Dixie Diva Blues (26 page)

Bitty placed the flash drive on the napkin Jake had draped over his plate. He gave it a good look, then wrapped the napkin around it and put it into his pocket.

“I’ll have this checked out.” He paused, then added, “And I’ll make sure your napkin is returned.”

“Thank you,” said Bitty. Her monogrammed napkins are quite precious to her. Jake obviously had some home training.

“Is there anything else?” he asked. “Any more evidence you might have stashed someplace? Another body you haven’t reported? An attic full of Confederate gold?”

“Well,” said Gaynelle tartly, “it’s not like the Holly Springs Police Department is eager to hear from us. We have been treated like second-class citizens when we have done our best to assist. Aside from a few errors on our part, the Divas have excelled at turning up clues. So there is no need to take that tone now, Jacob Hankins.”

Jake stared at her for a moment. No doubt, he was remembering virtual slaps on the back of his hand with a ruler, and comparing them to verbal slaps on the hand. After all, Gaynelle had taught him in the seventh grade. If my memory serves, he was a very active student. At family reunions, Jake was nearly always one of the boys caught doing some kind of mischief. Probably why he’d turned to law enforcement, I figured, to make up for his youthful indiscretions. It happens.

“Yes, Miz Bishop,” he said finally, “I agree that you ladies have done some quite remarkable investigating. The trouble is, the police department is pretty capable in its own right. Now we’re dealing with a department in another jurisdiction. It can get a bit complicated. And I seem to recall a couple of times the police barely rescued one of you Divas before you got yourself killed.”

He put up a hand when Bitty started to speak. “I know, I know, you could have done it all on your own. You’ve said that to me already. I disagree. In fact, if you weren’t my cousins and I didn’t happen to know you’ve got nothing to gain by killing these guys, you and Trinket would be at the top of my suspect list. Maybe it’s just dumb bad luck, but you two have stumbled across more corpses in the past few months than most of us on the force have found in our careers. Stop it. Stay home. Take up knitting. Crocheting. Make quilts. Travel—in fact, I think you both should see the country. Or Canada. Let another government deal with you for a while.”

Now, the fact that I have suggested almost the same exact thing a time or two did nothing to decrease my indignation. It’s one thing to think or say it yourself; it’s quite another for a man that you can recall as a five year old running around in his UnderRoos to actually say it aloud.

Just as Jake rolled forward to reach for another sandwich on the tea tray, I shook my finger at him. He looked slightly startled.

“Now listen here, Jacob Hankins, I happen to know your mother raised you to be more polite. What you just said to us completely disregards our personal sacrifices as well as reduces us to the level of naughty first-graders. Maybe we haven’t been as effective as the police, but we have at least tried to cooperate with law enforcement. Hard as it may be for you to acknowledge, it is law enforcement that refuses to cooperate with us. Why bother putting up Neighborhood Watch signs if you don’t want our participation, I might ask?”

“Hear! Hear!” Bitty said enthusiastically. “Well done, Gaynelle and Trinket. So, Jake—answer our question. We hear TV campaigns for citizens to get involved in their community, ‘Take back the Streets,’ and so on—is it all just a waste of taxpayer money?”

Jake looked for a moment like a deer caught in headlights. Then he leaned to pick up a sandwich, probably trying to buy himself a few seconds of time before answering.

When I had waggled my finger at Jake, I must have let go of Chen Ling’s bib ties. Just as Jake lifted a hefty roast beef sandwich from the delicate serving plate decorated with pink and red roses and trimmed in 24karat gold, Chen Ling darted forward. I suppose she just couldn’t tolerate seeing one more of those delicacies being handled by an intruder in her home.

Jake yelped and jumped back, but he needn’t have worried about the dog. She was only going for the roast beef. What he should have worried about was the chair. It shot across the polished wood floor of Bitty’s parlor/office and bumped into a plant stand that held a lovely, huge Boston fern. It was a tall plant stand, and when the chair crashed into it, fern, dirt, and fertilizer dumped out of the pot and onto Jake.

For a moment we all sat frozen. Except for Chen Ling, of course. She gobbled down as much roast beef and horseradish as she could.

I’ll never forget the expression on Jake’s face as he sat there with fern sprouting out of his ears and off his shoulders, covered in dirt and roast beef, still too stunned to react.

By the time we had him cleaned up, we had wrangled a promise from him to keep us in the know and give us some respect for our efforts. In exchange, we promised not to tell a soul we were working together, even though on a very limited basis.

Of course, I think the picture Bitty snapped of him wearing a roast beef sandwich and a fern on top of his head had a lot to do with his agreement. Cell phones can be very useful in some situations. Jake will never know if she really would have sent the photo to Michael Donahue at
The Commercial Appeal
. Just the threat was enough to convince him it was a very real possibility.

CHAPTER 13

Sometimes it’s the little things that trip me up. I can be rolling along quite blissful in my ignorance of impending doom, and the tiniest hint will throw me into a panic. It’s probably helpful that by the time doom strikes I’m already exhausted from a panic attack, so that I just accept my fate without too much struggle.

When I got home from Bitty’s house, my parents were outside in the cat hotel that used to be a barn where we kept farm machinery like mowers, tractors, and other work implements. Now it’s a cattery complete with warm little nooks tucked under eaves, in corners, and wherever there’s a likely spot for a cat to hide. While I’m sure the cats believe two meals a day just miraculously appear in metal food pans, my parents spend a nice little chunk of money to provide them with good nutrition.

Little Brown Dog, mostly called Brownie, regards the cats as nuisances and only on occasion worthy of a game of chase. He prefers chasing squirrels, but they rarely come down from high tree branches when he’s outside, although they have been known to pelt him with acorns from time to time. It drives him crazy. As do the birds that flock to the feeders my parents keep filled with expensive millet, corn, black oil sunflower seeds, and thistle. Hummingbird feeders hang from cherry trees devoid of fruit, but since they’re usually made of red plastic or glass, one can imagine an entire orchard of ripe, red cherries. We rarely beat the birds to the real thing, although this past year I think Mama got enough cherries to make a cobbler.

At any rate, I went out to the barn to inform my parents of my great achievement in getting a part-time job selling ladies underwear. Daddy was up on a ladder climbing to the loft, and he looked a bit shaky.

“Hey,” I called up to him, “need some help?”

“That’d be good,” came his reply, sounding a bit stressed.

There are several ladders leading to what used to be a hayloft. These are built-ins, made of sturdy pine wood slats. I asked Mama, who was standing at the foot of Daddy’s ladder looking up at him, what was going on.

“There’s a kitten up there that’s afraid to come down. Your father’s rescuing it.”

That sounded about par for the course. My parents are always rescuing animals in need these days. When we were all younger, they focused their energies on rescuing kids or whoever was down on their luck. There was a time when we had almost a revolving door of needy relatives sleeping on pallets or cots somewhere in the house.

“Don’t look,” I said as I tucked my skirt up and grabbed hold of a ladder rung. “It would horrify you.”

My mother’s known to be afraid of heights. I was more afraid of showing my underwear. I can be modest at all the wrong times.

I climbed up the ladder until I reached the hayloft, and found my father kneeling on the board floor looking under blankets and piles of straw. “I just saw the little thing not two seconds ago,” he muttered. “Now I don’t see it anywhere.”

“What color is it?” I peered through the sunny haze that filtered through cracks in the barn walls. Dust motes rode sultry air currents, and every time Daddy lifted up another blanket or tuft of straw, more dust clouds rose.

“White. I think. Maybe gray.”

“Uh, those colors aren’t really that similar. So it’s a gray and white kitten, right?”

“Yeah, probably. Couldn’t tell much by the face. Your mother says it’s a new one that’s started coming around. We need to catch it and get it fixed.”

He dropped a pile of straw back to the old board floor and I felt a sneeze starting to build. I twitched my nose to hold it at bay. Since I held on to the top rung of the ladder with my left hand, I used my right hand to lift another blanket in one of the cubes built for the cats to use. They line areas of the hayloft as well as below. A cloud of dust boiled up when I let the blanket fall back into place, and a huge sneeze caught me off-guard.

My entire body shook with the force of the sneeze that blew dust and heaven only knows what else across the hayloft. Apparently it had the desired effect of unmasking the elusive kitten’s hiding place, too. A gray and white streak bolted out of a nearby cubby and leaped from the hayloft to a shelf below, and then onto the barn floor where it shot out the open doors and into the ether.

Brownie—a dog with the head and coloring of a dachshund and the loud bay of a beagle—set off in hot pursuit. Mama called for him to come back, but the feisty little mixed breed has enough hunter in him to ignore everything but the call of the chase.

“Forget about the dog, Anna,” my daddy said to her as he started back down the ladder. “He’ll be right back. Probably smelling like a cow patty or a skunk when he gets here, too.”

Neither fragrance is particularly pleasant, so I was more than glad to make my way back down the ladder and to the house before the dog showed back up. Of course, I had dust and dirt all over my cream skirt, so I had to immediately go upstairs and change clothes. By the time I put on comfy crop pants and a light shirt and took my skirt down to the laundry room, Brownie had returned and my mother was gently scolding him.

The dog is a consummate con artist. He has several ploys he uses to escape well-deserved scoldings, and all of them work pretty well. This time he chose the “big-eyed, sad puppy” routine. He laid his ears back on his head, opened his eyes really wide, and gazed up at my mother with such a pitiful expression—don’t believe it if you’re told dogs don’t have facial expressions—that she immediately capitulated.

“Oh, you poor little thing, you don’t know why I’m scolding you, do you?” she asked him, and he lifted one paw from the floor and shivered. That was the cherry on top of the cake for my mother. She scooped him up into her arms and soothed him with hugs and expensive doggy treats. I swear he smirked at me over her shoulder. He knows I have his number and that he doesn’t fool me one bit, but we both politely ignore it as long as my parents are close by.

When I returned from the laundry room, Mama and Daddy were sitting at the kitchen table looking at colorful brochures. That alone is always enough to make me queasy, but when I heard my mother say something about snow in October, I knew it was not in reference to Mississippi. My heart rate escalated.

“What are you looking at?” I asked when I could breathe slowly enough to speak without wheezing. “A magazine?”

Without looking at me my mother said, “Oh, no, dear. We’re going to Colorado.”

My head got light. Black spots danced in front of my eyes. I think there was a seismic episode that made the floor shudder, but no one else said anything about it.

“You do know Colorado has mountains, right?” I managed to say as I reached blindly for the back of a chair to hold on to while the floor quivered. “
Big
mountains. Tall ones like Pike’s Peak. Tiny little roads, falling boulders . . . high altitudes.”

“Yes, Trinket. We know that. That’s why we’re going,” my father said, and I heard the excitement in his tone. “I’ve never been to Pike’s Peak. We’ve thought about this for several weeks now. We want to hike up a mountain.”

“It’s the heat,” I said. “Sun stroke. I’ll call the doctor for you. Both of you lie down and I’ll get you some cold cloths for your foreheads.”

“Stop being silly, dear,” my sweet little mother said to me. “It’s always been a dream of your father’s to see Pike’s Peak.”

“But you’re afraid of heights,” I reminded her. “How much fun can he have hiking alone while you sit at the bottom of the mountain?”

“Well, of course I’ll be with him. They have tours available, you know. Not that we would really hike all that far. Just far enough to say we’ve done it.”

“But what would your doctor say about this?” I asked my father. “You know your heart isn’t as strong as it used to be.”

“Neither is my back,” Daddy retorted, “but that doesn’t keep me from walking.”

“But . . .” I paused. I wracked my brain trying to think of a reason good enough to keep them from going off and leaving me with a zoo to feed. It came to me like a light from above and I said, “Well, if things go badly here and I go to prison, I’m sure that
someone
will notify you so the animals can be cared for until your return.”