Authors: Susan McBride
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Cozy, #General
To Helen Back (19 page)
H
ELEN
E
VANS AWOKE
with a start.
Oh, my, she hadn’t actually fallen asleep, had she? The crossword from that morning’s
Alton Telegraph
still lay in her lap, its squares almost entirely filled with the purple ink she always used precisely for that purpose.
Ah, she remembered now. She’d gotten stuck on a four-letter word for “sea birds.” She’d had the darned thing right there on the tip of her tongue—hang it all, it was in every other puzzle she did—when she’d put her glasses aside to rub at her eyes, laid back for the briefest of moments, and then must’ve dozed off.
“Napping,” she clucked, “just like an old person.”
Which, in fact, she was, according to the AARP and all those restaurants that gave her their senior citizens’ discounts without even checking her ID.
Well, as they said, getting old was better than the alternative.
Helen slipped her glasses back on and stared down with wrinkled brow at the crossword in her lap. “Erns,” she said aloud just as it came to her. “E-R-N-S,” she spelled, and filled in the gap she’d been studying before she’d taken her catnap. All right, so her mind might’ve slowed a bit over the years, but it was still all there.
“If you rest, you rust,” as she’d heard someone say once, and Helen felt the same. She wasn’t about to let any part of her corrode like a metal lawn chair left out in the rain.
Her puzzles and bridge games, the quilts she was forever cross-stitching, each kept her too busy to ponder if her bones were turning brittle or if her brain cells were retiring one by one.
Quickly, she finished up the rest of the crossword, setting the folded newspaper aside with a satisfied sigh when she was done.
She removed her specs and glanced up. Through the screens that fenced in her porch, she saw Amber in the grass across the street, chasing a bird or a bug, looking like exactly what he was: an oversized yellow tom.
She smiled at the sight and thought of something her granddaughter Nancy had said to her the day before. “Good God, Gramma, but you spoil that cat of yours more than you did any one of us.”
Helen chuckled, deciding the girl was probably right. But then, she had plenty of time to dote on Amber, what with Joe gone and her living by herself.
Oh, my.
Plenty of time.
She held her watch near enough to read its face without putting her glasses back on. She grimaced at the placement of the hands. “Hurry up,” she prodded, “or you’ll be late.”
She hopped off the wicker sofa, grabbing up her purse and hurrying out the door without bothering to lock up. She’d very nearly forgotten what day it was and fairly flew the several blocks to the beauty shop.
Helen arrived at LaVyrle’s Cut ’n’ Curl for her appointment with but a minute to spare. LaVyrle Hunnecker, operator and proprietress, was big on punctuality. “Would you show up late for one of Bertha Beaner’s teas?” she’d heard LaVyrle chastise a tardy client, a dark brow lifted beneath her teased web of blond hair. “Or for one of the minister’s sermons?” She’d harrumph, and the red-cheeked late arrival would sigh in agreement. The ladies who patronized the place knew good and well how LaVyrle—a strong woman despite her slight stature—could make their half-hour appointment one of misery, dismissing the shampoo girl and using her own steady fingers to tug and pull and wring one’s head with a roughness that left the scalp tingling for a good forty-eight hours after. And Helen, no namby-pamby herself—she couldn’t afford to be at seventy-five and a grandmother of nine—didn’t savor the thought of one of LaVyrle’s vindictive washes today.
She gave a self-conscious pat to her wiry gray hair as she pushed the door open and walked inside the place. The smell of hair spray and flower-scented shampoo assailed her as she gave the ponytailed receptionist-cum-shampoo girl a sheepish grin. She hurried past a row of occupied helmet hair dryers and slipped into a chair at the rear of the room, where LaVyrle worked her magic.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” she said, and glanced at the mirrored reflection of LaVyrle as she gave a final blast of hair spray to the neatly coiffed head of the sheriff’s wife, Sarah Biddle.
LaVyrle grunted and glanced at the watch on her wrist before muttering, “You know the routine, Mrs. E. Mary will wash up your hair in a sec. I’m done with Mrs. B here. Just have to ring her up at the desk.”
“Well, don’t hurry on account of me.”
LaVyrle brushed at the purple cape draped about Sarah Biddle’s shoulders, unsnapping it and removing it in one quick motion. Then she disappeared from her station with a rat-a-tat-tat of high heels; a moment later Helen heard her giving instructions to Mary in a no-nonsense manner.
“You look lovely, Sarah,” Helen said as the sheriff’s wife craned her neck this way and that to admire her hair in the mirror.
“LaVyrle always does seem to know what suits a person best,” Sarah replied with a satisfied tone.
“I think she must have a sixth sense about her customers,” Helen remarked, and set her purse beneath the drawer-lined countertop that held an assortment of brushes, combs, clips, and curlers, not to mention several bottles of mousse, spritz, and sprays.
A hand grabbed at her then, plucking at her warm-up jacket, and she straightened to meet Sarah’s buck-toothed countenance.
“We were just talking, LaVyrle and I, when you came in . . .”
“Oh?” Helen dared to ask, “About what?”
“Mattie Oldbridge, of course,” Sarah said in a rush, “and how she got robbed the other day while she was in St. Louis with her nephew.”
Though Helen had indeed heard about the incident from Mattie herself, she feigned ignorance so as not to deprive Sarah of the fun of telling the story again.
“Frankie—I mean, the sheriff—he thinks it might’ve been some kids from Green Valley. You know how they like to get drunk and raise a little hell on the weekends. Or it could’ve been that awful Charlie Bryan. That kid’s always up to his ears in trouble.”
“You don’t say?”
Sarah sucked in her breath. “It’s the third burglary in the last couple of months, can you believe? Anyway, Frank thinks they’re pawning the stuff they steal, using the money to buy drugs.”
Helen sighed. “For goodness’ sake.”
Sarah scratched at her long chin. “Frank thinks they must’ve climbed through an open window at Mattie’s because there was no sign of forced entry. In fact, he said the house was closed up as tight as a drum.” She paused, head cocked. “He figures the window lock must’ve accidentally jarred shut when they left.” She shrugged. “And they’re not taking big things, like TVs or computers, which is sort of strange. It’s like they know exactly what they want, get their hands on it, and leave the same way they came.”
“Any leads?”
“Not a one,” Sarah admitted. “He didn’t find a single fingerprint at Mattie’s house . . . well, except for Mattie’s. It was the same with the others.” Her eyes returned to her mirrored self, and she fussed with the sweep of hair over her ears. “Who knows, maybe they were smart enough to wear gloves or wiped off what they touched. Anything’s possible these days.”
Helen sighed. “The times are certainly changing, aren’t they? It hardly seems so long ago that locks were out of the ordinary here instead of commonplace.”
“It’s all the drugs,” Sarah said, retrieving her bag from beneath LaVyrle’s countertop. “Frankie says crimes all over have skyrocketed because of people buying crock . . .”
Helen stifled a grin. “You mean crack?”
“Crock, crack”—the sheriff’s wife wiggled her fingers—“whatever it’s called, it’s taking this country to hell in a hand basket.” She dug inside her purse and withdrew a pair of bills, leaving them lying atop LaVyrle’s station. With a snap, Sarah shut her bag, and her chin jerked up. “Well, I’ve got some shopping to do.” With a final glance at the mirror and a pat to her hair, she flashed Helen a buck-toothed grin. “See you later.”
“Good-bye, dear.”
A head popped around the corner and a timid voice squeaked out, “Missus Evans? If you’re ready, I’ll shampoo you now.”
“Of course, Mary.”
“And don’t forget to give Mrs. E a nice long conditioning,” LaVyrle’s sturdy tone reminded the girl as she grabbed the broom and swept out her cubby. “We can’t have her leaving here with her hair looking as dry as straw.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, LaVyrle,” Helen quipped over her shoulder as she followed the girl to the shampoo room.
As Mary worked the soap into her scalp with nimble fingers, Helen closed her eyes. She thought of Sarah Biddle’s remarks about Mattie Oldbridge being robbed, of several other such thefts in River Bend in recent months, which the sheriff attributed to boys from the valley searching for things to pawn to get money for drugs; and she wondered what the world was coming to when a town of two hundred or so, snugly set between the river bluffs, miles away from the big city, wasn’t even safe enough.
SUSAN M
C
BRIDE
is the
USA Today
bestselling author of
Blue Blood
, the first of the
Debutante Dropout Mysteries.
The award-winning series also includes
The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club, Night of the Living Deb,
and
Too Pretty to Die
. She’s also the author of
The Truth about Love & Lightning, Little Black Dress,
and
The Cougar Club
, all Target Recommended Reads. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and daughter.
Visit Susan’s web site at www.SusanMcBride.com for more info.
Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from
Mad as Helen
copyright © 2014 by Susan McBride.
TO HELEN BACK
. Copyright © 2014 by Susan McBride. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition MAY 2014 ISBN: 9780062359759
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062359766
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