A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1)

by Constance Barker

  We all carried on in this leisurely way until 11:14, when we were surprised to see Dolores Pettigrew coming in breathlessly a minute early, exclaiming about a windshield even before she had the front door of the salon open. “I’ve never seen the like of it,” she concluded, standing in the doorway, “in our little town.”

  “Good morning, Dolores,” I said. “The like of what?”

  “Oh, good morning, Savannah. The like of August Anderson’s windshield.”

  Betina’s head came around. “August’s windshield? What’s going on?”

  August was a close friend of Betina’s, equally pretty but as shy and reserved as she could possibly be, so August did not have the male following that Betina enjoyed.

  “Oh, Betina,” Dolores gasped, “I just heard it directly from the Bald Eagle.”

  The Bald Eagle, Sanders Bloomington was a 72-year old widower who was almost entirely bald. He had appeared in the doorway behind Dolores exactly on time for his regular weekly appointment with Betina. Suddenly it was clear why Dolores was one minute early: She got here just in time to upstage the Eagle’s news.

  Except that we hadn’t understood what she was talking about, so as Sanders came in the salon we all stared at him and waited.

  He looked around at our expectant faces. “I see you’ve heard the news.”

  “What happened, Sanders?” I asked.

  “This morning I got up at 5:30 to go to my sky diving class and saw the windshield of August Anderson’s Toyota in the driveway next door.”

  “It was smashed?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Somebody had spray-painted the word “SLUT” on the windshield in big red letters.”

  Chapter 2

  In some places and for some people, having SLUT painted on their windshield would be regarded as an annoying prank. The worst part would be scraping the paint off.

  But Knockemstiff was still a quiet, conservative town, and August Anderson was a quiet, conservative young woman. She would take the painted “verdict” as a stain on her character. She would think that's what people must think of her. As Betina said in the silence that followed the Bald Eagle’s description of the incident, “August will be mortified.”

  No one who visited the salon that day could come up with any reason why someone would paint SLUT on August’s windshield. No one could think of any reason to be jealous of August. Sure, August was as pretty as any girl in town, but she was threatening no one’s relationship with anyone. Betina was certain of that.

  The irony was, August wasn't a slut. As Betina pointed out, if August had had even one relationship that went beyond a serious kiss, she would not take the slut thing so seriously.

  Betina had tried to match up August with any number of boys, but August usually resisted. They had double-dated a few times. Betina was sure that all of August’s double-date guys (as well as one of the guys who was supposed to be Betina’s date) had asked August out afterwards. August had gone out with one of those guys, maybe a couple of times. That was about it.

  That meant that August had refused dates with a number of guys. Could one of them be upset enough to want to embarrass her? Betina couldn't imagine this was the case. But try as we did, we couldn't come up with a better explanation.

  The smashed windows also remained mysterious. Someone who talked to Mr. Keshian, maybe it was Annie Simmerson, said that he had found a brass cherub on the floor of his shop. It looked like a paperweight. Someone apparently threw it at his window.

  No one could think of any reason to dislike Mr. Keshian. He'd been a cobbler in Knockemstiff for nearly two decades, and he did excellent work on shoes, handbags, belts — anything leather. He'd never been known to cheat anyone. In fact, several people who lived on limited incomes said that he had made repairs for them and would not accept a cent in payment. Who would want to harm such a person? In fact, all the victims of these crimes and pranks were upstanding citizens, so who in the heck was targetting them. And was I next? Somebody wrote SLUT on my windshield they'd get slapped into next week.

  After I had blow-dried my last head of hair on Monday, I walked home by way of the shop run by the Paramabets. They have been in Knockemstiff far longer than Mr. Keshian. A couple of generations of Paramabets have offered various types of take-out food from the same shop for as long as I can remember. Their most popular items were tacos. I have no idea how people from Delhi became taco masters, but they were famous for making the best tacos in this half of Louisiana, not that they had a lot of competition. They also sold an Indian flat bread called nan that everybody liked and a dish they called étouffée, but that some observed was actually crawdad and okra curry.

  I don’t know a curry from a surrey, but I loved the étouffée and stopped at the Paramabets at least once a week for take-out food. This looked like a good time to walk by and take a look at their smashed window. The thundershowers that had passed through briefly in the afternoon cooled off the temperature a few degrees. The rain steamed on the hot streets, though, sending the humidity even higher than it'd already been. The air smelled steamy and metallic. My sleeveless top was already clinging to me before I was halfway down the block.

  When I got there, Connor O’Sullivan was removing the last of the broken glass and window frame from the front of the Paramabet’s shop. Connor is a third-generation blacksmith who makes everything from spiral staircases to small sculptures he calls “iron poems.” He wrote poems in words as well, and often read them aloud on open-mic nights at the Knockemback Tavern in town.

  Tonight, though, Connor was plying his sideline trade as a glazier. Connor’s father had seen that blacksmithing did not occupy a “growing market niche” and apprenticed the teenage Connor to an expert glazier for a few years. This was back in the town of Kilkeedy, Ireland. Connor says that the town was close enough to Limerick to make him a poet but not close enough to make him write limericks.

  I was fond of Connor and delighted to see him there. “How goes it, Connor?” I said as I walked up behind him.

  I got the impression that he stiffened slightly at the sound of my voice, but he turned around with his usual, “Top o’ the evening to ya, Savannah” — the Irish cliché that amused us both. Though he’d never outgrown his Irish accent, he only used Irishisms for amusement. Tonight he didn’t sound amused. He had tiny shards of glass in his flaming red beard that glittered in the light from the Paramabet’s shop.

  “Glazing got you down, Connor?”

  “It’s bad business this.”

  I peered into the shop and waved at one of the younger Paramabets behind the counter. “Are they pretty upset by the whole thing?”

  “Less upset than they have a right to be, I’d say. The grandfather told me that this is simply karma for some past misdeed.” He shook his head. “It’s the work of a first-class rascal, if you ask me. They threw this at the window.”

  He handed me a brass paperweight of an angel as big as his fist.

  “Mr. Keshian found a brass paperweight in his shop, too.”

  “Look at this.” He pointed to the little parking area next to the shop where he'd arranged several of the larger pieces of broken glass on the gravel. Following his finger moving across the pieces of glass I saw that someone had spray-painted letters on the window before it was broken. He traced out SL on the left and skipped to the right, where he traced out an E.

  “The pieces in the middle are mostly too small to deal with, but if you look at the bigger pieces here and here, we can guess there was an IM there.”

  “SLIME?” My stomach turned over. “These people have lived here for ages, and I’ve never heard an unkind word uttered about them.” Then I thought about the spray paint on August’s windshield and the other broken window. “Oh no,” I said, “I wonder if Mr. Keshian’s window was spray painted too.”

  “I’ll put in a new window for him tomorrow, and I’d just as soon not know about any more spray painting.”

  I agreed with him and told him that Mr.
Keshian had swept up the glass. But as I was going in to get my food, I was already wondering if Mr. Keshian had dumped the shards into the dumpster behind his shop.

  With an order of étouffée and two pieces of flat bread, I walked home deep in thought, no longer hungry. What was happening to Knockemstiff? I grew up here. I had married at 22 and moved to Baton Rouge with my husband. When the marriage fell apart after a few years, I moved back to Knockemstiff because I liked the quiet friendliness of the place.

  Literally a backwater, the town of Knockemstiff, Richwater Parish, is on a bayou that was left to its own devices a couple hundred years ago when a branch of the Atchafalaya River decided to move its business 40 miles to the east. That fickle river has changed course every few hundred years since the dawn of time. When part of the river silted up, it found an easier course to the east. As the river flowed merrily off to someplace else, it left behind old sections that still have water in them, some of them flowing this way and that, some of them stagnant and swampy. These river-shaped sections of water are bayous. One of the stagnant, partly swampy sections is the Knockemstiff Bayou.

  Some of the old guys who owned shacks on the Knockemstiff Bayou predicted that the river would change back again. “This property’ll be worth something again,” they’d cackle. “You’ll see. Give it another hundred years.”

  Meanwhile, the oil refinery in Stanleyville had brought in a number of outside influences. People came in from elsewhere, not all of them roustabouts. By and large, though, Knockemstiff remained a quaint world unto itself.

  We had seen isolated incidents of spray painting before, but everyone figured it was teenagers acting out. Now that I thought about it, some of the things that had been painted before were a bit mean; not the artistic tags you would expect from teens. None of the earlier spray painting had been as nasty as SLIME and SLUT.

  By the time I got home, I had made up my mind to see if I could find out if Mr. Keshian’s window had been painted. I put the étouffée in the fridge and called Nellie to ask if she would help me.

  “You’re inviting me to go dumpster diving for broken glass in the dark?”

  “Ahhh, yes, that’s about right,” I said, then added “I have a good flashlight.”

  “I too have a good flashlight. So it won’t be entirely dark. Good. Excellent. Here’s another thought: Let’s pass this idea to the police and let them do the diving.”

  “The Knockemstiff police?”

  “You make a good point,” she admitted.

  “Nellie, I think this needs to be done, and we’re the only ones who can do it.”

  “How did I get to be one of the only ones who can do it?” she wondered.

  “Nellie, this is the same dumpster we use for the salon, and you know your way around in there.”

  She barked a rueful laugh. Nellie had closed up the salon for me one evening and accidentally tossed out the day’s receipts with the hair clippings and other trash instead of taking the money to the bank. We hadn’t realized it for a couple of days. Fortunately, the dumpster had not been emptied. Nellie dug through a lot of rubbish in that dumpster to find the money. Pete had been gentlemanly enough to climb in and help her, though he also delighted in referring to the dumpster forever after as the “night depository.”

  “Bring some gloves,” I added.

  Half an hour later I was peering into the dumpster when Nellie walked up with a flashlight that looked like a car’s headlight.

  “Your flashlight is way better than mine,” I said with admiration. “What else have you got there? Is that a rifle?”

  “Rudy made me bring it for protection.”

  “I feel safer already.”

  “I also have a first aid kit,” she said hefting a large suitcase. “Just the normal items of a mother with three boys.”

  “Safer and safer,” I said. “I looked in the dumpster while I was waiting, and I think some of the pieces are pretty big. They’re over on the right side.”

  We climbed in the left side and started hefting the jagged pieces of glass so we could get a good look. Right away we saw red spray paint on some pieces and put those aside.

  “Hop out, and I’ll hand the painted ones to you.”

  In less than an hour we had only cut ourselves once apiece and had put together enough pieces of glass to make out SH. Then I found a big piece with most of a T.

  “I’ll bet we can guess the letter in the middle.”

  “Yeah,” Nellie said. “Part of the SLUT SLIME series. Collect them all. Win a prize.”

  We wrapped the pieces of glass in newspaper and stashed them in the salon’s back room in case they were needed as evidence. I helped Nellie carry all the stuff she’d brought back to her place. She thanked me for including her.

  I was exhausted. Now that I was walking alone, it was kind of creepy knowing that someone out there had mean intentions and was willing to smash things. What if I bumped into this person? What I did see around the corner surprised me even more. Lying on the grass was a small shape in a white dress, as if a little angel had crashed on the lawn. I ran over and shone my flashlight on her face. Sarah! I bent down over her, shouting her name.

  Her eyes popped open, and she screamed in my face, thrashing to get away.

  “Zombie! Zombie!” she shouted.

  “It’s Savannah, honey. Calm down. Are you OK?”

  She lay still on the grass. “Oh,” she said. She sat up. “You don’t smell so good. I thought you were one of the undead.”

  “Mmm, I wrangled with a dumpster tonight. How come you’re sleeping on the lawn?” The white angel dress was actually a terrycloth robe, I saw now.

  “I was looking at the Milky Way. Must have fallen asleep. Can’t a girl even take a nap without people shouting?”

  I could hear her parents inside the apartment building arguing loudly. They hadn’t even noticed her scream.

  “Sorry I woke you.” I sat down next to her, noticing the object lying in the grass that was almost as big as she was. I picked it up. “Is this your rifle?”

  “It’s Daddy’s thirty-ought-six,” she explained. “I unloaded it, but it’s not a toy to be played with.” She took it from me and placed it carefully on the other side of her.

  “Do you carry it around for protection?” I asked.

  “Protection from what?” she asked.

  “Um, I don’t know,” I said. “What are you doing with it out here?”

  “I brought it out here while Daddy and Mama are discussing her manicure and the red dress she bought over in Stanleyville. It’s really pretty. Daddy started wondering where she might be going in that dress, only he called it a ‘fancy get-up.’ ‘Where you think you’re going in that fancy get-up?’ he said. ‘That ain’t no church outfit.’ Then he started speculating about where she might be going. When he starts speculating like that, I think it’s a good idea to take the thirty-ought-six someplace else.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  The earth under the grass was still damp from the rain, but in a hot, humid climate like this, you get used to being damp one way or another. “It’s nice out here, isn’t it?” I said, looking up at the sky. The rain clouds had mostly passed, and the sky was decorated with a brilliant spray of stars. A bright sliver of moon was hanging in the west.

  Sarah nodded in the dark.

  Sarah’s mother had told me at the salon that morning that Sarah had arrived home crying. The encounter with Mr. Keshian must have upset her. “Sarah, you remember this morning when you came to the salon?”

  She nodded again and hugged her knees to her chest.

  “What did you think of all that broken glass at Mr. Keshian’s?”

  “He was very upset,” she said. “It made me think how upset my daddy gets if I break a glass.” She shifted to her gruff daddy voice. “‘Can’t you be more careful, Sarah?’ he says.” She shrugged. “I guess I can, actually. Anyway, Mr. Keshian was mad at whoever broke his window.”

  “Did that make yo
u sad?”

  “Well, mad, really. At first I was scared, since Mr. Keshian was so upset. Miss Simmerson asked him did he know who might have broken his window. He gave us an angry look. The way he was talking, it was like he thought I broke his window. Miss Simmerson said that it must be hard for him, since he doesn’t make very much money with his shop. She was very sympathetic. She said it must be terrible to know that people in town don’t like him.”

  “Annie said that people don’t like Mr. Keshian?”

  “Was that wrong? Why would someone break Mr. Keshian’s window if they like him?”

  I was about to ask Sarah to tell me exactly what Annie had said but stopped. Sarah is quite a talker for a six-year-old (or even a six-and-a-half-year-old). Still, exact quotes were asking too much.

  “There might be one person who doesn’t like Mr. Keshian. Or maybe someone just felt like breaking a window, and Mr. Keshian’s was the first one they saw.”

  Sarah looked at me dubiously. “Why would somebody just feel like breaking a window? People know they’re not supposed to break windows.”

  I was at a loss to explain random mischief myself. “It is mysterious, isn’t it? People seem to do things for no reason. It’s like that little boy who lives around the corner from you. Tommy? The other day he took your scooter and rode it into a hole in the street so that the wheel broke?”

  “That’s not mysterious, Miz Jefferies,” she said with some exasperation. “I know why he did that. It’s because he’s an idiot.”

  “That does explain a lot.”

  “Maybe somebody broke Mr. Keshian’s window because they’re an idiot.”

  “I think we’ve solved the mystery, Sarah.”

  I wanted to ask more questions, but it was late, and the argument in the apartment building had gone quiet. “Bed time for all young ladies, I think.” I stood up and brushed the grass off my pants — a futile gesture for pants that had been dumpster-diving.