I saw I had a missed call from the office so I called Wanda Jo.
“Hey, Wanda Jo, what’s up?” I asked as she answered.
“That package from the state real estate office came in. You know, that one you ordered on the Brooks Mansion?”
“Great,” I said. “I’ll be right there.” I hung up and headed to the office. I knew that new file would have a lot of answers for me. It had all of the information about the dates of the real estate offer filed by the Myrnas and their partners. That old place held special memories for me. It’s where Sonny first kissed me when we were only fifteen years old. Our ninth-grade prom had been held there. It was a Tuscaloosa mainstay, and one I intended to save. I hurried over to the office from the University Club. I knew Wanda Jo had to drop some papers off at the courthouse for Harry, so she would be gone or on her way out by the time I arrived.
I settled into my desk chair, opened the large envelope and pored through the materials. I studied the dates of the offers but even more importantly the dates of the acceptances, as offers on the Brooks Mansion had come in by the handfuls over the years. All of them were lowballs because of the ghost stories and all the ghost hunter groups that showed up on a regular basis. But it was such a stately place, sitting in the geographical center of town. Most of the surrounding grounds of the old plantation house itself had been sold. Over the years, the town grew up around it. So the mansion sat alone, surrounded by a frenzy of modern-day activity and newer structures, sort of like a spirit hovering over Tuscaloosa. It had a definite feel and personality, standing tall for over one hundred and seventy years. I couldn’t imagine a Tuscaloosa without its centerpiece, and I knew I had the power to save it.
Just then, I saw it. The dates of the acceptance of the offer from the Myrnas and their partners. It was one day after our halt petition was filed in order to present our petition from Alabama Places in Peril. That was it; the petition that stopped all activity until a review is performed. I knew it! I had to prepare a brief on it now, and let Wanda Jo know to set up the next meeting. Besides, the old place wasn’t zoned for commercial property anyway, so that would be another hurdle they would have to jump before an actual shopping center could be built. They could still mow the mansion down if they got their hands on it. But I was determined they would never own it.
Just as I was getting ready to leave, Harry walked in through the back door.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” he asked, like he was surprised to see me.
“I work here,” I replied straight-faced.
“Ha-ha, very funny, Blake.” He was rushing around looking for something.
“I’m actually here working on that Myrna file. Over my dead body will that old Brooks Mansion be torn down,” I said as I stood and gathered up my things.
“I never understood your love affair with that old place,” he said.
“I’ve told you a hundred times. I had my first prom there, my first kiss there. It’s just a part of me. Plus it’s a major part of Tuscaloosa and so many people feel just the same way. I’ll stop those Myrnas, believe me.”
“I thought your first kiss was with Sonny in junior high or something?” He found whatever he was looking for and actually stopped and looked at me while he put a file in his briefcase.
“It was,” I said. “And it was there, in the Brooks Mansion during our ninth grade prom.”
“Well, good luck,” he said, but I could tell he still didn’t get it. “I’ll be late tonight. Got a campaign thing.” And he turned to the door without waiting on me to answer. The back door shut and I was standing alone in my office. Why did I feel like a storm just blew through?
I left a note for Wanda Jo on my findings and instructions to set up the next battle—ahem, meeting. I locked up and left to head over to Vivi’s.
* * *
I drove along the river and before I knew it I was on the long gravel driveway to the McFadden plantation. I rolled my window down to smell the jasmine and the honeysuckle. I heard the gravel crunch under my tires as I pulled around to the front porch near the fountain.
“Hey, Arthur,” I called over to him as I parked and climbed out of my car.
He looked up from the tomatoes planted on the side yard, wiped his hands on his apron and started over to me.
“What brings you by, Miss Blake?”
“A girl’s gotta have a reason to come see her favorite people?” I chided.
“’Course not.” He was grinning as he reached out to hug me. “So good to see ya.” And I knew he meant it.
“You look nice today, Arthur.”
“Well, Miss Bonita’ll be around directly. She’s gonna be helping me sample some new recipes at my BBQ place. That woman has good taste.”
“Uh-huh, and she sure loves your cooking, too,” I said with a wink.
“Miss Vivi’s inside making iced tea. Why don’t you go on in and have some,” he said, trying to hide his bashfulness.
“Arthur, if I drink any more tea today, I’ll be floatin’ down the river myself,” I laughed. “But I’ll go on in and have a visit.”
“Okay. Tell her I’m almost through here, then I’m headin’ out to my restaurant to wait on Bonita.”
The Moonwinx was out back and to the right side of the plantation itself, with its own little gravel drive to the front of the stand. It was the type of place where you walked up to the screened counter and ordered. It wasn’t really meant to be a restaurant, just a few picnic tables and the smokehouse kitchen—small, mostly for pickup and takeout. Arthur kept himself busy getting ready for the fall grand opening. Of course he wanted to be ready for football season and all the tailgatin’ parties. And now with Bonita by his side, he’d have a partner.
“Okay,” I said over my shoulder as I headed up the stairs. The screened front door slammed behind me and I immediately smelled homemade buttermilk biscuits and heard the teapot singing. I had been coming in this house for as long as I could remember. The beautiful round solid mahogany table sat in the front foyer with an oversize milky-white vase of fresh blue hydrangeas. They grew in massive bushes on either side of the wide front porch. A curved staircase invited you upstairs to the left and parlors bathed in sunlight framed the back of the entryway just behind the staircase.
I walked through the right parlor and headed back to the kitchen.
“Hey, Vivi,” I shouted. I waited for the usual, “Hey, honey,” but all I got was silence. I walked into the kitchen to see a big rear end bent over and a head shoved into the back of the fridge.
Vivi was in a yellow sundress with an old apron tied around her waist. Her rear end was bouncing to the radio, causing the sundress to swing wildly back and forth.
“What the hell are you doin’?” I said, laughing. She bumped her head bringing something out of the fridge.
“Oh, hey, honey, come on in. I’m lookin’ for some lemons. I got me some tea made and Arthur has cut me some mint. But, oh, well, no lemon.”
I walked over and hugged her.
“Okay, spill,” she said. “I know that hug. What’s going on?”
We sat for an hour and hashed everything out again.
“You know, Blake, we’re all just needin’ each other in a time like this. You gotta let those walls crumble, honey. Let all the ones you love in. It’ll help. It’s not a bad thing to be needy every now and then. I know. I even enjoy it sometimes.”
“What am I doing in the middle of all this? I’m making out
with Sonny. I’m married. I am a fool. I have jumped in with sharks. Everyone has so many secrets and I’m in on all of them. How can I help anyone without betraying someone else?” I didn’t want to bring up the question Sonny asked me at lunch about me moving to D.C. I knew it would just upset her.
“Sweetie, you have secrets of your own brewing and I am here for you like you are here for me. You don’t always have to be the strong one. Sometimes I can be that for you, too, you know? So let’s come up with some answers here, okay?” She got up from the table to get a pen and paper. She was serious. I got a hold of myself and grabbed napkins from the center of the table and dried my eyes.
“Okay, then, first things first. Number one: you gotta make sure I’m not giving birth in jail.”
We both burst out laughing. Yes, Vivi had a point. That did seem to be the most important thing, that she not go to jail—not now, not ever.
“This baby, after all, will be your niece or nephew and it deserves a better start than to draw her first breath in a 6x12 cement block.”
“Vivi,” I said, “you are not going to jail. There is no way that is ever going to happen. No one has yet been able to even say whether Lewis is actually dead. And nobody anywhere believes you are a murderer! Plus, you’ve got his baby growing inside you. It will never happen. Got it? On Mother Teresa’s grave.”
“Okay, number two: you gotta tell someone about those letters. I mean, besides Kitty and me. You gotta tell someone who can actually do something with them. I think they have a lot of clues and they might help us.”
“Well, Kitty said she’ll go to Meridee when she comes home tomorrow and see what she can find out.”
“Okay, we’ll give her a couple of days. But then you gotta go to Harry or Sonny. Deal?”
“Deal,” I agreed.
“Next,” she continued, “we gotta find out about that hot-pink-colored cigarette. Honey, the thought of that has made me sick. I can hardly sleep over it. And that pink…well, it makes me think of Dallas, which gives me the willies. I just cannot believe Lewis would be with someone else twelve hours before he was playin’ cowboy with me—and especially if it was Dallas. That’s not like him. Not since we, he and me, well, since us. You know. Well, that’s really number one on my list. Next to finding him. I guess that would be my number one.”
“Okay, that’s a given,” I said, laughing.
“Next, Sonny.” She raised an eyebrow. “After I don’t go to jail and my Lewis is found…” She hesitated, and I knew she was thinking that there was still a chance he could be found…not alive. She cleared her throat. “When he is found alive, and you get to the bottom of those letters and the damned cigarette, and all of this is untangled, you better figure out those feelings for Sonny and how deep they run. Are they real, or were they just symptomatic of everything else going on? If they are symptomatic, it’s totally understandable considering the pressure you’re under. But if they are real, Blake, you may have your own set of long-term problems.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“Now, that’s the entire list,” she said with finality in her voice, hitting the pen to the pad with a flourish as she wrote the last question mark. She shoved the paper across the table to me.
No giving birth in jail for Vivi.
Find Lewis—alive.
Figure out those letters.
Pink cigarette. What the hell? (Dallas?)
Sonny. Real or symptom?
That was our to-do list. Vivi had a way of simplifying things and making them black-and-white. From a missing body, a possible murder and a pregnant suspect, we now had a list of five simple things to do and we’d all live happily ever after. At that moment I wished I was more like Vivi.
I looked out the back window over the sink and saw Bonita and Arthur finishing up some ribs at one of the picnic tables. She cleared things away and then made her way up to the house.
“Hey, girls, how’s it goin’ today?” she asked as she came through the back door.
“We are doin’ just fine and how ’bout yourself? Can I get you somethin’ cold to drink?” Vivi offered.
Bonita shook her head and rested her hand on her ample belly. “Honey, I could not fit one more sip of anything after that lunch. Mm-mmm, that man can cook.”
“Any word from the other lab on those cigarettes?” I said.
“Nothing yet, but we are expecting the results pretty soon. We had hoped we’d get them sooner but we had to send them all the way to Birmingham.” She changed back to her favorite subject. “Ain’t that Arthur just something?” she said, going over to the sink to wash the rib sauce off her hands. “He is just the sweetest thing. He’s taking me to the movies tonight.” She didn’t realize how big her grin was growing as she spoke. She was wearing a pink-and-black Chanel suit and black patent heels. Her silver charm bracelets caught the afternoon sun and sparkled as she dried her hands on a nearby dish towel. She was a lucky woman to have Arthur and I knew she was good to him. They weren’t quite a thing yet and he was nearly twelve years older but she liked the gentleman in him and he loved her sassy ways and bubbly personality. And of course, she loved to eat and he loved to cook. It was a really good match. When two people have that much fun together, the rest just seems to fall into place.
“Have y’all seen those billboards of Dallas all over town?” I asked, changing the subject to see if Bonita had anything new on the calls coming in.
“Yes, that girl will get that Emmy she’s after, that’s for sure,” Bonita said.
“I even saw a TV commercial yesterday,” Vivi joined in.
“What in the world does she think she can really do?” I wondered. “You just know she’s hoping she can be the one to find Lewis. Can you imagine? Her popularity will go through the roof.”
“I know it, and it seems that’s already happening. I saw it in the paper this mornin’,” Bonita said. “The ratings are going sky-high over there since they launched the Dallas Dubois segment on the six o’clock news the other day. The article said they are breaking ratings records every day now.”
“But, the problem with this little campaign is that it attracts all the crazies,” Vivi said. “You know those idiots who just wanna be on TV. To me it’s an interference with the real search. Just a flashy distraction.”
Vivi got up and poured herself another glass of tea, bringing the pitcher back to the table with her. Bonita turned to us.
“Well, that is the very definition of Dallas herself, is it not?” I said. “A flashy distraction.” We nodded to each other, smiling as if I had hit the nail on the head.
“Y’all won’t believe this but I saw her story last night and she was actually reporting live from a house near the edge of town—hon, that woman she was interviewing swore up and down she had seen the face of Lewis in her toast that mornin’! In her toast! I said to myself, good Lord, he ain’t even Jesus and people are seeing his face carved in their food. I mean I know people claim to see the Lord in their sandwich sometimes, but Lewis? What is the world comin’ to?”
Vivi and I burst out laughing and Bonita was laughing, too, and shaking her head. I wanted to tell Vivi about the sightings of Lewis at that Birmingham bank, but I knew she would just lose it and I didn’t want to give her any false hope. Still, I thought she should know, so I led the conversation in that direction to see if Bonita would tell us the latest. I knew Sonny said at lunch that she was checking on those leads.
“Bonita, have y’all gotten any signific
ant calls or info from any of this?”
“As a matter of fact, we did get something we thought was worth checking out,” Bonita said.
“Oh, my, what did you hear?” Vivi asked, sitting up straight and looking big-eyed at Bonita.
“We have had a pretty significant number of calls stating the same sighting so we thought it was worth looking into.”
“Oh, I hope it’s not a body to go look at.”
“No, Miss Vivi, it’s not. At least ten people have called saying that they think they saw Lewis at a Birmingham bank after you reported him missing.”
“After?”
“Yes, after. All have described him in the same clothes, at least all in a similar color of clothing, so we have asked the bank to provide records and videotape and we will have a look for ourselves.”
“That’s fantastic! At least he was walking around and breathing if he was at a bank. That’s all I need to know. Oh, I feel so much better.” Vivi was wringing her hands and a hopeful glimmer was in her pretty green eyes, not wet with tears this time, just shimmering with joy.
“I will let you know when we get the file from the bank.”
“This just might be the lead we’ve been waiting for,” Vivi said.
“Listen here, Vivi,” Bonita said, turning to us at the table. “I have a strong gut feeling we are about to break this case wide-open. I believe Lewis may be out there somewhere and somebody that smokes and wears pink lipstick knows something. I intend to find her and shake her till she talks. Trust me. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
The Sassy Belles Page 19
