They didn’t mention that it involves a homicide. But maybe the desk clerk has put two and two together. It’s a small town, after all; the guests might have asked her for directions to the funeral home earlier.
Or maybe the desk clerk is just being vigilant, as she should in her position.
Hell, if everyone were a little more vigilant—or nosy, as it were—her own job would be much easier.
Hearing the elevator bell ring at last, Crystal and Frank look over expectantly. The doors slide open and Landry Wells—aka BamaBelle—steps out.
Standing to greet her, Crystal notes that she’s changed out of her black dress, now wearing a pair of trim off-white linen pants with a sea-foam-colored summer cardigan. Her blond hair is caught in a neat ponytail and she’s got on a fresh coat of pink lipstick that matches her manicure and pedicure polish.
How is it that certain women—often, southern women—always manage to look so pulled together, even under duress?
Crystal—who rarely looks in a mirror after she leaves the bathroom in the morning and would never think to reapply lipstick in the middle of the day—is not one of those women.
“I’m sorry I’m late.” Landry walks quickly toward them, heeled sandals tapping on the tile floor. “I had to call home and check on my husband and kids and it took longer than I thought.”
“Do you know where the others are?” Crystal asks.
“They should be here any second. We all went to our rooms when we got back.”
“Okay. Why don’t you and I go have a quiet talk in the conference room while Detective Schneider waits here for your friends?”
“Sure.”
Crystal escorts Landry down the hall behind the front desk as the clerk pretends not to watch them over the open romance novel in her hands.
With a view of the side parking lot and part of the pool’s chain-link fence, the conference room is a no-frills rectangle that contains little more than a long table with eight chairs and a blue plastic water bottle cooler.
Crystal closes the door behind them. “Have a seat, Ms. Wells. Or do you go by Mrs.?”
“Either, but you can call me Landry.” She perches on the chair nearest the door, giving off the expectant, anxious vibe of a mom sitting in the Little League stands as her child comes up at bat, or in the audience as her kid takes a turn in a spelling bee.
She doesn’t belong here, in the middle of a murder investigation, Crystal finds herself thinking as she takes the adjacent seat at the head of the table. She should be back at home, with her family.
“All right, Landry. Let’s get started.” Crystal sets her bag on the floor, taking out her laptop and a notebook and pen, but leaving the recording equipment inside.
No need to make Landry Wells needlessly skittish. She always records witnesses she has a hunch might later become suspects, but she’s certain that won’t happen in this case. Her Internet search on Landry’s name had resulted—among other things—in a photograph from an Alabama newspaper’s society page. Snapped Saturday night at a charity ball, it depicted an elegantly dressed Landry accompanied by her husband and another couple identified as the husband’s law partner and his wife.
So there we have it—an alibi, she thought, when she noted the date.
Crystal opens the laptop and it instantly buzzes to life, already bookmarked on Landry’s most recent blog post—written several days ago, presumably before she found out about Meredith.
She flips her notebook to a clean page, picks up a pen, and clears her throat. “I just want to talk to you a little bit about your relationship with Meredith, and about her blog, and yours, and . . . I’d like your take on how the whole thing works.”
“You mean blogging?”
“The dynamic you have with other bloggers, that kind of thing.”
“Oh. Okay. Well . . .” Landry looks as though she has no idea where to begin.
“Why don’t you tell me first what made you decide to write your own blog?”
“Have you read it?”
Crystal nods. She’d first stumbled across it a few days ago, having noticed that someone named BamaBelle commented often on Meredith’s page, and tracing the comments back to the blog. She did the same with a number of others.
Today at the funeral home, after asking the three women about their online identities, she’d finally been able to connect the blog titles and screen names with real women behind them.
Afterward, when she wasn’t fruitlessly searching for a link between Jenna Coeur and Meredith Heywood, she’d spent the better part of the last hour reading—and in some cases, rereading—Landry’s, Kay’s, and Elena’s blogs, noting their interaction with Meredith, each other, and fellow bloggers.
It came as no surprise to her that the attractive, genteel southern stay-at-home-mom was behind the homey, conversational Breast Cancer Diaries, or that the reserved midwesterner wrote the staid I’m A-Okay.
The shocker was that the saucy Boobless Wonder blog was penned by a first grade teacher. But a few minutes in Elena Ferreira’s presence revealed an engaging, if somewhat frenetic, personality that seems convincingly reminiscent of the voice she uses in her blog.
Nothing unusual jumped out at Crystal in any of the blogs, other than a remarkably casual level of intimacy among a collection of strangers who had ostensibly never met in person. But then, she’s seen that phenomenon within other online communities. When people come together on the Internet, the usual social constraints fall away with the promise of anonymity.
“If you’ve read my blog,” Landry says, “then you know that I was diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s why I blog.”
Crystal shoots straight, as always. “But lots of people have breast cancer and don’t blog. Why do you?”
Perhaps taken aback, Landry tilts her head.
Crystal is about to rephrase the question, but then Landry answers it in a soft voice, as if she’s conveying a secret. Maybe she is.
In a lilting drawl that sometimes takes Crystal a moment to translate, Landry talks about the fear and shock and—more importantly—the loneliness that set in after her diagnosis. She describes the support group she visited early in her treatment, and the horror of coming face-to-face with doomed patients. She smiles faintly when she mentions her first foray onto the Internet in search of information, finding not just that, but also companionship—ultimately, friendship.
“I wasn’t isolated anymore,” she tells Crystal. “I realized these women were talking about things I could relate to. And that maybe I had something to say, too. Something I couldn’t say to the people I saw every day.”
“Because . . .”
“Because they just wouldn’t get it.”
Crystal asks her a few more questions about the evolution of Landry’s own blog before leading into how she got to know Meredith.
“She was kind of like the older sorority sister who takes a new pledge under her wing, you know?”
Crystal nods, though she doesn’t know. Not from experience. But she bets Landry does.
Sure enough, the question is met with a nod and a faint smile. “I was Alpha Gamma Delta at University of Alabama.”
“Roll Tide.”
Landry’s smile widens to a full-blown grin. “That’s right!”
“So Meredith was . . . what, like a big sister? A mentor?”
The smile fades promptly at the mention of the dead woman’s name.
She forgot, for a moment there, Crystal realizes. Forgot why we’re here; forgot her friend was murdered.
Now that Landry remembers, renewed sorrow taints her pretty face as she contemplates the question. “Maybe she was more motherly than sisterly . . . is sisterly a word?”
“You’re the writer. You tell me.”
“You know . . . it’s funny, I don’t really consider myself a writer, but . . . I guess that’s what blogging is, right? I kind of like thinking of it that way, and I know Meredith did, too. It’s what she always wanted to be.”
“A writer?” Crystal knows this—some of Meredith’s blog posts referred to the literary road not taken—but she waits for Landry to elaborate.