May Cooler Heads Prevail

We are all so thankful God allowed Teri to finish this book before taking her home. I know she was thankful, and she would have wanted to thank Faye Conn, Carol Davis and Diana Reed. Without their support and friendship, the struggle would have been uphill both ways in bare feet.

We all miss her very much and can’t wait to see her again.

—Patrick Dunnegan

CHAPTER
ONE

I
n 1833, according to the Kenna Springs Historical Society, one of my ancestors, Tenacious Tanner, was accused of stealing Isaac Farley’s horse. Unable to prove his innocence, Tenacious did the only thing he felt he could do. He broke out of jail and tracked down the real horse thief. Tenacious found the thief camped out by the Sapawhatchee River. But his attempt to take the man by surprise backfired. The horse thief suffered a heart attack and died. Tenacious, being tenacious, brought horse and corpse in tow back to Kenna Springs and insisted that the sheriff hang the dead man instead of him.

Ever since that infamous hanging, each succeeding generation of Tanners has been viewed by the townspeople of Kenna Springs as a generally God-fearing, but peculiar lot. And on the whole, the Tanner clan has always done their best to live up to the town’s viewpoint.

Being a practical sort of child, I never considered myself the least bit peculiar and resented any action or behavior by any and all of my Tanner relatives, including my parents, that
pointed in that direction. I was a lot more interested in sanity than most of my relatives. That being the case, eventually I earned a doctorate in clinical psychology. At age twenty-six I headed out into the world as Dr. Dixie J. Tanner.

I landed a very good position at a well-established clinic in Little Rock. With relatively good job security, insurance benefits, and a growing savings account, I felt like I had the world by the tail. Oddly enough, most of the Tanners thought I was the one acting peculiar. There’s just no accounting for personal perception.

Six years ago, my parents, Jeb and Memphis Tanner, sold their farm in Kenna Springs and put a down payment on a little condo near the beach in Destin, Florida. It wasn’t a huge surprise. We had vacationed in Destin as long as I could remember. Dad refers to the move to Destin as their “big adventure” in life. Mom calls it her dream retirement. The rest of the Tanners made bets on when they would come to their senses and move back to Kenna Springs.

Because my parents live in Florida, I now vacation there and only return to Kenna Springs for family reunions, family crisis situations, and the Kenna Springs Founder’s Day festivities. This summer I managed to combine the Founder’s Day festivities and a family crisis. I helped my fourth cousin, Dyson Tanner, and the potted plant that controls his mind, find a home in a very nice sanitarium.

Shortly thereafter, the Tanner clan divided up into two factions: those who argue that because Dyson’s potted plant
showed more sense than he ever did, I should have left well enough alone; and the second, which applauded my efforts and have looked upon me as a one-woman free mental health clinic ever since.

Tanners seldom let much time go by between one family crisis and another. Still, I was surprised when, after brushing off a nightmare blind date early in the evening and settling down in my comfy pajamas with a late night bowl of cereal, the phone rang and it was Uncle Rudd.

By the clock on my kitchen wall, it was eleven thirty when I said hello.

Uncle Rudd, from the free mental health clinic side of the family, firmly announced, “Dixie-gal, glad I caught you. Tried a little earlier, but you weren’t home. We got a family problem up here, and we need your help. You’ll need to make arrangements to stay a few days, so you go ahead and get things rolling, and I’ll fill you in when you get here. We’ll be expecting you soon.”

He hung up, and I was left standing in my kitchen with a bowl of soggy cereal in one hand and a dead phone in the other. Feeling stunned, and wondering what the Tanners had gotten themselves into this time, I put the bowl of cereal on the counter and punched in Uncle Rudd’s phone number.

Before he had a chance to say anything but hello, I jumped in. “Not so fast. I’m tired, it’s late, and it will certainly not be easy for me to make arrangements to get a few days off. Bottom line, I’m not going anywhere until you
tell me what’s going on.”

“Dixie-gal, you just gotta trust me on this. We need you, or I wouldn’t have called. I’ll tell you what’s going on when you get here.”

I asked the only question that made sense. “Has someone in the family passed away?”

I heard Uncle Rudd sputter the words “family” and “passed away” like they were foreign concepts to him. Then he bellowed so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “Well, I wouldn’t call that little ferret-faced varmint, Aaron Scott, family, but he’s dead just the same!”

Even with my uncle’s rather colorful description, I couldn’t dredge up a mental picture of this Aaron Scott. Finally, I gave up. “Do I know this man?”

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “Connie didn’t cotton to talkin’ about the man very much, so naturally the rest of us didn’t, either. The Scott family live around Brogan’s Ferry. Aaron Scott, in particular, is the scummy little toad that skipped town and left your Aunt Connie standing at the altar on their wedding day over forty years ago.”

I knew that someone had left Aunt Connie at the altar, and as a result she had never married, but I had never heard anyone speak his name. As far as I knew it was one of the best kept secrets, if not the only secret, in Kenna Springs.

“And you want me to attend his funeral?” I obviously didn’t get the point.

“Dixie-gal,” Uncle Rudd groaned, “Aaron didn’t just pass
away in his sleep real peaceful like. He was murdered.”

Murdered! The word slammed around in my head from one side to the other, giving me the beginnings of a terrific headache.

“And it wasn’t my baby sister that done him in, if that’s what you’re thinkin’,” he growled. “But it sure looks like she did!”

Right then and there I should have hung up the phone, packed my bags, and moved into a condo near my parents. Instead, I asked the question I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to. “Okay, Uncle Rudd, why does it look like Aunt Connie murdered this guy?”

Uncle Rudd huffed. “It’s against my better judgment, but I’ll give you the bare bones of it. None of us has seen or heard from Aaron Scott since he left Connie at the altar. That is, until he showed up here in town sometime yesterday evening. Nissa and I heard about it when we were having supper over at Patsy’s Café tonight. ‘Course, we got worried about how Connie was going to react, so we drove over to her place. We parked in the alley behind the flower shop, like we always do. We started to head up the stairs to her place over the shop when we noticed the back door to the shop was cracked open some and the lights were on inside. Nissa thought maybe Connie was so flustered at hearing that Aaron Scott was back in town that she forgot to turn off the lights and shut the door when she closed up the flower shop for the evening. We went in…and, well…that’s…”

Uncle Rudd’s voice trailed off until he stopped talking. I waited quietly. Finally, I heard him take a deep breath and let it out. “That’s when we found Connie and Aaron in the shop. Connie was sitting on the floor, moaning, and her eyes were all crazy-like. We tried to get her to talk to us, but she started saying stuff that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. She just moaned and rocked back and forth holding Scott in her arms, and him just laying there with a pair of her flower-cutting scissors sticking out of his back.”

Uncle Rudd’s voice quivered, and he quit talking. I knew I should respond, but I couldn’t translate my thoughts into words.

My head began to throb in earnest. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the perfectly good notion that I needed to move someplace where there are no telephones and no one could even pronounce the name Tanner.

I had heard enough to know this didn’t look good for Aunt Connie. I started to speak, but my mouth was so dry I had to stop and clear my throat. Swallowing as best I could, I croaked out the words, “Would you mind telling me again why you think Aunt Connie didn’t kill this Aaron Scott? I must have missed it the first time around.”

“Now see here, young lady,” Uncle Rudd bellowed again. “You just proved my point. You think she killed him, just like everyone else around Kenna Springs will. But I got her to make just enough sense to know that she didn’t kill him. I know good and well it looks bad for Connie. That’s why
it’s up to us Tanners to prove she didn’t do it.” Uncle Rudd paused for a brief second, then announced, “And I’ve come up with a plan to do just that!”

I immediately quit worrying about my aching head and my cotton-spitting mouth and felt the
thump, thump
of a nervous tic that was developing at the corner of my left eye. All things considered, I didn’t care that my voice sounded a bit testy when I asked, “Plan? What plan?”