Whiskey Rebellion (Romantic Mystery/Comedy) Book 1 (Addison Holmes Mysteries) (9 page)

“Gee, thanks.” I stood up shakily and got into the driver’s seat, wondering how many times I could embarrass myself in front of the same man. The answer wasn’t comforting.

“I’m going to follow you home. You still look a little shaky.”

I normally would have told him thanks, but no thanks, but I was still feeling a little unsteady.

“I’d appreciate that.”

We made it to my apartment with no major mishaps, and I decided to park close to the stairs and take my chances with falling brick crushing my car. I wanted nothing more than to crawl up the stairs and fall into bed.

I was surprised when the car door opened and Nick was there to help me gather my things and push me up to my apartment.

“You’re ruining your tough guy image.”

“I just like to make sure there are no dead bodies on my watch.”

“You’re such a giver.” 

I unlocked the front door and Nick shoved it open for me so I could stumble inside. I fell face first onto the couch and decided everything would be okay once the room stopped spinning. I heard Nick rummaging around in the kitchen and rolled over so I could see what he was doing. The light hurt my
eyes, so I lay there with them closed and hoped he would leave soon. 

A
bag of ice mysteriously appeared on my forehead.

“Ahh—t
hank you.”

“I don’t know why I have this insane urge to take care of you,” Nick said. “It seems like you’re used to having these things happen to you.”

“Yep. Someday I’ll tell you about my sophomore year of college. This is nothing compared to that.”

“Are you holding up okay?” Nick asked.

I stayed silent because I wasn’t sure exactly what traumatic event he was talking about. There had already been so many.

“About finding your principal dead in a parking lot,” he clarified.

“As well as can be expected. The funeral’s tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I’ll be there
with a few other undercover officers.” He squeezed the back of my neck between his thumb and forefinger and I felt like purring. I was a little tense for some reason.

“Have you found out anything about Mr. Butler’s murder?”

“We looked at the video tape from the parking lot, but the location of the stabbing was just out of range of the camera. We’re in the process of identifying everyone we see on the tapes from inside the club as well as the license plate numbers from the parking lot.”

“Stabbing?” For some reason not knowing how Mr. Butler had died made it seem less real. I hiccupped into a couch pillow and squenched my eyes closed. “What the hell was he doing in that place?” I asked, not expecting an answer. “What the hell was I doing there? If he hadn’t seen me on stage he never would have left so soon.”

“This isn’t your fault, Addison. You were both just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens to everyone.”

Surely he didn’t expect me to believe that things like that happen to everyone. I was a freak of nature, probably cursed at birth by Rumpelstiltskin or some other crazy shit. If Nick Dem
psey had any indication of self-preservation, he would run like hell in the opposite direction and never speak to me again. 

“Is there anything you need me to get you before I leave?”

“There’s some aspirin in the kitchen cabinet above the coffee pot, and there’s a half pint of hazelnut ice cream in the freezer.”

“It seems to me you ha
ve an obsession with ice cream. Maybe you need to get a man to help control these urges.”

“I had a man. He left me for the home economics teacher. I’ll pass, thanks.”

I heard him rummaging through the freezer and sat up a little. Nick wasn’t such a bad guy. 

“Looks like Dr. Crumb is guilty,” he said, pausing by the table with all my stakeout paraphernalia on it. “Nice photos.”

“Thanks. I’m sure it’ll give Mrs. Crumb a surprise, but it’s better to know for sure than to always wonder.” 

I took the aspirin and knocked it back with a spoonful of hazelnut ice cream.

“Sounds like you know from experience.”

“Nah. I was pretty much blindsided.”

“Then he obviously wasn’t the right man for you. I think I’d notice if someone that mattered seemed like they were drifting. Why’d you want to marry a guy like that, anyway?

I kept my eyes closed and decided I had a better chance of getting him out of my apartment if I just answered the question. “It’s not like he started out as lying, cheating scum,” I said. “He was charming and smart, and I was almost thirty.”

“Ohhhh,” he said laughing. “Old maid status.”

“Shut up. In the city being thirty and single is no big deal, but in Whiskey Bayou everyone is expected to marry and reproduce shortly after graduation. You have no idea what it’s like to walk down the street and have people look at you like your ovaries are no better than dried prunes.”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

“Greg was exactly what I was looking for in a man. He had a respectable job and he would have been a good father.”

“And he was cheating scum.”

“Yeah,” I said depressed. “That, too.”

“You never mentioned passion. Where was the spark? You can’t spend fifty years of your life admiring his charisma and intelligence.”

“Spark doesn’t last,” I said, getting irritated because I knew he was at least partially right. “It’s never a good idea to let hormones make the important decisions in life.” I opened my eyes and finally looked him in the eye. His cocky grin was not reassuring.

“Maybe next time you should look for someone who gives you better orgasms than a pint of Haagen Dazs.”

“
Get out,” I said, wishing I had the strength to throw something in his direction.

“Hey, look on the bright side. Right at this moment a whole room full of cops are watching you take your clothes off on tape. I’m sure you’ll find a man in no time after that.”

“Out,” I said and pointed toward the door. I ignored his laughter as he let himself out of my apartment. I tried to console myself with a bite of ice cream, but I realized he was right. I did have better orgasms with frozen desserts than with a man.

As far as I was concerned, real orgasms were myths anyway. And any man watching me strip on that tape would probably suffer from erectile dysfunction for the rest of his life. 

I decided to take back the nice thoughts I was having about Nick Dempsey. He was still a jerk, and I’d had more than my fill of jerks lately. Greg and Nick were packaged differently, but I had a sinking feeling that they were very much the same on the inside.

Wednesday

I woke up to music blaring and my head pounding. I slapped feebly at the alarm, because I had no desire in my present condition to listen to Paul Simon singing about some woman who had diamonds on the soles of her shoes, and made my way to the kitchen for more aspirin. I caught my reflection in the toaster. My forehead was an interesting shade of purple, yellow and green.

I staggered into the shower and let the hot water and steam work its magic on my body. Of course, the hot water in my apartment lasted for exactly four minutes and thirty-two seconds, so I’ve learned to be efficient once under the spray. Adequate shower time was definitely a priority in my new home.

I turned off the water, got out and wiped down the fogged mirror with a towel.

Eeek!

I should have let it stay foggy. The yellow and green on my forehead had disappeared at some point during the shower, and all that was left was dark purple and black and a big lump. It was an appropriate color for attending a funeral.

I was a little relieved to see the lump. I
’d read somewhere once that it was always important that a lump form when you had a head injury because if it didn’t it meant your brain was bleeding on the inside.

I was good to go.

My hair was wet and plastered around my head, and a brilliant idea popped into my brain. I needed bangs. Bangs would solve all of my problems. They’d give me a new look and cover my massive lump. Problem solved.

I snipped at a few strands of hair and
was satisfied I’d achieved my new look. I did a full makeup job and blow-dried my hair. The bruise was still showing after all that work, but there wasn’t much else I could do.

I winced as I heard a deep rumble of thunder loud enough to rattle the panes in my windows. I heard a
crash of glass and went searching through the apartment until I found the broken shards on the floor of my bedroom. The thunder had rattled a few panes right out of the window, so there was a gaping hole in my bedroom, though it did bring in a nice breeze.

“Great. Don’t you know I don’t have time for this today?” I asked God. Not that he was probably going to help me out since I hadn’t vis
ited him in a while.

I swept up the glass and taped a garbage bag over the hole with duct tape. While I was in clean
ing mode, I made my bed, vacuumed the floor and put the cans of beets, salmon and sauerkraut in alphabetical order in my pantry. They were the same cans that had been there since I’d moved in, and I’d already decided I’d leave them to be demolished with the rest of the building when I moved out. But that was no reason not to be tidy. Or perhaps I was stalling.

At ten o’clock I dug through my closet until I found my funeral suit. It was the same black suit I’d worn to my father’s funeral and overwhelming sadness took hold of me so quickly that I shoved it back in the closet and looked for something else.

The only other black dress I had in my closet was a 1950’s wool day dress with a flared skirt and thin black belt. I’d found it on the clearance rack at Neiman’s for a quarter of its original price, but it still had the tags on it because there was never a good time to wear wool in Georgia. As soon as the fabric got wet I was going to feel like I was being suffocated by a wooly mammoth, but I pulled it off the hanger anyway.

I skipped the pantyh
ose, slipped on a pair of three-inch strappy sandals, grabbed a pink rain slicker and shoved a bunch of Kleenex in the coat pockets.

I parked my car in the parking lot and slogged my way up to the doors of The Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church behind all the other mourners. Funerals were attended by all in Whiskey Bayou. All the businesses closed except for the Good Luck Café, and that was only because they had to be prepared for the onslaught of mourners that would hit the tiny restaurant after the burial.

The church was packed to its full capacity by the time I found a seat on a back pew. Both balconies were filled and the choir loft was crammed with singers in white robes. Mr. Butler’s casket was mahogany and draped with a white cloth, and the casket was closed to keep the guests from having an up close and personal look at what a body looked like after an autopsy.

Mr. Butler’s family walked in a procession from the back of the church to the front pews reserved for family. I didn’t recognize any of them because Mr. Butler had been a transfer from a Savannah high school several years before, and he’d kept his Savannah residence instead of moving to Whiskey Bayou. There was a younger version of Mr. Butler at the end of the procession, which I assumed had to be a younger brother. He had the same sandy colored hair and slight build.

Unfortunately, genetics hadn’t been kind to the Butler brothers because they all looked like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, and after seeing their mother lead the procession down the aisle it was very obvious that her boys got their looks from her.

The youngest brother turned as he passed my pew and gave me a look of such startling hatred that I sucked in a breath and flushed in embarrassment as the people sitting around me began to titter nervously. I slunk back in my seat and wished I’d worn one of those big black hats with the netting on them.

“We are here to today to celebrate the life of Bernard Ulysses Basil Butler.”

I took out a Kleenex and covered my face so no one would see my smile. How could anyone name a poor, helpless baby that?

I kneeled and sat and sang and kneeled some more with the rest of the mourners. I didn’t even start crying until the woman next to me started blowing her nose and hiccupping. We kneeled again and prayed some more, and I listened as Mr. Butler’s family and friends told stories about the man they loved.

I’d been right about the young man who’d given me the hateful look. His name was Robbie, and he was the youngest of the five Butler brothers. I had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach as soon as he took his place at the podium.

“My brother was a good man,” Robbie said in a shaky voice. His eyes were rimmed red and filled with sorrow. “He was a man who touched the souls of everyone he met.”

I couldn’t help but think how Mr. Butler had been touching the soul of the woman that was giving him the lap dance, but that probably wasn’t what Robbie was talking about.

“Bernie was my brother. And my guardian angel. He always protected me, no matter what the cost. But he had no one to protect him when his life was so viciously taken.”