“Oh. Yes. Your husband’s shop. God rest his soul. So you’ve managed to keep it profitable?” Priss didn’t bother to mask her skepticism.
“It’s done very well, actually,” Stella lied, seething. In truth, Hardesty Sewing Machine Repair & Sales—which she was now running with the help of her assistant, Chrissy Shaw, allowing her to concentrate more on her sideline business—barely covered its costs and eked out enough extra to keep her in generic laundry detergent and Maybelline mascara and an occasional dinner out at Red Lobster.
“Lovely. So delighted to hear it. I’m looking forward to hearing more about you, Stella, but this is a matter of some urgency, so I wonder if we could continue this conversation here at the farm—I’m staying with Liman.”
Stella figured Priss was looking forward to hearing about her about as much as she was looking forward to her next mammogram—but her distaste was overshadowed by surprise that Priss was staying with her brother: Priss hadn’t deigned to visit the ramshackle family home in years.
“Look here, Priss, I’ve got guests. We’re in the middle of dessert. I’m using
china,
for heaven’s sake.”
That last bit was stretching it—Stella didn’t own any actual china—but she had taken pains to go through the dishes and pick out the ones on which the fruit-bowl design was least worn.
“Of course. And you know that I am
loath
to interrupt such a special gathering.” Priss sighed, even over the phone lines managing to communicate a certain lack of sincerity. “In fact, I’m willing to double your usual rate.”
That stopped Stella cold.
Money troubles were a storm cloud that followed her everywhere she went. A small inheritance had helped her pay off her house and car before she sent her husband, Ollie, to an early grave. The wives and girlfriends who started coming to her for help with their own abusive men paid Stella for her services—most of them. But Stella didn’t exactly make big dollars. It was difficult to squeeze gobs of cash out of shell-shocked, bruised, worn-down women who often found themselves without any source of income once their no-good men had their attitudes forcibly adjusted by Stella.
And while nobody, neither the newly liberated women nor Stella herself, figured they were any worse for the trade, it generally took a certain amount of getting-back-on-their-feet time before her grateful clients could start up a payment plan.
Adding to Stella’s tenuous financial position was a recent hospital stay, courtesy of a case gone dramatically wrong to the tune of a couple of bullets, and a long recuperation during which she was unable to work. Her water heater had developed a difficult personality, likely as not to blast her with a surprise jolt of cold water midshower, and the garage door hadn’t worked right since a spate of tornadoes blasted through town last October. Her roof was about to go, damaged by those same tornadoes. She’d recently acquired a dog, and the pretty white fence that kept Roxy from escaping the backyard had set her back more than she’d planned.
The bottom line was that Stella was barely keeping the lights on and food in the fridge, much less fixing everything that was broken. An infusion of cash would be most welcome.
Still, a bitch was a bitch, and Saturday night was Saturday night, and Goat Jones in the chair next to her, rubbing his calf against hers in a manner that suggested it wasn’t entirely accidental, and might in fact lead to more rubbing and friction a little later, was an ace in the hole that had to be worth something.
“I doubt you could afford me, Priss,” Stella said.
“It’s Priscilla now. Nobody calls me Priss anymore—”
“Everybody
here
does,” Stella corrected her. “You’re just not around to hear us.”
“—and I can probably afford a lot more than you think. How does a deposit of, say, five thousand dollars sound to you?”
Stella blinked. She took the phone away from her ear, stared at it, and considered. Five thousand dollars sounded like a hell of a lot of scratch. That might cover the water heater and the garage door and a little fun money to boot. She swallowed hard, put the phone back to her ear, and opened her mouth.
Then she thought of Goat, who had come to dinner in a soft gray sweater that felt like a little baby lamb. Thought about how that sweater might feel against her skin as she tugged it off him in a moment of crazy monkey-love passion.
Thought about driving out in the dark and cold to the old Porter place to get bossed around some more.
“It sounds like you’re not keeping up with inflation,” she said coldly. “I’ll need ten thousand up front, and that buys you a conversation, no promises.”
There was a silence on the other line, and then Priss laughed. “My, my, my, Stella Hardesty. So it’s true what they say, you’ve grown yourself a backbone. Fine. I’ll have the check waiting. Do see that you get here at your earliest convenience.”
Priss hung up without saying good-bye, and Stella slipped the phone thoughtfully into her pocket.
“Darn it all,” she announced to her guests. They’d soldiered on through the dessert course without her. The twins—back from their brief television break—were wearing smears of pie on their darling faces, and Todd was well into a second piece. “I have to go help Mindy Jorgenhammer—her alpacas got out.”
“
All
of them?” Todd demanded. “That’s a shitload of alpacas.”
“Todd!” Sherilee exclaimed. “Watch your mouth!”
“I’ll help you, Stella,” Goat said, pushing back his chair.
“We could all help,” Sherilee said uncertainly. She was that particular breed of lady who never failed to offer to lend a hand, despite juggling three children and a mortgage and a pain-in-the-ass no-good ex and a shit-for-pay job in another town.
“Sit, sit,” Stella said as cheerily as she could manage. “This happens all the time, and it’s just a two-person job. You all would be in the way. And you’d scare them. Very skittish, alpacas. Really, it’s best if I go by myself.”
She turned to Goat, who was standing at the ready next to his chair. She allowed herself one last appreciative up-and-down view of his fine broad-shouldered form before sighing and grabbing her purse off the breakfront.
Duty called.
“Y’all know where I keep the good stuff,” she said a little wistfully. “Just make sure to leave me a little shot of Johnnie for when I get back.”
Chapter Three
In the car, she queued up her lookin’-for-trouble playlist and turned up the heat. Winter was hanging around this year, and it was a clear, star-dusted night, the latest cold snap dappling everything with a sparkly coating of frost in the moonlight.
As she pulled out into the street, Melissa McClelland filled the Jeep with her moonshiney voice singing “Solitary Life”:
Better keep the heat off ’till the snow falls,
I’ll fill up on whiskey, rye and reruns
“Hmmph,” Stella muttered to herself. A dire expedition, indeed. She turned down the volume and hit Chrissy’s number on the speed dial. After a few rings, her assistant picked up and Stella could hear what sounded like a drunken fraternity party fast deteriorating into a riot in the background. In fact, it was a sort of family reunion, occasioned by a distant cousin’s wedding. The ceremony itself had been a modest noontime affair, but it was the extended post-nuptials house party that prompted Chrissy’s many siblings and aunts and uncles to make the trip to Prosper.
“It’s me!” she hollered.
“Well, I can see that from the caller ID, Stella.” Chrissy, too, was shouting to be heard. “Everything okay?”
“Not sure. Got a call from Priss Porter, of all people, wants me to come over to the farm, but she won’t tell me what for.”
“Did you say Priss Porter?” Stella could hear high-pitched screaming in the background and what sounded like dueling air-raid sirens. “I didn’t know she was back. Man, I hate that stuck-up bitch.”
“You know her?”
“Yeah, she babysat a few times until Mama found out she was going around calling us trash. Like the Porters was some sorta fuckin’ royalty or something.”
“What-all you got going on there?” Stella asked as a man’s voice started barking orders.
“Oh, we’re just cleaning up from dinner. My brother Mac’s boys brought this toy car thing and they’ve run track all over Mom’s sofas and I guess she’s fit to be tied, and Dad wouldn’t help so she threw a plate at him, and Tucker’s got gum in his hair and Ginger’s upstairs trying to get the boys to apologize only she’s threatening to take a hairbrush to their butts and so things got a little out of control.”
Stella never ceased to be amazed at the sheer velocity and volume of goings-on in the extended Lardner clan. Chrissy was one of six kids, most of whom had run through a spouse or two and produced a slew of towheaded cousins for Chrissy’s two-year-old boy, Tucker. Chrissy herself was a widow; she’d started out as one of Stella’s clients.
“I hope y’all are keeping the firearms locked up tonight.”
“Stella!” Chrissy gasped. “Of
course
we are. There’s
kids
here. We put everything away after the turkey shoot, and that was
hours
ago.”
“Get anything?” Chrissy had told her all about one of the more colorful Lardner family traditions, which dictated that every male family member over the age of twelve sneak out to the state forest preserve early the morning of a wedding to shoot at wild turkeys. Lardners were generally crack hunters; the fact that they never managed to bag a bird was due to the other Lardner tradition of starting such mornings with ample amounts of schnapps in their coffee.
“Well, Pete and Mac got them a couple of squirrels. And then Dad almost took out a cow that wandered into the woods—that would of sucked. But Mom had a couple a store turkeys in the oven by the time they got home, so it all worked out. How’d your dinner go? Git you an extra large serving of sheriff?”
Stella ignored the teasing tone. At twenty-nine, Chrissy was about two decades more modern in her thinking than Stella was, and saw nothing wrong with a lady pursuing a gentleman full steam ahead. Stella herself was stuck in the wait-for-him-to-make-the-first-move habits of another generation, which might account for the fact that, despite the blistering kiss that had ratcheted up their relationship back at a party Stella threw to celebrate the wrap-up of her last big case a while back, things hadn’t moved along perceptibly since.
That, and the man had been busy. A series of snafus at the county sheriff’s office in Fayette, related to a recent murder case Stella had accidentally gotten involved in, had led to a flurry of butt-covering and reviewing of policies and reassessing of procedures by Goat’s boss, Sheriff Dimmit Stanislas. Goat and his fellow deputy sheriffs, who hailed from Fairfax and Harrisonville and Quail Valley, had been spending a fair amount of time commuting to Fayette to be retrained and reoriented and rededicated and otherwise made to suffer for mistakes they hadn’t personally made. The experience had left Goat both irritable and largely unavailable in the evenings and on the weekends, until now.
Tonight’s make-out session in the kitchen could have been a breakthrough—at least, if Priss’s call hadn’t messed things up.
“I used the alpaca thing,” Stella admitted grumpily.
“Aw, you did? That was one of the best ones!”
Stella had lined up a number of get-out-of-trouble contingency plans here and there all over the county. Most had been set up with the help of grateful ex-clients happy to do her a favor. Mindy, for instance, owed Stella for dealing with Rayburn Gish, a neighbor who made a habit of wandering over drunk and standing in the driveway howling up at her to come down and party with him, occasionally hauling out his man-parts and waving them around as an additional enticement.
Luckily, he hadn’t been too tough to discourage, and in return, Mindy had promised to serve as an alibi the next time Stella needed one.
After making a quick call and apologizing for cutting Mindy’s evening short, which Mindy reassured her was no big deal, since she’d only been watching the History Channel, Mindy rang off to let the alpacas out of their pens—to lend credibility to the story—and Stella drove the rest of the way to the Porter farm with nothing but Melissa McClelland’s soulful tunes to distract her.
Lights were, if not blazing, at least switched on here and there around the Porter homestead. Set in a clump of dispirited-looking trees amid a patchy sprawl of alfalfa fields, the farming of which Liman Porter had contracted out to leave himself more time for lounging around the house in his undershorts after his mother’s death, the house had seen better times. Paint blistered and peeled off the siding, the chimney leaned, and rails were missing from the front porch banister.
A car was parked at a haphazard angle in the roughly circular gravel drive that wound crookedly up to the house before quickly veering back to the main road as though it didn’t want to get too close. The car didn’t share the same hangdog air as the rest of the place: it was glossy and sleek and expensive looking.
Stella spotted a figure wrapped in blankets sitting in a weather-beaten wicker chair on the porch. She parked the Jeep behind the Mercedes and cut the ignition, then approached the porch cautiously, icy wind whipping her face.
“That you, Priss?” she called. Now that she was closer, she could see that there were towels layered with old quilts around the shivering figure, and that the person was huddled miserably against the wind. “What on earth are you sitting out here in the freezing cold for?”
“It’s
Priscilla
now,” the person said, standing and letting the blankets and towels fall to the porch. “I didn’t realize you were going to take forever to get here. How far could it possibly be, Stella, not more than four or five miles—what took you so long?”
That gave Stella pause—here she’d left the comfort of her toasty warm home and that nice spiked coffee and the promise of more Goat than she anticipated being able to handle, to come out to what was left of the sorry Porter homestead to visit with a woman who was pretty much despised by everyone in town.