Lavender Lies (20 page)

“My thought exactly,” Ruby said. “But when I probed, Ken got all huffy and said that the sale had nothing to do with anything.”

“At least his name isn’t Jean,” I said dryly. “I’m not in the least surprised that you didn’t learn anything. Nothing is going right. Did Laurel tell you that the punch bowls fell over and broke, and the mice got into your cookies before the cookies could get into the freezer—and that Bertha and Betsy won’t be here until tomorrow?”

Ruby looked dismayed. “You know, I didn’t check the stars when you set your wedding date. I’d better do that right away. Just to make sure what’s going on. I suspect that Mercury’s gone retrograde, at the least. Or maybe Pluto is acting up.”

“I’m glad there’s a logical explanation,” I replied.

“Don’t be tacky,” Ruby said, going to the front door to lock it and put up the Out to Lunch sign. “Some things are going reasonably well. All the work in the tearoom is done, and I went through the herb garden today—it looks very nice. Even if we don’t do any extra decorating, it will still be lovely. Unless it rains, of course.”

I shuddered. “God forbid.” Pecan Springs is normally dry—we get less than thirty inches of rainfall a year—and I’m always hoping for a nice all-day rain. Not this weekend, though. This weekend, I was praying for sunshine and decently cool temperatures.

“Amen,” Ruby said vehemently. “But I’m afraid we’ve got a major problem with the wedding cake. It turns out that Annie wasn’t the only one who took the bus to Tucson. She and Maureen have been having an affair and Maureen went with her. Which leaves Adele all alone to cater the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast on Friday and bake four wedding cakes for the weekend. To top it all off, somebody crunched her delivery van in the First Baptist parking lot. She says this just wasn’t her week. She’s doing the prayer breakfast, but canceling the cakes.”

Ah, the drama of small-town life. “Maybe we could get the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast to pray for Annie and Maureen to come back and bake cakes,” I said, “and ask the Baptists to take up a collection to fix the van.” I grinned. “Although the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast might be busy praying for Pauline’s forgiveness. After all, she is now a fallen woman. She needs all the prayers she can get.” Ruby scowled. “Be serious, China. This is your wedding we’re talking about, for pity’s sake.”

“Right. It’s only a wedding, not the event of the century.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ruby laughed cheerily. “Think again, sister. It’s the event of
your
century. After Sunday, you’ll be a married woman. You’re beginning a whole new phase of your life. Take it from me. Things will never be the same.”

I shuddered. I like myself as I am, plus or minus a few minor personality flaws. I like McQuaid, too, and the way we are together, friendly, comfortable, argumentative. If I thought marriage would change me, or change him, or change us, I’d cancel, even at this late date. Instead of a wedding, we’d have a party, and our honeymoon would simply be a great vacation. Which would be a whole lot easier, come to think of it. I could stop worrying about wedding cakes and marriage licenses and flowers and enjoy the party.

But I was gambling that McQuaid and I, married, could remain our independent, autonomous selves. I wasn’t entering a marriage like Letty’s, where one partner dominates the relationship so completely that the other is forced to give up what she wants in order to keep the thing going. I sighed. In the beginning, at least, Letty must have had great hopes for her marriage. When had she realized that it closed down her options, rather than enlarging them? At what point—if ever—did she understand that she had yielded up her will to his?

Thinking of Letty made me sad, but it also put this latest wedding-day glitch into perspective. “Relax, Ruby,” I said. “Let’s not sweat the small stuff. If we can’t find anybody to bake a cake, we’ll put out peanut butter and jelly.”

It’s a good thing the Mayor’s Breakfast bunch couldn’t hear Ruby’s response. They would have added her to their prayer list.

It was just noon, so Laurel and I closed up for lunch too. She went off to eat and I headed for the Adams County Courthouse, which sits in the middle of the town square, surrounded by statues dedicated to the memory of dead soldiers, and benches where the survivors can sit and remind one another of past glories. The building itself is constructed of slabs of pink granite hauled to the site from Marble Falls, seventy miles to the west and north. It’s a fine example of turn-of-the-century Texas political architecture, looking as if it will endure for centuries to come. The granite, which was quarried out of Granite Mountain, is likely to be around somewhat longer. It was born of Precambrian fury more than a billion years ago and buried beneath a half-mile thick layer of limestone rock that was deposited in the warm and shallow Mesozoic seas that extended west to New Mexico and north to Oklahoma. The granite was exposed after the land began to rise, the seas were drained, and Cenozoic erosion stripped off the overlying sediments. In various shades of gray-pink, it is found now in weathered heaps on the surface and in domes of unimaginable size beneath. By such picturesque names as Texas Sunset, Prairie Rose, Texas Star, and Texas Red, it has made rather a reputation for itself in the world. You can see polished slabs of it on buildings in such faraway places as Osaka, Singapore, and Atlantic City, as well as the Texas State Capital building in Austin. If you’re looking for Texas Red in the raw, you can find a 500-foot-high, 640-square-acre hunk of it a few miles north of Fredericksburg, on Farm to Market Road 965. It’s called Enchanted Rock. When you climb it, you’ll see how layers of the stone have peeled off like layers of an onion in a process called exfoliation, which is caused by the heating and cooling of the rock’s surface.

But there’s no peeling stone on our local courthouse, which attracts tourists from far and wide. A chattering flock of them—blue-rinsed ladies and balding men with cameras around their necks—were gathered in front of it today, being instructed by Vera Hooper, the town docent. Twice a day during tourist season, Vera meets groups at the Chamber of Commerce office on Pecan Street and leads them on a walking tour of the historic buildings around the square, including the Sophie Briggs Historical Museum, which houses Miss Briggs’s famous collection of ceramic frogs, the boots Burt Reynolds wore in
The
Best
Little Whorehouse in Texas,
and a four by five-foot bronze casting of a fire ant nest, made near Dime Box, Texas. (If you don’t believe me, come and see for yourself.)

I, however, was headed in the other direction, to the county clerk’s office, which is on the second floor of the courthouse, up the creaky staircase and down the hall to the far end. I counted myself lucky to find Melva Joy Stryker behind the marble-topped counter upon which generations of Adams County couples have leaned their elbows while they got licensed to marry. If Roseann Tice had been there, I probably wouldn’t have dared to make my request. Roseann, a transplant from Missouri, is narrow and nervous and never breaks a rule for fear that the bureaucratic gods will frown at her. But Melva Joy is a plump, pleasant third-generation Texan with tight brown curls and a generous personality, the sort who offers to take care of your cats and water your African violets while you are on vacation. We worked together last year on the Myra Merryweather Herb Guild bazaar committee, so we consider ourselves friends.

I started off by reminding her that I still had the large potted marjoram that I’d promised her some weeks before, whenever she wanted to stop by the shop and pick it up. Then I gave her my request.

“You want to take the license
where?”
she asked, startled.

“I’d like to take it to the police station for my fiancé to sign,” I said meekly. “He’s the temporary chief of police, and he’s on a case. I really wouldn’t ask, but it’s pretty hard for him to get away just now and the wedding is coming up on Sunday.”

“Oh, it’s Mike you’re marrying,” she exclaimed. “Well, why didn’t you say so? He’s cute.” She paused. “I hope he won’t have to use those canes forever.”

“We hope not too,” I said. “But we’re glad he’s improved as much as he has. There for a while it was touch and go.” It wouldn’t hurt to play on her sympathies, with which Melva Joy is abundantly supplied.

She pulled her brows down in a frown. “The case Mike’s on. It’s that Coleman business, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “And now that Letty Coleman is dead too, I’m afraid we may have to be married by proxy.” I chuckled, to show her I was only joking.

Melva Joy stared at me. “Letty’s
dead?”
Her eyes widened, her eyebrows went up, and her jaw dropped, registering dramatic surprise and shock. “Holy smoke! How’d it happen? Car wreck or something?”

I gave her a bare outline of the events of the morning.

“Well, my goodness,” Melva Joy said sorrowfully. Her substantial bosom rose and fell under her floral-print dress. “A broken neck. Would you believe? That is just too sad for words.” She tilted her head, giving me a sharp look. “She wasn’t pushed, was she? I mean, with her husband gettin’ shot and all, it makes you wonder.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The police are looking into it.” I leaned on the counter. “You knew her?”

The brown curls bobbed. “Oh my, yes. Letty was a very sweet person. My heart went out to her, all that trouble she had with that tomcat husband of hers.” Melva Joy paused and gave me a look that inquired whether I knew about Edgar’s philandering. I gave her a look back that said I did, and she went on, a little more confidentially, “We sang together, y’know. In the Sweet Adelines. Soprano.”

“No, I didn’t know,” I said. “I’m glad she had something to do—to keep her mind off ... well, things.”

“That Letty,” Melva Joy said, “she had perfect pitch. Which is awfully important when it comes to sopranos. You got one standing next to you who sings flat, it’ll pull you both down.”

“I can imagine.” Somehow, I was touched by the thought of Letty having perfect pitch. I was glad that something had been right in her life.

Melva Joy reached beneath the counter and took out a form. “Roseann would say it’s against the rules, but I’m doing it anyway. A man’s got a murder case to solve, he don’t need to be over here doing paperwork.” She sat down at an IBM typewriter and expertly rolled in the form. “You get close to a person when you’re both sopranos. Letty and me, we’d go for ice-cream cones afterwards, over to the Baskin and Robbins. She always had chocolate chip.” She looked up. “Names?”

I gave her mine and McQuaid’s, and added, “Did Letty talk much about her husband?”

“Only when she was feeling low,” Melva Joy said. She attacked the keyboard with energy, recording our names in a staccato burst. “Iris Powell I could understand. But I never could feature Pauline Perkins, somehow. Date and place of birth? I wouldn’t mention Pauline,” she added, “if it wasn’t common talk.”

I told her our dates. I was born in Houston, McQuaid in San Antonio. “Just out of curiosity, did Letty ever mention anybody named Jean?”

“Well, yes.” She frowned, backed up and hit the correction key. “But she didn’t know who Jean was—just her name, is all.” She looked down at the dates she had just typed and grinned. “Younger than you, is he? Roseann says that’s the kiss of death in a marriage, but I like to see it. Shows we don’t get older, we just get better.” She sighed heavily. “It didn’t work out just real well for Letty. He was younger than her, you know. But I expect you’ll do better.”

“I expect so too,” I said firmly. We went through the remaining items and I handed over the blood test forms we’d gotten back from the doctor the week before. “How much?” I asked, reaching for a pen and thinking of the symbolism of my writing and signing the check for our marriage license. This was not an indicator of things to come, I hoped.

“Thirty-five.” Melva Joy made an apologetic face. “It went up five dollars last month. Seems like everything is going up.”

I gave her my check. She turned it over, stamped it smartly, and put it in her desk drawer, then pushed the form across the counter. “When you come back with it all signed, be sure you give it straight to me,” she said. “Don’t let on to Roseann that I let you take it out of the office, or she’ll have a hissy at both of us.” She closed the drawer, shaking her head regretfully. “I really hate it about Letty getting killed. I mean
really.
It’s hard to find anybody with perfect pitch anymore, let alone a soprano.”