Polished Off (18 page)

“Yoo-hoo! Grace.” Mrs. Jones waved from her veranda, which protected her from the rain. “Did I hear you’ve entered a beauty pageant? You’re a lovely girl, but aren’t you a teensy bit long in the tooth?”

Closing my car door a bit harder than necessary, I started toward her, not caring that I was getting wet. It felt good. I noted that the forsythia bushes were encroaching on the sidewalk again. I’d trim them back this weekend.

“I’m not a contestant, Mrs. Jones,” I said. “I’m doing the girls’ hair. And Stella’s doing their nails.” I climbed the steps to the veranda and ran my fingers through raintangled hair.

Mrs. Jones shook her head, setting her pouf of hair dancing. “Such a shame about her husband. It just goes to show that you never know, doesn’t it?”

“What does?” I asked, wary of what the local gossips might have relayed to her. They took one part fact and mixed in three parts imagination or wishful thinking or spite and came up with a tale that didn’t bear much resemblance to actual happenings.

“Why, about him fathering that woman’s baby and then killing her when she told him about the pregnancy. Wine cooler? The sun’s well over the yard arm, as my father used to say.”

“What!”

“Peach or strawberry?” she asked, dipping her hand into the cooler beside her rocking chair. She held up a dripping green bottle.

“Uh, peach, thanks,” I said, sinking reluctantly into the rocker. I hadn’t meant to stay—hopefully Vonda was on her way over—but I had to learn what Mrs. Jones had heard, even if it was no closer to the truth than Chicago to London. Rain drummed on the veranda’s roof and I had to lean in to hear Mrs. Jones.

“Well, you know that my niece Karen works at the coroner’s office over to Kingsland. And she heard that nice Dr. Butler mention that the autopsy showed a fetus, not but two and a half or three months along.” She sat back in her chair with an expectant air.

Doing mental math, I realized that the baby very well could be Darryl’s from what Stella had said about the affair. The thought made me sick. Or maybe it was the wine cooler. I put down my half-drunk bottle. “Are they doing tests to establish paternity?” I asked.

She shrugged her bony shoulders. “As to that, I couldn’t say.”

Of course they were. If they were going to prosecute Darryl, it would be nice to have a clear-cut motive like a pregnancy to explain why he jabbed Audrey with his wife’s nail file. Things were looking grim for Stella’s husband. I held on to my conviction that he hadn’t murdered Audrey even if he fathered her baby and said diplomatically, “I hope this rumor doesn’t get around. Think how hurtful it would be for Jessica to hear about from one of her friends.”

Mrs. Jones nodded wisely. “Little pitchers have big ears. It never ceases to amaze me what parents will say in front of their children these days. And what they let them watch on television or at the movie theater. Heavens! You don’t need to worry about me, dear. Mum’s the word.”

“Thanks.” I stood and gave her wrinkled cheek a kiss. “And thanks for the wine cooler. I’ve got to go—there’s Vonda.”

Vonda pulled to the curb in her ancient Volvo station wagon. She and Ricky had bought it when they took on the B&B. “It might not be sporty,” she had said with a rueful look, “but it hauls enough groceries and linens to make life as an innkeeper a bit easier.”

“I heard she and Ricky Warren are tying the knot again,” Mrs. Jones said, watching as Vonda got out of the car and waved.

“Where did you hear that?” I looked at her, astonished. Vonda hadn’t even hinted as much to me.

“My great-niece who works at the courthouse said Ricky was in a couple days ago, hanging out in the marriage license office.” She winked at me. “And that little gal sure looks all lit up.”

Vonda
did
look happy. I hustled down the stairs to meet her, giving her a big hug.

“I’m here for my haircut,” Vonda said, holding a bottle of wine aloft. “Payment to be drunk after the cutting so I don’t end up looking like you went after me with a hacksaw again.”

“Unfair.” I led her around the side of the house and across the driveway to my apartment and unlocked the door. The carriage house coughed the accumulated day’s heat at us and I left the door open as I punched on the window air conditioner. “Phew.” I headed into the kitchen and opened the window over the sink. Ever since someone had dumped a water moccasin in through the screen, I locked up tight when I left. “The only time I botched your hair even a little bit was when we were seventeen and you were dancing in the chair to that tape we bought. It was like trying to clip a Lhasa apso on speed. What
was
that tape?”

“Bowie’s
Earthling
. Not his best, but still great.” She hummed the opening to “Seven Years in Tibet,” plopping down in the orange and cream floral easy chair I’d found at a garage sale. The price was right, so the fact that the orange wasn’t ideal with the pale taupe walls didn’t faze me.

“So,” I said, ultra casually. “What’s this I hear about you and Ricky getting remarried?”

“You’re not coming near me with the scissors; you’ve already had too much to drink,” Vonda said. She made a show of tucking the wine bottle back in her tote.

“Half a wine cooler,” I protested. “And don’t change the subject.”

“Been there, done that,” Vonda said. “You were maid of honor, remember? And you were counselor and comforter in chief when we split. Whatever makes you think I’d do it again?” She looked half annoyed, half amused.

“I heard Ricky was seen in the marriage license office,” I mumbled, embarrassed that I’d let myself think even for one minute that an unverified rumor from the St. Elizabeth’s gossip mill might be accurate.

Vonda laughed. “Which is also the place to get copies of birth certificates. We needed RJ’s for his baseball team. They’re mental about kids being in the right age bracket.”

“I’m an idiot,” I apologized. Maybe Mrs. Jones’s rumor about Audrey being pregnant had no more basis in fact than this one. For Stella’s sake, I hoped so.

 

 

AFTER I TRIMMED VONDA’S PLATINUM HAIR, KEEPING it in the modified pixie cut she’d been sporting all summer, we opened the bottle of pinot grigio and settled on the front stoop. The rain had stopped, but water dripped from the eaves. It was still twilight but the crickets were chirring and a bullfrog croaked loudly. I told her everything I’d learned that day, except for Mrs. Jones’s news that Audrey was pregnant when she died.

“I think that Sam Barnes must have done it,” Vonda said.

Worked for me—I didn’t much like Mr. Barnes. I sipped my wine. “Why?”

“Could be anything. He was married to her. No one has more reason to kill a woman than her husband. At least, that’s what Ricky says.”

“Then what about Kevin?”

“He’s a good choice, too.” Vonda nodded approvingly. “His brokerage business has really been on the skids since the economy nosedived. Maybe he needs the life insurance payout.”

“Is there one?”

Vonda shrugged. “How would I know? It’s my job to brainstorm suspects and your job to come up with some proof.”

“He knew about the affair,” I said. A vision of the grief-stricken man on Mom’s veranda this morning gave me pause. “He did seem genuinely upset about her death, though. But if he knew about—” I almost said “the baby” but stopped myself in time. “But he couldn’t have done it.” I explained about Faye being with the GBI when someone left the death threat.

“Maybe he’s got an accomplice,” Vonda said.

“Maybe.” That didn’t feel right to me, but it wouldn’t hurt to learn more about Faye. And I knew just how I’d do it. He was a Realtor and I was interested in buying a house . . .

“And this professor guy that Althea’s dating,” Vonda put in. “I don’t like it that he apparently had history with Audrey, too.”

“Me neither.”

“I suppose Althea might take offense if you start investigating him, huh?”

I gave her a speaking look.

She nodded. “That’s what I thought. Maybe you can get someone else to do a background check on him. How about Marty? He could get one of his researchers to plug him into a database and see what pops out.”

“Not a bad idea,” I said. “I already tried to get Marty to write a story and he passed, but maybe he could wangle a few days in St. Elizabeth if I pushed a bit harder.”

“Who else do we need to investigate?” Vonda asked.

I counted on my fingers. “Mrs. Metzger, the pushy mama.”

“The lioness defending her cub.”

“Something like that. The contestants.” I lumped them all together on one finger.

“All of them?”

“Well, not Rachel,” I conceded. “Maybe they’re not suspects anymore, now that we know it was Hayley that Audrey was going to toss out of the pageant.”

“Skip the contestants,” Vonda advised.

“The protestors.” I held up a third finger.

“What you need to look into,” Vonda said, “is access. Who had access to the theater to pull off the pranks, the sprinkler thing, and the mat thing?”

“Excellent question.” I hadn’t thought about that. “All of the contestants, obviously, and their parents. The judges. Sam Barnes. Kevin Faye, if he was coming to see Audrey. The theater staff and crew. The community theater people rehearsing
Phantom
. Half the town apparently.” I took a healthy sip of wine.

Vonda stood and dumped the dregs of her wine into the grass. “I guess that doesn’t narrow the suspect pool too much then, does it? And, unless they’ve fixed it, the back door from the parking lot doesn’t latch right. Anyone could walk in. Ricky and I used to sneak in to watch movies when we were dating. Our first kiss was in the back row of that theater watching
Jerry Maguire
. Maybe I
would
marry him again if he’d say, ‘you complete me,’ with that soulful Tom Cruise vibe. I’ve got to get home, sweetie. We have a full house so I’ll be up early cooking biscuits and grits for twenty-two people. Remind me why I thought I wanted to own a B&B?” She hugged me. “Thanks for the hair.”

After Vonda left, I stayed on the stoop for a while until night surrounded me and my fanny went to sleep. No revelations about the murderer’s identity struck me, so I went to bed.

I APPROACHED THE OGLETHORPE THEATER THE next morning at an unusually early hour. Vonda’s remarks about access must have played in my dreams, because I awoke determined to find out how secure the theater was. I wanted to check rear and side exits and windows without anyone asking me what I was doing. The sun had barely begun its assault when I pulled up across from the theater, and the air was crisp after the night’s rain. Worms wiggled on the sidewalk. Mockingbirds sang and early-morning exercise nuts were the only other people out, their faces serious as they pounded the pavement.

I tugged on the front doors—locked—then took the sidewalk along the left side of the building that led to the parking lot in the back. A door I assumed was an emergency exit from the theater proper sat at the top of a short flight of stairs, three-quarters of the way down the building. I climbed up and tried it. Locked. Several narrow windows looked down on me, but they were set too high to give access without a ladder. I continued around to the parking lot. No cars at this hour. A Dumpster, lid open, squatted at the rear of the lot where it connected with Yew Street.

Two more doors opened onto the lot, one at either corner of the building. And a window well, covered by a grate, let light into the theater’s basement, I presumed. I turned the knob on the first door. Also locked. Maybe they’d fixed it since Vonda’s time. I walked toward the window well, thinking someone needed to get back here with a Weedeater. Rank weeds grew a foot high against the back of the building, trapping discarded ticket stubs, plastic grocery bags, and other trash.
Clang!
Something banged against metal and I whirled. A black-and-white tomcat half the size of a puma glared at me from atop the Dumpster, daring me to interrupt his breakfast. “It’s all yours, kitty,” I murmured.

I hadn’t been nervous before—it was broad daylight, for heaven’s sake—but the butterflies in my tummy riled up by the cat refused to settle down. I rattled the grate on the window well after checking for spiders, but it didn’t budge. This was silly, I told myself. Even if I found an open door or window, what would it prove? Hurrying to the second door, I grasped the knob, expecting to meet resistance. Instead, it turned easily and the door creaked toward me, knocking me a little off balance. Drat. I would much prefer to have found the building secure against all invaders except mice and cockroaches because that would have given me a finite number of suspects for the murder. This way, anyone in the tri-county area could have snuck in.

A strange odor drifted from the open door and I sniffed. It was too faint for me to identify. Probably just musty basement smell aggravated by the damp from the rain. I started to shut the door when a low growl made me freeze. Turning my head, I saw the tomcat from the Dumpster crouched ten feet away. His tail lashed. Sticky matter clotted the corners of his eyes and he listed to one side. This was one sick kitty. He made a menacing noise again deep in his throat and inched closer to me. I retreated a step. Rabies is unfortunately fairly common in the county, and feral cats were carriers. I did not need to tangle with a potentially rabid feline. Reaching a hand behind me, I pulled the door wider and jumped through it backward, yanking it closed as I fell onto my derrière. The cat thudded against the door and yowled. The eerie sound made me shiver.