The sheriff kept working as Mama and I sat on the front porch, moving back and forth in tandem on our wooden rockers watching the commotion. All I needed was to be chewing on a wheat stalk and the hillbilly look would be complete. It was dark out now, but it might as well have been broad daylight with the power of the artificial light gleaming down on the yard. For a small town, Bliss seemed to have some decent equipment.
A black woman marched through the arbor and straight over to the sheriff, clearly not intimidated by his deep growls and barks. He greeted her with a slight dip of his chin. She folded her arms across her ample chest and waited. After a short exchange, he let her pass through the rosebushes to the cordoned-off scene of the crime.
When she stood under the lights, I could see she was shorter than I was, full-figured, and had cropped hair that clung to her head. Something hung around her neck, but I couldn’t quite see what it was. I leaned forward, stopping my chair from rocking. “What’s she got?”
“A camera,” Mama said just as the woman lifted it to her face and started snapping. She took pictures of the arbor, the ground, and everything but the dead body. Mama kept on rocking and I suspected her attention was glued to the sheriff.
“So who is she?” I asked.
“That’s Madelyn Brighton,” Mama said. “She’s a transplant. Literally. She’s from England. Met her Texan husband over there and came back with him. He’s a professor at the University of North Texas and she works for Bliss.”
I never would have guessed that Bliss could support any more staff than the sheriff, a handful of deputy sheriffs, a few office employees, and the mayor. We were a spit of a town. Growing, yes, but not anywhere near the size of a metropolitan city. “Doing what?”
“Any photography that needs doing, she does. I reckon she’s taking pictures for the medical examiner, or whoever crime-scene photos go to.” Mama kept her eyes on Sheriff McClaine as she rattled on. “I hear she’s creating a tourist brochure for Bliss. There’s a master plan for the community now. Bike trails, horseback riding trails, parks. Things like that. They have an architect and a civil engineer on staff so we don’t sacrifice our historic, small-town feel.”
I gaped at my mother. This was not the same Bliss I’d grown up in. “You’re kidding, right? A tourist brochure? As in people coming here for vacation?”
Mama just shrugged. “A lot of people want small-town living. They like to see the old history. Plus we have the lake. You came back, didn’t you?”
She had a point. I was back, and I had to admit there was a lot to like about small-town life.
If you could overlook having a murder take place in your front yard.
I sat back and started rocking again. Madelyn Brighton looked like a force to be reckoned with. She was crouched next to the dead body in my front yard at 10:20 on a weekday evening, which told me she had bigger aspirations than taking pretty pictures of Bliss. Medical examiner, maybe? But one body did not make for a career in criminal justice. Surely murder—and I was convinced it was murder; how else would a healthy young woman wind up dead in a stranger’s yard?—couldn’t be a common occurrence in Bliss.
“Why would anybody kill her?” Mama prattled on to herself as she creaked back and forth in her rocker. “She was a nice girl. Built the bead shop from the ground up. Not literally, of course; it’s on the square. But she remodeled it, taught classes, hired your friend Josie. She put all her time and energy into Seed-n-Bead. Did I show you the bracelet I made?” She thrust her arm toward me, her fist nearly ramming my chest. “She helped me, you know. Dug out her special stash of premium beads just to find ones that matched my eyes,” she said.
I turned my palm up and Mama rested her hand in mine. I knew less about beads than I did about Nell. I had worked long enough in the fashion industry to admire quality costume jewelry, though, and the double strands of silver and crystal beads with two spectacularly bright green ones strung on the center of each bracelet wire were spectacular.
She wriggled her wrist, letting the silver and glass jingle. “I’ll always think of her when I wear it.”
“It’s lovely,” I said, but what really caught my eye was the ring on her other hand. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now it glinted in the moonlight. My heart skittered to a stop. “Mama, is that a diamond?”
Her gaze shot to her right hand, to the yard, then back to me. Not to the yard, I realized. To Sheriff Hoss McClaine. Holy cow, Mama and Hoss McClaine? Was there something going on there? Could he have given it to her? But a man didn’t buy a diamond ring for a casual friend.
She tucked her hand by her side, the shimmering stone out of sight for the moment. Like that would make me forget about it. I dropped the subject . . . for now. Which was a good thing, because at that very moment a shrill voice carried into the garden. “She can’t be dead! I was with her practically all day today. She was almost ready to—”
“Calm down. You need to calm down, now,” a man said, drowning out her words, but the woman kept talking.
“Just. Today!” She didn’t seem to realize that everyone who dies had been alive just moments before, so the fact that Nell had talked with the woman shrieking in the street earlier today wasn’t anything unusual. In fact, I figured the sheriff would want to talk to everyone Nell had spoken with today in hopes of gathering some clues about what had happened.
A low voice countered the shrill one that was still ranting just beyond the entrance to the yard. As she calmed down, a flicker of recognition flitted through me.
“It’s a mistake. It has to be. Josie’s wedding . . .” The voice trailed off as a man and the woman stepped through the archway, framed in the moonlight. I recognized her immediately. She’d been with Nell practically all day today—right here at Buttons & Bows.
“Karen!” Josie stumbled across the gravel pathway toward the couple, tear streaks glistening on her face in the moonlight. They fell into each other’s arms. She still had her cell phone pressed to her ear, and I couldn’t tell if she was talking to the person on the other end of the line or to her bridesmaid.
Whether Karen was holding Josie up, or Josie was holding Karen up, I couldn’t tell. I felt like an intruder on Meemaw’s porch, watching Nell’s friends grieve for her. “She was only thirty-five,” I heard a muffled voice say. Mama and I looked at each other. Tears pricked behind my eyelids. It didn’t matter how old Nell was. Her life was over far too soon. She was just a couple of years older than me, and I felt like I’d hardly even started living.
What was it that people said these days? Thirty was the new twenty, and forty was the new thirty. My whole life was ahead of me, just like Nell’s had been just a few hours ago.
“Thirty-five,” I muttered, shaking my head. Mama rested her hand on mine and squeezed, seeming to understand the thoughts circling through my head. Looking at Josie and Karen, and at Nell’s body, still being photographed by Madelyn Brighton, seemed to put everything into perspective. Life, after all, was fragile.
The man with Karen looked a little like a young Robert Duvall, complete with balding head and watchful eyes. He had to be Karen’s husband.
Josie’s spine suddenly stiffened. “Oh!” She pulled away from Karen and quickly raised her cell phone back up to her ear. “Sorry, Mrs. Kincaid,” she said, listening, then speaking, then listening some more. “Yes . . . I know, but . . . I can’t.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “But Nell’s dead!”
She looked at the ground, cupping her hand over her eyes as she listened to Nate’s mother on the other end of the phone. The tall man with Karen hunched his shoulders and whispered in her ear. I felt as if I was in the middle of a movie. The characters were bleeding with emotion and I was on the outside looking in.