A Hair Raising Blowout
by
Constance Barker
Copyright 2016 Constance Barker
All rights reserved.
Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.
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Chapter 1
Turning my key in the front door lock of the salon on Monday morning, I looked down at the little girl who had come up beside me. I scanned the sidewalk in both directions looking for her mother and thought out loud, “Knockemstiff, Louisiana, is safe enough for a six-year-old to wander about in by herself, I suppose.” I looked at the scattering of broken glass a few shops down the street. “Or it was safe enough until last night.”
“Six and a half,” insisted the girl.
“Half what?” I said, looking down again at the little blond head.
“Six and a half,” she repeated. “I’m six and a half years old as of last Wednesday.”
“You had a half birthday and didn’t invite me?” I asked.
The word “But” began to form on the girl’s face, which shifted immediately into a wry smile. At six and a half, Sarah Jameson already had a fine appreciation of the absurd — a handy talent for getting along in Knockemstiff.
“Mama wonders if you could cut her hair today. She says she is desperate to get her hair cut, desperate with a capital D. I don’t know why it’s a capital D, if it’s not the beginning of a sentence, but that’s what she says.”
“I believe I can, Sarah, but let me check my book.” I swung the door open and let us both into the Teasen and Pleasen Hair Salon. “Why didn’t your mother call on the phone to make an appointment?”
“Daddy’s been on the phone hollerin’ for the past hour. He woke me up yelling ‘What?’ and ‘Damn,’ over and over. So Mama sent me down here to ask could she get her hair cut with a capital D.”
“OK, let’s see,” I said looking at my appointment book. “And Sarah,” I said absently, “nice young ladies don’t say ‘damn.’”
“That’s exactly what Mama says. I don’t think Daddy is setting a good example for me. Some days all he says is ‘damn’ all day.” She pursed her lips. “To tell you the truth,” she said, “this is looking like one of those days.”
I had been about to tell Sarah to send her mother over at 3:15 that afternoon, when I had an opening, but on second thought I said, “Tell your mother to come on over, Sarah. I’ll work her in right away.”
“My daddy says you work her over,” observed Sarah. “Mama comes home from here, and he yells, ‘Damn, what happened to your head? Has that woman worked you over again?’ Then they discuss the haircut and whatever else is on their minds, I guess.”
I took a lollipop from the bowl on the counter and handed it down to her. “Would you like a purple one, Sarah?”
“Yes, thank you, Miz Jefferies.”
“Go tell your mother to come around directly with a capital D, OK?”
As I was seeing Sarah out the door, I saw the slight form of Annie Simmerson coming along the sidewalk. “Annie,” I called out, “are you on your way to work?”
“Well, good morning, Savannah,” Annie said, and looking down, “Good morning, Sarah.” Sarah put her hand out and Annie shook it solemnly.
Annie turned back to me. “I’m on my way to Dr. Cason’s office, yes.” Annie worked as a secretary and assistant at the general practitioner’s office here in Knockemstiff. When you saw her on the street, she was always wearing a charcoal blazer, pressed white blouse and some flavor of slacks that would go with the pink lab coat she wore at work. She was only 25 but seemed older. Everyone loved her because she always had a radiant smile and a kind word, so I knew Sarah would be OK with Annie as an escort.
“Would you mind walking Sarah around the block to her apartment building?”
“I’d be delighted to do that on this fine sunny day, Savannah.” A sunny day in June meant that Knockemstiff would be oppressively hot. It was only 76 at this time of the morning, though, so a person determined to have a positive attitude could see the day as fine.
“Sarah honey,” I said, “how about if Miss Simmerson walks you home?”
Sarah frowned. She whispered to me, “Do I have to share my lollipop?”
I stepped back into the shop and pulled an orange lollipop out of the bowl for Annie and shooed them both down the sidewalk. “Miss Simmerson has her own lollipop. You two go on.”
“Yes Ma’am.”
Sarah skipped down the sidewalk, with the lollipop in one hand and her other hand held by Annie. Annie skipped a few steps herself, causing her brown curls to bounce. She slowed her walk so she could peer into the shop that had the smashed window, as Mr. Keshian came out of the shop with a broom. I could see him telling Annie about the window with that quiet intense way he has. Though I could not hear what he was saying, I could see Annie listening patiently and nodding. That was Annie, always taking time to express concern for other people’s problems. No trouble was too small for her attention.
The phone was ringing in the salon, so I went back in and picked it up to hear a raspy woman’s voice in full flow as soon as I lifted the phone from the cradle. The voice was in the middle of explaining how to season a cast iron skillet. “Let it bake in a 450 degree oven for half an hour,” the voice finished.
I added, “Do that process three or four times to make sure you’ve got a good finish.”
“Oh,” said the voice, “I didn’t realize you’d picked up, Savannah. Is this Savannah?”
I plucked one of my cards from the plastic holder on the counter and peered at it. “Savannah Jefferies,” I read out loud. “That’s what it says on my card.”
“Oh, Savannah, this is Dolores.”
While I was busy thinking, Yes, I know it’s Dolores, I walked over to get the coffee pot going. She continued without a pause to tell me about how her niece Julia had simmered jambalaya in her biggest cast iron skillet, the one Dolores inherited from her grandmother, and then scraped it out with a stainless steel scrub thingy. And that boyfriend of hers. And why couldn’t Emmit do something? And what’s going on with that broken window at the Paramabet place where they sell the funny étouffée?
And she was about to rattle on to another topic when I said, “Broken window?”
“Oh, Savannah, the broken window at the Paramabet place just three blocks from you. Haven’t you heard?”
“No, Dolores. What happened?”
“Oh, Savannah, the window of the shop,” she rasped dramatically, “was broken.” Dolores paused for effect. The only time Dolores Pettigrew ever paused was for effect.
“Dolores, when did this happen?”
“Oh, Savannah, Emmit told me about it on Sunday after services.”
So it must have happened Saturday night, I thought, and said aloud, “And Mr. Keshian’s window was broken Sunday night.”
“Oh, Savannah, the cobbler? Mr. Keshian the cobbler on your block? Oh dear. So we have a cluster of window breakings!” She paused.
“Dolores, two isn’t much of a cluster.” But she made a valid point. Two broken windows in one weekend was a crime wave for Knockemstiff, population 772, not counting the many people scattered around the countryside and the residents of the little knot of civilization that had grown up around the Interstate exit in recent decades.
Dolores was moving into the “Honestly, I don’t know what the world is coming to” phase of her observations
when Nellie Phlint came through the front door of the hair salon, ready for her first client at 10:00 am. I took the opportunity to break into Dolores’ overview of today’s moral turpitude with, “Oh, Dolores, sorry; Nellie just came in. Let me talk to you later? Thanks for the news about the window.” After another 10 minutes of additional Dolores observations and secondary, tertiary, and further good-byes (What comes after tertiary?) on my part, I got Dolores to wind down sufficiently to hang up.
I kept my hand on the phone, and it rang a few seconds later. When I picked it up, that raspy voice was already talking, this time about frying chicken, and when I heard Dolores’ niece replying in the background, I took the opportunity to say, “Dolores, will you be a little late for your appointment today?”
“Oh, Savannah, is that you? Say again?”
“Will you be a little late for your appointment today?”
“Oh, Savannah, yes. My niece Julia can’t drop me off until a quarter past 11 on account of her little boy. Did you hear about that already? You’re one of the best-informed people I know.” I was curious about what was happening with Julia’s little boy but thought it best not to ask. By the time I hung up the phone again, the coffee was perked.
“Dolores will be a little late for her appointment,” I called out to Nellie Phlint, who was in the back room looking for something.
“I’ve got her down for a quarter past 11,” she called back.
“Yep,” I said. We all expected Dolores about a quarter of an hour behind whatever time Dolores thought she was supposed to be there. Dolores was quite punctual if you reset your expectations by a quarter of an hour.
Nellie came out of the back room with a box of emery boards and orange sticks. She is the beautician at the Teasen and Pleasen, mainly doing nails, make-up and hair coloring.
“Did you have a nice weekend?” I asked over the rim of my coffee mug.
“Where to start…” She plopped down the box at her station, put both of her immaculately manicured hands on the little table, and twisted her head to look at me sideways. “That Rudy! It’s not enough that he drinks to excess on a Saturday night with those loud friends of his from the sawmill, he’s got to come home and wake up the kids to go bustling out into the woods to see some unusual owl he’s just heard.”
“The swamp by your house, you mean?”
“Those woods, yes.” Nellie lowered her forehead to the edge of the table. With her pixie cut, she looked like Peter Pan had crash landed — a Peter Pan who had moved out of Neverland long ago.
“You can just picture the bunch of them out in the swamp in the pitch dark looking for a bird that’s hooting up in a tree somewhere, can’t you? Well, it was exactly what you would expect, except none of the injuries was serious.”
Nellie’s husband and three boys had found no place in the natural world that they did not like and no season in which they did not like to go there. Nellie kept up with them as best she could, serving as safety officer as far as possible, which usually meant binding wounds and transporting injured parties to the Quick Help doc-in-a-box clinic over by the Interstate. Rudy and the three boys were some of the clinic’s best customers.
Nellie would rather have stayed home watching TV, but she figured that being outdoors with her husband more or less sober was better than having him off with his no-good friends, not all of whom were male. As a result of the outdoor activities, Nellie was a lean, strong, slightly weather-beaten woman, yet she somehow managed to maintain her manicure. I had never understood how she did that, and now I wondered how she had kept up with the boys in the swamp.
“Goodness, Nellie,” I said. “Were you hurt?”
She straightened up. “I’m fine, Savannah. I didn’t go into the woods with them. I stood at the edge of the trees with a flashlight so they could find their way out again. Otherwise, they’d still be in there. Did I mention he took his deer rifle into the woods ‘for protection’?”
“Oh dear.”
“I said, ‘Rudy, what is there in the woods next to our house that you need protection from?’”
“He said, ‘Nellie, there’s creatures in this world that don’t deserve to live.’”
“’Creatures?’ I yelled at him. ‘There’s no creatures in our woods.’ Which is not strictly true, but there’s hardly any gators anymore and nothing else you’d use a thirty-ought-six on. By this time they’re all tramping into the swamp.”
“He yells back at me over his shoulder, ‘Two-legged creatures, Nellie. They could be lurking anywhere with evil intent.’”
“So they’re thrashing around in there, and I never hear the owl again with all this commotion going on, but pretty soon I hear Rudy swear, and the boys all yell, ‘Daddy, are you OK?’ And it turns out he tripped over a root and twisted his ankle. The two older boys help him out of the woods, and bringing up the rear is my youngest, Dale, struggling along with that thirty-ought-six tucked under his arm like he’s going jousting with it, and the business end is pointed more or less in the direction of his father and brothers. I was praying the safety was on. I got over to take the rifle from Dale as quick as I could. The safety was on, and when I went to unload the gun later, I found it was never loaded the whole time. So that was good.”
“You know how to unload Rudy’s deer rifle?”
“Oh, yes, Savannah. Rudy insisted that I learn to handle that gun years ago ‘for protection.’ Anyway, I paid close attention to the deer rifle lessons so I would know how to unload the thing. I’ve probably unloaded that gun more times than anybody has unloaded a thirty-ought-six throughout history.”
She put her forehead back down on the table. “I’m too old for this.”
“Nellie, you’re only 42.”
“Are you sure? It feels like more. I’m going to check my ID.” She rummaged around in her purse. I handed her a cup of coffee. Eventually she pulled out a bottle of ibuprofen, shook out several tablets without looking, and swallowed them with a gulp of coffee. This is what passes for drug abuse in Knockemstiff.
I’ve known Nellie since we were both children. She dreamed of becoming a stylist for the rich and famous in Baton Rouge or maybe even New Orleans. Life didn’t turn out that way, thanks to the careless conclusion of one of their dates in the cab of Rudy’s pickup. (“I did at least enjoy it,” Nellie reported.) Rudy was her high school sweetheart, and she married him a few months ahead of the arrival of the first of their three boys.
Nellie’s 10 o’clock came in, along with the other two stylists who work at the salon, Betina Levesque and Pete Dawson. They made a nice looking couple, even though they were not a “couple.” Betina had eyes only for other men, and Pete had eyes only for other men also, a fact that he didn’t hide, but he was so shy, he’d never had a serious boyfriend. He lived vicariously through Betina’s stories of the studly males she dated, and she had dated a lot of studly males. And brought back a lot of stories.
A stunning redhead, Betina was wearing her usual little summer dress with flowers on it. (Her concession to winter was to put a coat over the cotton dress.) Betina was one of those girls who’s thoughtlessly sexy. I’d often see her leaning up against her male clients in alluring ways. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know the effect she had on these men. But if she thought about it at all, she must have thought that this was the way a girl was supposed to get along with males of the species. Betina was a lovely person through and through, though Pete sometimes cringed at the casual way she dismissed her suitors. In the two years since finishing high school, Betina had had maybe one relationship that lasted more than four months. We heard all about her exploits on Monday mornings.
Pete couldn't understand where she found these men. “How many good-looking 20-somethings could there be in a town this size?” he asked.
Betina would toss her head and explain that if the domestic market could not support the local demand, a girl just had to import what she needed. As she trimmed the shoulder-length hair of her first client of the day, she said, “Why,
just this weekend I was entertained by a nice young man from Studlyville.” That was what she called the nearby town of Stanleyville that was home to a large oil refinery. “He took me to dinner at the Studlyville Hotel, and we went to see a movie at the State Theatre.”
“What movie did you see?” Pete asked. He always asked what movie Betina saw because it amused him to hear that she had no idea.
“It had some shooting and explosions. Helicopter gunships. And that hunky guy from the jungle commando movie that was out last summer. You know the one I mean? I don’t recall the name of it. It was so exciting.”
“So you like this guy? Is he super-studly?” Pete asked.
“Does he have a brain?” Nellie added.
“He’s studly enough to make a movie exciting, I guess,” Betina said. “And I’ll have you know,” she said with her green eyes flashing in a good-natured way in Nellie’s direction, “that he’s thinking about going to the junior college over in Paudy to study oil refining.”
Sarah’s mother, Bee, came in at this point, chatting with Annie, and I remembered that Annie had an appointment with Pete for a trim. They both went over to the “café” area of the salon. We keep an urn of coffee going and put pastries out. People leave payment for the pastries in an honor-system basket. I could see that Annie was sympathizing with something Bee said. Annie dropped a couple of dollars in the basket and then dropped in a couple more for Bee’s Danish.
Meanwhile, Betina was carrying on with her date drama. Pete was urging her to further specifics, which we all considered part of his Monday-morning duties.
Betina said, “You remember what Zac Ephron looked like in Hairspray? He looks kinda like that, and he does dress nicely for a guy who works at an oil refinery.” She stopped trimming her client’s bangs and got a distant look in her eyes. “He has a really cute tongue,” she said.
Both Pete and Betina’s client let out little moan-like noises. In the eight months since Betina started working at the salon, I’ve noticed a significant upswing in Monday-morning business. The clients scheduled for later in the morning tended to come in early and enjoy cups of coffee and Betina tales until their appointment times rolled around. No hurry.
A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 1
