Die Job (13 page)

“Oh, yeah,” she said, grief in her voice and face.

She fell into step beside me and we left the school. “No homework?” I asked when she didn’t stop by her locker to pick up any books.

“I have to be back later for volleyball practice,” she said. “I’ll pick up my backpack then.”

“Do you like volleyball?” I asked as we cut across the parking lot. She certainly had the height for it.

“Love it. I’ve got a full ride to the University of Maryland. I signed my letter of intent a couple weeks ago.” She mimed a signature in the air.

“Congratulations.”

“My boyfriend’s going to Annapolis, so it’ll work out great.”

“Mark?” I said, remembering the name from Saturday night.

“Yeah, he’s got an appointment to the Naval Academy. It’s been his dream forever. And his dad’s. His dad’s a navy captain down at Kings Bay. His stepdad, really, although his real dad was in the navy, too.”

Kings Bay was the submarine base about twenty miles south of St. Elizabeth. “I think I saw him at Rothmere,” I said. And at the grocery store, fighting with his wife.

Lindsay nodded again, a curtain of brown hair swinging across her face. “Yeah. Mark was Braden’s best friend.” She kicked at a fallen pecan, sending it skittering into the road. “He’s really broken up about it, but he’s not talking about it. You know how guys are.”

She sounded both worried and a bit peeved. I tried to remember what it was like to be eighteen and in love. Had I resented it when Hank didn’t share something with me? I couldn’t
remember. “Give him time,” I said. “It’s probably just about the hardest thing he’s ever had to deal with.”

“I don’t know about that,” Lindsay said. She clamped her lips together and lengthened her stride.

I hustled to keep up with her and we climbed the steps to the salon’s veranda together. Mom was using a curling iron on a customer’s hair and Stella had a client in the Nail Nook. Althea sat on the love seat in our waiting area, flipping through the pages of a magazine. She looked at us from under her brows as I shut the door. “You dragging clients in off the streets now, baby-girl?” she asked.

Lindsay looked startled. I motioned her toward my chair, saying, “No. The Locks of Love girls are coming here.” I explained the change of plan.

“That’s a good idea, Grace,” Mom said. “Shasta here is my last client of the day, so Althea and I can help when the other girls get here.”

I flipped a cape around Lindsay’s shoulders and brushed her hair back from her forehead. She had enviably clear skin and strong bones. She was pretty now, but I figured she’d be striking once she hit her late twenties or thirties. I secured her hair with an elastic at the nape of her neck and quickly braided it. “You’re sure?” I said, lifting my shears.

She gave a sharp nod. “Yeah. This was really important to Braden—his little sister died of leukemia—and I really feel I should do it for him. I owe him this.”

I stood there stunned. “I had no idea. His poor parents. That’s awful!” I shut up; there weren’t any words that could begin to address the McCullerses’ family tragedies.

“Yeah.” Lindsay bowed her head and I thought for a moment she might be praying, but when she slanted me a look, I realized she was waiting for me to chop off her hair.

I cut off the braid and put it aside to be mailed to Locks of Love with the others when we’d collected them. Then, I led her to the shampoo basin and washed her hair, enjoying the fragrance of our new lavender-scented shampoo as it bubbled in the sink.

By the time I’d finished giving Lindsay a jaw-length bob, the other girls were trickling in, looking around curiously. “This is way cozier than Chez Pierre out on the highway,” one of them observed, running a hand through the fern fronds dripping from a hanging basket. “I need to tell my mom about this place.”

Mom beamed and swept her off to the shampoo sink. Althea and I each hooked up with a teenager, and the three of us were busy for an hour and a half. By the end of the afternoon, we had ten braids of varying length and thicknesses to send along to Locks of Love. I’d even remembered to take photos so Rachel could use them in the yearbook.

“I’m bushed,” Althea said when the last girl left. She sat on the love seat, kicked her shoes off, and began to massage the ball of one foot.

“Let me do that for you, Althea,” Stella said. She brought over the foot basin she used for pedicures and gently submerged Althea’s feet.

Althea leaned back and closed her eyes. “Thank you, Stel. That feels right good. I don’t know what’s more tiring—being on my feet all day or listening to all that chatter. Bunch of magpies!” But she said it with a tolerant smile.

“It reminds me of when you and Alice Rose were in high school,” Mom said, plopping her combs into the container of blue germicide. “And all your friends used to come around. Maybe we should do some kind of promotion to attract a younger clientele. Maybe Rachel would have some ideas. I hope she’s doing okay.”

“Nobody’s okay ten minutes after someone they cared about dies,” Althea said testily, opening one eye. “You of all people should know that, Vi.”

“I do.” She thought for a moment, standing with a comb forgotten in her hand. “I guess I was guilty of thinking that things like this don’t hit young people as hard because youth is so resilient. But they do. Sometimes harder.”

The salon door creaked open and we all turned, surprised, to see a young man on the threshold. He was tall, with a football player’s broad shoulders and thick neck. He wore the same letter jacket he’d had on at Rothmere. Mark Crenshaw. He shifted from foot to foot, looking uncomfortable in the feminine salon, with four pairs of female eyes—five, if you count Beauty—staring at him.

“Um, is Lindsay here?” he asked. “Lindsay Tandy?”

“She left almost two hours ago,” I said. “She said something about volleyball practice.”

“That’s just it,” he said, bringing his thumb to his mouth to gnaw on the cuticle. “I was supposed to meet her after practice, but coach said she never showed. She’d never skip practice. Something’s happened to her.”

IMAGES OF A GHOSTLY FIGURE PUSHING BRADEN down the stairs and a werewolf smothering him in his hospital bed jumped into my mind. Could some deranged killer be after all the kids who were on the field trip? What if—

Mom cut into my lurid thoughts with her usual calm good sense. “You say she’s only been ‘missing’ for a couple of hours? I doubt anything’s happened to her. Maybe she had more homework than usual and skipped practice to do it, or maybe . . . was she close to Braden McCullers?”

“He was more my friend than hers,” the teen said, looking less tense than he had.

“Well, but she knew him. Maybe she just needs a little space to come to terms with his passing.”

Althea nodded in agreement. “Uh-huh. I’ll bet your gal’s holed up somewhere having a good cry.”

“You could be right,” he said, doubt and hope in his voice. “She was a real mess when we first got the news.”

“Have you checked at her house?” Stella asked, rocking back on her heels. Using a towel, she dried Althea’s feet.

“I called, but no one answered. Both her folks work. Maybe they’re home now.” He rubbed at a dark bruise that discolored his left cheek, then winced.

I could see why Alice Rose didn’t want to let my nephews play football. “You get hurt playing football,” she declared every time her husband, a second-stringer during his time at Auburn, tried to persuade her to sign six-year-old Logan up for a league.

“You’re right,” Mark said. “I’ll run over there. I’m sorry for interrupting.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mom said to his back as he pushed through the door and pounded down the veranda steps.

“That young man is strung way too tight,” Althea observed. “If my William had fretted himself like that every time I was late or not where I was supposed to be, he’d have worried himself into an early grave and Beau Lansky wouldn’t have had the chance to murder him.”

“Now, Althea—” Mom started.

Althea had convinced herself that Georgia’s governor, Beau Lansky, with or without the help of the DuBois family, had killed her husband and his friend Carl. Their bodies had turned up in the old DuBois bank this past May, sealed into a wall, lending some credence to her obsession. Still, there was no evidence to tie Lansky to the crime, and Mom had tired of listening to her friend’s conspiracy theories.

“I’m just saying that boy needs to relax,” Althea grumbled.

Even though I agreed with her, I could see how it would be difficult to
chill out when your best friend had been murdered in his hospital bed.

I said good night to Mom and Althea, who were planning to see the new Robert Downey Jr. movie, and to Stella, who was headed home to hem her daughter’s marching band uniform. “How’s it going with Darryl?” I asked Stella as we descended the veranda steps together. Beauty slunk behind us, stalking a mockingbird under the magnolia.

“One day at a time,” she said, but she sounded more happy than sad. “We’re still going to counseling; I guess we both had a lot of stuff to get out on the table.” She held her hair back against a gust of wind. “Funny how you can be married to someone for twenty years and talk all the time without saying the things that really need to be said. Or maybe we just weren’t listening. Either way, it helps that he’s got a job again.”

Darryl was a mechanic who’d been out of work for several months and he’d used his down time to have an affair. “I’m sure it does,” I said. I waved as she scooped up a frustrated Beauty and got into her car. I was about to head for my apartment when another car pulled to the curb. A white Corvette with California plates. The passenger-side window buzzed down. “Grace?”

The voice was familiar but I didn’t place it immediately. Curiosity warred with caution. I peered through the open window. Glen Spaatz leaned toward me, smiling. “Hey, I’m glad I caught you. The kids told me you were cutting their hair for free and I wanted to stop by and thank you.” He must have seen my puzzled look because he added, “I’m the senior class sponsor and I okayed the head-shaving fund-raiser.”

“Oh, well, you’re welcome,” I said. “Locks of Love is a great organization.”

“Do you have dinner plans?”

His question caught me off guard.

“Uh . . . no.”

He pushed the passenger-side door open. “Why don’t you join me? I’ve got a stack of exams to grade, but I was going to get a quick bite at The Crab Pot.”

Why not? He was attractive, single (I assumed), and I had nothing more exciting waiting at my apartment than a tuna sandwich or canned ravioli. “Okay,” I said, sliding into the low-slung seat. Leather. They must be paying teachers more than I realized. He put the car in gear and pulled smoothly away from the curb before accelerating well past the speed limit.

“What’s the point of having all those horses under the hood if you don’t let ’em run?” he said, apparently picking up on my discomfort by my white-knuckled grip on the dashboard.

His mention of horses brought John Dillon to mind for a moment, but I pushed the thought aside. Glen pulled into a spot in the lot across from The Crab Pot a few minutes later and we walked into the restaurant, a cozy place with high-backed booths and décor that ran to strategically strung nets populated by plastic crabs and fish. I considered The Crab Pot a tourist haunt and rarely went there during the summer, but it was okay at this time of year. It sat on Ocean Drive and had a lovely view of the sound from the second-story deck. White caps made the sea look like a dark meringue tonight, and we opted to sit inside, out of the growing wind. A sprinkling of customers provided a background hum of conversation.

“Have you thought about evacuating?” Glen said. “I guess the storm’s supposed to hit late Wednesday.”

“If it doesn’t veer north like they usually do,” I said, opening
my menu. No surprise: nearly every entrée featured crab in some form. “What about you?”

“I’ve never seen a hurricane—we don’t have them in California. I’m going to stick around to see what it’s like.” He flashed a white smile, clearly jazzed by the thought.

“No power or running water is not the stuff of high adventure,” I said prosaically, giving my order to the waitress: she-crab soup and a Caesar salad. “So you’re from California?”

“LA. Land of palm trees and movie stars, daahling. Kiss-kiss.”

“I take it Hollywood wasn’t your cup of tea?” I asked, smiling at his air kisses.

“Oh, I gave it a whirl,” he said, “but it seems I don’t have that star quality.” His grin this time combined both self-deprecation and a hint of bitterness.

“Were you in a movie?” I asked, surprised.

“Several. Infinitely forgettable.” He waved the topic away. “I got tired of doing auditions and brown-nosing casting directors and decided it was time to grow up and do something useful with my life. My degree was in biology and I heard there was a shortage of science teachers, so I picked up my teaching credential and taught for a couple of years in LA before moving out here. No wife or kids to worry about—like how I worked that in?—so I could suit myself and give Georgia a whirl. What about you? Are you living the life of your dreams?”