Poisoned Tarts (8 page)

“How many packs of those do you, uh, suck a day?” she asked.

“Why? Does it bother you?”

“Not at all. At least with those, I don't have to breathe the secondhand smoke, and you smell like a fresh-baked apple pie, instead of a barroom ashtray.”

“Uh, okay. Thanks. I guess.” Then he added, “You're the only person I know who can give me a compliment and, at the same time, make me feel like I've just been kicked in the ba—”

“Hey, watch it with the potty mouth. Gran will ask me if the young man I was out with was a gentleman, and I can't lie to her. She can always tell.”

He chuckled. “What'll she do? Take you out behind the woodshed and tan your hide?”

“Don't think it hasn't happened. Gran was a sweetheart ninety-nine percent of the time. But if you sassed her or lied to her, heaven help you. She'd take a switch to your hind end and make you dance a jig.”

“You don't have to convince me. I'm scared to death of her.”

“I'm sure she'd be delighted to hear that, to know that her reputation has spread from coast to coast.”

They both laughed.

She noticed that he was headed west. “Are you taking me home now?”

“Yeah. It's after ten. There's not much more we can do tonight, and I want to stay on Gran's good side. I'll go home and grab some sleep and get an early start tomorrow morning.”

“And you'll be picking me up at what time?”

“Is eight o'clock too early?”

“Yes, but I'll be ready anyway. In fact, make it seven-thirty, and I'll have hot biscuits and sausage gravy waiting for you.”

He gave her a sideways glance that was quick but full of heartfelt affection and soul-deep gratitude. “I love you, Van. Adore you. I worship the ground you—”

“Oh please. You're just a glutton for free food.”

“And free, Southern-style, finger-lickin', gumsmackin', calorie-laden cuisine is just part of the glorious wonder that is you.” He paused. Rested. Then added, “How's that? Have I kissed up enough to get peach preserves on those hot biscuits?”

“Yeah, I reckon that'll do it. Now shut up already.”

“Okay. Cool.”

 

When Savannah entered her house, she found Granny Reid lying on her sofa, sound asleep, her reading glasses on her nose, her Bible on her chest, her
True Informer
folded neatly on the coffee table.

For a deliciously, long time, Savannah stood there, looking at her grandmother, loving this woman who had been grandparent, mother, and best friend to her for so many years.

She shuddered to think what might have happened to her and her siblings if Gran hadn't summoned her considerable strength and decided that she did, indeed, have what it took to raise nine grandchildren.

And now, even though she was more than eighty years old and all of those grandchildren were adults, Gran still felt as though she was on duty. She would consider them all her little chickadees for the rest of her life.

But twenty years ago—maybe even ten years ago—she would not have gone to sleep while waiting for one of them to come home.

Age took a subtle toll, even on as youthful a spirit as Gran's.

For just a moment, Savannah considered waking her grandmother and walking her upstairs to bed. But she knew Gran well, and she knew that Gran's preference was to snooze where she landed. Once she had passed out in a chair or on a sofa, there she stayed until time to rise and shine.

Gently, Savannah reached over and carefully slipped the glasses off her face, folded them, and placed them on the coffee table beside the tabloid. Then she moved the well-worn Bible, too.

She took an afghan, one of her dearest possessions because Gran herself had crocheted it for her, and spread it over her grandmother, covering her from chin to toes. After tucking it around her legs and feet, Savannah reached over and gave her a light kiss on the top of her silver hair.

She stirred slightly and whispered, “Savannah? You home, sugar?”

“Sh-h-h. Yes, I'm home safe and sound.”

“Did you have a good time with your young man?” she asked, her voice soft and drowsy from sleep.

Savannah smiled.
Old habits die hard
, she thought. “I was out with Dirk,” she reminded her, “looking for that girl who's missing.”

“Did you find her?” she asked, squinting up at Savannah.

“Not yet. But we will.”

Gran nodded and closed her eyes again. “I know you will, darlin'. I prayed on it. Real hard.”

“Thank you.” Savannah gave her another kiss, this time on the forehead. Then she reached up to turn off the table lamp. “Nightie night,” she said. “Don't let the bedbugs bite.”

But Gran was already asleep. And this time, she was snoring.

The chickadees were safe in the nest—she'd sleep soundly for the rest of the night. But Savannah was pretty sure she wouldn't.

Once upstairs and in bed, she would pray for the missing girl's safety, too. But she didn't have as much faith as Gran.

Sadly, few people did.

 

Some nights, sleep just would not come. And it was one of those nights for Savannah. Nothing helped.

Her prayers had been said. And her two cats, miniature black panthers named Diamante and Cleopatra, were in bed with her—Diamante snuggled under the covers against her legs, Cleopatra curled inside the crook of her arm. Moonlight was streaming through the lace curtains, throwing filigree shadows across the bedspread. But none of it helped.

“Where are you, Daisy?” she whispered into the night silence. “Are you still with us?”

Or are you already gone?

She didn't speak that thought—not even in a whisper.

Nearly twenty years ago, there had been another girl named Maggie, who had gone missing. And as misfortune would have it, Maggie's case was one of the first that the newly made Detective Sergeant Savannah Reid and her partner Dirk Coulter had been assigned.

Oh, they found Maggie.

Well, actually, they found Maggie's remains. Only hours after the girl had been murdered by a pimp.

Savannah had never gotten over it.

Some hurts, especially those having to do with children, never, ever heal. And from that moment on, any mention of a missing kid re-wounded that injury for her.

When Savannah remembered Maggie, finding her thrown away like so much unwanted garbage in that old citrus packing shed, Savannah felt like she was twenty-something going on ninety. The teenager's young life was ended, and a twenty-five-year-old, freshly promoted policewoman was changed forever.

To Savannah, after Maggie, the world was never quite as good a place.

She lay there, watching the shadows change on her bedspread as the moon made its way across the sky. She did her deep breathing relaxation technique and the hypnosis routine that Tammy had taught her. She watched as the red numbers on her alarm clock changed—one hour of sleep gone, two hours, then three.

Go to sleep
, she told herself.
Just give it up and go to sleep. If you don't, you won't be worth shootin' tomorrow
.

Four hours, and the moonlight was gone.

So were the cats. They liked to go downstairs and sit on their perch every morning just before dawn, waiting to bask in those first rays of sunlight.

Normally, Savannah took this desertion in stride. Cats were, after all, fickle creatures who loved you more than anything in the world…except food, pets, and sunshine.

But without the moonlight or the cats' quiet warmth and comfort, she felt especially lonely.

“Don't be like Maggie,” she whispered into the dark silence.

Surprisingly, she felt someone, something listening there in the quiet. A presence that she was aware of deep, deep in her soul. Somehow, someone was listening. Someone had heard.

So she said it again. “Daisy, please, please, honey…don't be like Maggie.”

And finally, her burden shared, she drifted off to sleep.

T
he next morning, Savannah's mood was a bit more optimistic. Homemade biscuits and gravy could do that to you. So could having some of the people you loved most in the world seated around your table.

Savannah's favorite thing was cooking and feeding hungry people. And they didn't even have to be hungry. She would happily feed them anyway.

Gran sat at the head of the table—Savannah wouldn't have it any other way—digging gleefully into a generous helping of grits.

Dirk sat at the other end of the table, totally grits free. He'd never actually tasted Savannah's grits. But he had made it clear early in their relationship that even a chowhound like him wasn't going to put something into his mouth named grit.

He didn't know what he was missing.

Tammy sat on one of the side chairs, her laptop on the table in front of her, a fruit smoothie in a mug next to her.

Tammy didn't eat grits either, or anything with saturated fat, processed flour, granulated sugar, preservatives, or artificial anything in it.

And that ruled out ninety-nine percent of Savannah's cooking.

Having breakfast, lunch, or dinner at Savannah's house usually meant that Tammy brought her own bag of “real food,” as she called it. And while Savannah would never admit it, over the years she had come to realize the value of a smoothie made from the recently sun-kissed fruits of the earth.

Especially if you threw a big scoop of Ben and Jerry's Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch into the mix.

Savannah got up to replenish the biscuit basket. Dirk was hungrier than usual, having spent most of the night driving up and down San Carmelita's streets, highways, and byways, looking for Daisy's 1991 Honda Accord.

Taking another sip of her smoothie, Tammy studied the computer screen, then said, “According to this, Andrew Dante just married that gal, Robyn. They've been together only a couple of years. It says here that he left his wife for her, and that's why Tiffy hates her.”

“Well, I could have told you that,” Gran said, reaching for the peach preserves. “I keep up on all that stuff. That Robyn was Dante's travel agent. Any time he went any place, she set everything up for him.”

“For his work or when he went away with his family?” Savannah asked.

“Both.” Gran took time to savor her first bite of the preserves and biscuit before elaborating. “And then his wife figured out that she was making travel arrangements for him and herself, too. Hanky-panky stuff, if you know what I mean. The kind that'll get your tallywhacker snipped off if you're married to the wrong woman…if you know what I mean.”

“Yep, we gotcha, Gran,” Savannah said, hiding a smile.

Gran prided herself on her subtlety.

Subtle as the Cotton Belt freight train that blew its horn from one end of McGill, Georgia, to the other every Thursday night about eleven forty-five.

“You're not saying much,” Savannah said to Dirk when she sat down in the chair across from Tammy and began her own breakfast.

“I'm worn out,” he said. “I should have just gone on home early last night and gotten a full night's sleep, for all the good it did me.”

“I'm sorry you didn't find the car,” she told him.

She could have mentioned that she hadn't slept much herself, but Dirk got irritated if you hogged any of his misery, so she kept it to herself and let him wallow alone.

“Yeah, me, too,” he said. “We need that car. If we could find it, we'd at least have a starting place.”

“Did you check her credit cards or ATM card yet to see if there's been any activity?” Tammy asked.

“Credit card?” Dirk barked. “What credit card? She's a kid, for Pete's sake. She wouldn't have a—”

“Yes. She does.” A light came on in Savannah's brain as she flashed back to finding the pregnancy test in the bottom of Daisy's desk drawer. “I remember seeing a receipt for something she bought at the drugstore there where she works. It had the last four digits of a credit card on it. It's either hers, or her mom lets her use it. Either way, Tammy's right. We need to check that.”

Savannah stood, left her food on the table, and walked over to the kitchen wall phone. “What's Pam O'Neil's phone number?” she asked Dirk.

He pulled his notebook from his shirt pocket and read it off to her.

Pam O'Neil answered before the second ring.

Savannah felt a ping of pity for her when she heard the hopeful tone in her “Hello?”

“This is Savannah, Pam. And we don't have anything new, I'm sorry to say,” she said, ending the suspense for the poor woman as quickly as possible. “But I do have a quick question for you. Does Daisy have her own credit card?” She smiled and nodded to those at the table. “Can you please give me the number if you know it? We need to run a check on it and see if there's been any activity.” She paused. “Sure, I can wait.”

A moment later, Pam gave her the long number; Savannah wrote it down on a notepad and confirmed it. Then she asked, “And can you tell me what bank it's drawn from and her pin number? That way we can check it right away without all the legal red tape.”

Savannah frowned. “Oh, you don't. Well, let me ask you a few questions about Daisy.”

A few minutes later, Savannah was back at the table, notes in her hand.

“Okay, Tammitha,” she said, “here's where you get to shine. Hack this account for me, would you? Here's her boyfriend's name, her birthday, her social security number, her favorite color, and the name of her dog.”

Tammy took the list and glanced over it. “People are so unoriginal. Luckily for us.”

“No kidding.”

Savannah wasn't even finished with her first biscuit until Tammy had exhausted the list and still hadn't found Daisy's password.

“I felt sure it would be the dog's name,” Tammy said. “People always use their pets' names.”

Savannah mentally reran her conversation with Pam. “Yeah, I thought that would be it, too. Pam said that's the second boxer she's had named Oscar. The current one is the first one's son. I saw a picture of Daisy and one of the dogs there in Pam's living room.”

“Hm-m-m…he's the second Oscar she's had,” Tammy said thoughtfully. “Let me try Oscar2.”

Her fingers clicked away on the keyboard. She squinted at the screen. “That didn't work either. I'll try Oscar 2nd.”

Having no luck, she typed in OscarII.

“Drats,” she said. “It's telling me now that if I don't get it right the next time, the security system is going to lock me out for twenty-four hours.” She looked around the table. “Any suggestions for my final attempt?”

Gran dumped a second heaping teaspoon of sugar into her coffee and said, “Well now, where I come from, if you name a boy young'un after his daddy, you call him Junior. Yeap, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, we're up to our tail feathers in Juniors.”

Tammy brightened. “Okay. Let's try that one.”

She typed in OscarJr. And a moment later, Daisy's private financial history was displayed before them in detail.

Tammy danced in her chair for a moment. “I got it! I got it!” But just as quickly, her smile faded, and her enthusiasm evaporated.

“What is it?” Savannah asked.

“It's nothing,” Tammy replied.

“What do you mean, ‘nothing'?” Dirk wanted to know.

“I mean that she hasn't charged anything or withdrawn a single dollar. Her last purchase was at a local nursery a week ago.”

Savannah nodded. “She's quite the botanist. Her room is filled with plants.”

“That's too bad,” Dirk said. “A person who's spending money right and left is a person who's easy to track down.”

“Not to mention the fact that spending money means they may still be alive,” Savannah added.

“
May
be?” Granny asked.

Savannah cleared her throat. “Unless the person who's doing the spending stole the card from them and…well…”

“Yeah.” Dirk sighed. “I wasn't going to mention that.”

His cell phone went off, and Savannah recognized the personalized tone. It was the station calling.

They all held their breath as they listened to his side of the short conversation.

“Yeah? Where?”

He scribbled in his notepad. “Okay. I'll be there in ten. Have Donaldson secure it. Tell him nobody goes near it.”

He snapped his phone closed. “They found her car. It's up at the end of Canyon Park where the hiking trails into the hills begin.”

Savannah didn't want to ask, but she had to. “Any DB?”

“No,” Dirk said, “thankfully.”

They both jumped up from the table.

Savannah started to grab her purse, then paused and turned back to Gran. “I'm sorry, Gran. Here I go off half-cocked, and I didn't even stop to think that you'd like to—”

“Shoo.” Gran waved a biscuit at her. “Get out of here, and don't waste time being silly. Go find that girl, and catch me a bad guy.”

“Thanks, Gran. I love you.”

“I love you, too, sweet cheeks. Make tracks.”

Gran waited until Savannah and Dirk had left the room before she leaned across the table and whispered to Tammy, “DB. Does that stand for what I think it does?”

Tammy hesitated a second, then said, “Um…it's police code for dead body.”

“That's what I figured.” Gran nodded and looked self-satisfied. “And we can certainly thank the good Lord for that.”

Tammy grinned. “Amen.”

Gran reached for another helping of grits. “You said it, Sister Tammy. Tell it like it is.”

 

Most small towns the size of San Carmelita did well to have one nice city park. But San Carm, as the locals called it, had three.

One was downtown in the quaint part of the city, near the old mission. And it was used mostly as a gathering place when the town fathers and mothers deemed it necessary to throw a craft fair, an art show, or any other sort of shindig to raise revenue.

The second was an exclusive hideaway up in the hills, not too far from the Dante estate. And even though it was a city park and therefore open to the public, it was pretty much understood that if you wanted to use the tennis courts, take a dip in the pool, or picnic on the perfectly manicured lawns, you had to behave yourself.

Then there was the third park. A long canyon that stretched deep into the foothills, the park was a stone's throw across and two miles long. And picnickers here were far more likely to be swilling beer or smoking pot than sipping Chardonnay.

Police did patrol the canyon and throw out the rowdiest of visitors, but not enough to cramp anybody's style.

It was pretty well-known that if you wanted to park and make out or blare your boombox and foist your questionable taste in music onto your fellow park attendees, this was the place to do it.

Savannah decided to give Dirk a break and drove him to the park in her Mustang. He didn't particularly like being a passenger—typical male thing—but he was in love with the 1965 'Stang, and she wouldn't let him drive it. So, on a day when he was tired, she could sometimes convince him to let
her
chauffeur
him
for a change.

And when he didn't try to tell her how to drive, when he just sat back and shut up and enjoyed the drive, it went pretty well, and they didn't fight…too badly.

“Why don't you just pass that friggen guy?” he said as they followed a car that was creeping along at a mere twenty miles over the speed limit. “We're never going to get there if you don't—”

“Dirk, do
not
even
start
with me. Or I swear, you'll be hoofin' it back to my house to get your own jalopy. Roll down the window, take a deep breath, and chill, son.”

“I'll bet it's a woman driver,” he grumbled. “When they hog the left lane like that and won't get over to let you pass 'em, it's always a woman.”

“It's a man.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can see his mustache in his rearview mirror, and he just about ran off the road looking at that female jogger in the hot pink short shorts we just passed. Call it a hunch.”

“Oh.”

“And they gave you a detective's badge?”

“Lay off me, woman, or I'll fly into a blind rage.”

“Yeah, yeah. You'd have to gather up your strength just to spit right now.”

He sighed. “That's true.”

“Well, don't tell Tammy. She'll start shoving vitamin pills at you.”

“No kidding. Great big ones that smell like horse manure. Or she comes at you with those Chinese herbs that taste like frog pee.”