Double blast, p.14
Double Blast, page 14
“I haven’t heard a thing. But she stopped posting pictures of every bite of food before, during, and after she’s eaten it.” Before I could find a way to tell her the Crooked Bea Brain story in the shortest way possible, Florida decided she didn’t want to hear it. “Just tell me if she’s on her way.”
“No,” I said. “She isn’t.”
“Will she be back before Memorial Day?”
That, I couldn’t be sure of. “How about if I let you know the minute I hear she’s coming home?”
“That’ll work.”
We rocked.
“I have a question for you, Florida.”
“Just one?”
“Just one.”
“Okay.”
“Did you come back for the money?”
After a minute that felt like ten, she said, “Pass.”
“Do you know where your father hid the money, Florida?”
“I passed on the money question, Davis.”
“So you don’t think he hid the money.”
“You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
“I want to, Florida. I really do.”
“Maybe this will help,” she said. “My mother doesn’t think he hid a thing. And since she’s had plenty of time to find it, that’s good enough for me.”
I’d love to have said, “That’s good enough for me too,” but it most certainly wasn’t. So I said, “I thought you didn’t want to talk about your mother.”
“I don’t. Final question.”
“Did you dig up Eli Atwell’s grave?”
Which she had a ready response for. Not an answer, but a comeback. “He wasn’t in a grave. Not in the ground anyway. He was in the crypt under the funeral home.”
“There isn’t a crypt under the funeral home.” As soon as the words left my lips, it came slamming back, what Roy Howdy had said earlier about a root cellar. Specifically, Eli Atwell’s body was supposed to be in his root cellar. He’d been serious? I thought he was just being Roy Howdy. “Florida.” I grabbed her arm. “Is there a crypt under the funeral home?”
She turned her face to me. Stunned. “Where have you been all day? Yes, there’s a crypt under the funeral home. They just found it.”
“Who is they?”
She shrugged. “The very large bald man your bestie calls Hair and the dead body police.”
“We call him No Hair.” I held out my plastic glass. She loaded it. “Are we talking about an actual crypt? A mausoleum? Full of tombs? Or are we talking stacks of dead bodies in Roy Howdy’s basement?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
I asked, “How many bodies are in the basement crypt?”
She answered, “Don’t know and don’t want to.”
“And Roy Howdy knew he was living on top of dead bodies?”
“That’s a trick question,” she said. “On the one hand, how could he not know? And on the other, Roy Howdy doesn’t know what day of the week it is.”
“Still,” I said. “Hard to believe.”
“Only in Pine Apple.”
We rocked.
“I wonder if Roy Howdy was authorized to live on top of bodies. Surely there are...rules.”
“One would think.”
“I wonder if my father knows there are dead bodies in Roy’s basement.”
“Another thing I wouldn’t know.”
We rocked.
I cut the cadaver silence with, “So?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t break into the crypt.” She let a full minute pass before slowly adding, “But I’m worried sick my mother did.”
I heard cricket necks snap our way with the breaking news. Before I could decide how to respond, or if I even should respond, Florida breaking our pinkie promise to not discuss our mothers for the second time brought mine around. My phone interrupted the still night with an incoming text message from her.
“Is that your phone?” Florida asked.
“It is.” I dug for it.
“It sounds like a fire alarm.”
“It’s the text alert and ring tone I’ve assigned to my mother.”
“That bad?”
“It’s worse.” I didn’t click on the incoming message right away because I was busy preparing myself for my mother’s barely decipherable voice-to-text message. “If it’s nothing, she calls. If it’s horrible, she texts.”
“It isn’t going to read itself.”
With a sigh, I clicked.
Davis Way, you glisten to me and you glisten ghoul. Your farther needs yelp. Bee is a illegal Fabian. She has been Arrested Development and is in the illegal Fabian detonation. We diddle nose she diddle have a gas port. The hospitable went to clack her in for an extermination and assed for her gas port. She diddle have one. Now she is a illegal Fabian. Halp us. And fixture your farther’s Fone.
I passed my fone—I meant phone—to Florida. “I see what you mean.” She passed it back. “Whatever it is, it sounds horrible.”
We rocked.
“What’s it say?” she asked.
“Bea has been detained in Canada for entering without a passport.”
She dropped her head. Her shoulders shook. She laughed out, “How’d that even happen?”
“She got on the wrong train and wound up in Canada. Apparently without a passport.”
“Why would Bea Crawford have a passport to begin with? Has she even crossed the Alabama state line in her life before now?”
“All the time.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really,” I said. “She shows up on my Mississippi doorstep regularly.”
“So you didn’t get stuck with Eddie but you got stuck with Bea?”
“So it would seem.”
We rocked.
“Davis?” Her voice was soft. Almost pleading. “Go easy on her.”
Every ounce of me wanted to reach for her hand and give it a reassuring squeeze that I wouldn’t skin her mother alive. But I knew better than to even hint that I’d look the other way if Fiona Simmons had, indeed, upended Eli Atwell’s final resting place.
So we rocked.
“Florida?”
“Hmmm?”
“What’s his name?”
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“It isn’t Junior.”
“I heard that,” I said. “Really. What’s his name?”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“It’s a secret?”
She said, “No. I just don’t want to tell you.”
I said, “Tell me anyway.”
“It’s Cole.”
“Cole Simmons.” I tried it on. “It’s a great name.”
“It’s worked out well for you.”
“It will work out well for him too.”
After a quiet moment of contemplation in which she found two more drops of Fuzzy Navel in the bottle and split them between our glasses, she asked, “What’s your son’s name?”
Staring into my wine glass, wondering if the lone drop at the bottom was worth the tip of the plastic glass, I said, “I’m not sure.”
FIFTEEN
Before I let my father swear me in to keep the peace in Pine Apple for two weeks, I had him send me the precinct’s police blotter for the previous twelve months. I studied it for three weeks as if my life and the lives of my children depended on it.
Because they did.
What I’d learned was the past twelve months had seen an uptick in crime, law enforcement activity, and public safety callouts in Pine Apple, Alabama. Murder and manslaughter counts, zero. Deaths by natural causes, two. The first, Mary Beulah Hawthorne’s great aunt by marriage, Jane-Jane Hawthorne, age 107, who didn’t wake up from a nap one afternoon. The other, Roy Howdy’s uncle, age 82, who didn’t wake up one morning. Rape, zero. Robbery, two: one bicycle and one chainsaw. Grand larceny, zero. Breaking and entering, one, the incident that sent Eugenia Winters Stone down the Delta Force Drive. Aggravated assault, two, up from one the year before, and both charges were against my ex-ex-mother-in-law, Bea Crawford—her again—over altercations with customers at the diner. One where she smacked a man upside the head with a hot skillet for complaining about her goulash. She paid him off rather than face him in court. Two hundred and fifty dollars in small bills and free corndogs for a month. Property crimes the year before, fourteen, most of those charges were filed by Emma Stamper against her neighbor, Dill Barter, for crossing his property line to hers with his weed whacker, endangering her arborvitae, which wasn’t the real problem. Dill Barter weed whacking in his birthday suit was the real problem. Property damage the year before? Five incidents. All mailboxes mowed down by strangers passing through on their way to somewhere else. Motor vehicle theft, zero. Parking violations, twenty-two (up five), traffic stops, thirty-seven (up eight), but most of those were Daddy pulling over his buddies to shoot the breeze. Disturbing the peace calls, multiple, just like the previous year, but nothing more serious than a ten-person food fight in the produce section at Pine Apple’s only grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, fondly referred to as The Pig. And on the fire side, there were three incidents. All three grill fires, all contained immediately with no substantial damage, and all three at (again) my ex-ex-mother-in-law’s diner.
In light of what I’d learned, which was nothing new at all, I’d decided filling in for my father wasn’t exactly putting myself or my children in harm’s way. And with my two least favorite residents out of my hair—Bea Crawford and her son, Eddie—I thought my time in my hometown would be a cake walk. I knew going in I was committing to oversee the Memorial Day Celebration, but that was 49 percent of the draw. It was traditionally the most fun that could be had in Pine Apple. My sister, niece, and my grandmother were the other 51 percent. Meredith, feeling very aunt deprived with almost two hundred miles between us, signed up to care for my children while I sat behind Daddy’s desk for three or four hours a day, something we’d both looked forward to. Me? The mommy break. Meredith? The pitter-patter of little feet in her house again and a baby to rock. And no one had been more excited than my grandmother, who’d been so looking forward to her job as deputy. None of us could’ve foreseen the goats, the torrential rain, Fantasy showing up with Whiskey in tow, Florida Simmons popping up out of nowhere driving a chicken wing truck with a boy who was very clearly a product of Pine Apple, or a dead body snatched from what turned out to be a crypt, which turned out to be nothing more than a root cellar. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined any single one of those events. Much less all of them. Within forty-eight hours. And I said as much later that night when I found myself in the hot seat at my mother’s kitchen table.
My people were angry.
Very angry.
At me.
Bradley and I parted ways in my parents’ driveway two hours earlier and he’d been fine. Much better than when I’d picked him up at the airport. He’d even wished me luck with my old friend on the porch and kissed me bye. But he’d gotten himself all worked up again when, ten minutes later, he found my dazed grandmother, sitting on the sidewalk outside of The Front Porch staring into space and sipping from a pint jar of watermelon moonshine singing an inebriated version of the theme song to Fancy Nancy, one of Bex and Quinn’s favorite television shows, and knew my grandmother couldn’t take one more minute of our children. Then he found Meredith. Without a marble left in her head after single-handedly caring for Bex, Quinn, and the baby since early that morning. “Why don’t they take naps?” she’d asked Bradley. “WHY?” Then she’d cried. Real live tears of exhaustion. “Even the baby, Bradley, he doesn’t nap.” After prying the moonshine from Granny’s bony fingers, then strapping her in her stairlift and sending her upstairs to bed, he helped Meredith put her house and store back together after twelve straight hours of a kid tornado. Then, with all three children in tow, he’d dragged Joe, of Joe’s Automotive on Cherry Street, away from his supper table to the site of the Bellissimo truck he intended to make his Pine Apple getaway in the next morning with No Hair at the wheel and Fantasy and Whiskey in the backseat, only for Joe to proclaim it good for nothing but scrap. Because the cost of replacing the computer I’d destroyed, which had 100 percent to do with the truck running, was just as expensive as buying the truck again. Joe had said to Bradley, “I’ll buy the tires off you for two hundred each.” And in the process of traveling from my parents’ house to Meredith’s, then to the dead truck behind Bea Crawford’s mobile home, he’d seen what had been in the ground and flourishing in Mississippi that morning in buckets and bales scattered all over town awaiting planting in Alabama the next. But it was something about the very sight of the eighteen-wheeler flatbed still in the middle of Main Street that had truly set him off. What? I didn’t know. But he was fuming.
No Hair was furious with Fantasy. For everything. For breathing, for being a Biloxi headline, and for forcing him to stop what he would otherwise be doing to hire her replacement. Because, he said, her dismissal was, “...permanent. Etched in stone. Don’t bother to clean out your locker, because I’m going to burn it all as soon as I get back.” He was even madder at me for asking the Biloxi Crime Lab to run unauthorized ballistics tests on the paintball guns Fantasy had chased through the casino the night of the incident. Which No Hair claimed was a delay tactic on my part and a waste of the city’s valuable time and resources, not to mention I should rest assured he did not have a word to say in my defense when Detective Sandy Marini called him to protest my unsanctioned use of her credentials. He’d had to stop what he was doing to talk her down, which was traipsing through the mud with the Wilcox County coroner through the small cemetery Fantasy, Whiskey, and I had already visited that day, without finding an unearthed grave. Only to learn Eli Atwell’s body had been in Roy Howdy’s basement. Something Roy Howdy claimed to have nothing to do with. That was all his uncle. No Hair went on to learn all manner of other things he didn’t want to know. Such as, Alabama allowed burial on private property, which Roy Howdy’s funeral home actually was, because (news to everyone) Roy Howdy wasn’t a licensed funeral director. Therefore his funeral home wasn’t a licensed funeral home. When No Hair confronted Roy Howdy with the ominous news, he’d said, “For real? I gotta have a license?” But mostly No Hair was as mad as a hornet about the fact that he wasn’t in Mississippi doing his own job, because he was in Alabama doing mine.
I didn’t know what was wrong with Fantasy. I’d asked as we’d assembled. She’d snapped, “What’s it to you, Davis?” I backed off, chalking it up to her fugitive predicament, fatigue, and the death of her Valentinos when she was forced to drop them in one of the many dumpsters still scattered around town.
All that anger combined had the three of them almost accusing me of carelessly risking everything I held dear by agreeing to come to Pine Apple and fill in for my father in the first place. To which I responded I most certainly had not, having done my homework and finding no risk to mine or my family’s safety. They weren’t impressed. Hinting that I’d allowed everything to happen. Or somehow caused it. Or at the very least, didn’t stop it.
My boss was to my right. In Mother’s seat. “No Hair? How could I have stopped Fantasy from showing up if I didn’t know she was coming?”
“Don’t you two have clairvoyant ESP tracking devices on each other’s brains?”
“There’s no such thing as clairvoyant ESP tracking devices on brains.”
Fantasy was to my left. In Meredith’s chair. Wearing Liberty overalls she’d cut off to Liberty capris over a tank top featuring jumping frogs, both of which she’d helped herself to after breaking in the backdoor of Pine Apple Mercantile and digging through the damaged and returned goods bin. Where she’d also acquired new footwear. Duck mocs. Which were duck boots without the boot part. They were an unfortunate shade of orange. “I called you, No Hair,” she said. “I called you from the casino floor while I was chasing naked gun-toting punks. I wouldn’t have had to run if you’d answered your phone. I called you again to tell you I was on my way to Pine Apple, and you didn’t answer that time either.”
“It was the middle of the night, Fantasy.”
“As long as I’m on record as having called you first.”
He said, “Duly noted,” but he didn’t sound like he gave a flip. Or maybe he sounded like it didn’t matter. Because at that point, after firing her so thoroughly, it didn’t.
“No Hair.” Fantasy slapped the table. “Do you think I’m happy about this? Any of it? Look at me. I’ve been here two days and I’ve already turned into an Alabama redneck. I’m wearing a frog shirt.”
I probably should have stayed out if it, but I jumped right in with, “That you stole.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Because the store wasn’t open.”
“That’s generally true of small-town retail at ten o’clock at night.”
She said, “It was seven o’clock at night and I left a note.”
No Hair said, “You two shut up.”
Fantasy redirected her wrath back at No Hair. “Stop acting like I’ve been on some kind of vacation. I’ve been on a nightmare.” She stabbed the table with a finger. “It’s been a total nightmare.” Stab, stab, stab. “For all that’s happened here, I’d have been way better off staying home and letting Biloxi PD lock me up. Or turning myself over to the punk’s parents. Because being here has been like being in hell. I don’t know what’s left for Davis to do to Pine Apple other than burn it to the ground.”
“Hey,” I snapped.
“I’m not necessarily blaming you, Davis,” she said. In a very blaming way.
“But you are, Fantasy.”
“Well, why don’t you run it by your best friend Florida? See if she thinks what I said was blaming you.”
My jaw dropped.
“Fantasy,” Bradley, who was directly across from me in Daddy’s chair, spoke up. “The only thing Davis is truly guilty of, other than hiding you and withholding information from me, is bankrupting her hometown, destroying a brand new truck, and wiping out the Bellissimo Gardens.”
“How have I bankrupted my hometown, Bradley?”
“Let me rephrase.”
