by Amity Allen
“Apparently, Brittany told her it was okay with her if she left.”
It didn’t sound like Brittany to let her daughter go on without a coach, but it had been a wild weekend, and if some of the more competitive mothers were shaken up by Heather’s death and did things a little differently, that wouldn’t surprise me.
“Does she have a history of panic attacks? If so, you might tell her to have her doctor send a note to the police department. That will give her some additional credibility.”
“Good idea, Poppy.” Skylar picked up her phone to send a text.
“Yeah, that is a good idea,” Mads echoed her twin.
I nodded. “Thanks.” I tried to think what else I could do to get Josephine out of the hot water she was in. But the only other thing would be to find the real killer.
The bell at the front door to the shop jangled, and Dave the postman came in and set a stack of mail on the counter.
“Thanks, Dave,” I said.
He tipped an imaginary cap at me chivalrously. “Sure thing, Poppy.”
The bell jingled as the door crashed closed behind him.
“I think he likes you.” Skylar grinned.
“Everybody likes her,” Mads observed.
“True,” Skylar agreed.
I made a face. “I’m not a big fan of the man bun.
“Me either.” Mads frowned.
“I like it!” Skylar enthused. “Anyways, Poppy’s got a crush on someone else.”
“She does?” Mads asked.
“I do?” This was news to me.
“Yeah. Officer Goodnight,” Skylar teased, her eyes shining.
“I do not,” I protested.
“Okay, okay.” Mads changed the subject. “Skylar, tell Poppy who you saw last night.”
I mouthed the words “thank you” to Mads, and she winked back.
“Oh, that’s right!” Now that she remembered, Skylar looked as though she could barely contain herself. “Guess who I saw last night?”
“Who did you see?” I asked dutifully.
She paused for dramatic effect. “Liz Stoner. Getting drunk at Abel’s.”
“Really? She’s been staying at the B&B. I wondered why she was still here. Aunt Cricket said that she said she was taking a bit of a vacation, that she liked it down here.”
“Maybe in the winter, like the snowbirds, but in September? Who wants to be here when it’s still hot as blazes?”
“Not me,” Mads chimed in.
Skylar had a point. The weather in Fairhope was its most brutal in August and September. It was a strange time to be a tourist.
“And, she spilled a juicy little secret. I don’t know if it’s true or if she was drunk and just hitting on my boyfriend. But we got to talking with her at the bar, and while I was in the restroom, she told Jay that she planned to finish the show, even though Heather shut it down. She said she had a signed contract and she was going to air the darn show.”
Now she had my full attention. “She told the guy you were with that?”
Skylar nodded. “Yep.”
“Why would she be spouting off about that to strangers? That’s pretty stupid. Especially after the woman who tried to get in her way has just been murdered.”
“Well, Jay is pretty cute and she was ugly drunk.”
“So, do you think that she’s really still here because Heather putting the kibosh on her show gives her a motive for murder and the police don’t want her to leave?”
Skylar shrugged. “I dunno, but it sure is interesting, isn’t it? Just hours after Heather basically gets rid of Liz by convincing all the moms to stop cooperating with her, she winds up dead. That is one heck of a coincidence.”
It sure was.
I paused as I stood on the front stoop of Heather and Tony Morgan’s house. That morning at The Flower Shoppe, Mads had asked who wanted to bring a delivery over to the Morgans’. Skylar suddenly became very interested in making sure we had paper towels in the back, but the job had piqued my interest. I’d never met Mr. Morgan and I was curious about him as well as his late wife so I raised my hand in the air and shouted, “Me! Me! Me!”
The other girls were glad for me to go, though now that I was here, I wasn’t sure what you said to a man whose wife had recently met her untimely death by the hands of some unknown perpetrator. But I was there to deliver flowers and I was determined to carry out that job.
This was my first time being so closely impacted by someone else’s death, outside of my own family of course. As awkward as I felt, the miniature azalea bush in my arms was starting to get heavy so I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.
The door opened and Mr. Morgan appeared. “Yes?”
Even though he wore a coat and tie, he appeared a bit disheveled.
“Good afternoon. Just bringing this by for you.”
I practically shoved the potted bush into his hands, but before I could, he stepped back and said, “Just put it over there with the rest of them.” He pointed at a jungle of flowers threatening to take over the entire front room.
“Wow, that’s a lot of flowers.” I laughed nervously. “You might want to set these outside on the porch or something. It looks like you’re running out of room in here. Plus they do better outdoors.”
“All right. How about back here?” He led me robotically through the kitchen on the way to the back porch.
A photograph of Tony and Heather and her sister Denise claimed a prominent spot on the refrigerator. It was held in place with a magnet shaped like a crown. All three of them were grinning at the camera, but there was something strange about Heather’s smile. It looked forced. Had there been trouble in paradise with her and the mister?
Mr. Morgan didn’t look so great. His skin had a grayish pallor to it, and the corners of his eyes and mouth drooped. But was his sad sack appearance a result of grief over losing his wife, or guilt over murdering her?
When Tony opened the back door, a black cat snuck past him and darted inside.
“Darned cat!” Mr. Morgan exclaimed, clearly vexed.
“Oh, is he not supposed to be inside?”
“No, I’m allergic. That’s Heather’s cat. Blasted thing just reminds me of her and makes my eyes itch like the devil. The other day I couldn’t get him out of here and my eyelids swelled up so bad I could barely open them. I’m going to have to take him to the animal shelter.”
The poor man was already sniffling. He dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief. Tears over the loss of Heather or more allergies from the cat?
“Dear me. Are you really going to give him up?” After I said it I realized I sounded more concerned about the cat than about Mr. Morgan. Sometimes my mouth worked faster than my brain.
Grim-faced, Mr. Morgan nodded his head. “I can’t deal with it. He was always a bone of contention between me and Heather, and now that she’s gone I can’t keep him.”
Hoping Mr. Morgan was better with plants than animals, I set the hot-pink azalea bush on the back porch. It was one of those hybrid kinds that bloomed more than once a year.
Then I went back inside where Mr. Morgan was digging in his wallet. He handed me a five-dollar bill.
“No, that’s okay,” I said.
He shrugged and put the bill back into his wallet.
“It has watering instructions on it,” I said, trying to be helpful, but knowing the newest plant in his vast collection was the least of his concerns.
He opened the front door for me, I stepped out, and it wasn’t until after it closed it behind me that I noticed the cat had also exited the front door, and was now making a circle eight between my legs.
I bent down and scratched the black fur ball behind the ears. His motor immediately ramped up, the contented purring of a cat who hadn’t had a good ear scratching in a while.
“Hi there. What’s your name?” I asked him, almost expecting an answer. The way things had been going, I wouldn’t have been too surprised if animals started talking to me.
Wo
uldn’t talking to animals be a wonderful power to have? Too bad you didn’t get to pick which powers you inherited or developed or whatever.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you. Bye, I’ve got to get going,” I said to the cat. His green eyes shone brightly at me and he meowed and followed me to my car. It seemed he wasn’t ready to say good-bye yet.
I had to open the door a matter of inches and squeeze my way in to prevent the cat from jumping in with me. He complained insistently, and as I started up the car, I was afraid I might actually run over him, but he eventually gave up and parked himself on the Morgans’ lawn.
As I drove away, I could see his face in the rearview mirror. It looked like he was saying, “I can’t believe you’re really leaving me behind.”
A pang of guilt gnawed at me.
Of course I had no choice. I was currently living at my aunt’s bed & breakfast, a business establishment that couldn’t house cats. There were potential customers who were allergic to their dander; it could significantly interfere with business.
Even so, I’d only driven two blocks before my conscience got the best of me, and I turned my car around and returned to the Morgans’ home.
I looked around, but I didn’t see the cat. He was already gone.
This should have been a relief since I still had nothing to offer the poor beast, but for some reason the less than promising fate of my new feline friend haunted me for the rest of the day.
Wednesday nights were Aunt Cricket’s bingo nights so I didn’t expect to find her home or dinner in the fridge. And this particular Wednesday I was feeling at loose ends.
Discouraged.
At first I’d thought Brittany Gustavez might have been the one who poisoned Heather, but now I didn’t believe that to be the case. Brittany might have disliked Heather, but she had such a big mouth that I didn’t think she’d have been able to keep quiet about it if she’d been the one to murder her. Plus, even though she might not win Mother-of-the-Year, I thought Brittany did love Allessandra and I couldn’t see her risking leaving her behind if she went to prison. Not to mention that after stretching her child’s limbs since she was an infant and hauling her around to pageants nonstop, she was heavily invested in having a front row seat to watch Allessandra’s career unfold, and not from behind bars.
Now my childhood friend Josephine was rotting in jail, and as far as I knew, no one was closer to finding out who really killed Heather than when the pageant ended. And it didn’t help that I couldn’t get Heather’s poor whining cat out of my head.
I paced around the empty B&B looking for solace, but found none. No guests around. Mads and Skylar had to attend a family dinner to celebrate the birthday of a young cousin I’d never met.
Aunt Cricket had invited me to bingo, but I’d made that mistake before, and I didn’t intend to make it again.
Even though Bingo night was held at the church, there was nothing sacred or holy about the way those senior citizens played. It was a cutthroat affair complete with multiple bingo cards, big money, and a professional bingo caller. The night I’d gone, two elderly ladies had gotten into a hair-pulling match over who had called out “bingo” first. Both were eventually asked to leave, but not before they lost some hair, and I’d lost some of my innocence. At the time, when I’d conveyed my concern to Cricket, she’d just shrugged and told me to lighten up.
No, I wasn’t in the mood for such contentious entertainment tonight, so I decided that even though I was by myself, I’d go to my favorite restaurant. I could eat at the bar and watch TV while I dined on the food I’d missed most while living in California—seafood from the gulf.
I changed out of my “delivering flowers” outfit of jeans and a T-shirt and into a black knit dress I could simply slip over my head, applied a little lipstick and went down to the parlor. The place was still dead.
Even though Aunt Cricket had never told me I was supposed to, I always checked the front rooms. If there were any guests there, I liked to make sure they didn’t need anything before I left. It must have been a side effect of living in a house with strangers most of my life.
As I left the house, it occurred to me that in Hollywood, I had usually been the one being waited on, and now I was the one doing the serving. For a split second I almost felt sorry for myself, but then I realized I kinda liked taking care of our guests. The same way I liked taking care of the place so Aunt Cricket could have more freedom, and how I enjoyed helping out Mads and Skylar with The Flower Shoppe.
When I got to the restaurant, a great place for peel-and-eat shrimp, the first person I saw was Liz Stoner.
She was sitting at the bar, dressed in another one of her pantsuits, this one navy blue.
Before I made my next move, I observed her for a minute. She looked to be drinking alone, fidgeting with a plastic straw and gazing up at a football game being played on the TV that hung high in the corner.
I considered continuing with my former plan to have dinner alone in the dining area, but life had provided me with a serendipitous opportunity here, and I couldn’t pass it up.
I approached her slowly, the way you would a wild animal in their habitat, careful not to spook her or cause her to be aggressive.
“Hi Liz,” I said with a smile. “How are you?”
She looked up, her eyes already glazed. “Oh, hey.”
Taking Skylar’s report of Liz’s earlier drunkenness into account, it was clear to see a pattern emerging. The question was, is Liz an alcoholic or was she drinking in response to the stress of Heather’s murder?
Heck, I didn’t even know how Liz felt about Heather’s death.
“Do you mind if I sit?” I asked.
She waved a hand, and it floated in the air a bit too long. “No. G’head. Have a seat. What have you been up to this week?”
“Just working.” I climbed onto the bar stool next to me, wondering who invented such strange seating and why. Those things put your legs at the weirdest angle. I preferred the ninety-degree bend you got from a chair, or to stand.
“What kind of work do you do here? I thought you were an actress.”
“I was. My show got canceled. Now I’m part owner of a flower shop.”
“Really? I would have thought you’d be in Hollywood still, auditioning or something.”
I sighed. “I was ready for a break, you know? TV can be such a brutal business.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, taking a long pull on her drink.
We talked about the business for a while, and I ordered a Diet Coke and tried to convince her to join me for a couple of pounds of royal red shrimp.
“C’mon. They’re delicious, I promise. And I’ll teach you how to take the shells off.”
“I guess I should, while I’m here,” she conceded.
While we talked, Liz kept drinking, and when her voice started to slur I knew I had to act now, or she might get too drunk for me to get answers.
“So Liz, I’d love to see some of the footage from the show. Do you think I could?”
She emptied her glass, set it down on the bar, and ordered another. “Why not? Everybody else has.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the police confiscated it.”
Foo-doo.
“So what does that do to the show?”
“Kills it. At least this episode.” She sipped again. “Once I realized that we had a murder during one of these pageants I thought we had it made. Sounds awful, I know, but can you imagine how many people would tune in for that?”
It was awful, of course, but I’d thought the same thing. We both knew how Hollywood worked. People had killed for ratings before, and they’d kill for them again. The question was, is that what had happened here—had Liz or someone from her crew killed Heather Morgan just to drive up ratings?
You couldn’t blame the police. Perhaps there was a clue as to who killed Heather on the show’s footage. I doubted the murderer was dumb enough to be filmed actually poisoning Heather, but yo
u never knew what sort of conversations the film crew picked up. There could be some helpful information on those tapes, which was why I was dying to see the footage myself.
“That’s terrible. Is your boss pissed?”
“Yes,” she said, but a little smirk came over her face.
“What? What are you smiling about?”
“Well, everything’s digital, right?”
I nodded.
“So, I made copies before I handed it over to the police.”
“Get out!”
“No, I did.” She grinned, super proud of herself.
“Excellent! I want to see.”
“I can boot it up on my laptop in my room if you want to watch it. Bloody boring, actually. We didn’t get much good stuff after Heather warned me off filming.”
“Yeah. What happened with that?”
“The woman was a world-class bitch. That’s what happened with that. For no reason whatsoever she ordered me to stop filming. And after I had hundreds of hours of preproduction with her contestants, an ironclad contract, and permits with the city too.”
“So, it doesn’t sound like she had a leg to stand on.”
“She didn’t. But she got my moms all upset. Then, after the murder, I couldn’t get access to any of the big three. Their mothers shut us down. Or mothers and father, I should say.”
“You mean Bruce Martindale too? He wouldn’t let Anna Beth talk with you?”
“Right. Before the murder he let her sing like a little canary. I’ve got hours of pre-pageant confessionals with her. But all that’s worthless if I don’t have film of her at the pageant.”
“Who are the other ‘big three’?”
“That’s the formula for the show. We feature three girls who are going to compete in the pageant. Beforehand, we go to their homes, film them practicing, doing their usual thing. You know—show them in their normal life. Viewers eat that up with a spoon. Then we follow their road to the pageant, film them competing, show the results, and their reactions to those results. That’s really the best part—the tantrums, or those moms whose kids win and they want to rub everyone else’s nose in it. Honestly, we show people at their best and their worst. It’s great TV.”
