The Calamity Café (17 page)

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Yeah, well, honey, what's done is done. Can't fix it now.” She nodded toward the paper, which I hadn't even begun writing on. “You got that ad ready?”

*   *   *

A
fter I got back home, I went into the fancy room, lay down on the sofa, and called Ryan.

“Hi,” I said when he'd answered. “I was wondering if you've had any new leads on the Lou Lou Holman case.”

“I haven't, but we're fully investigating the leads we
have. Is there anything new that has come to light on your end?”

“Not about this case, but maybe about one that happened around the time the lockbox was hidden in the office wall.” I told Ryan about my visit with Ms. Peggy and what she'd told me about Lou Holman killing Grady.

“That's certainly possible. Of course, she has no proof, and it wouldn't matter if she did, since Lou Holman has been dead for more than sixty years.”

“I know,” I said. “I just wondered if Lou
had
known about the money hidden in the wall of his office. If so, isn't it possible that he told someone about the money? Or that he maybe left a note?”

“What're you getting at?”

“Let's say Lou did leave a note in case something happened to him. He'd want his family to have the money, right?”

“Maybe.”

I huffed.

“Okay, probably,” Ryan conceded.

“So the note gets lost for all this time, and then someone finds it and wants Lou Lou to cough up the money,” I said.

“Doesn't it stand to reason that if her father had left a note, Lou Lou would be the most likely person to have found it?”

“Yeah, but what if she wasn't? What if someone else found the note and wanted that money? That could be the motive behind Lou Lou's death. Isn't that possible?”

“It is possible.”

“So if Lou Lou didn't find it . . .” I gulped. And then
I swallowed again because my throat had become thick and dry. “Pete?”

“I'll look into it,” Ryan said.

“Do you really think Pete could've had something to do with his mother's death?” I asked.

“He has always been a suspect. We typically look the hardest at the person with the most to gain from the victim's death. In this case, it was the victim's son.”

“Wow.”

“You had to have known we were looking at Pete.”

“I did, but in my mind, the possibility was too unlikely to honestly consider. Now I'm not so sure.”

“Why don't we discuss happy things? How are the renovations going?”

I began telling Ryan about what we'd got done so far. But in my mind, I was still ruminating over the idea that Pete could've killed his own mother.

I
decided it might be good for me to get out of Winter Garden for a little while. I could do some shopping, pick up some dinner . . . If it wasn't too late when I started back home, I could see if Mom and Aunt Bess wanted me to pick up something for them too.

Tucking a couple of foldable totes into my purse, I got into the Bug and backed out of the driveway. It was sunny, and since I had my hair in a ponytail, I put down my windows. The breeze not only felt good, it smelled like freshly mown grass. I turned on the radio and was delighted to hear Don Henley singing to me about the boys of summer.

On the way out of town, I drove by the mobile home Stan rented from Lou Lou . . . or Pete, I guessed, now. The roof had been patched in places using mismatched shingles. Hadn't Stan asked Pete for money to completely replace the roof? Maybe whoever he'd hired
hadn't got around to doing it yet, and Stan had just put the other shingles over the holes until the new roof was put on. It looked pretty bad. I hoped the roofer would get around to Stan's home soon.

I spent the rest of the afternoon looking at clothes, shoes, makeup, purses, linens, baking pans, and picnic tables with umbrellas—I made a mental note to ask Roger about what type of tables we planned to get for the patio. Fortunately for my wallet, I bought nothing.

Before heading back to Winter Garden, I called the big house. Aunt Bess answered.

“Hi, Aunt Bess. It's Amy. I was wondering if you and Mom would like me to swing by a drive-through and get us some burgers and fries for dinner.”

“You're going to
buy
us some cheeseburgers and French fries when you could make better-tasting ones right here yourself?”

“Yes, I am. I'm not cooking this evening. So when I get my food, do you want me to pick y'all up something too?”

“Well, yeah. I'd appreciate that, and I imagine your mother and Jackie would too.”

“I didn't realize Jackie was there,” I said. “I'll get dinner for everybody and be there in about twenty minutes.”

Mom had set the table by the time I got there with our bags of burgers and fries.

“The drinks are still in the car,” I said, putting the bags on the dining room table.

“I'll grab them,” said Jackie.

Aunt Bess instructed Mom to “light up the candles, since we're eating all fancy.”

Whether it was out of spite or not, Mom lit the white taper candles. When Jackie returned with the drink tray, she passed out the drinks. We put our burgers and fries on the good china plates and used the linen napkins rather than the paper ones that came with the food.

Mom gave me a little smirk behind Aunt Bess's back, making me think that the fancy table
had
been an act of spite since Aunt Bess had disparaged my bringing us fast food for dinner. Mom was probably of the same mind as I was—it sure beat having to cook this evening.

“What have you done today?” Mom asked me.

I told her about tearing up linoleum all morning and then shopping this afternoon. “I didn't buy anything, but I feel that it did me good to have a change of scenery for a while.”

“I bet it did,” Jackie said. “I've been taking ‘before' pictures of the café as well as photos of the progress we're making. I'm looking forward to seeing the café once all the work is done.”

“How long do you think it'll take?” Mom asked.

“Roger told me it would take a month at the outset, but it seems to be going quicker than I thought it would. How about you, Jackie?”

“Yeah, I think that with us working too, Roger has had help he wasn't originally counting on.”

Aunt Bess scoffed. “So you and Amy are doing the work of a whole crew of men?”

“No, Granny. But Amy is paying any of the café staff who wanted to help with the renovations to work.”

“Yeah. Homer's even working for us,” I said. “The only bad thing is that we've now lost Aaron as our busboy.”

“What?” Jackie asked.

“He's found that he really enjoys construction work. He's going to work with Roger.”

“That's good for Aaron and Roger, but what're
we
gonna do?” Jackie popped a fry into her mouth.

“I put an ad in the
Winter Garden News
before I came home after lunch. I put it on Craigslist too. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how many of our waitresses will be back either. There are only two who agreed to help renovate.”

Jackie waved her hand dismissively. “We'll be fine.”

Aunt Bess finished off her cheeseburger. “That was awfully tasty. We ought to do this more often.”

*   *   *

W
hen I went home, I got out my laptop. Ever since Roger had found the lockbox with the money hidden in the wall, I'd been curious about the bank robbery and the Holman brothers. So I did an Internet search for
Bo Holman, Winter Garden, Virginia
. As expected, there were genealogy sites with references to Bo's death, his marriage to Lou's mother, things like that. I hadn't expected the fount of information Ryan had been able to uncover, but I'd hoped for a little more than this.

Not getting my hopes up, I opened a new tab and typed
Grady Holman, Winter Garden, Virginia
into the search engine. Nothing. I went back to the results page for
Bo Holman
and found that he had a brother named
Grady Walter Holman
.

Thinking maybe Grady had started going by his middle name in an effort to remain hidden, I did a
search for
Walter Holman
. The first thing that popped up was an obituary from 1984.

Walter Holman, 88, originally of Winter Garden, Virginia, died today at his home near Boone, North Carolina. Mr. Holman was preceded in death by his beloved wife, Millicent, and is survived by his daughters, Anna and Sadie; son, Philip; and numerous grandchildren. A beloved member of the community, Mr. Holman . . .

I merely scanned the rest of the listing. Could this
really
have been Lou Lou's great-uncle Grady? Had he just walked away from Winter Garden and made a new life for himself?

I did a search for
Philip Holman
. As the only boy, I figured he'd be the easiest to find, because it was less likely he might have changed his last name. There was a phone number for a Philip Holman living in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I grabbed my phone and punched in Mr. Holman's number. As soon as this man answered, I could tell he was too young to be Grady's son. Still, I soldiered on.

“Hello, Mr. Holman. My name is Amy Flowers, and I live in Winter Garden, Virginia. I'm calling to ask if your father was Grady or Walter Holman, who was also originally from this area.”

“No. My dad was from here in Tennessee.”

I thanked him for his time and called two other relatively local Philip Holmans. Both times, I struck out.

I put Anna Holman's name into the search engine. I found an Anna Holman Carter who lived in Boone and was sixty-nine years old.

Fingers crossed, I punched in Anna Carter's phone number. When she answered, I introduced myself and asked if her father was Grady or Walter Holman, originally of Winter Garden, Virginia.

“Yes, he was. He hated the name ‘Grady' and went by ‘Walter.' Why? What's this about?”

“Well, I've got a crazy story to tell you.”

Ms. Carter laughed. “Daddy was full of crazy stories. Let's hear yours.”

I told Ms. Carter about my buying the café from Lou Lou Holman, leaving out the part where I'd found the woman murdered in her office. “When we renovated the café, we found a lockbox hidden in the wall. Inside we found a little money.” I didn't want to tell this woman we'd found twenty thousand dollars in the box. After all, Ryan had asked for my discretion.

“Oh, heavens!”

“We turned the lockbox over to the police because we didn't know what else to do with it. My aunt remembered hearing rumors of Bo and Grady Holman robbing a bank in North Carolina. It was never proven, of course,” I added quickly, “and no money was ever recovered, but no one here in Winter Garden could seem to figure out what had happened to Grady. Frankly, I think many people were afraid that either his brother or his nephew had done him in.”

Ms. Carter chuckled. “Our family heard all about that bank robbery growing up. You see, the bank there in Winter Garden was about to foreclose on Daddy's farm. His brother Bo offered to take him to a bank here in North Carolina to see if they'd give Daddy a loan.
Daddy didn't realize Bo intended to rob the bank until Bo handed him a ski mask and a pistol.”

“Poor Grady . . . or
Walter
!”

“Well, I don't know if it was ‘poor Walter' or not. He went along with the plan. Course, if you'd ever met Daddy, you'd have seen he was one of the most easygoing men in the world.”

Given Aunt Bess's description of Grady, he must've really changed his ways after moving to North Carolina.

“He'd have gone along with Bo just because Bo was his older brother and wanted him to do it,” Ms. Carter continued. “I mean, what kind of man allows his brother to rob a bank by himself?”

She laughed, and I did too.

“After they'd got back to Winter Garden, though, Daddy's conscience started to eat at him, and he wanted to give back the money. Bo told him no, they'd go to jail. To hear Daddy tell it, Daddy wanted to put the money in a sack and leave it by the bank's front door.”

“Somebody else would've surely come along and got it if they'd done that,” I said.

“That's exactly what Bo told him. Bo said he'd hide the money and that when things died down, they'd figure out how to get the money back to the bank. But Daddy figured Bo was lying, and he just left. He knew the bank would foreclose on the farm, and he didn't care. He just wanted to start over somewhere new.”

“Well, I'm so glad nothing bad happened to him.”

“Me too, or else I wouldn't be here.” She chuckled again. “We didn't hear that story until all of us young 'uns were grown and had children of our own. My sister, Sadie,
was incensed that Daddy had taken part in a bank robbery, but my brother, Phil, and I thought it was kinda neat. We never would've dreamed Daddy had an adventurous streak.”

“Did Sadie eventually forgive him?”

“Not until he was on his deathbed,” she said, an edge to her voice. “By the way, what ever happened to Bo?”

“He died in a tractor accident the year after he and his brother robbed the bank.”

“Huh. And Lou. Did you ever meet him?”

“No. I did know his daughter, though.”

“What was she like?” Ms. Carter asked.

I paused, trying to think of a nice way to describe Lou Lou.

Ms. Carter giggled. “That bad, huh?”

“A little bit. She was . . . a rough person to have to work for.”

“Which is why you bought the café?”

“That, and I wanted to either buy Lou Lou's café or build my own,” I said. “Buying an existing café was easier in the long run.”

“I imagine it was.”

“I appreciate your talking with me. I was just so curious about what happened to Grady. The rumors were that he'd died. And when I did the search and found his obituary, I wondered if Walter was
the
Grady Holman.”

“Well, he sure was. Do you have any photos of the Winter Garden Holmans?” she asked. “And I'd love to meet some of my relatives if they're amenable to it.”

“I'm sure I can round up some pictures from the newspaper office.”

“Thank you. I'd enjoy looking at them.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “I'll see what I can dig up, and I'll talk with Pete Holman—he'd be your great-nephew—and give him your number. And maybe once the café is renovated, I can come over and have coffee with you sometime. I'd like to look at your photos too.”

“I'm going to be in Mountain City late tomorrow afternoon. I know you're in the middle of a big project, but you've got my curiosity up. Is there any way you could meet me for coffee there somewhere? Mountain City is about halfway for both of us, isn't it?”

She was right about my stirring her curiosity. Surely, Roger could spare me—and Jackie—for a couple of hours. I told Ms. Carter yes, I'd love to meet.

As soon as I was finished talking with Anna Carter, I called Jackie.

“What's up?”

“I'm calling to see if you're up for a road trip tomorrow afternoon,” I said.

“Where are we going?”

“Mountain City.”

“What's in Mountain City?”

“Grady Holman's daughter.”

She was so quiet that for a second I thought we'd been disconnected. “Grady Holman's daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Why would we want to go to Mountain City to see Grady Holman's daughter?”

“Why wouldn't we?” I explained about my search for Grady and then filled her in on my chat with his daughter Anna Holman Carter. “Who knows? Maybe whatever happened to Grady—or Walter, as he called himself after leaving Winter Garden—has some bearing on what
happened to Lou Lou. What if getting to the bottom of the old mystery could help us solve the new one? So what do you say? Will you go with me?”

“I guess. I don't know what good you think it'll do, though. An eighty-year-old crime has nothing to do with Lou Lou's death. Have you talked with your hunky deputy about this?”

“No, I haven't mentioned it to him yet. I want to see if anything comes of it first. I figure it can't do any harm to talk with this woman.”

She blew out a breath. “Okay. I'll go.”