Divas and Dead Rebels (28 page)

“You’d have to ask Brandon or Clayton. They’d know. Why?”

“Catherine mentioned that there had been a death ruled accidental when it was really a murder.”

Bitty nodded. “I guess it’s possible. But she hasn’t been the same since her son died, so I don’t know if it’s true.”

“She’s had a really hard time coping,” I murmured. “I suppose that could affect her judgment.”

“Of course,” Bitty continued, “it made it even harder that Catherine and Breck had a torrid affair and had just split up when Monty died. I suppose that’s why she’s said Breck was responsible for her son’s death.”

“Torrid,” I mused aloud. “Such a descriptive word. So they had an affair, and everyone knew about it?”

Bitty looked astonished that I would ask such a question. “Heavens, Trinket, you can’t jaywalk in Oxford without someone finding out about it.”

“It’s not that small a town,” I argued. “It’s like Holly Springs, and—oh. I see what you mean.”

Bitty nodded. “Good. It’s not so much the number of people in a town as it is the number of people willing to gossip about people you know.”

“Dear lord.” I rolled my eyes and changed the subject. “Are we here to eat or to talk?”

“We can do both. I got quite a scare back there, you know. And my purse! I’m not at all sure it can be repaired.”

As if to illustrate her point, she pulled up her purse and stuck her forefinger into the hole. It was quite a large hole.

“Your forty-five, right?” I asked, and she sighed and nodded.

“Maybe you should carry a smaller gun.” I thought about that a second and added, “Or no gun at all.”

Bitty looked at me with wide eyes. “And be defenseless?”

“There’s a difference between being defenseless and being dangerous. I’ll grant you that you’re a much better shot these days, but I’m still in danger of having my nose shot off every time you pull out that cannon of yours.”

“I swear, I’m never taking you target shooting with me again. I was using another pistol, and it ejects spent shells. It was a hot shell that clipped your nose, not a bullet. Besides, if you’d get a little work done, it’d be a lot smaller target.”

“If you mean by ‘work done’ plastic surgery—and I know you do—I’m doing just fine with the nose I have now, thank you.”

There wasn’t much Bitty could say to that. It’s true. Kit Coltrane is a very nice catch. And I did it without Botox or a facelift, just my charming personality, despite what Bitty may say.

“Humph,” she said to my remarks, “I should never have told you that you look a lot like Delta Burke. You’ve done nothing but preen your feathers ever since.”

I smiled. “Well, she
was
Miss Florida before being a TV star, you know.”

Bitty shook her head. “Forty-five years ago!”

“No, it wasn’t. It was . . .” I did a rapid mental calculation and said, “. . . thirty-seven years ago.”

“Close enough.”

“Maybe in Bitty-years. You’ve been lying about your age so long I doubt you can even count right anymore.”

Bitty sucked in a deep breath, and before things got ugly I said quickly, “My, my, it’s so vairy, vairy wahm in heah!”

I wasn’t sure our usual conversational life preserver was going to work this time, but Bitty finally let her breath out in a huff of air and said, “That’s not going to work every time, you know.”

“Just so it works now.”

“Onion rings?” she asked after a moment of silence, and I nodded.

“Large order. With lots of ketchup.”

After we gorged—daintily, of course—we were in a much better frame of mind. Not even Chen Ling’s doggy utterances while she scarfed down a bare hot dog that was probably full of preservatives and a hundred different chemicals soured my mood.

“I’m ready to try again,” I said, and when Bitty looked up from untying the pink velvet bib around Chitling’s neck, I added, “With a much different approach, of course.”

“You mean go back to Catherine’s house?”

“Yep.”

“Well,” she said as she brushed a hot dog crumb off her dog’s face, “unless you have an invisibility cloak, Harry Potter, you might as well plan on getting caught.”

Chen Ling snuffled out the lost crumb while I said, “I have a plan.”

“About what to do after we’re caught snooping around Catherine’s house?”

“No.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “If that happens, we’re doomed. My plan entails disguises and secrecy.”

Bitty brightened immediately, as I’d known she would. “Really? Disguises? I like it already.”

“Good. Where can we find a costume shop in Oxford?”

Chapter 14

We ended up at Jo’s Auto Clean-up and Costume Shop on University. Mississippi businesses often like to diversify. It’s common to see hand painted signs that advertise proudly, “Snacks & Bait” shops all over the countryside. I try to never eat at those places, but renting costumes was an entirely different proposition.

Bitty was dismayed when she saw the costumes I chose for us. “
Maids?
You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“No, I’m not kidding. At least these should fit us and not fall down around our ankles.” I said the last as a not-so-gentle reminder of one of Bitty’s former schemes that hadn’t worked out well for me. When Bitty didn’t respond, I knew she remembered exactly what I was talking about. That didn’t stop her from blowing out an irritated puff of air, but at least I didn’t have to hear protests of innocence.

We left the shop with our costumes and a pug wearing a tiara. Don’t ask. Bitty has her peculiarities. Chen Ling looked smug all dolled up in a pink taffeta tutu and tiara big enough to fit the average first grader.

Once we were in the car I dropped my next bomb on poor Bitty: “Now we have to rent an old, beat-up car or something that looks like a work van.”

I thought Bitty was going to pass out from sheer horror. Finally she found words to go along with her shrieks of protest: “WHY? Are you crazy?”

“Because few maids drive Mercedes, and I thought we’d settled that crazy question a long time ago. Think about it, Bitty. Just for a moment. Does your Maria arrive in a nice, shiny limousine every morning?”

“She doesn’t come every day anymore,” Bitty replied, a bit sulkily, I thought.

“Okay. So when she does come to clean, what does she drive?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Trinket, how would I know? Even if I’m up when she gets there, I don’t look outside to see what she drives.”

I sighed. Sometimes getting Bitty to see reason is a long, complicated process. I gave it one more try. “All right, then, maybe you remember what Mrs. Tyree used to drive when she was a maid for the mayor?”

Mrs. Tyree is Bitty’s next door neighbor. She’s a lovely elderly lady who came from an entire family of domestics who were clever enough to form their own cleaning company way back in the new liberation era of the early 1970s. Then they diversified into offering yard services as well, and their little company grew large enough to keep Holly Springs well-supplied with help. It ended up being bought out by a larger corporation in the nineties, leaving Mrs. Tyree with enough money to buy the house next door to Bitty, and her children and grandchildren excellent college educations wherever they chose to go. Not that the Civil Rights era changed everything. Some taboos are still firmly in place no matter what the person’s race or position in life. Change takes time.

Bitty thought for a moment before she said, “I think she was the mayor’s morning help and drove a nineteen-forties Buick. Blue, with huge rust spots on it. It smelled like fish, too, since her husband used it to go frog-gigging at night.”

“There. You see? If we show up anywhere wearing maid uniforms and driving a Mercedes, no one would believe it. We have to be as inconspicuous as possible. Besides, your car has already been seen by probably everyone on Catherine’s street. We don’t want to risk it being recognized.”

“Then we can park it a few streets over and walk. I’m not riding in a piece of junk that’ll probably fall apart before it gets ten feet down the road.”

She had a point. I gave her that one and nodded. “Okay, we can park near a bus stop and act as if we just got off.”

“Just as long as I don’t have to actually ride on one again,” said Bitty. “For two days after riding the last bus, I had exhaust fumes in my hair.”

“Oh, Bitty. That’s all in your head.”

“No, in my
hair
. You need to listen more closely, sugar. Connie had to wash it twice and use extra conditioner.”

I gave up. “Fine. Stop at the next Dollar General you see. We need to buy some buckets and mops.”

Once we were well-supplied with the outer accoutrements that any maid would use—much to Bitty’s amazement—we stopped at a Mapco to change clothes in their bathroom. I looked at Bitty when she came tottering out into the convenience store next to the chips rack, all decked out in a maid’s attire of black dress and white apron and cap. However, I have rarely seen maids wear stilettos and pointed that out to her.

She looked down at her feet. “So what should I wear—Army boots?”

“How about flats. Don’t you own any?”

“Of course, I do. I even have a pair in the trunk that I wear when it’s muddy.”

“Then, by all means, let’s put them on.”

Once Bitty had changed into a pair of $400 Ferragamo red flats—I couldn’t be too picky—we set out for Catherine’s neighborhood again. I didn’t know why I felt so strongly that we had to check out her house before continuing our search, but I did. I’d told myself while munching onion rings that the police would have found any evidence of foul play, so there probably wasn’t a thing they’d overlooked or that we would discover. Yet, still, I had to satisfy that little voice in the back of my head that kept nagging me to make my own search.

Bitty parked her car in a lot outside a pizza shop. I expected her to leave Chen Ling and her tiara in the car as before, but she refused.

“No. We’re going to be an entire block over, and I’m not taking any chances that some criminal will come along and steal her.”

“They’d steal your car first,” I said, then realized what that would mean for the bug-eyed little puglet in Bitty’s arms. I sighed. “Okay. Just . . . stick her down in your mop bucket so she can’t be easily seen, okay?”

“In my
bucket?
” Bitty gasped. “Are you serious?”

“It’s clean. She’ll survive. Oh, and leave the tiara. It’d be hard enough explaining to any neighbors why we’re there without having to explain a dog disguised as a beauty pageant contestant.”

“You mean winner, not contestant,” said Bitty as she set the pug on the back seat. “Only the winners get the tiara.”

“I’m not up on all the rules. Just hurry up and put her in the bucket so we can go and do this before I lose my nerve.”

Bitty muttered indignant protests the entire time she got Chitling situated in the blue plastic cleaning bucket. I ignored her. It was nearly noon by now, and we had to get in and get out as quickly as possible. Unless Catherine had turned up in the past two hours, the police would eventually return to investigate her disappearance.

“What are we going to do if we get there and she’s home?” Bitty asked me. “I’ll just die if she tells people how I’m dressed.”

I rolled my eyes. “You better worry that she may
not
turn up. If that’s the case, we might have another murder on our hands.”

“Well, it’s not as if we
have
to do this, you know,” said Bitty. “We’re just being helpful since we’re worried about her.”

“Keep in mind that if she’s truly missing, the police will consider our helpfulness as interference. We need to get in and out as quickly as possible. I’m not eager to meet up with the Oxford police department.”

“Oh, they’re very nice,” said Bitty, and I looked at her.

“And you know this how?”

Bitty waved a hand in the air. “I had to come down and make a statement the other day. I didn’t want to tell you. But they were okay when I told them you don’t know any more than I do. Jackson Lee said it was just a formality.”

My head began to buzz like a nest of hornets, but we were already in front of Catherine’s house, so I didn’t press the issue. I had enough to worry about. We walked up the sidewalk to the front door like we were expected, although I could hear Bitty talking softly to the pug in the bucket.

“It’s all right, precious, Mama will protect you from crazy Auntie Trinket,” she assured the dog. I figured Chen Ling looked at it the other way around, but as long as she didn’t bite me or bark and alert the neighbors to two imposters, I didn’t care what either of them thought.

The front door was locked again, no doubt by the police, but I still had the key. I let us in, and this time I flipped on a light so it wasn’t shadowy as before. The back door had been closed, no doubt also locked, and nothing looked as if it had been touched since we’d left only a couple hours earlier.

“I’m going upstairs,” I said to Bitty, who stood owl-eyed in the living room like she’d done before. “If you want, check out things down here. I have a hunch the smell is coming from the kitchen, probably food left out.”