Southern Sass and a Battered Bride Read online

  Betsy gasped and my eyes widened.

  Betsy asked, “You positive, Miss Glenda?”

  The older woman gave a solid head nod. “One hundred percent positive. I saw them behind Mason’s Market a few weeks before she died. Mr. Mason always lets me go around back and use the spoiled produce for fertilizer for my garden.” The woman smiled. “It really works wonders with my tomatoes.”

  “I do the same thing, Glenda.” Miss Susie, the senior woman having lunch with her husband, Forest, in the booth across from us, agreed. “And I use my used coffee grounds too.”

  Miss Glenda nodded approvingly. “I heard of that on the lawn-and-garden program. I might start using my coffee grounds too.”

  “Excuse me, ladies.” I kept my tone as calm as I could manage. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you were telling me about Lucy and the biker, Miss Glenda . . .”

  She bobbed her head. “Yes, of course. I went back there to meet Mr. Mason at the shipment door and the two of them were really going at it, arguing about him showing his face on the island. She said something like, ‘I’m done. Forget it.’ The girl was waving her finger in his face, hollering about she wasn’t dying for him.”

  “And the tall fella grabbed her arm and said, ‘I guess we’ll see about that’ and jerked her to him and kissed her right on the mouth.”

  “Say what? We have another eyewitness account?” Betsy began coughing.

  “That’s right, and she seemed none too eager to get out of that lip lock. Her hands were all over him until Mr. Mason opened the doors and they saw they had an audience.” She shook her head again. “Trashy behavior when she was engaged to the Myers boy.”

  The fact he threatened her with death before they went at it made a lot of sense, with her loving those disgusting death spreads. I bet she didn’t believe she’d actually die.

  “Here’s your order, Miss Glenda. I put in the end pieces for Miss Sally. I know how much she likes them.” Rebecca handed her the bag and smiled.

  Miss Glenda held out a five-dollar bill. A nice tip from a senior on a fixed income. “Thank you, honey. Sister sure will be grateful.” Miss Glenda finished her coffee and turned to Betsy while my mind whirled with this new development. “You get yourself a good peach brandy from the liquor store. Pour yourself a jigger full and mix it with some raw honey from Mason’s Market. He has the local honey with all the wonderful antibiotic properties still in it.” She made a face. “Not that cheap industrial stuff. It’ll cure that cough in no time. Help you sleep too.” She winked at Betsy.

  “Glenda’s right. We use cinnamon whiskey and honey. Works like a charm every time.” Miss Susie smiled. Her face lit up in that warm, loving, grandmotherly way.

  “I better get this food home to Sister while it’s still hot. Y’all take care.” Miss Glenda gave my arm a squeeze. “Send your daddy our love and tell him we’re praying for his speedy recovery.”

  “I sure will. Thank you, ma’am.”

  Miss Glenda patted Betsy and waved bye to her contemporaries.

  Betsy and I returned to our food and attempted to process the elderly woman’s revelations regarding the biker and Paul. What was he doing arguing with her? And was Lucy cheating on Alex with two guys? I couldn’t imagine that. I had a hard time keeping up with one. Betsy nudged me and hitched a thumb over her shoulder to the rumblings behind us. Conversations regarding the investigation, Eddie, and new gossip about Paul and Lucy commenced around us, though softly. I spun on the stool, intending to digest the chatter in case another little nugget of relevance presented itself.

  “Yakety-yakking, that’s all you women do,” said Mr. Forest, and the natives went from unified to downright hostile.

  Every female in earshot turned to glare at the old man, who seemed unperturbed and swallowed another bite of pie. “It’s all the sheriff’s department seems to do too. Ain’t no one been arrested yet. If the sheriff hadn’t fallen ill, he’d have done something. That makes me wonder if he was targeted. Perhaps someone wanted him to have a heart attack.” He tapped his forehead with the back of his fork as if proud of his deductions.

  “Ya think it’s possible?” Betsy asked with big eyes.

  The old man gave a solid nod. “I do. Those confounded outsiders.” He made an obscene gesture that made Betsy snicker.

  “Hush, Forest. Quit showing these girls your worst side.” Miss Susie gave her husband a warning glare.

  “It’s the only side I got, woman.” He turned back toward Betsy and me. “I’m on y’all’s side. I told the idiot detective that dog just won’t hunt. You gals have lived here all your lives. Marygene’s mama was well-known and respected. Her daddy’s the sheriff, for God’s sake. All y’all banked with Peach Cove Credit Union, like the rest of us. Only a moron would believe that one day, out of the blue, you’d decide to rob folks and leave behind everything your families built.” He shook his head in obvious disgust. “You know. Now that I think about it. I have the perfect solution!” He tossed his napkin, which had been tucked under his chin, onto his plate.

  The old man was riled up now.

  “Do nothin’,” he sneered. “Let that crook, who I recollect is the biker fella, blow the boy up like they threatened on that YouTube thingy my daughter showed me.”

  Betsy and I exchanged a glance. Guess they hadn’t taken the video down soon enough or shut the media down in time. Making the case yet again, secrets on this island were difficult to keep, and I worried about repercussions if I kept the one Betsy and I were sitting on.

  “Something was off about him anyhow. You heard Glenda. Catting around with that woman engaged to the Myers boy. He’s been through it because of them. Although, that does beg the question why they don’t have a manhunt going on. Betsy, if I was Alex, I’d root the bastard out myself instead of laying back and coming across as weak.”

  Miss Susie shook her gray head, and I was speechless as the man ranted. I got the impression he enjoyed conspiracies and low discussion, where he held everyone’s attention. Betsy ate her fries and leaned forward, listening intently, and I could tell she worried now more than ever about Alex’s involvement. There wasn’t a Myers breathing that could stand weakness.

  “Hell, maybe they’ll blow each other up and rid the island of the riffraff altogether and stop bothering you girls and give the Myers boy closure. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m tired of it. Aren’t you tired of it, Betsy?”

  Betsy nodded with vigor. “I am! You’re right! Guilty or not, the nerve of them defamin’ our characters.” Betsy wiped her nose and leaned forward. “Mr. Forest, you think that blast would take out more than the killer and Paul?”

  The man shook his head, and I shot Betsy a warning glare. I didn’t want her encouraging the man or publicly incriminating herself.

  People are listening, for heaven’s sake.

  The old man leaned back and picked something from between his front two teeth. “Well, I reckon if it’s a pipe bomb, probably not.”

  Betsy clapped her hands together. “We just need the blast to be big enough to—”

  “While we appreciate the sentiment and belief in Betsy’s and my innocence, we certainly wouldn’t want anyone harmed. My goodness. The department needs to root out this lunatic and save the innocent. Paul is a victim here too. Wouldn’t it be better to wish for peace and harmony on the island?” I quickly interjected.

  The old man huffed and folded his arms. Miss Susie shot him a glare that said, You’re going to get an earful when we leave. She’d do a way better job than I could, too.

  “Peace certainly would be ideal, dears. You’ll have to forgive ole Forest here. He doesn’t know when to hush up. I keep telling him to keep his disturbing opinions to himself.” The older woman scooted out of the booth and tossed her large carryall over her shoulder. “I’ll be praying for your daddy and the rest of this mess. The Lord will sort it all out, you’ll see.” Miss Susie cast a scowl at her husband. “Come on, Forest, we need to get to the house before Dana brin
gs the kids over.”

  The bald heavyset man scooped up the last of his pie, humphed, tossed a couple of bills on the table, and leaned toward Betsy. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, gal, and a heart of a warrior, like me.” He thumped his chest with his fist before he followed his wife toward the door.

  Heart of a warrior. I rolled my eyes and turned back around in the chair toward my meal, though my appetite had waned. Betsy was still smiling to herself. Lord help us.

  Moments later the door jingled open and in waltzed Aunt Vi in a pair of tie-dyed yoga capris and a florescent yellow tank top. Her spiked red hair had bright platinum tips today. She huffed and waved her hand at her face as she charged toward us. “Hot flashes are the bane of my existence.” She reached over and grabbed a laminated menu and started fanning herself. “You’d think, with all the advances in medicine, they’d find a way to rid us women from this affliction.”

  “The doctor said she’d give you a prescription.” Betsy sipped from her glass.

  Aunt Vi slapped the counter with her menu. “She wanted to give me hormones. Whose hormones are they? Not mine! I bet they stole them on the black market.”

  “They do not steal hormones. That’s out there, even for you.”

  “Betsy! Don’t sass me, child. I read it right there on the internet.”

  “If it’s on the internet, well, it must be true.” Betsy gave an eye roll and stuffed the last of her fries into her mouth, and Aunt Vi gave her a light smack on the leg.

  Betsy snickered. “Hey, I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. I’m trying to help, Aunt Vi.”

  Rebecca came over.

  Aunt Vi’s greeting smile appeared more as a grimace. “Hon, if you’ll just bring me a large peach tea with extra ice and a couple of those peaches-and-cream bars to-go, that’ll do me.”

  “You went to the Beauty Spot this morning, I see.” I changed subjects as Betsy finished off her food.

  “Yeah, all this stress was making me feel down. I needed a pick-me-up and little Poppy had one of her girls fix me up. Do y’all like it?”

  Betsy and I exchanged a glance that said tread carefully before we both smiled and nodded with a mm-hmm. That was all Aunt Vi needed, anyway. She didn’t struggle with self-confidence. If anything, when God handed the confidence out, he delved an extra helping her way. Besides, what most folks couldn’t pull off, Aunt Vi could.

  We finished our food and said our goodbyes and went on our insane mission of breaking and entering.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Why, pray tell, do we need to lay down in the back seat?” My question came out muffled from underneath the blanket Aunt Vi had tossed over Betsy and me.

  We were slumped down nearly perpendicular in the back seat of the big brown late-’90s model Cadillac. She’d insisted none of the models made after the ’90s was suitable for her. The body styles went to pot, I believe she’d said. Followed by she needed a car with size, class, and panache. I guess the large pink dice hanging from the rearview mirror added to said panache. I held out my hand to Betsy and she passed over the box of tissues.

  “Yeah, it’s stuffy under here, and I’m already having trouble breathing out of my nose.” Betsy succumbed to a coughing fit, and I shielded my face with my arm.

  “Because, girls, if someone checks the traffic cameras, y’all won’t be seen on them.” Aunt Vi sounded pleased to have thought of this. “Whoever is trying to frame you girls will use anything and everything against y’all. I mean, I don’t know what the world is comin’ to. None of this ever happened in my younger years. We took the law into our own hands. Someone spoke against us, we took ’em to the woodshed. And if it comes down to it, I’ll root out the culprit and handle it myself.”

  I held my aching head and pictured Aunt Vi, the vigilante, running amok.

  “Hold on. We’re turning onto Alex’s street.”

  Betsy and I held on to whatever we could grab. Aunt Vi navigated the behemoth into the sharp turn, and I swore we must have gone on two wheels at one point.

  “Once we can knock some sense into that ignorant nephew of mine, he’ll help us.”

  Betsy cleared her throat. “Unless he’s involved.”

  Aunt Vi slammed on the brakes, and Betsy and I were flung into the back of the front seats. The blanket had somehow managed to come completely off me and wrapped Betsy like a burrito.

  I righted myself just in time to see Aunt Vi peering over the tall seats with an angry scowl. “That boy is not involved! He’s gone a little cuckoo, but who in this family hasn’t at one point or another? Ain’t no cause for slander.”

  Betsy had lain perfectly still while Aunt Vi ranted, opened the door, stomped out, and slammed the door shut.

  “Come on. Let’s get this over with before your aunt has an aneurism.” I reached around the front seat to open the passenger’s side door. A car this big should be a four-door.

  Aunt Vi marched toward Alex’s side door, keys in hand, and I climbed out onto the small carport and sighed. It’d been over a year since I’d visited Alex at his house. It’d belonged to his daddy’s side of the family and was willed to him. The all-brick ranch home sat on a large, private corner lot with a privacy fence and a gigantic double carport with a large storage building in the back. Alex had painted the beige shutters recently, and the clay shingled roof was new. The large palm tree in the front yard, which Alex and I had taken one of my favorite pictures of us in front of, had been recently trimmed.

  My attention was pulled back toward the car as a thumping commenced. Betsy had yet to emerge from the back seat.

  “Well, come on. We don’t want any nosy neighbors driving by seeing you or Betsy,” Aunt Vi said just before we noticed the car had begun rocking.

  I hurried around the car and opened the driver’s-side door. Betsy was yelling and thumping around on the floorboard.

  Aunt Vi stomped over, her flip-flops flapping loudly. “Sweet Lord, Betsy. We ain’t got time for games. Get on out of there.”

  A not-so-nice response came from beneath the blanket.

  “I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap and then take a hickory to ya.” Aunt Vi put her hands on her hips. “Out. Here. Now.”

  “I think she’s stuck.” I reached down and tugged at the blanket to no avail. How she managed to roll herself so tightly, I’d never know. One last tug, and I stumbled backward as the blanket came flying off her. Betsy crawled out of the vehicle. Her frizzy hair stood up all over her head. When she managed to look up from her hunched-over position, her eyes were bloodshot, and snot had run all down the left side of her face.

  “Sweet fancy Moses, you look possessed!” Aunt Vi jumped back.

  Betsy wheezed and coughed with her hand over her chest. “I nearly suffocated in there. I saw my entire life flash before my eyes. The light was coming for me.”

  “The light, huh.” I held out a hand to Bets.

  Aunt Vi leaned down. “Did you see Daddy in the light?”

  Betsy was about to launch into one of her tirades when someone called out, “Yoo-hoo!” from around the side of the yard. It sounded like Mrs. Davies, Alex’s sweet elderly neighbor.

  “Quick, hurry,” Aunt Vi hissed.

  Betsy and I scampered, hunched over, through the carport and through the side door that led directly into the galley kitchen. Aunt Vi closed the door behind us. We made sure to steer clear of the window over the kitchen sink. Betsy hovered low to wash her face over the white ceramic beauty. I did a double take. The deep sink with hook sprayer was the exact one I’d picked out for Alex when he’d considered a remodel three years ago. In the end, he’d decided he was happy with things as they were and would rather spend the money on a new fishing boat.

  I spun slowly around the kitchen. The new granite countertops were the ones I’d chosen as well. The new stainless-steel appliances gleamed against the creamy cabinetry. And my heart nearly stopped when I spied a set of double ovens.

  “What is it? You look like you’ve seen a
ghost, and not a friendly one.” Betsy patted her face dry.

  I swallowed hard. “This is my kitchen.”

  “Huh?”

  I shook my head and attempted to discern what I saw. “Not my kitchen. The kitchen I chose for Alex when we were together. The one I told him I could prepare Thanksgiving and Christmas meals in. When did this happen?”

  “Oh, I thought this was all about Lucy. He remodeled six months or so ago. Not that Lucy cooked or anything.” Betsy scratched her head. “Now that I think about it. It was during their separation period, right before they got engaged . . .” Betsy’s green eyes widened, and she sat at his farmhouse dining room table. “That’s why she told him she was expecting. He’d cut her loose and was planning on winning you back. Then when nothing else worked, she came up with the pregnancy scheme.”

  “Don’t go down that rabbit hole. I’m not the reason he remodeled. She wanted a nicer house and Alex, not having imagination for it, went with what I chose in the magazine Yvonne gave me. Knowing Alex, he didn’t even remember I was the one who chose it.” Part of me wondered if Betsy could be on to something, the other decided I’d take my own advice and not go down that rabbit hole.

  I moved through the house on the brand-new hardwood flooring past the living room with a large leather sectional and sixty-inch flat screen that I hadn’t picked, and down the narrow hallway toward their bedroom. I paused in the doorway of the tastefully decorated room and blew out a breath.

  “Here.” Betsy handed me a pair of purple latex gloves. Once snapped into place, I began snooping in my ex’s and his wife’s bedroom. Lord help us.

  When the bedroom provided nothing in the way of insight, either to Lucy’s character or if Alex had any involvement, I moved to the bathroom adjacent to the master bedroom. It was spick-and-span. Alex’s mom must’ve cleaned everything. There wasn’t any evidence that a woman used this bathroom. I sat on the closed toilet and sighed. That was when I noticed a dark black spot on the back of the tile beneath the sink. I went down on all fours, thinking it might be blood. I opened the cabinet beneath the sink and found a Q-tip. If it was blood, it would flake. Nope. Not blood. I added a bit of water to the tip and rubbed it over the stain. Hair dye. Brown or black hair dye. I carefully scanned the contents of the cabinet for a brush. What I found belonged to Alex. Not even Lucy’s comb or toothbrush was there.