Lavender Lies (4 page)

“Personally, I like the idea, Sheila.” Ruby began to braid another lavender heart. “Why don’t you volunteer to help with the investigation? The Council will see what you can do, and the turkeys who keep saying women don’t have what it takes will have to eat shit and die.”

“Absolutely not,” Sheila said firmly. “This is McQuaid’s case, and he won’t welcome any help.” She patted my arm. “I hope I didn’t hurt you, China. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”

McQuaid’s case, huh? I didn’t like the sound of that. To comfort myself, I reached for another cookie.

“There’s a bright side to this,” Ruby observed thoughtfully, adding a white bow to her lavender heart. “With Coleman dead, the Council can stop arguing about the annexation proposal, at least for now. They can get busy and hire a chief of police.”

“Don’t count on it,” Sheila said. “Anyway,” she added glumly, “I’m not sure I want the job.”

“Oh, yeah?” The Whiz was curious. “How come? Is the university upping the ante?” Central Texas State was not happy when they heard that their female chief of security was on the Council’s short list. I wouldn’t be surprised if they offered her a nice raise.

“Not yet,” Sheila said. She made a face. “It’s Blackie. He doesn’t think I ought to take it.”

Ruby scowled. “Well, you can inform Sheriff Blackwell that he has no right to tell you what to do. You’re not married to him. And even if you were, he still wouldn’t have any right.”

Sheila was quiet for a moment. “If I take that job,” she said at last, “we probably won’t be married.”

“That,” I said sympathetically, “would be too bad.”

Blackie Blackwell is a third-generation lawman who inherited his father’s job as sheriff of Adams County. He and McQuaid were friends at Sam Houston State and have graduated to become fishing and poker buddies, so I see quite a bit of him. McQuaid says Blackie is the best lawman he knows, and has asked him to be best man at our wedding.

“He doesn’t like the idea of having two law enforcement officers in one family,” Sheila said.

Ruby hooted. “What does he think you are now? The campus mascot? For Peter’s sake, Sheila, you’ve been a cop your whole adult life!”

“He says my university job is mostly administrative, and I have to agree with him.” Sheila’s eyes were dark. “It’s been a while since I’ve done any real police work.”

“I perceive a certain professional conflict of interest,” the Whiz remarked, “not to mention an undesirable degree of geographical proximity and political entanglement. Sheriff Blackwell is the elected county sheriff.
Chief
Blackwell would be the chief of police in the largest town in his county.” She pushed her lips in and out. “If you step on the wrong toes, Sheila, Blackie might not be reelected. If you pull the right strings, he could be a winner. Either way, he may feel that you are capable of exercising a potentially dangerous control over his career.”

Ruby frowned. I stared. Howard Cosell dropped his jowled muzzle onto Sheila’s foot and gave a ponderous sigh. There was a long silence. Sheila was the first to speak.

“Omigod,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of it
that
way.”

I shook my head. “Justine is being very legalistic, not to mention pompous and bombastic. I’m sure you and Blackie can work it out.”

“I don’t mean to be disheartening,” the Whiz said apologetically. “I felt it might be useful for us to analyze the relationship from a political, rather than a personal, point of view. Romance often blinds us to the disturbing and even ugly realities of our everyday lives.”

“I can’t wait for
you
to fall in love, Justine,” Ruby said fiercely.

“Love is all well and good,” the Whiz replied in a defensive tone, “but marriage exists in political, economic, familial, and social environments. Take our China, for example.” She waved her hand in my direction. “She and McQuaid must deal with the impact of the recent unfortunate events on their relationship. It is likely that not all of the expenses are covered by insurance, and that there are serious financial implications. Indeed, in the many divorce cases I have handled over the years, I have learned that what appears to be a purely personal difficulty between two partners often has its roots in the—”

She broke off as Ruby rose from her chair, drawing herself up to her full height, putting her fists on her hips and scattering lavender stems on the floor. Howard Cosell looked up in alarm.

“Justine Ayn Rand Wyzinski,” Ruby hissed, “you are without a doubt the most cold-blooded, hardhearted, fundamentally
insensitive
woman I have ever met. Why don’t you just whiz on back to San Antonio and abandon us to our pursuit of romance—blind as we are, of course, to the ugly political, social, familial, and economic realities of our everyday lives.”

The Whiz was pained. “I just think that this is a good time for China and Sheila to step back and—”

“Ouch!” I said loudly, and put my hand to my cheek. “Oh,
rats!”

“What’s the matter?” Sheila asked.

“I just bit down on something and my temporary crown came out.” The week before, I had lost a crown on my left molar and the dentist glued in a temporary as an interim measure while the lab made a new one. I explored with my tongue. There was a crater the size of the Gulf of Mexico on the left side of my mouth.

“You bit down on a splinter of mace,” the Whiz said in an effort to be funny.

“A piece of pecan shell,” I said crossly. “I should have been more careful when I shelled those nuts. Now I’ll have to stop by the clinic in the morning and see if the dentist can fix it.”

“The price of crowns is above rubies,” the Whiz remarked in a ruminating tone. “I trust that you have dental insurance.”

I gave a short laugh. “You forget, Justine, that I no longer charge people out the whazoo for a few words of legal wisdom, like some of my friends. No, I don’t have dental insurance. I had to choose between replacing my crown and replacing the rear tires on my car.”

Sheila patted me on the shoulder. “Bear up,” she said. “At least you don’t have to choose between McQuaid and your career.”

“Lavender’s Blue”
Early 19th-century song

Lavender
Tessa Evelegh

 

 

 

For the past fifteen months, McQuaid and I have leased a white-painted five-bedroom Victorian situated on three acres of Texas Hill Country. It is a truly splendid house. The kitchen windows open east into the sunrise, and the master bedroom looks out across green hills toward the sunset. There is a turreted room with windows on three sides for my library of herb books, a large garage workshop for McQuaid, and sunny limestone ledges where Brian collects the snakes and lizards who share his bedroom. As if this weren’t enough, there is a garden, several two-hundred-year-old live oak trees, and a sparkling creek with a mossy waterfall draped with maidenhair ferns. The downside to this near-idyllic situation is that the roof leaks, the kitchen foundation needs some urgent attention, and-the worst part—the house isn’t ours. It belongs to an English professor and his wife, who packed up their three kids and went off to spend an eighteen-month sabbatical in Italy and France. Unfortunately, they are due back the first of January, which means that we will be dispossessed in a little over three months. Every now and then I experience moments of sheer terror as I try to calculate how we’ll fit ourselves, our hobbies, and our expectations into an ordinary house. Normally, I’m as courageous as the next person, but I’d rather face lions than look for a new house.

McQuaid was an hour late getting home from work. We avoided any mention of Edgar Coleman at supper, on the theory that Brian, who is now thirteen, has already seen his share of violence on television and doesn’t need the gory details of a murder dished up with his spaghetti. So we saved that until later and talked instead about the science project that Brian is working on with Melissa, his twelve-year-old girlfriend. This requires extended closed-door observation of Brian’s terrarium by both young scientists and detailed computer records of reptilian diets, down to the last mealworm. (If you ask me, this is a ploy to get his own computer, which will no doubt come loaded with games and equipped with the latest electronic joystick. Bribes have gone way up since I was a kid.) We discussed the dietary preferences of reptiles and segued into the topic of clothing for the Big Event.

“I don’t have to get dressed up for your wedding, do I?” Brian asked defensively.

McQuaid leaned over to gaze at his son’s unlaced Reeboks, ragged cutoffs, and knee-length T-shirt. “In a word,” he said, “yes. You will be wearing shirt, tie, slacks, blazer, and shoes.
Real
shoes. You’re going to look respectable if it kills you. Or us.”

Brian flopped his head onto the table as if he had died of a sudden heart attack, narrowly missing his plate of spaghetti. After a moment he straightened up and brightened. “I don’t have no
real
shoes.”

“Any,”
I said automatically. I put a heaping spoonful of pesto on my spaghetti and added some grated Parmesan, taking an appreciative sniff of the pesto. “You don’t have
any
real shoes.”

“Right. I don’t have none.” He stuck out an unspeakably filthy Reebok and gazed at it fondly. “Guess I can’t go, huh?”

“No such luck,” I replied, thinking that I’d better snip all the basil tonight, before it got dark, and put it into the freezer. If October was hot, as it often is, there’d be time for one more crop. I’m one of those who believe a bag of basil in the freezer is a marvelous thing to happen upon in the chilly depths of midwinter. “Your grandmother is coming up from Kerrville to take you shopping,” I added. “She’s in charge of your wedding costume.”

Leatha, my mother, is good at clothes. When I was a kid, that was one of the few things I could count on: having the right outfits in my closet for school programs, dance recitals, tennis matches, and so on. I could also count on Leatha to show up at these events with whiskey on her breath—and my father to be too busy with his legal practice to show up at all. Back then, I thought it was her drinking that drove him away. Now, I suspect that his abandonment was responsible for her drinking. It’s a little late to point fingers, though. He’s dead and she, at long last, is sober, remarried, and reasonably happy.

“Costume?” Frowning, Brian spooned my homemade tomato sauce onto his spaghetti, then buried it in tomato catsup, which he liberally applies to everything except cake and ice cream. “What’s this about a costume?”

“Think of the wedding as Halloween,” I said, “without a mask.”

McQuaid looked up from his plate. “What am I wearing? Not a tux, I hope.” He narrowed his eyes. “Tell me I’m not wearing a tux.”

“If you were wearing a tux,” I said, passing the Parmesan, “you’d have heard about it long before this. You’re wearing a Mexican wedding shirt.”

“What’s that?” Brian asked, swinging his foot against the leg of the table.

“Please don’t kick the table,” I said. “A Mexican wedding shirt is a loose short-sleeved white cotton shirt decorated with floral embroidery and lace. It’s traditional.”

“Lace!” McQuaid yelped. “Flowers!”

“Think of it as Halloween, Dad,” Brian advised.

“Plus your black dress-up jeans and cowboy boots,” I added. I’d had to compromise on a lot of things, but I’d gotten my way on our no-fuss wedding outfits. McQuaid’s shirt was borrowed from Leatha’s husband, Sam, who owns a ranch near Kerrville. I was wearing an ivory cotton dress with broomstick pleats and a handmade lace yoke that I found several years ago at a border market in Matamoros, and white sandals. Ruby, my matron of honor, was wearing—well, I didn’t actually know. She had promised to tell me as soon as she figured it out. She had also promised that it wouldn’t be so outrageous that it would upstage the rest of the party.

Brian jerked his head in McQuaid’s direction. “If he gets to wear jeans, how come I gotta wear shoes and a tie?”

“I
don’t know,” I said, and put a hand on his knee to remind him about the table leg. “Ask your father.”

McQuaid pulled off another hunk of garlic bread. “We’ll discuss it later,” he said.

Brian dropped a piece of garlic bread in front of Howard Cosell’s nose. “Whenever she says to ask him,” he remarked to the dog, “he says we’ll discuss it later. I wonder how come.”

I snatched up the garlic bread.

“Because we can’t think of anything else to say,” McQuaid told him. He looked across the table at me. “You’re not kidding about the jeans and boots?”