Wedding Bell Blues (19 page)

I stopped at the top of the stairs, took some deep breaths, felt color come back to my face, neck and hands. “What about Miss Isabella and Miles Fortune?” I whispered as we came down the stairs.

“Miss Isabella's luggage is already on the porch. She paid and checked out when she came down for breakfast,” Ida Plum said.

“What about Miles Fortune?”

“He said earlier he'd taken his daily run before breakfast this morning and was going over to Raleigh for new running shoes,” Ida Plum told me. She went for the phone.

I went outside to wait for the inevitable. What in the world had killed poor Debbie Booth? Yesterday she was throwing up like she had a stomach virus or food poisoning. I'd had a touch of food poisoning once or twice. I felt like hell for a few hours and maybe overnight, weak the next morning, but it didn't kill me. Just made me miserable and resolve not to buy seafood from the back of a pickup truck even if it did say
STRAIGHT FROM THE SEA
and the driver swore his fish and shrimp had been swimming only hours ago. If it was something Debbie ate, it had to be either at the fairgrounds or before. I knew nothing she'd eaten at the Dixie Dew had anything in it that would make her sick. In my mind I went over what all I had served for breakfast yesterday. The rest of us had eaten the breakfast casserole and muffins and we were fine.

Then I remembered how Malinda had gotten sick at the fairgrounds. The smoothie? Malinda had thrown up almost immediately after drinking it. Miss Isabella mentioned that Debbie had gotten a smoothie and gone back to the Dixie Dew feeling sick right after that. But it didn't make sense. Malinda had the smoothie, thrown up and been okay. Debbie was dead. Did the Dixie Dew have a curse on it? Sometimes I really did wonder.

 

Chapter Thirty

While Ida Plum called 911, I waved Miss Isabella off. She and Debbie Booth drove to Littleboro in separate cars and as she left, she said she hoped Debbie was enjoying her “lie in” this morning. Last night she thought Debbie had looked a bit under the weather and Miss Isabella had told her to rest and sleep late.

I thought, Oh boy, she sure is sleeping late. God bless her little recipe-loving soul. I just nodded and wished Miss Isabella a safe trip.

Miles Fortune had jogged out after Miss Isabella, cocked his head as he heard the wailing sirens approaching, but shrugged, hopped in his rental car and sped off. “Hurry, hurry,” I said under my breath. As the sirens got closer Miles disappeared down the street in the opposite direction.

I sat in the porch swing holding Sherman. Robert Redford sat at my feet giving himself a bath. “Funny rabbit,” I said. “You're a good boy. You're home.” He looked up at me, twitched a whisker. He seemed perfectly happy here. He had people and he had Sherman. I didn't worry he'd bound away looking for Verna or try to go next door. He seemed relieved to be found.

I didn't have long to wait for the world as I knew it to come crashing in. Ossie DelGardo had beat Eikenberry to the Dixie Dew. He roared up in the police car, blue and red lights flashing, parked right smack dab in front, got out, slapped on his white cowboy hat, slammed shut the car door and came striding up my walk like he owned the place. And me.

“You,” he said and pointed his forefinger like a dagger toward my heart.

“Me?” I said meekly. Sherman jumped down and disappeared in the boxwoods. Robert Redford hopped under the swing.

“You,” he repeated. “As I have said more than once, I did not move to this godforsaken nowheresville burg to
work
and you're making my job
work
.”

“It's not my fault,” I said and started to say more, but just clamped my lips shut and held the door for his majesty's grand entrance. Ossie looked down as if he expected a red carpet, then glanced to both sides like he waited for trumpeters to sound his arrival. He wiped those snakeskin boots on my doormat. Okay, so that proved he wasn't raised in a barn, and I'd give him points for manners.

Ida Plum would raise him up some notches in her rating, which had always been higher than mine since my rating of Ossie was zero. I thought he acted like this town was beneath him, that he was too good for the likes of us Littleborians. That he'd like to wipe his feet on all of us. And here he was engaged to one of us: Juanita, who was a Littleboro institution. I thought she must be doing hair on the third generation: grandmother, daughter and granddaughter. I hadn't been in her shop since my seventh-grade disaster of a perm. I came out looking like a brunette Little Orphan Annie. Every hair on my head was curled and the curls curled. Now I just took the manicure scissors to my bangs and whacked the end of my ponytail when it got to brushing my butt. “Simplify, simplify” was one of the idioms I got from Ben Johnson. I remembered Juanita's beauty shop had plaques of sayings on the walls, things like
HAIRDRESSERS ARE A CUT ABOVE
and
WE ARE BEAUTICIANS, NOT MAGICIANS
. A little humor always helps no matter where you find it.

Bruce Bechner came right behind Ossie. It's like the two of them were joined at the hip. You saw one, you saw the other one. Bruce tipped his hat to me and said, “Ma'am.” He went in after Ossie, who squared his shoulders and strode ahead like he was ready to take on a Roman army if that's what waited for him inside.

I hugged myself. None of this was good and I feared the worst as I pointed upstairs. What were Ossie and Bruce doing up there? Taking photographs? I hadn't noticed a camera, but then some cameras were so small one could be in a shirt pocket and Ossie and Bruce had whizzed right by me. Checking for fingerprints? Poking in Debbie's lingerie drawer? I thought the worst.

Ida Plum poked her mop of white cotton-ball curls out the door, dish towel slung over her shoulder. “In case you have forgotten, this is still a business. You have one guest and another to come. And breakfast dishes to clear up. I've got linens to do.”

About that time Eikenberry very quietly pulled up in his long, gray hearse, parked right in front of the Dixie Dew and came in. He nodded his good morning. And as was his way, his look seemed to measure me up and down and sideways as if he were fitting a coffin for me. In his dark, spiffy suit, white shirt and shiny purple tie, he went upstairs. Purple tie, I thought, what's the world coming to? Is it his little attempt at modernism in a very conservative, traditional business? That purple tie would lead to a lot of speculation and gossip in Littleboro. Did he now have a girlfriend? Been on a vacation to some exotic place with palm trees? Was something different in his life? Any change around Littleboro got the gab going.

I went inside. In the dining room I cleared away breakfast things, then carried dirty dishes into the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher.

I had forgotten to eat breakfast and despite the continued thumping and shuffling of heavy footsteps upstairs, I heated a cranberry muffin and poured myself a mug of the last dregs from the coffeepot, then just sipped and nibbled as I read today's copy of
The Mess
. Sure enough, on the front page was a picture of Ossie in all his glory with details of his finding the unidentified John Doe on the Interstate. Moore County Medical still listed him in critical condition. In bad shape, we called it in Littleboro, but hanging on. Was I the only one who knew this John Doe was not the God Reba thought she was marrying? And if this wasn't her God, who the heck was he? Where was her real fiancé? Wasn't her fiancé Bruce Rigsbee? Reba's fabrications could surely get tangled, woven and rewoven. But I had seen her little love nest and the wedding feast and it was real. When she called me on that cell phone, she'd said she killed God. This mystery guy was still alive, so had she killed Butch Rigsbee, the one she had been calling God? I felt as mixed up as if I were Reba.

I flipped pages over to the society news and there popping off the page was our illustrious Mayor Moss posed ever so prettily with her arm around a few of her luncheon guests. I was not in the picture, nor was Pastor Pittman, but we were mentioned in the “also attendings.” Pearl Buttons gave the menu, the names of the flowers in the table centerpiece, and the names of the china and silver patterns. She described the day as having been “weather perfect with a Carolina-blue sky and multitude of fluffy white cumulous clouds.” I surmised she must be paid by the word, bless her. And she did love her words, whoever she was. And how did she know all these details unless she was at the luncheon in person? Somebody at that luncheon was a paid snoop and gossip.

 

Chapter Thirty-one

I was trying to think of all the names of everyone at that luncheon table when I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Heavy, hard-hitting feet. I heard Eikenberry say, “Dead,” as he opened the front door to go out.

Ossie followed. “Dead,” he said.

“Chapel Hill,” Eikenberry said. “That's where she goes.”

A few minutes later Eikenberry came back in and he and his assistant loaded up poor little Debbie Booth onto their stretcher and carried her lightly out the door of the Dixie Dew. They carried that stretcher so effortlessly it looked as if she weighed little more than a tray of feathers.

“You'll hear from us,” Ossie said as he left, tipped his hat. “I'll want you in for some questions so don't plan to go anywhere.”

I think I nodded or swallowed or maybe started to say something and it came out as a weak gurgle.

“I'll talk to you later,” Ossie said.

It sounded like a threat. Then he mumbled something about fingerprints and how things had been speeded up lately, mumble mumble. Something about he'd see me in his office for a “follow-up,” which didn't sound good. I wanted to avoid Ossie's office like it had a contagious virus.

When I went upstairs there was yellow crime scene tape across the bedroom door where Debbie Booth had slept her last sleep.
DO NOT ENTER. CRIME SCENE. DO NOT ENTER
. There was no way I ever planned to enter that room again. Ever. Except I knew if I stayed in the B and B business I'd have to. But I'd never tell the incoming guest who had last slept in that bed.

I set about cleaning Miss Isabella's room, which didn't take much doing. The whole room was as neat and clean as if she'd never been there. She'd even made the bed. Habit, I supposed, but I'd have to strip all the bedding and wash it for the next guest.

I thought about Reba's room at Motel 3, how she and her “man” had made it almost a home: food, champagne, unpacked their clothes and hung them up. I still could see in my mind the suit and shoes and I'd noticed then that they didn't seem they'd fit the guy on his back on the picnic table. Who was he? All I knew was that he surely wasn't the “God” who apparently owned the big white truck and made regular stops at Motel 3. Also, where was all that stuff from the motel room now? In Ossie's crime lab? Did he even have one? And Reba? Was she still hanging out at Verna's next door or had she gone back to the group home or her good old tree? Reba, Reba, I thought, you and I get in such situations.

Such messes, Ida Plum would say.

I stripped the bed, put on fresh pink sheets, plumped the pillows, did the bathroom, vacuumed and dusted. Whoever Miles Fortune was bringing from the airport could have this room or the room across from his.

I didn't even know if the mystery guest was male or female, not that it mattered. All rooms rented at the same rate and I was glad to have any guest. Even a runaway rabbit who, the last time I looked, was snoozing next to Sherman in the blue living-room chair, Sherman's favorite napping spot. Cat and rabbit looked content.

Ida Plum brought a stack of fresh, warm sheets from the ironer to the linen closet.

“Wait,” I said.

“What in the world?” she stood holding the stack of pink.

“I just need one good smell to remind me of Mama Alice and sweet childhood dreams on sun-dried sheets and summer and Littleboro when all was right with the world.”

Ida Plum waited while I took a deep breath of sunshine and memories then said, “You enjoy your sniffing. I've got to leave early.”

I didn't ask why or where or what for. Ida Plum had her own life and she sure was closemouthed about it. I knew only as much as she wanted me to know which wasn't all that much. There was a daughter in California Ida Plum flew out, ever so reluctantly, to visit. She said she could never live in a place where they dried okra instead of frying and eating it, that those people didn't know good eating when it was set in front of them.

After lunch I checked the computer to see if any reservations had come in. My website had already brought in a few and I really owed Scott for dragging me into social media, plus he had designed a site that made the Dixie Dew look homey and sparkling fresh.

Oh, miracles of Photoshop! He put up photos of the porch, boxwood-lined front walk, porch swing, dining room, bedrooms, the biggest and best bathroom. I oohed and awed, clapped my hands when he ran it by me. “Big bucks,” he said. “You owe me big bucks.” I must have grimaced because he leaned over and pulled me in for a long kiss. “Down payment,” he said.

There were several comments from people who had been guests here, comments like “Soft beds, great breakfast,” “small-town charm” and “Be sure to taste the local barbecue.” No complaints were listed, which made me give a sigh of pure relief. And no mention of a recent “unpleasant situation.” Relief on that one, too, but the last e-mail asked if there had been any “sightings.” I read the word twice. As in ghost? Not here, I thought. I've lived in this house all my life and there have not been any unaccountable noises or incidents.

The writer went on to explain she or he had read that a lot of older houses, especially in the South, were haunted and they were especially interested in staying in a B and B that had its own ghost. I e-mailed the writer back to say I was not aware of any at the Dixie Dew but to please come and stay. Perhaps between the two of us we could scare up, conjure up, a ghost. Miss Lavinia, I wanted to say, you could help me out a little here. Tiptoe in and go through some walls, rearrange some furniture, bang clang some doors or crash some pictures off the wall.