The Saucy Lucy Murders

by Cindy Keen Reynders

  A few minutes later, she pulled into a parking space in front of the Jefferson Theater, shrinking in her skin when she saw Jack pacing outside the building. This was so embarrassing.

  “Wow,” Jack exclaimed when he saw her, eyes lighting up. “My date’s a knockout. What happened to your head?”

  Lexie’s face got warm and she touched the bandage. “A minor accident at the café. I’ll tell you about it later. Your knockout date is late. I’m sorry.”

  He chuckled. “No harm done. We’ve probably only missed a few boring previews.” He took her hand and they went inside to purchase tickets. In the lobby, he bought popcorn and soda and escorted her up to balcony seats.

  The theater was an old relic, probably dating from sometime in the 1930s. Ornate maple woodwork, red brocade wallpaper, plush carpeting, and vintage light fixtures gave the place a feeling of a time gone by. The interior had been renovated, but the restoration maintained the original flavor.

  Lexie recalled coming as a kid to the Saturday afternoon matinee. Lucy usually brought her and of course, being the older sister, Mom and Dad put her in charge. For treats, the girls bought popcorn and sodas, Pay Day, Baby Ruth, and Look candy bars. It was a good time, a pleasant escape from reality. Except for Lucy’s bossing. Since Lexie was the younger sister it had come with the territory.

  Lexie relaxed in her seat next to Jack, feeling a familiar sense of anticipation as the lights faded. It was a fun movie about a boy wizard, which was actually meant for children. But Moose Creek Junction didn’t exactly get first run movies. There wasn’t a large selection to choose from and they were usually several months old. As they said, beggars couldn’t be choosers, so the audience was packed with adults and children alike. Despite its shortcomings, the old Jefferson Theater was a major attraction.

  Jack leaned over and whispered another compliment to Lexie about how good she looked and how much he enjoyed being with her. Lexie shivered with delight at the feel of his strong arm when it came down gently around her shoulders. Instinctively, she snuggled closer, feeling safe and protected. Though the black car incident was still in her thoughts, it was way in the back of her mind. She’d think about it later.

  It had been a long time since Lexie dated anyone, if you didn’t count the tragic Henry Whitehead fiasco. Going to the movie with Jack was different. He had a pleasant personality and was very nice looking. He smelled like Irish Spring soap, not dirty diapers, which was a vast improvement over Violet’s ex.

  When the movie was over, Lexie and Jack walked through the Moose Creek Junction Park hand in hand, enjoying the silvery moonlight and warm October evening. Bushes rustled softly in the light breeze and late autumn flowers and trees had a magical quality. Also magic was having a nice man paying her compliments and speaking sweetly to her. Not yelling and slapping her around like Dan. How different this was. How … wonderful.

  Jack Sturgeon was someone special.

  “So, what’s with the bruise on your noggin?” Jack asked.

  Lexie frowned. “Some kid threw a rock through my front window. Unfortunately, I got in the way. The police think it was probably just a prank.”

  “Little punks.” Jack stopped walking and took her face in his hands, staring at her in earnest. “Are you all right? Maybe you should be home resting?”

  “Oh, believe me,” she told him, smiling up at the angled planes of his attractive face, her skin prickling. “This date has been the best medicine. I’m right where I need to be.”

  Jack leaned into her and gave her the most exquisite kiss. Later, when he’d walked her to her car, he said, “I had a very nice time, Lex. You’ll go out with me again, won’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good.” He leaned over and lightly kissed her forehead, then stood straight and smiled. “How about next Sunday you come with me out to my cabin on Gun Smoke Lake? We can spend the day fishing and grill up some trout for dinner. Then we can head back to town and catch another movie, if you like.”

  “Sounds like fun.” Lexie smiled. “And thank you for tonight. I really enjoyed myself.”

  “So did I. I’ll pick you up about seven-thirty on Sunday. The fish don’t sleep in too late, you know. Remember to wear old clothes. Fishing’s a dirty business.”

  Lexie got in the Escort and drove home through the dark streets, her whole being alive. How could she have been so lucky to meet Jack Sturgeon? He actually liked her, wonder of wonders. Tonight, nothing could bother her. Any time a problem broke surface in her mind, she fought it back into a deep, dark corner. She had all week to think of a way out of her dilemma. Tonight she wanted to bask in the after-glow of her date with Jack.

  Another customer-less week dragged by. Lucy decided they needed to take advantage of the break, instead of moping around, so they took inventory of the café supplies: canned goods, flour, sugar, salt, and the list went on. They cleaned and organized all the cupboards. They decided to make their Saucy Lucy fruitcake for the church bake sale that was held in November, just in time for Christmas. It was an old recipe and wasn’t one of Lucille Castleton’s, but actually came from Grandmother Castleton, who the family claimed, had brought it over from England. The cakes were filled with a multitude of dried and candied fruits, the crimson, green, and gold of the ingredients being representative of the holiday season. It was also filled with spices such as cloves and cinnamon and the baking scent was so heavenly you could nearly float away on it.

  As the week dragged by, Lexie had the strangest experiences. She went from elation when she thought about Jack Sturgeon to fretting endlessly about her predicament. She kept waiting for the Briarhurst’s attorney to call and give her bad news, but he never did. She knew, deep down, the Briar-hursts had merely been behaving like distraught and confused parents. There was no case against her because she’d done nothing. It bothered her, however, to have people mistrust and dislike her.

  At the moment she was like the pariah of Moose Creek Junction with no customers and no friends. Everywhere she went people shunned her, except for Jack, and behaved as though she had a contagious disease, sending her narrow-eyed, sidelong looks. It was downright awful and Lexie briefly considered sewing a scarlet letter of some sort on her apron. Possibly “M” for maligned, or “P” for pissed off. She vacillated between the two ideas.

  It was Thursday and as they prepared the day’s minestrone soup special—why they bothered, Lexie had no idea—Lucy finally came up with an idea she thought would help Lexie clear her name. “For Pete’s sake, people simply couldn’t be mean spirited to you if you attended church services with me,” she proclaimed. “It would be extremely uncharitable. And besides …”

  Lexie and Lucy were standing at the kitchen sink, peeling carrots. Lexie turned to Lucy and gave her a long look. “For God’s sake, Lucy, they’d stone me. Either that or put me under a door and pile rocks on it until they crushed my chest.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “There you go again, getting all melodramatic. Why, you should have gone into acting, even though Mother and Father would never have approved.”

  “Leslie’s right,” Aunt Gladys piped up. She sat at the kitchen table, which was covered in newspapers, doing one of the paint-by number pictures Lexie had purchased at the Loose Goose Emporium. She actually enjoyed it, or so she said. Today she wore her zebra-striped caftan, about fifty strands of huge black beads looped around her neck and about a thousand jangling bracelets. “There’s a bunch of teeny-tiny pea brains around here. Lucille, you’ve spent entirely too much of your life in Moose Creek Junction. Born yesterday, if you know what I mean.”

  “What in heaven’s name do you mean by that?” Lucy asked indignantly as she turned from the sink to glare at Aunt Gladys, carrot peeler held in mid-air.

  Aunt Gladys cackled as she used her paintbrush to dab rich green color on a tree. “Take off your rose-colored glasses, girl. People are mean and ignorant. When they get even the slightest thing on you, they’ll tear you apart like a pack of wild dogs
.”

  “Moose Creek Junction is our home,” Lucy protested. “People wouldn’t hurt their friends and neighbors like that.”

  “Lucille, your sister has been gone too many years to be one of them any more. To them, she is an outsider. They have no loyalty to her.”

  Lexie had to agree with Aunt Gladys. Occasionally the old bag of wind actually had some wise counsel although Lucy didn’t think so.

  “You’re delusional again,” she said. “I think it’s time for you to take a nap.”

  Aunt Gladys stuck out her tongue at Lucy and made a farting sound.

  Lucy snorted with indignance and turned back to the sink to peel carrots with a vengeance. “Lexie, if you would just go with me to church this Sunday, you would see how forgiving people are.”

  Lexie sighed. “Sorry, I can’t. Jack and I are going fishing.”

  “On Sunday?” Lucy was flabbergasted. “Really, what would Mother and Father think? Sunday is a day of rest.”

  “Fishing is very restful,” Lexie said. “Besides, Jack is a wonderful guy. Mom and Dad would be happy for me.”

  “I don’t know this Jack Sturgeon fellow, but he doesn’t seem like the best influence on you. Taking you out to cavort in the wilderness on a Sunday, no less.”

  “Oh, leave her alone, Lucille,” Aunt Gladys called out as she lit up a cigarette and blew smoke into the air. “Your mother and father would have liked knowing Lexie’s enjoying herself with a nice young man like Jack. Let her kick up her heels a little. ‘Make hay while the sun shines’, they say.”

  Lexie frowned at Aunt Gladys and her cancer stick. She had all but given up trying to control the old woman’s smoking. It was impossible.

  “You’re not much for maintaining decorum, are you?” Lucy asked Aunt Gladys.

  Aunt Gladys blinked. “Maintaining what? If you mean do I like to have fun, you sure as hell better believe it. Now I know why your father named you after your mother. You are exactly like her. A friggin’ stick in the mud.”

  Miffed, Lucy ignored Aunt Gladys and turned to Lexie. “If things get serious with this Jack fellow, he’ll need to join the church so you can be married there. You and Dan ran off to get a quickie Las Vegas wedding and that could have been part of the problem. The marriage was never a church sanctioned union.”

  “Lucy, lighten up, will you?” Lexie finished chopping the last of the carrots and frowned at her sister. “We’re only dating. OK? Nobody said anything about a wedding.” Not yet, anyway, she thought.

  Lucy pouted, her face melting into lines of defiance.

  Lexie hated that look. It always meant Sister Lucy was on the warpath. “Just because you didn’t hand pick Jack Sturgeon to date me doesn’t mean he’s not a good man. Trust my judgment for once, will you?”

  “You didn’t do so good picking out Dan, Lexie.” Lucy’s lower lip quivered. “I don’t want to see you hurt again.”

  “I’ll be all right. At the moment we need to worry seriously about our lack of customers. While I’m sure the homeless shelter loves it, we can’t keep giving all our leftover food to them. We’ll go broke. You have Otis to fall back on. I only have the poor house.”

  Lucy nodded. “I’ll talk with my friends and encourage them to come back to eat at the café. Besides, I still haven’t been accused of anything and I’m part owner.”

  Lexie patted Lucy’s arm. “That’s right.”

  The telephone rang and Lexie seriously considered not answering. She was pretty certain it wasn’t a customer asking what their hours were. More than likely it was Barnard Savage, or another reporter from Westonville, or maybe even one from Timbuktu, asking more questions about Henry Whitehead’s murder.

  “I’ll get it,” Lexie finally said, on the outside chance it might be someone ordering a pie or maybe a dozen cinnamon rolls. She picked up the receiver and put it to her ear. “Hello?”

  Click.

  Lexie slammed the phone down, furious.

  “Another hangup?” Lucy asked.

  Before Lexie could answer, the phone rang again. “What do you want? Why do you keep calling and hanging up? We’re getting pretty sick and tired—”

  “Lexie?”

  It was Jack.

  Lexie felt completely ridiculous. “Gosh, I’m so sorry. I’ve been getting a ton of prank calls. I got one right before you called.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Have you told the police?”

  “Yes. My phone’s supposedly tapped. It drives me crazy that whoever is calling doesn’t stay on long the line long enough to be traced.”

  “Of course,” Jack said. “That’s the game they play. I was calling to check and see if Sunday is still good.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Lexie said.

  “Great. I’ll pick you up at seven thirty. Fish don’t sleep in.”

  Lexie laughed. “I’ll be ready.”

  Lucy took off her apron and set it on the counter, then smoothed down her lavender- and blue-flowered housedress. “You’re going to burn in hell, Lexie.”

  “At least I’ll have a nice tan,” Lexie responded.

  Aunt Gladys gave a loud hoot. “Good one, Leslie!”

  Lucy shook her head. “I hate to peel and leave, but I’ve got to go vacuum the church and dust the pews. I figured since we’re not that busy, I could get it ready for Sunday services.”

  “That’s fine,” Lexie said. “I really doubt the café will get slammed.”

  She was right. The remainder of the week dragged by in a similar fashion, and by Saturday afternoon, Lexie was ready to throw in the towel. She felt like trotting downtown and standing in front of the old granite courthouse wearing a sandwich sign that said, There is nothing wrong with eating at the The Saucy Lucy Café. You will not get ptomaine poisoning, no one will not put a curse on you, and you will not die.

  That, however, was absurd.

  Instead, for the second Saturday in a row, Lexie and Lucy closed the café early. Once again, the soup kitchen regulars were fed well. Lexie and Lucy discussed their budget and decided that before long, they would have to shut down the café. Something had to give, and fast.

  While Lexie and Lucy’s business was suffering, on the contrary, Aunt Gladys’ love life was blossoming. Frenchie, Aunt Gladys’s rich boyfriend from the Sunrise Center, had been coming by in the evenings, courting the ex-Las Vegas dancer in an old-fashioned and quaint sort of way. It amazed Lexie he could put up with the loon, but they seemed to get along famously.

  Aunt Gladys was annoying with her chain smoking and incessant gabbing, yet had an outlandish, eccentric wisdom that was appealing in a shunts-under-the-fingernails sort of way. Lexie admitted, grudgingly, she’d taken a shine to her. Whether she liked it or not, she could see they held similar ideas about life. They identified with each other on a certain quirky level.

  Frenchie, the leprechaun man, was pleasant enough. He was kind to Aunt Gladys and kept her occupied so Lexie could have a break once in a while.

  That was something to be happy about.

  Sunday dawned bright and unusually warm for mid October. Outside Lexie’s partially open bedroom window, birds twittered to each other in the cotton-wood and aspen trees and neighborhood dogs barked in the distance. Yawning, she stretched lazily in her double, four-poster bed, enjoying the idyllic morning. For the first time in a while, she’d had a decent night’s sleep, though her ravaged forehead was still tender to the touch.

  Wincing at the dull throb still threading through her temples, she sat up and looked outside into the azure blue, cloud-studded Wyoming sky. That was one nice thing about living in this state. Since the wind blew incessantly, there was never a trace of smog obscuring the horizon, a far cry from Los Angeles, or even Tidewater, where she’d spent the last years before moving home. Down there, a person could believe it was normal for the sky to be a muddy brown color all the time.

  Standing, Lexie performed isometric exercises to work out the kinks in her lower lumbar. She twisted her to
rso, rolled her arms and did circles with her neck. Yawning, she padded over to the window, opened it further, inhaling the fresh air. It seemed like a fine summer day, not autumn. Hard to believe this part of the country was still in the clutches of a severe drought, a drought that had lasted for the last few years. Despite its devastating effects on local economics, the warm weather was good for one thing.

  Fishing.

  Slipping out of the white nightshirt with a nasty looking Chihuahua on the front that said, Bite Me, Lexie took a long, hot shower, letting the silken water sluice over her skin. Boy, she sure needed to get a softer mattress. Unfortunately, as the years marched on, her body was beginning to demand she relinquish the punishing firmness and give her old muscles a break. As she let her mind wander in the mist of steam, a thought occurred to her.

  I need to call Bruce.

  She had no idea what time it was in Singapore, but what the heck. It was worth a try. Exiting the shower, Lexie wrapped up in a large bath towel and sat on her bed. She picked up the phone and dialed the group of numbers Bruce had given her to reach his hotel. It’d probably cost a fortune to talk with him for a minute.

  A series of beeping sounds filled the airwaves and finally a person actually came on the line. “Singapore International Hotel, how may I help you?” a man with a clipped voice answered.

  Lexie asked for Bruce’s room and the operator connected her. The phone rang and rang and finally someone picked up, but didn’t say anything.

  “Hello, Bruce? It’s Lexie.”

  A high-pitched giggle echoed from the phone receiver. “Brucie?” A pause. “Ah, he no here. He working.”

  Lexie rolled her eyes. Right. “When will he be back?”

  Another giggle. “I not know.”

  “Thanks.” Lexie hung up. Bruce either wasn’t there, or wasn’t talking. No use wasting her thin dime talking to his bimbo.

  Damn. She’d e-mailed Bruce several times, but he hadn’t responded. Now he probably wasn’t going to answer his phone calls. She punched her frustration into a pillow. Knock it off, Lex. Don’t ruin what could be a fantastic day.