Garrett had just closed his fleshy pink lips around the spoon when my cell phone started vibrating in the front pocket of my jeans.
I pulled it out, cussing under my breath. The screen indicated it was my cousin Bree calling. She was manning the A-la-mode booth over on the midway.
I hustled a few yards away, ducking behind a shelving unit lined with jars of preserves, and answered.
“What’s up?”
“Hey,” Bree said. She never moved faster than a sashay, but she sounded as if she’d been running. “I need you back here, pronto. You and Peachy. And bring that man of yours, too.”
“Is everything okay? Is Alice all right?” About the only thing Bree got worked up about was her precocious teenage daughter. Alice didn’t raise much heck, but she still managed to get herself into some sticky situations.
“She’s fine as frog’s hair. For now.”
“Well, I’m kinda busy here,” I said. “Eloise accused Tucker of stealing an A-la-mode recipe—”
“Tally,” Bree snapped. “This is an emergency. You’ll never in a million years guess who just moseyed past the booth.”
“Who?”
“Sonny Anders.”
“No.” The last anyone had seen of Alice’s daddy, he’d kissed his toddler child on the forehead before driving off into the night with an exotic dancer named Spumanti.
“Yep. Just strutting down the midway, bold as brass.”
“Sweet Jesus,” I breathed.
Bree laughed. “I don’t think the good Lord had anything to do with this.”
Garrett was still contemplating the two dishes of ice cream, lifting first one spoon to his lips, then the other, his freckled brow crumpled up like a used dish towel.
Quietly as I could, I told Kristen Ver Steeg I had to go. “Family emergency,” I explained. The corners of her mouth tightened a smidge, but she didn’t show any other sign of interest or concern.
I took Peachy by the hand and skedaddled out of there. As we ducked out of the barn, I glanced over my shoulder. I could see Garrett speaking, his hands clasped behind his back. Garrett’s large frame blocked my view of Tucker Gentry, but I didn’t need to see his grin to know what Garrett had decided. Eloise Carberry’s face had gone as pink as her apron, and as Garrett spoke she shook her head like a terrier with a chew toy. I felt bad that Garrett had to deal with Eloise on his own—Kristen had distanced herself from the ice cream debate and had her cell phone plastered to her ear, and I couldn’t stick around to help smooth the waters—but if anyone could restore peace, Garrett was the man.
Peachy and I made our way to the Remember the A-la-mode booth on the fair’s midway as quickly as Peachy’s arthritis would allow. As we hustled across the dusty fairgrounds, I called Finn Harper on my cell phone and asked him to poke around a bit about Sonny’s sudden appearance and then meet us back at the booth.
Finn and I had dated in high school, our relationship burning with that peculiar passion that seems reserved for adolescents. A week before we graduated, I dumped him in the Tasty-Swirl parking lot. He roared into the night in his dark green Sirocco, and I didn’t see hide nor hair of him for the next seventeen years.
Then one day he literally turned up on my doorstep, all grown up and looking more sinful than a doubledip hot fudge sundae with extra whipped cream, and pretty soon he was helping me solve a murder. We’d spent a few months dancing around each other, nervous as pigs at a barbecue, trying to figure out which feelings were real and which were the ghosts of a love long gone, before we began dating for real.
Finn wasn’t just pretty to look at. He had a good head on his shoulders, and his position as a reporter for the
Dalliance News-Letter
meant he had access to all kinds of information. If anyone could ferret out why Sonny Anders had slithered back to town, Finn could.
Peachy and I made our way along the stretch of the fairgrounds devoted to food stalls, past the standard fair fixtures—corn dogs, fried Twinkies, and funnel cakes—and the local favorites like the Bar None’s beer booth and El Guapo’s taco stand. It was only the first day of the fair and not quite noon, so attendance hadn’t picked up yet. The workers were still enjoying the peace as they prepped their booths for the crush of the first evening, and several shouted out friendly hellos as we passed.
We found Bree pacing the twenty-foot length of the A-la-mode booth, back and forth like a tin duck in a shooting gallery. She braced one arm across her belly while she chewed on the thumbnail of the other hand.
“What took you so long?” she snapped.
I jerked my head subtly toward Peachy. When my grandma looked in the mirror, I fancy she still saw herself with a full head of auburn curls and bright eyes that could lure a man to her bedroom or knock him flat on his backside, depending on her mood. She did not care to be reminded of her infirmities. “It’s a long hike,” I hedged.
“Well, I about piddled myself when I saw Sonny, walking down the midway without a care in the world. Like it was no big deal to just show up in Dalliance after fifteen years.” Bree plopped down on one of the folding chairs we’d set up for slow times, and Peachy gingerly lowered herself into the other.
“Did you say something? Did he see you?” I asked.
Bree laughed. “I don’t think he saw me, and I was too stunned to speak. Lord, what am I gonna tell Alice?”
“You’ll tell her the truth,” Peachy said. “That girl’s got more sense than the two of you put together. She’s not gonna have a conniption just because her daddy’s back in town.”
“He looked good.”
Peachy sucked her teeth, her lip curled in contempt. “Now, you just keep those hormones holstered, little girl.”
Bree rolled her eyes dramatically. “Not that kind of good, Gram. Give me a little credit. I mean he looks like he’s doing good. Wearing a suit and everything. I almost didn’t recognize him. And he was walking with a woman on his arm.”
“A wife?” I asked.
Bree looked as if she’d smelled something funky. “Maybe. But for all I know, Sonny thinks we’re still married.”
When Sonny split town, he didn’t leave a forwarding address. Bree had to jump through a million and one hoops—and wait over a year—to serve process through newspaper publication and obtain a divorce on the grounds of abandonment.
She shrugged. “Whoever she was, she was a fair step up from that skank Spumanti. Lord, do you remember her?” Bree shivered dramatically. “That was the most humiliating part of Sonny leaving, the fact that he left me for that sorry creature.”
Spumanti had been a dancer out at the Pole Cat, famous for its cheap ribs and cheaper girls. I only saw her a couple of times, when Bree dragged me along to hear Sonny’s band play crappy Skynyrd covers before the dancers took the stage.
None of the girls at the Pole Cat were much to look at. If a dancer had a good body and a few moves—and wasn’t suffering from meth-mouth—she could make a lot more cash at one of the clubs off Harry Hines in Dallas or in the rougher clubs over in Fort Worth. In fact, the Pole Cat got a lot of runoff from those more upscale establishments. Girls who got fired for getting too close to the customers or doing drugs at work would show up at the Pole Cat, and the Pole Cat let everything with two X chromosomes work the pole.
But even for the Pole Cat, Spumanti was sorta pitiful. Something about her—her lank blond hair, her unwholesome complexion, her lifeless eyes—something reminded me of overcooked grits.
“Dang,” I said, smothering a snort of laughter, “you remember that tattoo of hers?”
Peachy perked up. “What tattoo?”
“She had this upended champagne bottle on her tummy, made it look like someone was pouring champagne on her . . . well, you know.”
Peachy whistled. “Her mama must have been so proud.”
“I don’t think her mama cared a lick,” Bree said. “Which is how she ended up stripping and running off with a married man. Anyway, I bet this new lady doesn’t have a tattoo on her cooch. She was dressed all classy, like a Junior Leaguer.”
“Are you sure she was with Sonny?” I quipped.
Bree snorted. “Sonny always did like a little sin in his sugar.” Her lips twisted in a self-deprecating smile. My cousin had a big ol’ brain and a heart the size of Texas, but she also had a wild streak a mile wide. Even dressed for scooping ice cream, in a skintight Remember the A-la-mode T-shirt and sprayed-on skinny jeans, she looked like trouble. Norma Jean Baker just waiting to be transformed into Marilyn.
She shrugged. “The lady was a little buttoned up for Sonny, but she had a wiggle in her walk. And maybe his tastes have matured a bit.”
Peachy dipped a hand in the wide pocket of her barn jacket, which she wore no matter the occasion or the weather, and pulled out her pipe and a rolled bag of tobacco. With fingers gnarled by age but still sure and steady, she set about the small ritual of filling her bowl with her favorite dark cherry blend.
“Gram,” I said, “you can’t smoke in here.”
She shot me the hairy eyeball. “Says who?”
“Says the government. It’s a fire hazard and probably a health hazard, too.”
She snorted. “This pipe’s safer than that old rattletrap ice cream freezer.”
We all paused to study the freezer. It was a bit disreputable, its motor emitting a high-pitched whine as it struggled to fight against the brutal August heat.
“That may be,” I conceded, “but the law doesn’t see it that way.”
“Lord a’mighty,” she said, even as she began rerolling her tobacco stash. “You’re no better than the clipboard Nazis out at Tarleton Ranch.”
Peachy had recently given up the real ranch she’d managed for the last fifty-some years in favor of a studio apartment—complete with all the amenities of modern life—at a senior living community called Tarleton Ranch. She joked that the only livestock at Tarleton Ranch were blue-haired hens and randy old goats.
Peachy carped about the rules (especially the one that made her go outside to smoke her pipe), the food, the “clipboard Nazis”—who were really just aides who patrolled the halls checking on the residents, and even the upholstery in the card room, but that was just Peachy’s way. She wouldn’t stop finding fault until she cocked up her toes for good. I could tell that, deep down, she was having a blast bossing around the other ladies and flirting with the gents.
“Hello?” Bree waved her hand above her head trying to get our attention. “Can we get back to my problem?”
I pulled a can of diet soda from a chest cooler and then sat on the lid as I cracked it open. “I know it’s a shock, Bree, but I’m not really sure it’s a ‘problem.’”
“Heck yes, it is. We have to keep him away from Alice. That man isn’t getting within a hundred yards of my child.”
Peachy harrumphed. “Alice can decide for herself if she wants to see her daddy. And whatever she decides, we support her.” Bree opened her mouth to argue, but Peachy cut her off with a waggle of her finger. “It’s her choice, Sabrina Marie. Not yours.”
Before they could get into a knock-down, drag-out fight, Finn poked his head over the counter of our stall. “Hey. Can I come in?”
Every time I saw the man, my heart went pitter-pat. I gave him a big dopey smile and gestured to the door on the side of the stall. He smiled back before he disappeared, a little heat and promise in his evergreen eyes.
“So I asked around,” he said when he’d joined us inside. “Didn’t take long for the word to get around. Sonny’s not exactly lying low.”
“What’s he doing here? Where the heck has he been?” Bree demanded.
Finn held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m going as fast as I can, Bree.”
I handed him a soda and he leaned his back against the wall, settling in for a good chat. “Okay, so I don’t know how long Sonny was up north, but he apparently spent some time in Pennsylvania developing a natural gas field there.”
“Natural gas?” I said.
Bree snorted. “The only way Sonny could develop gas is to eat a can of beans.”
“Wow,” Finn said. “Aren’t you just the picture of genteel southern womanhood? I can’t believe the League of Methodist Ladies hasn’t recruited you for their board.”
She flipped him the finger, and he laughed.
“Look, I’m just telling you what I heard. Dave Epler from the Chamber of Commerce said Sonny showed up at the Parlay Inn last night, buying rounds of tenbuck-a-glass Scotch, and talking about how he made a bundle working an old field with some hot new technology. He’s got the wad of bills and the shiny sports car to prove it.”
“Who’s the woman?” Bree asked. The chill in her voice made me shiver despite the triple-digit weather.
“That I don’t know,” Finn admitted.
“And why’s he here?”
Finn shrugged. “Dave said Sonny got real cagey when folks started asking him that. But Dave and Mike Carberry got to talking, and they think maybe Sonny has a bead on a way to extract more gas from the Altemont Shale.”
The Altemont Shale was a geologic formation that ran under dang near all of Lantana County. Petroleum soaked the rich, porous rock, but getting it out had never been cost-effective. New developments in drilling technology, though, had made other similar shale deposits profitable, and so squeezing black gold from the Altemont had become a favorite source of speculation for the barflies and old-timers around town.
Bree snorted. “All I know is if Sonny Anders has money, he owes me a passel of it.”
Finn raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Sonny never paid a lick of child support,” I explained.
“That should be easy to fix. The state should be able to calculate what he owes based on the order and go after him for it. You don’t need to lift a finger.”
“There is no order,” I said.
Bree’d been taken to task for her failure to secure a support order often enough to anticipate Finn’s reaction. “Before you go off on me, just remember that when Sonny left, he hadn’t had a paying job in over a year.”