Iced Chiffon (3 page)

How could she say those things to me? So I’d hit a rough patch. Everyone hits a rough patch from time to time. Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror, with hair sticking out in all directions and meat-loaf juice on my T–shirt. I bit back a scream.

I did the ten-minute shower, then yanked on my white skirt from Target and the blue blouse KiKi gave me for my birthday, all the while thinking of how to get the fountain to Raylene. I had sold my car just last month to cover the cost of a leaky roof, and KiKi took her mother–in–law to breakfast every week like a good daughter–in–law should. If I asked my mother to borrow her Caddy, that would open up the whole
Why are you selling your things?
discussion.

Gloria Summerside was widowed when I was two. She
was sharp, smart, and savvy and told me, “For the love of God do not marry Hollis Beaumont.” She also told me not to buy the Lexus with only his name on it no matter what he said about deducting it from business expenses for tax purposes. I can still see the expression on her face when I told her I’d signed the prenup. She told me I’d clearly lost my mind, and as I look back on the whole marrying-Hollis ordeal, I realize she was absolutely right.

I was a pushover for Hollis, the older, handsome man who was really, really good in bed. Mamma was known in judicial circles as Guillotine Gloria, and no one pushed her around.

I’d paid a lot of money for that stupid Lexus, and I was going to use it! I’d put the fountain in the trunk, tie down the door, and motor my way over to Raylene’s. Hollis Beaumont the third would just have to live with it, no matter how divorced we were. The lying, cheating, fornicating bastard with bleached hair owed me that much.

I grabbed my handbag and charged out the front door.

“
H
I
, IdaMae,” I said as I entered Hollis’s real-estate office on East Wayne. The white clapboard bungalow sported green shutters, neat gables, a brick sidewalk, and window boxes filled with wilted pansies. IdaMae had never married, and she’d been with Hollis since the day he opened the agency, twenty years ago. She was more family than secretary, and I swear the woman could make anything grow in those window boxes. This year Cupcake commandeered the job.

“Well, bless my soul. Reagan, is it really you?” IdaMae’s brown eyes widened, and she put her hand to her bosom in pure delight. “How are you, honey? And how is your mamma getting on these days? I trust she’s doing right well.”

IdaMae rose from behind her neat desk, her yellow-and-blue cotton-print dress flowing around her like an attractive tent, topped with a white sweater. If Hollis set the AC any
lower in the place, it would snow. She hugged me and kissed the air behind my left ear. “I haven’t seen you in ages and ages.”

It had been about a month, but between friends in Savannah, that was an age. “We need to do lunch and catch up. Next week?” IdaMae beamed her approval, then sobered when I said, “Is Hollis busy? I need to borrow the Lexus, just for a half hour or so. I want to haul something. It’s important, or I wouldn’t be asking. Is he in a good mood?”

IdaMae drew in a quick breath, making the flowers across her upper half sway back and forth as if caught in a spring breeze. “Oh my goodness, you know how he is about that car of his. You’d think the man gave birth to it the way he acts. Janelle drove it all day yesterday though. That girl’s got him eating out of her palm—I swear she does. Anything she wants, she gets…usually.”

IdaMae leaned close enough that I could smell Orange Blossom, the fragrance of choice of a true Southern belle, even if the belle was nearly fifty and her family had fallen on hard times and been forced to surrender their membership to the Oglethorpe Club. “Word has it Hollis and Janelle had a spat at that cocktail party last night. She made a scene right there in front of everyone and then drove off in her car, leaving Hollis standing by himself in the parking lot and mad as a hornet. I’m not one for sorting out dirty laundry in public, mind you, but I sure wish I could have seen that with my own two eyes.”

“And you should have been there, IdaMae.” Hollis and I had taken her to the Homes and Gardens Telfair cocktail party for years, just as we had her over for Christmas dinner and celebrated her birthday at the Pink House, which just
happened to be her favorite restaurant. Then Cupcake came into the picture, and life as we knew it ceased to exist.

“When I asked where Janelle was this morning, Hollis said he hoped to never lay eyes on the woman again. Then he stormed into his office and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the windows; can you imagine? I made arrangements to have the Lexus detailed this afternoon as a little surprise and cheer him up a bit. Right now, he’s meeting with Reverend Franklin.” IdaMae nodded to the front conference room. “I think the reverend’s soliciting donations for his family-values campaign. He dropped off some papers yesterday. He’s such a fine man. He was good to my mamma when she was sick over at the nursing home. Came to see her every week.”

“Family values? Hollis?” I rolled my eyes so far back in my head that I saw where my ears connected.

“Franklin’s a friend of the Beaumonts, and you know that his wife is Hollis’s second cousin. Family counts for plenty, and nowadays money’s money. I don’t think the reverend and Janelle much like each other, though. When he called to see if Hollis was going to be in this morning, he asked if Janelle would be on the premises. I told him she never comes in before eleven.”

A sly smile made its way across IdaMae’s face. “You know, I’ll just go see if the Lexus key is in Hollis’s jacket. You could use the car and get it back here right quick. It’s parked out back, and he wouldn’t even know it was gone now, would he? We’ll make this work for you, honey. That’s what friends are for.” She went after the key.

I didn’t need Hollis upset that I was using his car as a delivery van. I wanted to keep him in Zen mode till he
signed over Cherry House. Smiling, IdaMae came back and dropped the key in my hand. “Be careful now, you hear?”

A
S
I
DROVE DOWN
H
ABERSHAM THE SMELL OF FINE
leather and the feel of an electronically cooled seat chilling my derriere made me realize just how much I’d missed this car. Right now I missed any car. I pulled up next to the gnarled cherry tree in full bloom that gave the house its name. The aroma was incredible, the tree a bouquet of pink and white, and half the reason I persuaded Hollis to buy the house years ago.

The other half was that I’d loved this house since I was a kid, riding my bike by it when visiting Auntie KiKi. I watched it deteriorate bit by bit, and I knew I could save it. The fact that I’d never hammered or screwed or sawed a thing in my life didn’t deter my enthusiasm. It should have.

Auntie KiKi scurried out the front door waving her hands in the air. “Where in the world have you been?” she panted, leaning in through the open car window, her cheeks flushed. “When I got home from breakfast, there were three people waiting on your porch ready to shop, of all things! They said they got one of those tweets.” She
tsk
ed, the universal sound of exasperated Southern women everywhere. “Whatever happened to the days when you got a nice phone call from a friend telling you what was what?” she lamented. “You have customers in your dining room, and I have a waltz lesson with Bernard in ten minutes.” She heaved a weary sigh.

Bernard Thayer was seventy, had no rhythm and less coordination, had been Mr. Weather on Savannah TV for
thirty years, and was determined to wind up on
Dancing with the Stars
. KiKi thrust a wad of bills at me. “I went and got stuff from my own closet to sell to spruce up your inventory. My black-and-white coat that’s gotten too small somehow went for thirty bucks.” She blinked. “What in the world are you doing with the Lexus?”

“I sold that fountain in the backyard to Raylene Carter for a small fortune. Now I have to deliver it as well as get the car back before Hollis knows I took it. I sort of didn’t tell him.”

“Oh, honey, grand theft auto—your mamma will be so proud.”

I ignored the possibility and popped the trunk. “Take a look-see at how much room we have. Hollis stores his real-estate junk in there.”

“We?”

I grabbed Old Yeller and rummaged for keys to the shed as I headed for the backyard. “I’ve got a cart, and we can haul the fountain and—”

“Sweet Jesus in heaven! Uh, Reagan, honey,” KiKi called, her finger crooked at me in a come-here gesture. “We have junk, a great big pile of it.”

“We’ll dump it on the lawn,” I said hurrying back to the car to help unload. “If I have to hire movers, I won’t make any money at all, and we’re running short on time and…Holy mother of God!” My gaze landed on Cupcake, face up, eyes wide open, and dead as Lincoln right there in Hollis’s trunk.

KiKi and I stared, neither of us breathing. KiKi finally whispered, “She doesn’t look nearly as good in the pink chiffon as you do.”

“Maybe because she has blood in her hair and is rolled up in plastic like a hot dog in a bun.” I made the sign of the cross for disrespecting the dead.

“There is that.” KiKi sounded faint and slowly slumped to the curb. We sat together holding hands, trunk still wide open like a casket at a viewing. “You wouldn’t happen to have a martini in that purse of yours, would you?”

A woman in a poison-green tank top, white jeans, and stilettos hustled out of my house, her tiny heels clacking on the brick walkway. “Is that more clothes in the trunk? I bet it is,” she giggled. “Let me at it.”

“Don’t look in there,” I said in a rush, putting up my hand to stop her.

She sidestepped around. “No way! I get first dibs and…Lord have mercy!”

Savannah tends to get real religious during times of great anxiety. Stiletto Girl slapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes the size of duck eggs. She ran back inside as fast as her teetering heels would allow. There were a few screams from my dining room and sirens approaching.

“How could Cupcake be dead?” I wondered aloud, trying to make sense of all this. “A few times I’ve wished her demise, but this is for real. What is she doing in Hollis’s trunk?”

“Not much, honey,” KiKi said in a far-off voice. “Not much at all.”

Two cruisers slid to a stop, and my dandelion front yard was overrun with blue uniforms, a lot of nosy neighbors, and gaping customers. A woman about five feet tall and just as wide, dressed in polyester navy pants and a white wash-and-wear blouse, introduced herself as the lead detective
and told me and KiKi to move, as the police needed access to the car.

Still holding on to each other and averting our eyes from the Lexus, we staggered our way to the porch. The detective asked if I knew the woman in the trunk. When I said her name was Cupcake, the detective gave me an exasperated look and took a bottle of water from her purse, which was even larger than mine.

She handed me the water, then walked over to AnnieFritz and Elsie Abbott, who were standing by the cherry tree. They must have had better answers because they didn’t get nasty looks or water, and the detective was scribbling like mad in her little brown book. My guess was the sisters called the cops. Nothing happened in Savannah that they didn’t know about in under ten minutes flat.

Auntie KiKi sipped the water. “Hollis and Cupcake had a humdinger of a fight at the museum last night.”

I glanced at the car’s license plate, with “HB3” on it, for Hollis Beaumont the third. “I heard. You don’t really think that Hollis would actually—”

“Of course not,” KiKi added in a rush. “I was just thinking out loud is all.” She took another swallow of water. “I mean, the man’s full of himself and an ornery jackass, but he’s not a you-know-what.” She couldn’t say the
m
–word any more than I could. “You think they’ll arrest Hollis?”

My brain hadn’t jumped that far ahead. My thoughts were limping around in circles, wondering how this day got so bad so fast. “Maybe I should tell Hollis what’s going on. It’s the least I can do after borrowing his car and having all this happen. Think the police will mind if I leave?”

KiKi slumped against the front of the house, and I eased
her down to the porch floor. She looked up at me, her eyes sort of rolling around in their sockets. “You’re driving a car with a dead person in it. If the cops want you, honey, they’ll find you.”

“Are you okay?”

“I think I’ll cancel the waltz lesson.”

KiKi downed more water, and I backed off the porch, then ran for the real-estate office. Pumping my arms, I tried to look like a jogger and not someone in a state of pure panic, though I suspected the white skirt and flip-flops sort of blew my cover. I felt as if everything was happening in slow motion, and I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs.

I stumbled through the office door of the real-estate office, and IdaMae glanced up from her computer. “Oh dear me, you look plumb awful. Did something happen to the car?”

I crumpled into a chair and put my head between my legs so I wouldn’t pass out. Why couldn’t I be more of a kick-butt kind of woman, like Lara Croft or Xena or even Kim Kardashian? Kim wouldn’t have to put her head between her legs so she wouldn’t pass out. “Hollis!” My shout was more of a squeal.