A Bad Day for Pretty (7 page)

She saw a flash of blue—a bright, clear blue as though the sky over Prosper were being reflected in a mirror. She edged closer, stutter-stepping along in her clogs as discreetly as possible, knowing that any minute Goat or Detective Daphne Simmons was liable to yank her back.

The blue was some sort of fabric, maybe a tarp or sheet. Dusty with concrete, it appeared to be stuck to some of the larger chunks, and in other places had pulled free from the wreckage. It was draped over a body-shaped lump, and Stella peered at the ends, trying to determine which way was up, and if any details—body parts, for example—were poking out where she could see them.

“Ma’am, this is an official investigation,” Simmons said with about as much warmth as a ham hock in a meat locker. “Kindly back away from—”

“Holy fuck,” Stella exclaimed, because a final few shuffling sidesteps brought her close enough to get a full-on view of the near end of the lump, where the sheet had been pulled away—

—revealing the vaguely facelike gray stretched mask of horror nestled in the blue folds with its protruding cheekbones and jaw wrapped in leathery skin and its stringy crumbling eyes and its horrible stained-tooth grin and freakishly preserved wig of perky blond hair in a cut that belonged on a housewife from a Kansas City suburb, not this Halloween nightmare—

—and then Goat’s hand closed on her arm and gave her a good solid yank, dragging her back away from the hole. Instinctively, Stella wrenched away from him, but there was more power in Goat’s one-handed grip than Stella managed to churn up in a week’s worth of workouts on the Bowflex, and she was helpless to go any direction but the one Goat had picked out for her, which, as it turned out, was back toward Neb’s cabinet.

Goat gave her a not-ungentle shove, which caused her ass end to make solid contact with the plywood surface, right next to Neb. It didn’t hurt anything other than her pride, and Stella considered jumping up and objecting, but one look at Goat’s face convinced her that this was one of those times that came along occasionally where every word you uttered dug you a little deeper into a mess of your own making.

The mummified body in its blue shroud provided enough of a distraction for the visiting crime-fighters that they forgot Stella for a moment, crowding around the remains of the shack’s foundation and making all kinds of appreciative sounds.

Stella tuned them out for a moment and turned to Neb. “That what I think it is?”

“Yeah, Stella, if what you’re thinkin’ about is a nasty-lookin’ old rotted human body that’s been layin’ under my shack for three years,” he said glumly. “I think I’m gonna puke again.”

“Who is it?”

“I b’lieve that’s what they’re all trying to figure out.” Neb took a much-folded, none-too-fresh-looking handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped it across his face. The day was headed toward the hot side of warm, but the faint sheen on Neb’s pallid skin appeared to be a product of nerves and nausea.

“Seems to me they might want to figure out who was here pouring that concrete,” Stella remarked, thinking back to three years ago, a time when she had been distracted from the town’s goings-on by what turned out to be a steady ramp-up to and subsequent sorting-out after her bout of murderous husband-eliminating rage.

“Well, now, Goat already done that first thing,” Neb said. “He’s a sharp-enough one, I’d guess.”

“No kidding?” Stella maneuvered her butt on the hard surface of their makeshift seat, trying to find a position that was a little easier on her hip and hoping to avoid splinters. “Well, who is it?”

Neb watched her attempts to get comfortable with sympathy as he stuffed his handkerchief back into the pocket of his drawstring lounging trousers.

“Funny enough,” he said in a tone that indicated any humor involved had long since frittered itself away, “that would be me.”

Donna Donovan
liked strawberries. A
lot
. The plague started in her front yard, where a large wooden strawberry that Neb had cut out with his scroll saw was nailed to a stake driven into a nest of sprawling pink impatiens.
The Donovan’s
was painted on it in a curlicue-style script, the overzealous and not strictly accurate apostrophe taking the form of a little green leaf on a tendril that twirled down from the cap of leaves on top.

Stella passed by the sign and headed up to the door, which featured a wreath of plastic greenery and fuzzy faux strawberries, but she didn’t have time to knock before Donna herself flung the door open and swept Stella into the house, nearly tripping over a large yellow cat.

“Oh, Stella, I don’t know what I’m going to
do
I’m so upset,” she said. “I can’t bear to call Bobby and Luther—why, this would just break their hearts.”

Donna and Neb’s grown sons had left Prosper for more exotic locales: Bobby was studying forestry in Minnesota, and Luther was managing a sports bar in Saint Louis. Back in Neb’s drug-fancying days, and later when Stella was saving him from the lure of the straight and narrow path, Donna had insisted on keeping the boys in the dark. She didn’t want to worry her darlings, even though they were well into their twenties now.

“Mmm-hmm,” Stella said noncommittally. Considering her track record with her own daughter, who had gone more than three years without speaking to Stella at all, she had a hard-and-fast rule against handing out parenting advice. If someone had come up with the one true way to get the job done right, Stella sure hadn’t heard about it.

She evidently wasn’t following Donna through the tidy split-level house fast enough, because Donna slipped her hand into Stella’s and tugged, dragging her into the kitchen and nudging her toward a chair. The chair’s pad was waffle cotton stitched into a strawberry shape. As Stella sat herself down, setting her notebook and pen on the table, she noted that little had changed in the kitchen since her last visit: a wallpaper border of teapots and strawberry runners still graced the top of the red-painted cabinets. A row of porcelain canisters shaped like berry baskets lined the countertops. The theme played out on the red teapot on the stove, the tea towels hung on hooks, the tiles on the backsplash, and the ruffly curtains in the window. Even the magnets on the fridge were shaped like plump little berries.

Stella thought an hour in the kitchen would make her vomit, but she kept her opinion to herself.

“So what have they done with him?” Donna said, plopping into a chair across from Stella. She slid a platter of sliced coffee cake toward herself and started pinching off little pea-sized crumbs and nibbling at them. Stella was quite familiar with this coping technique, which basically entailed eating enough food for a large family in increments so small that it hardly seemed likely they could possibly contain any calories, and she helped herself to the other end of the cake.

“Well, now, Donna, it’s all just information-gathering for now,” she said. “I expect the sheriff’ll give me a call just as soon as they’re ready to release Neb. I asked him to, as a courtesy, you know.”

“Why didn’t you stay there with him? He needs someone on his side,” Donna fretted. A smudge of jam traced the corner of her mouth, and a hank of hair had escaped its barrette and hung over her cheek, clues that she was falling apart. Donna never, ever looked anything but her finest unless her world was well and truly crashing in on itself.

She was one of those ladies who took seriously her mother’s admonishment to offer her best side to the world. Her hair was always done, her makeup carefully applied, and her clothes neat and pressed. For a bit of individual flair, Donna favored bright-colored separates that molded themselves to her curvy shape and generally found some creative way to let a bit of undergarment show, either at her cleavage or up the slit of her skirt or peeking out over her low waistband in the back. Thongs had been a happy discovery for Donna. She’d amassed a wardrobe of lingerie in every color, so the peep show was always nicely coordinated.

But today she had on a lavender knit jacket over a stretched and gapping lime green camisole with plain beige bra straps showing. Her gray sweatpants came all the way up to her belly button and hinted at nothing more than a possible call to get on the StairMaster a bit more often. In short, she looked a mess.

“Now, Donna,” Stella said gently, opening her notebook. It was a fresh one from the stack Stella kept in her hall closet. Every case got a new notebook, purchased in bulk from the Wal-Mart sale bins, and this one featured Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! at the Wuzzleburg Celebration. Stella didn’t know much about Wubbzy other than he was shaped like a yellow nine-volt battery with a snout, and she doubted kids found him all that entertaining, despite the fact that big lettering down the side declared him
abso-hula-lutely hysterical
—she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his creators had been impaired by OxyContin abuse themselves. “You know I’d be there if I could, but you need to remember I’m just a civilian. Those folks being down from Fayette and all, Sheriff’s got to clamp down on procedures. That’s how they do.”

Donna paled even further. “But, Stella,” she said hoarsely, her voice barely above a whisper, “you’ve got to make them understand it’s not the way it looks. Do you think I ought to call Priscilla?”

Priscilla, Donna’s attorney niece, had just passed the bar exam over the summer and joined up as a junior associate at a firm in Joplin. Stella wasn’t convinced the girl was really the best choice to defend her uncle, if it came to that.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Stella said cautiously, “but if we decide … down the road … well, I have some names we could consider. You know, since Priscilla’s probably so busy getting settled in her new job and all.”

“Oh, but no one can defend a person like family, Stella,” Donna said. “’Cause she would
know
he’s innocent.”

“Uh, yeah.” Stella figured a change of conversation might be in order. “Tell me again about the snack shack. Help me out with a time line here.”

As Neb had explained before Goat gave Stella the heave-ho, and Donna confirmed on the phone as Stella drove over to the Donovans’ house, he had indeed been a key player in the construction of the snack shack, but he had no memory of wrapping up any blond ladies in blue sheets and laying them out in the framed-out foundation before backing up the concrete mixer and covering up the whole mess with a fresh batch of Ready Mix.

“Why, you remember,” Donna said. “It was after they redid the track. Got one season into it and everyone was so dang parched during the demolition derby. Don’t you recall? There was practically a riot in the stands when the Optimists ran out of lemonade.”

“I’m kind of fuzzy about the details,” Stella said. “I was, ah, having some drama in my own personal life back then.”

Donna looked at her blankly; then comprehension lit up her gaze. “Oh,” she said. “That was when, uh, Ollie died.”

A faint blush crept across her cheeks. Everyone in Prosper knew the official version of Ollie’s death, of course; how the old sheriff—Burt Knoll, Goat’s predecessor—answered a call from a neighbor worried about strange sounds coming from the Hardesty home, and discovered Ollie’s forehead caved in and Stella sitting on the floor next to him, holding a wrench.

Everyone knew, too, how the judge had folks lined up out the door of his office wanting to offer up accounts of Ollie smacking or threatening or being just plain unconscionably mean to his wife at some point in their twenty-six-year marriage.

But naturally enough, no one really talked about it after Stella’s acquittal. She herself didn’t remember the details of that day for several months, and by then a little seed of an idea had begun to germinate in her mind, a growing conviction that no woman should have to put up with abuse by her husband or boyfriend, and—to Stella’s surprise—that she might just have a calling to help put a stop to it. After all, she already had one notch in her belt, so to speak.

As all this remembering and realizing and deciding was going on, Stella maintained a very tenuous hold on the finer details of her life. Other than getting herself up in the morning and back to bed at night, she pretty much ignored the rest of the world and let it take care of itself.

“So,” she said now, “why don’t you pretend I wasn’t around back then. Like I was off visiting my sister in California or something. Tell me everything.”

Donna took a deep breath and a fortifying lump of coffee cake. “Well, now, Neb’s back went out January of that year … and he had his surgery in February, and the rehab and all went good ’cept for by then he’d got a taste for that poison, only course I didn’t know it. That whole summer was—well, you know. What with them pills and all.”

“A haze,” Stella suggested.

“You might say. Now, that was Howell’s last year before he retired, so Neb was still the assistant groundskeeper.”

Howell Laurey used to be the head caretaker, an ancient grizzled man who’d been running the place since the ’80s, less effectively every year, until they’d finally hired Neb to pick up the slack while Howell wheezed toward his twenty years and full retirement benefits. Stella vaguely recalled how the landscaping overgrew its bounds toward the end of Howell’s tenure, how the buildings sprang leaks and paint peeled and fences went unmended, while Howell doddered painfully around with the assistance of a cane as gnarled as he was.

“Howell and Neb did a half-ass job right up through fair time,” Donna continued, “and the town got some complaints. Porta-potties not getting emptied, gates not opened on time, trash around the midway, like that. But the thing people complained about most wasn’t even their fault—everyone wanted better food at the track now that it was all spiffed up.”

“It wasn’t great before,” Stella said, remembering the old structure, a carportlike shed with rough wooden shelves, from which the Sunrise Optimist Club sold Hostess Fruit Pies and bags of chips and sodas and lemonade.

“Yeah. So they got plans for the new shack, got all the supplies ordered, and Neb got to work on it.”

“How did he manage?” Stella asked. “With his, you know, troubles.”