I Scream, You Scream Page 4

  “But I just saw her last night,” I whispered.

  I don’t know why people say that. I just saw her . . . As though people die only when you aren’t looking.

  “You and half of Dalliance.” Karla Faye ran her fingers through my hair, studying the strands with a critical eye. “We’re always busy on a Saturday, what with ladies getting ready for date night or wanting to get their hair done for church, but this place has been mobbed today. Ladies who didn’t even have appointments just popped by to chew the fat.”

  She walked over to a recessed Formica counter and started shuffling through plastic bottles of colorant.

  “Everyone says Brittanie was sauced at that picnic last night, but she was otherwise fit as a fiddle,” Karla Faye threw over her shoulder. “Heck, Luanne Peters said the girl did two hours of cardio at the Lady Shapers yesterday.”

  “Two hours?” No wonder you could bounce a quarter off her behind.

  “Oh, yeah. Luanne said she was in there every day, working her little patoot off.” Karla Faye snorted as she started pouring glops of purple goo into a glass dish. “I think that Lady Shapers thing is a cult or something.”

  Karla Faye ruled over an all-female domain, but she was deeply suspicious of any other organization that excluded men. I’d heard her rant about Lady Shapers, the women-only gym, before, along with similar screeds about Mary Kay, Avon, and our local quilters’ guild, the Dalliance Fat Quarters.

  I tried to keep the conversation on track. “Did she have a stroke or something?”

  Karla Faye shrugged. “No one knows. Did she seem sick last night?”

  “I don’t think so. Drunk and cranky, but not really sick.”

  She fixed me with a squint-eyed stare as she sashayed back to my chair, a stack of foil squares in one hand and a paintbrush balanced on a dish of dye in the other. “The scuttlebutt is, you two got into a catfight over Wayne.”

  It was my turn to snort. “I wouldn’t call it a catfight. Just a misunderstanding. Brittanie seemed to think Wayne and I were flirting.”

  Karla Faye didn’t say a word, but one eyebrow shot up.

  “We were not flirting. I wouldn’t take Wayne back if he begged me to, and I don’t expect him to come knocking anytime soon.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she hummed as she snapped on a pair of gloves.

  “Really, Karla Faye.”

  She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t look convinced.

  Though my pride demanded I argue the point, I hushed up to let Karla Faye work. Color correction’s a tricky business. Using a rattail comb to tease out sections of pinkish hair, she painted them with the colorant, then whacked a square of foil with the rattail to get a good crease before folding it around the treated hair. I ignored the purple goo and the halo of aluminum foil, because I knew the drill: hair had to get ugly before it got pretty.

  When it looked as though Karla Faye had found her groove, I brought the conversation back to the big story. “So, what are people saying about Brittanie’s death?”

  Karla Faye paused to brush a strand of platinum hair from her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Oh, I don’t know,” she hedged.

  “Bull pucky. You said yourself the shop’s been buzzing all day.”

  She pulled a face. “Yeah, with a bunch of silly twits who don’t know ‘come here’ from ‘sic ’em.’ ”

  I felt a niggling of unease fluttering in my gut. “I know it won’t be gospel, but I’m still curious. You know I like to dish as well as the next girl.”

  Karla Faye sighed. “Just about everyone thinks Brittanie finally paid the piper for her many and varied bad deeds. But there’s some disagreement over how, exactly, fate decided to collect on the debt.”

  “What do you mean?”

  A grim smile spread across her face. “Well, there’s a small but vocal minority who think God struck Brittanie down for adultery.”

  “How very Old Testament of them.”

  Karla Faye laughed.

  “Besides,” I continued, “Wayne and I were still technically married when he started dating Brittanie, but we weren’t sharing a bed and I’d already seen my lawyer.”

  She grunted noncommittally.

  “What about the others?” I prodded.

  For a minute, I didn’t think Karla Faye would answer. She seemed completely absorbed in making a perfect foil packet around a lock of my hair. Finally, she cleared her throat. “Well, twenty-three-year-old sorority girls don’t usually just drop dead, not without a little help. Some folks think Brittanie crossed the wrong person.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Maybe someone murdered her,” Karla Faye confirmed with a nod.

  That fluttering in my gut came to a full boil. “That’s ridiculous,” I croaked. “Who would murder that little girl?”

  Karla Faye rested her hands on my shoulders and met my gaze in the mirror. “Some say Wayne. Some say you.”

  chapter 5

  To the best of my knowledge, Emily Post never addressed the tricky question of whether a woman should attend the funeral of her ex-husband’s mistress. Proper protocol might depend on whether the mistress in question had been murdered and whether the woman was a suspect, but on the day of the funeral—two weeks to the day after Brittanie’s death—the tricounty medical examiner’s office continued to list the cause of death as “undetermined.”

  In the absence of a formal rule of etiquette, I fell back on one of my Grandma Peachy’s maxims: you can’t go wrong if you show up with a casserole.

  Thus, I found myself knocking on what had once been my own front door, with a King Ranch casserole balanced on one hand, ready to make my contribution to the postburial dinner. As I waited for someone to open the door, I shifted my weight from foot to foot.

  “Relax,” Bree hissed from behind me.

  “I can’t relax,” I whispered back. “Folks have been looking at me cockeyed all week.”

  “All the hubbub’s been good for business.”

  “Bree, that’s terrible!”

  “Terrible but true,” Bree protested, giving an indignant tug on the hem of her little peplum jacket.

  I couldn’t deny it. With the ME mum about the cause of death, outlandish rumors continued to swirl around town about the bad blood between me and Brittanie, and everyone wanted a peek at the woman who might be the subject of an upcoming Lifetime television movie. Popping by Remember the A-la-mode for a waffle cone gave the looky-loos license to gawk to their hearts’ content.

  Still, it seemed gauche to comment on our uptick in sales when we were waiting to pay our respects to Wayne.

  I rang the doorbell for good measure. “My point is, it’s bound to be a hundred times more uncomfortable in there”—I jerked my head at the frosted-and beveled-glass inset of my old front door—“than it was at the Sack ’n Save or the credit union.”

  “So we’ll only stay a minute, give Wayne our regards, then dash back to the store. Besides, that’s why we brought the casserole. To smooth things over.”

  “My King Ranch casserole is good, but it can’t work miracles.”

  Bree frowned. “I told you we should have brought the cheesy funeral potatoes instead of the King Ranch.”

  Before I could snipe back at her, the front door swung open to reveal a little dollop of a woman, just a whisker over five feet tall. The unrelieved black of her ankle-length broomstick skirt and shiny knitted tunic matched the plaits wound around her head. The severe color and style of her hair seemed out of place atop a face as pale and undefined as a scoop of melting French vanilla.

  “Good afternoon,” I said gently. “I’m Tally and this is Bree. We came to pay our respects.”

  For a split second, a spark of something—recognition, surprise, guilt, anger—flashed in the woman’s mahogany eyes before the watery veil of grief shifted back into place.

  “Who is it, Linda?” Wayne stepped up behind the woman and cupped a hand gently around her shoulder. He wore an austere black suit that straine
d over his midsection enough to make the buttonholes gape. Even to my untrained eye, his deep lavender tie looked expensive. I recognized the suit as the one I helped Wayne buy for his grandfather’s funeral five years earlier. The tie, though, was new, and given the color and the quality, I suspected it had been a gift from Brittanie.

  “Hi, Wayne,” I said. “I am so sorry for your loss.”

  “Tally. Thank God.” Wayne reached for me like a quarterback diving across a pileup for the touchdown. I don’t know quite how I expected Wayne to greet me, but I never anticipated such naked relief.

  As Wayne dragged me by my un-casserole-laden arm into the foyer of the mid-eighties colonial house we’d once shared, he introduced Linda. “Tally, this is Linda Brinkman, Brittanie’s mother. And this,” he continued, indicating a gray dumpling of a man in a navy sport coat and charcoal slacks, “this is Brittanie’s father, Fred.”

  Fred Brinkman was as colorless as his wife, a soft man of indeterminate age. He kept his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, as though he were prepared to ward off a blow.

  “Bree, meet the Brinkmans,” Wayne muttered as he drew me farther into the house. He steered me into the formal dining room, where my mission oak table had been replaced by a heavy Spanish colonial monstrosity decorated with inlaid turquoise and now groaning beneath the weight of dozens of potluck dishes. I managed to nudge aside a glass-covered dish of broccoli rice casserole and slide my King Ranch onto a corner of a trivet before Wayne pulled me into the kitchen.

  He skidded to a halt, turned to face me, and leaned in urgently.

  “Tah—,” he breathed, stopping short as his gaze swept our surroundings.

  In the mid-nineties, Wayne and I had knocked down some walls to create a great room spanning the width of the house. From the kitchen, you could see all the way to the fieldstone fireplace on the far side of the family room. A bank of French doors opened onto the awning-covered patio, with views of the terraced yard and blue-tiled pool beyond.

  That afternoon, clusters of somber mourners dotted the dining area and family room. I saw a few familiar faces from the Dalliance Chamber of Commerce crowd with whom Wayne socialized, including Mayor and Mrs. Jillson. But most of them were strangers, matronly women with helmets of tight gray pin curls and avuncular men wearing drab but tidy suits with the quiet pride of country folk. Probably friends of the family and members of Brittanie’s church.

  Outside on the patio, a few dozen of Brittanie’s twentysomething peers huddled together, sharing cigarettes and bright red plastic cups, looking as though they’d rather be anywhere else in the world. The girls all wore black, but with glimpses of cleavage and sequins, as though they were too young to distinguish between church dressy and club dressy.

  Funny how when we die, all the disparate elements of our lives—public and private, business and pleasure, old and new—coalesce, the fragments of our being pulled together into a rough collage that finally shows a true picture of who we were.

  In Brittanie’s case, the pieces of her life didn’t seem to want to mingle. Yet, despite the stark differences between the inside and outside guests, at that moment they were united in their unabashed interest in me and Wayne.

  Flummoxed, Wayne heaved a giant sigh and pulled me into the breezeway to the garage. He flopped down on the upholstered boot box and cradled his head in his hands.

  “Tally, you have to help me.”

  “Oh, Wayne. I don’t think it would look right for me to play hostess today. Besides, we left Kyle and Alice in charge of the store, so we have to hustle back before they eat all our profits.”

  He looked up at me with the most pitiful hang-dog expression I’ve ever seen. Heck, he didn’t look half as guilty when I caught him dictating a memo to his secretary with his pants around his ankles.

  “No, Tally. I did something stupid, and I need your help. If anybody asks, I need you to say I came to your house after the luau. I need you to say we were together the night Brittanie died.”

  chapter 6

  “Lord a-mighty, Wayne, what have you done?” I had very few illusions left about my ex, but never in all my born years would I have imagined him needing an alibi.

  Wayne groaned and dropped his head back into his hands. “It’s complicated. See—”

  The thunderous sound of someone pounding on the front door cut short his explanation. Wayne and I exchanged a glance. His eyes were rounded in alarm and his mouth hung open just a fraction. He looked like a scared kid, and some ingrained maternal instinct made me want to shield him from the monster at the door.

  I took the lead, marching back past the Greek chorus of mourners in the great room, past the untouched smorgasbord of casseroles in the dining room, past Bree and the Brinkmans, still awkwardly sizing one another up in the foyer. As I reached for the brass handle, another volley of violent blows landed on the door, startling a yelp out of me.

  “Oh, for the love of . . . What?” I barked as I jerked open the door.

  A half dozen men crowded my front steps—or, rather, Wayne’s front steps. In the lead, with his hand poised to knock again, stood another blast from my past, Cal McCormack.

  Cal had always been Mr. Macho: junior rodeo calf-roping champ, star running back for the Dalliance Wildcatters, undefeated Texas 4-H small-bore rifle marksman. It hadn’t surprised anyone when Cal finished up a stint in the army and became a cop or when he made detective in record time.

  “Well, hey there, Tally,” Cal drawled. The desultory breeze ruffled his short salt-and-pepper hair. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Hey, Cal. Just paying my respects.”

  He nodded, then jerked his chin over his shoulder to indicate the uniformed officers behind him. “We’re here on official business. Got a search warrant.”

  Oh, dear.

  I turned around to look for Wayne just in time to watch Linda Brinkman collapse to the floor in a dead faint.

  “Do you live here, ma’am?” The officer standing between me and Wayne tipped his head back so he could stare down his nose at me.

  “Of course—” Bree elbowed me, hard, in the ribs. “What?” I snapped. I met her exasperated gaze. “Oh. No. I don’t live here.”

  “In that case, I’m going to have to ask you to wait in the living room, there, with the rest of the folks, until we can figure out how to proceed.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice, a note of childlike excitement creeping in. “I don’t think we’ve ever served a search warrant during a party before.”

  “It’s not a party. It’s a funeral. Barging in here like this, it’s disrespectful. That woman”—I jerked my head toward Linda Brinkman, almost lost in the cushions of an overstuffed leather sofa, her husband gently patting her hand—“she just buried her daughter, and you’re detaining her like a common criminal. Didn’t your mama teach you better?”

  The poor kid flushed brick red, but he didn’t back down. Instead, he squared his shoulders and got all formal on me again.

  “Ma’am, I’m just doing my job. Detective McCormack told us to keep everyone together, and that’s what I aim to do.”

  On the far side of the kitchen, Cal was speaking earnestly into his cell phone. With every fiber of my being, I wanted to march over there and give Cal a piece of my mind. The good boy I grew up with would never treat a grieving mother like that.

  To Cal’s left, Wayne stood flanked by two uniformed officers. He looked madder than a wet rabbit. When our eyes met, he squinted hard, then raised his eyebrows and jerked his head in Cal’s direction. After all those years together, I knew how to interpret Wayne’s charades: he was reminding me to lie for him to Cal.

  I wanted to march over and give Wayne a piece of my mind, too. Lying to the police. What a damn-fool idea. How could Wayne even ask me to do such a thing?

  But the young man with the gun on his hip wasn’t going to let me anywhere near Cal or Wayne.

  Bree tugged me away by the sleeve of my linen jacket. She snagged a pla
te piled high with pigs in blankets and a couple of diet sodas off the breakfast bar and led me into the midst of the crowd in the living room.

  I caught Fred Brinkman’s gaze, but he waved me away with a faint smile. Bree and I made our way through the milling guests to an empty ottoman. As we plumped ourselves down, she offered to share her bounty, but I wasn’t in the mood.

  “Suit yourself,” she mumbled around a mouthful of Vienna sausage and crescent roll.

  A few minutes later, Cal swaggered into the room.

  “Listen up, folks,” he announced, his brow wrinkled beneath the weight of his authority. “We are not going to detain you much longer, but we are going to need to get everyone’s vitals before they leave. Name, address, phone number, and the like. I will have Officers McClusky and Tibert gathering that information.” He indicated my friend from the kitchen and another boy so scrubbed and scrawny that he looked as though he were playing dress-up. “Y’all need to be patient, and speak with the officers one at a time. After you have been processed, you may leave.”

  “Processed,” Bree snorted. “Sounds like we’re meat.” She set aside the plate of snacks and stood up. “I’ve gotta hit the ladies’.”

  She sashayed toward the powder room, pausing to flirt her way past a blushing lawman. I watched Cal McCormack pull Fred Brinkman away from his wife for some sort of tête-à-tête. Poor Fred hunched up so much his shoulders nearly brushed his ear-lobes. Cal managed to keep up his end of the conversation, alternating between speaking softly and nodding, while following the sway of Bree’s hips with his eyes.

  I was sighing to myself when Honey Jillson appeared at my side.

  “Would you mind if I shared your seat?” she asked. “I think this is going to take a while.”

  “Oh, but . . . sure . . . of course,” I stammered.

  Hand to God, Honey Jillson scared the piddle out of me. She personified Southern aristocracy, both her wit and her backbone crafted of honey-dipped steel. I had never heard her raise her voice or say an unkind word about anyone. She didn’t need to. With just the slightest tightening of her facial muscles, she could convey the sort of absolute, withering contempt that could reduce a Ladies Auxiliary president to tears (an event I had personally witnessed).