Double blast, p.26
Double Blast, page 26
It was six o’clock in the morning when Bex and Quinn settled down enough to sit down. With their father. They, along with everyone else near and far, took to the streets at four in the morning to watch the spectacular fireworks blunder, except my family had taken to an attic window. My sister wouldn’t let the girls or my grandmother leave the house. “And Junebug,” she said, “slept through it all.”
The baby was still asleep. In Bradley’s arms. And I was way too tired to tackle the Junebug business.
“Where’s Eugenia?” Meredith asked.
“Probably asleep.”
“Where’s Courtney?”
“Probably the same.”
“Where’s Florida?”
Any other time I would have said, “On the other side of the state line,” but I said, “I’m sure she’s asleep too.”
“Now, what’s this about a coin?” Meredith was perched on the double vanity between the two small sinks, yelling at me as I finally took a shower already. “They were looking for a coin? Did they find it?”
I poked my soapy head out of the shower to tell her that not only were the prison escapees’ denials of finding the coin credible, as credible as a felon’s denial could be, we’d wanded them to death with a metal detector only hitting on belt buckles and prison dental work.
“And you believe them?” Meredith asked.
I poked my soapy head out again. “Meredith, if you separate three criminals and question them individually, at least one is going to turn on the other two. Every time. And I’m beginning to think the coin is long gone if there ever was a coin to begin with.”
“Get back in the shower,” my sister said. “You’re dripping mud on my floor. Now, what’s this about Eugenia?”
I yelled the story from under the hot spray.
“Davis, you have to be making this up.”
I stuck my head out of the shower again. “Who could make that up?”
And just to get Meredith going again, insisting that I’d hallucinated every Eugenia word, at seven that morning, while we sat on The Front Porch steps with hot mugs of coffee, Eugenia Winters Stone and her Women’s Society friends marched down Main Street ready to flip Memorial Day pancakes. Eugenia was dressed in her Talbots finest red, white, and blue. With her right arm resting in an American flag scarf sling.
Ah, recoil. Thy name is Eugenia.
She slowed in front of us.
“Davis.”
“Eugenia.”
“Meredith.”
“Good morning, Eugenia,” Meredith said. “What’s wrong with your arm?”
“A touch of bursitis.” She turned to me. “How are you this fine morning?”
“I’m well, Eugenia. Your touch of bursitis notwithstanding, how are you?”
“Other than the rude interruption of the premature fireworks display that was nothing short of a massive explosion disturbing me at such an ungodly hour, which your father would’ve never let happen, I’m looking forward to a lovely small stack of blueberry pancakes.”
She barely winked at me.
When the women were out of earshot, Meredith said, “I knew you made all that up.”
“What I need is to get up.” I sat my coffee mug down and slapped my knees. “And open the police station.”
“I’d hang a Gone Fishing sign if I were you.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Daddy would never forgive me, because it’s go time. Our Memorial Day Celebration is here. People are starting to pour in for pancakes. The street fair vendors are setting up. We need police presence.”
“No one needs police presence to eat pancakes or buy light-up necklaces, Davis.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll open the station and get a nap in the jail cell.”
Five quiet minutes later and I had yet to move a muscle. Meredith grabbed my arm. “Davis?”
“Hmm?” Sleep was barreling toward me.
“What about Eddie?”
Sleep stopped, waved bye, and sprinted the other way.
We ran, with me bringing up the rear, because I was wearing clean shoes of Meredith’s that were a size and a half too big. The last time I’d been anywhere near the bank was when Roy Howdy and I were tracking wax. It was still dark then, the fog had firework smoke reinforcement, our heads were down, our eyes trained on the beams of the flashlights, and as soon as we passed the back of the dark bank—which, honestly, didn’t even register at the time—the missing Bellissimo eighteen-wheeler had commanded all our attention. Hours later, in the light of a new day, I saw what I’d missed behind a willow tree. Eddie the Insane had managed to beat a two-foot-tall and two-foot-wide square opening into the back wall of the vault.
I dove in up to my waist, blocking daylight and plunging myself into semi-darkness. I wrangled an arm out. “Give me your phone.”
It landed in my hand. “Is he in there?” she whispered. “Is he dead?”
Shining the beam of the flashlight around the room as far as the light would reach, I didn’t see Eddie. More than that, my skin wasn’t crawling. So I knew he wasn’t there. Odd furniture that might have been placed in somewhat of an orderly fashion the day before was strewn about, piled haphazardly, and mostly demolished. Legs were broken off small tables, a dresser was missing its drawers, and a mirror had been pulverized for its metal framework.
Seven years of bad luck for Eddie.
Boxes that had probably been full had been emptied. Clothes were strewn everywhere. A stretch of old safe-deposit boxes had been ripped from the wall, then mutilated. But the most interesting was an inset on my left that looked like a small utility room. From my vantage point, I could only see a blue pedestal sink. Scattered with what looked like white rocks. White rocks of wax. Marcus Flash had been there. How had we missed it earlier? Because he’d picked up his waxy trail right where he left off after his detour to the vault on his way to the eighteen-wheeler. We hadn’t seen where he’d veered off the path in the dark. He’d probably hidden in the vault until the chaos of the emergency vehicles gave him enough cover to make his getaway.
So where was Eddie?
Eddie the Idiot was probably driving the eighteen-wheeler.
But that wasn’t the worst news.
The worst news was, Flash wouldn’t have passed up an opportunity to rob the bank.
I shouted over my shoulder. “Meredith!”
She smacked me. “I’m right here. Don’t yell.”
“I think the bank’s been robbed.”
“AGAIN? Davis, Daddy’s going to disown you.”
By then, I was stuck. I couldn’t twist my arms back through the opening far enough to push myself out. Meredith pulled me out by my legs.
I dusted myself off and poked through the contacts on her phone. “You don’t have Courtney’s number?”
“Why would I have Courtney’s number?”
I found Roy Howdy’s. “It’s Davis. I need Courtney’s phone number. Right now.”
“Davis, I was up all night.” Like I didn’t know. “I’m trying to sleep till the pancakes are ready.”
“The number, Roy Howdy.”
He gave me Courtney’s phone number.
“Say, Davis, do you know if we’re having bacon at the pancake breakfast? Last year it was just sausage. And not sausage patties. The link kind. Me and sausage links ain’t friends.”
I hung up on him and dialed Courtney’s number.
“What?”
I might lose my mind. “Roy Howdy? Are you at Courtney’s?”
“Yes. My place is a big mess.”
Another tidbit he was sharing as if I didn’t know.
“When I asked for Courtney’s number, you could have just—” There was no reason to waste my breath. “Let me speak to Courtney.”
“She’s sleeping. She was up all night too.”
Someone save me.
“Roy Howdy—” It was a threat.
“Alright, alright, hold on.”
When I finally had Courtney on the line, I asked for the security code to the bank’s front door keypad. She said, “I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Courtney—” Another threat.
“Nineteen-nineteen. Okay?”
Roy Howdy and Courtney were a match made in May-December romance heaven.
Everything inside the bank looked exactly like it had the last time I’d seen it—Courtney’s teller drawer wasn’t in broken pieces on the ground, Fiona’s desk hadn’t been touched, and the small locked door in her office where the real money was hadn’t been tampered with. Nothing about the bank said, “I’ve been robbed!”
Relief, relief, relief.
But it also meant any evidence left by Marcus Flash was inside the vault. And short of taking a wrecking ball to exterior wall, I didn’t have access. The problem was the grandfather clock. It was in the way, and it wasn’t going anywhere. Tipping it over to block the door was one thing. Standing it up to gain access would be quite another. So I sat down where I stood. In the middle of the lobby. Flopped down might be more like it.
“Davis, honey,” my sister sat down beside me, “go to Mother and Daddy’s. Climb in bed. Get a few hours of sleep. We’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t think you understand what all I’m up against, Meredith.”
“Yes, I do.” She lobbed an arm across my shoulders and pulled me in. “You’re up against our Memorial Day Celebration. We have a pancake breakfast to get to, then we have the street fair to go to, then we’ll spend the rest of the day getting ready for—”
I picked up where she left off. “—the chicken wing competition that isn’t happening.” I hauled myself up.
“Where are you going?”
Crazy, was where I was going. “I’m going to the police station to put out an APB letting everyone chasing Marcus Flash know that he probably has a passenger. Then I’m sending Granny to the police station to man the desk and answer the phone for a few hours. Because I’m taking your advice. I’m going to lay down before I fall down.”
“Davis, Granny is at her casino. Baylor and the men who came with him are helping her set everything up.”
I’d forgotten all about the casino in the Fellowship Hall at the Baptist church.
“Did you hear what they found when they unpacked the slot machines?”
I threw my hands in the air. “Dead bodies?”
“Silver dollars! The slot machines pay silver dollars! Baylor says they’re uncirculated, so anyone who wins one silver dollar is really winning twenty-five dollars.”
I stared at her, blank-faced—I couldn’t take anymore—and turned for the door.
“Wait!” She ran after me. “Don’t leave me here by myself!”
On the street, she peeled off at The Front Porch. “Why don’t I check on Bradley and the kiddos? I’ll let them know you need a little...quiet time.”
I nodded.
Somehow my leaden legs made it to Town Square. There were hundreds of people at picnic tables with plates piled high with pancakes. I went straight through the middle to the large tent with four flat-top griddles on the left, condiments and drinks on a long table on the right, and in the middle, huge portraits of Wilcox County’s three fallen soldiers on easels. Eugenia was standing beside Eli Atwell’s image in deep conversation with two women I didn’t know. I tapped her shoulder. Her good shoulder.
“Davis?”
“Could you take over for me at the police station for a few hours?”
She smiled at the two women. “Could you excuse us?” They scattered, and she turned back to me. “Certainly.”
“No funny stuff, Eugenia. I mean it.”
She nodded. “Understood.”
“Do I need to define funny stuff?”
“You do not.”
I turned to slink away, but Pine Apple’s finest hour, full of laughter, energy, and the retelling of the fireworks fiasco at every other banquet table draped in red, white, and blue, stopped me. I turned back around. “Eugenia?”
“Davis?”
“Get the word out. We’re having a potato salad competition tomorrow.”
“Of course.”
At the edge of Town Square, I heard the squeals of delight as she shared the news with her devoted Women’s Society followers. I made it to the police station where I unlocked the door for Eugenia and kept going. I don’t remember the two-block walk to my parents’ house, but I do remember seeing them. My mother was standing in the middle of her dirt yard with her mouth wide open. She saw me and started screaming. “Davis Way! WHY IS MY YARD IN THE DRIVEWAY?” I said, “Mother, you’d better get to the kitchen. The potato salad business is back on.” My father let me get to the mailbox before he said, “Sweet Pea? Are you okay?” I said, “Is it really Tuesday already?” Then I saw Bea Crawford rounding the car laden with enough overstuffed mismatched luggage for a six-month cruise. “Oh, hey, Bea,” I said. “You have a grandson. Fiona Simmons is his mother. They’re inside.” I didn’t turn to look on my way in the door, but it sounded like she’d dropped six months’ worth of overstuffed mismatched luggage.
Nope.
She’d passed out.
Inside the front door I found a ghastly pale Fiona with her hands on Cole’s shoulders. “What do I do, Davis?” she whispered.
I passed her on my way to bed. “Take your son outside to meet his grandmother.”
TWENTY-NINE
My husband woke me seven hours later with the glorious Biloxi news that Butch and Boofie Bartlett had dropped their lawsuit against Fantasy. Something about Butch not having a permit for the gun he sent his eighteen-year-old son into the Bellissimo with, plus all the other parents filing Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor charges against him. Somewhere in all the media frenzy and scrutiny, his partner in the drywall business got spooked and turned himself in for tax evasion, which was, in effect, turning in Butch too. The Bellissimo internal and police investigations of Fantasy’s role in the dustup were still open and in progress. The Bellissimo was still mad at having to swap out the controversial Tesla in the middle of the casino floor, but the huge expense of a defense attorney and the ordeal of a long-drawn-out trial wasn’t going to happen.
“So she’s back at work?”
“I didn’t say that.”
There was a knuckle on the open door.
It was my father.
“Sweet Pea?”
“Hi, Daddy.”
He said, “You missed the pancakes.”
Bradley kissed the top of my head. “I’ll let you two talk.”
Daddy pulled out the desk chair I used to sit in to memorize spelling words. I took the furry vanity stool where I’d learned to—mouth all the way open—poke myself in the eye with a mascara wand.
Daddy kicked things off with, “Who picked red?”
“What?”
“The police station door. Who decided to paint the door red?”
And the thin father ice I’d been skating on turned to solid ground.
“Why did you tell me you’d be home Tuesday?” I asked.
“You must not have read my entire message. I said I’d be home Tuesday unless the charges against Bea were dropped. I went on to say if the charges were dropped, we’d be on the first flight home. Which we were. We left Buffalo at six thirty yesterday evening, landed in Atlanta at nine, retrieved your mother’s car from long-term parking, got on the road, stopped and rented hotel rooms in LaGrange, Georgia, slept, then drove the rest of the way early this morning.”
“Canada let her go?”
“She wore them down, Sweet Pea.”
Bea could wear down The Supreme Court.
“The authorities confiscated her souvenirs, she’s never to set foot in Canada again, and she’s landed herself on an international travel watchlist which will most likely prevent her from ever acquiring a passport. Although I’m not so sure she’ll ever want to leave Pine Apple again. So all in all, she received a slap on the wrist considering what she put everyone through.” He sat back. “And for the record, I tried to call you repeatedly. On the way to the airport in Buffalo, again when we landed in Atlanta, and even this morning.”
“I lost my phone.”
“Ah.” He sat back. “So, what all have I missed?”
I laughed.
“Davis.” He leaned forward in his seat, elbows on knees, and let me know important news was on the way. “Eddie ran the confiscated eighteen-wheeler off the road in Fort Deposit.”
I knew they wouldn’t get far. Fort Deposit was another small Alabama town north of Greenville. Larger than Pine Apple, for sure, but not a metropolis. “What about Marcus Flash?”
“When the authorities arrived at the scene, they found Marcus Flash unconscious on the floorboard of the cab. He was apprehended, and he’s currently at Regional in Greenville being treated for second-degree burns covering most of his torso in addition to a thorough truck beating.”
I raised an eyebrow. “A truck beating?”
“Eddie’s never driven an eighteen-wheeler,” he said, “and his passenger wasn’t buckled in. Apparently, Eddie took the curves pretty hard and found the brakes tricky. Marcus Flash almost went through the windshield.”
“So he’s in custody? Handcuffed to a hospital bed?”
“And shackled,” Daddy said. “With officers posted at the door.”
“Really? Do they think a banged-up man with second-degree burns is going to chew through the shackles?”
“No,” Daddy said. “But there was a small problem.”
I raised both eyebrows that time.
“Or maybe I should say there was a large problem.”
My eyebrows stayed where they were.
“Bea.”
“What?”
He told me Bea called Eddie to break the glorious news—she was a grandmother. He congratulated her with breaking news of his own—he was a father. He went on to tell her he was being held for questioning by the Alabama Bureau of Investigation concerning his road trip with Marcus Flash. Then told her he’d been imprisoned at Pine Apple Bank & Trust before being kidnapped by a human candle with a buzzcut. Bea immediately drove to Greenville and busted Eddie out with, “I watch Blues Bloods. Either charge him or let him loose.” She and Eddie went straight to Regional Hospital so she could have a word with the buzzcut human candle about treating a new father so poorly. Hospital security called it in to the police, saying Bea was posing a threat to one of their patients, when we could have told them to give her a minute, because Bea posed a bigger threat to herself than anyone else.
The baby was still asleep. In Bradley’s arms. And I was way too tired to tackle the Junebug business.
“Where’s Eugenia?” Meredith asked.
“Probably asleep.”
“Where’s Courtney?”
“Probably the same.”
“Where’s Florida?”
Any other time I would have said, “On the other side of the state line,” but I said, “I’m sure she’s asleep too.”
“Now, what’s this about a coin?” Meredith was perched on the double vanity between the two small sinks, yelling at me as I finally took a shower already. “They were looking for a coin? Did they find it?”
I poked my soapy head out of the shower to tell her that not only were the prison escapees’ denials of finding the coin credible, as credible as a felon’s denial could be, we’d wanded them to death with a metal detector only hitting on belt buckles and prison dental work.
“And you believe them?” Meredith asked.
I poked my soapy head out again. “Meredith, if you separate three criminals and question them individually, at least one is going to turn on the other two. Every time. And I’m beginning to think the coin is long gone if there ever was a coin to begin with.”
“Get back in the shower,” my sister said. “You’re dripping mud on my floor. Now, what’s this about Eugenia?”
I yelled the story from under the hot spray.
“Davis, you have to be making this up.”
I stuck my head out of the shower again. “Who could make that up?”
And just to get Meredith going again, insisting that I’d hallucinated every Eugenia word, at seven that morning, while we sat on The Front Porch steps with hot mugs of coffee, Eugenia Winters Stone and her Women’s Society friends marched down Main Street ready to flip Memorial Day pancakes. Eugenia was dressed in her Talbots finest red, white, and blue. With her right arm resting in an American flag scarf sling.
Ah, recoil. Thy name is Eugenia.
She slowed in front of us.
“Davis.”
“Eugenia.”
“Meredith.”
“Good morning, Eugenia,” Meredith said. “What’s wrong with your arm?”
“A touch of bursitis.” She turned to me. “How are you this fine morning?”
“I’m well, Eugenia. Your touch of bursitis notwithstanding, how are you?”
“Other than the rude interruption of the premature fireworks display that was nothing short of a massive explosion disturbing me at such an ungodly hour, which your father would’ve never let happen, I’m looking forward to a lovely small stack of blueberry pancakes.”
She barely winked at me.
When the women were out of earshot, Meredith said, “I knew you made all that up.”
“What I need is to get up.” I sat my coffee mug down and slapped my knees. “And open the police station.”
“I’d hang a Gone Fishing sign if I were you.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Daddy would never forgive me, because it’s go time. Our Memorial Day Celebration is here. People are starting to pour in for pancakes. The street fair vendors are setting up. We need police presence.”
“No one needs police presence to eat pancakes or buy light-up necklaces, Davis.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll open the station and get a nap in the jail cell.”
Five quiet minutes later and I had yet to move a muscle. Meredith grabbed my arm. “Davis?”
“Hmm?” Sleep was barreling toward me.
“What about Eddie?”
Sleep stopped, waved bye, and sprinted the other way.
We ran, with me bringing up the rear, because I was wearing clean shoes of Meredith’s that were a size and a half too big. The last time I’d been anywhere near the bank was when Roy Howdy and I were tracking wax. It was still dark then, the fog had firework smoke reinforcement, our heads were down, our eyes trained on the beams of the flashlights, and as soon as we passed the back of the dark bank—which, honestly, didn’t even register at the time—the missing Bellissimo eighteen-wheeler had commanded all our attention. Hours later, in the light of a new day, I saw what I’d missed behind a willow tree. Eddie the Insane had managed to beat a two-foot-tall and two-foot-wide square opening into the back wall of the vault.
I dove in up to my waist, blocking daylight and plunging myself into semi-darkness. I wrangled an arm out. “Give me your phone.”
It landed in my hand. “Is he in there?” she whispered. “Is he dead?”
Shining the beam of the flashlight around the room as far as the light would reach, I didn’t see Eddie. More than that, my skin wasn’t crawling. So I knew he wasn’t there. Odd furniture that might have been placed in somewhat of an orderly fashion the day before was strewn about, piled haphazardly, and mostly demolished. Legs were broken off small tables, a dresser was missing its drawers, and a mirror had been pulverized for its metal framework.
Seven years of bad luck for Eddie.
Boxes that had probably been full had been emptied. Clothes were strewn everywhere. A stretch of old safe-deposit boxes had been ripped from the wall, then mutilated. But the most interesting was an inset on my left that looked like a small utility room. From my vantage point, I could only see a blue pedestal sink. Scattered with what looked like white rocks. White rocks of wax. Marcus Flash had been there. How had we missed it earlier? Because he’d picked up his waxy trail right where he left off after his detour to the vault on his way to the eighteen-wheeler. We hadn’t seen where he’d veered off the path in the dark. He’d probably hidden in the vault until the chaos of the emergency vehicles gave him enough cover to make his getaway.
So where was Eddie?
Eddie the Idiot was probably driving the eighteen-wheeler.
But that wasn’t the worst news.
The worst news was, Flash wouldn’t have passed up an opportunity to rob the bank.
I shouted over my shoulder. “Meredith!”
She smacked me. “I’m right here. Don’t yell.”
“I think the bank’s been robbed.”
“AGAIN? Davis, Daddy’s going to disown you.”
By then, I was stuck. I couldn’t twist my arms back through the opening far enough to push myself out. Meredith pulled me out by my legs.
I dusted myself off and poked through the contacts on her phone. “You don’t have Courtney’s number?”
“Why would I have Courtney’s number?”
I found Roy Howdy’s. “It’s Davis. I need Courtney’s phone number. Right now.”
“Davis, I was up all night.” Like I didn’t know. “I’m trying to sleep till the pancakes are ready.”
“The number, Roy Howdy.”
He gave me Courtney’s phone number.
“Say, Davis, do you know if we’re having bacon at the pancake breakfast? Last year it was just sausage. And not sausage patties. The link kind. Me and sausage links ain’t friends.”
I hung up on him and dialed Courtney’s number.
“What?”
I might lose my mind. “Roy Howdy? Are you at Courtney’s?”
“Yes. My place is a big mess.”
Another tidbit he was sharing as if I didn’t know.
“When I asked for Courtney’s number, you could have just—” There was no reason to waste my breath. “Let me speak to Courtney.”
“She’s sleeping. She was up all night too.”
Someone save me.
“Roy Howdy—” It was a threat.
“Alright, alright, hold on.”
When I finally had Courtney on the line, I asked for the security code to the bank’s front door keypad. She said, “I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Courtney—” Another threat.
“Nineteen-nineteen. Okay?”
Roy Howdy and Courtney were a match made in May-December romance heaven.
Everything inside the bank looked exactly like it had the last time I’d seen it—Courtney’s teller drawer wasn’t in broken pieces on the ground, Fiona’s desk hadn’t been touched, and the small locked door in her office where the real money was hadn’t been tampered with. Nothing about the bank said, “I’ve been robbed!”
Relief, relief, relief.
But it also meant any evidence left by Marcus Flash was inside the vault. And short of taking a wrecking ball to exterior wall, I didn’t have access. The problem was the grandfather clock. It was in the way, and it wasn’t going anywhere. Tipping it over to block the door was one thing. Standing it up to gain access would be quite another. So I sat down where I stood. In the middle of the lobby. Flopped down might be more like it.
“Davis, honey,” my sister sat down beside me, “go to Mother and Daddy’s. Climb in bed. Get a few hours of sleep. We’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t think you understand what all I’m up against, Meredith.”
“Yes, I do.” She lobbed an arm across my shoulders and pulled me in. “You’re up against our Memorial Day Celebration. We have a pancake breakfast to get to, then we have the street fair to go to, then we’ll spend the rest of the day getting ready for—”
I picked up where she left off. “—the chicken wing competition that isn’t happening.” I hauled myself up.
“Where are you going?”
Crazy, was where I was going. “I’m going to the police station to put out an APB letting everyone chasing Marcus Flash know that he probably has a passenger. Then I’m sending Granny to the police station to man the desk and answer the phone for a few hours. Because I’m taking your advice. I’m going to lay down before I fall down.”
“Davis, Granny is at her casino. Baylor and the men who came with him are helping her set everything up.”
I’d forgotten all about the casino in the Fellowship Hall at the Baptist church.
“Did you hear what they found when they unpacked the slot machines?”
I threw my hands in the air. “Dead bodies?”
“Silver dollars! The slot machines pay silver dollars! Baylor says they’re uncirculated, so anyone who wins one silver dollar is really winning twenty-five dollars.”
I stared at her, blank-faced—I couldn’t take anymore—and turned for the door.
“Wait!” She ran after me. “Don’t leave me here by myself!”
On the street, she peeled off at The Front Porch. “Why don’t I check on Bradley and the kiddos? I’ll let them know you need a little...quiet time.”
I nodded.
Somehow my leaden legs made it to Town Square. There were hundreds of people at picnic tables with plates piled high with pancakes. I went straight through the middle to the large tent with four flat-top griddles on the left, condiments and drinks on a long table on the right, and in the middle, huge portraits of Wilcox County’s three fallen soldiers on easels. Eugenia was standing beside Eli Atwell’s image in deep conversation with two women I didn’t know. I tapped her shoulder. Her good shoulder.
“Davis?”
“Could you take over for me at the police station for a few hours?”
She smiled at the two women. “Could you excuse us?” They scattered, and she turned back to me. “Certainly.”
“No funny stuff, Eugenia. I mean it.”
She nodded. “Understood.”
“Do I need to define funny stuff?”
“You do not.”
I turned to slink away, but Pine Apple’s finest hour, full of laughter, energy, and the retelling of the fireworks fiasco at every other banquet table draped in red, white, and blue, stopped me. I turned back around. “Eugenia?”
“Davis?”
“Get the word out. We’re having a potato salad competition tomorrow.”
“Of course.”
At the edge of Town Square, I heard the squeals of delight as she shared the news with her devoted Women’s Society followers. I made it to the police station where I unlocked the door for Eugenia and kept going. I don’t remember the two-block walk to my parents’ house, but I do remember seeing them. My mother was standing in the middle of her dirt yard with her mouth wide open. She saw me and started screaming. “Davis Way! WHY IS MY YARD IN THE DRIVEWAY?” I said, “Mother, you’d better get to the kitchen. The potato salad business is back on.” My father let me get to the mailbox before he said, “Sweet Pea? Are you okay?” I said, “Is it really Tuesday already?” Then I saw Bea Crawford rounding the car laden with enough overstuffed mismatched luggage for a six-month cruise. “Oh, hey, Bea,” I said. “You have a grandson. Fiona Simmons is his mother. They’re inside.” I didn’t turn to look on my way in the door, but it sounded like she’d dropped six months’ worth of overstuffed mismatched luggage.
Nope.
She’d passed out.
Inside the front door I found a ghastly pale Fiona with her hands on Cole’s shoulders. “What do I do, Davis?” she whispered.
I passed her on my way to bed. “Take your son outside to meet his grandmother.”
TWENTY-NINE
My husband woke me seven hours later with the glorious Biloxi news that Butch and Boofie Bartlett had dropped their lawsuit against Fantasy. Something about Butch not having a permit for the gun he sent his eighteen-year-old son into the Bellissimo with, plus all the other parents filing Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor charges against him. Somewhere in all the media frenzy and scrutiny, his partner in the drywall business got spooked and turned himself in for tax evasion, which was, in effect, turning in Butch too. The Bellissimo internal and police investigations of Fantasy’s role in the dustup were still open and in progress. The Bellissimo was still mad at having to swap out the controversial Tesla in the middle of the casino floor, but the huge expense of a defense attorney and the ordeal of a long-drawn-out trial wasn’t going to happen.
“So she’s back at work?”
“I didn’t say that.”
There was a knuckle on the open door.
It was my father.
“Sweet Pea?”
“Hi, Daddy.”
He said, “You missed the pancakes.”
Bradley kissed the top of my head. “I’ll let you two talk.”
Daddy pulled out the desk chair I used to sit in to memorize spelling words. I took the furry vanity stool where I’d learned to—mouth all the way open—poke myself in the eye with a mascara wand.
Daddy kicked things off with, “Who picked red?”
“What?”
“The police station door. Who decided to paint the door red?”
And the thin father ice I’d been skating on turned to solid ground.
“Why did you tell me you’d be home Tuesday?” I asked.
“You must not have read my entire message. I said I’d be home Tuesday unless the charges against Bea were dropped. I went on to say if the charges were dropped, we’d be on the first flight home. Which we were. We left Buffalo at six thirty yesterday evening, landed in Atlanta at nine, retrieved your mother’s car from long-term parking, got on the road, stopped and rented hotel rooms in LaGrange, Georgia, slept, then drove the rest of the way early this morning.”
“Canada let her go?”
“She wore them down, Sweet Pea.”
Bea could wear down The Supreme Court.
“The authorities confiscated her souvenirs, she’s never to set foot in Canada again, and she’s landed herself on an international travel watchlist which will most likely prevent her from ever acquiring a passport. Although I’m not so sure she’ll ever want to leave Pine Apple again. So all in all, she received a slap on the wrist considering what she put everyone through.” He sat back. “And for the record, I tried to call you repeatedly. On the way to the airport in Buffalo, again when we landed in Atlanta, and even this morning.”
“I lost my phone.”
“Ah.” He sat back. “So, what all have I missed?”
I laughed.
“Davis.” He leaned forward in his seat, elbows on knees, and let me know important news was on the way. “Eddie ran the confiscated eighteen-wheeler off the road in Fort Deposit.”
I knew they wouldn’t get far. Fort Deposit was another small Alabama town north of Greenville. Larger than Pine Apple, for sure, but not a metropolis. “What about Marcus Flash?”
“When the authorities arrived at the scene, they found Marcus Flash unconscious on the floorboard of the cab. He was apprehended, and he’s currently at Regional in Greenville being treated for second-degree burns covering most of his torso in addition to a thorough truck beating.”
I raised an eyebrow. “A truck beating?”
“Eddie’s never driven an eighteen-wheeler,” he said, “and his passenger wasn’t buckled in. Apparently, Eddie took the curves pretty hard and found the brakes tricky. Marcus Flash almost went through the windshield.”
“So he’s in custody? Handcuffed to a hospital bed?”
“And shackled,” Daddy said. “With officers posted at the door.”
“Really? Do they think a banged-up man with second-degree burns is going to chew through the shackles?”
“No,” Daddy said. “But there was a small problem.”
I raised both eyebrows that time.
“Or maybe I should say there was a large problem.”
My eyebrows stayed where they were.
“Bea.”
“What?”
He told me Bea called Eddie to break the glorious news—she was a grandmother. He congratulated her with breaking news of his own—he was a father. He went on to tell her he was being held for questioning by the Alabama Bureau of Investigation concerning his road trip with Marcus Flash. Then told her he’d been imprisoned at Pine Apple Bank & Trust before being kidnapped by a human candle with a buzzcut. Bea immediately drove to Greenville and busted Eddie out with, “I watch Blues Bloods. Either charge him or let him loose.” She and Eddie went straight to Regional Hospital so she could have a word with the buzzcut human candle about treating a new father so poorly. Hospital security called it in to the police, saying Bea was posing a threat to one of their patients, when we could have told them to give her a minute, because Bea posed a bigger threat to herself than anyone else.
