by Lane Stone
Asher seemed unsteady on his feet, but he soldiered on. “Harvard Medical School.” Only he said, “Haavad.” You don’t know how badly I wanted to ask him to say, “Park the car.”
Tara was still leaning back to get some personal space. “Murder She Wrote, Keep the Home Fries Burning. Season Two.”
CHAPTER 3
Continuation of statement by Leigh Reed. I nonchalantly took a couple of steps back and then turned and ran to my mom’s booth. My emergency hundred dollar bill had been transferred from the secret compartment in my wallet (inside, to the left, next to the snap) to my hand. I figured that would take care of their tab with enough of a tip for them to come back to Tex Mex Rex. “You all need to get out of here.”
Actually, I needed them to get out of there before they learned about Tiara Investigations. My husband doesn’t know about our agency. Neither does Victoria’s husband. Ditto Tara’s boyfriend. If my mother and aunts found out about our double lives, Gwinnett County would know. The ladies had already seen and heard too much. Then there’s the fact of how unpleasant a murder scene is, and I don’t mean just for the dead guy. Thankfully, Detective Kent hadn’t said anything about putting the restaurant on lockdown, and I figured that was because of what he could learn from the cameras. Still Tex Mex Rex was quickly filling up with police officers and technicians, and would soon not be a place for such delicate flowers of Southern womanhood.
“What’s going on back there?” My mom was craning her neck to see.
“The manager just told us that they are expecting a busload of old people in about five minutes.”
They left skid marks getting out of there.
I’d promised my mother I would call her that night to tell her what this was all about. That would give me time to get a story together. After telling Detective Kent everything we knew about the victim, we reconnoitered at the Starbucks two blocks down Highway 20. We’d missed lunch. Thank you, Pop Tart.
“Another murder, whaddya know.” I put my shaken iced tea, trenta, black, three pumps classic syrup and fruit plate down and slid in. Most days in Atlanta you can eat outside and this was one of them. Ah, Atlanta. It’s what I’m made of. We took advantage of the autumn sunshine so we could talk.
“But this one, we don’t have to solve. He wasn’t a client.” The slight quiver in Victoria’s voice told me they’d been discussing this while I was getting my food. “Last year we took it upon ourselves to find David Taylor’s murderer because we felt we had let his wife, our client, down. That’s not the case with Pop Tart.”
Tara put her sandwich down. “We also worked on the case because Detective Kent called us untrained, ill-equipped and incompetent––which is no longer true! So there’s no need to get involved with this murder investigation.”
“I agree!” They exhaled with relief at my answer. “I couldn’t work on it anyway. Remember, my husband’s coming home tonight from the Gulf.” I looked at my watch just in case four hours had passed without me being aware of it, making me late picking him up at Hartsfield Jackson Airport. “Tara, how did you know he was poisoned with, what was it?”
“Di-Serious-Shit-Oxide and it was ripped from the reruns. His face was beet red and he died quickly. He didn’t get sick first.”
Not exactly a Georgia Bureau of Investigation analysis, but it was good enough for me. I tossed an almond into my mouth. “Running into Mom and my aunts has put the fear of God into me. They didn’t know we were involved until they heard Detective Kent call us by name. I was thinking maybe we should have code names ourselves.”
You may be asking yourself why it took us so long to think about giving ourselves fictitious names. By the time we’re through with a case, everyone but the wife hates our guts, and she’s not exactly throwing rose petals at us. While we mentally got it that we were never going to hear, “Gosh, thanks for catching me cheating,” not being liked is so foreign to our life stories, that we didn’t grasp it on an emotional level. My mom and aunts getting a peek into the world of Tiara Investigations gave us the idea. What if my husband or Victoria’s husband, Shorty, or Tara’s boyfriend, Paul, found out? Have mercy.
“I want mine to be Paula,” Tara said. “I know Paul will never know anything about it, but I like the way Paul and Paula sounds.”
“I’ll have Abby as mine.” I picked up my tea then put it right back down.
“But that’s your dog.” Victoria reached over for an almond from my tray. “It might be confusing for her. What’s the matter with your tea? Isn’t it good?”
“I was star-yucked. Okay, how about Shelley? As in Shelley Fabares of ‘Johnny Angel’ fame.”
“Good. I’ll be Leslie. As in Leslie Gore, of ‘It’s My Party’ fame. What is star-yucked? Is that another made up word?”
“Star-yucked is when someone picks up your drink thinking it’s theirs and you feel like it’s going to taste different because they touched the cup.” I pointed to Tara and then Victoria, then to myself. “Paula, Leslie and Shelley. Got it. Vic, did you make our dinner reservations for Sunday night?”
She took a last swig of her iced tea. “Seven o’clock at Deegan’s. It’s in the new section of downtown Hartfield Hills off Highway 20.”
We stood up to go and Tara gave me a hug. “Have a good time with your husband. If you can come up with something I wouldn’t do, do it. We’ve got work covered.”
I smiled at them. “Is what we do work? It’s never felt like it.”
Next Vic and I hugged and she said, “We sure do make a lot of money at it. Maybe it is work.”
We just stood there grinning at each other like jackasses chewing briars. I looked around, waiting for someone to make a move toward the gate of the Starbucks outside seating area.
“Oh, well,” Tara said, drawing out both words.
“You two are taking Julio to the movies tomorrow?” I was just making conversation. We had covered that ground before and after the workout that morning.
He had been our trainer for three years and when he said he wanted to see the new IMAX movie at the Mall of Georgia, Tara jumped in and said she’d take him and then they would have lunch at Mimi’s. Victoria said she’d join them.
“Guess I’ll be going,” Victoria said, but she didn’t make a move to go. “Leigh, I’d love to see your new windows.” She looked down checking her manicure.
“Anytime.” I checked my nails, too. “Guess I’ll head out, too.” Oh, what the hell. “Just as soon as Tara tells us what was on the napkin she stole from Mr. Chestnut’s table.”
“I’ll tell you that as soon as you tell us why you just about swallowed your tongue when you heard the word, skiff.” Tara’s hand was on her hip and she was tapping the toe of her beige stilettos.
We sat back down and I turned to face Victoria. “You got anything you’re holding back?”
“No-o-o.”
“How about that conversation you had with my mom and aunts in the parking lot? I scampered away like I’d stolen something and there you were hanging around.” Here I gave Tara a glance since she had in fact stolen something. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Anyway,” I continued, “you hung back and talked to them.”
Tara put her arm on mine. “I need a margarita before I can listen to this.” She looked around, but we were still in Starbucks. “Whoa, there’s a nice sandwich.”
Victoria and I looked to see what she was talking about. Her eyes were following two fine-looking specimens of young, muscular manhood. Vic reached over and pulled Tara’s face back around and she started talking again. “Sorry. Look, putting Victoria in a situation where she’ll have to lie would be like locking you in a minivan full of screaming kids. It was more than she could handle and she cracked.”
“They waylaid me. It was like they picked off the weakest member of the herd. They knew someone had been murdered.”
“How did they know that?” I asked.
“One of the aunts had to go to the ladies roo
m and she saw and heard quite a bit.” Victoria put air quotes around “had.”
While Victoria talked, I pictured either Aunt Thelma or Aunt Opal stealthily making her way through the restaurant. I rubbed my forehead, thinking how they had played me when I paid their tab.
Vic continued, “Your mother asked how many murders we’ve solved. She was thinking in the neighborhood of one a week. I told her that it was more like one in a lifetime and that the police would be handling this case.”
“And my mother accepted that?” I found it hard to believe she’d let it go that easy.
“Well, no. She asked what if the police needed our help. I said they’d call us. To which she replied, “And you can call us.” She made me take her phone number and made me give her mine.” She reached into the side pocket of her bronze and silver striped crossover handbag and pulled out a yellow post-it note. Yup, that was my mother’s cell phone number written in her “you can tell a lady by her handwriting” handwriting.
“They don’t know about Tiara Investigations, right? They only know what they saw and heard this morning. That being, we know a police detective and helped solve a previous murder.” I exhaled. Damage had been controlled.
Tara shook her head. “We’re not going to be investigating a murder, so neither will they. Everybody’s happy.” Her voice had gained momentum until she was positively chirping. She was getting panicky.
That made me anxious about what was on that napkin she’d taken from the table. “The napkin?” I held out my hand.
She took it out of her handbag and slid it across the table. “Whose lip prints are the-s-e?” I let that last word trail off because Tara’s face gave me my answer. The small amount of lipstick left on her matched the lip smack on the napkin.
“That lip-plumping stinging was getting on my nerves and I couldn’t think straight. The napkin was right there, so I picked it up and used it.”
“Now I don’t feel so bad about touching his head.” Victoria leaned over and rubbed Tara’s shoulder.
That sonofabitch orange dinosaur was right there on the corner of the napkin wearing a look that I wanted to beat off of him. He was laughing at us for making such a serious mistake. The thought cracked me up and before I knew it I was laughing so hard it was a minute or two before I could tell Vic and Tara what was so funny. “Tara, you’re an attorney and you took evidence from the scene of a crime. Find some way to get this napkin to Detective Kent. Tell him we didn’t know it was a crime scene when you took it.”
“Okay,” she said.
Victoria touched the corner of the napkin with the handle of her fork and turned it around. Then she read the scrawled words, “Buford Dam. Intermittent denial of service. First step.”
“What the hell?” the three of us asked in unison.
“Buford Dam?” I live in Hartfield Hills, a little town in metro Atlanta. I’m a couple of miles from Lake Lanier. The next town over is Buford where you’ll find the dam that created the lake out of the Chattahoochee and Chestatee Rivers. About sixty percent of Georgia gets its drinking water from the Chattahoochee system. Hydropower from Buford Dam’s powerhouse generators provides electricity to 25,000 homes, pollution free.
The two gents Tara had noticed earlier, walked by and they were both trying to make eye contact with her. “What’s the matter? That little kiss at the restaurant wasn’t enough?” I asked.
“Nothing from that guy would be enough.”
“Ouch,” Victoria said. Then she turned to me, “So, your turn. What does skiff mean?”
“SCIF is an acronym for sensitive compartmented information facility. It’s a special room for the highest level intelligence work, completely secure against eavesdropping and protected from the outside world. I think the restaurant manager was mistaken. Why would Buford, Georgia, have a top secret communications center?”
“Well, what did Thomas Chestnut mean when he wrote this?” Victoria looked at me and then Tara, waiting for an answer.
“Do we know he wrote it?” I dabbed the corner of my mouth with a less important napkin.
“There was an ink pen on the table by his hand.” Tara finished off her deviled egg.
No one said anything for a second. Anyone watching us would swear we’d planned the next part, but it just happened. We all got up and walked out. Not another word was spoken until we got to our cars. Sure, we’d chew on all that later, but for now we’d get back to our full case load and full personal lives.
Tara touched my sleeve. “Leigh, don’t give this a single thought.”
Victoria was about to second this when a text message came in on her cell phone. “It’s your mother. She wants to remind us they are available to help gather ‘clues or evidence.’ I’ll type back ‘k’.”
“K, indeed.”
CHAPTER 4
Continuation of statement by Leigh Reed. At nine o’clock on Saturday my husband and I were still spooning. I’d gotten up much earlier to take Abby out and feed her, then I came back to bed. She was taking her morning puppy-nap at the bottom of the bed when my ringing cell phone woke all three of us up. It was Tara.
“Paul’s stepfather passed away.”
“I didn’t know he had a stepfather.”
“Neither did I. They haven’t been close since his mother passed a few years ago. Anyway, the viewing is tomorrow night. Can we stop by the funeral home before dinner? I know it would mean a lot to Paul.” She wasn’t violating our ‘no phone calls while my husband is in town’ rule. It was strictly a personal matter.
“Sure.” Then I realized I might have been a little hasty. “Just a sec.”
I rolled over to nudge Jack, but he was wide awake and watching me. Our eyes met and I giggled, then reminded myself what I was supposed to ask him. “He’s fine with it.” He’s Southern himself and knows how Southern women are about our dead people. “Have fun today with Julio.”
“Uh, Leigh…. There’s something else. It’s about your mother. She’s sent Victoria two more text messages.”
“What’d they say?”
“We have no idea. After the first one, which just said what each of them would be doing today in case they were needed. By the way, your mother will be walking with her friends from the Senior Strider Gals, then she has her appointment at the beauty parlor, as she refers to it. Anyway, Victoria responded TTFN.”
“Ta-ta for now.”
“Yeah. Now they think you can make up your own acronyms. You don’t know what AYHTDIA means, do you?”
I sat up and reached for the pen and notepad I keep by my bed. “Say it again.”
I wrote it down and …. “All you have to do is ask.”
***
Jack, Abby and I were going to be spending the day on the Chattahoochee River in, I almost said, my canoe. In our canoe. The first year after I left my husband and then the first year Tiara Investigations was in business all you heard from me was my house, my dog, my boat, and on and on. We were separated not even a month before he followed me to Georgia. Our marriage was better than before, but it took longer for me to heal. I had to gather up all the pieces of my personality I had let slip from my grasp during my years as a military wife. You can’t replace something with nothing. Tiara Investigations made me whole again. It had the same effect on Victoria and Tara. And that’s why we haven’t told our husbands, in Tara’s case––boyfriend, about our secret lives as private investigators. If this is our room of one’s own, what would happen if our high-profile, very accomplished partners saw it? Offered opinions on it? Offered advice? We were not ready to take that chance.
The night before, we’d settled that we’d take the canoe rather than the two seater kayak. The yellow kayak was twelve feet in length and the green canoe was sixteen so we would have been comfortable in either. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about cooler weather that says canoe.
Jack drove the Jeep and I drove the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, with the canoe strapped up top, to our take-out point on the river.
Dog was my co-pilot for the thirteen-mile drive. We took Peachtree Industrial Boulevard to Abbott Bridge Road. Less than a mile up, we turned left towards the river, then ran out of road. The parking lot is about a quarter mile up the gravel drive.
While the Chattahoochee River runs from the north Georgia mountains to the Apalachicola Bay in Florida, the fun stuff happens in the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. The 48 miles of the CRNRA starts at Buford Dam and ends at Peachtree Creek, near downtown Atlanta. About three million people a year canoe, kayak, tube, raft, and picnic there. I only know that from my former park ranger days and my Miss Georgia reign. Some are there to be seen; some are there to be a family. It’s good to live in Atlanta.
Jack paid the nominal fee while I locked up the Jeep. Then we joined Abby in the Toyota for the return trip to Buford Dam, our put-in spot. Jack turned on his country music station and I liked it okay. It’s just not my favorite. What bothered me was that not listening to my world music station was bothering me. Was that what I had to look forward to in his retirement? Then, like he’d read my mind, he reached up and pressed the button for my usual station. I grinned and he reached over for my knee and we drove on.
When we got close to Buford Dam Road I pulled out my cell phone. “I’m trying to call the water release information line for an update but I can’t get a signal.”
I recited the number to Jack but he didn’t have any better luck getting a signal on his phone. Before we could say ‘Can’t get a damn signal at the dam,’ the phone in my hand rang. He chuckled. “Intermittent denial of service, huh?”
“Why would you say that?” my guilty conscience lashed out. That’s what Thomas Chestnut had written on the napkin. You remember the one we stole from the murder scene? My phone rang again.
