I did, too. Mostly I was relieved that her friends weren’t throwing her under the bus. They didn’t seem to believe Mrs. James could have killed Macon Vance any more than I did.
The first woman’s lips drew together as if she’d sucked a lemon dry. “Abigail, tell me you are not going to the jail. Why, you simply cannot step foot in that place.”
The woman named Abigail recoiled. “Heaven’s me, no, Cathy. Lawrence would be fit to be tied if I even mentioned it. No. I’ll see her when she gets out.”
“If she gets out,” Cathy said. The rest of their conversation faded away as they drifted off, and my shoulders sank.
And here I’d thought they were her friends. “I’m going to visit her,” I told Madelyn, making up my mind on the spot.
“Who, Mrs. James?”
“Yup. Tomorrow.” I couldn’t sit by and do nothing. I’d go to the source to figure out what sort of garment to make her. But most of all, I’d be her friend.
Chapter 16
Trudy and Fern had gone into the procedure bedroom before I could speak to them. Josie had shown up while we waited, and she, Madelyn, and I hovered near the back room, debating whether to stay. I caught a glimpse of Steven, Sandra, and Libby Allen, and a flash of memory hit me. I’d seen the parents together at Villa Farina the morning Macon Vance had died.
Duane paused in the hallway, lifting his hand in a wave to Libby as Steven guided his wife and daughter toward the front door. Sandra’s head hung low and her shoulders slumped. So coming out hadn’t gotten her mind off the fact that her mother was in jail.
As I wondered if she’d been to the old brick jailhouse, my worry for Mrs. James grew to the size of a ten-gallon hat.
Tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough.
“Those Lafayette sisters have been in there since the dawn of time,” Madelyn mumbled, tapping her foot.
“Maybe not since the dawn of time,” Josie said, “but for a good twenty minutes.”
Finally, after another five torturously slow minutes, the door was flung open and they sauntered out. Trudy still looked tense, her fingers pressed against the hollows on the inside of her eyes, just like earlier.
“Don’t rub, now,” Dr. Hughes said, coming up behind her. “You don’t want to spread it around.”
Fern and Trudy said good-bye, then shuffled up to us. “You came?” Fern said.
I nodded. “So did you.”
“Trudy’s headache,” she said by way of explanation. “It hit her harder this afternoon after y’all left. All that squinting over the hand-beading. Couldn’t very well send her alone.”
I nodded with approval. Fern was a good sister. “I was just, er, curious,” I said, not wanting to reveal that I hoped to somehow help Mrs. James. The doctor waved at them, nodding, and as Trudy walked by she held her head high, but her lower lip quivered, from the pain, I guessed.
She didn’t look all that different. Same crow’s-feet. Same wrinkled forehead. Same vertical lines between the brows. If the Botox helped her wrinkles, too, it hadn’t worked yet.
“People pay for that?” Madelyn whispered to Josie and me.
“They do. And a pretty penny, too,” Josie whispered back. “My hairdresser gets it done. She pays twelve dollars a unit.”
Madelyn looked fascinated, her eyebrows arched high on her forehead. “How many units does it take?”
“Twenty-five for her crow’s-feet.”
Bless my soul. That was a whole lotta money to get rid of a few lines for a few months.
“Step right in, little ladies!” Buckley Hughes’s voice boomed at us.
“No, no.” I waved my hands, taking a step back, wanting to go talk to Trudy and Fern.
“Harlow.” The doctor took my hand and pulled me into the room. Josie and Madelyn were on my heels.
“It’s perfectly safe,” the doctor said, but my stomach clenched at the sight of the syringes and vials.
“Really, no,” I said, trying to be polite. There was no way I was forking over hundreds of dollars to minimize my wrinkles. And if I ever did, it would be in a sterilized doctor’s office. I subscribed to Meemaw’s philosophy that I’d earned every single one of them and they were a testament to my years. Plus, I’d just seen on Trudy that it didn’t work.
“I was wondering, though…” I decided to just ask what I wanted to know down deep. “I heard that my great-grandmother came to some of your parties. Did she…” I swallowed, still hardly believing it could be true. “Did she get any treatments? Loretta Mae Cassidy,” I added, picking up a vial with a salmon-colored lid and label from the stainless steel medical table and turning it over in my hands. “That was my great-grandmother.”
“’Course. I knew Loretta Mae pretty well. She was a talker, that one. Always with the questions and the predictions and the stories about Bliss.” The doctor perched on the edge of his chair, stroking his clean-shaven chin. “Lots of women come on over to the parties but never get a treatment. Far as I know, Loretta Mae didn’t get anythin’ done. Not by me, anyway.”
I put down the vial as Madelyn and Josie crowded behind me. “Are you sure? Fern and Trudy Lafayette seemed to think she’d had some work done, but I… I just have a hard time believing that.”
He paused for the quickest beat, then got up and strode around us to the door. “Anna?” He moved a few steps into the hallway and called again.
His wife appeared a moment later. His voice was too low to hear, but he came back into the room after a minute, shaking his head. Anna followed him.
“My husband’s right,” she said, her accent thicker than a pot of baked beans. “Loretta Mae came around every now and again, but she never got any treatments done.” Her words were a little slurred. Her wineglass was full again, I noticed. Flowing drinks didn’t seem like a good idea at a cosmetics party. Impaired decision making, and all. Could a woman really know what she was giving consent for if she couldn’t think straight? I glanced around the room. No Shiners or Merlot for Dr. Hughes, thankfully. At least if he aimed for a woman’s forehead with his syringe, he wouldn’t miss.
The doctor leaned against the doorjamb, one arm folded over his chest, the other cocked at the elbow, his finger tapping his chin as he thought. “Now, she did come in and talk to me about it once or twice,” he said. “Seems to me we spent more time chatting about everything else under the sun, though. She was skittish, if I recall, but whenever I brought up the procedure, she changed the subject to her quilts, her daughter’s goats, my life, Will next door… you. Anything, really. I just figured she was lonely and wanted to talk.”
Lonely? Skittish? Loretta Mae? That didn’t sound right. Then again, if she’d been considering going against one of her own personal life philosophies, I could see why she would have been on edge. “She talked about me?”
He cupped his chin, his thumb joining the tapping rhythm. “She couldn’t wait to have you back home, although…” He paused, looking up at the ceiling as if his memories were stored there.
“Yes?” I didn’t know what insight a doctor who’d barely known Meemaw could give me, but I’d take any scrap he threw.
“She seemed to be worried about something. I’m a pretty good judge of character, and it seemed to me like she was keeping something under wraps.”
“Secrets,” Anna Hughes blurted. “Everyone’s always keeping secrets, aren’t they, honey?” Her ankle buckled and she stumbled, her wine sloshing over the sides of her glass.