Holly Blues (10 page)

“Is that you, China?” Ruby called from the adjoining shop.

“It’s me,” I called back. “Brought you a jelly doughnut. Raspberry.”

“Oh, yum,” Ruby said. I went into her shop. She was sitting on a stool in front of her book rack, shelving books. Khat, our shop Siamese, was lying on the floor beside her. “Just put it on the counter, and I’ll get to it in a minute,” she said. “So how did it go last night?” she added over her shoulder. “Supper with Sally, I mean.”

Ruby’s bookshelves offer all the important New Age topics, from deciphering your horoscope to reading your runes, throwing the I Ching, channeling spirits, attracting health and wealth, understanding your dreams, and unearthing your past selves, as well as the usual yoga, meditation, and feng shui books. If you have a secret hankering to discover your inner person and learn your place in the Universe, Ruby can recommend a book that will show you how. Or she’ll show you herself. Just sign up for one of her classes.

“Sally was on her best behavior.” I put down the sack containing Ruby’s doughnut and took an appreciative sniff. Ruby burns a different incense every day. Today, it smelled like cinnamon-spiced apple cider, a homey smell on a chilly December morning and a sweet accompaniment to the Christmassy fragrances in my shop. “She and Caitlin were soul mates from the get-go,” I added. “They discovered a secret bond. Fairies.”

“Fairies?” Ruby stood up and brushed her red velour skirt. She was wearing a black turtleneck with a red silk scarf and high-heeled black boots today—her skyscraper boots, I call them. Her mass of red hair was piled up on her head. She looked like a towering inferno. “Really? Sally is into fairies?”

Khat got up, too, stretched, and walked over to me.

“So it seems,” I replied, bending over to stroke his dark ears. Ruby is another fairy aficionado. She has a shelf of fairy lore in the shop, a collection of fairy dolls in her guest bedroom, and a framed Tinker Bell poster in her bathroom. I chuckled. “Maybe you and Sally ought to get together and compare fairy tales.”

“Maybe,” Ruby said without enthusiasm. She’s probably heard me complain about McQuaid’s ex too many times. She gave me a look. “Is she coming with us tonight to get the tree?”

I nodded, straightened, and leaned against the door frame, taking an appreciative bite of my jelly doughnut. “But McQuaid isn’t.”

“Meow,”
remarked Khat in a meaningful tone. He much prefers eating (chopped liver or fish) to watching people eat.

“Uh-oh,” Ruby said. “Because of Sally?”

“Because he promised Charlie Lipman he’d go to Omaha to find somebody. I didn’t tell him so, but I’m glad he has the work, with Christmas bills on the horizon.” I made a face. “And with Sally here, he’s probably glad to get away.”

Ruby went back to her bookshelf. “He won’t miss Saturday night’s party, will he?”

“He’s coming home on Friday.” I eyed her. “Are you still game for tonight?”

“Sure,” Ruby said. “Donna’s saving a tree for me, too. I may be a bit late, though. I need to stop at Castle Oaks. Mom’s having a little trouble.” She chuckled sadly. “A ‘little trouble’ is relative, of course.”

Khat wound himself around my ankles, reminding me that it was cruel to eat in front of him.

“Relative.” I ate the last of my doughnut. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“Hear what?” She picked up a copy of
Rune Stones and Your Destiny
, considered it for a moment, then propped it, partially open, on the shelf where she displays rune stones and other divining tools. Turning back to me, she added, “I ran into Sheila and Blackie last night. Did you know they’re seeing one another again?”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “Really?”

“Truly,” Ruby replied. “They were having supper at Beans’ Bar and Grill. And if you ask me, Blackie looked as if Sheila was all he wanted on his menu. She seemed pretty happy about it, too. They were holding hands under the table.”

I shook my head. “Will wonders never cease,” I muttered.

My friend Sheila Dawson is Pecan Springs’ chief of police, and a tough one at that. Since the city council appointed her to the job a few years ago, law enforcement funding is up and property crimes and motor vehicle accidents are down. Under Bubba Harris, the previous chief, the police department was a comfortable haven for good ol’ boys on the verge of retirement. With the funding, Sheila is rapidly turning it into a younger, stronger force that the entire community can be proud of. Sheila has had to arm-wrestle the city council for every penny, but even the most miserly, antifeminist council member grudgingly admits that Chief Dawson has put the department on the right track.

Blackie Blackwell, on the other hand, is McQuaid’s poker and fishing buddy, a friendship that goes back at least fifteen years. As the Adams County sheriff, Blackie carries on a proud Blackwell family tradition. His father was sheriff back when the county was still largely rural, and his mother cooked for the prisoners and cleaned the jail. Both are warmly remembered by longtime residents, who would probably like to go back to those peaceful days, when vacationing families from Dallas and Houston came to fish in the San Marcos and Guadalupe rivers and sail on the Highland Lakes, and cattle rustling was the most significant crime.

But Adams County is no longer just a scenic rural vacation destination. Pecan Springs is close enough to Austin (some forty minutes, depending on the traffic) to be considered a bedroom community, and urban sprawl is crawling in our direction. We’re located on the busy I-35 corridor, along which illegal drugs and illegal aliens are daily smuggled out of Mexico, and there are plenty of remote hideaways in the Hill Country for crystal meth labs, which Blackie aggressively targets. He has a sterling statewide reputation as a lawman’s lawman, and Adams County appreciates what they’ve got, which is why they recently elected him to his third term.

That may also be why, when Sheila and Blackie first got together, their friends gave an enthusiastic cheer. Not only are they decent, likable people, but it seemed like a perfect match: two fine law-enforcement professionals, one the popular county sheriff, the other the police chief of the county’s largest town—but not always popular, partly because she’s a woman, partly because she’s had to clean house in the PSPD. Then they got engaged, and we were all delighted. But as time went on, Sheila began to back out of her bargain and finally broke off the engagement. It wasn’t their relationship, she said. It was their careers. Two cops in one family was one cop too many.

Ruby raised her eyebrows at my lack of enthusiasm. “I thought you’d be happy to hear that they’re back together again.”

“I can’t decide,” I confessed. “If it lasts, sure, I’ll be thrilled. But I don’t think any of us wants to go through the misery of another breakup.”

“I don’t have anything to say about it,” Ruby observed practically, “and neither do you. So we might as well be happy for them.”

“I guess,” I said and looked down at Khat, who was sitting on my foot, watching me with a plaintive expression. “Breakfast?” I asked.

To his credit, he didn’t say “It’s about time.” He merely rose with dignity and led the way to the kitchen, where I warmed his chopped liver in the microwave and set it down in front of him. “Enjoy,” I said. The bell over my shop door tinkled, and a customer came in, so I left Khat to his breakfast and went to help her.

The customer bought one of Donna’s wreaths, a couple of Jim Long’s cookbooks, and some of the handcrafted paper we made in our papermaking workshop last summer. The purchase turned out to be a promising start to a pretty profitable day, and by the time I locked the door that afternoon and closed out the register, I was happy to see a tidy bundle of bills in the cash drawer, as well as a respectable sheaf of credit card slips. (If you’ve ever been in business for yourself, you’ll appreciate what that means.) Both the Crystal Cave and the tearoom did well, too, and Cass reported that the Thymely Gourmet had picked up another new client. A good day all the way around.

On the family front, too, it looked like things were under control, for a change. McQuaid had turned in his grades and gone to the Austin airport to catch his flight to Omaha. Sally had volunteered to pick Caitlin up at school, and I had promised Brian I’d be waiting when his science club meeting ended. The four of us would meet for a pizza at Gino’s, then head out for Mistletoe Farm to get the tree and join the evening festivities.

I was still putting the bank deposit together when the phone rang. I debated whether to answer, since the Closed sign was hung on the door and I had to stop at the bank before going to get Brian. But thinking it might be McQuaid calling about something he’d forgotten, I picked up.

“Thyme and Seasons Herbs,” I said, cradling the receiver against my shoulder as I stamped the last three checks. “How may I help you?”

There was a momentary pause. Then, “I’d like to speak to Sally,” a male voice said.

“Sally?” I clipped the stamped checks to the bank deposit slip. “Sally Strahorn?”

“Yeah, right. Is she there?”

“Not at the moment.” I reached for a slip of paper and a pencil. “Who’s calling? Give me a number, and I’ll have her call you back.”

“Don’t bother.” Another pause. “Just tell her a friend called.” The man’s voice was mild and almost ingratiating, but I thought I heard an undertone of something else. In the next second, though, the tone was lightened by an ironic chuckle. “Tell her I’ve got her car. She’ll understand.”

“What was that again?” I asked, not sure I’d heard right.

“Her car. The yellow Mini. Just tell her I have it.” There was a sharp click as the connection was broken.

I frowned at the receiver as I put it down.
A friend
had Sally’s car? I thought back to our conversation the day before. She’d said it was repossessed, hadn’t she? But there wasn’t time to think about that now. I put the checks and currency into the blue bank deposit bag and zipped it shut. I just had time to drop off the deposit and drive to the high school for Brian.

 

 

IT doesn’t take long to get from one end of Pecan Springs to another, even with a detour through the drive-through window at Ranchers State Bank, where Bonnie Roth (known to her friends as Loose-Lips Roth) took my money away from me. Bonnie and I are both members of the Myra Merryweather Herb Guild, and she is one of my most loyal customers. As she tallied my deposit, she handed over some of the local gossip. This kind of community service is not part of her job description, but Bonnie is a valuable employee in all other respects, and Helena Stubbs, her supervisor, knows it. Helena turns a deaf ear when Bonnie starts retailing the news.

By the time my money was safely in the bank’s hands, I had heard two stories—that Sheriff Blackwell and Chief Dawson were secretly married and that Lila Jennings had sold her diner to Bert Dankins—both of which I seriously doubted. Sheila wouldn’t get married without giving me a heads-up, and Lila had said just that morning that the deal with Bert was off. That’s Bonnie for you, though. She passes along every little scrap of news that blooms in her gossip garden, true or not.

But as she handed over my deposit slip, she leaned forward and whispered into the teller’s microphone something that I knew to be true: “Maybe you’ve already heard this, but Sally Strahorn is in town.”

Pecan Springs is growing fast, but at heart it’s still a small town, where everybody knows everybody else’s business and is happy to share it with as many people as possible. McQuaid is something of an icon here, for he once served as the interim police chief and solved (with a little help from his friends) a particularly notorious local murder. His ex-wife has been around often enough for people to learn something of her history.

I smiled nicely. “Yes, I know. We’ve invited Sally to stay at our house for the holiday.” There was no point in adding fuel to the fires of gossip.

“Oh, good.” Bonnie breathed a gusty sigh of relief. “To tell the truth, I was a little worried when she cashed that big check this morning and drove off with all that money. You never really
expect
anything bad to happen, although it’s certainly true that sometimes it does, don’t you know?” She took a deep breath, getting wound up for more. “I mean, I know Hark Hibler hates to print those awful things in the
Enterprise
, but he can’t just leave them out, now can he? Just last week, there was that piece about poor old Mr. King getting mugged on his way home from winning twenty-seven dollars playing bingo, and the week before, Betty Banning’s car got broken into at the mall and somebody stole the new flat-screen TV she’d just bought.” She fanned her hand, dismissing these ugly snippets of crime. “But now that I know Sally is staying with you and Mr. McQuaid—” She smiled broadly. “I’m just glad she’s being taken care of.”

I unzipped my bank bag and stuck the deposit ticket inside. “All that money?” I asked casually, latching on to the one new fact that Bonnie had handed me. Sally had cashed a check and driven away with a lot of cash? But she’d said she was broke. Where did she get the check? And how much money were we talking about?

But it had occurred to Bonnie, a bit belatedly, that she might have said too much. She glanced over her shoulder and gave a nervous laugh. “Guess I shouldn’t have mentioned that check.” She pursed her lips and made a gesture meant to suggest a key turning in a lock. “My lips are sealed. Definitely.”

Well, heck.

But I smiled. “Very professional. We’ll take good care of Sally,” I added reassuringly. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Bonnie.”

 

 

TWENTY minutes later, Brian and I were settled in a booth at Gino’s Italian Pizza Kitchen. This historic joint served up Pecan Springs’ very first pizza sometime back in the 1950s, and in spite of the fancy franchises that have mushroomed along the interstate, Gino’s pizza is still the best in town. It has the same delicious crust (thick or thin), the same tempting cheese that strings when you pick up a slice, and the same fresh mushrooms, anchovies, and Italian pizza sausage heaped generously over the top. Fads may come and fads may go, but Gino’s just keeps keeping on.