Chapter 24

As I stepped into Hairway to Heaven, the only place in town to get a hair cut, I caught a glimpse of the stylist and thought about turning and running. Her hair was, to put it simply, a bit much. Piled high upon her head, and with blue and pink streaks running through it, it looked like something you would see on a fashion runway in Milan, where all the fancy fashion people worked so hard to make their models look as outlandish as possible.

The stylist had dark eye makeup and false eyelashes. There was nothing subtle about her. She was working on an older woman with graying curls, who appeared to be asleep. The stylist glanced over at me and smiled. “You must be Laurel.”

Too late. I had lost my chance to escape. I couldn’t just turn and leave now. “Yes,” I said.

“I’ll be right with you. Have a seat.”

I sat down on an uncomfortable seat and reached for some reading matter on the table in front of me. There were no magazines, only several King James Version Bibles all in black leather, three books, and a pamphlet with the intriguing title, Turn or Burn. I looked over the three books: Fire and Brimstone by Thomas Vincent, Hell’s Terror by Christopher Love, and A Few Sighs from Hell by John Bunyan. I shuddered. Whatever happened to entertainment magazines?

I thought the pamphlet looked the most interesting as I thought it contained stories about firefighters, but it was a long diatribe stating that people who didn’t repent were headed straight for hell. I gave up and stared blankly at the wall until the old woman woke from her slumber, her haircut apparently done. She paid at the small counter near the door, and then the stylist beckoned me over.

She smiled at me and pointed to her chair. There were three chairs, but no other stylists seemed to be working, or if they were, they were through a closed door that I imagined led to a back room, maybe a break room.

“Laurel, your mother told me at church last Sunday that you had to get in here, and I agree. You’re letting that hair get way too long.”

My hair wasn’t any longer than it normally was, and I shrugged my shoulders. “I only want an inch or two off,” I said.

“I’m Katy by the way, and there’s no way an inch will do. I was thinking a lot more. It’s one thing when I’m working on Elspeth—that’s who just left—and I know, this might not be the best thing to say, but old women are simply set in their ways. They won’t let me do anything fun, anything stylish!”

“I don’t want anything fun or stylish, either,” I said, when she paused for breath. I didn’t think Katy’s idea of fun was going to end up anything like mine. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I just want the split ends cut off.”

Katy swiveled my chair, and I was staring into a mirror. She waved her hand at my reflection. “Don’t be a party pooper,” she said.

“My hair isn’t a party, believe me,” I countered.

“Let me just tell you what I was thinking. Can I at least do that? Let me tell you that, and then, if I can’t convince you, we’ll give you the Elspeth,” Katy said with a chuckle. As frightening as it was to be in a chair in front of this crazed woman with blue and pink in her hair, seconds from her doing something to my hair, I decided right away that I liked her.

“Okay, that’s fair,” I said. “Tell me.”

Katy took a deep breath, and then launched into her pitch, her hands moving this way and that so I could see them in the mirror as she explained what she saw for the future of my head.

“Cut it short. I mean short. All right, and I know, you have this long hair, and it’s beautiful, it really is, but short is in. I’m telling you right now, it’s in. Short. Short, short, short. Shorter than Tom Cruise, all right? Like, to here. Can you see my hand? There. Okay, and then this gets shaved down, and a lot of women scream when they hear I want to shave their heads, but I’m telling you, this is movie star stuff. So we do that, and then I’m thinking hot pink. Streaks. I’m not crazy—it would just be streaks.”

“Katy,” I said, my eyes wide, “um, err.” I was truly speechless.

She smiled at me in the mirror. “I knew it. I got you! I convinced you. Finally, someone in this little town who will let me transform them into a star.”

“No,” I said, and I felt a little bit bad as I watched the woman’s face fall. “I’m sorry, but no. Please just cut off an inch.”

“All right,” Katy said with obvious disappointment, holding up her hands. “You’re the boss, right?”

I smiled. “Thank you.”

The woman got to work. “Your mother tells me you took over your father’s business.”

I nodded.

“Sit still, girl, or you’ll end up with a shaved head after all.”

I laughed. “Sorry.”

“Your father never came in here. I think your mother did his hair herself.”

“Yes, she cut it for him,” I said.

Mom had been cutting Dad’s hair for as long as I could remember. When I was younger, I used to sit in the kitchen on the floor watching her. She cut his hair while he sat on a dining room chair that had been pulled over to the sink. That way Mom could easily sweep the linoleum tiles in the kitchen. She was never great at it, but my dad always let her do it.

“I thought so. Well, my uncle died a few years ago, and your dad was so great to my aunt and all of us. You know I go to church with your mother. I can’t believe I haven’t seen you there yet,” Katy said.

“Church isn’t really my thing.”

I don’t think that was what Katy wanted to hear from me, but to my enormous relief, she changed the subject. “You know, I cut the hair of only one regular guy, Lester Denning. Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said.

“He works over at the grocery store. He’s the manager there. He’s a really nice man, but strange too.”

I could tell she was itching to drop some juicy gossip onto my lap, so I took the bait. “How so?” I asked. Her last client had been sleeping while she had her hair done, so the poor woman was probably itching to impart some good gossip.

“He wears make up. I swear it. I don’t know if he dresses like a woman too, but he’s come in before, and he has splotches on him that he’s missed. It’s mainly concealer and stuff. There’s usually some under his ear, things like that. And you know, he keeps his hair so short, that I think he does it to put a wig on.”

“It sounds like you find out some secrets,” I said.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” Katy said happily. She was so interested in talking with someone new, I didn’t even think she was upset about not getting to dye my hair pink and blue. “Do you know Martin Kaplan?”

I tried not to gasp. Martin Kaplan was my number one suspect in Tiffany’s murder. “Sort of,” I said carefully.

“Well, his wife, Louise, comes here. Did you know he was having an affair?”

“He was?” I asked, trying to sound shocked.

“Yeah, with that poor girl who died. You know, the one who was murdered.”

I nodded. “I did her funeral.”

“Right, well, that poor girl, sweet as can be, Tiffany was her name, she went to my church too, but she fell in with the wrong sort of man. Sleeping with a married man, it just isn’t right.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said when she paused for breath.

“Still though, that’s something you work out with God, and I hope she got the chance when she passed. It’s not for me to speak ill of her.”

“So Martin Kaplan’s wife knew he was cheating on her?”

“Yes, of course she knew.”

“Was she very upset?”

The stylish shrugged. “She didn’t seem that upset about the cheating, ‘cause she seemed more worried about the business.”

“The café?”

Katy nodded.

“Why would she be worried about that?”

“Her grandfather had opened that café, and when he retired, her father ran it. Then, when her father was set to retire, he passed it on to Louise.”

I wasn’t quite following her train of thought, and hoped she’d come to the point soon.

“Well, with divorce laws and all that, since they’d been married for so long, he’d get half of the café, which means they’d have to sell it and split up the proceeds,” she continued.

“I see,” I said, hoping that I did. “So are you saying that if they got divorced, she’d have to sell the café that had been in her family for decades?”

Katy clicked the scissors at me by way of affirmation. “Exactly!” she said triumphantly. “That’s right. She was really upset about that the last time she came in.”

“When was the last time she came in?”

“Actually, it was the same day that Tiffany was killed,” Katy said. “Louise had only just found out about the affair the night before. Boy, was she furious!”

I gasped. “So Louise Kaplan had the motive for murder!” My timing couldn’t have been worse. Katy’s scissors stopped and she turned to the counter. Standing there was Louise Kaplan.

“Is that new shampoo for colored hair in yet?” Louise Kaplan asked Katy, while shooting a nasty stare at me. If looks could kill! Clearly she had overheard what I’d said.

Katy appeared unperturbed and rustled around in a cupboard, finally producing a giant bottle of shampoo along with a giant bottle of conditioner. Louise Kaplan paid for them and left abruptly, all the while glaring at me.

My heart was thundering so loudly in my chest I could practically hear it. Katy droned on, this time telling me about a client who’d had a child out of wedlock, but I wasn’t listening. I nodded at intervals. By the time I paid, I had no idea what Katy had said, past the stuff about Tiffany and Louise.

I walked out of Katy’s shop on legs that felt like they were jelly, and the drive home was a blur.