A Tale of Two Biddies (League of Literary Ladies)

by Logan, Kylie

  “FX O’Grady.” Luella supplied the name and I bit my lip to stifle a groan. “Bea might be quick-thinking and brave when it comes to lake rescues, but she’s scared to death of FX O’Grady’s horror stories,” Luella told Hank so he’d know what we were talking about.

  “Can’t say I blame her,” he said. “The last time I finished one of his books, I couldn’t sleep for a week. The guy has some serious psychological issues. And a freaky imagination.”

  “But he did that.” As if it would explain both the he and what he did, Chandra pointed across the road to the dock and automatically we all looked that way, too. Six months on the island, and I was learning that storms like the one we’d just experienced were nothing unusual. Lake Erie is the most shallow of the five Great Lakes and when the wind picks up, the waves can turn treacherous in no time at all. Add a dose of summer heat and humidity and it’s the perfect recipe for a quick-hitting thunderstorm. As fast as it struck, though, the storm was over, and now lightning flashed over the mainland to our south and the rain that had been driving and furious simply pattered against the gazebo roof.

  “He did that,” Chandra said again. “That guy in the movie. You know, the hero of the story where the vampires rise from their underground kingdom. The hero was trying to save his friend who fell in a lake and he tossed a closed cooler into the water.” Chandra’s excited expression melted. “Of course, the guy who got saved ended up getting sucked dry by the vampires later in the movie, anyway.”

  “Well, I guess what that proves is that FX O’Grady and I have the same sort of freaky imagination.” I managed a smile and hoped that would put an end to the topic. I didn’t like being thought of as a hero, almost as much as I didn’t like being associated with the King of Horror. “It just seemed like the most logical thing to do and the only thing I could think of at the moment.”

  “Well, it worked, and that’s what matters.” Hank backed away. “EMS is on its way,” he said, almost as an aside to Richie. “They’re going to check you out.”

  “But, Hank!” Richie’s clothes streamed water and he’d lost one of his sneakers. When he stepped out of one puddle and moved forward, a new puddle formed around him. “You have to know, Hank. We gotta talk.”

  Hank scratched one hand through his buzz-cut hair, and even if Richie didn’t get the message, the rest of us did. Our police chief might be pretending to be patient and professional, but now that he’d made sure Richie was okay, Hank had other things to do. Other things more important than Richie Monroe.

  Hank’s words were clipped by his clenched teeth. “So tell me, Richie. What do we have to talk about?”

  I take it back. I guess Richie did get the message because he raised his pointy chin, and beneath the blanket, his scrawny shoulders shot back. “How about the fact that somebody just tried to . . . to kill me?”

  Kate stood on my left, and astonished, I glanced at her. Chandra was to her left, and looking just as skeptical as I felt, Kate turned that way. Luella was over on our right, and as one we all looked at her and saw her roll her eyes.

  Hank, though? Hank was stonefaced. “Is that so?” He tugged his left earlobe. “Somebody tried to kill you, huh? How do you know?”

  Richie’s bottom lip quivered. “Know? Well, I . . . I . . . I just know, is all. I mean, there I was out on the dock, minding my own business, and then everybody started runnin’ around and talkin’ real loud and it was thundering and lightning and—”

  “And that’s how you know somebody tried to kill you?” Hank asked.

  Richie scrubbed one finger under his nose. “I know because I felt a hand on my back. I know because I know what it feels like to get shoved. And I got shoved. Right into the water.”

  “All righty then.” Hank let out a long breath before he hauled a little notebook out of his back pocket and flipped it open. His pen was in his shirt pocket and he pulled that out, too. “Who was it, Richie?” he asked, pen poised over paper. “Who tried to make you into fish food?”

  “Well, I . . .” Richie blinked and his shaggy brows dropped low over eyes that were as pale as the single anemic light that hung from the center of the gazebo ceiling. “I dunno. It’s not like I saw the person or anything.”

  Hank flicked his notebook closed.

  “Now wait a minute!” Richie put out a hand to grab Hank’s arm. At the last second, he thought better of it and froze. “Just ’cause I didn’t see who it was, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” he said. “There was lots of people around. Somebody must have saw something.” He glanced around the circle of people in the gazebo. Island residents, every single one of them, and like the other Ladies and I, they’d already made up their minds: Richie was being Richie, and everybody knew that Richie Monroe liked attention almost as much as he liked to make up stories in which he was either the one being picked on by uncaring and unreasonable people, or he was the hero. Same tune, different words.

  One by one, the folks around us turned and wandered away.

  The other Ladies and I might have done the same thing if we’d been quicker. Unfortunately, before I could move, Richie’s eyes met mine. “Tell him, Bea! You saw what happened. You were right there.”

  One of Hank’s eyebrows lifted. “Were you?” he asked me.

  “Right there? Sure I was. But . . .” I went over the scene again in my head. Chaos just about described it, and in that chaos . . .

  “Richie came by carrying the cooler,” I explained to Hank. “He talked to Mike Lawrence, but—” When I saw the way Richie’s eyes lit as if he was ready to glom on to that bit of info and convince Hank to slap the cuffs on Mike, I was quick to add, “But by the time Richie fell in the water, Mike was already gone. I’m sure of it.”

  “You’re not sure. You can’t be sure.” Richie gave me a testy little click of the tongue. “If you were, you’d tell Hank how you saw somebody push me.”

  “But I didn’t,” I told Richie, then turned to Hank. “I can’t say if it did or didn’t happen. I can say I didn’t see it. But then, I was scrambling, just like everyone else. I didn’t realize Richie was in the water until he called for help.”

  “It was pretty confusing.” Luella confirmed my version of the story. “There was a lot going on, and a lot of noise.”

  Hank took this in, then glanced at Kate. “You have anything to add?” he asked, and when she didn’t, he closed his eyes for a second—no doubt praying for strength—and asked Chandra the same thing.

  “I think we have a mystery on our hands,” she announced.

  A muscle twitched at the base of Hank’s jaw. “That’s not what I asked.”

  “But it’s true. I can feel it.” Chandra swayed like a snake charmer. “The aura of the island has changed.”

  “And there’s a disruption in the Force.” Hank’s sarcasm wasn’t lost on anyone, not even Chandra.

  “You shouldn’t ask for the truth if you can’t handle it,” she snapped.

  “You shouldn’t start talking nonsense,” Hank shot back.

  And I stepped forward before things could get any more out of hand. See, Chandra and Hank had once been married, and as strange as it seemed when they started in on each other like this, I knew they still ended up in bed together once in a while. This did not mean that they were inclined to be friendly at other times. Like this one. In fact, Hank went out of his way to make fun of Chandra’s belief in all things woo-woo, and because he did, Chandra took every opportunity she could to throw her oddball theories in his face.

  “How about we all just sleep on it,” I suggested, taking in not only Chandra and Hank, but Richie, too. “I bet after we’ve all had a chance to warm up and relax, we’ll remember more of what happened. That would be good, wouldn’t it, Hank?”

  He got my message. If there was any hope of us escaping Richie’s crazy talk and Chandra’s New Age babble, it was time to put the subject to rest. “Yeah, yeah.” Hank headed out of the gazebo. “I’ll keep all this in mind,” he told Richie, even though
none of us standing there believed it was true. “And if any of you remember something, feel free to stop by the station and let me know.” Hank didn’t waste a moment, and a few seconds later he roared out of the park in his SUV.

  “Proof!” Richie puffed out a breath of annoyance. “How can I have proof when I was the one getting pushed? Bea, are you sure—”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” I said. “I wish I was. I wish I could help.”

  “Well, here’s something that will help.” Margaret Defarge had obviously been listening to the entire exchange. She stepped out of the shadows behind Richie, and how she happened to be so well prepared, I can’t imagine, but Margaret had a thermos in her hands. She poured and handed a cup of steaming liquid to Richie.

  “It’s tea, dear,” she said when he accepted the cup and downed it. “And there’s plenty of sugar in it. It’ll warm your insides and that will help clear your head. Then you’ll remember that the next time there’s a great deal of commotion near the water, you need to be more careful.”

  Richie’s bottom lip jutted out. “I’m always plenty careful,” he said, and no one had the nerve to mention the blown-up summer cottage, or Gordon Hunter’s boat. “I was plenty careful tonight.”

  “Of course you were.” It was a little out of character for Kate to be diplomatic, but then, I knew Richie sometimes helped out around the winery. She knew him better than the rest of us did. “But that doesn’t mean someone didn’t bump into you accidentally and—”

  “It wasn’t an accident.” Richie stomped one foot and water spurted from the puddle and splashed us all. He didn’t apologize. “It was real. You’re all standing around acting like it’s no big deal, but somebody just tried to kill me.”

  “There, there.” Margaret handed Richie a second cup of tea. “You’ll feel better after you’ve had some time to relax and recover.”

  Richie snuffled and took the cup out of her hands. “Thank you, Margaret,” he said, and maybe he was finally coming out of the shock; his gaze snapped to hers. “Or are you Alice?”

  Margaret’s silvery laugh was as gentle as the pitter-pat of the raindrops on the roof. “Don’t be silly, dear. You’ve known me all your life. You know exactly who I am.”

  “Yeah,” Richie said. “Yeah, I do.”

  With Richie sipping tea and Margaret clucking over him like a mother hen, the Ladies and I had a chance to turn our backs and exchange looks.

  “You don’t think—”

  Kate hushed Chandra’s question with a well-placed elbow to the ribs.

  “Well, it’s only natural to ask,” Chandra hissed. “Mike was on the dock, and Mike can’t stand Richie.”

  “And Gordon was around, too. And now . . .” Luella stood on tiptoe and glanced around the park. “I don’t see him anywhere. He disappeared. Just like Mike did.”

  “Oh, come on!” It wasn’t unusual for me to be the voice of reason. After all, I was the one who tried to talk these ladies out of investigating a murder just a few months before. Of course, that hadn’t worked.

  The realization sat on my shoulders, as real as my clammy clothes. I knocked it away with a twitch.

  “You don’t really believe any of what Richie’s saying, do you?” I whispered. “Nobody would try to kill somebody in front of so many people. And even if they wanted to . . . well, they wouldn’t want to. Nobody’s trying to kill Richie. Sure, he’s screwed up some things, but I’m sure Gordon has insurance on his boat, and I know that big summer house on the other end of the island is already being rebuilt. Nobody would actually want Richie dead because of any of that.”

  “Except maybe the guy whose house he blew up,” Kate said.

  “Or the guy whose boat he damaged,” Chandra added.

  “Or Mike,” Luella said. “He lost everything, remember.”

  I cut her off before she could go any further. “Okay, I get it. So lots of people are mad at Richie. But murder?” I scrubbed my hands over my face. “If you wanted someone dead, there are plenty more efficient ways to get it done than to push someone in a lake.”

  “Listen to her!” Chandra screeched her approval, then remembered that we were supposed to be keeping our conversation under wraps. “You do have a freaky imagination, Bea. Just like FX O’Grady.”

  “Thanks for nothing.” I gave her what I hoped was an intimidating look. Since Chandra went right on grinning, I guess it didn’t work. “Just because we caught one murderer doesn’t mean there are others lurking around every corner.”

  “No one said there are,” Kate conceded. “But it does seem mighty coincidental, don’t you think that Mike was on the dock. And so was Gordon. And then Richie—”

  “Tripped and fell. Or slipped and fell. Or wasn’t watching where he was going. Or was in such a hurry to stow that cooler he was carrying, he moved too fast. Or he—”

  “Bea’s right.” Luella patted my arm. I had a feeling it was more to make me keep quiet than because she bought into what I said. “We all know Richie can be a little overemotional. Once he calms down, he’ll forget all about what happened and he’ll be as good as new.”

  “But I told you. Somebody pushed me!” Richie had a new audience, a group of well-wishers who’d come over to see how he was doing, and his lament filled the gazebo.

  “Of course, you’ve got to ask yourself how good ‘as good as new’ is,” Kate whispered, leaning my way.

  I didn’t have a chance to consider it. There was a commotion at the dock and, grateful for a break from the Richie drama, we all looked that way.

  “Well, that proves it. The storm is officially over,” Luella said. “One of the jet ferries is here from the mainland, and by the look of things . . .” She craned her neck. “Looks like lots of new visitors.”

  “Including my rock group, I bet.” I groaned. I hadn’t forgotten that the members of Guillotine would be checking in to Bea & Bees that evening; I’d just been a little too busy saving Richie’s life to care. “Chandra, can you drive me back to the B and B?”

  Chandra wasn’t listening. But then, I guess I couldn’t blame her. Like her, my attention was suddenly caught by a flurry of activity over near the cinder block building that housed the public restrooms, where a group of a dozen or so women emerged from what little protection they’d been able to find from the rain under the eaves. As near as I could tell from this distance, they were all about Chandra’s age, that is, close to fifty. You wouldn’t have known it by what they wore.

  Miniskirts.

  Leg warmers.

  Acid-washed jeans.

  Fishnet gloves.

  Shoulder pads.

  Lots and lots of shoulder pads.

  “A Madonna convention?” I asked no one in particular.

  “More like a flash mob stuck in a 1980s time machine.” Kate stepped back to watch the action. “They’re headed for the ferry.”

  Kate was right. The women ringed the dock, and when the first passengers stepped off the ferry, they started to squeal like teenagers.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I had to raise my voice to be heard over the excited wails.

  “Guillotine has fans?”

  “Weird, 1980s fans,” Chandra pointed out.

  I pictured the posters hung all over the island to advertise the big Saturday night Bastille celebration here in the park that would feature a concert from Guillotine. In the picture, the five members of the band were dressed in faux French Revolution style. Tight trousers, shirts with puffy sleeves, hair pulled back in ponytails. None of this meshed with the eighties throwbacks jumping up and down and yelling their lungs out.

  But then, when five long-haired guys stepped off the ferry, suitcases in hand, I had to admit they didn’t exactly live up to what I’d been expecting, either.

  Kate’s expression was sour. “They’re old!”

  “And overweight,” Chandra added.

  “And my goodness, aren’t they loving the attention!”

  Luella was right. The women closed aro
und the smiling rockers, who dropped their suitcases and offered handshakes and kisses like they were stumping for votes.

  With their groupies right behind them, Guillotine swaggered through the park.

  “I’ve got to get back home,” I said. “Luella, if you leave everything from dinner, I can come back later and help clean up.”

  She held up one hand. “No worries. I’ve got it covered.”

  By now, the five members of Guillotine were close to the gazebo. They smiled and waved, and I reconsidered my plan. If I raced home, it would only look rude when they realized they’d already seen me in the park and I’d left as soon as they arrived. I’d introduce myself, and offer them a ride.

  I stepped forward just as the guy leading the way—middle-sized, and with a round beer belly and a mullet so dark I knew there was no way the color could be natural—stepped into the circle of light thrown by a nearby lamp.

  “What the hell!”

  Behind me, I heard Richie Monroe grumble and, surprised, I turned to see what he was talking about.

  I shouldn’t have bothered. Richie was gone, so fast that he left behind that blanket Hank had brought him. It was soaking up that puddle of lake water.

  3

  If there was one thing I’d learned to appreciate over the last six months, it was having a routine.

  Back in New York, see, I didn’t have one at all. Sure, I worked, but I also partied and jetted from one place to another on a frantic schedule that included more work and more parties, plenty of schmoozing, and lots of stress. It was all good in its own weird way, and I’m not complaining. Working like a madwoman back then allowed me to live the life I was living now. But as exciting—and profitable—as it all was, my hectic schedule never left me with enough leisure to develop a day-to-day, make-it-a-habit, sit-back-and-enjoy routine.

  No way I would ever go without again.

  I reminded myself of all this when I grabbed my first cup of coffee on Tuesday morning and, just like I did every day, took a deep breath of sun-kissed air and headed out to the front porch for a few minutes before my guests stirred and breakfast was served at nine. From the white wicker couch with its floral pillows in shades of teal and purple that matched the colors of the house, I could watch the never-ending changes in the lake across the street, listen to the gentle whoosh of the waves against the shore, and savor these special, quiet moments.