“I can explain,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I could. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all.”
“Juni, you’re always in the wrong place at the wrong time,” J.T. said.
“Hey! Don’t talk to my sister in that tone of voice,” Tansy said, jumping to my defense.
“How is that any worse than what you just said?” he asked.
“She’s my sister. I can talk to her any way I want,” Tansy replied. As far as sisterly logic went, that made sense.
“Come on, y’all, we need to focus.” I turned to Tansy. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you. Beau took my phone so I couldn’t warn you.”
She nodded. “I should have known. Juni, sweetie, when are you going to come to your senses about him? Beauregard Russell is bad news.”
“I appreciate you standing up for me, but if I can forgive him for breaking my heart ages and ages ago, you can too,” I told her.
Tansy put her hands on her hips. “Six years wasn’t so long ago.”
“We were just kids,” I replied.
“You were both in your twenties. You were old enough to move halfway across the country by yourself. You weren’t kids anymore,” she argued.
“Ladies, can we get back on topic, pretty please?” J.T. interrupted. “Tansy, Officer Jayden Holt came to see you this morning, right? Tell me what happened.”
“Yeah, Jayden came by the booth. She asked me if I’d seen the mayor today, and I told her he was here this morning, but he’d left in the middle of setting up the DJ booth to take a meeting. Then she confiscated the coffee maker and all our supplies.”
“Yeah, Beau told me.” I glanced around to make sure that none of the gossip mongers from the DJ booth had followed us. A few nearby locals threw curious stares in our direction, but no one was close enough to overhear. “When I found Mayor Bob, he was already dead. His lips were blue, you know, like when someone has been poisoned.”
“You watch too many crime dramas,” J.T. said. “There’s lots of reasons why lips could turn blue after death.”
I shrugged. I was just a software developer turned records salesperson-slash-barista. What did I know about causes of death? J.T. was a lawyer. He knew more about criminology than I ever wanted to. “Anyway, he was holding a Sip & Spin Records coffee cup.”
“He was what?” Tansy asked, loudly enough to turn a few nearby heads.
“Shh,” J.T. said, putting his hand on her back. “People are watching.”
“That’s why Jayden was so interested in our coffee. The cops think our coffee killed Mayor Bob?” Tansy looked like she was going to be sick. “If that gets out, Sip & Spin is ruined.”
I hadn’t considered that. We relied on the coffee café to bring in new and repeat customers so we could sell them music. If everyone in Cedar River was afraid to drink our coffee, they’d go back to ordering their music online, or worse, streaming it. Our dreams of a vinyl resurrection in town would be dead.
“Oh, girls,” my mother shouted. We turned and she was waving us over.
“Don’t tell her anything,” J.T. warned us.
“Too late,” Tansy said. “Half a dozen people overheard me talking with Jayden Holt, and they all called Mom immediately.” The biggest downside of being the daughters of the biggest gossip in the county was we never got away with anything. If we so much as talked too much in a movie theater, our mom knew about it before we even got home.
Reluctantly, we returned to the booth. Once we’d walked away, the crowd had mostly dispersed, leaving the immediate area around us relatively empty. With no coffee to sell and no juicy details to share, there was no reason for anyone to approach the DJ booth except to request a specific song or ask us to broadcast a message. My mother studied us carefully before zeroing in on J.T. “Is there anything you need to tell me?” she asked him.
“No, ma’am,” he said, but he sounded nervous. I thought it was hilarious that J.T. could face the sternest judges and hardened criminals without blinking, but my mom scared him. Then again, he’d be a fool to not be at least a little intimidated by his mother-in-law.
He turned to us. “You two, don’t repeat anything we’ve talked about to anyone”—he cut his eyes to Mom—“anyone. And if Officer Holt or Detective Russell come sniffing around again, even if all they want is to ask for directions, you call me. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Understood,” Tansy agreed aloud for both of us.
J.T. sighed. He knew we meant well, but he had a sneaking suspicion we weren’t going to follow his orders. In his defense, he was probably right. Though it wouldn’t be for lack of trying—it just wasn’t easy keeping secrets from our mother. “If you need anything…”
“We’ll call,” I promised.
“You better. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find my wife.” J.T. melted into the crowd of tourists, their arms laden with food and shopping bags. I noticed a lot of them were wearing Cedar River’s signature Blue Bonnet—a bright blue baseball cap with plastic bluebonnets mounted on springs to the bill. It was a perennial best seller, and all the proceeds went into next year’s festival.
My mother looked me up and down before making a tsking sound. “Juni, you’re such a pretty girl. Would it kill you to wear a little makeup?”
“Mom, it’ll be a thousand degrees out here by the end of the day and all my makeup would have sweated off, so what’s the point?”
“It wasn’t a thousand degrees when you spent the morning with a certain Beau Russell, was it?” she asked.
“Not this again,” I said with a sigh. My mother meant well, but she was eager for me to settle down. The problem was I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to settle down, much less who I wanted to settle down with.
She flapped a hand at me. “Not this again?” she repeated, shaking her head. “Is that any way to talk to your mother? Besides, I’m starting to think that your sister’s right.”
“Which one?” I asked. Maggie had been fantasizing about a wedding between me and Beau since I was eighteen. Tansy, on the other hand, would prefer to drive him out to the desert, shoot his kneecaps. and leave him there for breaking my heart. I wasn’t sure which option sounded better.
“That Russell boy is trouble. Stay away from him,” Mom said.
“Finally,” Tansy said. “What made you come around?”
“He had the gall to pull me over and write me a ticket for speeding last week! Can you imagine?”
“Were you speeding?” I asked.
“That’s beside the point.” Mom fluffed her hair. “Since you girls are back, Marcus and I have to get going or we’re gonna miss the hole-digging contest,” Mom said.
“Marcus? Who’s Marcus?” I asked. I leaned around her to get a better look at the stranger next to her in the booth. I still couldn’t place him.
“Marcus Best, at your service,” he said, offering his hand to shake. “You must be Juniper. You mom tells me you don’t have a car. Swing by the dealership anytime, and we’ll see what we can do about that. You know what they say, ‘If you need a car, you need the Best.’”
That’s when I recognized him. He ran a bunch of smarmy used car commercials on the local television stations for Best Used Cars, and that was his tagline. “Thanks, but I’m good,” I told him.
“She needs a car. Right now, she’s riding a tricycle,” my mom said derisively.
“An adult market tricycle,” I corrected her. The way she said it, it sounded like I rode a kid’s bike, instead of a perfectly practical, environmentally friendly method of transportation.
“I can see you in a truck. Something big. A dually maybe,” he suggested. “What do you think, Bea?”
“I think I’m happy with my trike,” I said before Mom could speak up.
“Suit yourself. Girls, nice to finally meet ya. Bea, don’t you think we should get going?” She nodded in agreement, and they walked away.
“Who was that guy?” I asked my sister.
“Marcus Best,” she said. “Surely you’ve seen his commercials.”
“I have, but what’s he doing with Mom?”
“That’s her new boyfriend,” Tansy said.
For a moment I worried that the fried ice cream I’d just eaten was causing hallucinations, because it sounded like my sister had just said that my mom was dating someone, and that couldn’t be true. “Excuse me? Her what?”
“Her boyfriend. Trust me, Juni, I was as shocked as you are when she introduced him, but he seems nice enough.” She shook her head. “Honestly, I was afraid she’d never find someone again.”
“Dad’s only been gone a year!” I said.
“Almost a year and a half,” she corrected me. “Mom’s lonely. And she doesn’t do lonely well. I think it’s sweet that she’s met someone she likes.”
I took a minute to think about that. Tansy had a point. Mom wasn’t good at being alone or being idle. She needed to be needed, and as much as my sisters and I loved her, we didn’t exactly need her anymore, not full-time at least. “But does it have to be him?” I asked.
“You’ll like him if you give him a chance,” she said.
“I’m sure you’re right.” Then again, how much time had she spent with him? An hour? Less? “I’m not calling him Dad.”
“No one’s asking you to, Juni. They’re just dating.”
I made a noncommittal noise in the back of my throat. Out of everyone in my family, I’d always felt closest to our dad. He’d died suddenly while I was in Oregon, and I’d never had a chance to say goodbye. I wanted my mother to be happy, I did, but I wasn’t ready for her to be dating anyone, especially a used car salesperson.
“I’m gonna go watch the hole-digging competition,” I announced. I wasn’t being nosy, honest. I had no intention of spying on my mom and her new boyfriend. I just really liked watching people dig holes. That was my story, and I was sticking to it.
“Juni, don’t leave me here alone. I’ve been in the booth all morning. We promised we’d all rotate.”
“You’ll be fine,” I assured her. I noticed that a band was setting up on the main stage. “Looks like they’re getting ready to start. Once they do, it will be too loud for anyone to bother you with questions about Mayor Bob.”
“Juni…”
“Look, if I see Maggie, I’ll ask her to come relieve you, okay?”
“Fine,” Tansy said. “But come right back after the contest is over, and bring me a sweet tea.”
“Deal,” I agreed, and scurried off before she could change her mind.
To an outsider, a hole-digging competition didn’t have much of a place at a Bluebonnet Festival. Digging up bluebonnets was the last thing that any native Texan wanted. They were the state flower and even if it wasn’t technically a crime to disturb them anymore, most folks I knew felt bound to protect them so they’d be around every spring for generations to come.
They were pretty. And more important, they were quintessentially Texas, like longhorn cattle and Shiner Bock beer. A real Texan would sooner burn down a Buc-ee’s travel stop than pick a bluebonnet. And for the record, Buc-ee’s was the absolute best.
But the hole-digging contest had little to do with bluebonnets and everything to do with the festival itself. Way back in 1956, during the tenth annual Bluebonnet Festival, while everyone was busy enjoying the festivities, the First Bank of Cedar River was hit by four robbers. They got away with a million dollars in cash. An hour later, the police caught up to them at the town limits. There was a shootout. The four bank robbers and one of the cops were killed, but the money was nowhere to be found.
Almost seventy years have passed since that bank robbery, and the money still hasn’t been recovered. There were all sorts of wild theories about where the money ended up, but since the bank robbers had mud on their shoes, even though it hadn’t rained in a week, and two of them were carrying shovels along with their rifles, prevailing wisdom said they buried the money somewhere in Cedar River. No doubt they planned on coming back and retrieving it as soon as the heat died down, but with all four robbers dead, there was no one left to do so.
Over the years, there have been massive community efforts organized to find the loot. Cedar River has hired everyone from water witches to commercial companies with ground-penetrating radar to survey the town, to no avail. Every couple of years, someone hears the story or reads an article about the bank heist on the internet and comes down here looking for a quick buck. So far, every professional and amateur treasure hunter has left with empty pockets.
The mystery of where the money was buried remains elusive, but every year during the Bluebonnet Festival, the town hosts a hole-digging competition. I don’t think anyone truly believes that they’ll hit upon the exact spot where the money was hidden by hand-digging their assigned plot, but that doesn’t stop anyone from trying. It’s so popular, that people enter a lottery just to get their chance at a few square feet of ground and a shovel.
This year was no exception. The hole-digging site was several blocks away from where the main festival was being held, but the area was already swarming with spectators. This spot had been a grove of oak trees back in the fifties that were bulldozed in the seventies to build a roller rink. The rink had been closed longer than I’d been alive, and now it was finally being torn down. In a few months, they’d pour the foundation for a new condo building, but today it was prime digging ground. More importantly, it had never been surveyed by treasure hunters before.
The town had erected a chain-link fence around the approximately block-long area in preparation for the festivities. They’d staked out forty-eight individual plots to randomly assign to lotto winners. The rules were simple: No teams were allowed. Contestants used shovels generously provided by the local hardware store. They had one hour to dig—the precise time that the bank robbers were unaccounted for. At the end of the hour, the person who had moved the most amount of dirt, as determined by the judges, won. Unless, of course, someone managed to dig up the actual treasure, in which case, they would be crowned champion.
I was as invested as anyone else who’d grown up hearing the legend of the lost Cedar River fortune, but as much as I loved watching the contest, I always hoped that the diggers would come up empty-handed. Personally, I loved the mystery more than the idea of one person striking it rich.