Line Dancing Can Be Murder (6 page)

Jackie batted her eyelashes like the southern belle she wasn’t. “Thank you for the compliment, Norma! You all may not believe this, but I’m turning fifty in a few months. My friends and I are on this trip as a way to celebrate our upcoming milestones. Annette’s the first of us. Her birthday is on Sunday.”

I noticed how she easily deflected Norma’s question about her husband.

“Fifty!” Joyce slapped her thigh. “That seems like a lifetime ago for me. What a terrific way for you ladies to commemorate surviving half a century of living.”

“Gee, that makes us sound ancient,” I chuckled.

Joyce asked Winnie for a hand up. I heard her bones creak. “Wait until you’re on the other side of seventy and then talk to me about ancient,” she said, grabbing at her back.

“Joyce, you don’t look a day over sixty-nine,” Chuck joked. We all laughed, and I noticed the sweet smile she graced him with.

“Do you all like to dance?” Jackie asked, changing the subject altogether. Their gray and white heads bobbed up and down. She stood up and put her fingers between her lips and whistled. When Kim, Crystal, Donna and Annette glanced our way, she waved them over. “My girlfriends and I will show you folks what we do in Illinois for fun every Monday night.”

After coaxing Crystal to let down her inhibitions and be spontaneous, the six of us proceeded to sing a cappella (mostly off-key) while we line danced to Tim McGraw’s
I Like It I Love It
in front of our new friends and any other tourists wanting a good chuckle.

When our performance ended, we received a standing ovation and thunderous applause. We smiled and bowed in appreciation. That day was our first line dancing show on the National Parks Wonders Tour, but it wouldn’t be the last.

“That’s what I call shaking your booty,” Chuck said, clapping the hardest.

I already liked our fellow travelers and guessed I’d have at least a dozen new laugh lines on my face by the end of the trip. What I didn’t expect would be the accompanying worry lines. But killing someone does that to you.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Whoa, Cowgirl!

There are some women who can look at a man and realize he’s no damn good and still think all he needs is the right woman to love him. She thinks she can love that loser better than anyone else can and nobody can tell her any different. For a young woman, that lesson can be a tough one to learn, but for women our age, it’s just plain ridiculous.

When we were in high school, Crystal had a poster on her wall that said:
YOU HAVE TO KISS A LOT OF TOADS BEFORE YOU FIND YOUR PRINCE.
I was sitting in a booth in Ruby’s Cowboy Steak and Buffet Room with Annette, Barb and Joyce eating my dinner of ribs and a couple of sides of carbs. As I observed the hustle and bustle around me, I thought about that proverb.

In another booth across the room, Jackie and Keith sat side-by-side chatting and laughing. Bill and another lady I hadn’t met yet were their booth mates, but they seemed to be lost in their own conversation. I swallowed a bite of macaroni salad and stared at Jackie.

She’d certainly kissed her share of toads through the years. Although Milton had been a nice man before his mind went, and he’d given her every material thing she’d ever dreamed of, he was a far cry from the prince of her girlhood dreams.

I pierced a chunk of meat with my fork and wondered if Chris Stevens was a prince or a pig dog. Was he missing Jackie while she was on this trip? Had she called him since we’d left Illinois? She hadn’t mentioned him, and I honestly didn’t know if their relationship was serious or just another fling. My gut told me Chris was another toad in a long string of Jackie’s amphibians.

When she caught me watching her, she waved. Keith looked over and waved, too. I smiled and hoped their friendly flirting wouldn’t escalate into more.

“Hey, Teresa, you’re going to the rodeo, aren’t you?” Annette asked, drawing me out of my reverie. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and pushed back from the table with her hand on her stomach.

“Heck, yeah I’m going. I’ve never been to a rodeo before. I want to experience everything the Wild West has to offer.”

“I think we should change out of shorts and into jeans though,” she said. “Wayne told me it can get cool in Utah at night.”

“All right.” Just then, Donna and Crystal stepped up to our table and we informed them of our plans. “Where’s Kim?” I asked.

Donna answered. “She’s browsing in the gift shop and said she’ll meet us out front in twenty minutes.”

We stopped at Jackie’s booth on our way out of the restaurant. She told us she’d catch up with us at the rodeo.

“We’ll see you there, too,” Bill said. “By the way, this is Violet.”

We said hello to Violet. When we introduced ourselves, we learned she was a widow from New York.

“I came on this tour with my sister, Daisy,” Violet said. “She’s around here somewhere.”

“Have a good time at the rodeo,” Keith said. “Everyone always does.”

We left the foursome, and when I looked over my shoulder before turning the corner, I saw Jackie squeeze Keith’s arm. Gooseflesh peppered my arm, and I shook my head.

As we passed by the gift shop, I decided to purchase some post cards for my scrapbook. “I’ll be up to change into jeans and grab my sweater in a few minutes,” I told my roomie, Donna.

Strolling straight to the rack of postcards, I thought of Phil while thumbing through them. I hadn’t called him since leaving Harley’s Grove and had no plans to. Our relationship wasn’t like that. We didn’t check in with each other or talk on the phone like silly teenagers. Ours was a mature relationship based mostly on sex. It was true he liked to cook for me, and as I’ve mentioned already, we went shooting together. But we mostly enjoyed the physical pleasures we offered each other without strings attached. It was an arrangement we were both comfortable with, except that I’d been wondering about Phil lately.

Feeling sentimental when recalling the moony look that had shone in his eyes when he kissed me goodbye the night before I left for Vegas, I decided he might appreciate getting a postcard from me in the mail. I chose two of the same card (one for him and one for my scrapbook). It had cowboys and stampeding horses on the front with the caption reading
The Great American West
.

On my way to the cash register, I almost changed my mind about purchasing a memento for him. The image of Harley Grove’s nosy mail carrier, Gwen, flashed in my mind. As soon as she saw a postcard from me to Phil, tongues would wag. Gwen was the biggest busy body in town. Handling everyone’s mail just made her side job as village gossip easier.

“Oh, hell,” I mumbled to myself. “Let them talk.” I slapped the postcards on the counter and reached into my wallet to pay.

Before heading to the door, I searched the aisles for Kim. I’d almost given up thinking she’d already left when I spied her. In a far corner of the store, she stood alone with her back to me. Her head jerked from side to side as if she were on the lookout for someone. Slipping quietly up behind her, I tickled her ribs and said, “Boo.”

The items in her hand dropped to the floor, and she let out a soft strangled scream. Her eyes enlarged when she spun around and our gazes met. “Why are you sneaking up on me like that, Teresa?” she barked. “I almost peed my shorts.”

“Sorry. We’re getting ready to go to the rodeo. You want to go?”

She inhaled a deep breath. “Sure.” Grabbing my arm, she tried to spin me away, but I escaped her grip.

“You dropped your stuff.” I bent and picked up three small Kodak boxes. “What do you need film for? Isn’t your camera digital?”

“Those aren’t mine,” she said, snatching the boxes from my hand and tossing them into the bin in front of her. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Whatever.” As she pulled me out of the gift shop, a shiver ran down my spine. She’d dropped those boxes of film when I scared her. I’d seen her drop them. Why did she lie? What was Kim hiding?

~ * ~

Turned out, the rodeo participants were mostly local kids and teenagers, which was disappointing for Doris and her cronies. They’d been hoping to get a quick thrill salivating over mature cowboy man meat. The five amigas, as we started calling the retired ladies from Florida, sat on the bleacher behind me, all wearing matching straw cowboy hats and looking as cute as dolls.

“Why didn’t we buy cowboy hats?” I asked my friends.

“We’re not cowgirls,” Crystal answered.

“There are plenty of cows around Harley’s Grove,” I said. “And everyone we’ve met says we look young enough to be girls. That should qualify us to be cowgirls.”

Crystal screamed and bolted up from her seat when a young rider got bucked off a snot-nosed bull and was nearly horned in the buttocks before scrambling up the rails of the fence to safety. When the excitement was over, she lowered her weight onto the bench again. “That was a close one. These kids have more guts in their pinkie fingers than I do in my entire body.”

“Hey, Teresa, do you remember those guys from Iowa that we hung out with the summer after we graduated high school?” Donna asked. “They were on the construction crew building the new seed plant outside of town.”

“How could I forget them?” I said, leaning across Annette to talk to Donna. “That jerk, Scott, stole my guitar and left town and never returned.”

“Didn’t you date him for a while? He was kind of cute in a long-haired lanky kind of way.”

“Cute, but weird. And yes, we went on a couple of dates. Once he took me to the Smorgasbord in Bloomington for dinner. I was so embarrassed I didn’t tell anyone. My folks used to go there for lunch after church on Sundays!”

I thought back to those days. There had been six guys Donna and I met cruising Main Street, and between us we’d dated all of them at some point that summer. Scott had been strange, so of course, he gravitated toward me. All the weird ones did back then.

I remembered swimming with him and a couple of the other guys in the community pool one afternoon. Scott kept plunging under the water near me. It wasn’t until one of the other guys pulled me aside and said Scott was beaver hunting that I realized his reason for going underwater. He was trying to look up my swimsuit.
Pig.

“What made you think of them?” I asked Donna.

“Randy wore a cowboy hat and boots all the time.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember. He was nice in a chunky fresh-faced kind of way.” I smiled, recalling more crazy times we had with those Iowa guys. I pressed my hand on Annette’s thigh and leaned farther over her. “Donna, do you remember the night Randy drove us through somebody’s cornfield in his big four-wheel pickup?”

Her mouth broadened into a grin. “Yes. The three of us were crammed into the cab of his truck, along with his friend with the red hair. I think they were both drunk. Randy must have ruined that farmer’s whole crop. Cornstalks were flying everywhere and bouncing off the windshield.”

We both laughed.

“It’s a wonder you didn’t get arrested,” Annette said.

“Yes, it’s a miracle a lot of things didn’t happen that summer.” Donna and I stopped chuckling and locked gazes. One of those things I was referring to was her own close call. She’d missed a period after sleeping with Randy and had thought she was pregnant. Fortunately, it was a false alarm.

“Way to go!” Crystal hooted, halting our reminiscing. A teenage girl apparently ran the barrel race in record time. As the girl accepted her award, the crowd around us applauded.

I glanced at Kim, who blankly stared at the activity going on in the ring and seemed lost in her own world. My mind drifted back to what had happened in the gift shop and then further back to New Year’s Eve when that box from her closet had nearly knocked my block off. Worry niggled at me, but whatever it was that bothered her—and me—this wasn’t the time or place to talk about it.

“Kim, where’s Jackie?” I asked instead. “I thought she was meeting us here at the rodeo.”

Kim snapped out of her daydream. “She was laying on the bed when I left our room. Said she had a bad headache and may not make it.”

“Oh. That’s too bad. She’s missing out on a lot of fun.” My gaze returned to the rodeo ring. I robotically clapped when one clown dumped a bucket of paper graffiti over the head of another clown, but my mind traveled elsewhere. I was hoping Jackie wasn’t doing something idiotic.

Of course, if I’d known then what I learned later about what she’d been up to that night, I’d have moved hell and earth to stop her. Because, what she did was just the start of a series of events that led to Keith’s unfortunate demise.

CHAPTER NINE

HooDoo You Trust?

The next morning, our first stop was Bryce Canyon National Park, distinctive for its unique geology. As we exited the motor coach, Keith gathered the group around. He wore a pair of dark sunglasses, which wasn’t surprising since it was sunny out. The fact that he hadn’t removed them while inside the bus earlier seemed odd since the windows were tinted. But the thought was fleeting at the time.

“Bryce Canyon consists of a series of horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters carved from the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau,” he explained. “The erosional force of frost-wedging and the dissolving power of rainwater have shaped the colorful limestone rock into bizarre shapes, including slot canyons, windows, and these beautiful red and orange spires behind me called hoodoos.”

When I gazed at the scenery that seemed to stretch for miles beyond, the breath literally left my throat. I’d never seen anything like those rock hoodoos.

Keith went on. “The Paiute legend is that these spiral pillars are men who were turned to stone by an angry deity and are condemned to stand forever in silence.”

When his recitation was over, everyone headed off in different directions to explore. Crystal tugged on my hand pulling me to the Bryce Point sign showing we were at an elevation of 8300 feet. A group of Harley bikers were taking their pictures in front of it.

“I want you to take my photo here,” she said, sizing up the male bikers that were clad in black clothes and boots, despite the heat that had already climbed into the eighties.