The unseasonably cold and snowy spring kept Goat and his deputies hopping with fender benders and icy-road pileups and the usual bar fights and domestic calls that cabin fever seem to bring out in some folks, but he promised to take Stella out for a proper dinner as soon as things calmed down. Meanwhile, BJ called and invited her to the movies.
Stella felt a little funny about accepting a date with BJ when things with Goat were simmering and sparking, but Noelle gave her a thumbs-up. “No sense trying to control love,” she said dramatically. “You got to just let it come in its own time.” Stella did her best to pretend she hadn’t given her daughter pretty much that very same advice herself.
Dear Big Guy, just let her be happy,
she prayed.
Noelle’s boss called in a panic, begging her to come back to help with the backlog of beauty-starved customers, and she went back to work. But she took a day off to go shopping with Stella one Tuesday when the shop was closed. She helped Stella pick out a fuchsia dress with an eye-popping V-neckline to wear to Easter services and a darling little suit with a bow tie for Tucker, which, along with a pretty set of amethyst earrings she’d picked out earlier as a surprise for Noelle, pretty much cleaned out her share of the holdup money.
They were having lunch at the food court of the Fayette mall when Noelle put down her fork and set her chin in her hand and got a thinkin’ kind of look on her face.
“Joy’n me had a talk,” she said.
“Mmm?” Stella was grateful to be chewing at that moment, so she wouldn’t be expected to make a more thorough reply.
“I guess I shouldn’t have ought to gone fixing her up when she was fine with how she was,” Noelle continued.
“You
did
make her look awfully pretty,” Stella said after she took her time swallowing.
“Yeah, I know. It’s hard to believe, Mama, but I guess not everyone wants to look their hottest.”
She looked so full of wonder and amazement at the notion that Stella merely nodded along sympathetically.
“And I got to respect that. Only, that got me thinking. Sometimes there’s folks that
would
like to look their best, only they just don’t have the means. And that seems like such an awful shame.”
And then she told Stella the plan she had cooked up.
That Saturday, the night before Easter, Noelle drove over after work and everyone enjoyed an early supper of scrambled eggs and frozen waffles, since nobody felt like going out to the store. As Stella did the dishes, Chrissy helped Tucker fill his basket with the eggs they had dyed earlier in the day.
“What do you think’s keeping that boy?” Noelle asked, handing her mother a fresh beer and reaching one across the table to Chrissy.
“I don’t—,” Stella began, but then there was a clattering from the hall and they all turned to look.
“Holy Mother of God,” Stella breathed.
Noelle had made them all wait to see the finished product. She’d done her work in the hall bathroom, and laid out her purchases in the guest room. For the last couple of hours, there had been a lot of mysterious sounds and the occasional hoot of laughter from that end of the house.
“Damn, I’m good,” Noelle said, clapping her hands together.
Todd Groffe was standing in the hallway looking like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He could have put them in the pockets of his baggy jeans—there were pockets to spare. He was wearing a plaid shirt that looked like something her dad would have kept for working on cars, over a T-shirt that she was pretty sure had a bad word emblazoned across the front in some sort of Gothic script. His shoes weren’t much of a change from his old ones—still giant and puffy, still unlaced with the tongue sticking out the top—but they were brand new.
Most amazing was his hair. Considering how long Noelle had been working on it, Stella had expected it to be a little shorter, but she’d kept nearly all the length, the ends now faded from his natural brown to a nice blond to pure white at the tips, and half of it stuck straight up and half sort of clumped around his face.
It wasn’t like anything she would have picked out, but she had to admit that Todd looked just like all the fellas she saw on the celebrity rags at the checkout.
“What’s in that shit you made me put on my face,” he said, glowering at the floor—but trying hard not to smile, Stella was nearly certain. “Smells gay. Uh, I mean, sorry, Noelle.”
“That’s okay,” Noelle said serenely. “But that
shit
costs thirty-five bucks a jar and it’ll clear that skin of yours right up, so I wouldn’t be disrespecting it.”
There was a brief silence, during which Todd looked as uncomfortable as if Noelle had dressed him in a ball gown, and then Noelle got her purse off the counter and swung her car keys around her finger. “Okay, then, might as well go.”
“You’re sure it’s okay to meet at the Arco?” Stella asked one more time, though Sherilee had reassured her in an earlier phone call that she and a couple of other moms were planning to cruise by in fifteen-minute intervals, just to check things out.
“Mom,”
Noelle protested at the same moment that Todd muttered, “I’m sure.”
After ducking out of would-be hugs, Todd refused to have his picture taken and then they were gone. Stella and Chrissy and Tucker stood in the picture window and watched them pull out of the driveway in Noelle’s little blue Prius, waving to beat the band.
“That Chanelle better treat him good,” Chrissy said fiercely, swinging Tucker up into a bear hug.
“Oh, I expect he’ll get his heart broken a time or two,” Stella said. “It’s only natural.”
“Bye bye, Todd,” Tucker said. “Bye bye, Null.”
After that, there was a fire to build and hot cocoa for Tucker and a stack of quilts to snuggle under, and
The Sound of Music
to watch, just as Stella had with her own parents so many years before. When it got to the scene where the Reverend Mother tells Maria to find out how God wants her to spend her love, Stella got a little teary and reached for a Kleenex, and noticed that both Chrissy and Tucker had fallen asleep.
“Sweet dreams,” she said softly, and carefully disentangled herself from the quilts and snuck down to her sewing room, where Tucker’s giant chocolate Easter bunny was hidden in a drawer in her sewing cabinet. She nestled it into his basket, where he’d see it first thing when he got up in the morning.
Then she went back for the other three.
She propped two of the chocolate bunnies on the fireplace mantel as surprises for Noelle and Chrissy, and then she snuggled back in front of the fire and sighed contentedly, unwrapping the foil from the last one. She started with a big bite of the ears, just like she had when she was a little girl. Only this time, she didn’t plan to stop there. Life was too short to save a single sweet moment for later.
Also by Sophie Littlefield
A Bad Day for Pretty
A Bad Day for Sorry
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
A BAD DAY FOR SCANDAL.
Copyright © 2011 by Sophie Littlefield. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Littlefield, Sophie.
A bad day for scandal : a crime novel / Sophie Littlefield.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Thomas Dunne book.”
ISBN 978-0-312-64837-4 (alk. paper)
1. Hardesty, Stella (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Middle-aged women—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Missouri—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.I882B326 2011
813'.6—dc22 2011005102
First Edition: June 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-8321-1
First Minotaur Books eBook Edition: June 2011