Lethal Bayou Beauty (7 page)

I smiled. “But if
I
killed her, I wouldn’t be in any danger if I attempted to investigate, so the fact that you’ve told me to stay out of your case also tells me you don’t think I did it.”

“Doesn’t matter what I think. It only matters what I can prove, and unfortunately, I can’t prove you
didn’t
do it. That may be all that the good citizens of Sinful need to rally behind Celia and demand your arrest. Remember, Pansy was the mayor’s niece. This could get very ugly.”

Holy shit!

A jolt of fear shot through me like a lightning bolt. I’d completely forgotten to put things in perspective. I wasn’t back in DC, with hundreds of thousands of people and a staff of attorneys at my disposal. I was an outsider in a small bayou town who’d just threatened a dead, politically connected local.
 

So much for flying below radar. I’d just blown the whole thing up.

###

After an admonition from Carter not to leave town, I flew upstairs to call Harrison and ensure that my Sandy-Sue cover was shored up from every angle possible. I felt my lower back tighten as I clenched the phone, waiting for him to answer. He was not going to be happy about this turn of events, and Director Morrow was going to flip.
 

“What’s wrong?” Harrison sounded half-asleep and half-stressed, well aware that a six a.m. call on a line reserved only for emergencies couldn’t be a good thing.

I gave him a brief rundown of the situation, leaving out the details about the actual reason for the fight. His responses went from chuckling at my foray into the beauty world to disbelief over the fact that yet another body had racked up on my watch.
 

“Jesus, Redding!” he said when I’d finished. “You can handle the most complicated weaponry like you designed it yourself and traverse some of the world’s deadliest terrain like it’s a stroll in the park, but you can’t manage to lay low in some hick town for even a day without landing smack in the middle of trouble. I’m beginning to think Morrow is right and
you’re
the real problem.”

I clenched my teeth and struggled not to tell him off. It wasn’t totally his fault. You had to actually
be
in Sinful to figure out it was a whole different level of strange.

“This town is the most difficult assignment I’ve ever had,” I said. “I’m not trained to be a civilian, and I’m certainly not trained to host beauty pageants. How well would you do in my place?”

“I’m a guy.”

“Exactly my point. And for all intents and purposes, so am I, at least from the average female perspective. I am just as lost here as you would be. It’s like Alice in Wonderland. This place is not anything I know or can draw a comparison to from my normal life. What the hell kind of assassin would I be if I was worried about messing up my hair or breaking a nail?”

He sighed. “Okay, so it’s definitely not the best cover for you, and I’m sure Morrow had no idea that you’d be thrust into the limelight with all your feminine shortcomings up for exposure. But this makes four bodies since you’ve been there.”

“What can I do about that when they keep popping up? I can’t keep people from being murdered by someone else.”

“Shit.” Harrison was silent for several seconds, and I knew he was at as much of a loss as I was. “If you hadn’t threatened her, this might not be as serious. What did she do, anyway?”

“She called me stupid.”

“Oh.”
 

Harrison knew better than anyone how that one word could set me off. People could call me crazy, ugly, emotionally stunted…even fat, although that would be a lie. But no one called me stupid or weak and got away with it.

“And what did you do to get her to that point?” he asked.

Crap. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t work around to the details.
 

“I didn’t do the kid’s makeup to her standards.”

“No big surprise there, but a lousy makeup job rarely incites name-calling. What kind of makeup did you do—zombie apocalypse?”

I sighed. “Lady Gaga.”

“You didn’t.”

“She said it was a royal theme. How was I supposed to know that some pop singer is masquerading as royalty?”

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Do me a favor, Redding. Open up the curtains on the front of that house so that everyone can see in. Then sit in front of the television and watch anything but CNN for a good twelve hours. You can catch up on what the rest of the world is in on and have witnesses that you were at home in case another dead person turns up.”

I’d already spent half my night dedicated to learning pop culture, but I saw no reason to admit that to Harrison. “What are you going to tell Morrow?”

“As little as I can get away with, and even that is likely to send him into cardiac arrest.”

“He can’t pull me out. It would only make things worse.”

“I know. That’s the part he’s going to like the least. You know how he hates having no options.”

“Join the party.”

“Hang in there, Redding. I’ll do what I can on this end to ensure your cover remains intact. I’ll get back to you when I have information. You stay in plain sight as much as possible. Sit on the corner of Main Street and play the banjo if you have to. But try to have witnesses just in case this beauty queen wasn’t the only one whose number is up.”

I hung up the phone and walked into the bathroom, my knotted back and neck in desperate need of a hot shower. In reality, I hadn’t been alone often since I’d been in Sinful, but I suspected that Ida Belle and Gertie, with all their shenanigans, weren’t the best of alibis. I hated to drag any of the other residents into my crap, but if I did everything in public, then I supposed that would leave everyone I interacted with off Carter’s hit list.

I grabbed a handful of hair extensions and clipped them in a wad to the top of my head. It was things like showering that had me longing for my one-inch locks trapped beneath all that fake hair and glue. Some of the long strands escaped my grasp and I grabbed more barrettes to hold them in place.
 

The entire process could have been simplified if I’d just use the mirror, but I hadn’t been able to look at myself since we’d returned from New Orleans two days ago. Genesis was a genius, no doubt about that. She’d exposed the delicate bone structure of my face while leaving me looking like I was hardly wearing any makeup at all. The simple, casual look she’d given my hair was no fuss and would be easy for even me to keep up.
 

Then she’d spun me around in that chair to see her handiwork in all its glory, and I’d been struck speechless. Genesis, Ida Belle, and Gertie had taken it as my stunned appreciation for Genesis’ extraordinary abilities, but that wasn’t it at all. What had rendered me speechless is that I looked exactly like my mother. Ever since I’d arrived in Sinful—freshly made over to look completely different from my normal self—I’d caught glimpses of her in me. A pitch of the eyebrow, a curve of the lips, but they’d been flashes.

Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye.
 

And I’d made sure I didn’t linger in front of the mirror, allowing the whole view to come into focus. But when I’d seen myself in that beauty shop mirror, it was as if I were looking at a photograph—my favorite photograph of my mother. She was sitting in a lawn chair on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard. We were on family vacation, the last one before she died. Back then, my father was a different man—human even.

Entire years of my adult life ran together and disappeared into the nothingness of my mind, but I could remember every minute of that summer at the beach. It was absolutely perfect.

Then she’d died. And nothing had ever been right again.

Chapter Six

I’d barely gotten the coffee on before I heard the second set of a.m. pounding on my front door. This time, Ida Belle and Gertie stood on my porch, looking a bit worse for the wear. Ida Belle was in her usual morning-interrupted wear of robe and curlers. Gertie, who’d attempted to dress, had on a purple sweat suit and a giant red headband pulling her unkempt hair off her bloodred face. She was leaning against the doorjamb and wheezing like an asthmatic.

I peered around her but didn’t see Gertie’s ancient Cadillac parked nearby.

“Did you run over here?”

“
Someone’s
car is out of commission,” Ida Belle said, who surprisingly didn’t even seem winded.

“And
someone
won’t take her car out when it’s foggy lest it mar the perfect detail job,” Gertie wheezed.

“Your car was fine last night,” I said. “What happened?”

Gertie sucked in a deep breath and her expression shifted to that look she gets when she doesn’t want to admit to something. “I hit a squirrel on the way home from Francine’s.”

I stared. “Sooooooo? Does Sinful have giant elephant squirrels made of titanium or something?”

Ida Belle waved a hand and walked past me into the house. “The damn squirrel was in a tree.”

“Not wearing your glasses again?” I asked.

“I don’t need glasses!” Gertie protested.

“Uh-huh,” I said and motioned her inside. “Can you get to the kitchen without breaking the living room furniture?”

“Smart alecks,” Gertie said as she stalked by. “Both of you.”

“How come you’re not winded?” I asked Ida Belle. She’d had to jog to my house the week before and had been huffing like a train.

“I didn’t let myself go as much as Gertie, but that run last week let me know how lazy I’ve been. I’m doing two miles a day on my treadmill. Since I was in reasonably good shape before—unlike some people—my body has responded quickly.”

As we walked single-file toward the kitchen, Gertie gave Ida Belle’s back the finger.

“I saw that,” Ida Belle said, without so much as even a slight turn of her head.

I grinned and followed them into the kitchen, where Ida Belle grabbed the coffeepot. Gertie breath was almost restored, and I gave her outfit another assessment.

“Red Hat Society meets
Jersey Shore
?” I asked.

Gertie stopped stirring her coffee. “What?”

I waved a hand at her. “The look. I thought it was a mash-up. Never mind.”

Ida Belle raised her eyebrows. “What exactly did you
do
after we left Francine’s?”

“I can tell you what I didn’t do—I didn’t kill Pansy Arceneaux.”

Ida Belle nodded. “We know.”

“Poor Celia,” Gertie said and sniffed.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “You’re not supposed to outlive your kids, much less find them murdered. I bet she’s a mess.”

“Beatrice tells us they had to sedate her. One of Celia’s cousins came to get her and took her to New Orleans.”

Silently, we all took a seat at the kitchen table. By unspoken agreement, no one spoke for the first few sips, then Ida Belle sighed.
 

“While I’ve enjoyed a whole two minutes completely free from Gertie’s babble, we have a serious crisis on our hands.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve already reported in to my partner at the agency. He’s going to do everything he can to shore up my cover on his end, but if Carter digs too deep, it won’t hold.”

Gertie’s eyes widened. “Surely, he doesn’t think you did this. Carter is young and not yet up to our standards of stealth and subterfuge, but he’s smart.”

“Gertie’s right,” Ida Belle said. “You have opportunity and ability, but you really don’t have motive. No one will take that beauty pageant stuff seriously as a reason to kill someone.”

“People in Sinful might,” I said.

Gertie’s eyes widened.
 

Ida Belle blew out a breath. “Crap. You’re right. No one in Sinful could stand Pansy, but they won’t be willing to admit that one of our own killed her. You’re the easiest scapegoat, and that falling-out last night will only cement it in the majority of their feeble minds.”

“Not to mention,” Gertie said, “that our idiot mayor will be looking to find a quick solution. It’s an election year. Hard to get votes if you’re letting the people who murder your family members get away.”

I’d already known it was serious, but hearing them spell out all the details made it sound all that more bleak. “So what do we do? Harrison told me to stay in public as much as possible—that way if anyone else turned up dead, I’d have an alibi.”

“That’s fine if we assume another murder victim is forthcoming, and in the same manner Pansy was murdered,” Gertie said. “But what if it was an isolated incident?”

 
Ida Belle shook her head. “And it probably was. Let’s face it, Pansy was the type of person who created long-term grudges. You heard that argument between Mark and Joanie last night at the church.”

“That’s true,” Gertie said. “It’s entirely possible someone has been waiting all these years for her to return to Sinful so that they could exact their revenge over something from high school.”

I frowned. “You really think someone could have waited all these years to kill Pansy over some high school slight? That seems a bit far-fetched to me, even by Sinful standards.”

Gertie’s brow creased with the effort of her thoughts. “Maybe thinking about getting revenge all these years drove them steadily over the precipice of sanity. What started as a simple revenge plot morphed into murder.”