A Parfait Murder (16 page)

“Tally, this is really important.”

I sighed. “Dang it, Bree, I told you I was busy. Can’t I have just five minutes here? We’re sort of in the middle of something.”

“You and Finn?”

“Yes,” I hissed. “Something real important.”

She was quiet for just a beat, and when she spoke again I heard something in her voice, a thread of despair I’d never heard from Bree before.

“Tally, I got the DNA results today.” Of course, the courier that afternoon with his supersecret, superimportant envelope. “I stared at that envelope for hours before I could bring myself to open it.” She paused, but from her tone and urgency, I could already guess what she’d say next.

“Sonny isn’t Alice’s daddy.”

“Oh. Oh my. Bree, how’s that possible? Who else could it be?”

Beside me, Finn quirked a brow in question. I mouthed “D-N-A.”

He grew very still, and he nearly crushed my hand in his grip. I knew he was thinking what I was: not only would this drive a wedge between Bree and Alice, but it would add fuel to the prosecution’s case against Bree for Kristen’s murder. It wasn’t just shame that made Bree mad at Kristen. She legitimately had something to hide.

“Tally,” Bree said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

I felt my heart grow cold at the gravity of her tone. For an instant, I thought maybe she did it. Maybe she killed Kristen to protect her secret. Maybe she was about to confess.

As quickly as the thought popped into my head, it fled. Bree might be a bit irresponsible and a whole lot of trouble, but she’d never do anything so hurtful or dishonest. Never.

“Tally, you have to believe me. I didn’t sleep with anyone after I met Sonny, I swear. I really thought Sonny was Alice’s daddy.”

“Of course you did.”

“But now that I know he isn’t, well, I guess the doctors must have been wrong. Alice must have been conceived in May, not June. She wasn’t premature, just tiny.”

She paused again, but I let her work through whatever she was working through. I knew there was more, and she’d tell it in her own time.

She made a choked sound. If I didn’t know Bree better, I’d have sworn it was a sob.

“Tally, I only slept with one guy in the months before I met Sonny. A month before I met Sonny, actually. The night after your wedding. There’s only one other person who might be Alice’s father.”

“Who?”

“Tally, I’m so sorry. The only person it could possibly be is Finn.”

At that moment a gust of wind blew across the fairgrounds, rocking the car in which we sat and jarring my hand from Finn’s. I looked at him across the handful of inches that separated us, saw the resignation in his eyes. The sadness.

He knew what Bree had told me.

I had a sudden image of Finn the first night he’d returned to Dalliance the year before, the night he showed up on my front porch. In my mind, I saw again the subtle widening of his eyes, the look of barely contained shock on his face, when he first saw Alice.

Had he suspected even then? Had something in the slant of her cheekbones or the angle of her jaw resonated with him on some elemental level?

I felt the phone slide from my fingers, heard it clatter on the floor of the Ferris wheel car, but I couldn’t move.

And that was when the storm hit, a crack of lightning striking close. At that moment, the lights went out in Dalliance, plunging the fairgrounds in darkness and stranding me at the top of the Ferris wheel with the one person I wanted most to flee from.

I
t took twenty minutes for us to get off that Ferris wheel. And the minute my feet hit the puddles forming on the ride’s platform, I hightailed it across the fairgrounds.

I raced through the parking lot, but skidded to a stop when I saw Bree leaning against the side of the van. The sepia-tinted light from an overhead streetlamp turned her hair a mellow copper, and when she raised her head at my approach, the light deepened the shadows around her eyes.

“Not now, Bree.”

“Tally, please. I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry? Some stuff, sorry doesn’t cover.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she pleaded. “We were both drunk.”

I laughed, a sharp and ugly sound echoed by a crack of thunder overhead. “There it is. The cheater’s hat trick—‘I’m sorry,’ ‘Didn’t mean to,’ and ‘I was drunk.’ You take lessons from Wayne?” Invoking my tom cat of an ex-husband wasn’t really fair, but I didn’t care much about fair at that moment.

The barb hit its mark. Bree drew herself up. Even without her high heels, she had a couple of inches on me. She took a step in my direction, forcing me to tip my head back to look her in the eye, but I didn’t back down.

“Cheater?” she snapped. “Who were we cheating on? Finn and I were both free agents.”

“On me! You were cheating on me! Breaking my heart by screwing around. You knew I loved him, Bree.”

“Sure. Loved him so much you dumped him and married another man. Remember that? You had just promised to love, honor, and obey someone else, Tally. Were your vows nothing but lies?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, you can’t have it both ways. You chose Wayne over Finn. Your choice, Tally. No one else’s.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Of course you do. And that’s why you’re so mad at me. You made a choice, and now you know it was the wrong one.”

“Yeah, well, you made a choice, too. You chose your own libido over everything we’d shared. Like all our history, yours and mine and mine and Finn’s, didn’t matter a lick compared with a few minutes of mindless pleasure.”

Bree staggered back, collapsing against the side of the van as though I’d physically attacked her. I felt a stab of pain as a flash of lightning illuminated the raw anguish on her face.

“That’s not fair,” she said, the fight gone out of her.

“Nothing about this is fair,” I snapped.

I turned on my heel and ran off as fast as my legs would carry me. By the time I made it to the entrance to the parking lot, the skies had opened up again. Billowing sheets of warm water fell to the ground, instantly soaking me to the skin.

Fairgoers shrieked and laughed as they fled the storm and a flood of cars bottlenecked at the entrance to the lot. I moved between them, peering through windshields and searching for a familiar face, until I finally hitched a ride home with some guy I barely recognized, someone I’d seen at the Bar None a time or two.

At home, I made my way to the tiny first-floor room we’d turned into a cozy TV den, wrapped myself in one of Peachy’s old quilts, turned off my cell phone, and hunkered down to brood.

I heard Alice traipse in around midnight, her step unmistakably heavy for such a little thing. She stomped up the stairs and slammed into her room. I didn’t know if Bree had told her about the paternity results. Even if she had, I didn’t have the emotional resources to help her. I knew I’d end up feeding into her anger rather than soothing it.

Peachy and Bree both came in a bit later. They each took a turn at the door to the den, calling my name, but I didn’t answer. I wanted to be alone with my pain.

While the storm raged outside, I seethed quietly inside. I spent the night curled on the couch watching ShopNet on the television, Sherbet perched on my hip, occasionally making biscuits on my thigh. Usually the mindless patter of the shopping channel hosts drowned out the babble of my own anxious thoughts and allowed me to drift off to sleep. But that night, all the leather handbags and porcelain collectibles and mineral makeup in the world couldn’t silence my bitter internal monologue.

Finally, the storm broke, and as the first hint of dawn brightened the living room window, I nudged Sherbet to the floor and made my way to the front porch and stretched out flat on the swing. The storm had carried in a wall of cool air even more welcome than the rain. I tipped my head back to allow the mild breeze access to my throat as I stared up through the frame of the swing’s chains.

Very little grew in our yard. The Texas climate is not naturally conducive to green lawns and ornamental plants, and we didn’t have the time or the money to bend the vegetation to our will. The one plant that seemed to thrive was the cherry laurel at the corner of the house. From the street, the elegant emerald leaves and the graceful arc of the small tree’s trunk appeared vital. But from my vantage point, I could see a tracery of bare limbs, the fine net of twigs left naked by the plant’s instinctive allocation of energy to the branches in the sun.

I gazed into that brittle web and let my eyes go unfocused.

The front screen door opened with the soft whine of unoiled hinges and slapped shut.

“I thought I heard you stirring,” Peachy said.

“Didn’t sleep.”

“It was that kind of night.”

She tapped me on the knee, so I swung up into a sitting position. She joined me on the swing’s terry cloth cushion.

“This family needs you to hold it together.”

“I’m not sure I’m strong enough, Gram.”

“
All
my girls are strong. Just how I raised ’em.”

I snorted. “I’m not like Bree. Or even Alice. I’m not that tough.”

Peachy hummed a little assent. “You’re right about that. That’s a good thing. See, all that independence has a downside. The Decker girls make dumb-ass mistakes, are too proud to admit it, and way too proud to ask for help. You’re just a little softer than the rest of us, Tally. Soft enough to bend without breaking.”

“I don’t know,” I hedged.

“I do. Now, you had your little pity party, and you were entitled. Today, you have to put your big girl pants on and help Alice through this.”

I cut my eyes to the side to see Peachy’s face. “Bree told her?”

“Of course. I made her do it. Told her Alice deserved to be the first person to know.” Peachy frowned. “Alice pitched a royal fit. But she understands that this hurts her mother’s legal situation pretty bad. If the authorities find out Bree really had something to hide—that Sonny was right to challenge his paternity of Alice—then it seems even more plausible she would kill to keep it quiet. I told her she needs to keep her mouth shut for now, and she gets it.”

Peachy patted my knee again. “Look at me, Tallulah.”

I did as she ordered, turning my head to face my grandma. The diffuse morning light blended away some of the lines in her face, softened her, but there was no mistaking the rock-hard resolve in her eyes.

“The same goes for you, my child. You, Alice, Bree, and I know about those DNA results—”

“And Finn. He was with me when Bree called.”

Peachy’s mouth tightened at the corners. “Well, the five of us are the only folks in Dalliance who know that Sonny isn’t Alice’s daddy. And it’s going to stay that way until we get this murder charge against your cousin dropped. You hear?”

“Yes’m.”

“That means you and Finn Harper are going to keep on keepin’ on, just as lovey-dovey as you have been. No one’s going to suspect a thing.”

The thought of spending time with Finn, maintaining a pretense that all was well, made me die a little inside. But I’d been raised to do what Peachy said.

“Yes’m.”

“Huh.” Peachy laughed, a rasping deep in her smoker’s lungs. “I see that look in your eyes. You want to give that boy what-for. Well, if you want a big blow-out with Finn Harper, you better set your mind to getting Bree out of trouble. The sooner you get her off the hook, the sooner you can rip him a new one.”

Peachy was right. My relationship with Finn was definitely in jeopardy, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could ever trust Bree again. But I loved my family—Bree included—and I knew we’d never recover if Bree went to prison for killing Kristen. The DNA results were another nail in Bree’s coffin, evidence that Bree had a strong incentive to put the kibosh on the lawsuit, and I needed to start prying up some boards if I was going to save us all.

I
decided to start with the one person who seemed to want to talk about Kristen: Neck DeWinter.

He scared the ever-living bejesus out of me, but Neck seemed legitimately broken up about Kristen’s death, and I figured maybe he would be willing to open up about her life a bit.

When I’m right, I’m right.

After a quick call to Jason Arbaugh, I had no trouble tracking Neck to the Bar None. He was slouched over a pint of something that looked more like blackstrap molasses than beer. Even at midday, the interior of the Bar None was dim, but Neck’s eyes were hidden behind his shades.

“Can I join you?” I asked, half hoping he’d say no.

He nodded sullenly.

“How are you holding up, Neck?”

He took a pull on his beer by way of answer.

“That bad, huh? Would it help to talk about her?”

His beefy shoulders inched up. Was that a yes?

“How long did you know Kristen?”

He sighed. “I didn’t meet her in person until two years ago. Best day of my life.”

“In person? Did you meet her online before that?”

He laughed, a short, brittle bark. “Huh. Yeah, I did.”

I didn’t see what was so funny about meeting her online. I was pretty old-school, but I knew lots of folks who’d used online dating services. Some of them even ended up marrying the people they met.

“She was so beautiful,” he said, a river of raw ache running through his voice.

“She certainly was. I heard she had a mess of crowns from the pageants she won.”

He tilted his head slightly to the side. I really wished I could read his eyes, but the movement made me think I’d confused him a bit.

“The crowns?”

“Yeah, crowns from beauty pageants. Those are tough to come by.”

“eBay.”

I know I’m not brilliant like Alice, but I fancy myself reasonably intelligent. But talking to Neck, I felt like an idiot. He was saying words—I heard them come out of his mouth—and they were English words, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of them. Not at all.