I fell back on what Meemaw had always taught me. “Any man can be tempted, Anna. It’s what they do in the face of temptation that speaks to their character.”
She’d loosened her grip on the notebook and must have felt my stare because she sat up and held it out to me. “Guess you want it back.”
Does an armadillo wear armor? I took it before she changed her mind, and once it was safely in my hands, I asked, “Why’d you take it?”
She sat back against the firmly stuffed couch again and crossed her legs. With the back of her hand, she brushed a long strand of hair away from her face, following up by combing her bangs back down over her forehead. Stalling, getting a handle on her alcohol-blurred mind, or gathering up her gumption? Maybe all three.
“She’s meddlesome…”
“Trudy?” I asked, working to keep my voice steady. It was quite possible I was sitting in a room with a killer, and that didn’t make me feel very calm and collected.
“It’s just… I hate to spread rumors about someone who’s in ill health.”
Too late now. She’d already planted the seed. I looked at the notebook, the edges of the cover worn and frayed from use. What was in here that had set Anna off? What did Trudy know?
The tone in her voice had an edge to it that made my spine stiffen. Trudy was lying in a hospital bed, her face swollen and her mind muddied, after being drugged and injected with— My mind screeched to a halt. With Botox.
A chill seized me. What if the break-in here had been fake? And furthermore, what if Anna had been the one to stage it, all to cover her tracks as she attacked Trudy? But I came back to why?
I started to stand, itching to get the heck away from Anna and back to the club with the notebook, but she leaned forward and she patted the air so I’d sit back down.
Anna closed her eyes, and for a moment, I thought she’d fallen asleep. They popped open suddenly, and I jumped, startled. “She did it.”
I stared at her. “She did what?”
“Trudy Lafayette killed Macon Vance.”
Chapter 32
Anna couldn’t explain why she thought Trudy had killed Macon Vance, so I waved her proclamation aside and told her I had to get back to the club to get ready for the pageant.
But once I was out of the Hughes’s house, I knew I had to take a few minutes to look at the notebook more closely. I pulled my truck forward until I was parked on the grassy shoulder in front of Will Flores’s house instead of the Hughes’s. My hands shook and blood pulsed in my ears. What in tarnation was going on with this town. In two seconds, I’d practically convinced myself that Anna had killed Macon Vance so her husband wouldn’t be influenced by the golfer’s promiscuity, and that she’d attacked Trudy to keep her quiet about… something.
Ridiculous, it turned out.
But it was more ridiculous to think that Trudy Lafayette could have done it. Stabbing a man with a pair of sewing shears had to require some strength, didn’t it? Trudy couldn’t have overpowered Vance. And would she have broken into the Hughes’s house, stolen a vial of Botox, drugged her sister so she’d be none the wiser, and then injected herself enough to send her to the hospital? That seemed terribly risky to me.
“Assuming the two incidents are related,” I muttered, but I felt sure that they were.
As I opened the notebook to scour it for information, I felt the force of someone’s stare. I looked up to see Will, a length of rope in his hand, sidling along the cattle fence of his property, his gaze curious. I gave a little wave. “Hey,” I said through the open passenger window.
“Hey, yourself.” He looked around, as if he could read the environment to see why I was sitting in front of his property, finally arching an eyebrow at me when the answer didn’t come to him. “Wanna come inside? You look a little hot.”
My breath hitched and a wave of self-consciousness floated over me about how the curls of my hair were weighed down by the humidity. It was tough to weather well during July in Texas.
“Inside your house?”
One side of his mouth quirked up. “Unless you’d rather melt in that old truck.”
He didn’t wait for me to agree. He moved around the hood of the truck, grabbed the handle of the driver’s door, and yanked. It stuck for the briefest moment, then jerked open. “Come on. I don’t bite.”
“Of course you don’t,” I said with a self-conscious laugh. I knew Josie and Mama were handling things at the club and by now the girls had gone home and wouldn’t be back until four o’clock for a last minute rehearsal. I had a little time, but I sure hadn’t planned on spending any of that time at Will Flores’s house. “I have a few minutes. Very few,” I added, telling him I needed to get back to the club.
Grabbing my Michael Kors bag and Trudy’s moleskin notebook, I hopped out of the cab. I schooled my expression, pretty sure I looked calm and collected, but on the inside, my nerve endings were firing double time. I needed to see what had caught Anna’s attention in the notebook.
I walked with him down his asphalt driveway, along the cement sidewalk leading to the front porch, and into his ranch house. I stopped short just inside the door. The entry opened up into a big family room. The largest table I’d ever seen sat on the right side of the room, covered in tiny houses and buildings.
I moved toward it as if an invisible rope, just like the real one in Will’s hand, had lassoed me and was pulling me forward. “What is this?” It looked like Bliss’s town square, and beyond, all done in miniature.
He came up behind me, not so close that he was touching me, but close enough that I could feel him. “It’s for the historic society. It’ll go in the new section of the museum.”
I pointed to the center of the display where the hundred-and-something-year-old limestone building sat smack in the center of the square’s grassy lawn. “There, in the courthouse?”
He was beside me now, only a breath of air between his right arm and my left. “The third floor is going to be devoted to Bliss’s architectural history.” His voice took on a hint of excitement as he pointed to the different buildings, telling me about the new plastic composites and Taskboard he’d used to represent the limestone exterior of the courthouse.
“It looks exactly like it.” He’d re-created every last element, from the pillars to the stone steps and domed roof.
He folded his arms over his chest, a hint of pride in his expression. “The devil’s in the details.”
Like the finish work of a garment.
“The square doesn’t have a pergola there,” I said, pointing to the northeast corner of the grassy lawn near a cluster of miniature trees.
“It will.” He indicated the walkway from the pergola to a flower garden. “The model includes current elements, as well as pieces of the long-term plan for town improvements.”
Around the perimeter were replicas of the quaint restaurants and shops that made Bliss an up-and-coming destination town. I recognized Villa Farina and Seed-n-Bead on Elm Street, just a hop, skip, and a jump away from my farmhouse on Mockingbird Lane.
“I’m working on Loretta Mae’s house now,” he said, following my gaze to the empty spot where my house should have been. He pointed to a second table, off to one side of the room. Right there, smack in the center on a smaller piece of Taskboard, was the red brick farmhouse I’d practically grown up in. Once again, every detail, from the taller roofline and dormers on the left side of the house to the yellow siding and wood porch leading to the front door was perfect. He’d even made a miniature replica of the Buttons & Bows sign I’d recently had hung from the eaves.