The Bass Wore Scales (6 page)

Since The Slab Café was in my path, and I had little else to do, I stopped in to see if Pete was busy. He wasn’t. The lunch crowd had abated, and the lone stragglers sitting at the tables didn’t look as though they’d be ordering anything else.

“
Need some lunch?” asked Pete as I came in, the bell on the door jangling behind me.

“
Nope. I had an ostentatious lunch with Meg over at the Ginger Cat. I just came in to borrow your boat.”

Pete frowned. “You come in here telling me you just had lunch at my competition’s place and now you want to borrow my boat? You’ve got some nerve.”

“
If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t pay for it,” I offered. “The new waitress is a little ditsy.”

“
Well, that’s okay then,” said Pete. “As long as I’m not the only one comping your meals.”

“
I may have to go back and pay,” I admitted. “Meg might shame me into it.”

“
Yeah, yeah, whatever,” said Pete, already losing interest in riling some guilt out of me. The Ginger Cat wasn’t a threat to the Slab Café, and Pete had good reason for wanting them to stay in business. Pete Moss was, as they say in investment circles, a generator of multiple cash streams. Over the past twenty years, he’d been buying the old buildings on the square, renovating them and renting them out to the merchants of St. Germaine. This strategy was starting to pay off in a big way. The Ginger Cat was in one of Pete’s buildings.

“
Which boat do you want?”

“
How many do you have?” I asked.

“
Three,” said Pete. “No. Four.”

“
Four?”

“
I’ve got the sailboat over at Emerald Isle. I’ve got that bass boat. The cabin cruiser—it’s in the shop—and the rowboat.”

“
I need the rowboat.”

“
It’s tied up on the lake. Been there since Easter.”

“
Down at the dock?” I asked. Our little mountain lake was just outside town and surrounded on three sides by the Mountainview Cemetery. The remaining adjacent property had belonged to Malcolm Walker and was now in the possession of his ex-wife, Rhiza. Malcolm was doing prison time and wouldn’t be seeing this or any lake for quite a few years to come. The Mountainview Cemetery didn’t offer an access road to the shore, but anyone could park up on the hill overlooking the lake and walk down. A small dock, set on piers, jutted about eight feet into the water. There were “No Swimming” signs every fifty feet or so, but every once in a while a couple of kids would sneak down there to cool off. And cool off they did. The water came right off the mountains and was usually about sixty-eight degrees or so.

“
Yep,” said Pete. “It’s tied up at the dock. That is, unless someone’s stolen it.”

“
I kind of doubt that,” I said. “Where would they go? The lake only covers a couple of acres. And anyway, I’m a detective. If it’s stolen, I’ll find it.”

“
I was just kidding. It’s not stolen,” said Pete. “I was there yesterday. I took Molly out for a nice boat ride just about dusk.”

“
Molly Frazier? Kenny’s sister?”

“
The very same.”

“
Are you two an item? You working on wife number four?”

“
Well, you never know,” said Pete, thoughtfully. “Love seems to be in the air.”

“
Speaking of love in the air, have you talked to Noylene lately?”

“
Actually, I have,” said Pete. “She’s doing a brisk business at the salon, but she’s going to close on Mondays and Tuesdays. She says that ever since she opened Noylene’s Beautifery, she doesn’t meet as many people as she used to when she was waiting tables. So she’s going to come back to work here on Monday and Tuesday mornings.”

“
I’m sure you’ll be glad to have her back. If the help at the Ginger Cat is any indication, good waitresses are mighty hard to come by. But that wasn’t the news I was talking about. It seems that Noylene has a beau.”

“
Really? Who?”

“
Meg said his name was Woodrow DuPont. He just bought Kenny Frazier’s farm.”

“
Oh sure,” said Pete. “Wormy DuPont. He’s lived around here off and on since he was born. I went to school with him.”

“
Wormy?”

“
Yeah. Wormy. He got the nickname in second grade. The school nurse got on the intercom and told him he had to come to the office for his worm medicine.” Pete laughed. “I remember it like it was yesterday.”

“
Poor kid.”

“
Oh, he never seemed to mind,” said Pete. “Wormy is better than Woodrow anyway.”

“
How about ‘Woody?” I offered.

“
Never thought of it,” Pete shrugged. “And ‘Wormy’ sort of fit him, you know?”

* * *

I stopped by Noylene’s Beautifery and Dip ‘n Tan on my way around the square. Noylene Fabergé had graduated from an on-line beauty college and opened her salon a couple of months ago. She and her son, D’Artagnan, had invented the immensely popular “Dip ‘n Tan”—a contraption that allowed the customer to hang from a trapeze and be gently lowered into a vat of tanning fluid. Noylene’s first few attempts at getting the recipe just right had resulted in a rash of orange-colored St. Germainians, giving some substantiality to the scuttlebutt around town that we had been invaded by giant mutant carrots, or, at the very least, Yankees.

There were three cubicles in Noylene’s Beautifery, and they were all in use. Noylene was in the one furthest from the door. The other two were staffed by a couple of young ladies from Boone—the signs on their mirrors identified them as Darla and Debbie. These name-tags were decorated with various cute personal items and complimented their officially framed licenses to practice the art of beauty in the state of North Carolina. Noylene looked up as I came in and waved me back.

She was diligently teasing the hair of a woman I didn’t know. I smiled and nodded, trying to avert my eyes as the woman glared up at me. I had forgotten the one rule of beautiferies—a visitor is not allowed to see a woman whose coif is in a state of disrepair. If you’re there getting a haircut, that’s one thing. But you mustn’t wander in off the street without an appointment and gawk in horror. It’s bad form. Noylene didn’t seem to mind, however, and started talking to me as soon as I walked up.

“
Man, what a day! I’m ready for a break. My dogs are barkin’.”

“
Fridays usually this busy?” I asked.

“
Oh, yeah,” answered Noylene, the rat-tail comb flying in her hand. “Summer’s here, and everybody wants a cooler ’do.”

“
I heard you were going to work over at the Slab a couple of mornings a week.”

“
Yeah,” said Noylene. “I miss it, you know. I mean, here I get to talk to folks, and this is my life’s work…doing hair…but I miss seeing the regular people. And anyway, Brother Kilroy says that we are supposed to find our gifts and use them. I have two gifts. The gift of beauty and the gift of getting your breakfast out on time.”

“
Well, I’m sure Pete and Collette will be glad to have you back.”

“
That’s the other thing. Collette’s got to plan her wedding. She’s going to be busy enough with that.”

“
That’s true,” I said. “By the way, I heard you have a new boyfriend.”

“
Wormy? Yeah, he and I go way back. He just bought Kenny’s farm you know.”

“
I just heard.”

“
I think he’s got big plans,” said Noylene with a smile.

* * *

Five-thirty in the morning comes early—especially on a Saturday—but I’d told Moosey that I’d pick him up at six and, by golly, a promise was a promise. I was ten minutes showering and getting dressed, five minutes eating breakfast and pouring a thermos of coffee from the coffeemaker that, luckily, I’d remembered to set the night before, and two minutes throwing a couple of poles and my tackle box into the back of the truck. Baxter, the Burmese Mountain Dog that shared my house, heard me rummaging around and was happily waiting by the truck, his entire hindquarters a-wag at the prospect of a ride. I’d gotten Baxter for Meg as a Christmas present, but now he stayed at the cabin where he had the run of the mountain.

“
Not today, boy,” I said and handed him a dried pig’s ear. The big dog chomped on it delightedly and made his way to the front porch, apparently appeased.

It was a fifteen-minute drive to the McCollough’s trailer, so I’d probably be right on time. I didn’t worry about being a couple of minutes late, though. Moosey would have been on the front porch waiting for me since the sun came up. It was foggy and a little chilly at six in the morning, but the weatherman had promised a beautiful seventy-degree day with just a few clouds. I figured he might get lucky. I started the old truck and slipped a CD into the player—just about the only thing that was up-to-date on this dinosaur. The Chevy had no power steering, power brakes, power windows, power door-locks, fuel injection, air conditioning or computer chips. I also suspected it had no springs in the seats or shocks to speak of, and a family of mice was living in the air cleaner. The sound system was top-notch though, and I was treated to the sounds of Anton Bruckner’s
Te Deum
sung by the Berlin Philharmonic Chorus. I knew the text well enough that, even though my Latin was as rusty as the tailgate latches on the truck, I had no trouble being drawn in by the poetry as well as the music.

Te Deum laudamus: te Dominum confitemur.

We praise you O God: We acknowledge you to be the Lord.

The
Te Deum
was heading into the fourth movement as I pulled into Ardine McCollough’s drive. Moosey, as I expected, was sitting on the edge of the porch, his chin in his hands, tapping his tennis shoes on the dusty ground. He had his old cane pole wedged upright against the porch post, and as soon as he saw me, he stopped counting the ants (or whatever was consuming his interest at the moment), grabbed the pole and ran toward the truck.

“
Hey there,” I said. “You ready to catch some fish?”

“
You bet!” exclaimed Moosey. “Hey, can I ride in the back?”

“
No, you may not. Put your pole back there though unless you want to use one of the rods I brought.”

“
Can I?”

“
Sure. Do I need to tell your mother we’re leaving?”

“
Nah,” said Moosey, leaning his cane pole back against the porch. “I’ll tell her. She’s prob’ly still in her drawers.”

“
Go tell her then.”

Moosey disappeared into the trailer and banged out of the door a minute later carrying a large coffee can.

“
Almost forgot our worms,” he said. “I’ve been keeping them in the fridge, but Mom says she’ll be glad to see ‘em go. She says they’ve been causing a racket.”

“
Really,” I said. “I didn’t know worms carried on so.”

“
It weren’t the worms so much. Pauli Girl reached in there to get some coffee.”

“
I see.”

“
She screamed for about a minute, and now she won’t go near the fridge.” Moosey’s ears perked up. “Hey, what’s that music?”

“
That is the
Te Deum
of Anton Bruckner for chorus, orchestra and organ.”