Chapter Sixteen #2
Her phone buzzed, and she answered without looking at the screen. “I know I put you in a tough spot, Betsy. I’m so sorry, but I can’t leave Sarsaparilla Falls.”
“I know my hearing ain’t what it used to be, so please tell me I misheard you and you’re not in that town?” The loud screech coming through the line most definitely wasn’t Betsy. Cordelia pulled the phone away from her ear in horror.
Only to see her momma’s number on the screen.
“Momma, listen.” Cordelia gripped her hair at her nape. “Before you freak out.”
“Before I freak out?” Her momma’s pitch could set off dogs from twenty miles away. “I’m way beyond freaking out. Just what in the hell are you doing in that town?”
She couldn’t even say the name. Twenty years away and nearly that many years sober, and she still couldn’t stand to speak the name of the place that had driven her out of her mind.
Cordelia knew she was going to have to have this conversation with Sherilynn eventually, but she’d hoped to do it in person. In public. Where there were witnesses.
“You know how I told you I was exploring other job opportunities?” Cordelia just had to bite the bullet and come clean to her momma. “As it turns out, I inherited a motel.”
Silence. “A motel? What motel?”
“Um.” Cordelia clenched her teeth. Sarsaparilla Falls only had one motel, and her momma knew it. Squeezing her eyes shut, she forced out the words in a rush. “The Chickadee.”
“Oh my God.” A muted bounce like a tree branch hitting a trampoline came through the line. If Cordelia wasn’t used to her momma’s histrionics, she would’ve thought she’d fainted dead away on her couch. “And just how did a thing like that happen?”
“You know how Daddy told you all his relatives were dead too, and that’s what the two of you first bonded over? Welp, surprise. It turns out he was lying. Miss Penelope was his aunt.”
“I’m not concerned about the lies of a known liar.” Sherilynn’s voice sharpened. “What concerns me is why you seem to be taking after him by not telling me.”
Cordelia bristled. She wasn’t anything like her daddy.
Unlike him, she wasn’t lying to her momma on purpose.
She’d just been put between a rock and a hard place and chose the rock for the time being.
“I was going to tell you eventually. I was just working up the courage to do so because I knew this was how you’d react. ”
“Oh, sure. Blame me.”
“I’m not—”
“My only daughter, running a cathouse.” Sherilynn groaned. “Where did I go wrong?”
“Is that a rhetorical question, or . . . ?”
Her momma released a long-suffering sigh fit for chaise longues and smelling salts. “I’m coming down there.”
“No. Please don’t.” The last thing Cordelia needed was to add her momma to the list of senior women she was in charge of minding. “This really isn’t a good time.”
“Why? What’s going on?” Her momma could dig up dirt from a soap factory.
“I’m still getting settled and figuring out my way around things.” She could hardly tell her momma she was trying to solve a murder that had happened on her watch. “How about I call you when things settle down?”
“I guess that would be okay.” Sherilynn West wouldn’t be deterred forever.
She was born and raised in Texas, and the stubborn gene came part and parcel, but Cordelia hoped she could put her off for just a little while longer.
“But if you don’t call me regularly, I’m going to assume something terrible has happened and then I’ll have no choice but to scurry down there. ”
“Yes, Momma. I understand.”
Cordelia hung up, blowing out a breath of relief as she leaned against her car. That could’ve gone much worse. Of course, her momma hadn’t actually shown up in Sarsaparilla Falls. If that happened, all hell would likely break loose, but that was a problem for another day.
With her job and her momma settled, Cordelia headed back to the Chickadee to share the news.
The chicks were overjoyed she was staying, though they pointed out that they never thought for a second she’d leave.
Belinda Sue served up the day’s drink special: Dirty Shirley Temples.
Which were really just Sprite and Absolut Cherrys. Cordelia once again abstained.
“Honey belongs in jail.” Daisy raised her glass like she was about to shoot out the lights, but there was nothing about Honey’s situation worth celebrating in Cordelia’s opinion.
She needed to get them back on track. “She’s not a nice person—”
“And she sounds like a lousy nurse,” Belinda Sue said.
“Yes,” Cordelia said. “Bad at life and her job. But that doesn’t make her a killer.”
“So?” Arline said. “If the sheriff thinks she did it, why is that our problem? We don’t owe Honey Stevens our time or effort.”
Cordelia closed her eyes and breathed in deeply through her nose.
Her sense of right and wrong was being tested daily.
She didn’t care about Honey any more than the rest of them, but they were holding a key piece of evidence that could absolve her in an instant.
As far as Cordelia was concerned, that meant they had an obligation to see this through.
“We’re not letting Honey hang for the crime someone else tried to pin on Daisy,” Cordelia said. “My momma was a careless drunk, and she still raised me better than that.”
“Fine.” Arline crossed her arms, a sour expression etched into the hard lines of her face. “It was just a suggestion.”
“What should we do then?” Daisy asked. “We’re not the sheriff. There’s only so much investigating we can do on our own without authority.”
“That’s because we’ve been playing it safe so far,” Cordelia said.
That instinct she’d been fighting her whole life, the one that tried to encourage her to be a little more fearless, try something a little more dangerous, reared up in her.
Maybe it was finally time to let her out of the box. “We only have one suspect now.”
“Corbin and Edna.” A grim light of determination entered Belinda Sue’s eyes, like she’d been born to dish out punishment, and not the fun kind she used on her clients.
Cordelia nodded. “Edna’s been walking around town like she don’t put her pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us. If you ask me, she’s wearing that confidence like a fake fur. As if she knows she didn’t earn it.”
“It’s too bad we’ll never get near her house,” Daisy said. “All we would need is one peek inside to see if they’ve got a saltwater tank.”
“That would be a start,” Cordelia said.
They would still need to connect them to the Dew Valley wine, and the point where they handed it off to the pastor. But finding out they had access to palytoxin would go a long way toward building a case. They already had the motive. They just needed the rest to fall into place.
“Ladies.” At the sound of that strong, sure voice, Cordelia’s bones melted like butter. She hadn’t even looked at him yet, and Archer Reed-Smythe was already having his way with her.
“Oh, Lord. Archer, what did you do to your face?” Belinda Sue asked.
Startled, Cordelia spun around and her jaw about hit the floor. Archer rested his powerful forearms, sleeves rolled up, on the gate to the pool. His mustache was gone. Shaved clean off, leaving his face bare and nearly unrecognizable.
“You shaved.” Cordelia was stating the obvious, but she was too dumbstruck to say anything else. “Why?”
Archer shrugged, looking unsure of himself for possibly the first time in his life. “You said you hated it.”
“I changed my mind,” Cordelia said. “Grow it back.”
Archer laughed. “I’m afraid I can’t pull off something like that on command.”
“I didn’t say you had to do it now.” She averted her gaze, finding it hard to look at him. She wasn’t a facial hair person by any means, but Archer was proving to be the exception to every one of her rules. “Sometime this week would be fine.”
“Delia.” Ooh, the way that voice made her toes tingle. That kind of chemical reaction deserved to be studied in labs. “I was hoping you’d given some thought to going out on a proper date. I’d like to take you to dinner.”
Daisy sighed like she’d collapsed on a fainting couch. Cordelia pinched her lips together. She did not want an audience for this conversation. It was awkward enough trying to keep a straight face when Archer looked like a sheep without its wool.
Smoothing her hands over her lap, brushing away the wrinkles in her skirt, she nodded stiffly. “I have given it some thought, and I’ve decided to accept your invitation.”
Daisy squealed, and Cordelia shot her a look to quiet her down.
“If”—Cordelia held up a finger—“you grow your mustache back before then.”
His lips twitched with amusement. “Consider it done. I’ll pick you up next Friday.”
As soon as he left, all the chicks faced Cordelia, looking like cats who had the mouse cornered. Cordelia picked a piece of invisible lint off her skirt, ignoring the fiendish stretch of their jack-in-the-box grins. She wasn’t anyone’s form of entertainment.
“Archer shaved off his mustache for you,” Daisy said, like he’d presented her with a diamond ring. “He’s never done that before.”
“Probably because deep down he knew he’d look ridiculous without it.”
Belinda Sue rapped her knuckles on the metal frame of her beach chair. “Don’t go acting like that’s not something special. That boy’s had a mustache since the seventh grade.”
“The madam and the pastor’s son.” Arline cackled and slapped her knee. “I couldn’t write the script on this if I tried.”
“Well, you can just cap your pen, because it’s not a thing.” Cordelia huffed. “We’re just having dinner, not getting hitched.”
“But it could lead to that.” Daisy’s voice had gone breathless as she fanned herself. “You and Archer would have the cutest babies.”
“They most certainly would,” Belinda Sue said. “With a whole pack of aunties just waiting to spoil them.”
Cordelia held her hands out. “Y’all are getting way ahead of yourselves. No one is having babies. I’m not even sure if I want babies.”
Babies were the epitome of messy, with their diapers and spit-up and floppy heads. The thought of trying to keep something alive with so many needs made Cordelia break out in a cold sweat. She could barely manage the three fully grown functional adults under her care.
Belinda Sue opened her mouth to make a point Cordelia intended to dismiss when her phone buzzed.
Putting the conversation on hold, Belinda Sue answered the phone, her stern expression brightening as she informed the person on the other end of the line that she did have openings for the evening, and scheduled them into her tablet.
Seconds later, Daisy’s and Arline’s phones went off as well. Word of Honey’s arrest had gone public.
And just like that, the Chickadee was back in business.