Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
After we finished cleaning out Aunt DeeDee’s stash of costume jewelry, bagging about a thousand dollars’ worth of accessories that she would bill to me, she kissed me on the cheek and squeezed Lacy’s arm. “Where are you gals off to next?”
“Two quick stops. And she’ll love them both.”
I handed Lacy the next clue. She read it silently this time.
If these walls could talk
they’d have stories of us to tell.
But now they hold
love-lorn tomes for sale.
Lacy squinted at me, trying to decipher the clue.
“It’s a place that we loved when we were kids but that’s been converted into something else entirely,” I hinted.
“Oh! The Old Soda Shop?” With the way Lacy’s eyes lit, I knew she was getting a second wind. We’d visited there for every major occasion in our classmates’ lives—birthdays, breakups, bat mitzvahs—to bag up peppermint sticks, saltwater taffy, and fireballs from the jars lining the counter.
“It closed a decade or so ago,” Savilla clarified for the non-residents as she gently bounced Ollie, who was still asleep despite the squealing during the jewelry giveaways in The Attic. “Now it’s a bookstore—Sugar Grave-Robbing Your Inner Demons; or How to Set Your Marriage Aflame.
Looking around the store now, I guessed that the self-help section was small if non-existent.
The offerings seemed to be entirely fiction and separated by genre.
Giant tags—Sweet, Salty, Sour—hung at the top of bookshelves, and all of the books faced cover out, making a rainbow of color against the blue-gray walls.
“Welcome,” the owner—a forty-something woman with a lilting Southern accent—called from the back of the store. She’d agreed to give us a quick tour and then help us make spine poems, stacking books to write a message with the titles in honor of Lacy and Anton. “Come in, come in.”
But before we could begin perusing the shelves, a noise came from outside. We all turned toward the floor-length window display of popular novels just in time to see Charlie rear back and punch another man, flattening him to the ground.
I felt my pulse begin to race and I was first to the door, flinging it open and screaming Charlie’s name as the other man attempted to sit up, a hand on his jaw as if protecting it from another blow.
“Do not get up,” Charlie yelled at the man.
I hurried over and took my boyfriend’s arm. “What are you thinking?”
Charlie blinked several times as if he didn’t know who I was at first. I moved closer, taking his hand more gently this time as I tried to shake him out of whatever insanity had overtaken him.
“Charlie?” I said. “Look at me.”
He met my gaze as reality settled in, and for the first time I noticed that Charlotte had gone to the other man—who happened to be the priest, Todd Anderson. She was helping him to his feet, brushing the ice off of his coat, and shooting daggers at Charlie.
Charlotte was carrying the pink bag with the mini arsenal inside, and my throat tightened at the idea that she could pull a weapon from it if she so chose. “We’ll get you inside and warm you up,” she said, as Todd stood and then slanted sideways before sinking into the brick wall.
“Looks like your priest can’t hold his liquor,” I said.
“And the police presence around here is obviously confused as to their real job.” Charlotte spat out the last sentence at Charlie, even though she didn’t make eye contact with him, and I once again wondered how she knew that my boyfriend was the “police presence” around here.
Charlie’s truck was still running in the middle of the road, the passenger door open, as if the priest had fled without stopping to even shut the door.
Charlie shook his head at the priest, a look of disgust on his face. I’d never seen this side of him. I didn’t even know he was capable of this kind of violent behavior, especially with a near-perfect stranger.
“Both of you, come inside,” I said, trying to sound authoritative as I opened the door to Sugar & Spice.
Jemma’s, Savilla’s, and Lacy’s eyes were wide as they watched the scene unfold from the doorway, while Myrtis and Bella stood on the other side of the store, as if they didn’t want to get involved.
“Do you have some ice? For the priest’s jaw?” I asked the owner of the store, whose name I’d completely forgotten.
The woman simply nodded and gestured for me and the sheriff to follow her to a tiny back room, where she opened a fridge and took out an ice pack that usually went inside kids’ lunchboxes. It would have to do.
I grabbed a couple of napkins and wrapped them around the pack before handing it over to Charlotte, who placed it against Todd’s jaw. Then I grabbed Charlie by the shirt, pulling him into what looked to be a back office. The owner tactfully closed the door behind us.
“This is not you,” I started, not knowing how to say everything I wanted to say to Charlie.
Maybe that he was supposed to be my mild-mannered, ever-steady, measured anchor.
Maybe that I’d never seen him overreact.
Maybe that he never got into his head so much that he did something unhinged.
The unexpected, the nonsensical, the righteous anger—that was occasionally my territory, but not his.
“Todd was saying threatening things about Valerie and the baby,” Charlie said, his tone weary as the adrenaline started to wear off. He sat in the office chair and spun it around to face me.
“Threatening?” I repeated after a few seconds, making sure I’d heard him correctly.
Charlie breathed out a long sigh and hung his head, letting it fall into his hands. “I mean… I think so.”
I could tell that he too was struggling to wrap his mind around what had just happened. He took a steadying breath.
“We played poker, we drank, we had a good time. The evening was winding down when Todd said he was going to drive into town for a nightcap. I told him that since we’re a dry county, nightcaps don’t really exist in Aubergine, but he insisted, got really fidgety, then started acting almost manic.
” Charlie shrugged. “He’d been drinking alcohol, so when he took his keys and headed outside, I took them from him.
He was insistent, talking about how he had ‘things to do’ in town.
When he started walking down the lane in the freezing cold, I got in my truck and told him to get inside.
” Charlie sighed and looked up at me. “I was planning to either show him how dead our town is at night or drive him around until he passed out, then bring him back to The Rose to sleep it off—whichever came first.”
Charlie paused as if to consider how to explain the next part of the story, his brows darkening as he replayed the last few minutes. “But then Todd started shouting about how he needed to go to the bank.”
“The bank?” I repeated.
“Yes—and saying he was going to kill Will if he didn’t come through.”
“Come through with what?”
“He wouldn’t say. Then he totally changed course and started saying all of these awful things about what he was going to do to Valerie and the baby if Will messed things up.
I stopped the car and told him to shut his mouth, but instead he saw you all in the store window, flung open the door while I was still driving, and ran out of the car.
I assumed he was coming to find Valerie, so that’s when I went after him and did the only thing I knew would get him to stop. ”
“Punch him in the face?”
Charlie shook his hand as if he could still feel the force of it against Reverend Todd’s face. He stared at me. “I’ve never punched anyone. Ever.”
This sounded more like my boyfriend, the one who didn’t act without thinking—unless someone was a danger to himself or others.
“Todd could press charges against me,” Charlie thought aloud.
“For what?”
“Assault.”
I let out a huff of air. “I’ll be impressed if the man remembers tonight, and if he does, I don’t think he’ll want to admit that he was running around threatening a woman and her baby.”
Charlie let his head sink back against the chair and closed his eyes, as if he was trying to think clearly. “How is this man a priest? And what on earth does Patty see in him?”
An idea came to me, and I pulled out my phone.
I thought back to my first conversation with the priest, and I remembered Todd Anderson saying that he’d met Patty Swanson at a place that started with an “S.” As soon as he’d said the words, he’d acted strangely, almost as if he’d caught himself.
Then, he’d said something about the place being a homeless shelter. Had he been lying?
“What is it?” Charlie asked.
“Shhh. Give me a second.” I closed my eyes, trying to recall the specifics of what he’d said. What was the name of the place? I grabbed my phone and typed in “Swanson + Texas + homeless shelter.” Nothing came up.
I tried the same combination with a variety of “S” names. Sammy’s, Sinclair’s, Smith’s. Then it hit me. Sully’s. That was the name. I typed it in, and the only result was a restaurant—or, more specifically I realized, as I clicked on the link, a honky-tonk bar with dinner and line dancing.
That meet-cute sounded more like the Patty–Todd romance that I’d seen this weekend.
I held up the phone. “This is where the supposed priest told me he met Patty Swanson.”
Charlie took the device and scanned the contents of the website, raising his eyebrows at the video of guests two-stepping to twangy music. “It’s not that priests can’t have a good time, but… to meet here?”
“Right. It’s strange, especially since he told me it was a homeless shelter. He made it sound like they were volunteering together.”
“Which would be a more wholesome story for someone trying to pass themselves off as a holy man,” Charlie finished for me.
I realized now that Todd had almost blown his cover in that first conversation. Sure, a priest could go to a bar. He could even line dance. But with everything else on Todd Anderson’s rap sheet, I was now sure that he was anything but a priest.
Charlie was obviously thinking the same thing. “There’s no way he’s a clergyman with the way he’s behaved. He must’ve done one of those online ordination things to legally marry people.” Astonished, he shook his head. “I’m actually relieved.”
I tried for a smile, kneeling down in front of Charlie and meeting those hazel pools of his eyes. “I think you’re safe—this time.”
Something nagged at Charlie, though. “But why lie? Why not just come as Patty Swanson’s plus-one?”
I considered that question and recalled my unofficial training with sleazebags at The Rose these past few months. “Sometimes it’s easier to hide behind a persona, I guess.”
Charlie gave me a sad smile and leaned forward to put his forehead against mine. He closed his eyes. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
I tilted my head. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. I just keep feeling like there’s something else happening this weekend, something that we can’t quite see.”
I knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t want to believe that anything other than my best friend’s celebration was underway.
Still, as I looked into his eyes, I was certain that, for both of us, the nagging feeling was here to stay.
Something indeed was afoot, and I was beginning to think that whatever it was—as Momma would say—stank to high heaven.