by Hillary Avis
I turned back to the door and then paused in my tracks.
Tambra hadn’t been home between the festival and McKenzie’s murder. She must have looked up the comportment clause beforehand—which meant she knew about something else McKenzie had done. Another instance of drinking, maybe? I glanced back at the book and for the first time, noticed that the folded piece of paper wasn’t just a bookmark. It had writing on the inside. I didn’t have time to read it here, though. I slid the paper out of the book and stashed it in my purse just as Eli turned back to me with the basket in his hands.
“All done,” he said. He brought me the basket, quickly twining his fingers with mine as he handed it to me. “Have fun at the pool.”
His brief touch made my cheeks redden, and he winked at me. I caught the state police officer giving us a dirty look, so I turned my back on both of them and marched out the door, my head held high. I was leaving, anyway.
When I got back to the Suburban, both boys were out of their seatbelts and pressing their noses to the glass so they looked like piglets. I laughed and, balancing the basket on my hip, opened the door—or tried to. It was locked. And as soon as I turned the key in the door, Ollie, grinning wickedly, slammed his hand down on the door lock again. Dylan howled with laughter at my chagrined expression.
Brats.
I held up the teddy bear from the top of the basket and slowly squeezed its head in my fist, shaking it slightly so its legs flopped to and fro, as if to say open the door or the bear gets it. Dylan got the message immediately. His chin wobbled a little and he pushed past Ollie to unlock the door. Ollie shot him a derisive look but quickly scrambled back to his seat and before I got the door all the way open.
“It wasn’t me!” he declared. “I didn’t do it.”
“Nice try. I saw you do it.”
Ollie crossed his arms. “Not the first time. He did it first.”
I leaned in and handed the teddy bear to Dylan. “I don’t care who it was. If we don’t get going, you’re going to miss your swim class.”
“Buckle up, Dylan!” Ollie’s voice was sharp with annoyance. “Put away that stupid bear.”
“He’s not stupid!” Dylan said hotly. Ollie jerked the bear out of his hands, making Dylan squawk in protest and launch himself at Ollie with both fists flailing.
I rubbed my forehead. “Please don’t bicker. Just buckle your seatbelts so we can get to the pool on time.”
With no small amount of grumbling, the boys obliged, and we arrived at the pool with just enough time for them to change. With Dylan’s little paw in my left hand and the basket of trunks and towels in my right, I herded Ollie to the front desk, where a disinterested looking teenager in a red one-piece raised one eyebrow at us.
“Ollie and Dylan are here for their lesson,” I said, slightly out of breath.
She flipped her ponytail over her shoulder and snapped her gum. “Archer’s in the pool already.”
“Is he their instructor?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “Uh, yeah.”
You can live fifty-seven years on this earth, earn a college degree, raise a child, and travel to twenty-six countries, but a teenager in a minimum-wage job can still make you feel like dirt. “Well, how was I supposed to know that?” I snapped.
“He’s the only swim instructor, ma’am.”
“Again, how was I supposed—”
“C’mon, Dylan! We’re going to be late!” Ollie tugged the basket out from under my arm and pointed to the clock above the front desk as it ticked over to two-thirty. Dylan dropped my hand like a hot potato and, before I could stop them, followed his brother into the men’s locker room. I started after them, but the front desk girl jerked her head toward the other door.
“That way. You can meet them on the pool deck.”
“Fine.” I stormed through the women’s locker room, which was awash in baby blue tile in swirling wave patterns, and out to the pool. It wasn’t anything special, the standard rectangle with two diving boards at the deep end. A row of molded plastic chairs, the kind that stack, lined the cyclone fencing that surrounded the concrete pool deck. I chose one near the roped-off swim lesson area, where a rangy lifeguard was wading, his skin that deep red-brown that lifeguards turn after hours every day in the direct sunlight. Under his mirrored sunglasses, the thick sunblock smeared on his nose matched the white tips on his blonde hair. I could only assume that this was Archer.
“The boys are just getting changed,” I said to him as I took my seat. “They’ll be out in a sec.”
He nodded and continued walking in a circle, the waist-high water churning behind him. I guess you didn’t get that kind of body by sitting around. I shouldn’t be looking anyway. He was young enough to be my kid.
But even with that reminder, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was parading himself back and forth, the droplets from the pool gleaming on his muscled shoulders in the afternoon sun. If he were thirty years older, Eli might have some competition.
Get ahold of yourself, Leona. I shook my head to clear it of unsavory thoughts. I needed something else to stare at, even if it was a silly app, so I dug in my bag for my phone. My knuckles grazed the piece of paper that I’d swiped from the book in Tambra’s kitchen. I’d forgotten all about it. I pulled it out and, as Dylan and Ollie rushed out of the locker room and jumped into the pool near Archer, flipped it open.
Report to the Oregon Board of Pageants. As I’d suspected, it was Tambra’s complaint about McKenzie. I hurriedly scanned the form to see the boxes she’d checked, my heart hammering.
Violation of Clause 21A. That was the comportment clause.
Recommendation: One-year disqualification. In effect, that was a permanent disqualification. Since McKenzie was twenty-one, this was the last year she could compete.
I jumped to the empty space on the form where Tambra had filled in the reason for her recommendation. To my surprise, it wasn’t because McKenzie had been drinking or smoking.
Observed contestant locking lips with a local lifeguard during a Little League game.
Chapter 8
A secret boyfriend! I froze with the paper in my hands and looked up at Archer. He was dragging the boys around in the water, one on each arm, encouraging them to kick their feet.
Was he the local lifeguard Tambra had seen with McKenzie?
I cleared my throat nervously, and Archer looked up at me. When I didn’t say anything, he let go of the boys and pushed his sunglasses up on his head to get a better look at me.
Heat crawled up my chest toward my face as sweat burst from every pore—although how I could get warmer in this weather was beyond me. I thought I was done with hot flashes. After a moment of awkward silence that I spent airing out my T-shirt, looking everywhere but Archer’s face, he shook his head. “Sorry, I thought you had a question.”
“I do,” I blurted out. “I was wondering, are you dating anyone?”
He choked, stammering, “I don’t usually—ah—you know—go out with—ah—relatives of my clients.”
He thought I was asking him out! Oh lord, he must have noticed me staring at him earlier. He thought I was some kind of grandma cougar. How mortifying. At the horrified expression on my face, Ollie and Dylan howled with laughter.
“Archer and Leona, sitting in a tree,” Ollie singsonged.
“K -I-S-S-S-S—how many S’s are there again?” Dylan asked. I guess his kindergarten curriculum hadn’t prepared him for spelling “kiss” yet.
“Two.” Ollie smirked up at Archer.
I stood up, the paper still clutched in my hand. “I meant McKenzie Masters. Were you and she a thing?”
Even with his deep tan, his face paled. “No,” he said sharply.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire!” Ollie crowed as he splashed around. “I saw you smooching on the covered bridge when I was playing outfield.”
So that was the source of Tambra’s dirt on McKenzie—Ollie!
“Gross,” Dylan chimed in. “McKenzi
e and Archer, sitting in a tree, K-I—is it two or three, Ollie?”
“Two,” Ollie said smugly.
“McKenzie and I are just friends,” Archer protested. “Let’s get back to swimming, guys.”
Just friends, huh? Most friends don’t kiss on the covered bridge. It was a favored makeout spot exactly because it was so concealed. Only a person standing directly in line with the bridge—say, in the baseball outfield—could see the people inside. If Archer and McKenzie’s kiss was platonic, they wouldn’t have taken such pains to keep it a secret. And now Archer was lying about it—and I wanted to know why.
I waited until the timer buzzed on the boys’ lesson. They moaned in unison, but Archer boosted them out of the pool. They waddled over to me and stood, shivering and dripping, in front of me.
Dylan clasped his hands in front of him, his teeth chattering. “Please, please can we stay for rec swim?”
“Mom lets us sometimes,” Ollie said, already on the defensive.
“I really need to get back home.” I smiled sympathetically as their faces fell. “It’ll be fun, I promise. You’re both a couple of prunes anyway! Go dry off and change. I’ll meet you out front.”
Shoulders slumped, they dripped all the way back to the locker room. The moment they were out of view I turned on Archer. “Take off those glasses.”
He was so surprised by my request that he obeyed, sliding the glasses off his face, his eyebrows quizzical, blinking in the bright glare from the pool. “Why? What is it?”
“I want to see your eyes when you answer this. Were you at the Fourth of July festival yesterday?”
He immediately glanced off at the kids in the pool even though he wasn’t on duty. “No.”
He was lying. Everyone in town was there. “I bet all your friends went. Why didn’t you? Were you sick?”
He sighed heavily and worried the sunglasses in his hands for a minute. Finally he looked up at me. It was only then that I noticed his reddened, swollen eyes. Maybe his sunglasses hadn’t just been to keep the pool glare down. Maybe he was privately grieving the loss of his secret girlfriend.
“McKenzie told me to stay away. She said it would cause problems for her, and I didn’t want to mess up her whole pageant deal.”
“Why would it cause problems if you were just friends?” I asked, my voice syrupy sweet. Archer ignored me and slid his glasses back on as his next batch of swim students, three little girls, came out of the women’s locker room.
“Today is backstroke day, friends!” he called to them, stepping off the edge of the pool into the water with barely a splash. “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
It didn’t matter. I knew why McKenzie told Archer not to come. If Tambra had proof McKenzie was dating, she would report her to the pageant board, so McKenzie must have asked Archer to steer clear for a while to convince Tambra that she was following the comportment clause to the letter. Shoving her downlow relationship even downer and lower would help McKenzie rehabilitate her image—and help her keep her Miss Honeytree crown, the thing she valued most.
I shook my head. Now that I thought more about it, that couldn’t be right—Jillian said that McKenzie was boozing it up in the beer garden at the festival, not playing good girl. Obviously, she wasn’t trying to follow to any of the rules. In fact, she was brazenly flaunting them! McKenzie’s behavior almost guaranteed that she’d have her title stripped away. Why would she be so reckless?
There was an obvious explanation. She must have thought Tambra had already submitted her report—the report that I still held in my hand. McKenzie believed her disqualification was a done deal, so why not break every rule in the book? Drink beer. Curse like a sailor. Key the car.
Except one. I turned back toward the pool, where Archer was windmilling his well-muscled arms, demonstrating the backstroke to the small group of eager children. I believed him that McKenzie had asked him to stay away. But it wasn’t because of the comportment clause. There was some other reason, and I was going to find out why.
Just then, my focus was shattered by a wail sounding from the men’s locker room.
“I can’t get out!” Dylan’s pitiful voice drifted out of the open door. “Help me, Ollie!”
“I’m trying,” Ollie shouted. “It’s stuck.”
Well. That was my cue. I braced myself for the worst and headed into the men’s locker room, my hand at the ready to cover my eyes in case of Speedo malfunctions.
I found Ollie grasping the handle of a dressing stall, his feet braced against the floor. “It won’t! Come! Open!” He punctuated every word with a jerk on the handle.
“The lock is stuck,” Dylan blubbered inside. “I’m stuck.”
“I’ve got this.” I patted Ollie on the shoulder and he released the handle.
“Can you even be in here? This is the boys’.” He fixed me with a disapproving glare.
“I can be in here for emergencies,” I assured him.
Dylan sent up another wail from inside the stall. “I didn’t know this was a ’mergency!” He began beating his fists against the inside of the door.
“Shhh, honey. Everything is going to be OK. Auntie Leona’s going to get you out.” I looked around the locker room for anything that might help. Spying a stepstool in the corner, I dragged it over and stood on it to peer down on Dylan from the top. He looked up at me, his cheeks shiny with tears. “Can you wiggle the lock a little so I can see what’s going on?”
He obediently wiggled it. The thing was wedged so tightly, it didn’t even move. There was no way his little noodle arms were going to force it open. I reached down toward him as far as I could, but I could barely get my elbow over the door. Even when he stood on tiptoes, we could just brush fingertips. There was no way I could lift him out.
“What are you doing?” The horrified tone of the front desk girl bounced off the tiled walls. “You can’t peep in the dressing area!”
“I’m not peeping!” I said hotly from my not-so-elegant perch. “Your door latch is busted and the poor kid is stuck.”
At the word “stuck,” Dylan started crying again. “I need to go potty!”
“I’ll put in a maintenance call,” she said stiffly, backing away from us.
“What’s he supposed to do until they get here?” I called after her.
“I don’t know—wait?”
Dylan whimpered, and Ollie sank to his knees in front of the stall, peering underneath it. “Can you crawl out, buddy?”
I hadn’t even thought of that solution. Unlike regular dressing room or public restroom doors, the pool changing stalls only offered a tiny sliver of space between the bottom of the door and the floor. I knew for a fact that my rear end wasn’t sliding underneath it. Even Ollie was too big. But Dylan was just a skinny little guy. Maybe he could squeeze.
I moved the step stool to give him even more leeway and watched, trying not to think about the nasty locker room germs as he scooted, inch-by-inch, out from under the door. When his torso finally cleared, I lifted him up in my arms. “You did it!”
He beamed at me until Ollie said dejectedly, “But you left your towel in there.”
Dylan slumped against me, and I gave him a little reassuring shake. “Forget the towel. We’ll pick it up from them some other time. We have more important things to do. We have some chickens to chase.”
Chapter 9
When the boys and I got back to the farm, I let the flock out to forage and hung Ollie and Dylan’s swim trunks on the clothesline to dry. The late afternoon sun streamed through the leaves of the apple trees, casting dappled shadows on the boys as they ran around the orchard, catching grasshoppers to feed to the chickens. It would have been one of those ideal moments of childhood if their mother hadn’t been in handcuffs at the county courthouse at that very moment.
Of course, they didn’t know that, and I hoped to keep it that way. The hours flew by while the boys played and I washed and sorted eggs, but the second Ruth arrived, I grabbed the pint of blueberries
Eli had left on the porch and gave the whole thing to the boys even though it was coming up on the dinner hour. I didn’t care whether they ate the berries or fed them to the birds—I just wanted them occupied so I could catch her up on what I’d found.
“How were your afternoon clients? Never mind, I don’t care. Look at this.” I shoved the form I’d stolen from Tambra’s house into her hands.
Ruth settled into one of the chairs on the porch, her forehead furrowing as she read it. When she got to the bottom of the form, she looked up at me. “So McKenzie kissed some boy. So what?”
“So McKenzie thought Tambra had already sent this paper to the pageant board. That has to be why she keyed the Prius! She figured her reign as Miss Honeytree was over anyway.”
Ruth looked sick as she handed me back the piece of paper. “Does anyone else know about this?”
“No.”
“You haven’t told Eli?”
I shook my head. “No, and I’m not going to. He’ll just scold me for stealing evidence. I’ll have to sneak it back into Tambra’s house somehow.”
“Throw it away. Burn it and forget you ever saw it!”
I frowned. “Why? It shows is that McKenzie was behaving badly, not Tambra. Tambra was doing the right thing by turning her in.”
“The less connected they are, the better.” Ruth pressed her lips together and stared out at the boys in the orchard as they chased one of the cockerels around and around a tree, throwing blueberries at him. “I’m starting to think that she and McKenzie really did have an altercation in the parking lot. I can see it: McKenzie’s already furious, then Tambra catches her vandalizing the car and explodes. They struggle over the gun and it goes off.”
I rolled my eyes. “That’s crazy talk. Even if they argued, what about the gun? Tambra doesn’t even own one!”
Ruth reached out suddenly and gripped my arm so tightly I worried it would leave a mark, her eyes burning into me. “That’s just it, though. She does.”
