A Bad Day for Romance (8 page)

Stella sighed as she hung up, wondering how to frame the news to the Flycocks. Her hopes of getting Divinity out in time for the wedding had been dashed, but maybe Taffy would be suitably buoyed by Pearline’s upcoming visit that she’d be willing to slip away long enough to see her cousin married, and Dotty could be convinced to settle for two-thirds of the Flycock branch of the family tree.

“She’ll call you as soon as she gets a minute,” Stella told the Flycocks, and then said her good-byes, dragging Chrissy toward the door before she could say anything further to upset Taffy.

“Nice going,” she muttered, once they were outside the building. “You get Taffy riled up any more, she’s liable to try to storm the cells and then Lloyd’s gonna have to lock her up, too, and how you going to explain
that
to Dotty?”

“I don’t get how her and Mrs. McAfee can be twins,” Chrissy mused. “Mrs. McAfee’s pretty cool. And Mr. Flycock, you think that’s his real hair? Plus why’s he always hunching like that? It’s like he figures if he can disappear into that raincoat he won’t have to listen to his wife anymore.”

“No idea, but hush up, I got something interesting to show you.”

Stella had Chrissy stand guard on the sidewalk by the entrance while she fetched the plastic wrapped bow from a mound of English ivy on the side of the building. She took the long way back to her Jeep, taking advantage of a storm culvert and a thicket of black walnut trees to shield her from view, and tossed the thing in the trunk before driving around to pick Chrissy up. On the way, she checked the dashboard clock; if they floored it, there would be time for a late lunch, a massage, and a nap before the rehearsal dinner.

“You gonna tell me what you just plucked out of the bush?” Chrissy asked.

Stella filled her in, and was rewarded with a whistle. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”

“Nope, it looks like it’s Divinity that done it.”

“No, I don’t mean that, her killing someone don’t surprise me in the least. I just can’t believe she managed it with that bow. Only pink bows they make are youth models, and they don’t have a heck of a lot of firepower.”

“Maybe she has spectacularly good aim.”

“Mmm.” Chrissy didn’t bother to mask her skepticism.

“What about you? You find out anything useful?”

“I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Divinity’s gotten even nastier,” Chrissy said, slumping into her seat and massaging her temples. “And I had to practically pry Lloyd’s tongue off the floor where it fell outta his mouth all drooling. He said he had to oversee the visit but all he done was sit out in a folding chair staring at me.”

“Well, we got good reason to think Divinity did it, but why?” Stella asked, trying to focus Chrissy’s commentary. “Bryant dumped her, she wasn’t gonna stand for it—something along those lines?”

“I don’t know… I mean, she really didn’t give me that impression. You know how sometimes a gal will just dig in tighter and tighter the more a guy tries to put her behind him?”

“Mmm, don’t I know it.” It was one of the biggest ongoing challenges in their line of business—the curious natural phenomenon that somehow rendered a man more attractive when you couldn’t have him anymore. It was most problematic when that man did the kinds of things to a woman that brought her to Stella in the first place, because then Stella had to deal with the twin scourges of first straightening a bad man out and then convincing his ex that she was better off without even the new-and-improved version.

“Well, she ain’t one of ’em. She was saying how she’s already got her eye on someone new, he plays bass in some band that opens for the Outlaw Junkies. Sounds like she barely waited for the door to slam on Bryant’s way out, tell you the truth.”

“So, maybe
he
was the one all broke up about it? He threatened her, told her if he couldn’t have her no one else would either, et cetera… She, I don’t know, killed him in self-defense?”

“No, sounds like he moved on, too. Divinity confirmed he’s seeing her old roommate, this Lexie girl. Honest, Stella, I think they really were down here doing just what Divinity said, rehearsing for her
My Side of the Mountain
audition.”

“Her what?”

“Aw, you gotta be kidding me,” Chrissy protested. “You never heard of it? On TLC? They run promos for it all the time.”

“You know I only got the basic.” Stella had downgraded her cable in a cost-cutting move a while back and discovered she was just as content without all the channels competing for her attention, especially since the covert justice business tended to get done in the after-work and leisure-type hours when other folks generally found time to tune in. Also, in the recent months, when Stella had been trying to juggle both her romance with BJ and her Goat…
entanglement
, for want of a better word, she had discovered that she needed to spend a fair amount of time mooning and sighing and curling up in the corner of the sofa with a romance novel, looking for answers in her beloved dog-eared copies of Nora Roberts’s Three Sisters Island trilogy.

“Well, it’s one of those reality shows. It’s like
Hunger Games
for grown-ups meets
Survivor
, with a lot of titty shots and fellas taking their shirts off. They film it in the Blue Ridge Mountains and they’re casting the second season now, only it ain’t like
American Idol
, you can’t just show up and try out. But Bryant knows somebody, so he got her an audition.”

“Divinity wanted to be on a show like that?” Stella shook her head, remembering the Christmas cards she’d received from the Flycocks over the years, every one featuring Divinity in a frilly party dress with full makeup and her hair up in one fancy updo or another, eerily segueing from trussed-up toddler to glitzed-out teen to overdone diva. “Doesn’t seem like her thing. I seen them
Survivor
pictures in
People
, where everyone’s all slimed up with seaweed and they’re eating grubs and whatnot. You wouldn’t think Divinity would want people to see her au naturel.”

“Divinity don’t much care as long as the money spends, is my impression,” Chrissy said. “
Mountain
is tearing up the ratings and they’re only halfway through the first season.”

“So let me get this straight. Bryant dragged her down to the state park on a camping trip so he could coach her on…”

“Survival stuff, is what she told me. They were working on her audition video, showing her drinking out of a stream and picking berries and peeing behind a bush for all I know.”

“So… where’s the video?”

Chrissy was silent for a moment. “Huh.”

“Didn’t think of that already? Neither you nor Lloyd nor any of the rest of the cops up here?”

“Well, far’s I know they could have it tucked away in evidence or something—”

“But nobody mentioned it? Not in all that time you were back there with those two?”

“Well, I—”

“Just how hard did you work him anyway?”

“I’m not sure I like your tone,” Chrissy snapped. “
You
try dealing with Divinity carrying on about how there ain’t any hand sanitizer and the crackers are stale, all while Lloyd’s edging his chair closer and closer to you in the visiting room starin’ at you like he don’t want to miss it if your skirt spontaneously falls off all by itself. It was distracting.”

“So, what
did
she tell you, anyway?”

“She says she must of got hit on the head or something because she can’t remember a thing past when she climbed up that tree.”

“Mighty convenient.”

“Yeah. She said Bryant wanted to shoot her pretending to sleep up there, like they did in
The Hunger Games
. Anyway, one minute she said she was climbing up the tree and the next she woke up all lying on the ground cut up and bloody, with her leg twisted and her arm all fucked-up. She saw that Bryant had an arrow sticking out of him, and according to her, she figured it was a hunting accident, and she wanted to get help so she got her a branch to lean on and kind of dragged her leg along behind her until she run into the ranger.”

“And you’re sure there really was a ranger?”

“Yeah, he was driving around in the park truck the way they do, looking for folks to bust for exercising their constitutional rights to enjoy the outdoors.” Stella knew not to inquire further into that comment; she assumed it was a reference to the Lardners’ disdain for hunting regulations. “The ranger called the cops and an ambulance for Divinity. Once the paramedics got her toted off to the hospital the ranger took Lloyd and his partner over in the direction where she said she’d come from, and that’s where they found Bryant, shot dead.”

“They must’ve found the bow about that time, too. Only if Divinity didn’t mention it to you, she must not know they have it. Wonder why they haven’t let her in on that fact?”

“No idea, Stella, even I can’t get a fella to burst out with confidential information like that just from him breathing my pheromones.”

Stella snorted. “You done it before,” she reminded Chrissy, and was about to give her a few examples when she noticed that blush creeping back across the girl’s face. “Okay, okay, you want to be all coy, that’s fine with me. Only, if we don’t figure out a way to spring Divinity, I don’t see how we’ll get her folks and Tilly to leave their jailhouse vigil, and I just don’t know what to tell Dotty. I mean, I got Pearline to come down on Sunday, but it would sure be nice if we could get this wrapped up before then.” Stella paused. “I mean, that Divinity’s always been a pain in the ass, but I just can’t believe she’s a
killer
. There’s got to be some other explanation for that bow.”

Chrissy was silent for a long while, screwing up her face in an expression of fiercely conflicting emotions. “Oh, hell,” she finally said, as the resort entrance came into view at the crest of a hill decked out with trees in glorious fall colors. “Lloyd did mention he might come by the rehearsal dinner tonight. Wanted to ask folks a few questions.”

“And Ian’s not coming until tomorrow!” Stella crowed. “Leaving you to your own devices. And with a full bar, no less.”

“Don’t be thinking I’m going to get up to anything nasty with Lloyd,” Chrissy sputtered. “I might talk to him for a minute, is all.”

“And maybe fetch him a drink,” Stella advised. “Or two. It
is
a joyous occasion, after all.”

“You just got done saying you didn’t think there was going to be a wedding at all if Divinity stays locked up.”

“Well, here it is not even lunchtime yet,” Stella said, using the entrance to the resort to execute a gravel-spitting U-turn. “Way too early to be making dire predictions, you ask me. In fact, I think we ought to go have us a picnic in the national forest—what do you say?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHAT CHRISSY SAID WAS “PULL ON
over” when she saw a hand-painted sign hanging from a tree half a mile from the turnoff to the park. The sign advertised “SAWYER COUNTY HAM CORN STRAWBERRY’S ANTIQUE’S KNIFE’S SHARPEND.”

“That’s a mighty big claim,” Stella observed as she drove over the rutted dirt road that passed through a clump of poplars. They came up on one of those houses that started out as a couple of rooms constructed from elbow grease and timber from the closest trees the builder could find to cut down and had evolved over the next eighty years into a cluster of additions and porches until it was more or less a compound. Stella’s dear friend Jelloman Nunn lived in such an abode back in Prosper, though there was evidence that he differed from the owners of this home in his hobbies and avocations. At Jelloman’s, you were liable to stumble over a motorcycle muffler or fender or other part resting or leaning or hanging next to every wall and fence post and outbuilding, jars of sun tea shared windowsill space with pyramids of empty Schlitz cans, and the whole place was permanently scented with the skunky aroma of fine homegrown.

At this place, a delicious hickory smell wafted from the back, suggesting a smokehouse just out of view; the tinkling of half a dozen wind chimes competed with the sounds of passing traffic, and every surface was decorated by a cat or two, sunning itself under the glorious September sky. A woman of indeterminate age, wearing a gray braid down past the waistband of her ancient Lee jeans, came out onto the porch and greeted them with a television remote in one hand and an extra cat hooked in the other.

Ten minutes later, they’d traded ten dollars for two sandwiches piled high with the local ham and a thin dollop of mustard, the ham salty enough to singe one’s sinuses and so tender it fairly melted in the mouth.

“I ain’t never moving.” Chrissy sighed happily, taking her first bite before they were even out of the woman’s driveway. “I ordered a ham sandwich over in St. Louis one time and you wouldn’t have known it was ham at all. Tasted like tofu.”

“You’ve never had tofu,” Stella pointed out.

“Don’t have to to know it ain’t anything like this.”

A half-dozen miles down the road, Stella pulled into the park entrance and rolled to a stop by the guard shack. A bored-looking ranger in a crisp brown polyester shirt leaned out the little window and squinted at her. His little name tag read “Foster.”

“Just a day pass,” she said.

As the young man took her twenty and made change without comment, at a pace that suggested he hoped to draw out this task for all the entertainment value he could squeeze from it, Stella pushed her sunglasses up on top of her forehead and gave him her most fetching smile. “So, did you have to work these last few days? What with all this nice weather we been having?”

Park Ranger Foster paused in his glacier change counting, and he leaned out of his little window to favor her with a glare. “So you’re one of
those
,” he said.

“One of who?”

“Them looky-loos coming in here all day hoping to get an eyeful of a murder scene. Bloodthirsty, all of y’all. It ain’t right.”

“There was a
murder
?” Chrissy piped up, leaning across the console so she could get a proper view of the ranger and, more importantly, he could drink in a view of
her
. “Right here in the middle of this beautiful park?”