Rhythm and Bluegrass

by Molly Harper

  Still, the Mayfair had a cozy, college-dorm feeling, especially when I caught sight of Cyrus, one of Kelsey’s adopted nerd-herd buddies, on her hall. Cyrus was one of four software programmers who lived two doors down from Kelsey—Aaron, Cyrus, Wally, and Bud. When they first moved in, they hadn’t quite evolved beyond their grad school lifestyle, living two to a bedroom and playing video games until three in the morning. Kelsey was drawn to that sort of carefree, not-quite-grown-up lifestyle. Her passion for sci-fi and fantasy TV knew no bounds, so she fit right in as their den mother. She cooked for them on occasion and made sure they left the house for fresh air. In return, they secured bootleg copies of obscure British TV shows and fixed her computer when Darrell downloaded multiple viruses while surfing for porn.

  Cyrus, a sweet guy with shocking white-blond hair and rimless glasses, was hefting a huge bag from GameStop under his arm and had a smile on his face that was downright frightening.

  “New gaming equipment?” I asked, nodding toward the bag.

  “Ergonomic floor cushion,” he said. “Now my butt won’t fall asleep on game nights. Victory is within my grasp.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Here to see Kelsey?” he asked, raising his pale eyebrows. “Good, Darrell’s at it again.”

  I sighed. “What is it this time?”

  “Kelsey had the ‘gall’ to ask him to contribute some money to their expenses. They’ve had a lot of bills come in, including a Visa card that Kelsey didn’t know she’d applied for. She asked him to get a job. Darrell got all huffy. He said she’s just a nine-to-fiver, and she couldn’t understand how the entrepreneurial mind works. He needs space and freedom to expand his business without silly things like ‘deadlines’ and ‘expectations.’” Cyrus sneered. “He’s being particularly obnoxious about the fact that she bought herself some new clothes. If they can afford new clothes, he says, they can afford his bills. And his new iPhone.”

  “You mean her consignment sale work clothes, which she wears while earning the paycheck that pays for the iPhone?”

  Cyrus nodded, a dark look on his face as he unlocked his apartment door. “The boys and I have taken the liberty of e-mailing you a list of the ways we can make his death look like an accident. I believe Sadie would be willing to provide us all with transportation and an alibi.”

  I gave him a little salute. I knocked on the door to find the aforementioned “boyfriend” standing before me. Darrell was tall and dark-haired, with an athletic build he’d taken for granted in school, so now he was going soft around the middle. He frowned at me, rolled his eyes, and turned away from the door without a word.

  Charmer.

  Kelsey, however, bounded from the back bedroom and threw her arms around me. “Sweetie! I’m so glad to see you. What’s going on with your hair? You look all post-traumatic stress. Are you okay?”

  “I—”

  She gasped. “Oh my God, you didn’t kill that sexy mayor, did you?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t panic. People make mistakes when they panic and that’s how they get caught. We just have to think this through.”

  “Really, Kelsey—”

  “We’re going to need shovels and heavy-duty plastic, maybe some lime. And we’ll buy it at different locations all over town. Pay cash. We don’t want a paper trail. And we’ll wear baseball caps to hide our faces from the in-store security cameras.”

  “Kelsey, I didn’t kill anybody.”

  Kelsey snapped out of planning mode, frowning a little. “Oh, good. But we should probably write all that down, just in case, because I’m pretty sure I had some solid ideas there.”

  “Kelsey. Breathe. There was a big storm last night that blew over my trailer. I’m here to get some of my clothes that I stored in your closet. Really, everything is fine.”

  “So, no fake alibis and cover-ups,” she huffed, clearly disappointed. “Wait, why are you living in a trailer? And what happened to it?”

  “Long story.”

  Darrell slunk out of the bedroom in low-slung jeans and the gaudiest Ed Hardy T-shirt I’d ever seen. He didn’t spare either of us a glance as he strolled over to Kelsey’s purse, helped himself to twenty bucks, and walked out the door.

  “I’m going to Zach’s,” he called over his shoulder. “We’re gonna be talking business. Don’t wait up.”

  I flopped down on the couch, staring up at Kelsey. I couldn’t even make the “would you please” part of my “would you please dump him” face before she told me, “Don’t start.”

  Kelsey force-fed me a decent meal—leftover beef pad thai from Golden Palace, thank you very much—and I flopped facedown onto her guest room futon for about twelve hours of sleep. I woke up to hear my ringtone—which Kelsey had apparently changed to a Metallica song while I was sleeping because she knew that drove me crazy—blaring right next to my head.

  I slapped at the floor mattress until I managed to close my fingers around my phone. I opened one eye and hit the “Accept” button. “Yello?”

  “You took off,” a voice said with a hint of indignation.

  Did. Not. Compute.

  Clearly, my silence prompted a more thorough opening salvo from my mysterious caller. “You took off, from my house, from my damn bed, without a word. Do you think I let just anyone sleep in my bed?”

  “Will?”

  “Yes!” he exclaimed. “Unless you got up in the middle of the night and climbed into someone else’s bed.”

  I held the phone away from my face and frowned at it.

  “Uh, your silence is leaving me with a lot of uncomfortable thinkin’ room,” I heard him say.

  I said, “I’m sorry. It was really nice of you to let me stay, but I had so much I needed to sort through and I knew you had to be exhausted. What with the storm duties of the fire department and the stripping me while I slept and all.”

  “You could at least have woken me up,” he insisted. “I was a total gentleman. Even after kissing the hell out of you in my truck, I didn’t try anything. I slept on the couch, for goodness’ sake. When I changed you, I didn’t even peek!”

  Cue more phone-frowning from me.

  He admitted, “Okay, I peeked a little bit.”

  “Awesome, and I would imagine that everybody in town knows that you drove me away from the trailer park last night,” I muttered.

  “No! Don’t be silly! People have been too worried about storm damage to keep track of you— Okay, yeah, everybody knows,” he admitted. “My neighbor, Rosemarie, saw you sneaking out of my house in the morning and activated the gossip phone tree. But that’s not so bad, right? You might make more friends around town if people think that we’re dating. Not that you have too much trouble in that area, but still.”

  “Really, that’s how I should make connections with the community?” I scoffed. “Being your fake girlfriend?”

  “Hey, I never said ‘girlfriend.’”

  “You have pretend commitment issues, surprise, surprise,” I said drily.

  “I’m just saying, you leaving like that made me feel weird,” he said, his tone a bit more serious. “Like I’d hurt you or you were scared of me or something. I didn’t like it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I just needed to get back to the city and regroup, get some more clothes. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Be sure you do,” he said, clearing his throat. “Joe Bob, he worries about you.”

  I chuckled. “Joe Bob, huh?”

  “Mmmhmm. Not me, of course.”

  “Fibber.”

  I ended the call and drifted back to sleep. Eventually Kelsey woke me to say that Darrell was staying at a friend’s, so it was safe for me to come out of the guest room. Though she was supposed to be helping Sadie at some historical reenactment, Kelsey took a personal day—something she never did during the busy summer season, so clear
ly, I was more disheveled than I thought. After gathering a few days’ worth of my “second-tier” clothes, plus my backup reading glasses and some toiletries, I let Kelsey drag me to Sweet Eats, a bakery in Frankfort’s historical district. Sweet Eats was known for cookies the size of dinner plates and cupcakes filled with mysterious and wonderful concoctions of liquor, cream, and jam. Al McKinney, the owner, was like Willy Wonka without the political Oompa-Loompa metaphors. Or you know, the children maimed in industrial accidents.

  “You are the only person I know who has a problem with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Kelsey informed me as we entered the fragrant, cozy shop with its low white tables and deep-cushioned pink-and-green chairs. I was wearing a yellow sundress that Kelsey had coerced me to buy from a secondhand shop and pretty white sandals, which had helped my outlook a little.

  “That can’t possibly be true,” I said, asking Al for a softball-size chocolate cupcake covered in toasted marshmallow and coconut.

  “Wow, a Mississippi Mud Mountain?” Kelsey winced as I sliced my selection in half, revealing the marshmallow center inside dense chocolate cake. I had already eaten the toasted marshmallow topping. “This must be serious.”

  I glanced down at her dessert, one of Al’s low-cal key lime tarts. They were Al’s, so they were still tasty, but they were tiny and they just didn’t leave you with that happy, accomplished feeling that finishing one of his cupcakes did. I didn’t have to ask to know that either Darrell or her mother had made some crack about Kelsey’s weight in the past twenty-four hours. Kelsey only turned to diet food when one of them tried to convince her that her bombshell figure was something she should “work on.”

  “Apparently I jiggled a little too much the last time we were in bed,” she said, before I could so much as raise an eyebrow. “He said it was distracting. I mean, he’s the only one that sees me naked, so he does have some vested interest in what I weigh.”

  “Did you hear the words that just came out of your mouth? Why are you doing this to yourself? I don’t get it. If this was any other guy, you would have told him to suck one of the many objects in your insult repertoire, and maybe burned some of his stuff in your yard.”

  “Who else is going— I mean, I haven’t exactly been raking in the male attention lately.”

  “Is that what he tells you?” I hissed quietly. As angry as I was, I wasn’t about to embarrass Kelsey by letting one of the other customers hear our conversation.

  Kelsey poked at her tart with her fork. “Not him.”

  “Your mother? You know what I think of your mother.”

  “It’s not worth breaking up with him. When I do, my mom freaks out and e-mails me all these articles about rising rates of spinsterhood and ticking clocks and tells me how I’m not getting any younger. And how I haven’t exactly been careful with my appearance, so how am I expecting to find someone better?”

  Someone better immediately came to mind. Charlie Bennett, the KCT’s resident genius statistician, was a math prodigy with several doctorates from perfectly respectable schools and for some reason had eschewed legitimate academia to design, distribute, and decipher surveys on Kentucky tourism. Kelsey had been secretly, achingly, head-over-heels in love with him for two years.

  Aside from his enormous intellectual endowment, Charlie was lean and sleek with a smile that verged on naughty on the rare occasions we saw it. Charlie seemed curious about the rest of us, but unsure how to join in our wacky antics. Kelsey usually translated office conversations into nerd-speak and vice versa. And in return, he brought her fancy coffee at least two days a week.

  I had tried to talk Kelsey into admitting her feelings for Charlie I don’t know how many times, but she was so afraid of losing the friendship she had with him that she wouldn’t even flirt with him. And Sadie told me once that without a large billboard directly outside his bedroom window, Charlie would never realize that Kelsey liked him. So she stayed with a man who loafed at home all day playing Guild of Dominion while Kelsey worked her butt off to support both of them.

  “I know that Darrell is not a great boyfriend,” she mumbled. “But it’s not like he hits me or anything.”

  “That’s our standard now?” I demanded. “He’s never gone all Ike Turner on you, so he’s okay?”

  “There are more contemporary domestic violence references, you know,” she said, completely ignoring my observation. “I think you’re spending too much time doing your musical history research.”

  “Don’t change the subject . . . even though you’re probably right,” I said. “What I’m saying is that if you waste your time with Darrell, you’re not going to be open and available when you do meet someone who deserves you. Someone nice and sensitive, who loves animals and recycles and holds your hand during the scary parts in movies and has current car insurance.”

  “I don’t want to meet him. He sounds like a weenie.”

  “He does,” I grumped. “But that doesn’t change the fact that Darrell doesn’t deserve to lick the bottoms of your shoes.”

  “Eh, he’s not into the kinky stuff anyway,” she said blithely.

  As I twitched in horror at the mental images that brought up, Kelsey asked, “So what’s going on with you?”

  “The weather hates me. It knocked my rental trailer over on its side last night, so I won’t be able to get to my stuff for a couple of days. Also, as you know, I have nowhere to live. And I have a feeling that once people figure out what I have planned with the museum, there’s no one in town I would trust enough to let me stay with them without them shaving my head while I sleep.”

  “Yikes. So what do you plan on doing?”

  “I plan on taking up drinking. Not professionally or anything. Just enthusiastically,” I said.

  Kelsey rolled her eyes and tossed a napkin at me, which I used to wipe chocolate frosting off my upper lip.

  “So your overall problem isn’t the building, it’s the location, right?”

  I frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the locals don’t care what you do with the building. They just don’t want it to get in the way of the plant. And the people who want to build the plant will only do it if they can get that location. Quonset huts are basically one big piece, right? They can be moved. I mean, we’ve seen hundred-year-old log homes get moved from one place to another. Surely we can kick a big tin can around.”

  “But not without considerable expense and a specialized contractor to get it done without damage to the building. And I don’t have that sort of money. I certainly can’t go to my sponsors and say, ‘Hey, I know you’re already giving me an indecent amount of cash, but can you pony up a little bit more to bail me out of a jam of my own making?’”

  Kelsey shrugged. “So go to ComfyCheeks and ask them for the money to move the building. And since our office has contact information for most of the transport specialists who would be qualified to move the music hall, you could probably get a pretty good discount.”

  And in that moment, I was reminded why Kelsey had not only kept but flourished in her position at the KCT, despite her questionable verbal filters and occasional threatening of interns. She was brilliant. I’d been so focused on the building, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak. There was an empty lot right across the road from the original McBride’s site, some former family farm that had gone bankrupt. The only reason that ComfyCheeks wasn’t interested in that location was that it didn’t have the railroad access that the McBride’s lot did. Moving the building would be just a question of careful dismantling. Heck, half of the appeal of Quonset huts was that they could be assembled quickly without skilled labor. Surely taking them apart and moving them a few hundred yards wouldn’t be that much harder, right?

  I leaned across the table and kissed Kelsey soundly on the cheek.

  “Well, you just gave Al a thrill,” she muttered, glancing over the
bakery display case to its grinning proprietor.

  “You’re a genius and I love you,” I told her, grabbing my purse and scampering toward the bakery’s front door.

  “Hey, where are you going?” she called. “You can’t just leave a Mississippi Mud Mountain half-eaten! We leave no cupcake behind!”

  9

  In Which I Earn a Scarlet Letter of My Very Own

  I spent most of the drive back to Mud Creek rambling notes into my tape recorder. I’d found that scribbling notes on paper while driving tends to upset the other drivers.

  Sweating profusely thanks to the wheezing, useless air conditioner, I made lists of tasks. I would need to check the availability of the lot across the street from McBride’s, and if it was unavailable or too costly, who to call for other lots that might suit. I reminded myself to measure the lot and the building to make sure I had the right specs ready, so I wouldn’t look like an idiot when I called the movers for estimates. And I listed all of the other information I would need before I could even think about approaching ComfyCheeks with a proposal.

  I would have to keep this quiet, I told myself. If I gave any hint of Kelsey’s Hail Mary plan to anyone in town, miscommunications and misunderstandings might ensue that could bring said plan toppling about my ears. I could end up raising false hopes if it didn’t work out, which would damage my credibility with the townsfolk even more. Once all of the pieces were in place, I would present my complete plan to Will, hopefully with the enthusiastic cooperation of the good people at ComfyCheeks.

  Apparently, in all of the excitement to get back to the music hall and start outlining logistics, I drove faster than was advisable in a rusted out, yellow-and-Bondo-colored VW bug, because Jenny Lee pulled me over as I rolled past the city limits.

  “Speeding or endangering other drivers through the possible disintegration of my car?” I asked her as I rolled down my window, license in hand. Jenny Lee, looking fairly badass in her uniform and mirrored aviators, waved it away.

  “Neither.” She chuckled, handing me a frosty-cold can of Barq’s Root Beer through the window. “Joe Bob warned me that your air conditioner would be on the fritz.”