm.
“When you gonna teach this dog some manners?” she asked. “Oh, my gracious mercy me—what are you
doin’
to that girl, Noelle?”
Stella followed Chrissy’s line of sight and found herself staring at Joy Benagle dressed in an iridescent plum-colored smock, her hair sticking out in every direction in clumps that appeared to be glued to shiny foil strips with frosting. Only then did she notice the acrid smell in the kitchen.
“Highlights,” Noelle said cheerfully. “And lowlights, too. Oh, it’s gonna be awesome.”
“It better be,” Joy grumbled, looking none too pleased as Noelle’s quick, sure hands fussed in her hair. Considering the unflattering getup Joy was dressed in, Stella was able to focus on her face without any distractions, and she decided that it was true: Joy
was
a pretty thing. “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this.”
“Oh, sure you do,” Noelle said, giving her shoulder a playful poke. “When you lost at strip poker, remember?”
“Oh my,” Stella said, wondering if she ought to go back outside.
“It wasn’t
strip
poker,” Joy said, “and you shouldn’t oughtta talk that way in front of your mama anyhow. It was
regular
poker and you were cheating.”
“She wouldn’t strip.” Noelle shrugged. “So she had to let me do this. Fair’s fair.”
“Yeah? Then how come you ain’t messin’ around in anyone else’s hair that was playin’?”
“Who-all was playin’ poker?” Chrissy asked. “Reason I ask is, my family was fixin’ to play last night and they usually have the neighbors in.”
“This was a different crowd, I’m pretty sure,” Noelle said, “unless your folks like to play in
gay
establishments.”
It seemed to Stella that her daughter put a little extra emphasis on the word, but she let it pass.
“Don’t think so,” Chrissy said. “Least, not last time I checked. Hey, thanks for covering the shop for me today. How was it?”
Noelle shrugged. “I printed off the register tapes for you. They’re over on the counter. Had a carful of ladies from over in Quail Valley who were stocking up on fusible web and trim and metallic thread and all kinds of shit for some butt-ugly wall hangings they were gonna make. I tried to talk ’em out of it.”
“Noelle, you were trying to talk people
out
of spending money at the shop?” Stella demanded, incredulous. “Are you gonna come visit me in the poorhouse? ’Cause that’s where I’m headed if we don’t make the numbers this month.”
“So long as you pay me first, I’ll visit you,” Chrissy said, peeling foil off a platter on the counter. “Oooh, somebody made them little cookies with the chocolate kisses—I love those. Stella, run along and get your stuff, we have a date with a minibar.”
“Where are you going?” Noelle demanded.
“Long story—I assume you don’t want all the details?”
“Damn right, if there’s bad guys involved. I’ll just wait and hear about it when you’re done and back safe.”
It was their deal, and it was a good enough one.
Still, after Stella had packed a couple of outfits and her toiletries into a duffel, helped herself to a couple of the cookies that it turned out her good friend Dotty Edwards had dropped off, and given Joy a sympathetic smile as she sat perched on towels on the edge of the couch waiting for her color to set, Noelle followed her and Chrissy to the door.
“Be careful, Mama,” she whispered as she hugged her close. “Don’t let the bad guys win. I need you.”
* * *
Stella let Chrissy drive,
against her better judgment. Chrissy didn’t lack confidence, but unfortunately she was indifferent to the conventions other drivers generally observed, like sticking to a consistent speed and reserving the left-hand lane for passing. By the time they found the Super 8, they’d incurred the wrath of half a dozen apoplectic drivers who employed a variety of gestures to illustrate their feelings about sharing the road with the two of them.
“Gosh, Stella, there is just so much
hate
in the world,” Chrissy sighed as they got their bags and checked in.
She perked up in the room, though, sitting down on the bed closest to the bathroom and giving it an experimental bounce or two. “Do you know,” she said, “I ain’t stayed in a hotel but twice? Once was on my honeymoon up in Wisconsin Dells, and once was this time we were going to see Mama’s people over in Bolivar and we had a blowout and we all stayed in one room at this little motel that looked like it came right out of an Elvis movie.”
“That must have been crowded,” Stella observed. There were six Lardner children in all, born over an impressively brief and amorous span of the Lardner parents’ marriage.
“Oh, it was, and I had to sleep between Lorrie and Danyelle, and you just don’t
ever
want to sleep with them two—Lorrie farts all the time and Danyelle snores.”
Stella left her to check out the rest of the room while she slipped into her favorite sneaking-around outfit: an old pair of stretchy black yoga pants and a fleecy top that had once been solid purple but had had an unfortunate bleach accident on an especially inattentive laundry day and now had a pale Florida-shaped stain near the hem.
Her cell phone rang and she squinted at the display.
GOAT
. Her heart did a little shuffle.
“Hello,” she answered in a voice that aimed for sexy indifference and came out a little like she was talking around a sizable ice cube.
“You want to tell me what your prints are doing at Liman’s place?”
Stella gulped. She shut her eyes and replayed the conversation she and Priss had in the Porter living room. She hadn’t touched anything, had she? She was sitting in the smelly chair, she hadn’t accepted anything to drink … and on their return trip, she’d had gloves on the whole time.
“Um. It was … see…” She cast around frantically for an explanation, and came up empty. “I had a date. Um, a few days before all the, uh, trouble. With Liman.”
There was a silence, a long one, and Stella could practically feel the thunderclouds building and blowing along the cell towers toward her. She resisted an urge to duck.
“You went on a
date
with Liman
Porter
just before his sister abandoned her
car
in his driveway and the two of them
disappeared
under suspicious circumstances,” he said, coming down hard every few syllables with a force that made Stella flinch.
“Uh. Yeah.”
“And rather than take you to a restaurant or a movie theater, he, what, invited you over and before you could touch any other surface in the house—because we checked, Stella, I know you think me and Mike and Ian are a bunch of backward yobs, but I assure you we turned over every stone—he got you in such a position that you had to hold on to the side table for balance?”
Oh. The
side
table.
The image in Stella’s head backed up and replayed, and she remembered sinking into the musty old armchair much more quickly than she expected, its cushion’s stuffing being considerably less ample than it appeared, and grabbing the table in surprise.
Damn.
In the years before Stella killed Ollie, she’d stuck to a single tactic in the face of his ranting and crazy accusations: She would deny timidly, protest softly, and generally just wait quietly until he wound himself up tight enough to blow spectacularly out of control.
Since then, however, she’d switched gears.
Stella didn’t grovel for anyone. And she didn’t much care to explain herself. Especially when she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong. And while the law might frown on her reasons for being at Liman’s that night, and while it might be very interested in the photographs with which Priss had lured her inside the house in the first place, Stella was still well within her own ethical comfort zone.
So she took a deep breath and tried not to think about what the pissed-off man on the phone was doing to her a mere forty-eight hours earlier, lest she lose her momentum, and she said, “I don’t believe I need to describe exactly what position he had me in, Goat—that’s private.”
The silence that ensued was much shorter and accompanied by sputtering. “Stella, not only is Liman Porter at
least
a dozen years younger than you, he favors the kind of company a man pays for, which, as far as I know, is one branch of lawbreaking you ain’t yet got around to, and—”
“Keep talkin’ that way, and I’m hanging up,” Stella warned. She didn’t brook insulting, not even from Goat.
“Hang up, and I’ll come over there and haul you in,” Goat said. “I’m mostly doing you a courtesy by letting you know that you hadn’t better leave town until we get this figured out. You hear?”
“I hear.”
“So I can count on you being where I can find you on short notice if I need to?”
“Sure,” Stella said breezily, closing her eyes and crossing her fingers so the lie wouldn’t count.
“You made him mad,” Chrissy guessed after Stella hung up.
“How do you know?”
“It’s obvious. Honestly, Stella, how are you
ever
gonna get any if you keep pissing him off?”
Stella sighed and explained the sheriff’s discovery.
“Oh. Well, he ain’t hauled you in yet. That must mean he’s, you know,
protecting
you. That’s kind of romantic.” Chrissy didn’t sound terribly convinced.
Stella fretted for a few more moments, then gave herself a mental kick. She would
not
waste time regretting things she couldn’t control.
“Let’s go, girl. Time to get my pictures.”
Chapter Fourteen
They called every number Chrissy had managed to find for Judge Carstairs—home, mobile, and office—and came up empty. Stella figured the judge would keep until morning, and they had a quick dinner at a Red Robin next to the Super 8 and headed over to Priss’s address in the inky darkness. It was a fancy if smallish house in a neighborhood tucked behind tall stone walls. The homes were fairly new, but they’d had all manner of trim slapped on them to make them look like they’d been plucked from the Italian countryside and replanted in orderly rows.
Priss’s place had a fancy drive-through overhang thing leading to the garage, which shielded the entry from anyone looking in from the street. After leaving the Jeep in a cul-de-sac in the next block, Stella and Chrissy darted through the darkness to the front door. This time, the lock was a bit more of a challenge, and after letting Chrissy try for a few minutes, Stella figured the cover provided by the overhang didn’t really justify conducting a full-on breaking-and-entering lesson, and took over. Thirty seconds later, they were in.
Luckily Priss had lamps on timers in nearly every room, probably so that it would appear that someone was home if she had to work late. At her
landscaping business,
Stella thought darkly, shaking her head over Salty’s inept lying.
She and Chrissy worked until well after midnight, taking a couple of breaks to drink Priss’s fancy imported beer and eat the little individual fancy cheese balls that constituted half the food Priss kept in her fridge, passing up the moldy mass in a Chinese takeout container that had apparently taken up residence there some time ago. The cat that Jake and Lawrence had mentioned, a large and skittish gray one with yellow eyes, slunk back and forth and watched them malevolently.
They checked drawers and shelves and all the obvious places, then turned to less likely spots under pictures and along baseboards and behind electric sockets and in the lining under the upholstered chairs—anywhere a flash drive could be hidden.
It wasn’t particularly satisfying work. “It’s like she ain’t ever been introduced to a stray thought,” Chrissy said after they’d finished up in the living room.
“At least she’s got good taste,” Stella said, gloved hands on hips, surveying the expensive interior. The furniture was all fine woods and expensive fabrics and free of even a speck of dust. There were few mementos or pictures, just a couple of silk floral arrangements here and there.
“Yeah, ’cept for that little display there,” Chrissy said, jerking a thumb at the shelves of a mahogany glass-fronted bookcase that looked like it might be at home in a lawyer’s office. Inside appeared to be every textbook Priss had ever owned, from a series of algebra and history and science books stamped
PROSPER HIGH SCHOOL
through a dizzying array of economics and finance books. There were also several years’ worth of a magazine called
Financial Times,
whose editors appeared to have worked hard to present the driest information they could find in as lusterless a fashion as possible while making sure not to waste any extra paper on illustrations or pictures. “That’s just pathetic.”