Bed & Breakfast Bedlam (A Logan Dickerson Cozy Mystery Book 1) (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

I don’t know if Miss Vivee’s pregnant
pause was for a dramatic effect or if she had lost her train of thought. But it
took her a few minutes to fill us in on how she thought Gemma had been killed.
The silence was killing me.

“When Gemma came into the Maypop she was
coughing,” Miss Vivee finally said. “She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her
face looked distressed and she complained to Renmar of chest pains and that she
felt really tired.”

“Wait,” I said. “You told me she bounced
in. Ponytail swinging. This is the first I’ve heard that she was sick when she
came in.”

“I used the word ‘bouncy’ metaphorically,”
she explained. “You know, to show the contrast in her state of being in a short
amount of time – alive when she came in and dead when she left,” she explained.

I rolled my eyes.

“Anyway.” Miss Vivee directed her
attention back to Mac. “She had on one of those running suits.”

“Sweats,” I offered.

“No. She wasn’t sweating,” Miss Vivee
said. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see her.” She looked at Mac. “She didn’t
see her.”

“No. I meant her outfit. We call them
sweats.”

“Oh. Okay. I didn’t want Mac to think that
sweating was one of the symptoms, because it wasn’t.” Miss Vivee took a sip of
her tea. “Anyway. She coughed the entire time she was there until she fell over
dead in her bowl of bouillabaisse. And her ‘sweats’ were dirty, like she’d been
on the ground.”

A knowing smile crossed Mac’s face and his
eyes lit up. “Like she had had a fall?”

“Exactly.” Miss Vivee’s eyes gleamed.

“You think she dry drowned, don’t you?” he
said.

Miss Vivee practically leapt up in her
seat. Then she turned and grabbed my arm and squeezed it. “See? He agrees,” she
said to me. “Mac thinks the same thing I do. Gemma Burke was murdered.”

“Wait! What?” I was totally confused.

“Vivee thinks Gemma dry drowned.”

 “In the bouillabaisse?”

“No.” Miss Vivee frowned up her face. 
“Not in the bouillabaisse,” she said with some frustration in her voice. “Are
you always this slow?”

I opened my mouth to talk and then thought
better of it.

“Tell her, Mac,” Miss Vivee ordered.

“From what Vivee tells me, I’d have to
concur. I think she dry drowned.” He scooted up closer to the table. “Y
ou see people drown when
their
lungs can’t get enough oxygen from the air. Normally a person drowns because of
some kind of fluid in the lungs. But dry drowning is when a person can’t pull
in enough oxygen for some reason other than the presence of water.”

“Isn’t that the same as
suffocation?” I asked.

Miss Vivee clucked her
teeth.

“It’s the cause and
effect,” Mac offered. “Gemma suffocated yes, but the reason was because she
drowned.”

“The
no
water
drowning,” Miss Vivee said. “So it’s called
dry
drowning.”

I looked over at Vivee
and back at Mac. I had never heard of dry drowning before. I was so tempted to
pull out my iPhone and Google it. But that would upset Miss Vivee that I had to
confirm what she and Mac were telling me. I made a mental note to look it up
later. In the privacy of my room.

 “How do you two know
that?” I said instead.

 “The symptoms of
course,” Vivee said. “She came in coughing. When she sat down to eat she told
Renmar that she thought some of her soup would help her. And she had dirt on
her clothes.”

“Coughing?” I said.
“That’s all?” I shook my head in disbelief.

“And the dirt on her
clothes,” Miss Vivee said again.

“You could tell from
that?” I said confused. “That’s what made you know she dry drowned. Or whatever
it’s called. Maybe she just swallowed the wrong way, or she was catching a
cold.”

“You don’t die from a
cold. Or from swallowing the wrong way. Leastways not that quickly. And you
don’t cough that long.” Miss Vivee didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t just
falling in line with her coughing culprit version of Gemma’s death.

“Vivee said that Gemma
complained to Renmar of being tired. Having chest pain,” Mac said.

“I heard Renmar tell
the Sheriff that,” Vivee said and gave a quick nod of her head. “And Brie
confirmed it.”

Mac looked at me. “I
know it seems quite incredulous for us to make that assumption on so little
information. And you’re right, there’s lots of things that’ll make you cough.
But there aren’t many things that will make you cough and kill you.” He nodded his
head slowly. “Go ahead. Gaggle it,” he said and sat back in his seat, seemingly
quite pleased with himself.

“Gaggle it?” I crunched
up my nose.

“You know,” Miss Vivee
said. “On the World Wide Web.”

I started laughing. I
had planned to later on, but since they were okay with it, I whipped out my
phone.

“Just do a search for
coughing as a symptom,” he said.

And while I searched, I
heard Miss Vivee talk to Mac about what she had come to ask.

“Mac,” she said. “Like
I said, we’re on the trail of a few of the suspects. And it’s led us to a strip
club in Atlanta.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And . . . Well.
Logan and I, upstanding women that we are, can’t go into one of those places by
ourselves.”

“So you and Logan are
solving the murder?”

“Logan’s an
archaeologist,” Miss Vivee said.

I glanced up when she
said that. I wondered was being an archaeologist a step up or down from me being
“a good friend and companion.”

“And she knows all
about solving murders,” Miss Vivee continued, her voice was so sweet it could
have sweeten a whole sea of iced tea.

“And?” he asked. He
seemed eager to find out what she wanted.

“Well.” I saw her lick
her lips out the side of my eye. “I want you to ride to Atlanta with us,” she
said, rather meekly for her. “You know. For protection and to help with our
investigation.”

He smiled. “When you
thinking about leaving?”

“Tomorrow,” she said
and smiled.

“I’m in,” he said
returning the smile.

“Thank you, Mac,” she said.
She batted what was left of her eyelashes and blushed. “I knew I could count on
you.” Then in the same breath, the smile disappeared and she raised an eyebrow.
“And when we go,” her voice dropped an octave lower. “Don’t wear any of that pomade.” 

She patted her hands on
the table and said, “Now, we’re all set.” She nodded her head at me. “I’m going
to the little’s girl’s room. You need to go?”

“No. I’m good,” I
muttered barely looking up from my phone. There really was a thing called dry
drowning. I Googled “cough symptom” and every illness it listed wasn’t very
serious or took a really long time like emphysema or lung cancer. Except for
dry drowning. It took anywhere from one to twenty-four hours to kill a person. The
symptoms, according to WebMD were coughing, chest pain and shortness of breath.

Wow.
Maybe Miss Vivee really did know what she was talking about.

Once she left, Mac slid down his bench so
he was directly across from me. “I know Vivee must’ve told you that story about
me, her and Betsy.”

“Huh,” I said and looked up from my phone.
“Betsy?” the name sounded familiar.

“Her car. My limp.” He pointed down to his
leg.

“Oh yeah,” I said realizing what he was
talking about. “She told me.” My face cringed remembering the incident.

“Well. I’m sure she made it sound a lot
worse than it was.”

“Oh?” I said, my mouth linger in the shape
of the letter “O.”
Was he getting ready to defend her for hitting him with
her car? Oh my goodness. He couldn’t be.
“She said she ran you over with
her car and broke your hip,” I said slowly waiting to hear his answer.

“See. That’s what I mean. She didn’t
run
me over, she just kind of bumped me with it. I could have moved out the way,
but I didn’t really believe her when she said she was ‘gonna mow me down.’”

I just closed my eyes and shook my head.

“And she didn’t
break
my hip,” he
continued. “It was just fractured.” He rearranged the silverware in front of
him. He seemed to be thinking over what he wanted to say.

“I wasn’t messing with that woman, you know.
‘The Hussy,’ as Vivee calls her,” he said sounding like he wanted me to believe
him. “
She
was messin’ with me. I told her I didn’t want no parts of her
or her cooking.”

“Miss Vivee told me she’s dead now.”

He looked at me, curiosity flashing across
his face. “She didn’t tell you she killed her, did she?”

“
Did
she kill her?” I said a little
louder than he liked.

“Shhh!” He reached over the table and
squeezed my wrist. “Don’t talk so loud,” he said and scanned the room checking
to see if anyone had heard me. He let me go, took a sip of his iced tea and
cleared his throat.

“Nobody saying she killed her,” he said,
almost fussing at me. “But the woman died not too long after the incident with
the car.” He glanced at me and then fiddled with the straw in his glass. “I
just always wondered if it was Vivee . . . The coroner up in Augusta said it
was a heart attack. But you know Vivee with her herbs and concoctions . . . She
could make it seem like a heart attack.”

“I’m learning a lot about her capabilities,”
I said and took a sip of my pop. “No wonder she’s so interested in finding Gemma’s
killer. They’re two of a kind.” I said low, almost muttering.

“I’m back!” Miss Vivee came waltzing, well
as much as she could as ninety-something, back over to the table and slid into
the booth next to me. Happiness oozing out of her.

“What you two got your heads together
about?” she said all smiles.

“Nothing,” we said in unison.

She looked at the two of us. “Well good.
Now. Did anyone order anything? I’m starving.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Interstate
Route 20, North

Wednesday
Afternoon, AGD

“What’s in the bag, Miss Vivee?”

We were in Miss Vivee’s car, the 1994, gas
guzzling, “Mow Your Man Down Lincoln,” on our way to Atlanta. She had refused
to go in my Jeep Wrangler saying she didn’t want to ride for hours on end that
high up. Plus, she had said, she would wrinkle her dress climbing in and out of
it. She acted as if we were going on a road trip across the country. So I was stuck
driving the weapon she’d used to assault and maim Dr. Mac Whitson.

“Our lunch,” she said and shook the bag at
me.

“Lunch? There’s plenty of places on the
way to eat,” I said.

“And spend good money buying food when there’s
perfectly good food at the house that we can take with us? Nonsense.”

“What do you have?” Mac asked. He had come
over to the Maypop before we left. Miss Vivee refused to go to his house to
pick him up. She wouldn’t even let me leave by myself and go and get him.

“If he wants to go, he can get here on his
own,” she had said. She must’ve forgotten she’d asked him to go. I knew,
though, it was all because of the vow she made never to set foot in his house
again.

“I packed egg salad,” Miss Vivee said to
Mac. “Viola Rose heard about my trip and brought me over a whole tub of it. I
brought goose liver for you and Logan.” She pulled out a waxed paper wrapped
bundle and waved it in the air. “I put it both on white and wheat bread. You
can take your pick.”

I stuck out my tongue. “Yuck.”

“You don’t like goose liver?” she asked.

“No. I. don’t.”

“I do,” Mac said from the backseat. “Hand
me one of those.”

I took it from Miss Vivee and handed it
over the seat to Mac.

“So, Vivee,” Mac spoke with a chuck of
goose liver in his jaw. “Have you come up with a theory on who killed Gemma and
why?”

“I’m thinking that it was one of the Becks
that killed her,” Miss Vivee said.

“Who are they?” Mac asked.

“We found a letter,” I offered. “It was
from a man named Jeffrey Beck to Gemma. In it he said he’d be willing to leave
his wife, Miranda, if Gemma would take him back. Evidently she had broken it
off with him.”

“Ah,” he said. “A love triangle. Always a
good motive.” I watched in the review mirror as he shoved the rest of the sandwich
in his mouth and then asked, mouth full, “Got another sandwich up there?”

“You can have mine,” I said and handed him
the neatly wrapped package.

”Either a love triangle with both the
husband and wife involved,” Miss Vivee explained to Mac. “Or maybe it was just
Jeffrey Beck who killed Gemma Burke in a jealous rage.”

“Maybe he killed her because she was a
stripper,” Mac offered.

“Who kills people because they strip?”
Miss Vivee’s voice had gone up an octave. “Being a stripper is like any other
job – archaeologist, cook,” Vivee unwrapped the sandwich she made from the egg
salad Viola Rose gave her. “You don’t go around people killing people just
‘cause they work in a diner do you?”

“It was just a suggestion,” Mac said.

“I was a stripper once,” Vivee said
matter-of-factly, taking a small bite of her sandwich.

“You were not,” I said.

“I could have been. Times were hard trying
to raise my girls after their daddy died. I had a friend that owned a juke
joint down in the swamps. And I worked there for a good little piece. Dancing. Had
to smile at the customers, keep’em happy, you know. And believe me when I tell
you, some of them got right friendly at times.”

“Wish I’d a known you back then,” Mac
said.

“That’s not the same as a stripper.”
Neither one of us paid attention to Mac’s comment.

“Almost,” she said. “It almost made me a
stripper. Sometimes I felt like I was.”

“You can strip for me anytime, Vivee,” Mac
said, with a sly grin working its way across his wrinkled face.

“Then I won’t be the blame for just your
broke hip, but for that heart attack you’d have,” she said over her shoulder. “You
can’t handle what I’ve got to offer, you old goat.”

“At least I’d die with a smile on my
face.”

I took my hands off the wheel and covered
up my ears. “Please you two. I can’t take any more.”

“He started it,” Miss Vivee said. “I was
trying to have a civilized and proper, mind you, conversation about being a
stripper.”