“Oh, hang on. I have to dive to get it to the first hook.” I put my hands together over my head and leaned back sucking in my stomach as much as I could. “Just get the zipper up to the first hook and hook it in place so it doesn’t slide back down.”
I felt the tug and the compression.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” he asked.
“It’s not fabulous. Okay, the next hook…I have to blow out my breath and push my ribs together.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Just get ready.” I closed my eyes and pictured my birthday cake, blowing out all twenty-two candles and at the same time I squeezed my ribs in.”
Zip.
“Bobbi Jax, I’m really uncomfortable doing this to you. It’s like a torture device.”
“Welcome to the woman’s world of fashion.” I panted.
“You call this fashion?”
“You know what I mean. Women put on pointy-toed shoes that squeeze our toes together, and at the same time we balance on the balls of our feet, leaning back on a rickety stiletto heel. It’s so painful. Imagine doing that to yourself for hours on end. And don’t even get me started on pantyhose. Then there are the foundation garments that squish and squeeze our innards so that there are no panty lines showing because the cloth in our clothes is so light. And then we get frost bite, because we’ve got on a skirt, and the cold winter wind blows right up between our legs and freezes our nether regions. Me getting squished into this dress is just a symbol of the torture women go through on a daily basis for societal conformity.”
Connor had caught my eye in the mirror. “That was one of the reasons you left the corporate world, so you wouldn’t have to be so uncomfortable. Why are you doing this to serve drinks at the Celtic Festival?” He paused. “Delight made the dress. You don’t want to disappoint her.”
I pouted.
“You are such a marshmallow,” he said.
“You know, you really shouldn’t say that to a woman when you can’t get her zipper up.”
He patted my shoulder. “Hold tight. I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
“To my garage. I think what I need here are a pair of clamps, some ratcheting tie down straps, and a pair of pliers.”
18
Sunday Morning
The Celtic Festival
Kay caught up with me and Twinkles as we made our way from the parking area to the festival field. “I stopped by your place this morning, but you weren’t there.”
This was a conversation that I didn’t want to have.
“Where were you?” Kay asked, she peeked around to my back. “How’d you get your zipper up all by yourself?”
I considered how to move the topic of conversation to something different. I ran scenarios through my brain. But Kay and I had been best friends since we were two, and I knew for a fact that I could run but I couldn’t hide. Kay would know I was concealing something from her, and she could be relentless. “I spent the night at Connor’s house. He zipped the dress up this morning.” My gaze scanned the area looking for a Beaver or a Golden Cock, well, anyone that I even mildly knew to interrupt this conversation.
“You and Connor?” She grinned hard as she gripped my arm. “Did he come with you?”
I paused for a moment. “He, uhm, drove over in his own car. He had to get here in time to warm up for today’s opening ceremony.”
“But you spent the night together?”
“I went to his house. I decided to sleep there. I’ve been a little riled by the Stromboli family.”
“You slept…where exactly?”
Man, she was persistent. I thought my concerns about the Stromboli family would shift the topic.
“His guest room has a comfortable bed.”
Kay gripped me even harder, bouncing up and down, she’d realized I’d just hedged.
“I have to go to the port-a-potty.” As I turned, aiming myself away from the vendor tents, I saw Delight, waggling a banger at me.
Twinkles licked his chops.
Delight called out, “I got this for you, Twinkles!”
Twinkles bunched his muscles and launched in her direction. I dropped the lead, as he sprinted toward her. When Delight grabbed up his leash, I pointed toward the comfort station and she nodded.
One. Two. Three steps and Kay started in. “That’s quite the jig you’re doing,” she said. “You two have been dancing around each other since you graduated from college. I always thought you were a brave person. Why are you so afraid of a relationship with my brother? I’m watching you play it safe, Bobbi Jax. It’s a weak look.”
“I’m not playing safe as much as I’m clinging to my independence. I’m trying to guard this safe space for myself.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“I’ve seen so many women adapt when they get into a relationship. Don’t get me wrong, there should always be give and take. But I see my friends just sort of melting and morphing into the kind of person that they think their significant other wants them to be. When that happens, everyone ends up being miserable. I’m going to be my whole person before I get myself entangled.”
“I’m assuming this means that you have some kind of scoring rubric to let you know when you’ve run through the race tape and stood on the whole-person award platform?”
“Your sarcasm is not appreciated. But yes. The race tape, following your metaphor, is stretched across my twenty-fifth birthday.”
“Because…” She’d slowed her pace to match mine.
I was breathless as I heaved. “Science says that’s the year we complete the formation of our adult brains. I figure an adult brain is the minimum requirement for adulting in a relationship.”
She stopped. “You’re serious right now?”
I kept walking and after a couple of steps, she caught back up.
“When my dad met my mother, he was twenty-six, and she was twenty-one. They fell in love, married, and had me. When my mother turned twenty-five, she realized that the life she’d constructed had more to do with my father’s goals than hers. She didn’t want to be married to a firefighter, and she didn’t want to be tied down by a child. So she left.”
“Ah,” Kay said.
“My dad knew who he was and what he wanted. He was an adult. I want that for me. I don’t want to hurt someone I love, because I was pushing the timeline forward. And I certainly don’t want a child to pay for my mistakes.”
I could see that tumbling around in Kay’s brain. I thought perhaps that would be enough, and we’d be done with this conversation. But, no.
Her mouth opened, and I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say about this, so I plowed on. “It may be a little bit artificial, and I can see some good things about being in a relationship. But when my friends get into a relationship, and I don’t mean you−” I lifted my brows for emphasis “−I think of you as a wholly formed person even if you’re a month younger than me. But−”
“Bobbi Jax, this is just silly. You form relationships all the time. Look at your friends.”
“Ah, but a romantic relationship isn’t the same as friends.”
“So…when you’ve stuck your nose into my relationship with Terrance to try to encourage us, what you were really doing was what exactly?”
“Terrance lives his life the way he wants to. You live your life the way you want to. His being on the road all the time for his work means you each get to have the comfort of a relationship and the distance to do your own growing. I think it’s great. Your situation is unique. But that is the exception. Not the rule.”
She scowled as she processed that idea.
“We’ve talked about this so many times. You know that I’ve decided to have my physical relationships as a badge bunny − friends with benefits. Those guys are not, however, the friends I turn to and depend on. Conner is in my heart, Dick as well, just differently. And I’ll even admit that my heart stirs around Rex, which makes me feel relie
ved he lives in Texas. I just need some time.”
“To mature.”
“You don’t think?”
“Psh,” she said. “This is all because your mother ran off with a used car salesman. Sins of the mother being revisited upon the daughter?”
“Lessons of a mother profiting her daughter. From what Hooch tells me, when my parents got married, they were crazy in love with each other. My mom realized when I was a baby that who she was in that relationship was not who she wanted to be. I think if she’d known who she was before she got married, she would have saved my dad and me from a life of pain. I’m not going to make my mother’s mistakes. I won’t harm someone I love by loving them too soon.”
“That really stinks,” Kay said.
“I think what your smelling is the port-a-potty.” I took a step toward the blue plastic stall with the door slightly ajar.
“I meant your philosophy really stinks, but you’re right.” Kay stepped toward the next one in line. “They should have cleaned these out. They smell terrible.”
I pulled the door open.
There sat Sal Stromboli. Legs spread wide. Pants around his ankles. Head dropped back and wedged in the corner of the blue walls. White as a ghost. His fingers curled around a wad of toilet paper. A look of surprise was frozen on his face. And in the middle of his chest, a red handled hatchet was wedged. My red handled hatchet with my name calligraphed on the brass name plate.
“Holy shit!”
19
Sunday Morning
The Celtic Festival
I slammed the porta-potty door shut.
Kay had stalled on her way into her potty. “What are you doing?”
I just stared at the door that popped open again.
“What’s going on?” she asked and reached for the handle.
A good friend would have stopped her, so the image of dead Sal wouldn’t bury into her psyche. I would like to think that I was that good friend. But in that moment, I wasn’t fully functioning. I was working on hyperventilation. When there’s no expansion room for ventilating, hyperventilation, as it turns out, is impossible.
I grasped at the neckline of my dress, trying to pull it wider. I was desperate for air.
Kay still hadn’t seen the problem. But my face must have looked dire. She was on the phone. “Connor, come now! Bobbi Jax is dying. Call an ambulance!” She moved behind me, phone to ear, one hand on the top hook of the dress. “By the port-a-potties.” She stalled. “Yes, I’m serious.” She listened again. “Yes, get the EMTs!” She dropped the phone to the ground. “Try to stand still, let me see if I can’t get this…”
I flailed my hands out in front of me. Bubbles of color and light danced in front of my eyes. Then the outline of the port-a-potty became liquid and tremulous. I went down on a knee, a hand to the ground, the other clutched at my breast.
“Bobbi Jax, what the heck?” That was Connor’s voice. “What happened, Kay? Did she get stung by something? Is she choking on something?”
Kay rounded in front of me, she was kneading her hands, tears ran down her face. “I don’t know. I don’t know. She opened the door.” Kay spun and opened the port-a-potty door.
I reached out a hand as if to stop her but there we were staring at Sal Stromboli’s widely spread and very naked knees.
Connor reached into his sock and pulled out his ceremonial knife. “Hold very, very still, Bobbi Jax. I’m going to cut you out of this thing.”
I would protest him destroying Delight’s work, but I was seriously in fear for my life in that moment.
Kay stood staring at dead Sal.
I could feel Connor making progress, sliding his knife, cautiously, along the zipper stitches toward my waist, opening the dress inch by miraculous inch until finally the cold autumnal air was on the back of my waist.
I pushed back to sit on my heels, clutching the fabric to my chest in the front, still not able to gulp in the air my body was straining for.
Connor had his hands on my arms, steadying me. “You’re okay,” he said in a calm voice. “It’s okay. You found another body. You find them all the time. It’s going to be okay.”
“Connor,” Kay pointed out. “That axe has Bobbi Jax’s name on it.”
Connor stared past my shoulder to dead Sal. He looked down at me. He pulled out his phone. “Dick, Connor here. Bobbi Jax found a dead body in the port-a-potty.”
“This is problematic, BJ,” Dick said. “Based on our discussions. You had a motive. You also had the means and opportunity.” He scratched over his head. Dick was dressed in a black compression shirt and an olive-colored utility kilt, with his black combat boots. He had taken a knee in front of me.
“It can’t have been Bobbi Jax,” Kay said with an air of disdain. “First, I was here when she discovered the body. If she knew there was a body in this port-a-potty do you think she’d open that door?”
Security had already run crime scene tape around the area. The coroner was working on dead Sal.
No one said anything for a long moment.
Finally, Kay offered, “She’s a bookaholic. She reads police procedurals like she’s eating a bag of potato chips, one after the other. Do you think she doesn’t know enough to have multiple people interact with her, so she has her alibis in place?” She focused over on Connor. “Oh, huh…”
“Okay timeline. That’s a practical place to start,” Dick said.
“We’re too close to this. We need to call someone else in,” Connor said, his tone professional.
“This could be problematic,” Dick said. “BJ knows everyone.”
“BJ does not ‘know’ everyone,” I said.
Dick looked at me as he processed what I’d just said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“We can do McCann,” Connor said.
“No.” I shook my head. “That won’t work. Him, I actually know.”
“Parker−”
“No.”
“Gibbons.”
I sighed loudly. “No.”
“Jardin?” Dick tried.
“No.”
“But, he’s like sixty years old and has dentures.” Dicks brows were up in his hairline.
“Right. Now, you suck, Dick,” I said.
“George Jardin plays poker with Bobbi Jax’s dad,” Kay clarified.
Dick’s brows reseated themselves over his eyelids where they belonged.
“Burt!” Connor said triumphantly.
“I don’t have a connection to Burt Solomon other than his occasionally grabbing a beer at Hooch’s.”
While Dick dialed the number and got Burt on the phone, I pulled Dick’s digital recorder from my pocket. “I’d like to get a timeline pieced together. If you two can help me.” My gaze went from Kay to Connor.
They nodded.
“According to the security tapes that Justice pulled up last night,” Connor said. “Sal was in the restaurant alley just after five o’clock, smoking a cigar. That’s a good place to start if that’s the last time he was seen alive. It will help the coroner make a better decision about time of death.” As he said that, he turned his head to see the coroner working in the port-a-potty with dead Sal.
“Keep going. I didn’t look at the security footage.” I had my dress clamped in one hand, covering the girls, and held the recorder in the other.
“The fire wasn’t noticed until it was a full-on dumpster fire when Justice took out the trash.”
Kay leaned in. “It couldn’t have been BJ who killed him even if it is her hatchet lodged in the man’s chest. I was with her until the festival closed at five. I saw her at her apartment when I brought Chinese food around seven-fifteen and that’s when I helped her get out of her dress.”
Delight came up to us. “I heard tell that Sal is dead in the port-a-potty.” She reached out my apron to me. “When they said you were cut out of your dress, I thought you might need the coverslut.”
I so regretted teaching her that word.
“Bobbi Jax
was still in the costume at her apartment, Kay?” Connor asked. “It was pretty tight, could you have thrown the hatchet while wearing the dress? Unless someone was helping you, there was no way you could have gotten out of the dress to throw the weapon and then gotten yourself back into the dress.”
“I didn’t compete this year. I was too busy serving the whiskey. And now that you’ve cut it, I’m not sure how I could tell. Normally, I throw two handed. But it’s not just a matter of getting my hands over my head. I also needed to be able to breathe.”
Dick had put his phone back in his pocket. “Were you with her after the Chinese food?”
Kay was holding her nose. It did stink pretty badly − not the port-a-potties, those were well managed. It was dead Sal. “I went home. But I saw her again running from the direction of her apartment right around eight, the time when I was heading to Hooch’s for the fire.”
Connor nodded. “I can vouch for Bobbi Jax’s whereabouts from the point of the fire until she got here to the parking area this morning.”
Dick tried to hold his face stoically. But I could see that the news that I’d been with Connor all night was a kick in the gut.
“And Sal’s been dead a good while,” Connor finished.
“BJ has an alibi from the point where Kay brought Chinese food. We can figure out fairly precisely when that would be if Kay paid by credit card.”
“I did,” she said.
“We need someone who saw you between the time Kay left the festival until the time Kay came to your apartment. So between five and 7:15 − minus time to drive home − that’s a half hour so say…6:45.”
The coroner came over and signaled to Dick.
Dick stood up and shook the man’s hand. “Thanks for coming so quickly. What have you got?”
They were talking in low tones, and I strained to listen.
“Based on the data I’ve collected,” coroner guy said. “I can say with a fair amount of surety that this man was killed between fourteen and fifteen hours ago, which would mean sometime between 5:30 and 6:30 last night.”
If You See Kay Jig Page 11
