Whiskey Rebellion (Romantic Mystery/Comedy) Book 1 (Addison Holmes Mysteries) (26 page)

“I’ve brought you a few necessities,” she said, pushing me towards the couch until I was laying flat on my back. “That nice young man mentioned you’re without a car, so I brought mine for you to use until you get yours back. I’ll call and have a neighbor come pick me up when I’m finished here. I stopped by Peach Tree Bakery and bought an ice cream cake. I’ve got a twelve-pack of Corona, my manicure kit and Sleepless in Seattle.”

“That’s so sweet.”
My eyes started to well with tears again. I’m not much of a crier normally, but I seemed to be leaking tears at an alarming rate. Maybe it was hormones. I was thinking I probably needed to drink quite a bit of that Corona so I wouldn’t get dehydrated.

“I also brought the video from when you graduated high school,” she said, and I started to cry harder. “I was so proud of you. I got great footage of your valedictory speech. Maybe we should watch that first.”

I could think of about a million things I’d rather do instead, but I just nodded my head noncommittally.   

“Of course, it was also a bitter-sweet moment because I realized how old I’d gotten without even noticing. Then before I knew it I was afraid to wear a bikini in public anymore and my pubic hair started to turn gray. Let me tell you, that’s a real eye opener.”

I always had such nice, tender moments with my mother. I decided this moment needed the gift of silence.

“Now there will be no more crying today,” my mother said briskly. “I’ve got just the thing you need.” She whipped a large cucumber out of her handbag.

I was pretty much speechless.

“Do you always carry produce in your handbag?”

“Only when necessary. Now lie back and let me put some slices on your eyes.”

“Oh. Slices on my eyes. Good idea.”

“Of course slices on your eyes. What else would I be doing with it?”

I had no idea, but it was probably best if I turned my brain off and stopped thinking of the possibilities.

Amazingly enough, the cucumbers worked like a charm and my face lost the puffy redness that too much crying always brings. I’m not one of those pretty criers
anyway, so the fact that I looked less like Quasimodo and more like my original self was a step in the right direction.

I’d gotten my mother to leave before Nick showed up so he wouldn’t have to go through the inquisition twice in one day. I heard my front door open and paused. A combination of adrenaline, fear and ice cream cake roiled in my belly. I’d left the door unlocked and I hoped to God it was Nick letting himself in instead of
the murderer.

I didn’t have a gun or a knife, and the towel rod on the wall had fallen off long ago, so I didn’t have anything I could hit him with either. I took stock of the cabinet and pulled out a can of hairspray in hopes I could blind him long enough to escape.

I heard the muttered curses and relaxed. It was just Nick, and he was irritated about something. I put away the hairspray and continued to put the finishing touches on my makeup. 

“Don’t you ever lock your doors, woman?” Nick bellowed from the other side of the bathroom door. “There’s a murderer out there.”

Considering Nick had yelled the statement and I was locked in the bathroom, everybody in the whole building now knew I sometimes forgot to lock the door. It’s not like there was a lot of traffic on the fourth floor of a condemned building.

When I came out Nick was lounged back in a chair and watching ESPN highlights. I’d pulled on a comfortable cotton sundress in bright yellow and sandals, but when Nick turned and looked at me the desire in his eyes made me feel like I was wearing something sinful.

Of course, I’d picked the sundress because I hadn’t been able to get my other skirt buttoned after I’d finished off a good portion of the ice cream cake. It was a good thing I’d eaten those cucumber slices to offset the calories.

“I really don’t feel like going out,” I said. I’d hoped he’d changed his mind about the whole thing. I didn’t feel like facing a crowd of people, some of which would be rude enough to ask what it had
been like to run over my ex-fiancé.

“The last thing you need is to sit in this depressing apartment and wallow.”

“But I want to talk to you about what happened this afternoon. About Greg. What did the ME say?”

Greg sighed. “The ME said Greg had been poisoned. The discoloration of the lips and the slight smell when she opened the stomach makes her think it was arsenic. She said it would take a while to get the results of the Marsh test and make sure, but she was almost positive it was the cause of death.”

“What?” I asked. “But I thought I was the cause of death.”

“Arsenic is a poison that can be found in almost every household in one form or another.” Nick ran his fingers through his hair in a frustrated gesture. “Which means we’re going to have a hell of a time narrowing down the source. The ME said whoever gave Greg the dosage didn’t give him enough to kill him right away. He could have ingested the poison and been deathly ill for up to two days before dying. Stomach cramps, nausea, chills, fever. It’s not a pleasant way to go. He would have been in and out of consciousness. Someone was holding him against his will and he managed to escape, despite the poison working its way through his body. The ME said Greg was in the last stages when he ran in front of your car. She can’t be sure if the organ damage and the hemorrhaging he suffered
were due to the poison or your car, so she’s going with the poison. Which means I have myself another homicide that ties into all this. I told you my gut didn’t feel right about Greg’s death.”

“
That’s terrible.” What Nick had described sounded like the worst kind of torture and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Not even Veronica. “Poor Greg.”

“I’ll find out who did it, Addison. It’s my job.” He squeezed my shoulder and pushed me toward the door. “Now we’re done talking about murder for the rest of the night. We’re going to relax and get to know each other.”

That was something to think about. If we didn’t talk about murder, what else would we talk about?

To say that dinner was a disaster was an understatement of epic proportions. 

“I’ve never been here before,” I said, inanely. “I hear the food’s very good.”

“Mmmhhhmmm,” Nick said, noncommittally.

We both looked around, our eyes on anything but each other, trying to think of something to say that would get us through what looked like an impossibly long meal.

He’d taken us to the The Waterfront, a seafood place between Savannah and South Carolina, and we’d been led to a table that overlooked the lake. The whole scene should have been very romantic, but we’d managed to make it the most awkward dinner ever. On the positive side, I hadn’t run into a single person I knew.

There was one point during the meal where I leaned over a little too far, and I
was sure Nick got a glimpse down the front of my dress. His eyes glazed over and his features softened, and I thought,
Oh, boy. Here it comes. Here’s the Nick Dempsey I’ve come to know.
But then the magic was interrupted by the waiter refilling my water glass, and I was left with nothing but a shortness of breath and a need for extra dessert.

We left the restaurant in silence. I think the word “date” had become
an obstacle as soon as it was mentioned. We were doing just fine without mentioning any kind of potential relationship.

I turned in my seat as Nick
drove us back to my apartment, admiring the strength of his profile and trying frantically to figure out a way to get us back on at least “friendly” terms. I could only think of one thing to say.

“Nick, I don’t think we should date anymore.”

He turned and looked at me, his face solemn. “I think you may be right.”

We attacked each other as soon as we reached my front door.  If I hadn’t gotten my key in the door in another thirty seconds, Nick would have taken me where we stood, and that would have been perfectly all right with me. Nick slammed the door shut with his foot and pushed me against the wall, his hands everywhere at once and his lips fused to my own.

“God, I want you,” Nick panted as his lips made their way down to the valley between my breasts. 

I wasn’t capable of rational conversation, so I pulled off his shirt and ran my hands over his torso. I didn’t protest at all as the straps from my sundress slipped over my shoulders and the bodice fell below my breasts. All I cared about was having a Nick induced orgasm.

When the heat of his mouth found my nipple, my knees gave out and Nick had to press me harder against the wall so I wouldn’t fall in a gooey puddle to the floor. I worked his belt free and unbuttoned his pants so I could feel what I needed inside me with my hands.

“Please—please,” I begged. 

I protested when Nick k
ept my hands from stroking his shaft. 

“Stop, baby, I won’t last, and I need to be inside you right now.”

I agreed whole-heartedly, so I wrapped one leg around his waist. He had my dress pushed up far enough to see that the expense of an underwear of the month club membership was well worthwhile. I was in the perfect position to feel a strange and erotic sensation coming from the front of his pants.

“Nick, your pocket’s vibrating,” I said, biting his earlobe and running my fingers through his hair. God, I loved his hair, thick and just long enough to tangle my fingers in.

“You haven’t seen anything yet, baby. It can do a lot more than that.”

“No, I mean, it’s really vibrating.”

Nick stopped his hand from taking the journey the rest of the way up my thigh, and I moaned in frustration when the tip of his fingers just skimmed the edge of my panties. He detoured away from giving me ecstasy to reach into his pocket. 

He leaned his forehead against my own, his breath shaky
while he checked the display, and I could feel the struggle within to get himself under control as he listened to whoever was speaking on the other end. I was surprised the phone didn’t disintegrate as tight as he was holding it.

“Shit,” he yelled, leaving my half naked body against the wall and throwing the phone hard enough to leave a dent in my wall. 

So much for control.

Wednesday

“Fuuuuuuuuccccccccccckkkkkkkk!”

In the grand scheme of things I thought I handled the new disaster in my life fairly well. I woke up vaguely depressed, mostly because I was alone and the people around me seemed to be dropping like flies, but I think part of it was the fact that my eyes were swollen almost completely shut. Apparently, I ha
d some kind of allergic reaction to cucumber. Who knew?

So I did what everybody does when they’re faced with sickness or something else equally horrible. I called my mother.

I reached for the phone on my nightstand and congratulated myself for buying the kind with the large buttons, so at least now I could feel out her number. When my mother answered I had a sudden urge to cry.  Just the sound of her voice, vaguely questioning and oddly comforting made me yearn for something I couldn’t explain. The only thing that kept me from crying was that I didn’t know where the tears would go since my eyes were swollen shut. Would it make my eyelids explode from the tear buildup? It wasn’t something I wanted to find out first hand.

“Addison, is that you? Stop blowing your nose into the phone. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I’b gob a lurbic abtion,” I said and cried harder.

“What was that? Are you sick?”

“Yeb.”

“I’ll be right there.”

I hung up and waited for her to arrive. I laid spread eagle in bed and traced invisible maps through my mind of my mom’s route to my apartment. My thoughts eventually veered back to the night before and what would have happened if Nick hadn’t been called in to work.  He gave me a hard kiss on his way out the door and promised he’d be back. I hoped it wouldn’t be any time soon, considering this newest predicament.

I heard the key turn in the lock on the door and whimpered a little, knowing my mother would be able to fix everything in no time at all. I tilted my head and listened closely as my mother made her way to the bedroom. I’d never noticed before how distinctive her walk was.

“Mom?”

“I’m here, sweetheart. I dropped off a few groceries in the refrigerator. I know you don’t take the time to eat a balanced meal now that you’re living on your own.”

I refrained from reminding her that I’d been living on my own for ten years now and hadn’t died of malnutrition yet.

“Dear God! What happened to your eyes?” she asked, dropping something on the floor and sitting beside me on the bed.

“Is it really that bad?”

She hesitated too long before she lied, so I knew it must be pretty bad indeed.

“No, it’s not bad at all. We’ll just get some cold compresses on them and I’ll give Dr. Jones a call to see if he has any suggestions.”

Mom didn’t wait around to see if I was going to ask her to tell me what I looked like. And of course, that’s exactly what I was going to ask her. She practically ran to the kitchen to use the phone before I could
tell her to use the one on the nightstand.

When she came back in she told me she was holding a bag of ice and the Aloe Vera plant I kept on my
windowsill and not to be surprised by the cold.

“See, we’ll have you fixed up in no time,” she said, taking her place beside me again.

“So, what do they look like?” I was trying to envision the expression on my mother’s face as she described my newly deformed face. I could practically hear the corners of her mouth pinch tight and her eyes squint in concentration.

“Do you remember that time you fried your eyeballs in the tanning bed?”

“Yes,” I said, dreading what was coming next.

“This is worse. How in the world did you do this anyway?”

“It was the cucumber.”

“Oh, no,” my mother said, horrified. “I had no idea you were allergic to cucumbers. You’ve always loved cucumbers.”

Not really, but I wasn’t going to break my mother’s heart by telling her that. “It seemed to work so well. All the swelling was gone by the time Nick came by last night.”

She began rubbing the Aloe on my itchy lids and the cool, soothing balm was like an answered prayer. “And how is Nick?”

“He’s good. And still hanging around despite the fact you gave him the third degree.”

“He seemed very excited about getting a home-cooked meal. Not everybody is as blessed
as you are to have a mother who likes to cook. I’ll make meatloaf. Everyone loves my meatloaf.”

“Hmmmmm,” I said for lack of anything better.

The truth is my mom’s meatloaf has the consistency of an Acme brick, and it’s still one of her best dishes.  

“We’ve got to get the swelling down,” I said. “I have work to do tonight, and I’m sort of on a deadline.”

I thought about the murders and how Nick was keeping information from me. I needed to pay a visit to John Hyatt. This time in a professional capacity instead of as a hysterical wanna-be homeowner. There was something fishy about the Hyatt situation. I needed to find out for sure what his relationship was with Loretta Swanson and if she was lying for him to give him an alibi. There was no reason for Victor Mooney to be dead unless he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to. Since he was supposed to be watching John and Loretta, it made sense that the secrets should lie with them. Not to mention there was still something about Loretta that I didn’t trust.

“I don’t know if I like you working in all these dangerous situations.”

“It’s not dangerous, mom. All I do is take pictures.” 

I didn’t bother to tell her I was more of a danger to myself than any criminal could be. I told her about Nick’s suspicion that Mr. Butler’s death at The Foxy Lady was somehow related to Mr. Mooney and now Greg.

“Poor Greg,” she said. “But I don’t understand what you have to do with Bernard Butler’s death. You’ve never even been to that place where they found his body.”

“Maybe it’s because we worked together.” It was a lot easier to lie when you weren’t able to look anyone in the eye. There was no reason for her to know about the new job on my resume
or the fact that my principal was a stalker. “Mr. Mooney called me and wanted to meet before he died, and someone poisoned Greg. I’ve got to be connected somehow.”

“This is just awful. I can’t believe something like this is happening in Whiskey Bayou. We have to do something to stop it.”

“There’s nothing
we
can do about it, Mom,” I said. A little niggling of worry was making itself present in the depths of my bosom. I knew that tone in my mother’s voice. “The police are doing their jobs, and I’m trying to help them out in a limited capacity.”

I didn’t bother to mention the
promise I’d made to Kate or the fact that Nick wanted me to stay out of police business. I was skating on thin ice as it was. My mom would go ballistic if she found out I was skirting around the police and starting an investigation of my own.

“You can’t go anywhere in your condition. You need someone to drive you around. I can do that for you. I’ll be your sidekick.”

I prayed for the cucumber infection to enter my bloodstream and take me quickly, but no such luck.

“
Now get some sleep. When you wake up adventures will still be waiting. We’ll be just like Batman and Robin,” she said.

Lucy and Ethel was probably a more accurate assessment.

I woke a few hours later to cold cream being slathered on my eyes. Amazingly enough, when your eyes are swollen shut you have no other alternative but to eventually fall asleep. 

“
Dr. Jones dropped this by for the reaction,” my mother said. “He said it should make the swelling go down.”

I was secretly relieved she
had stayed while I slept and hadn’t left me alone to stumble my way to the bathroom or the kitchen.

“And I’ve made you a little something to eat. I hope you don’t mind.”

I nearly fell off the bed when I realized I could open my eyes the smallest bit. A flood of something I won’t even begin to try to describe ran down my cheeks, and I had a slight moment of panic when I still couldn’t see, thinking that my eyeballs had dissolved.

“And to think a little cucumber did this,” my mother said.  “You’d think it’d do t
he same thing to your insides. Maybe it’d be best if you didn’t eat them any more.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.
I laid back in bed with little to do but sleep.

When I woke up again I could hear my mother rustling around in my closet. I could open my eyes a little farther this time and even managed to see what was going on, though things were still a little blurry.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m getting our things ready. It’s getting dark outside and we’ll need to leave soon if we want to find a good place for a stakeout.”

I groaned and flopped back on the bed. I felt like hammered dog shit, and now I had to go sleuthing with my menopausal mother. What else could the fates throw at me to make my life miserable?

“I’ve got our things all laid out,” she said excitedly. “This is going to be so much fun. It’s been ages since we’ve been on a mother-daughter outing. The last one was when we took that camping trip to Allatoona Lake. You got poison ivy and a second-degree sunburn. That was a memorable trip.”

No kidding.

“What things did you get ready?”

“Our outfits, of course. We don’t want anyone to recognize us.”

I looked at the outfit on the chair and started laughing hysterically. Tears rolled out of my sore eyeballs, but it couldn’t be helped. My mother had dug a black trench coat out of the back of my closet that I never wore anymore because it was missing the buttons. She’d laid a black fedora over it I recognized as my father’s.

“Where’d you get Dad’s hat?”

“I ran home and got it while Dr. Jones was here. Isn’t this exciting?”

“Uh huh.” It was then I actually got a good look at my mother. She was dressed in head to toe black—a skintight black cat suit with bell
-bottom legs, ballet slippers and giant hoop earrings. But the kicker was the Do-rag tied around her head. She looked like a slutty pirate. 

“It’s ninety-five degrees outside.
I can’t wear a trench coat. And you can’t wear that outfit. You’re a mother for goodness sakes.”

“Columbo always wore
a trench coat, no matter what the weather was like. And it was wearing outfits like this that made me a mother in the first place. Don’t be such a prude, Addison.”

“Hmmm,” I said. She was right. Columbo always wore a trench coat, and
he
never looked out of place. And I guess my mom had the right to dress however she wanted, no matter how much I hated it. I could only hope our disguises worked because I couldn’t bear to give everyone in town more to talk about.

Since my car was still at the impound we were left with the Dodge for transportation.

“Where are you going?” I asked when I noticed her heading into Savannah.

“All this planning has made me hungry, and I don’t want to eat in Whiskey Bayou. Those people ask too many questions, and I assume you want to keep our after hours activities a secret.”

My stomach growled at the mention of food. The last time I’d eaten was with Nick the night before. And mom was right about the people in Whiskey Bayou asking questions. There was nothing normal about either of us in our current state.

My mom pulled
through a Burger King drive-thru and placed our orders, and the guy at the register only looked slightly appalled at the two of us. His bland reaction did wonders to ease my self-esteem issues.

“I can’t believe John Hyatt could be cheating on Fanny. First Greg, now John. I don’t know what the world is coming to. Men need to learn how to keep their flies zipped if you want my opinion.
John Hyatt and his family are practically legend in this town. Whiskey Bayou would be a ghost town if his family hadn’t used their own money to support the businesses during Prohibition and the Depression. And then the train depot stopped running and all those jobs were cut. The man is practically a saint. And now this. An adulterer.”

The thought had crossed my mind more than once of what the ramifications would be if I brought down a pillar of the community
. Would I lose my job? Would they take my picture down from the wall in the Good Luck Café from the time when I ate all those hot dogs and won a free T-shirt? The consequences were too unbearable to think about. 

We pulled into a parking space and ate our burgers. A knock on the window had both of us jumping in our seats. A middle-aged man with a comb-over and thick glasses looked at us and blinked like an owl
as he caught a good look at us. My mom rolled down her window slowly.

“Sorry to disturb you,” the man said. “But I found this on the ground next to your door.” He handed my mom a
five-dollar bill, said goodbye and ran to a blue Honda Civic before she could tell him thank you.