Sophie Littlefield - Bad Day 05 - A Bad Day for Romance

by Sophie Littlefield

  “And Taffy?”

  “She was the do-gooder. Had a real martyr thing going. Every time Tilly got in trouble, Taffy would figure out some new way to shine her own halo up bright. Tilly got kicked out of choir for making out with the student teacher, next thing you knew Taffy’d win the candy drive to send them to state finals. Or Tilly’d get caught cheating on her math test and Taffy’d volunteer to tutor her.” Stella paused, remembering. “We never could stand her, actually. Tilly was way more fun.”

  “How’d that work out for Taffy in adulthood, anyway?” Chrissy said, helping herself to an onion fritter.

  Stella grimaced. “She met Marty at Bible School and married him before he had a chance to think twice. They had one perfect child, as I suppose you’ve heard more than once this weekend. Marty figured out there wasn’t a whole lot of money to be made in preaching and went into real estate. They sent Divinity out on the pageant circuit and to hear her and Marty tell it, they had to finally stop because it wasn’t fair to all the other little girls, she was just that exquisite. And then there was all them voice lessons and acting lessons, and supposedly Divinity lit out for Branson to sing on stage. Taffy and them weren’t real clear on how that was going, but Divinity stuck it out for a year or so before she came back a month or two ago to rest up her voice. Brought Bryant with her, and Taffy just can’t stop talking about all the singers he’s launched and the ring he bought Divinity and how they’re headed for Nashville any second now.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Chrissy sounded skeptical. “I knew Divinity a little. My mom had me in the pageants for a while when Pop thought that was how we were going to make the family fortune. Divinity was a lot younger than me, four years old or so, and even then she could sing. But her mama had her tricked out in this froufrou satin dress with her hair done up like a drag queen, only Divinity wasn’t having any of it. She bit her mama on the arm and called the chaperone something so bad nobody would repeat it, and then she lay down on the floor and threw a fit like you never did see.”

  “Interesting,” Stella said, wondering if any of this would help explain why the gal was blowing off her aunt’s lingerie shower in favor of stomping around in a forest. “I bet you sure were adorable, though.”

  “Yeah, I was.” Chrissy grinned, dimples blooming on both her cheeks. “The lady running it told my mama I needed to shed a few pounds if I wanted to compete, and my mama said if they didn’t know quality when they saw it then they could just keep their goddamn tiaras. She let me wear my pageant dress to school every day for a month and when I ripped up the skirt on the playground she said it didn’t matter, any kind of a real princess was bound to get into a scrape or two taking care of royal business.”

  “Your mama sure did a few things right,” Stella said, admiringly.

  “I know it. They all thought I was dumb as a stump, and mama didn’t have any more ambition for me than she could measure in a thimble, but she loved the heck outta me, and she’d tell anyone who’d listen that I was the prettiest girl in town.”

  “Well, that’s not a bad way to grow up, now is it?”

  “Time to get this party started!” a drunken voice shouted. Stella and Chrissy turned to see one of Dotty’s friends from work clamber up on the coffee table. “Everybody ready to see what Dotty’s gonna be wearing on her wedding night?”

  There was a volley of cheers as Dotty held up a pair of generously sized, frill-edged black bikini panties that was missing most of the crotch, and Stella fervently hoped that the mess with Divinity would be sorted out soon, so Dotty and Kam could enjoy themselves under the banner of legal matrimony.

  Chapter Three

  By ten o’clock the following morning, everything had gone south.

  Stella had planned to call BJ to wish him a speedy recovery, but he beat her to the punch—at six in the morning, well before Stella intended to be awake. Evidently his pain meds didn’t make him particularly sleepy. Flat on his back in his apartment above the garage behind BJ’s Bar, he was being cared for by his assistant manager, Jorge, who was also singlehandedly running the bar.

  “I can’t keep eating all that Mexican food, Stella,” BJ confided. “My digestive system just can’t take it. And there’s something wrong with my Comcast. I can’t get but the regular channels, my Showtime ain’t coming in at all.”

  Stella had banished the fleeting thought that if she’d been in town, it would be her waiting on BJ, cooking his meals and fixing his shows for him—as well as the disturbingly strong sense of relief that she had dodged a bullet.

  “I’ve had Jorge’s chuletas,” she said lightly. “I could eat that every night. Traded him some of my persimmon jam for it. Are you doing okay otherwise?”

  “Oh sure. Except I’ve got this itch on my one ankle, and there’s just no way I can reach it without it aggravatin’ my back,” BJ said. “I can’t even tell you how bad I wish I could reach on down there and scratch, and when you get a thought like that in your head, why, you just can’t get it out again.”

  Stella stayed silent, figuring she’d rather sew Dotty a whole new gown than sign up for nursemaid duty, and then she wondered what was wrong with her, especially since BJ was always so sweet to her.

  After showering and waiting for the relatively civilized hour of eight o’clock, she called Noelle, who was already at the salon prepping for the day’s clients. Noelle was a hairdresser of considerable renown, at least in the town of Coffey, which was half an hour from Prosper. Getting the weekend off had been a challenge, which was why she’d had to miss the shower and rehearsal dinner and was driving in Saturday morning, loaded down with enough cosmetics and hair gizmos for the entire bridal party.

  Stella and Chrissy, on the other hand, hadn’t had much trouble getting time off from the shop. The Friday appliqué class had agreed to meet at Happy Donuts just this once after Stella negotiated a group rate—three bucks for a fritter and unlimited coffee—and for the benefit of any would-be weekend shoppers, Stella had enlisted one of her best friends, Jelloman Nunn, to keep an eye on the shop. Jelloman’s two vocations—fixing motorcycles and growing and selling weed—afforded him the kind of flexibility that let him help out in a pinch. And while he was a somewhat startling sight, ringing up elastic and sewing-machine needles and rotary cutters in a Nazareth concert T-shirt and leather vest, he was unfailingly polite and Stella’s customers loved him.

  “I don’t mind going without a date this weekend,” Stella lied, pressing the phone between her shoulder and ear, which wasn’t doing much for her posture. She was working on Dotty’s gown, yards and yards of satin laid out on the food-service table she’d talked housekeeping into bringing up to the room. The French seams were turning out to be a bitch to separate, especially since it was way too easy to snag the tiny strands with the seam ripper. “Only it seems a damn waste to have this room all to myself. Noelle, sugar, I wish you’d reconsider and stay with me, at least for Saturday night.”

  “Well, Mama, about that,” Noelle said cheerily. “I wasn’t going to say anything until I was sure she could get the time off, but I think Cinnamon’s gonna be able to make it after all.”

  “Really! Well, that’s just great!” Stella said, careful not to put too much extra enthusiasm into her voice. She’d learned the hard way that fresh developments in her daughter’s romantic life had to be treated with care. If she pried, Noelle would clam up; and if she overdid the enthusiasm, Noelle would huffily remind her that people entered gay relationships every day and her mother didn’t need to act like it was the second coming of the Lord. Besides, Cinnamon had until very recently been “just a friend,” and Stella knew firsthand how precarious those waters were to navigate for any lovers, gay or straight, young or old, experienced or not.

  “So, I guess I’ll keep my room,” Noelle went on. “When are you going to get around to fixing your own dress, anyway?”

  Stella blanched at the unwelcome remin
der; her maid-of-honor dress, the pink creation in the bag hanging over her door, had come straight from the bridal store and needed a fair amount of nipping and tucking as well. “Tonight, I guess, while the rest of the gang is whooping it up in the bar after the rehearsal dinner.”

  “Oh, cheer up, Mama, I’m bringing you a couple of surprises. You’re going to look amazing for the wedding.”

  Too bad none of the men in her life would be there to appreciate all that beauty, Stella thought darkly as Noelle’s first customer of the day arrived and she had to ring off.

  “Don’t be looking at me to babysit you, either,” Chrissy said. She’d barely budged, having spent the night with Stella since her date wasn’t arriving until today. She stretched luxuriously and slipped her satin sleep mask up over her blond curls like a headband. “Ian’s due here by lunchtime and we got plans.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Stella said, though in fact that was exactly what she’d been considering. For some reason, the prospect of spending the night after the wedding all alone was making her melancholy.

  Her phone rang, and she had to paw through several yards of satin to find it. She squinted at the display and saw it was Dotty.

  “Less than thirty-six hours to go,” Stella said by way of a greeting. “I hope you’re enjoying your last gasp of freedom.”

  “Stella, something terrible’s happened! They found Divinity and Bryant!”

  “But that’s good news, isn’t it?”

  “Bryant’s dead, Stella, and Divinity’s hanging on by a thread. They got her airlifted to Independence and she’s in surgery right now.” Her voice hiccupped into a sob. “Oh, Stella, I don’t even know what to do.”

  “Oh, honey, what happened?” Stella gripped the phone tight to her ear as Chrissy, alerted by her tone, sat up straight under the covers.

  “They don’t know yet. They said it could’ve been a bear or a mountain lion or—oh, I don’t know, Stella, even some sort of human attack. Tilly and Taffy are driving up to Independence now, and they’ve got a prayer circle started over at St. Giles, but now I don’t have a pastor, which I hate to even say under the circumstances, I feel just awful even thinking of myself at a time like this but—”

  “You come right on down here,” Stella said. “You know where my room is. Bring whoever you want, but I got Chrissy here and we’re gonna take care of you while you sort this out. Hear?”

  “I hear,” Dotty sniffed gratefully.

  Stella hung up the phone and sighed. “Wouldn’t be any kind of a wedding without something going terribly wrong, now would it?”

  “What?” Chrissy demanded.

  Stella explained it as quickly as she could. “Bears, mountain lions, or miscreants,” she said in summary. “Guess you know as well as I do what they left off that list.”

  “Yep,” Chrissy agreed in the tone of one who’d learned a great deal about the subject since coming to work with Stella. “Good chance they done it to each other.”

  * * *

  By the time Dotty showed up she’d received an update. Divinity was going to pull through just fine, though she had twenty-eight stitches on her face and arms, a broken humerus, and a sprained ankle. She had not been airlifted, nor had she come within a breath of dying, contrary to earlier reports from her hysterical mother. Taffy didn’t have the details about how Divinity had been hurt, but apparently she was feeling well enough to complain about a patch of scalp shaved smooth as a newborn baby so they could stitch a gash behind her ear.

  “I don’t guess that’s going to help her stage career any,” Dotty sighed. “Though now her manager or fiancé or whatever’s been shot, guess she’s got a few more hurdles than just wowing ’em with her looks.”

  “Shot?” Stella demanded.

  “Oh, yeah, see, Bryant had an arrow in him, that’s what turned out killed him. Went clean through and I guess he fell on it such that if it hadn’t killed him already, the quiver or whatever poking around in his guts finished him off.”

  “Fletching,” Chrissy said. “Not quiver. Quiver’s the thing you put the arrows in to carry them around.”

  Stella and Dotty turned to gaze at Chrissy. “You gonna favor us with how you come to know that?” Stella asked. The girl never ceased to amaze her with her pockets of deep knowledge—all the more remarkable given her reputation for being longer on looks than smarts. This was a misapprehension that Stella did little to correct, since her assistant was often able to use her appearance to their advantage when interrogating suspects who didn’t realize they were being interrogated, so mesmerized were they by Chrissy’s bountiful assets.

  Chrissy rolled her eyes. “I kicked ass at the Camp Fire girls jamboree when I was nine. Spent all summer on the archery range and would have took home the trophy except I got caught setting fire to the outhouse.”

  “Uh-huh. And fletching?”

  “You know, the little stick-out feathery parts on the arrow? You got your hen fletching, your cock fletching…”

  “Oh my,” Dotty said, blushing.

  “Don’t be all nasty, it’s just what they call the different vanes. You got to have them for accuracy, but if that fella was shot with a hunting arrow it was probably solid plastic, and man, those little fuckers are stiff.”

  While the other two women gaped at her, she added, “Oh, forget it, just go on. How is it they thought it was a mauling attack, anyway?”

  “Well, Taffy was just so tore up about Divinity the first time I talked to her I guess she couldn’t get all the details out. Plus, now Divinity’s all stitched and bandaged up and talking, turns out she didn’t get attacked at all. She fell out of a tree and ran into some branches on the way down, is what got her all gashed up.” Dotty shook her head with admiration. “She managed to crawl near a quarter mile before she come up on a park ranger. That’s one tough little gal, I’ll give her that.”

  “Mmm,” Chrissy said, raising her eyebrow, no doubt remembering the Divinity in her younger days on the pageant circuit.

  “So, Stella, I need you to go on up and figure out who shot Bryant, okay?”

  “Me? Why do I got to do it?”

  Dotty blinked and looked from Stella to Chrissy and back. “Come on,” she said. “It’s just us here.”

  Stella sighed. She wasn’t surprised that she had not been able to shield her best friend entirely from the knowledge of her exploits. The thing was, even in a town as small as Prosper, just about every woman knew at least one who was on the receiving end of a man’s foul temper. Unless she was blind, she’d seen the evidence of a bad mood on the body of a sister or friend or checkout girl or the woman sitting next to her at church, and eventually, word got around of the mysterious savior who could help such a woman in her time of need, meting out justice on a sliding scale, delivered on the sly, its recipients too shamed, battered, and terrified to consider retribution or even laying so much as a finger on their former victims.

  In short, though they’d never discussed it, Stella knew that Dotty was aware of the general outline if not the details of her avocation. And it wasn’t really surprising that Dotty wanted her to look into Bryant’s murder. It wouldn’t be the first time Stella had been asked to sleuth around when folks met with violent ends. Several times in the past, she’d solved murders as favors to loved ones, as when one of her friends had been accused of killing and mummifying a woman, or when her sister’s step-nephew had been a suspect in a bloody dismembering. Still, considering that Divinity was alive and on the mend, she didn’t see the need to meddle in the case.

  Stella coughed delicately. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. But last I checked, they got their own sheriff’s department a few miles down the road in Quail Valley. I imagine they can spare a cruiser to run on up to Kansas City and ask Divinity who shot her boyfriend.”

  “But that’s just it,” Dotty said. “Divinity says she didn’t see an
yone around before Bryant was shot, but there was some hunter up there they ran into at the campground who was toting a bow. The cops are trying to find him now. Only they don’t want Divinity to leave until they do, even though the hospital says she’ll be ready to go by this afternoon. And…” Dotty’s voice was rising higher and higher, her eyes beginning to brim with tears as she pulled anxiously at the hem of her T-Shirt, on which was written “Because I’m the Bride, Bitches” in rhinestone-encrusted script. Chrissy handed her a tissue and she dabbed at her eyes. “And Taffy and Tilly won’t come back until they let Divinity go, and Marty won’t come without Taffy, and that’s pretty much half of my wedding party right there, other than Soorat and Rashita and Mrs. Rangarajan, who, by the way, I’m having a devil of a time explaining all this to, and—and—”

  Dotty gave up the battle and erupted into sobs, and Stella hugged her friend tightly and made all kinds of soothing sounds, all the while exchanging meaningful glances with Chrissy, who was drawing her finger across her throat and making silent gagging motions. Not on your life, Chrissy was telegraphing; her assistant’s reluctance was only one of the reasons this was one of the dumbest ideas to roll down the pike in a while.

  “But, sweetie, what if we all pitch in and find you a backup? There has to be someone else around here who can do the ceremony.”

  “No, it has to be Tilly. I mean, this is like her preaching debut, you know? And since Mom and Dad passed, I want family up there with me, and I ain’t got anyone else. I mean, you’re family to me, you know that, but Tilly’s blood and… well…”

  “What is it?” Stella prodded gently when her friend hesitated.

  “Well, it’s Mrs. Rangarajan. I mean, I love her and all… I mean I’m sure I will love her once she warms up to me a little… but I got to say, she is just barely on board with Kam marrying me.” Tears welled up in her eyes and she dabbed harder.

  “Oh, Dotty, you never said anything!”