Chapter Eight
Hours later, my cupcake lunch had worn off. After studying those ledger photos, I was ready for dinner. Gram ate dinner at six. She said five was too early and seven was ridiculous, so exactly six. If you weren’t there, you didn’t eat . . . and may the lord help you if you complained about what was on the menu. Never argue with the person cooking the meal.
Five minutes until mealtime.
The intoxicating smell of roasting pork hit me before I walked through the doorway to the kitchen. Someone had already prepared the table. Four place mats and four sets of dishes. A bounty of barbecued pulled pork, cheese grits, and green beans in their respective serving dishes.
That combo could only mean one thing: Jackson was coming to dinner. He loved this meal.
Lawyers ate at six? That didn’t sound right.
Before I could ask, he walked in with a perfect, smooth stride. All businesslike in his dark suit. A different dark suit from the one he wore yesterday. One that fit him like he was born in it.
He kissed Gram where she stood next to the refrigerator and Celia as she sat down at one end of the table. He stopped and looked at me with fake surprise. “You’re still here.”
I could play this game, too. “Is this what time you eat lunch?”
Celia clearly thought it was a real question and not a snide comeback because she answered, “He joins us for dinner at least once a week.”
“What a good boy.”
Celia might not catch my sarcasm, but Jackson would.
He winked as he took off his suit jacket. “I’m a boy who enjoys great food and knows what time it’s served around here.”
Some things never changed, including Gram’s pulled pork recipe. See, this was Carolina barbecue. That meant slow roasted with vinegar and spices. None of that inferior sweet tomato barbecue nonsense touted by other states. This was shredded and tender, and in our house served without a roll because that’s how Jackson preferred it.
“He goes back to work after he eats, but he thinks we don’t know,”
Gram said as she set the sweet tea pitcher on the table. “He works too much.”
Even I had to admit the way Jackson kept up with the ladies was kind of sweet. He checked in. They fed him. It sounded like the perfect relationship to me.
“Did you hear Cash died?”
Jackson asked.
What a way to start a meal. He could have at least let me fill my plate first. “That was a bit dramatic.”
He shrugged. “I walked in, sat down, and started a conversation.”
He also managed to bring dinner to a crashing halt before it even started, which I did not appreciate at all. “My description stands.”
“When?”
Gram put the platter of pork down instead of passing it. “I hadn’t heard anything.”
Celia shook her head. “What a shock.”
Celia didn’t sound all that shocked or sad. Her voice stayed steady, almost without emotion. Gram sounded the same. Neither asked a basic question. Like, How did Cash die? The look that passed between them was . . . well, weird.
I needed to keep up my end of the discussion and that required more information. “Is Cash a horse, a dog, or a person?”
Jackson almost smiled but buried it in time. “A person. Cash Burns.”
Huh. Not any clearer but strangely familiar. “That’s his actual name?”
Gram stared at me with that you know better expression of hers. “Cash is a good Southern name.”
Interesting that the name thing is what bothered her and not me being flippant about this man’s death. I didn’t know how to respond, so I skipped ahead, hoping Jackson would cough up more intel. “Was he a friend of yours?”
“He and Dad were close. They met up for golf and talked politics.”
Jackson took a sip of tea before continuing. “You knew him.”
“Did we go to high school together or something? Because I can only remember the names of people I didn’t like. Those are seared into my brain.”
Speaking of which . . . “Whatever happened to that Brandy chick? The one with red hair. Does she still live around here because I have some unresolved issues with her.”
“Cash Burns, or his household, is a client of ours,”
Celia said before sneaking another peek at Gram.
“He’s the father from the tennis club incident.”
Jackson broke the food logjam and reached for the grits. “At Christmas.”
Oh, damn. That guy. “The rich dad who yelled at me for outing his son as a creep?”
Jackson moved on to the pork serving dish and filled half of his plate. “Same one.”
“I only met the guy once.”
It was probably wrong to ask if his rotten son did it, so I tried more nuance. “Heart attack?”
“That’s not clear. It happened yesterday and was the talk of the courthouse all day. He was only fifty-six.”
Jackson moved on to the green beans, not letting a little discussion about death impact his appetite. “Some people are suggesting poison.”
Celia dropped her fork.
Gram did a cough-spit while drinking her tea. “Wait, who is saying that? I’m sure it was health related.”
She was on the verge of gagging and demanded more details. I noticed what wasn’t happening. They still weren’t asking the obvious questions. Like why would anyone think that? Jackson jumped from saying a guy died to talking about poison and no one but me seemed to think that sounded like a big leap.
This whole conversation confused the crap out of me. “Is that something the police would know already? Unless he was holding a bottle of poison when they found him . . . wait, was he?”
“Something at the scene—and I don’t know what yet, so don’t ask—tipped off the police and started the rumor. They’re talking to his wife.”
Jackson hesitated before taking his first bite. “And to Austin, Cash’s son.”
Austin Burns. So that was the creeper’s name. I could see his face. His snotty, irritating, creepy face. Forget nuance, time to ask the million-dollar question. “Did he do it?”
“Kasey.”
Celia’s voice was back to full volume now. “That’s not appropriate.”
“Why would his son kill him?”
Gram said.
Jackson shrugged. “Is it such a stretch? Cash was not a nice man in business or in his personal life. He had enemies. He and Abigail had—”
“Wait . . .”
The name finally clicked. “Abigail Burns?”
That’s how I knew the last name. I’d read it. I’d studied it and her banana cream pie purchase.
“Yes. That’s Cash’s wife.”
Celia put a comforting hand on my arm. “Do you know her, honey? I wouldn’t think so.”
“No.”
But I remembered Abigail Burns and the star in the delivery ledger.
It probably meant nothing . . . or it could be something. Hard to tell because Gram wasn’t talking. She sat there, tight-lipped and rigid. She looked everywhere—around the room, over at the stove, at the pile of pork on Jackson’s plate. Everywhere except at me.
That couldn’t be good.
“I get that he was a jerk, but that doesn’t mean his wife poisoned him.”
I mean, the guy had been awful during my one experience with him, but I didn’t wish death on people. Not without more information.
“I’m guessing we’ll hear details over the next few days. The Burns’s house is being searched. That and his office.”
Jackson scooped up a forkful of grits and swallowed before talking again. “It sucks for Abigail because people will jump to conclusions.”
The weirdness of the conversation shifted into overdrive. I didn’t know what unspoken conversation jumped between Gram and Celia but tension choked the room. The ladies looked like they wanted to bolt from the table.
Not Jackson. He kept eating.
The strange behavior. The secrets. The locked cabinet. The star in the ledger beside Abigail’s name. The timing of the pie delivery. The reaction to the poison talk—on steroids at some points and suspiciously unsurprised at others. The pieces probably didn’t fit together into a complete picture. Certainly not anything nefarious.
Mags’ Desserts. Purveyor of coconut, buttermilk pecan, and lemon icebox pies. Poison not included . . . but could it be?
No, of course not.
But . . .
Jackson had referred to me as a cyclone or a hurricane or some other natural disaster that blew through town and upended their lives. Turns out he wasn’t wrong.