A Bad Day for Romance (24 page)

The terrible silence was made worse by the fact that the desk clerk and a lady helping herself to iced tea over in the complimentary buffet were both watching with wide eyes. “I’m afraid there isn’t,” Stella said miserably. “BJ, I guess I got some things to say to you.”

BJ nodded, his handsome face suddenly looking very tired. “Okay, Stella, let’s have us a talk. Only first, I wonder would you help me with these here wings. What with my back and my stitches and all, I can’t really reach around up there.”

They found an out-of-the-way bench down near the meeting rooms. BJ lowered himself slowly and gingerly onto the seat, and then insisted that leaning up against the wall was doing wonders for his back, that he was comfortable as can be, practically as good as new, and would Stella be happier if he hunted up a chair for her?

It was BJ’s steadfast good manners that undid her. Stella had known other such men, a breed that seemed to be disappearing: her father, her friend Jelloman, the fellow who had owned the filling station at the corner of Third and Clayton for forty years. Men who were quick to help and slow to anger, who gave up their seats for ladies and the elderly, who took off their caps to sing the national anthem at ball games, who kept a tight lid on their grievances and disappointments and would never, ever consider taking them out on a woman.

In short, BJ was exactly the sort of man Stella would have given her eyeteeth to trade Ollie for, all those years. And here he was, delivered and practically gift-wrapped—though he’d stuffed the sparkly wings into a trash can on the way out of the lobby—and she had the terrible duty of not only facing the fact that BJ would never be enough for her, but telling him the truth to boot.

Stella dabbed at the tears puddling in her eyes, which just made her cry harder. “This is all my fault,” she sniffled. “I’ve wrecked everything. You’ve been so good to me and—”

“Aw, now,” BJ said, gingerly putting his arm around her and wincing from the effort. “Aw, Stella, honey, don’t cry. You ain’t done nothing. I mean, truth be told, I guess we both knew it wasn’t going to work out, didn’t we?”

Stella hiccupped and dabbed harder. “We did?”

“Well, sure. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re—why, you’re a stunning woman, Stella, and I ain’t never been prouder than when I was out on the town with you on my arm.” He sounded so sincere that Stella felt her face warm, and the tears slowed to a trickle. “But, well, I guess I’m an old fool. I believe… now don’t laugh, Stella, but I believe there’s a true love out there for all of us. We had fun together and all, and we’ll always be good friends, but—well, I guess neither of us ever felt the spark, did we?”

Stella blinked several times. “You mean… when we were, uh, all those times, like on my sofa—”

“
Great
times,” BJ said quickly, tipping up her chin so she was looking straight into his eyes. “You’re just, well, sexy don’t even begin to cover it. Way you look in a skirt, why, you could get a fella’s engines revved up—well, I suspect you hear that all the time. It’s just, at this point in my life, I’m ready for a little more. I’d like to find the
one
, you know?”

Stella took BJ’s hand in her own and squeezed, smiling through her tears. All those make-out sessions that had ended up tentative and awkward, all those kisses that seemed a little soggy and uninspired—well, of
course
he’d noticed it, too! She’d sold BJ short—Stella had never stopped to think that maybe she wasn’t exactly the woman for him, either.

“You deserve better,” she said decisively.

“Not better,” BJ amended. “Just, you know, different.”

“You’re a fine man,” Stella said from the bottom of her heart. “And I hope we’ll always be the best of friends.”

“I’m sure we will,” BJ said, patting her hand and then wincing as he began the process of rising from the bench. “But right now I think I best hunt up Jorge and see if he’s ready to haul me home.”

“Aw, you poor man,” Stella murmured, trying to assist him with a hand under his elbow.

“Ain’t nothing,” BJ protested, while he staggered a couple of steps, clearly about to pass out from the pain. “Why, I hardly even notice it.”

As they made their slow way down the hall, BJ leaning on her for support and covering up the occasional pained squawk with fits of coughing, Stella reflected that if men—even dear ones, like BJ—were half as tough as they pretended to be, the Advil folks would be out of business.

Once she and Jorge got BJ set up in the passenger seat of the truck—after popping a couple of Vicodin, he seemed to feel he could make it home without resorting to the homemade plywood stretcher, which had gotten lost anyway somehow in the excitement of the paramedics and the ambulance and all yesterday—Stella bid him a fond farewell and watched his tricked-out truck drive slowly down the road into the trees as a pink-and-orange sunset gave way to an indigo evening.

Stella went to her room to change clothes, her heart heavy when she saw that Goat had removed his suitcase along with every other trace that he’d ever been there. She chose a sweater in a stormy gray-blue that matched her mood, and pulled on her jeans and a pair of high heeled boots. Then she headed to Dotty’s room, where the ladies had planned to get ready for dinner.

Stella was vastly relieved that the breakup with her boyfriend had gone as well as it had, but her mood remained low. Going through the motions of merriment was one of the hardest things she had ever done, but she put a smile on her face and got on with it. She owed it to Dotty—and to Noelle, and Chrissy, and the Green Hat Ladies—to bear up cheerily even though she felt like her heart had been run through a Slice-O-Matic and sautéed into a patty before being returned, hard and charred, to her chest.

All around her, a festive air pervaded Dotty’s suite. Dotty’s future mother-in-law regaled them all with stories about Kam’s childhood, which featured dual presidencies in the chess and Star Trek clubs. Ian popped by with a delivery of ice and the best champagne stocked by the gas station out on Route 9, and Chrissy mixed up yet another batch of punch with supplies she’d brought from home.

With only half an hour to go before they were due downstairs, Noelle tugged her wheeled case over to where Stella, sipping dejectedly, sat on the couch next to Irene.

“You want to talk about it, Mama?”

“No, sweetie,” Stella said softly, trying not to cry. “I guess I don’t.”

Noelle nodded. “Okay. Well, at least you don’t have to look as bad as you feel.”

Then she set to teasing and spraying Stella’s hair into a faux-messy topknot with bits cascading loosely around her face as though they’d been sprung free by Stella’s own untamable sensuality and made up her face with a generous application of smoky eyeliner and plum lip gloss. Then she set to fixing a nail that Stella had broken in the tussle with Wayne.

“Honestly, you are so hard on your nails,” Noelle tutted.

“Thanks for making me look nice,” Stella said to her daughter as she dabbed on nail glue and smoothed out the polish.

“I bet the sheriff’ll take notice.”

“I don’t know if he’s coming,” Stella said quietly. “He, uh…”

“He have to get back to work?” Noelle asked. “Couldn’t stay over?”

“Well, you know. Crime. It… never sleeps. Or whatever.” Stella grimaced at her blundering effort.

“Okay, Mama,” Noelle said gently, letting her off the hook. “But you got to promise me you’ll have fun anyway and not mope.”

“I promise,” Stella lied, determined to fake it.

“It’s like you always told me. You got to make the best of what you got.”

Stella only nodded, swallowing the lump in her throat. She remembered dishing out that advice… only that had been back in the days when she’d been her husband’s punching bag, a shadow of a woman whose hopes and dreams had been squashed so flat you could have slid them under a door. How many mornings had she woken up dreading the hours until she could crawl back into bed again? How many times had she done the laundry, the shopping, the cleaning, scrubbing so hard her knuckles were rubbed raw, trying to fill the days with something, anything, to take her mind off her reality?

“Wait,” she said softly.

Noelle, who was applying a fresh top coat, paused. She looked at her mother with her beautiful green eyes wide. “What, Mama?”

“It’s just…” Stella swallowed, not really sure what she was on the cusp of saying, or how to say it. “It’s just that I might have been wrong. Kind of.”

“Wrong about what?”

“About making the best of what you got. I mean… what maybe I should have told you is what you done figured out for yourself anyway. It’s not that you should sit there suffering through a bad lot with a smile on your face. What I should have told you is that if things are bad… why, you get out there and you
change
’em, baby girl. Which is what you’ve done, right? You put yourself through beauty school, you got rid of the wrong man and found yourself the right, er, girl, you got you a job you love, and look at you, why, you grabbed the reins and never let go.”

Noelle broke into a big grin that showed off her dimple and crinkled her eyes in a way that reminded Stella of old pictures of her mom when she was a little girl. “I learned that from
you
, Mama.” She capped the nail polish bottle, peeled off her gloves, and tossed them in the trash. “It’s such a relief to get those things off. I feel like I’ve had them on all weekend. Not that I mind, but—”

Stella blinked. “What did you say?”

“I said, I feel like I’ve had these darn things on all weekend, what with everyone’s manicures, and the powder just dries out my skin like nobody’s business, and—”

“Honey, I need to run.” Stella’s mind had snagged on her daughter’s words and gotten stuck, resulting in a revelation, one big enough and urgent enough to blow her glum mood clear away.

“But you need to dry!”

“Be right back, sweetie,” Stella said, fanning her hand furiously. “You go on down to dinner and I’ll be there right quick. I just got to take care of something.”

Noelle didn’t protest, but she gave Stella a raised-eyebrow expression that implied she had an inkling that it wasn’t a run in her hosiery or a sudden craving for peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers from the vending machine that called her mother away. “I’ll save you a seat,” she called as Stella made a beeline for Chrissy.

“Come on, duty calls,” Stella muttered, grabbing Chrissy’s arm. “Let’s get out before anyone misses us.”

Chrissy squawked her protest. “We’re supposed to be downstairs in, like, ten minutes!”

“And we sure don’t want to be unfashionably early,” Stella snapped, pulling Chrissy out into the hall. “Now listen good. I think we might’ve overlooked something been trying to stare us in the face this whole time where Bryant’s untimely death is concerned.”

“And we got to sort through it
now
?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact we do. I’m going to run up to my room and get my sneakers. I suggest you do the same, and we can meet—”

“No, to hell with that,” Chrissy said. “I’ll wait for you right here. If I’m gonna have to go knock heads on my way to the party, I might as well look good doing it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

STELLA CONSIDERED SHUCKING HER TIGHT JEANS
and throwing on some sweats, but settled for changing only her shoes. Luckily, she still had her interrogation kit in the room; she’d brought it up with the intention of cleaning and sorting out all her tools, a habit she’d learned from her dad long ago when she hung around with him in his workshop. “Job ain’t done until the tools are put up,” he’d counseled her a hundred times, letting her wipe the top of the workbench with a rag and sweep up wood shavings while he took care of the rest.

She grabbed the Tupperware box and had twisted the door handle when suddenly the door burst open and she was knocked flat on her ass. Marty Flycock slammed the door shut behind him and stood above Stella, panting. His left hand sported a white bandage on his thumb, but in his right he held the little Diamondback handgun, a one-handed piece if there ever was one.

Stella sighed and rubbed the elbow that she’d fallen on. So it was his thumb that he’d been hiding all along. It wasn’t until Noelle had peeled off her gloves earlier that Stella had made the connection: Marty had been keeping his hands hidden for the entire weekend—jammed in his pockets, or hidden by his ridiculous driving gloves.

“You follow me up here?”

“Well, yeah, since you called my wife to tell her you’re going to keep poking your nose in our business, I figured you just weren’t going to get the message. I
tried
to be a good guy about this—it’s your fault it’s got out of hand.”

“You mean, you thought Chrissy and me would quit because you locked her in the ladies’ room? You’re right, that was
totally
terrifying.”

Marty colored. “Well, look where it’s got you.”

“How’d you explain that to Taffy, anyway?” Stella inquired, pointing at Marty’s thumb. She was trying to buy time; if she got Marty distracted enough maybe she could make a grab for the gun.

“I told her I was slicing a bagel.”

“Aw, nice, good thinking. Guess you’re lucky you didn’t take off the tips of your fingers—that would have been tougher to explain. And I reckon you’re lucky it ain’t sliced all the way off—don’t those bolts go hundreds of miles an hour?”

“My thumb is
fine
. Going to be, anyway, and that was—I was just rushed is all. I can hit a tin can at twenty paces.”

“Yeah? I never knew you were a marksman, Marty. I kind of thought the real estate thing kept you pretty tied up.”

“It ain’t your business, but my cousin hunts. Sometime I go.”

Stella nodded. “Uh-huh. So you got your cousin’s crossbow, looks like you got his gun—how does he feel about being an accessory to Bryant’s murder?”

A little bubble of spittle formed at the corner of Marty’s mouth. “He’s—just—just be quiet, Stella. Ain’t none of this any of your concern. Which if you’d just stayed out of all of this, everything would be fine. The cops around here would have wrote it all off as a hunting accident and Divinity would be on TV where she belongs.”