An Affair to Dismember (5 page)

“It was the least I could do.” It
was
the least I could do. I hadn’t even bothered to bring flowers.

I needed another cookie, fast.

“You’ll come to the memorial on Wednesday, won’t you? It would mean so much to me.”

“Of course, Betty. I wouldn’t miss it,” I said. This was guilt talking.

She hugged me, and I saw Peter over her shoulder.

“I’ll see her home, Mom.”

I didn’t want Peter or any of the Terns family near me or my home. “Oh, no,” I said. “I can walk home by myself. It’s just across the street. I wouldn’t want to put anybody out.”

“You’re not putting me out at all, Gladie,” he said, and escorted me out the door.

We walked across the street. “Your mother is very kind,” I said to fill the moment.

“You don’t know the half of it. My mom suffered like a dog for years and years, and all with a smile on her face. You can’t imagine what she had to put up with.”

I had the strongest desire to stick my fingers in my ears and sing the national anthem—anything not to hear how Betty Terns had suffered through the years. If I heard how much she’d suffered, I would feel the need to help her, and I had enough problems. I was tired. I was supposed to be a matchmaker, but I had no idea
how to go about it and would probably bankrupt my grandmother. I had gained ten pounds. Half of Cannes, and almost all of its police force and fire department, had seen my underpants. And most important, I had to shower in antiseptic as soon as possible because I had just spent an hour resting my arms on the table where poor Randy Terns had bashed his brains out.

Peter Terns didn’t seem to sense my discomfort, couldn’t tell that I had problems of my own. He planted his feet on the sidewalk in front of my house, halfheartedly dusted off his tie, and looked me in the eyes. “My mother was married for fifty-four years,” he said.

“Th-that’s wonderful,” I stammered.

“Wonderful? It was hell. My father treated her like crap.” A vein on his forehead popped out.

“Domestic abuse is a terrible thing,” I said, taking a step back.

“It sure as hell is. You know what he did?” I took this as a rhetorical question. “Dad didn’t like to share.” He spit out the last word with a sneer that made me step back again. To my horror, he made up the difference, advancing toward me. “She should have left him long ago,” he said. “But she stayed with him, and what did it get her? What did it get
me
?” He hit his chest for emphasis.

Peter took out a cigarette, the go-to drug for the Terns family. I jumped on the break in his little tirade to say goodbye and hightailed it up the driveway. Just as I reached my front door, I heard Peter grumble to himself, something like, “… if he slipped or not,” and “… rat’s ass if someone knocked his head, he deserved it.”

I locked the door behind me and checked on Grandma. She was sleeping soundly in her canopy bed, probably dreaming about Cupid, not about bashed-out brains.

I grabbed a well-deserved cookie from the kitchen and went back up to the attic. After I’d spent fifteen
minutes scouring through index cards, Peter’s words came back to me with a jolt.

Share? What didn’t Randy Terns want to share? Whatever it was, it sure made his son Peter angry. Angry enough to bust open the walls in his house, most likely.

Peter wasn’t shedding any tears over his father’s death. In fact, I hadn’t noticed any tears in the Terns household. Instead, they were almost ghoulish in their curiosity about the exact cause of Randy Terns’ demise. Supposedly he had slipped, cracked his head open on the corner of the table and died on the floor.

I was starting to understand what was so interesting about the kitchen table being clean. Something was definitely fishy about Randy Terns’ death, and at least one of his children thought he deserved to be murdered.

I WALKED up a block to Main Street and took a left. It was a gorgeous day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the temperature was a dry seventy-eight degrees, and the breeze was blowing, sending me wafts of wild-flower scents. This part of Main was covered in cobblestones with narrow sidewalks and quaint stores. If you were looking for antiques, silver jewelry, pies, and tea, you didn’t have to look any farther than Main Street in the historic district of Cannes.

I wasn’t after any of those things. I was on my way to Saladz restaurant to meet up with my friends Bridget and Lucy. In addition to salads, Saladz offered a wide
selection of sandwiches, soups, homemade pies, and assorted tea. But its coffee was horrible, and I desperately needed a shot or two of caffeine. I decided to stop at Tea Time to grab a coffee to go.

Tea Time was housed in a former saloon. The bar was still there, and so were some well-placed bullet holes in two walls, but otherwise Tea Time was all lace tablecloths, yellow painted daisies, porcelain teapots on every table, classical music piped in at a respectable level, and a rack of crocheted tea cozies for sale at ludicrous prices.

The shop was owned and operated by Ruth Fletcher, an eighty-five-year-old woman who possessed more energy than I. She viciously hated coffee drinkers.

“I hate when you come in,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Ruth.” I placed my Visa card on the bar. She looked at it as if she was debating whether or not to take it.

After a few moments she took the card and sighed. “You venti, grande, caramel mochaccino, Starbucks generation people have no taste. The same?” she asked.

I nodded. She got busy with the espresso machine and in a couple of minutes handed me a cup to go. I took a sip.

“Ruth, you make the best lattes in the world.”

“Like that’s a compliment. You people are ruining this town. I have to make coffee now in order to stay in business. Coffee! What next? I’ll have to put in Internet access. You make me sick.” Ruth’s coffee was great, but her customer service left a little to be desired.

“Gotta go,” I said, and headed for the door.

“Tell your grandmother I finally caught her,” she said as I reached the door. “She said it would rain today, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. I even checked with NOAA. No rain expected all week. Ha! That woman thinks she knows everything. I finally got her.”

Bridget and Lucy waited at Saladz at an outside table. They sipped raspberry iced tea and waved hello when I approached. They didn’t look like they should be together. Where Bridget was no-nonsense in a starched shirt, slacks, and pulled-back hair with no makeup under giant round glasses, Lucy was Southern charm and elegance, waiflike and beautiful in a flowy chiffon number and long, wavy blond hair. I was somewhere between the two. I had ditched my sweatpants for linen slacks. On top, I wore a white pima cotton T-shirt. I’d had no luck in managing my frizzy hair, even though I had spent twenty minutes and used up most of a bottle of mousse struggling with it.

“They are selling Christmas ornaments at the grocery store,” Bridget yelled as I sat. “Christmas ornaments in August! What is wrong with this world? Has the world gone completely cuckoo-doodle-doo? We are living in the dark ages. When will people stop living their lives according to outdated mythology and superstition? Oh, by the way, we ordered for you, Gladie.”

Lucy rolled her eyes and gave me a pointed look.

“Speaking of the dark ages and outdated mythology and superstition,” she said, her voice dripping a languid Southern drawl. “Nobody has asked about my trip to England.”

“You’re always going somewhere with your work,” Bridget said, shrugging. She was right. Lucy was in marketing, whatever that was. She worked for some unknown company based far away but chose to live in our small mountain town. She and Bridget had been friends for years, and we became a tight circle when I moved to town.

Lucy was a marketer, Bridget was an accountant, and I was pretty much nothing. I was treated like I was heir to a great business, but I wondered what they would
think if they knew I was ready to quit any second and leave town as an abject failure.

Lucy put on her crystal-laden sunglasses and crossed her arms in front of her. I thought I heard her harrumph but couldn’t be sure.

Bridget turned to me. “Any update on the new neighbor? Did you find him a match?”

Lucy perked up. “What new neighbor? How is all that matchmaking coming along, anyway?”

Our lunches arrived, and I dug into my Cobb salad. “It’s not coming along anywhere,” I said, deciding on honesty. “I have no idea what I’m doing or how to get started.”

“Isn’t your grandmother helping?” Lucy asked. “Isn’t she training you?”

“Sort of, but she just knows what to do. She doesn’t have to think about it.” Bridget and Lucy nodded.

“And what about the neighbor?” Lucy asked.

“Nothing exciting,” I said.

“That’s not true,” Bridget interrupted. “Thirty-three years old, gorgeous, rich, single, and straight.”

Lucy took off her sunglasses. “Oh, darlin’, that is
the
definition of exciting.”

“I haven’t spoken to him yet.”

“No surprise there. You don’t talk to anybody.”

I flinched. Was that true? Was I some kind of recluse? I was. I was a recluse with a paunch and no prospects for a successful career or an orgasm.

Lucy rubbed my arm. “Ouch. I’m sorry, darlin’. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

I sniffed. “You didn’t hurt me.”

“It could be worse, darlin’. Look at Bridget. She doesn’t even believe in men.”

“I believe in men,” Bridget screeched. “I see them. I know they exist.”

“But you don’t believe in intersecting with them.” Lucy crossed her hands to illustrate her point.

“My intersections are more like head-on collisions,” Bridget said.

“At least you make contact,” said Lucy. “Contact is good, Gladie.” She wagged her finger at me. Then her head snapped to the side and her jaw dropped. Bridget followed her gaze.

“I wouldn’t mind making contact with that,” Bridget said in an unusually low voice.

I turned to see what all the hubbub was about.

“Oh, no,” I moaned. I slid down in my chair and put my hands over my face. “Pretend I’m not here,” I whispered. “Don’t draw any attention to me.”

“Why not?” asked Bridget.

But it was too late. A heavy hand tapped me on the shoulder.

“Pinkie, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.” I felt his breath on the back of my neck, and right there and then I began to ovulate. I dropped my hands from my face and turned around.

“You don’t remember me? Prince Charming,” he said. He had a perfect, cultivated five o’clock shadow. His eyes were bluer than I remembered. He was dressed in yet another expensive suit, but this time it came with a supermodel attached to his arm. She was blond, six feet tall, and obviously in the midst of a protracted hunger strike. She wore a peach-colored handkerchief-sized swath of silk that almost covered her boobs and would have almost covered her rear end if she’d had one.

How annoying.

“Not in a talkative mood today?” he asked. He nodded to Bridget and Lucy. “Good afternoon, ladies. I’m Spencer Bolton.”

“I know exactly who you are,” Lucy drawled.

“The new police chief,” supplied Bridget. She smiled
from ear to ear, pulled her hair out of its ponytail, and gave it a shake.

“Nine months new,” he said.

“From Los Angeles,” said Lucy. “How do you know our Gladie?”

“Well …,” he began.

“Go. Away,” I hissed.

“Are we going to sit down or what? I’m hungry,” the supermodel whined.

The attention at the table shifted to the supermodel. Bridget and Lucy looked like either it was the first time they had noticed her or they were genuinely surprised she could speak.

She could speak, but I was having a hard time.
Yes, go feed Barbie
, I wanted to say.
Can’t you see she needs to eat? Hurry up before someone starts a telethon for her or something
. Instead, I didn’t say a word. I scooted my chair away from him and dug my fork into my salad.

“Yes, we’re going,” he told the model. “Gladie, it was a pleasure, even if your pants were on this time.”

I choked on my salad, coughing and sputtering until Lucy gave me a couple of whacks on my back. When I came up for air, Spencer Bolton and his date were gone.

“You’ve been holding out on us, darlin’,” Lucy said.

“No, I haven’t. It was a strange, humiliating chance encounter. Nothing happened. First him and then the dead guy. I’ve been having a very weird week.”

Bridget perked up. “What dead guy?”