by Duffy Brown
“What if Simon the jackass made threats about wanting to claim the child as his own. Maybe he said he wanted the baby and so did Waynetta. Icy and his daughter don’t travel in the same circles as the Waverlys. They don’t know Waynetta like we do, that someone else’s child is the last thing on earth she’d tolerate. Icy paid Simon to stay away from his daughter and grandson. Simon being Simon wanted more money. A man like Icy wasn’t about to have his life ruined by Simon Ambrose, so Icy killed him.” I considered the possibility of what we just put together. “Then again that sounds a little extreme, if you ask me.”
“Oh, honey, I think that’s it,” KiKi said, heading down the road. “It’s not extreme at all. When you’re a mamma or grandparent or auntie, what matters is that child, the love of your life. Icy knew the Waverlys would bring in expensive lawyers and take his grandson away. That’s all he could see and he wasn’t about to take the chance.”
“Icy wanted Simon and Waynetta to go away and it had to happen before the marriage or Waynetta might have a legal claim on Simon’s child.” I looked at KiKi. “It fits. We need to get into Simon’s house and look around. I bet there’s a birth certificate or other papers that connect Simon to Icy or the daughter or baby. I wonder what else that sleaze was up to? If he was willing to go after the mother of his baby, the man has no limits.”
KiKi bit at her bottom lip. “But what if Icy did indeed kill Simon?”
“We give him a medal and bring in a marching band?”
“We can’t put a grandfather in jail for protecting his daughter and grandson. And if we don’t, Chantilly could go to prison . . . or worse.” KiKi shook her head. “We need to get into Simon’s place soon. We’ll bring vodka, lots of vodka to numb the ickiness of touching things Simon-ized.”
“Tomorrow we’ll go,” I lied in agreement. I couldn’t involve my dear aunt in B and E, vodka or not. “But right now I’ve got to get home and get Chantilly to Bonaventure. There was talk of making use of her daddy’s shotgun, and I don’t want her taking aim at me for not keeping my promise.”
• • •
“I don’t believe this,” Chantilly whined, the two of us standing in front of Bonaventure Cemetery, the massive wrought-iron gates padlocked together. I stepped closer and read the little plaque dangling from the chain. “Summer hours. The place closes early in August.”
“Since when do dead people get summer hours? They’re dead. They have no hours. This is crazy.” Chantilly grabbed the gates and gave a hard shake that did no good at all except to make a lot of racket. “I knew we should have come earlier.” Chantilly stepped back, parking her hands on her hip, staring at the high stone wall surrounding the place.
“I had customers,” I offered in my own defense. “It’s real-estate tax month.” And Hollis is ready to pounce, I added to myself. “I couldn’t shoo out potential sales.”
“They didn’t even buy anything, and I need to see Simon now. He might still think I’m sweet on him, and I need to set the record straight.”
“He’s dead, honey. What more do you want?”
I got the beady-eyed stare. “You promised.”
I switched the heavy picnic basket holding KiKi’s donated bottle of champagne to my other hand and hitched Old Yeller up on my shoulder. “All right, all right. We’ll sneak in. I know a way, but first off we need to park the car out of sight so no one knows we’re breaking into a cemetery. Not as uncommon as one might think.”
“You really sneaked into Bonaventure?” Chantilly said, brows raised after we found a spot for the Jeep on a side street. “You’re the goody-two-shoes judge’s daughter.”
“I was desperate. Come on, we got to get a move on, it’s getting late.” We hoofed it to the rock wall surrounding the cemetery, then followed the sidewalk beside it to the river. The walk ended and we stepped into the grass, heading for the sandy riverbank under a line of birch trees. I pointed to a break in the wall where the water came in. “The river’s low in late summer. We’ll go around the end and get in that way. Sometimes in the spring you have to swim.”
Chantilly grabbed the strap of my purse, eyes huge, feet planted firmly in the dirt. “There’re water moccasins in that there river.”
I was tired and cranky and out of patience, moccasins or not. “Do you want to see Simon?”
“What had you so desperate to swim with snakes? It must have been a doozy of a reason.”
We were never getting to Simon at this rate. “I wanted a date for junior prom. If I didn’t come up with one Auntie KiKi was going to fix me up with the kid who cut her grass. He was two years younger and kept his clipped fingernails in a mayonnaise jar. I saw it with my own two eyes. Now let’s get going.”
Chantilly grinned as I pulled her along. “You devil. You sneaked in to see Marguerite.”
“Cost me fifty bucks, forty for Marguerite and ten to the kid who told me how to get in here.”
“I heard the going rate was a hundred. So who did Marguerite fix you with for a measly forty bucks?”
I took a deep breath. “Sugar-Ray Dunlap.” I kicked off my flip-flops, offered up a quick prayer for no snakes, then stepped into the river, the cool water swirling around my ankles. I could hear Chantilly breathing hard behind me. “Simon’s grave isn’t far,” I said to keep our minds off snakes. I threw in the events of Waynetta, Bridesmaid, and the casket for added distraction.
“And you made me miss out on all that today,” Chantilly said when we got to the other side of the wall. “I should have been there.”
“Along with the police in riot gear.”
“There is that.”
Now I understood why there was a procession to bury the dead—a crowd made a cemetery a whole lot less creepy. Two lone souls on a deserted gravel road with an overcast sky was not a procession or a crowd.
“You know,” Chantilly said, edging close to me, or maybe it was me edging close to her. “Did you ever think that Waynetta killed Simon? She had a mighty good motive if she knew he was doing the slippery-slide with Bridesmaid on her wedding day in the closet. Maybe Waynetta took Bridesmaid’s dress when she saw it on the floor, then stabbed Simon to frame Bridesmaid. Do them both in at once, so to speak.”
I nodded up ahead to the grave freshly covered with a mound of dirt, a backhoe parked off to the side. “There’s your boy. You dance, and I’ll pop the champagne. Make it quick; I think a storm’s rolling in off the ocean.”
I braced for a deluge of grief. Chantilly wanted to take her time, savor the moment, dance her heart out. She cut her eyes side-to-side looking around and said, “I sort of thought this would be more fun.” She shivered then baby-stepped her way to Simon’s grave. She paused, then touched the tip of her toe to the fresh dirt and shivered again.
I sat on the edge of a tombstone that declared Mildred Snyder was indeed beloved, missed, a devoted wife and mother, and a member of the Savannah Garden Club. Chantilly did some wild gyrations that made me want to give her a few complimentary lessons with Auntie KiKi. I twisted the wire cage off the top of the champagne bottle, pried up the cork, and—
“This here ain’t no dance club and hoochy-coochy bar,” a voice said behind me, making me jump, scream, pop champagne, fall backward over Mildred, and instantly turn forty all in two seconds flat. I looked up at a guy right out of the grave complete with a shovel in his left hand. I figured he was about two hundred years old, shirt and pants ripped and muddy, face and hair caked with dust and sand.
“Help?” I stammered, Chantilly running over to assess the damage.
“I’m the caretaker, grave digger, and whatever else needs doing around here. What’s wrong with you people? Doesn’t anyone know how to read these days? We’re closed up and what’s with all the interest in that there grave over yonder anyway?” Graveyard guy pointed his shovel to Simon then peered down his nose at me. “You don’t have a dead chicken or cat in that there basket do you? Folks are always hauling in dead chickens and cats. Do you know what it’s like to cl
ean up—”
“No!” My heart ricocheted around in my chest like a BB in a box. “I have no idea what it’s like.” And I didn’t want a blow-by-blow description.
“Even found a human toe once,” Graveyard guy went on undaunted. “I don’t mind a little chicken blood now and then as long as they keep it off the tombstones so it doesn’t leave a stain. Blood stains something awful and is the dickens to get out. People got to do what they got to do, but we have to keep things clean and not be dripping—”
“What kind of interest in that new grave are we talking about?” I asked, forcing my brain to work and forget about big toes, dead animals, and bloodstains.
“Well now, another gal was here earlier crying something awful. Felt right bad for her at first, but then she got all mad and cursed like a sailor. Haven’t heard the likes of it since my navy days. I take it that there is that Simon’s grave. She sure did call him a bunch of unflattering names. A bit later a man came along and spit on the grave.”
“What did they look like?”
“Just saw them from behind. Got another grave to dig before noon tomorrow over yonder.” Graveyard guy pointed through the trees. “It’s August, people are dropping like files. To escape the heat is my guess.” He nodded back to Simon. “Love and hate, that’s what makes the world go round, but you need to be doing it when the place is open, not now. I’m going off to eat some supper. You can get out through my caretaker shack by the front. I’ll be back to lock up and I best not find you here, if you get my meaning. It’s fixin’ to rain. You don’t want to be locked up in here at night in the rain. Gets kind of peculiar if you don’t mind me saying so.”
He tossed his shovel onto the backhoe with a loud clank, charged up the engine, and took off in a growl of exhaust, the locals not too concerned about their daily intake of hydrocarbons.
Chantilly grabbed the champagne bottle off the ground and took a long swig, the drone of the backhoe fading. “Lordy, I needed that.” She squelched a burp, hiccupped, then swiped her hand across her mouth. “We got to get out of here. That guy is creepy.”
“What’s he going to do to us?” I asked trying to add a bit of sanity to our situation.
“Girl, this is a man partial to chicken blood and finding hacked-off extremities. You want to hang around here and find out?”
I finished the last of the champagne, which didn’t amount to much, Mildred and Chantilly getting the lion’s share. I dropped the bottle back in the basket next to the glasses that didn’t get used and followed Chantilly. We power-walked without saying a word, disrespectfully cutting in and out of grave plots. Angry clouds blocked the sun. Wind whipped through the trees and tumbled leaves and twigs over tombstones. If a zombie popped out, I wouldn’t have been one bit surprised.
We rounded a marble crypt and spied someone by Marguerite’s grave, someone who obviously didn’t want to be seen or they would have obeyed the little plaque out front. I grabbed Chantilly’s arm and we ducked behind a tombstone that looked like a mini Washington Monument.
Who is it? Chantilly mouthed to me. I hunched my shoulders in I don’t know. We crawled over behind a big iron flower basket, taking us close enough to hear bits and pieces of a chant between gusts of wind, something about money and Waverly and Simon. Holy mother-of-pearl! The person chanting and throwing money was Sugar-Ray. I figured it was one of those déjà vu things where you go years without seeing or even thinking about someone, then you mention their name once and suddenly they’re there.
Thunder rumbled over the ocean. Sugar-Ray did another lap around the grave, bowed three times, took a swig from a bottle that I assumed was white rum, that being the drink of choice with Marguerite. He dropped a wad of cash on the base of the tombstone. I leaned to the side to get a better view. Old Yeller heavy against my side threw me off balance and I fell against the basket, the empty champagne bottle clinking against the glasses.
Sugar-Ray yanked a gun from his pocket. Beady-eyed, he gazed around, not looking at all like the Sugar-Ray I had danced with when I was sixteen and who refused to kiss me good night, giving me a kissing complex for months. Then Ronnie Bowler took me to a drive-in, and by the time Indiana Jones found the ark I was cured.
I didn’t move. Chantilly froze beside me. If someone was packing heat to a graveyard, they meant business, and this being off-hours, it was private business. Sugar-Ray slid the gun back in his pocket and my heart started up again. He screwed the lid on the bottle of rum, put it on the tombstone, then hurried off toward the river, probably leaving the way Chantilly and I got in.
“Oh my stars and garters,” Chantilly whispered. “He had a gun, did you see that! I don’t remember Sugar-Ray being a gun-toting kind of person, and did you catch the part about Waynetta and money? Simon wasn’t the only one with dollar signs on the brain.”
We stood and I grabbed the basket. “Why did Sugar-Ray and Waynetta break up?” Chantilly asked as we started off. “Whatever the reason, the man’s none too happy about it.”
“Irreconcilable differences, I have it on good authority.” I picked up the pace, my flip-flops slapping against my feet, the sound comforting, knowing each step took me closer to getting out of this eerie place.
“I bet he wants to get back with her,” Chantilly huffed, keeping up. Headstones cast dark shadows across our path, the cemetery falling into shades of black and gray. “I heard his marriage counseling business is going straight to the dogs since his engagement to Waynetta fell apart. I mean if you can’t manage your own relationship, it sort of puts a big old damper on your expertise in that particular field. Maybe that’s why he came to see Marguerite? He needs money and sees Waynetta as the way to get it and toss in a little romance to boot. Waynetta might very well go right back to him since Simon bit the dust. She’s desperate for a man. I know her.”
“Honey, believe me when I say she isn’t that desperate.” We reached the caretakers shack in a full-out run. The place held a lot more cutting and chopping apparatuses than I wanted to see right now. The door to the outside opened and I couldn’t have been happier if Saint Peter himself let me though the Pearly Gates. Chantilly felt pretty much the same way because she knelt right down and kissed the sidewalk.
• • •
“Well, did Chantilly give Simon a proper send-off,” Auntie KiKi asked that night, sitting beside me on the front porch and handing me a double martini, two olives. Usually I considered a double a bit on the lethal side, but taking into account the day I had at Bonaventure Cemetery not once but twice, it looked like heaven in a glass. I took a sip, the cool trickling down my throat, my brain shifting into relax mode.
Moonlight spilled through the cherry tree and BW did his nightly routine of sniffing and sprinkling. After the storm, humidity had turned Savannah into one giant communal steam bath, the whole city sweating together. I suppose it made more sense to sit inside with the AC and chat, but gossip never flowed quite as freely inside as it did on a front porch or over a fence. My guess was that whereas Twitter dished the dirt fast and furious it would never take the place of real gossip. There was simply no room on the information superhighway for such things as Lord have mercy, now ain’t she just precious, and I do declare.
“Chantilly did the hokey-pokey over Simon and we came across Sugar-Ray shelling out money and drinking white rum over with Marguerite.”
“The best Chantilly could muster up after all Simon’s put her though is the hokey-pokey?”
“Maybe Sugar-Ray knocked off Simon.”
KiKi snagged the martini right out of my hand. “You’re zonked after one tiny sip. Not everyone’s a murder suspect, you know.”
I snagged back my martini. “Sugar-Ray was chanting something about Waverly, money, and Simon so I say the odds are better than even I can add him to our stick-it-to-Simon list. Breaking up with Waynetta ruined his business. He borrowed money from Simon to stay afloat and when he couldn’t pay it back Sugar-Ray did the old boy in. I bet that was double sweet for him since Sim
on was the one who took Sugar-Ray’s place with Waynetta. That ties things together pretty neat in my book, and there’s the added fact that Sugar-Ray’s a slender guy; he’d fit right into that bridesmaid dress if he didn’t zip up. And he was packing a gun.”
“Just one?” KiKi tsked. “Never did understand the just- one concept of gun toting. What if it got misplaced, then where would you be?” She swirled her olives around in her glass while I considered what in the world my auntie had stashed in her purse.
“Killing Simon at the wedding,” KiKi said in a thoughtful tone, “was a desperate last-ditch effort to stop the wedding, and that wedding didn’t matter diddly to Sugar-Ray. Waynetta’s completely off his radar. There’s no connection there.
“Except,” KiKi said, her blue eyes dancing in a blast of divine revelation, or closer to the truth, martini revelation. Sometimes in Savannah it was hard to tell which. “Waynetta isn’t the only Waverly. Reese is a Waverly and you said he was blasting holes in Simon’s picture that day you went out to his place for the packages. Reese is a shrewd businessman. He wouldn’t buy a company without digging around and he wouldn’t let his daughter marry someone without making sure everything was on the up-and-up.”
“Boone was out at Waverly Farms, I saw him. Maybe Reese hired Boone and Boone found out that Simon was doing Bridesmaid and into loan-sharking. Reese pays Sugar-Ray to do in Simon before he gets his grubby hands on Waynetta and the Waverly money. But then why would Sugar-Ray be at Marguerite’s now? It’s sort of after the fact.”
“It could have been a thank-you visit for a job that went off without a hitch. Simon’s dead, Chantilly’s the prime suspect, Sugar-Ray’s off the hook, Waverly money’s safe and sound, Waynetta’s back man-hunting.” KiKi clinked her glass to mine. “It’s like Cher says, If you can’t go straight ahead, you go around the corner. Sugar-Ray was Reese’s way of going around the corner to things done right. That makes perfect sense especially with Sugar-Ray desperate for money the way he is.”
