Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 06 (26 page)

“That I was confused, I suppose.” He flushed as he realized I was staring at his seminude torso. “Ah, let me grab a shirt and we can … Would you like another drink, Arly? I’m out of canapes, but …”

It was obvious he was still confused, but he didn’t deserve to be in any better mental shape than I was. We regarded each other with varying levels of bemusement, neither of us quite sure what to do next. We finally figured it out and tacitly decided to do it in his room. And did it damn well, too.

Once again, Brother Verber was staggering up the hillside, panting like a Lamaze student, sneezing every now and then, sweating copiously, and praying with impressive sincerity that the moonshine still would pop up from behind a rock any minute. The major differences were that he was obliged to limp and that the storm was squarely overhead and making it clear it was gonna get down to business real soon.

“Around these rocks?” Mrs. Jim Bob said, trudging behind him. “Are you sure it’s there, or are you still addled from your fall? We have been up here and down there and over this and behind that to the point I couldn’t find the car if you paid me. I’d like to think you would have known if Raz was lying to you, you being trained in that sort of thing, but I’ll admit I’m beginning to wonder, Brother Verber.”

“We have to keep the faith, Sister Barbara. That’s the only way to tell the saints from the sinners, and we both know which side of the bed we get up on, don’t we?” He wished he could wipe the sweat out of his eyes, but there wasn’t any way to juggle the boxes and get to his handkerchief. A raindrop bounced off his balding head, adding to the ambience of impending doom. “It sure does look like rain. Maybe we ought to think about putting off this Christian mission until we have a nice, sunny day?”

“We are not putting this off for anything,” she said firmly, although she was equally dismayed by the growls from the sky and the occasional raindrop. “You’re the one who said it wasn’t all that far, if I recollect, and you’re the one who’s going to lead us to the still and light the fire. If you ask me, you’d better save your breath for the climb.”

The two differences have already been mentioned. Now two things were about to happen, neither expected and neither to be savored in the manner of a glass of iced tea on a hot afternoon. The first happened right off. Just as Brother Verber was finding the courage to admit he was confused (if not as lost as a flea on a sheepdog), he saw the still in a clearing.

“Oh my gawd,” he said, blinking in disbelief. “I mean to say, praise the Lord. Sister Barbara, we have reached our goal. Let us fall to our knees and offer thanks for the success of our mission to rid the community of moonshine and perfidy.”

“It’s about time. We’ve been wandering in circles for more than three hours.”

Brother Verber was too amazed with his luck to insist on an impromptu prayer meeting in the woods. He would have patted himself on the back, had it been possible, but had to settle for a smug chuckle and the knowledge that he had been guided by the Lord on account of the undeniable purity of his soul. He put down the packages and studied the still, a real artistic arrangement of copper coils, a big ol’ vat, some gallon jugs, and a goodly collection of mason jars in wooden crates. The remains of a fire, nothing more than some charred wood and feathery white ashes, were visible below the vat.

Something twitched from underneath. He was curious enough to squat down and poke the shadow with a stick. “Something’s under here,” he said. “One of the Lord’s little critters needs to be on its way afore we commence our mission.”

“What is it?” she said, joining him. Destroying the still and burning up unspeakable lingerie was one thing—two, actually—but she didn’t want any roasted groundhogs on her conscience.

This led almost immediately to the second unexpected thing. The Mephitis mephitis (also called polecat, zorrino, and, by the less couth, wood pussy) was frightened by the jabs to its hindquarters. Instinct took over and it backed out from its haven, lifted its tail, and spewed out a message that had stopped many a predator ten times its size. Having succeeded, it stalked indignantly into the brush to hunt up some tasty grubs for supper.

Mrs. Jim Bob and Brother Verber were grappling with each other as they tried to escape the yellow mist that stung their eyes, clogged their throats, and seized their lungs. Both of them were screeching something awful; the words weren’t intelligible but the messages were pretty much identical. By the time they reached the far edge of the clearing, Mrs. Jim Bob was sobbing uncontrollably and Brother Verber was on his hands and knees and in the process of tossing his lunch.

“You idiot!” Mrs. Jim Bob howled between sobs. “I can’t believe what an idiot you are!” She staggered to her feet and tried to wipe the miasma off her face. She might as well have tried to wipe off her nose or her chin. “You stupid idiot!”

He caught hold of a sapling and pulled himself up, in some corner corner of his mind obliged to agree with her. “I didn’t know! I thought it was a—a—I dunno! I didn’t think it was a skunk, for pity’s sake!”

“You idiot,” she repeated for good measure, “look what you’ve done. I can barely see. What if I’m blind forever after? How are we gonna find our way out of here?”

She remained hysterical for another ten minutes or so. Brother Verber missed some of it because of recurrent nausea, but it finally eased up and he offered her his handkerchief. She was still making disparaging remarks when lightning crackled. Not more than a few seconds later, thunder exploded with such fury that the whole ridge trembled.

“Now what?” she shrieked, immediately lapsing back into hysteria. “Now what? What do we do?”

A fine question, worthy of the beacon of the flock, he heard himself thinking as he spun around and gazed at nothing more useful than scrubby brush and the creek bed they’d come up. He couldn’t recall which way the car was, but he was certain it was a long, long way. And they had a short, short time to find shelter.

“Stay here a minute,” he said, then hustled himself past the still to the other side of the clearing. There wasn’t much of anything there, either, and he plunged into the brush, his feet moving of their own accord and his mind nigh onto blank. He thrashed this way and that, feeling as if he were covering miles but actually making a loppy circle, and therefore was a little surprised at how quickly he returned to his companion.

“Well?” she snapped. “There’s a cave not too far from here,” he gasped. “It ain’t a Holiday Inn, but it’s deep enough that we can get out of the rain. I think Raz uses it to store his whiskey.”

“What about this disgusting stench?”

Thunder reverberated, this time clearly a warning that the preliminaries were over and the rain was coming any minute. Brother Verber snatched up the packages and said, “I didn’t see a shower in the cave, if that’s what you mean. We’d better hurry, Sister Barbara. Time’s a-wasting.”

The heavens proved him right. They hurried to the cave, but by the time they arrived, they were soaked to the skin, shivering so hard neither could speak, and their clothes, rather than being rinsed off, smelled all the worse for being clammy. Mrs. Jim Bob sat down on a crate and blotted her face, then took a look at the decor, which consisted of a dozen crates of moonshine, a few stubby candles, crumpled candy wrappers, and a vast quantity of crushed acorn shells on the muddy floor.

She wrapped her arms around her shoulders and began to sniffle. It was retribution, she thought despondently. She’d sinned, and now she was being made to suffer for it. She’d entertained notions of lust, and to make it worse, had envisioned herself in the arms of another man. “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” she mumbled under her breath, “and thou better not even thinketh about it.” She’d said those very words to Jim Bob, time and again, once going so far as to write them down on a paper and leave it pinned to his pillow the night he hadn’t come home until the roosters were crowing and the first yellow school bus was sucking in a child at the edge of the county.

“Beg pardon?” Brother Verber said as he fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. He took in her startled gaze and said, “Don’t you mind, Sister Barbara. I have on an undershirt. I’m hoping it won’t smell quite so bad and I can put my shirt way off in the corner behind those crates.”

“I’m not about to take off my dress,” she said primly, or at least as primly as anyone could who was shivering, shaking, stinking, and dripping onto the floor of the cave. “I shall not sink to indecency, no matter how trying the situation. Now you fetch some wood and build a fire.”

They both looked at the rain coming down like Niagara Falls. “I don’t reckon we’ll have much luck with a fire,” he said as he threw his shirt down and determined sadly that his undershirt was just as wet and just as smelly. Lordy, it was cold. Poor Sister Barbara was twitching from her head to her ankles, and it was all he could do to stop himself from rushing to her side and wrapping his arms around her to share his warmth and to comfort her in this time of trouble and despair. “I wish we could get out of these wet clothes,” he said as he put that idea right out of his mind and sat down at a decorous distance. “They might dry if we spread ‘em out for a time, but of course I know we can’t do that on account of being good Christians.”

Mrs. Jim Bob plucked at her sodden skirt. “You’re probably right about getting out of these clothes. However, I am a married woman, and under no circumstances would I behave immodestly in front of another man. Or in front of Jim Bob, for that matter.” Her teeth began to chatter so hard she had to stop talking. Her knees were knocking against each other as if they were applauding, although there sure wasn’t anything worthy of ovation. There they were, stuck in a cave with whiskey. They were wet, cold, stinking to high heaven, with no good idea of how to find the car should the rain ease up, and it was all her fault. She clenched her hands together and hung her head.

“I don’t think you ever said what’s in these boxes,” Brother Verber said, picking up one and peering at the splattered paper and listless white ribbon.

Ruby Bee was still irritated from the interview with Lieutenant Henbit and had been making it known going on several hours now. At the moment, she was flipping through the guidebook, but for not the first time. Then she slammed it on the bed and said, “I don’t know when I’ve met a less mannersome man. He acted ruder worse than Leadbelly Buchanon did when those kids tipped his outhouse. I swear, I thought ol’ Leadbelly would never quit griping about that.”

Estelle decided not to mention an uncanny parallel that happened to be lying on the bed. “At least you didn’t tell him about the purpose of your mission last night. Gawd only knows what he would have said if he’d been told. He might have arrested you for tampering with the contest rules or something, and you’d be back in the slammer before you knew what hit you.”

“If we could get this mess straightened out, maybe Geri could go ahead and have the cookoff,” Ruby Bee said, again not for the first time. “Ten thousand dollars ain’t chicken feed, not by a long shot, and I sure could use it. I might just buy some ferns for the barroom, after all. Dahlia doesn’t do much more than mope around as it is, so she could be in charge of sweeping up the leaves.”

They discussed the tragedy in Lebanon for a while, but they didn’t know much. After they’d agreed how awful it was and how they couldn’t imagine such a thing happening on a honeymoon and maybe this hotshot black FBI man might help, the conversation dribbled off. It did get them back to the problem with the plumber, however, in that Eilene was supposedly looking into the lead vs. copper situation.

Estelle snorted and said, “I’m having some doubts about this fellow, even if he really is just a bad plumber. Why would he be moonlighting for a snooty magazine? It seems to me he’d make a lot more money making emergency calls at night, when people are obliged to pay an arm and a leg to keep the house from flooding.”

“That old boy in Emmet charged me forty-five dollars when the commodes backed up on a Saturday night,” Ruby Bee muttered, getting steamed up just thinking about it. “He had the audacity to tell me that if I didn’t want to pay the extra charge, he’d see if he could come by Monday or maybe Tuesday. Now how am I supposed to make do without commodes for two or three days?”

“Why would he say he was a plumber if he wasn’t?”

“And what is he?” Ruby Bee mused aloud. There was a truckload of other questions, but she decided to chew on this one for the moment. “If he’s not a plumber, then maybe some of these other so-called workmen aren’t what they say, either. I’ll tell you one thing: Gaylene Feather is no cook. I asked her a few questions about her recipe, kind of assessing the competition, and she was as addled as a snake with feathers. I don’t know how she ever got to be a finalist.”

“It’s odd, her going to the Xanadu yesterday,” Estelle said. “If Arly hadn’t turned up like a bad penny, we might have figured out what she was up to. But you had to start asking that clerk about the lottery and how it worked, and that’s why Arly snuck up on us like she did.”

“I seem to recollect you were slobbering over my shoulder at the chance to win all those millions of dollars.”

“That ain’t the point. If those television detectives were as sloppy when they tailed someone, they’d end up dead before the second commercial.”

Blame was cast back and forth, but in a perfunctory way, and again the conversation dribbled off and both of them took to eyeing a spider on its way across the ceiling.

“It’s too bad we didn’t go up the alley alongside the Xanadu,” Ruby Bee said. “We might have seen Brenda Appleton inside, shooting that fellow—or someone else shooting him. I suppose the police looked around for clues, but they sure seem to think Brenda’s their culprit.”

Estelle assumed Ruby Bee had done her homework well. “Does she know how to cook?”

“Yeah, but she mentioned funny things like matzoh balls and chopped chicken liver.”

“Instead of fried? Does she cook it first, or is it raw?”

Ruby Bee held up her hand. “We didn’t swap recipes, Mrs. Pillsbury Doughgirl, and that’s not important, anyway. What matters is why those men keep going to the third floor and pretending they’re regular workmen. I’d be willing to say there’s something going on up there that doesn’t involve Krazy KoKo-Nut or lead pipes.”