“Uh, okay,” Breslow said, taking the bag and looking none too enthused about Heath’s instructions. “Will you two be back tomorrow?”
Heath looked at me to see what I thought. I nodded dully. “We’ll pick it up in the morning, Deputy,” I said.
That seemed to set him a little more at ease. “Great. Thanks, Mary Jane. Heath, take care of her and I’ll pick you up tomorrow around nine a.m.”
“We’ll be ready,” he promised.
Gilley arrived a short time later and he took one look at me and said, “What the hell happened to you?”
“The paparazzi heard I was in town and they mobbed me for a picture.”
Gil graced me with his most well-aren’t-you-funny expression. “There are days, M.J., when you are just so much fun.”
“It’s a gift,” I said, limping my way to the car and getting in.
“Heath?” Gil said when my sweetheart got into the backseat.
“She got roughed up,” Heath said.
Gilley reached over and touched the side of my cheek. I winced because it felt raw and sore. “What roughed her up? A mountain lion?”
“Polar bear,” I said, and felt a small smile at the edge of my lips. It actually felt good to joke about it.
“Come on, tell me!” Gil said impatiently. “Who or what roughed you up?”
“A bunch of possessed mental patients,” Heath told him.
Gil glared hard at Heath in the rearview mirror. “Fine! Don’t tell me! God, you two are impossible—you know that?”
I glanced over my shoulder and winked at Heath, who reached out and put a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
We drove in silence for a long while and I thought that I couldn’t wait to get home and have a good hot soak in the tub, but then Gilley took a familiar shortcut down a residential street and I suddenly called out, “Hey, would you pull over next to that house on the right, Gil?”
“Mrs. Chadwick’s?” he asked.
I should’ve figured he’d remember. “Yeah,” I said, pulling down the visor to take a look at myself. I looked frightful. “Can I borrow this?” I asked Gil, pointing to his water bottle in the cup holder.
“Have at it,” he said.
I dabbed the end of my shirt in the water and patted away some of the blood on my face, then smoothed out my hair. “Where are we?” Heath asked.
Gilley answered for me. “We’re at Linda Chadwick’s house. She was M.J.’s mom’s best friend, and she’s like an aunt to M.J.”
I felt Heath study me, but I didn’t want to waste time filling him in on what I was about to do. Instead, once Gil pulled over, I got out of the car, poked my head through the window, and said, “Would you mind if I did this alone?”
“Sure,” they both said, even though I knew they didn’t have a clue what I was up to.
“Thanks. I’ll try to make it quick,” I promised.
“We’ll be right here,” Heath vowed.
“Or at the ice-cream parlor,” Gil said with a bounce to his eyebrows.
I rolled my eyes and hurried off to see if Linda was home. I walked nervously up the drive, and shook my hands to steady my nerves. I hadn’t seen Linda in almost five years, although we did keep in touch through e-mail and a phone call every few months.
Linda had been one of the angels in my life who’d helped me during that awful time right after Mama died. She used to come pick me up almost every Saturday to go to the movies. I didn’t speak for a long time after Mama’s funeral . . . like, not even a word. The heartbreak I felt had pushed me into muteness and I spent about a year as silent as a mouse.
Linda had also been grieving terribly at the time. She and Mama had been best friends since grade school, and they’d been the maid or matron of honor at each other’s wedding. I never got the sense that Linda cared for Daddy much, but she made a special effort to be kind to him in the months following Mama’s passing. I think she did that solely for me, because she knew that if she argued with him, he’d never let her take me out on those precious Saturdays.
And we always went to the movies, never to a place where I’d feel pressured to talk. We used to see two or even three shows in a row, and it was the most wonderfully comforting thing anyone could have done for me.
It still choked me up to consider that kindness, that Linda could have cared so much about me, as to put aside her own grief and give me what I needed with such a selfless act. One that truly humbled me.
I got to her back door and hesitated, running a hand through my hair one last time and hoping I didn’t look too scary, and then I rang the doorbell. “Just a minute!” I heard from inside, and I closed my eyes to keep them from misting up. I realized suddenly that I’d missed Linda far more than I’d first thought.
A moment later the door was flung open and there she stood, my mama’s best friend in the world and my honorary aunt. She was a beautiful woman—always had been, with perfectly coiffed blond hair, sparkling green eyes, and a smile as big as Georgia. “Why, land sakes!” she cried, opening her arms wide and throwing them around me. “Mary Jane! Oh, my baby girl! Is this really you?!”
I laughed and squeezed back, and those damn tears flooded my eyes again. “Hi, Linda,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’ve missed you.”
“Oh!” she said, squeezing even tighter. “You can’t imagine how much I’ve missed you, my darling girl! Now let me step back and take a look at you!”
Before I could warn her, she’d let go of me enough to look at my face and I saw her whole expression change. Cupping the side of my cheek where I’d been scratched, she said, “My God! Mary Jane! Who did this to you?!”
“Linda, I promise, it’s nothing,” I tried, but she was looking at me so tenderly, and with such concern, and in that moment I just missed her so much that I found myself crying big, wet, sloppy tears.
“Oh, honey!” she said, pulling me inside and shutting the door with her foot. “Now don’t you worry! We’re gonna take care of you—just let me get the phone and call the sheriff! Do you need to go to the hospital? Oh my God, were you . . . were you . . . ?”
I shook my head and pulled on her arm. Wiping my cheeks, I said, “Linda, I promise you, I’m okay. And the sheriff already knows. I was helping with an investigation and things got a little rough.”
Linda stood there blinking for a long minute. “You were helping who with what and it what?”
I smiled at her. She’d just mimicked Gil from the day before. Then I took a deep breath and gave her the shortest version I could of the afternoon’s events. By the end of it we were sitting in her cozy living room and she was practically forcing me to drink the water with cucumber slices she’d had chilling in her fridge. “Does your daddy know you’re doing all this work for the sheriff’s department?”
I shook my head. “No, and don’t you tell him, neither.”
She leveled a look at me. “And if he finds out I knew and didn’t tell him, what do you think he’ll say?”
“I expect he’ll say a great deal, Linda, which is why we won’t tell him that either.”
She threw her head back and let go her rich, throaty laugh. No one laughed like Linda. It was such a beautiful sound. It made me really homesick all of a sudden. Then I remembered what I came here for. “Listen,” I began, “there’s something I need to ask you.”
She cocked her head like a curious puppy. “What’s that, baby?”
“It’s about Mama.”
“Okay,” she said, sitting forward and lacing her hands together. “Shoot.”
“Mama used to have a small porcelain cup on her vanity. It held all of our ponytail holders. Do you remember it?”
Linda looked at me like I’d asked the oddest question she’d ever heard. Still, she must have guessed by my earnestness that I wasn’t joking around. “I don
’t believe I remember it, Mary Jane. I’m so sorry. Did your daddy lose it or something? I know he had some of your mama’s things moved to storage when he took up with that Mrs. Bigelow.”
“No,” I said. “No, it’s nothing like that. I just . . . I just needed to know where it came from.”
“Did she not tell you?”
“No.”
“Why is it important?”
“I think it’s connected to a tea set that was owned by someone else.”
“Who?”
“Sarah Porter.”
Linda’s brow shot up. “Oh, well, that’s quite possible. DeeDee and Sarah used to be best friends before DeeDee and I became best friends.”
My back went rigid. “They were?”
“Oh yeah. See, your grandmama was a bit of a social climber, and I don’t usually speak ill of the dead, but you knew your grandmama, always puttin’ on airs when she had no cause for it.
“Anyway, when she found out that your mama and Sarah Porter were in the same kindergarten class together, well, she practically forced them into a friendship. She was always encouraging your mama to go over to Sarah’s house. You know I suspect that your grandmama thought that eventually she’d get invited to one of those fabulous parties Regina Porter was always throwing.
“But the joke ended up being on her, because Regina only had the patience and liking for your mama. But then, DeeDee was so beautiful—even as a child she was the spitting image of Elizabeth Taylor—and Regina loved beautiful people, as she considered herself to be a great Southern beauty—even though she was the only one who was willing to consider that.”
Linda made her brows dance and she shimmied her shoulders a little to indicate she was making fun of Regina Porter, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “So, at what point did you and Mama become best friends?”
Linda pressed her lips together and squinted, her gaze far away. “Well, now, I suspect it was right at the beginning of third grade. DeeDee came into the first day of class, sat down next to me, and said, ‘Listen here, Linda S. Walters. You and I are gonna be best friends. Forever. And by the way, your grampy says hello, and to stop hiding under your bed.’”
She then threw her head back and laughed uproariously and I felt my heart swell with longing to have been there on that day with the two of them in that moment.
“Now, what I should also say about that day, Mary Jane, is that not two weeks earlier, my grandpappy had in fact died, and he was my favorite person in the whole wide world, and I’d spent the next two weeks before school started hiding under my bed, crying my little heart out! That’s how I knew that when your mama told me that you were starting to talk to people who’d died, she’d passed on her talents to you.”
It took me a few seconds to be able to talk after that. I was always so moved by stories of my mother. Still, I was after information and I tried to focus back on that. “So, you guys became friends in third grade—how old were you?”
“Oh,” Linda said, taking a moment to think about it. “I believe we were eight going on nine.”
“What happened between Mama and Sarah Porter?” I asked.
Linda waved her hand. “Oh, hell, honey, I don’t know. At that age you’re making friends and unmaking them in the bat of an eye. From what I remember, though, Regina Porter found some fault with your mother, and banned her from ever speaking to her daughter again. It was probably that DeeDee had said something passed on from a dead relative or something. Back in those days people were so spooked by those kinds of things.”
“Linda?” I asked next.
“Yes, buttercup?”
I had a hard time meeting Linda’s gaze for my next question. “Did Mama ever mention someone called the Sandman?”
Linda’s sharp intake of breath told me I was right to be worried. “How did you find out about him?” she asked carefully.
“It’s not important,” I said. “What did Mama say about him?”
Linda’s entire demeanor had changed dramatically, and for the first time ever in the entire time I’d known her, she seemed to eye me angrily. “I made a promise to your mother, Mary Jane, a promise that I swore I would take with me to my grave, and I have no intention of discussing that with you, now or ever!”
I was so stunned by the forcefulness of her statement that for a moment all I could do was sit there and stare at her.
To Linda’s credit, she appeared to be rather alarmed by her outburst too, and really neither of us knew what to say next. The entire atmosphere had changed and what had been a lovely reunion had suddenly turned into an awkward encounter.
Getting to my feet, I said, “Thank you for your time, Linda. It’s getting late and I left Gilley and Heath waiting in the car.”
Linda got to her feet too. “Oh! Oh, my, Mary Jane, they’ve been waiting for you in the car? Why didn’t you—”
“I’ve got to go,” I said. Now that the shock was over, I was beginning to feel the full sting of Linda’s outburst and all I wanted to do was run out of there.
Linda’s hands attempted to reach out to me, but I turned away from her and headed straight for the door. Pausing only for a moment, I said, “Thank you again, Linda. It was great seeing you.” And then I was out the door and running down the block, searching frantically for the rental car, which wasn’t in the spot where I’d left Gilley and Heath, and they were nowhere else in sight.
Feeling even more desperate, I began to run down the street in the direction of Mrs. G.’s. She lived only a mile and a half from Linda and I focused on getting there as quickly as possible.
About a quarter mile into the mad dash away, a car pulled up alongside me. “M.J.!” Gil shouted.
I took several more steps, on the fence about stopping to get in the car, or whether to keep running and work off some of the hurt I felt at Linda’s rebuke. “M.J.!” Gil shouted again.
I slowed down, then stopped, but I didn’t immediately move to the SUV. I heard a car door open and in the next moment I was drawn up into a hug. “What happened?” Heath asked me.
I shook my head. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry. I think I’m just tired.”
Heath lifted my chin and forced me to look at him. “You don’t want to tell me?”
“Not really.”
“Okay,” he said, stroking my hair. “I’d run with you, ya know, but I think you’re worn-out and could use a lift home.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, allowing him to lead me by the hand to the car. He opened the passenger door for me and I scooted in next to Gil.
“What happened?” Gilley asked the second he saw my tearstained face.
It was odd, but there were things I could say to Gilley that I knew he’d understand instantly because of our shared history, which made it much harder to explain to Heath. “She yelled at me.”
Gilley was holding a large, double-scoop chocolate–peanut butter ice-cream cone. By the amount of chocolate smeared around his mouth, it was an easy call to say that it’d started out as a triple. “She did not!” he said.
“She did.”
“Why?”
“I asked her if Mama had ever mentioned the Sandman. She told me she’d sworn an oath never to speak about it to anybody, including me. Actually, she yelled it at me.”
Gil adopted a sympathetic expression. He knew how much Linda meant to me, and how kind she’d always been to me. Of course he’d also know how being unfairly yelled at by someone I loved so much might feel. He looked down at his cone, seemed to think about something, and then he offered it to me. “Here,” he said. “This’ll make you feel better.”
That small gesture went a long way to doing just that. “I couldn’t take your cone, honey,” I told him, although my mouth watered a little.
“We got a pint of pistachio,” Heath said from the backseat. I’d once
told Heath that my favorite flavor ice cream was pistachio, and I’d done that because his mother had told me that it was his favorite flavor and I wanted him to think we shared something sweet in common.
And while I do love pistachio, my favorite flavor was the one currently being offered to me. Chocolate peanut butter. It was Gil’s favorite too. “Go on,” he said with a wink, knowing I’d been a big fat fibber to Heath. Over his shoulder he said, “I think she needs some of LuLu’s comfort now rather than waiting until we get back to Mama’s.”
I cleared my throat, and eyed Heath apologetically. “I am kinda hungry.”
“Then go for it,” he said easily and with a knowing grin. “I hear that’s your real favorite anyway.”
“What? Who told you?”
Gil shoved the cone in my hand and put the car into drive. “That’s not important. What is important is that we get you home and have Mama take care of you tonight. You look like you’ve gone a few rounds with Mike Tyson’s polar bear.”
Mrs. G. took one look at me and ushered me into the house with a great deal of fuss. “I saw it all on the news!” she said. “I hoped y’all weren’t involved, but then they played some footage of you and Heath coming out of that building where those mental patients went nuts and I knew you two were in the thick of things.”
“Wait,” Gil said, looking wide-eyed at us. “That really happened?”
I let Heath tell him the story while I polished off Gilley’s cone. Gil stared at his disappearing dessert with more than a hint of regret in his hungry eyes, but then Heath broke out the pistachio and added some hot fudge, and that set Gilley back to rights again.
Meanwhile, Mrs. G. drew me a nice hot bath, which I soaked in for about an hour, letting the healing fragrance of the bath salts work their magic.
Toward the middle of my soak Heath popped his head in and said, “Want some company?”
I smiled. “Come on in, baby, but I’m afraid we’re all out of bubbles.”
Heath stripped down quickly and I marveled at the exquisiteness of his physique. He was so beautifully proportioned and wonderfully well toned that he constantly took my breath away. He slid into the tub, careful not to jostle or splash me, and I sighed when he settled in and picked up my foot to rub the sole. “How’s the tendinitis?” he asked.