Chapter Ten

I stood rooted at the door until Jackie had glared her fill and turned down the street with a smirk clear on her face. Part of me stood there for so long because I was afraid I’d pee my pants if I moved. The other part wondered what the heck she was going on about. Did she want me to think she was going to kill me? Next for what? I shuddered to think about it, so I didn’t. Instead, I locked up the shop, called Ben, and waited for him to come over to escort me home.

When he showed up at the front door, he nearly scared the bejesus out of me. I’d been listening to every little crack and creak of the old house settling into the foundation, hoping Jackie wasn’t going to come back. But I’d turned my back for one quick second when the door’s tinkling bell gave its merry little sound. I whipped around with the handiest weapon I could find, but it wasn’t much.

“What are you going to do? Stab me in the throat with the back of that earring?” Ben smirked, holding up his hands to show his key glinting between his fingers. I’d had about enough smirking for the day. I was half-tempted to try to stab him with my weapon, or that key, solely to see if it would work.

But I pulled myself back at the last moment. He had been nice enough to come over and settle my fears about going home alone. I had to return that kindness by not making him bleed. But I did have to say something. “You never know. I’ve done damage with less.”

And I had. I wasn’t your conventional kind of girl when it came to weapons. Up to this point, I’d managed to hurt people with mannequin legs, cooking spray, and feather boas. Earrings could be next, though I’d prefer not to be put in a position where I had to hurt anyone again, to be perfectly honest.

“Can we just go, please?” I shoved my purse strap up onto my shoulder, checking around to ensure everything was in its place. “I want a cheese steak before we go home, too, so let’s stop at The Country Kitchen.”

“But I made…” The look on my face must have made him trail off like that. “Country Kitchen it is. One cheese steak coming right up.”

Ben was as good as his word, though I did feel a little bitchy when we came home with take out. He tucked his homemade Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo into a Tupperware container, stashing it in my overflowing fridge. But the cheese steak was so good that my remorse lasted only a few minutes. Plus, I could have his meal for lunch tomorrow.

After I’d polished off my twelve-inch sandwich, I sat back with a satisfied smile and a full stomach. I was in the mood for a little conversation, yet I had to tell Ben about Jackie’s weirdness. I hadn’t confided in him about hiring Charlie, either, but I thought I might wait for another day to drop that particular bomb on him. Of course, he’d probably heard about it already through the infamous Martha’s Pointers’ grapevine. But unless he brought it up tonight, I wasn’t ready to discuss it.

I recounted the sign to Ben, and he stared hard at me for a few uncomfortable moments. “Why is she bothering you all of a sudden? What does she mean, you’ll be next?”

“I have no idea. She mentioned something before she slammed my head in the counter the other day, too, about asking Bella what happened when she was crossed.” Which reminded me I hadn’t talked to my best friend today, other than to have her shout at me. Apparently I needed to figure out who the murderer was because her shop was now hopping with people who wanted someone famous (or infamous, as the case may be) to do their hair. She’d even started thinking about hiring an assistant. I told her she couldn’t have Charlie, and she’d laughed like a loon for the first time in too many days. She was supposed to be over a little later for what she was calling her nightly “Progress Check.” Yay. I was feeling more and more like I had a supervisor for the first time in a long time.

I changed the subject because I had no answers. “So, Bella’s going to be here soon.” I stuck my elbows on the table, jamming my fingers into my hair to cradle my head. “What am I supposed to tell her? We haven’t ferreted out a single clue. I have nothing new, which is making me want to pull out my hair. This is very, very bad. Do you have anything for me to appease her with?” (Good word!)

Ben wiped his mouth with his napkin before putting it on the table next to his plate. He settled back into his chair with his hands clasped on his stomach. I only mention the pose because it was one of my favorites. It always made me want to go sit on him.

Maybe he was becoming adept at reading minds, because he gave me his half-mouth smile, then blew me a kiss.

Had someone turned the thermostat up? Phew!

“So, when were you going to tell me you hired Charlie?” He sat patiently, unmoving, while I squiggled around in my chair.

I sat up straight, looked him in the eye, and said, “I don’t think that has anything to do with the conversation we are currently undertaking. I feel we should stick to the topic at hand and not divert our attention from the necessary and immediate situation.”

“Mighty prim and proper, but still not an answer.”

I broke before he even batted an eyelash. “Okay, I was going to tell you in a couple of minutes, if you’d given me a chance.” He looked doubtful, so, of course, I started blabbering away. “No, really, if you’d given me a second, I definitely would have told you right away. But we went to the restaurant, and then we came home. Then we were eating, and you know how rude it is to talk with your mouth full. I was going to tell you immediately, but then I remembered Bella was coming over soon, and I wanted to be prepared to tell her anything we’d found out.”

Just then the doorbell rang. I had never heard a more welcome sound in my life. I ran to the door, escaping the kitchen as quickly as my heavy thighs could carry me. After throwing open the door, I immediately wished for a more welcome face.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked Jackson, a.k.a. the Bastard, Bella’s ex-husband. I’d had about enough of him, too, even though I’d barely seen him. But he couldn’t seem to leave Bella alone, no matter what she wanted, and I was almost to the point of wanting to ask Ben to go over to take care of the jerk.

“That’s not exactly the Martha’s Point way to open a door, now is it?” His smile was oily. I swear he was less attractive every time he opened his mouth—which still put him at pretty attractive, but I wasn’t feeling it this time.

“Do you have a purpose here, or should I let my big German Shepherd come chase you off the porch?” I was half tempted to slam the door in his face, but I’d had it today. Here was someone I could take my anger out on without real fear of reprisal. Nice word, good thought.

“Someone ought to teach you a thing or two about manners.” His smile slipped while his skin flushed at his neck. He pulled at his collar, then rubbed forcefully at his throat. I guessed from the look on his face that he was trying to calm himself down. I wasn’t about to let that happen, since I was obviously getting under his skin. I was doing it for Bella. Honestly.

“Ought they? Because I think you ought to get the hell off my porch before I set Boris on you. He likes men a lot. Your leg might never be the same.”

He took a stumbling step back at that but then smoothed his hair, moving forward again. “I know you don’t have a dog, bitch,” he said in a low, mean voice. “In fact, I know a lot about you that you aren’t even aware of. You’d better watch your step.” He straightened up, quickly looking over my shoulder while I stood there like a statue.

“What’s up, Jackson?” Ben said from behind me, not sounding any more cordial than I had been only moments before. I would have kissed him, but I appeared to be completely petrified. Me, Ivy, who’d been shot at and tied up like a turkey. But there was something infinitely mean glinting in Jackson’s eyes as he glanced at me before looking away again.

“Ivy and I were having a little chat. I want to help Bella in any way I can through this ordeal. I was telling Ivy not to hesitate to call me.” He handed over a business card with a number scrawled on the front in blue pen. “That phone is always on, so any time you need anything, you give me a buzz. Any time at all.”

A screech rent the air before the sound of his last word disappeared. “What in the living nine hells are you doing over here, Jackson! I told you to stay away from Ivy. Didn’t I tell you to stay away from her? She has a job to do, and she certainly doesn’t need your help.” Bella came bustling up the sidewalk at full steam ahead. I was surprised her hair wasn’t flaming from the sides of her head. She looked that pissed. I was willing to bet those four-inch heels of hers could do some serious damage.

Jackson seemed to have the same thought. He turned on his heel and strode across the grass before she made it to the porch steps. Pretty smart of him to beat feet to his car. He’d parked in my driveway, which wouldn’t have irritated me too much except that he squealed his tires as he backed out onto the street. With a jaunty wave of his hand out the sunroof, he was gone.

Bella huffed as she stood on my front porch. She looked like an angry bull, but there was no way I would tell her that. Instead, I ushered her into the house and asked if I could get her a glass of wine while we made our reports.

****

“What I don’t get is why everyone is being so closed-mouthed,” Bella said, leaning back on my couch and sipping from a glass almost as big as a cereal bowl. I’d drive her home tonight if I had to, or she could crash here. It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have a semi-permanent guest.

“I think it’s because it’s you.” Ben put his beer bottle on a coaster sitting on the coffee table (good boy!). Leaning back, he put his arm behind my head on the loveseat. “I think some people around here think it’s a shame you didn’t run this good ol’ boy, Trev, out of town like you did last time with Jackson, but that you actually killed him, instead.”

“That’s preposterous!”

“Good word,” Ben and I said at the exact same time.

Bella beamed for a brief second. “I thought you’d like that one.” But then the smile fell from her face while her eyes narrowed. “So Dennis won’t tell you anything?”

“No one at the station will tell me anything. It’s not only Dennis—it’s everyone. I can’t even get outside people to tell me what they saw, or heard. The only person talking is some old lady everyone says is senile. She has some half-cocked story about a god coming from his travels with a knapsack on his back.”

Why did we always get the loonies? I asked that very question, which caused Bella to snigger into her wine.

“Why wouldn’t we? This is my life, after all. If it can be screwed up, it will be. I can’t even get divorced right, apparently.”

“What?” Ben and I said in unison, again. The first time was funny, the second time made me feel like we should be wearing matching sweaters and sporting unisex hairstyles. Yick!

Bella hiccupped while rolling her head back and forth on the upper edge of the couch. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it at all. In fact, I don’t even want to think about it, to be honest. And I seem to be the only one in this whole damn town who hasn’t had their picture frames stolen, so now the police are sniffing around me for that, too. They think I’ve turned to a life of crime.”

How bizarre was that? Bella hadn’t ever stepped a toe out of line her whole life here, that I knew of. Why would they start looking at her for everything going on in town?

But in another bout of what I was fast thinking was truly a talent for reading minds, Bella lifted her head from the back of the couch and stared right at me. “I had a few run-ins with the law when I was younger. Even though the records are sealed, some of the people still on the police force here have really long and vivid memories. They’ll never let me live it down, especially now with the Bastard back in town.”

My look must have been pure puzzlement, because Ben jumped in before I could start with all the questions I had hovering on my tongue.

“Are they still harping on the joyriding?”

“Yeah,” Bella said. “And that wasn’t my fault, but no one ever believed their golden boy Jackson could have been behind it.”

“And the flowerbed thing?”

“Now, that was my fault,” Bella said, laughing and pulling on the end of her mahogany hair. “I was trying to help, but I have the blackest thumb I think God ever created. And when I was done it looked more like I was trying to vandalize than plant.”

Since I could sympathize with her plight—I sucked at gardening, too—I leaned forward from the loveseat and patted her arm. “Did someone press charges on that?”

“Yeah. Thelma Boden has never forgiven me for messing with her prize roses.”

Well, that would explain why she and Thelma had never gotten along when I saw them together. But it was all so long ago, why did it have anything to do with now? Other than the car, I hadn’t heard anything about stealing. What would Bella be doing with so many frames anyway? Which got me to thinking.

“What do you think someone’s doing with all those frames? Who could possibly need that many? And in so many different sizes?” I asked, looking at Ben as the wheels churned furiously inside my head. In a flash, I remembered seeing an advertisement in the daily paper about a new art gallery going in on one of the streets shooting off from Main Street. But how truly bizarre was it to steal frames for displaying art in a shop? Wouldn’t the owner run the risk of someone being able to identify one of their frames? And why would anyone start up a gallery if they couldn’t even afford to frame the pictures they were displaying? It was all too ridiculous to say out loud, so I kept my mouth shut as Ben and Bella continued to detail her youthful escapades.

“There was that one time when I accidentally broke the front window of the drug store.” Bella cradled her head in one of her hands. “I still shop outside town for my prescriptions to avoid Lloyd Drummond.”

“You were a little hellion,” I said, finally jumping into the conversation, leaving all my questions on the back burner of my mind. If I didn’t have something useful to add, at least I could show them I was listening.

“Not really a hellion, just incredibly clumsy. Along with helpful without actually helping.” Bella smiled with all her teeth, but I could tell it was a sort of mask at this point. The strain of all this was cutting into her. I remembered when I was the primary suspect for another murder and how shaken I had felt, how powerless.

In a burst of compassion, I grabbed Bella’s hand and squeezed, maybe a little too tightly from the way her eyes went squinty. “Sorry.” I cleared my throat. “I just want to tell you that nothing is more important than figuring this out now. We have to get you off the hook.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you’d get rid of Jackson, too, while you’re at it.”