Secrets, Lies, and Crawfish Pies Read online

  Low blood pressure, confusion, feelings of guilt would have all been symptoms.

  Add to that her history of depression.

  I looked at Auntie Zanne. Right into her eyes. She’d stayed quiet while I processed the information she’d thrown at me.

  “When did she tell you that she knew who John Doe was?” I asked.

  “Just today. This morning.”

  “Is that true?” I asked.

  “You’re not calling me a liar, are you?” she asked. “That would be disrespectful, and not very nice.”

  “I didn’t say that, Auntie.”

  “You better not,” she said.

  I took a moment before I even dared to utter my next thought aloud. “Did she do it?” I said, almost in a whisper. “Josephine Gail? Is she the one who killed him?”

  “No,” Auntie Zanne said. “Of course not. Would we be trying to prove her innocence if she’d killed him?”

  “I’m not trying to prove her innocence,” I said. “At least I hadn’t been. At first, I was trying to prove that it wasn’t my Aunt Julep.” I frowned then lightly smacked my Auntie Zanne on the hand. “You knew all along it wasn’t my Aunt Julep.”

  “I knew no such thing,” she said. “And I still don’t.”

  “How could you not know?”

  “Because someone did it,” she said. “And with us not knowing who it is, we can’t rule anyone out.”

  “No one?” I asked.

  “No one except Josephine Gail,” she said. “Mark my words. It wasn’t her.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  We’d spent nearly an hour and a half walking the fairgrounds in ninety-degree weather and I knew it had been a bit much for Auntie Zanne. I decided to stop at her favorite air-conditioned diner, Momma Della’s, so she could cool down. Everything at Momma Della’s was either greasy or covered in gravy, including her, but the tea was sweet and ice cold.

  Momma Della was big–she had big eyes, big lips, big hands and big breasts. She always looked like she was covered in enough grease to fry a chicken. Her smooth dark skin glistening as she barked out orders to everyone from behind the cash register where she was perched on a stool. She never moved from that spot.

  “Morning, Miss Babet,” she said when we walked in the door. “How you doing?”

  “Hot,” Auntie Zanne said. “Been walking the fairgrounds for the last two hours making sure it’s ready for the Crawfish Boil and Music Festival.”

  “Well, I know you must be parched,” Momma Della said. “It’s hotter than a stolen tamale out there.”

  “It sure is.” Auntie Zanne nodded in agreement.

  “Heard about that trouble over at your place,” Momma Della said. “I feel lower than a gopher hole about it.” She swiped the sweat off her forehead with a white rag. “Is Josephine Gail alright?”

  “Best as can be expected,” Auntie said.

  “Well if it’s anything I can do, you just let me know,” Momma Della said, then turned her attention to me. “And if this child ain’t a sight for sore eyes,” she said to me, a big grin on her face. “C’mon round here and give Momma Della a hug. Your auntie told me you was gonna come back here with her. I didn’t believe she could do it.”

  I shot Auntie Zanne a look before I stepped behind the register and got wrapped up in a Della’s bear hug.

  “I’m not staying,” I said. “Only here for a little bit.”

  “T’ain’t what Babet says,” Momma Della said. She threw back her head and let out a hearty laugh. “And I tend to believe whatsoever she says.”

  I glanced over at Auntie Zanne.

  “We’re busy as a church fan in July, but I always got a place for you ‘n yours,” Momma Della said. She pointed toward the back of the restaurant. “Go’on back and have a seat. I’ll have two glasses of my good ole sweet tea brought round to ya.”

  The furniture in the diner was old, but scrubbed clean. The mauve-colored vinyl covering on the booths was split in places and had been repaired with duct tape. The Formica tabletops were dim, the fluorescent lights buzzed, the short swivel counter stools groaned if you turned them, and the wooden floor creaked as we walked over it. But the food was good, and people piled in for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Auntie loved the sweet tea but would tell everyone to steer clear of Momma Della’s coffee. She’d say it was black as sludge and bitter as quinine. Although, I was fine with it. I’d drink it before I’d let her give me a cup of her “tea.”

  “Stop telling people I’m here to stay,” I said as I slid into my seat.

  “Okay,” was all Auntie Zanne said, knowing that would shush me from saying anything else. I also knew that meant she wasn’t going to stop.

  We hadn’t talked much since we’d left the fairgrounds and that was good. I had needed time to mull over what she had told me about her clues, and whether I was sticking to my promise about not telling Pogue. I was sure I could get one of my Chicago lawyer friends to argue, probably successfully, that I’d made that promise to Auntie Zanne under duress.

  After the revelation–the information that Auntie Zanne got from Josephine Gail–I figured it was time to have a heart-to-heart with her.

  We gulped down the ice-cold drinks and took a refill before we left and headed back to the Roble Hardware Store to look at paint. I drove.

  Auntie Zanne sat with her hands folded and looked out of the window. I hadn’t forgotten my way around Sabine County, something I wasn’t too sure I was happy about.

  We stopped at a stoplight, and suddenly Auntie Zanne acted as if she was having some kind of seizure. “Oh!” she groaned, her whole body jerked.

  “What is wrong with you?” I said.

  “That’s it,” she said and grabbed her chest.

  I threw the gear into park “What’s it?” I said frantically trying to find out what was wrong with her. I grabbed her arm. “Something hurts?”

  She turned and looked at me. “No,” she said and pulled her arm away. She opened out her purse and pulled out one of the business cards she’d shown me earlier. “The number.” She pointed to the back of the surveyor’s card and then to a bench that sat on the sidewalk. A painted advertisement on the front of it read: Realtor. Taralynn Williams. Service and Experience with Heart as Big as Texas.

  I read the phone number on the card, then the one on the bench. “That’s what you were having a seizure about?” I said.

  “I knew I knew that number.”

  “Yeah, but you scared me half to death. I thought you were having a heart attack or something,” I said. “I swear Auntie Zanne it’s not that big a deal.”

  “It’s a clue.”

  “Who is Taralynn Williams?” I asked. “You know her?”

  The picture was of a strikingly pretty woman, her face belonging on a billboard for designer perfume or lipstick rather than a commercial business ad. She had shiny black hair and indigo blue eyes that even on the sidewalk bench sparkled.

  “Of course I know her,” Auntie Zanne said. “She’s on several boards with me, including the Tri-County Chamber of Commerce. And her husband is Coach Williams.”

  “The man that came to Angel’s Grace the other day?”

  “Yes. Him.”

  The light turned green and I pulled off. Auntie turned to watch the face on the bench as we passed it for as far as her little neck would stretch. “What in the world does she have to do with all of this?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I wish I’d known about this when I saw Coach.”

  “And what would you have asked him?” I said. “Did your wife kill the dead guy at my funeral parlor?”

  She sucked her tongue. “No. Of course not.” She batted her eyes a few times, I could see that she was thinking. “But I would have asked what she knew about him.”

 
“It’s quite possible that she didn’t know anything,” I said. I glanced at Auntie. “She is a realtor. This is about land. Maybe that was all the association she had with him.”

  “It has to be more than that,” she said.

  “Why does it have to be more than that?” I asked.

  “Because you heard Consuela. She visited more than once.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Auntie repeated, mimicking me and bugging her eyes. “She would have met him at the property at least one of those times. Don’t you think? Why keep coming back to the hotel? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “We don’t know that she didn’t visit the property with him.”

  “Which makes her even more of a suspect,” Auntie Zanne said. “If she did go there with him it would be the perfect place to kill him.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, uncertainty swirling in my words. “I think you’re going about this all wrong.”

  “How so?”

  “Because you keep zeroing in on one person. Getting a ‘suspect’ mixed up with someone just being a ‘person of interest.’”

  “A person of interest?” Auntie Zanne pursed her lips. “Now you’re just repeating stuff Pogue said. Is that even a real thing?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a real thing.”

  “Well, I don’t like it. If that were something I wanted to engage in, terming people just someone of ‘interest,’ which mind you, I don’t, then everyone that ever talked to that man would be one.”

  “Then you have to narrow it down. But when you do, you have to include all the names you have even Josephine Gail.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Just to get the big picture, Auntie.” I pulled into the parking lot of the hardware store.

  “I can’t even think like that,” she said.

  “You have to.”

  Auntie Zanne let out a huff. “Thinking like that could easily make someone conclude that she did it.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Not necessarily. He was investigating her land,” I said. “The investigation, by whoever initiated it wouldn’t stop, right?”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “So, I wouldn’t think she’d think that killing him would stop anything, and probably would no one else.”

  “I wondered who hired him,” she said. “They might know something that could help lead us to the murderer.”

  “That’s a good question,” I said. “Who hired him?”

  “Wait,” she said. “I should write some of this stuff down.” She pulled a stenographer’s notebook out of her purse. She flipped through the book and found a clean sheet.

  “It couldn’t be anyone from around here that hired him,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because he used an alias.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “So maybe he was hiding from someone around here.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Like Taralynn,” she said.

  “He did have her phone number,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “I shook my head. “I still think that he only had her number because of her occupation,” I said. “But it is worth looking into I guess. Is she the type of person that would kill someone?”

  “She is all fluff,” Auntie Zanne said. “Designer wear. Manicured nails. A twang that any country-western singer would kill for.”

  I laughed. “So, she would probably be the target.”

  Auntie slipped the business card back in her purse, snapped the clasp closed and patted it. “Maybe so,” she said. She looked at me. “How about we go and pick out some paint?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  People started speaking to Auntie Zanne before we even made it into the store. The young sales clerk in the paint department gave her a hug, and someone passed her an envelope that I think was filled with money.

  Who carries an envelope full of money on the off chance they might see her?

  I felt as if I was out with the Godfather of Roble.

  I looked at her and shook my head with incredulity. In all the years I’d been gone she hadn’t changed. Maybe not the Godfather, but definitely a godmother, of the fairy variety and otherwise to so many people.

  “How about this one?” Auntie said and showed me a swatch of a lavender paint nearly identical to what was currently on the walls.

  “Wouldn’t be any reason to change the color if I picked that one,” I said.

  “You used to like it,” she said and frowned.

  I cocked my head to the side and looked at her. “Don’t you know that I don’t like the same things anymore? I’ve changed.”

  “You’re still the same to me,” she said with an earnest smile.

  “Then I’ll have to try harder to show you that I’m different.”

  “I don’t think that you could.”

  I blew out a breath. “How about we just look for something to cover the walls with. Something that’s not purple.” I saw her ready to speak, I knew she was going to tell me that lavender wasn’t purple. “Or in the purple family.”

  “Humph.” Her one-word answer.

  I turned back to the rack of colors, but before I could get a good look at the paint, Auntie grabbed my arm, firmly holding onto me at the elbow and gave me a yank.

  “Whoa!” I said. “I’m trying to pick out a color.”

  “Didn’t you just see who that was?” she said and dragged me out of the paint aisle and toward the front of the store.

  “No,” I said and pointed back toward the paint section. “I was looking at paint colors.”

  “Shhh! It’s Taralynn’s husband,” she said in a hushed voice then pinched my arm.

  “Owww!” I shrieked and snatched back my arm. “I don’t know who he is.”

  “He was at Angel’s Grace when we were there,” she spoke in a strained whisper. “And keep your voice down.”

  “I barely saw him through the window,” I said. “I don’t know what he looks like.”

  “Shush!” She put her finger to her mouth. “We don’t want everyone to know we’re spying.”

  “You are dragging me through a store and pinching me,” I said. “I think that alone will make people take notice. And why are we spying on him?”

  “We need to find out why Taralynn would kill Ragland St. John.”

  “What? No, we don’t,” I said. “And his name was Ragland Williamson. St. John was his alias.”

  “We have to determine her motive.”

  “Well, I don’t think stalking her husband in a hardware store will supply us with any clues as to why the dead man had his wife’s phone number or what motive she had to kill him.”

  “Oh my,” she said and stopped abruptly. I ran into the back of her. She turned and looked at me. “What are the odds of us seeing Coach Williams here when we just found out that it was his wife’s number on that business card?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure it probably isn’t that high. We are in a town with only a few hundred people.”

  “It’s the universe settling,” she said. “Wrongs being righted.”

  I said the last part at the same time she did.

  “Don’t mock me,” she said. She grasped the cuff of my sleeve and yanked. “Let me do the talking.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Coach” was a handsome, rugged Texan type. Sandy hair, baby blue eyes, clean-shaven. Wholesome looking. He had on a short-sleeved polo-like shirt with a Roble High School football emblem on it.

  And standing with him at the counter was a beautiful young girl. I thought she couldn’t be much older than thirteen or fourteen, and it was obvious to see she was related to the woman on the bench advertisement. She had her indigo eyes and dark hair. It was long, thick, and just as s
hiny as in the picture. Her skin was flawless, a feat I was sure for any teenager.

  “Coach,” Auntie Zanne said and walked up to him. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Hi Babet,” he said. “It was an emergency of sorts.”

  “Throwing footballs in the house?” she asked.

  “No.” He laughed. “Our little gymnast was doing flips in the kitchen. Knocked the blender over. Thought we’d come pick up another one. You know Taralynn loves her smoothie shakes.”

  “Where is Taralynn?” Auntie Zanne asked and turned around to look for her. “She didn’t come with you two?”

  “She’s at work,” he said. “Amelia and I like to hang out together.”

  “My mother says he’s a big kid,” Amelia said. “She says because he was an only child and spoiled, he still hasn’t grown up.”

  “You’re an only child, too,” he said and laughed.

  “Hi, Amelia.” Auntie Zanne’s voice changed to speak to the child. “How are you?”

  “Good.”

  “You getting ready for the festival?”

  “Yes ma’am,” she said.

  “She’s been practicing extra hard,” Coach said.

  “I’ve learned all the music Rhett gave me. I know it by heart.”

  “Good,” Auntie Zanne said. “I knew you could do it.”

  A beaming smile spread across Amelia’s face.

  “Here,” Auntie said and grabbed my arm, pulling me closer to her. “This is my niece. Her name is Romaine. She’s a doctor.”

  Amelia’s face lit up. “I want to be a doctor,” she said.

  “Really?” I said. “What kind of doctor?”

  “I think I want to be a pediatrician,” she said.

  “She’s an A student in science and math,” her father said. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Chip Williams. Most just call me Coach.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said and shook his hand.

  “And this is my daughter, Amelia. Not only is she the brightest student at Roble High, she’s a gifted accordion player.”

  “And she’s the newest member of Rhett’s zydeco band,” Auntie Zanne said.