The Merlot Murders

Chapter 13

The house at noontime was worse than a blast furnace, and the heat so oppressive it weighed me down like the gravity on Jupiter. I took another shower and dressed without drying off. It helped for ten minutes and then I was as enervated and listless as I’d been before.

I’d been putting off making a trip to the attic, which would be even more suffocating and airless than the rest of the house, to retrieve one of the old fans, but it was getting down to choosing between the lesser of two evils. I rummaged in the kitchen for a flashlight, betting the lights would be burned out in the attic. When I found one, the batteries were dead so I pawed through more junky drawers looking for fresh replacements. After half an hour I quit looking.

I could buy batteries at the general store, which would be quicker than a trip to Middleburg. Besides, Thelma had already squeezed every bit of news about our family out of everyone else in Atoka, so there wasn’t much chance I’d get mugged for new gossip.

There was no one in the store when I walked in, even though three pickup trucks were out front, angled so they filled all the available pavement on either side of the gas pumps, the area Thelma liked to call “the parking lot.” The sleigh bells attached to the front door jingled as I entered. The store smelled, as it always did, of fresh-brewed coffee and pine-scented sawdust. Abruptly, voices in the back room stopped talking and a moment later, Thelma scooted out front. She was small and compact, a woman of “a certain age” as the French say, or, as she put it, “I’m not as young as I look.” She had the tornado energy of a twentysomething, but a lot of the old-timers said she was over seventy if she was a day. She was dressed completely in lime green from the bows in her bright orange hair to the killer pair of stiletto slingbacks. She wore the usual tonnage of makeup, though she’d gotten a bit whimsical drawing in her pencil-line eyebrows. I’d once heard her described as the Mata Hari of Atoka, with her va-va-voom style of dressing and her success at weaseling information out of her neighbors—but with the eyebrows she looked more like Spock from Star Trek.

“Lord love a duck,” she said when she saw me. “I swear, that Marissa is some hussy! They’ve just let her out of prison for forgery and already she’s trying to take away poor Katarina’s husband. And he doesn’t recognize her after all the plastic surgery she had after the fire so he believes every word she says. And her pregnant with twins by Diego, that gorgeous prison guard who’s really Dr. Lance Tarantino!”

“General Hospital? Days of Our Lives?” I guessed.

“A new one. It’s called Tomorrow Ever After. The characters are so real, Lucille, they’re practically like family. I just love that show.” She put her hands on her hips and studied me. “You know, child, you lost too much weight while you were over there in France. How much do you weigh now, anyway?”

“I don’t actually know. I’m okay, though.”

“Can’t be more than a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet,” she said. “You need to put some weight on, Lucille. I think there’s one blueberry muffin left from this morning’s delivery. Better’n those cross-ants you got in France, too. Hampton Weaver wanted it when he was here earlier, but Lordy, that man must be close to three hundred pounds and lookin’ like a doublewide trailer, so I said, ‘Hamp, you put that muffin back and you get yourself on a diet, you hear me?’ So you take it, now, and you eat it. On me.”

Stiletto heels clacking like castanets on the wooden floor, she crossed the room. The blueberry muffin sat, on its own, in the glass cabinet where she kept the fresh bakery items she ordered every day. She wrapped it in a piece of white paper and handed it to me. “Now eat that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She picked up a dish towel and polished imaginary fingerprints off the glass cabinet. “I heard that new winemaker of yours is over seeing Bobby Noland right now, trying to get him to speed up the investigation into poor ol’ Fitz’s death so you all can get back inside your winery.”

I coughed on a piece of muffin. “Mmmm.”

She eyed me. “So it’s true, then?”

I swallowed. “I don’t really know where he is right now. Where did you hear that?”

She stopped polishing and touched her hand to the back of her hair. “Why, from him. ’Course he didn’t actually say that’s where he was heading, but I know the receptionist over to the sheriff’s office. He’d called there a little while ago.”

“You still know everything about everybody, don’t you, Thelma?”

“Oh, I keep my oar in, Lucille. It’s what keeps me so young. People are so interesting, you know? And, of course, I just plumb love the socialism of my job.”

“I can see that.”

“He left here a few minutes ago,” she continued. “Nice-looking young fellow, except I wish he’d take off that jewelry. Worries me when a man wears a necklace and bracelet. Didn’t waste any time getting himself a girlfriend since he got here though, did he?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She smiled sweetly. “That dancer.”

“What dancer?”

“The one takes most of her clothes off.”

I stared at her. “Are we still talking about Quinn Santori? Our winemaker?”

“Who else?” She resumed polishing. “She works at Mom’s Place.”

“That night club on the way to Bluemont?” The joke about that particular strip joint was that all the men who went there told their wives or girlfriends they were going to “Mom’s,” which saved a lot of grief and questioning— until everyone wised up about their real whereabouts. “How did he meet her?”

“How do you think?”

“Oh.” He’d said he was headed over to Bluemont the other day when he took all our leftover food to the soup kitchen. He was probably going over to Mom’s for a little lunchtime…refreshment.

“She’s right pretty.” Thelma said. “’Course I’ve only seen her with her clothes on. She’s about your age, Lucille. I think at her place of work she goes by ‘Angel.’ Just one name, like some of those rock stars. Her real name is Angela Stetson.”

“Angela Stetson? I went to high school with her! She was really quiet. I don’t think I ever heard her say two words.”

Thelma arched her eyebrows, which was not a good idea since they disappeared under her orange fringe of curls. “Still waters, Lucille. Still waters.” She looked sly. “So what do you think about that?”

I’d finished my muffin and crumpled the white paper in my hands. “I think it’s his business who he sees. And hers. Do you have any batteries?”

“’Course I do. They’re over in hardware. What size do you need?”

“For a flashlight. D, I think.”

“Hardware” was all of half a row, just behind camping items, fishing lures, and ammunition. The other half of the row was seeds and greeting cards. You could get anything at Thelma’s, if you didn’t mind the lack of variety. We walked over to hardware.

“Here they are.” She handed me a package of batteries. “As long as we’re on the subject, what’s all this I hear about you and Gregory Knight? Is he trying to start a fire with you again, Lucille? And him sleeping with your sister, too. That boy has no shame. A regular Casablanca, he is, a real two-timer.”

Some government ought to hire this woman for serious under-cover work. Where had she heard that? “I don’t know what you heard but there is absolutely nothing going on between Greg and me.”

“Is that so? Well, let me tell you, my sources are the horse’s mouths themselves. I spoke to Gregory when he was in here this morning after getting off work at the radio station. He went redder ’n a tomato when I asked him. If that isn’t an admission of guilt, I don’t know what is.” She clacked over to the cash register leaving me to trail behind her while she rang up my sale in silence. Then she added her denouement. “I have it on good authority that last night he was seen in the throes of passion, kissing you for all the world to see.”

“Oh gosh, Thelma, it’s not what you’re thinking.”