He winked at me, and a wave of something a lot more wicked washed through me.
“Oh, hush,” I muttered. “Eat.”
He picked up his sandwich and took a healthy bite.
“Why disqualify her?” he asked around a mouthful of barbecue.
“Mmm. No one is really sure, but the speculation is that it might be against pageant rules to wear a wig. Anyway, I got to thinking. If my daughter was sick and maybe dying and she wanted to win a pageant and someone told her she couldn’t even compete, I’d be mighty angry.”
Finn narrowed his eyes thoughtfully while he finished chewing. “Did Mike even know about the disqualification?”
“Yep. I went out to the Lilting Bloom and talked to Cookie Milhone. She’s on the board of the League of Methodist Ladies with Eloise Carberry, and she’s on the judging panel for the Rodeo Queen Pageant.”
Finn shook his head in mock hurt. “I thought you brought me flowers because you care. And now I find out it was just cover for your snooping.”
I let my lips curl in a coy smile. “Poor baby. I’ll make it up to you.”
“Tallulah Jones. You vixen.”
We both busted up laughing.
“The point I’m trying to make, if you’d keep your mind out of the gutter, is that Cookie Milhone got a call from Kristen about needing to get the judges together to talk about Dani. And then Cookie, being a good friend, called Eloise and gave her a heads-up.”
“Hmm. But I really can’t see Mike Carberry as a killer. Besides, the morning Kristen was killed, we had a staff meeting at the paper. Mike was sitting right next to me when the call about shots fired came over the police scanner. He couldn’t have done it.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Mike. I was thinking of Eloise.”
Finn popped a chip in his mouth. “Interesting. Eloise is kind of a bitch.”
“Finn!”
He laughed darkly. “She is. Ask anyone. You know, she got a waitress at the Prickly Pear Café fired for dropping a bottle of hot sauce on her lap. It was an accident, and the bottle wasn’t even open. But she told the manager that he was lucky she didn’t sue and she’d never come back to the restaurant again unless he fired the poor kid.”
“Wow.”
“But,” he continued, “it’s a long way from getting a waitress fired to killing a lawyer.”
“I don’t know. It’s just a matter of degree. I hadn’t heard the story about the waitress, but I know she went after Tucker Gentry like a terminator robot because he made a snide remark about her cooking skills. It’s a pattern, right? Someone gets in her way, she does what it takes to destroy them.”
Finn grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t know, Tally.”
“She can shoot, too. Remember last year there was the brouhaha about the Methodist Ladies hosting that fund-raiser with the marksmanship contest? Some people didn’t think that was the most appropriate way to raise money for wounded veterans. But Eloise won that contest.”
Finn looked skeptical.
“She was a gymnast in high school, wasn’t she?”
He nodded. “Went to college on scholarship. Almost made the Olympic team.”
“So she maybe could have pulled herself up to the balcony where the saloon girl was sitting. She has the upper body strength.”
“Had,” Finn corrected.
“She’s still real fit,” I insisted. “I bet she still has some moves.”
“Look, I’m not saying she didn’t do it,” Finn said. “I’m just saying you need a lot more to go on if you think you’re going to shift the blame from Bree to Eloise.”
“I know. Will you help me get it?”
Finn’s expression grew serious. He reached out to take my hand. “You know I’d do anything for you.”
A warm stillness came over me, as if Finn and I were in a bubble of quiet apart from all the crazy in our lives.
Finn liked to tease, and I liked to laugh, so our relationship was mostly pretty lighthearted. Lord knows, we needed a little light in our lives to help us forget all the sorrow and fear: Finn’s mom out at the Garrity Arms Nursing Home, slipping further and further away from us with every tiny pinpoint stroke. The A-la-mode, where every step forward seemed dogged by two steps back. Alice’s pain over her daddy. Bree’s fear of being arrested.
But in that solemn moment, I didn’t just forget about those things . . . they simply ceased to exist. The entire universe was me, Finn, and the yearning heat between us.
He tightened his grip on my hand, his eyes burning into me. “You know, right?”
I opened my mouth, but no words would come. I nodded.
He pushed away from the table and gently tugged me to my feet. One step brought him up against me. His gentle kiss on my lips was a benediction.
Walking backward, his eyes never leaving mine, he led me to the stairs, and together we climbed to his room. Everything else—Bree, Alice, the murder—it would have to wait.
chapter 10
I
’ve heard tell that the Eskimos have thirty different words for
white
. In Texas, we reserve that granularity of description for our summer heat. You’d think Texans would simply be used to hot, would suck it up and go about their business. But we’re the biggest wusses in the world when the mercury inches into the triple digits.
That particular summer strained our collective ability to describe heat. We stretched every metaphor to the breaking point, and still we couldn’t quite capture the ungodly, never-ending, smothering, oppressive, makes-you-want-to-turn-your-own-skin-inside-out quality of the weather that August.
It kept the daytime crowds at the fair thin and listless, but it meant good business at the A-la-mode.
After a long but enjoyable night with Finn, I stood shoulder to shoulder beside Kyle Mason, both of us dipping cones until our hands cramped, trying to keep the fairgoers from expiring.
During a brief lull just before lunch, I caught Kyle watching me out of the corner of his eye. His head was tipped down so his dark mop of hair—this silly-looking combed-forward bowl cut that all the teen boys seemed to wearing—fell nearly to the tip of his nose, but I could still see the lines of worry around his mouth.
When he met my gaze, he tossed his head, flipping his hair back in a practiced move that was just a bit too self-conscious to be genuinely cool.
“Is Alice okay?” he asked.
I sighed. “I think so. Or at least, she will be. She’s a tough girl. She’ll get through this.”
He picked at his thumbnail with his teeth. I made a mental note to have him use the hand sanitizer liberally before serving any more customers.
“CnnnItllsmtg?” he muttered.
“Enunciate, Kyle. Learn to use your words,” I teased.
“Can I tell you something?” he repeated, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
The tremor of emotion in his voice made me get real serious real fast. Kyle was a surly teenage boy with a significant juvie record. He did not emote unless something was wrong.
“Of course. You can tell me anything,” I soothed.
Please don’t let Alice be pregnant, please don’t let Alice be pregnant, please don’t let Alice be pregnant
. . .
“The other night, after Alice found out her dad was back in town, I let her borrow the Bonnie.”
Our intellectual prodigy, Alice, had to take her driver’s test three times before she passed. She still had a limited learner’s permit, which meant she wasn’t legally allowed to drive without someone twenty-one or over in the front seat with her. In other words, she wasn’t supposed to be tooling around Dalliance in Kyle’s Bonneville.
On the one hand, I didn’t want to condone this behavior. On the other hand, I didn’t want to spook Kyle. I got the feeling there was more to this story yet to come.
“Huh,” I hedged. “Know where she went?”
He shook his head, shaggy hair flopping back and forth. “After the midway closed down, I was stuck here. I called her like ten times, but she didn’t answer. Finally, she showed up after midnight. Wouldn’t tell me where she’d been.”
I had this mental image of Kyle just sitting out behind the A-la-mode booth, alone with his thoughts, patiently waiting for Alice to come back with his car. He hadn’t called any of his friends, or his parents, or us . . . he’d just waited for her. He might be a big dork with a rap sheet, but I got why Alice liked him so much.
“I’m worried about her,” Kyle said, raising his head to look me square in the eye. “I don’t know how to help her.”
I took a risk and looped my arm around his shoulders, pulling him into a reluctant hug. “I don’t know, either. We just have to be patient. I think you can do that.”
His body spasmed a bit, something I took for a laugh. “Guess so. Not like I got anyplace else to go.”
I let him pull free. “Oh, Kyle, that’s not true. I’m happy you and Alice have each other, but you shouldn’t stay together just because you don’t feel like you have other options. You always have other options.”
His shoulders jerked up to his ears. I spoke “teenager” fluently enough to know he didn’t agree.
“You do. I know you struggled in school, but that’s because you were bored. You’re not stupid. Heck, if you were stupid, Alice wouldn’t waste her time with you. If you want to learn a trade, or go on to school, or whatever, you can do it. You really do have options.”
“I guess.”
By that point, the boy’s ears were as red as my brandied cherry sauce. Thankfully, we were saved from further awkward bonding by a new onslaught of customers.
“Kyle,” I snapped as he reached for a sugar cone, “sanitize first, my friend.”
He huffed a melodramatic sigh, but did as he was bid. We were back in familiar territory, and I smiled softly at the return to normalcy.
“Tally Jones, I have a bone to pick with you.”
Bye-bye, smile.
Eloise Carberry bore down on the A-la-mode booth like a semi hurtling down a steep grade. She still had a gymnast’s build, slender and straight. Not that you could make out much of a figure beneath her no-nonsense tan chinos and her embroidered chambray shirt. Her frosted brown hair was set in face-framing layers sprayed into fierce submission, much like a mideighties Mary Lou Retton. Eloise was a handsome woman, might have been on the homecoming court, but would never have been queen. She ruled the League of Methodist Ladies with dictatorial efficiency, but she’d never crack into the Junior League set. There was just something a little too practical about her. A little too workaday. A little too matronly.
But that very no-nonsense quality made her seem bigger than she was. And when I found myself in the crosshairs of her thin-lipped frown, I took a step back.
“Hiya, Eloise. Enjoying the fair?”
“It’s too hot to enjoy anything.” Something about the way she said it made it seem as if the weather were her own personal cross to bear.
“Oh. Sorry to hear that.”
“Tally, we need to talk. Tucker Gentry competing in the ice cream category is an absolute travesty. You and I both know he stole that flavor profile from you. Why, the man should be disqualified from all the edibles contests.”
Given the number of second-place ribbons Eloise took home the year before, I could just imagine how anxious she was to have her biggest competition disqualified from the events.
“Now, Eloise, I trust Garrett’s judgment.”
She snorted. “Letting Garrett Simms make that call,” she huffed. “That’s the fox guarding the henhouse if ever I saw it.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” I said. In fact, I was pretty certain she was using the idiom all wrong.
“They’re both, you know. . .” She leaned in close, but didn’t bother to drop her tone a lick. “Perverts.”
I smothered a sigh. While I had managed to remain in the dark until the year before, Garrett Simms’s preference for men was one of the most unsecret secrets in all of Dalliance. It didn’t bother his wife any, and as long as the two of them were happy with the arrangement, most folks just let them be.
But Tucker Gentry was a youth pastor at a very conservative church. An allegation that he was gay, whether it was true or not, could do him some serious damage.
I stepped off to the side of the counter, pulling Eloise as far from my line of customers as I could. “Eloise,” I hissed, “it’s not like gay people all have some secret handshake. Even if Tucker is gay, there’s no reason to think that Garrett would show him any favoritism.”
“Oh, he’s not . . . well, that,” Eloise said. “He’s just a pervert. Spends all his time with girls young enough to be his daughters.”
“He’s a youth pastor. It’s his job.”
Eloise crossed her arms and set her lips in a mutinous frown. “Exactly.”
“You’re not making any sense. Are you suggesting that everyone who chooses to work with kids has an unnatural attraction to them?”
“Not at all. But that man is creepy.”
Now we were getting to the heart of the matter. It wasn’t that poor Tucker had done anything at all. He was just odd. And for Eloise, “odd” had to be put into some sort of box. Apparently she’d chosen “pervert” for Tucker.
“Creepy isn’t a crime. And even if it was, Tucker being creepy doesn’t put him in the same boat with Garrett, who isn’t creepy at all.”
I mentally crossed my fingers for the fib. Garrett Simms was supercreepy. Hard to explain, but he looked like a big, hairy baby . . . but he was such a nice man. It wasn’t his fault he looked like he looked.
“I know what you’re thinking, Tally Jones. You’re thinking that I’m close-minded and judgmental.”
Bingo
.
“But I’m telling you, Tucker Gentry chaperoned an interfaith youth group trip to South Padre Island last spring break, and my Dani got some very bad vibes from him. She was deeply shaken. To prey on her in her condition . . .” Eloise’s eyes filled, and I thought she might actually start weeping.
“Oh dear,” I soothed, reaching across the counter to lay a comforting hand on her arm. “I’m so sorry. I just heard about Dani. You must be beside yourself. But honestly, Eloise, you have to be careful what you say about Tucker. You could seriously damage his life with accusations like that.”