Powdered Peril

by Jessica Beck

  “I’d say we tackle the ladies,” I said.

  “You’re not afraid of Bryan Morgan, are you?” Grace asked gently.

  I thought about it for a second, and then I admitted, “I wouldn’t say that I’m afraid of him, but then again, I wouldn’t want to be alone in a dark alley with him, either. To tell the truth, he kind of gives me the creeps.”

  “I know what you mean, but that doesn’t make him a murderer, does it?”

  “No,” I acknowledged, “but it doesn’t clear him, either.”

  “So, should we tackle Kaye or Leah first?”

  “I vote Leah,” I said. “I heard she’s already back in town, staying with her uncle again. I guess Ida put too many restrictions on her.”

  “Great. Nothing like a little family honor to defend. Burt isn’t exactly your biggest fan, is he?”

  I grinned at her. “That’s what makes it so nice. I don’t have to tiptoe around him, do I?”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Is Leah here?” I asked Burt as Grace and I walked into the hardware store.

  It was clear that Burt wasn’t all that happy to see us, but that was just too bad. He said sharply, “I told you both, she left town, not that you ever bothered respecting me or my family’s wishes. My sister told me you were up at her place, so don’t try to deny it.”

  “Why would we? She was really nice to us,” I said, hoping that he’d get the hint.

  “Yeah, well, she always was a softie. Don’t make that mistake with me.”

  “Burt, we’re going to find your niece one way or the other, so you might as well help us. The last time we spoke, Leah was really cooperative, and we left things on really good terms.”

  “I don’t know why you think I should believe that, because I don’t. Not that it matters. She’s not here,” he repeated.

  “Come on, Suzanne. Let’s go,” Grace said, tugging at my arm. “It’s no use.”

  I wasn’t about to give up that easily, but something in Grace’s expression told me it was time to retreat. I trusted her instincts almost as much as I did my own. “Fine, but we’ll be back later, Burt.”

  “Do what you want. I can’t stop you. But I’ll be here, you can count on that,” he said, and then he dismissed us both.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Grace as we walked out onto the sidewalk together. “We can’t just let him off the hook like that. We need to find Leah.”

  “I did,” she said with a grin. “While you were chatting with Burt, I was looking out the window, and guess who I saw?”

  “Leah, I’d wager, but where is she now?” I asked as I glanced up and down Springs Drive. I didn’t see any sign of her now.

  “She just ducked into the Cutnip, and if we play things right, we might just have a captive audience when we question her.”

  “That’s brilliant,” I said as we walked across the street, passed the town clock, and then headed into the beauty parlor to see what we could find out about Leah and her alibi.

  * * *

  “Are you finally coming in for a new hairstyle, Suzanne?” Wilma Gentry asked as Grace and I walked into Cutnip. Somewhere in her forties, the salon owner was wearing her signature tight black stretch pants and leopard print blouse under her smock. “You know, you could do worse than try mine.”

  I looked at the giant ball of teased henna on her head, and it was all I could do not to laugh out loud. It wouldn’t have been well received, though, especially since there were half a dozen women sitting in chairs waiting patiently to have their own big hair done.

  “Thanks for the offer,” I said as I spotted Leah getting her hair washed, “but I just need a second with her.”

  Cynthia Trent, Wilma’s most conservative stylist and a woman close to my age, was working on Leah’s hair, wetting it under the sink and no doubt cutting off any chance Leah had of hearing our conversation.

  “What can I do for you, Suzanne?” Cynthia asked.

  “Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. It’s Leah I need to speak with.”

  Cynthia nodded. “It’ll be a second. She can’t hear a thing right now.”

  Wilma didn’t look all that pleased to see us hovering in front of Cynthia’s station, but she didn’t say anything. I’d been thrown into her world once when one of her stylists had been murdered, not because of the way she did hair, but because of who she’d been dating.

  Cynthia finished soaking Leah’s hair, and wrapped it in a towel as Leah sat up.

  “We need a minute of your time,” I said.

  “What?” Leah asked as she first became aware of us. It took a second for it to register. “What’s going on, Suzanne? I already told you and Grace everything I know.”

  “That’s not quite true,” Grace said as Cynthia quickly toweled off her hair.

  “Can’t we do this later? I’m kinda busy right now,” she said.

  “I don’t mind if you don’t,” Cynthia said. I wasn’t sure she was enhancing her tip, but I appreciated the fact that she was trying to help me out. Or was she just curious about what we wanted to talk to her client about?

  “Go on then, get it over with,” Leah said.

  “If you need a little privacy, you can use the back room,” Cynthia relented, so maybe her motives weren’t so base after all. It was tough to miss when Wilma scowled at her. The salon owner cherished gossip nearly as much as she did receipts, and I had a feeling the stylist would be getting scolded for even suggesting we take our conversation somewhere else.

  “I’ve got nothing left to hide,” Leah said, the resignation clear in her voice.

  “Wonderful,” I said. “All we need is your alibi the night Peter was murdered, and we’ll leave you alone about this forever.”

  Leah didn’t look all that pleased with the question. “What do you want from me? I already told you.”

  “No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t,” Grace said.

  “I was home alone,” she said as her eyes shifted around the beauty parlor.

  I knew she was lying, but I also realized that she wasn’t going to tell me right there in front of everyone else.

  “Good enough,” I said. “That’s all we needed. Thanks for your time.”

  Grace looked puzzled, but it was nothing compared to Wilma’s reaction. “Seriously? You’re buying that lame story?”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” Leah asked. “It’s the truth.”

  Wilma realized she was in danger of offending one of her customers. “Of course it is. I’m sorry, I’ve just been watching so much truTV that I get caught up in this stuff. It’s like the drama’s taking over my life, you know?”

  “Did you see the case about the missing mom, and they found her in Las Vegas in the middle of her husband’s trial for her murder?” one of the clients asked.

  “I’d have gone there, too, if I’d been married to that man,” another volunteered.

  “I would have gone with her,” one of the other stylists added.

  I broke in before they dragged me into their debate. “Thanks again, Leah. We’ll see you’all later.”

  Grace and I left the building, but instead of going back to her rental car, I sat down on one of the benches by the town clock.

  Grace nodded her approval. “We’re going to ambush her out here, right?”

  I smiled. “I’d like to think of it more as if we’re continuing our questioning in a more private setting.”

  Grace looked around, and then nodded. “You know, there’s a very real chance that she might not give us any more of an answer out here than she did in there.”

  “Look at it this way,” I said. “Here, at least there’s a chance that she’ll tell us the truth. It seems as though Leah cares more about what people think than she lets on. If we get her alone, we might just find out where she really was.”

  “You don’t expect her to tell us anything if it incriminates her, do you?”

  I shook my head. “Grace, I’m still not sure if she did it or not. Have you made up your mind
already?”

  “No,” my best friend admitted. “Maybe I just want her to be the one.”

  “It can’t be easy hearing all that she’s had to say,” I said. “But hang in there. We’re getting close. I feel it in my bones.”

  “Well,” Grace said with a slight smile, “if it’s not Leah, then it’s most likely going to be Bryan, Kaye, or Nan.”

  “If we even have the murderer on our list,” I reminded her. “There might be a lead that Chief Martin is following right now that’s going to flush out the killer, and we may have never heard of him. Or her,” I added, realizing that our own list was heavily slanted toward women.

  “I don’t care much who catches the murderer,” Grace admitted. “I just want this mess to be over.”

  We waited out on the bench for a long time, and when I looked at the clock above us yet again, it had been nearly an hour. “What’s keeping her? She should have been finished by now.”

  “Should we go check on her?” Grace asked.

  “I don’t know how we can do that without arousing more suspicion,” I said.

  “Suzanne, I don’t care. I’m going in.”

  I followed her, wondering what we would say, but Grace took care of it. “What happened to Leah?” she asked as we walked back in.

  “I thought you were done with her,” Wilma said, waving her scissors around in the air like a baton.

  “We just have one more question for her and then we’re finished,” Grace said.

  Cynthia looked puzzled. “I don’t know what to tell you, but she’s not here. She slipped out twenty minutes ago.”

  “That’s impossible. We were sitting by the clock the entire time,” I confessed.

  “I wondered why she wanted to go out the back door,” Cynthia said.

  “She didn’t say where she was going by any chance, did she?” Grace asked.

  “Not a word. Sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as we are,” I said.

  We left the hair salon, and I told Grace, “She’s getting pretty good at eluding us, isn’t she?”

  “If it were an Olympic event, she’d win the gold medal every time.”

  I shrugged. “Let’s go talk to Bryan. We’ve been lied to so much lately as people smile at us, it might just be refreshing to have a little open hostility.”

  “What possible reason could we give him to talk to us, Suzanne?”

  I remembered the cash we’d taken from Peter’s apartment. “Let’s drop by the donut shop, and then I’ll tell you what I have in mind.”

  We drove over, even though we could have easily walked the short distance, and I saw the sign Chief Martin had put in the window. It said simply, CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  “That’s not right,” I said. “I’m just shutting down today. This sign makes it look as though I’m going out of business.”

  “That’s why we came by here?” Grace asked. “So you could fix your sign?”

  “Of course not,” I said as I took it down. “But now that I’ve seen it, I’m going to put a new one up since we’re already here.”

  Once we were inside, I took a sheet of paper and wrote, OPEN TOMORROW, THURSDAY, BUSINESS AS USUAL and put it in the window from the inside. After I did that, I walked into the back and pulled an old-fashioned donut sign made of raised metal from the wall.

  “What are you doing now, redecorating?”

  “This is my personal version of a safe,” I told her. Once I had the sign down, I started to take the banded cash out that we’d gotten from Peter’s place.

  “That’s pretty creative,” Grace admitted. “I’ve just got that old safe I don’t use in my basement that’s tucked under the steps. I should give it to you since I don’t use it myself.”

  “Thanks, but this works fine for me. I never have much cash on hand, but that’s where I keep it, if you ever want to rob me,” I said with a smile.

  “It’s so much smarter than most folks could figure out,” she commented.

  “And economical, too. Who’s going to check behind a sign like that for a safe? It’s as secure as I need it to be.”

  “So then, we’re giving the money to Bryan,” she said when she saw that I had the cash.

  “It’s the right thing to do, since he’s Peter’s executor,” I said. “Besides, this way, he’s bound to talk to us, if for no other reason than to get his hands on the cash.”

  “We’re just going to hand it over to him?” she asked.

  “It’s not going to be that easy for him. He’s going to have to jump through some hoops before we turn it over. Are you okay with that?” I asked as I handed her the banded bills.

  “It was never ours to begin with,” she said. “I’d just as soon we didn’t have it anymore, so let’s go.”

  * * *

  As we drove to Bryan’s place, I noticed that Grace had lost a lot of her nervousness about driving.

  “This rental car’s nice, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Better than what I had before. I can’t wait to see what I’m getting next.”

  “It must be nice having a company car,” I said.

  Grace frowned a bit. “Suzanne, don’t kid yourself. I learned early on that if a company gives you a perk like that, you’re expected to use it for them. I can’t tell you the miles I’ve logged driving for them, and now that I’m a supervisor, it’s just gotten worse.”

  “You still like what you’re doing, though, right?”

  “Of course I do, but I haven’t ever met anyone who had a perfect job.”

  “I don’t know,” I said after a long pause. “I really like what I do for a living.”

  She took her gaze from the road for a second to look at me. “Are you telling me that you enjoy getting up in the middle of the night while everyone else is sleeping just so you can make them donuts?”

  “Okay, I might change the hours if I could,” I admitted with a laugh.

  “There you go, then.”

  * * *

  By the time we got to Bryan’s house, we’d come up with a way of dealing with him, but that all went out the window when we arrived. He was standing by his door having a very public argument with someone else we needed to talk to. It appeared that Kaye Belson was paying a visit herself, for what reason, I had no idea.

  But I was going to find out.

  “Keep low and drive on past his place,” I said as Grace started to pull in.

  “Why?” she asked, but she ducked down a little as she kept driving.

  “Pull over right here,” I said, as we passed a row of spruce trees that blocked one side of Bryan’s property.

  She did as I asked, and that’s when I spotted a familiar car just ahead of us, its driver also watching the scene unfold on the porch.

  There was no reason in the world I wouldn’t recognize it. Grace and I had tried to follow it when we’d been in Montview.

  It was Leah’s cherry-red Trans Am!

  I got out of the car before Grace could even come to a full stop, and hurried toward where Leah was parked. She must have seen me, though, and her car suddenly shot down the street as if she were being chased by demons.

  Grace pulled up beside me and asked, “Want me to follow her?”

  I shook my head. “You’d never catch her. Why don’t you just go ahead and park.”

  She did as I suggested, and as we got close to the trees, which offered a perfect shield for us, she whispered, “What was Leah doing here, anyway?”

  “I’d say that she was stalking Bryan, if I had a guess,” I replied softly. “We’ll deal with her later, though. I’m more interested in what those two are arguing about at the moment.”

  We had no trouble hearing either voice from where we hid, since neither one of them was making any effort at all to control their volume, and we could peek through the bushes to watch them as well. It was like live theater, though none of it was scripted, and the element of danger present was real enough.

  “I want it, Bryan. It rightfully belongs to me,
” Kaye yelled, and I could certainly feel the heat from her temper from where we stood.

  “I’m telling you, I don’t have it,” Bryan yelled back, looming over the young girl like a man mountain. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” I caught a smug expression on his face as Kaye looked away for a split second, and I had a feeling that Bryan was hiding something from her, and gloating about it as well.

  Kaye backed down a little from his presence, taking a step off the porch. Her voice was quite a bit more timid as she added, “Bryan, it’s not worth anything to anyone but me. I just want something to remember your brother by.”

  “Cut out his obituary then, and paste it in your scrapbook,” Bryan said. “Now, go away.”

  “I’m not leaving until I get what is rightfully mine,” Kaye said, and I had to admire her courage, if not her common sense. “Call the police, if you have to.”

  “I don’t need them to fight my battles for me,” Bryan said as he took a step toward her. “I can deal with you myself.”

  I was still trying to decide what the best course of action was for us to take when Grace stepped through the trees toward them.

  I no longer had an option then, so I followed her.

  “Are you sure you want to do that in front of witnesses?” Grace asked.

  Bryan’s fierce scowl suddenly disappeared. “I’m not doing anything. She won’t leave, and I’m tired of asking her.”

  “I want those letters Peter wrote me. They’re bundled up in a packet, and they’re mine,” Kaye protested.

  Bryan looked at me and asked, “Did you find anything like that when you cleaned out his apartment?”

  It was a little too close to the truth for my taste. “We didn’t find any letters,” I replied, hoping neither one of them pushed me on it. “Did you find any letters, Grace?”

  “No, there were no letters that I saw,” she said, mimicking my answer. In a nearly broken voice, she suddenly asked Kaye, “He really wrote you letters?”

  “Seven of them, to be exact,” she said, a little too smugly for my taste. Then she pouted a little as she went on to explain, “When he found out that I had kept them, he took them back. But Peter said that he’d keep them safe for me.”