Wash, Rinse, Die: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 2) Read online

  Wash, Rinse, Die

  by

  Constance Barker

  Copyright 2016 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

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  · CHAPTER ONE

  The early October sun was beginning to warm things up when we got to the salon. Standing on the sidewalk with the gentle warmth on my back, I watched Sarah Jameson unlock the door as Sanders Bloomington, AKA the Bald Eagle, approached from the direction of the hardware store.

  “Good morning to you ladies,” he said, touching the bill of his “Kiss My Bass” baseball cap. “Savannah Jefferies, I see that young Sarah is helping you out.”

  “Her salon-opening technique is excellent, wouldn’t you say?”

  He studied the way Sarah turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. “A perfect 10,” he said and continued on his way down the sidewalk.

  Seven-year old Sarah has been staying with me since her parents went gallivanting off to New Orleans last year, ostensibly to rekindle their love life. That was Bee Jameson’s song and dance at the time, anyway. We haven’t heard a word from them since they left. Not that it’s a panic. Sarah is engaging company, and for her part, she doesn’t seem to mind being away from her parents. She’s a practical little person. When I brought her to my house and she discovered that she’d have her own room, she settled into that room as if it had always been intended for her. I liked to think that she’s right about that.

  Every weekday morning she and I walk to my hair salon. This little blonde had decided that unlocking the front door of the Teasen and Pleasen Hair Salon was her job. With me bringing up the rear, she takes charge of opening the door and then settles into a chair to supervise the day’s start-up activities. I bring the till out of the back room to the register, plug in the credit card reader, and generally get things ready for the first customers.

  And so it was this morning. Another exciting day in Knockemstiff, Louisiana was underway.

  A few minutes later Nellie Phlint came in looking uncharacteristically upbeat. She has lately become alarmingly cheerful, and today she was taking cheerfulness almost to the doorstep of smiling. Now that she’s given up on wearing her hair in a pixie cut, in what was a failed attempt to pretend she wasn’t getting older (she’s forty-three, like me), it’s easier to tell she’s an attractive woman. Nellie is our beautician and specializes in nails, makeup, and hair coloring. She usually comes in right after I do and starts the coffee in the urn we keep going all day before setting up her station for customers.

  Until recently, Nellie’s life read like a page out of a bad romance novel — a lot more than a page, come to think of it. She had lived through enough of a bad romance novel to make the average reader put the book down and look for an activity that was more fun, like scrubbing the kitchen floor or taking out the garbage. Seeing her almost smile gave me pause.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “Days are too short,” she said and gestured toward Sarah, “Children grow up too fast. People aren’t grateful for what they have.”

  “Miz Phlint,” Sarah said, “I’m grateful for you and Miz Jefferies and Finnegan.” Finnegan, the blue tick hound, wagged his tail with cautious happiness at getting a mention. “Aren’t I people?”

  “Usually,” I explained, “when ‘people’ mention ‘people,’ they mean people who are not present in the room.”

  Sarah looked at me blankly. Why is it that so many things that are clear in my head go sideways when they emerge from my mouth?

  “In any case,” I said, “Nellie is wonderfully happy today, isn’t she? Which makes us wonder if she’s taking something stronger than ibuprofen.” I stopped messing with the cash register to glance at Nellie. “You are looking like the cat who caught the canary.”

  Sarah looked alarmed.

  “Not a real canary,” I assured her.

  “When ‘people’ mention ‘cats’ and ‘canaries,’” Nellie explained to Sarah, “they usually mean cats and canaries who are not present anywhere on earth.”

  “Nellie,” I said, “Why on earth are you so upbeat?”

  She gave Sarah and me a sheepishly defiant look. “Last night, when Rudy came home, he brought me flowers.”

  “Flowers?” I asked, trying to get Rudy and flowers in the same mental picture.

  “Yes, you know those colorful growths that appear on the ends of green things?”

  “I wonder what he did?”

  “What he did?” Her face flushed as she thought about it. She shoved her hips against the table holding the coffee urn and grabbed the urn with both hands. “Oh, he did lots of things, let me tell you.” She rolled her eyes back in her head. I was glad that Sarah was there. Otherwise Nellie might have told me exactly what he did, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the details. I’m not a prude — well, not much of one — but my life has been devoid of anything romantic for some time. Hearing the specifics of her love life would be a joyless exercise for me. “I meant what brought this on?”

  She shrugged. “I think he's just happy that he and his grandaddy and Aunt Hattie are legal moonshiners now.”

  Rudy Phlint's moonshining family had recently gone legit. They were not only licensed to make booze, but courtesy of Nellie’s oldest boys, and somewhat to her dismay, they had a web presence and serious branding for their product — Bayou Shine. “Aren’t you supposed to call them artisan distillers or something like that?”

  As she talked, Nellie was working, starting with the vital task of filling the coffee urn with filtered water from the deep sink. “They are bootleggers by any other name.”

  “Except now they pay taxes and don’t have to worry about being raided.”

  Her almost-smile faded. “Well, Conway, Rudy's grandaddy, is still running the old still.”

  “Barn A?”

  She nodded. “It’s sentimental. He’s attached to it, but I'm not sure the license covers him making moonshine wherever he likes.”

  “Well,” I said, shifting back to the happy side of the topic, “whatever it is, I’m glad you're happy. It just might take me some time to get used to the new you.” I held out a hand to Sarah. “We need to get you to school, young lady.”

  “Young lady,” Sarah mused, “Yet apparently I’m not ‘people.’ Miz Jefferies, I’m pretty sure I am still a little girl,” she said.

  “But now you are seven.”

  She gave me her serious face as she did whenever the very serious subject of Sarah Jameson came up. “Actually, I’m seven minus sixteen point six percent years old.”

  “Sixteen point six percent?” Nellie said. “Where does that come from?”

  “That’s what percentage two months is of one year,” she said. “Mrs. Lacey thinks it’s important to be accurate when we use numbers.”

  “Mrs. Lacey…” Nellie began. And stopped. At the sound of Sarah’s teacher’s name, Nellie let the conversation lapse. I didn’t know what the story was, but it seemed at some point there was history between Nellie and Mrs. Lacey. That may have been from the time I was living in Baton Rouge, and got married, and made lots of other mistakes.

  With Nellie taking charge of the salon for a time, Sarah grabbed her book bag and her lunch and we set out. It wasn’t a long walk. On a gorgeous day like the one we
were having, I wished it were longer. It was one of those delicious fall days when things are cooling down. Bear in mind that this is Louisiana, and that means, for a time at least, the humidity falls a little and the high temperature stays below 80. That’s our version of fall. Cool and dry -- almost.

  As we walked, Finnegan trotted along close to Sarah. When we stopped at the school she put her hand on the dog’s head, petting him in a way that was rather possessive. “Can Fin stay with me at school today?”

  “Stay at school? I don’t think Mrs. Lacey allows animals in the school.”

  Sarah tried to keep a straight, serious face, but I caught the sly smile that passed over it. She’d set me up. Again. I wondered where this was going. Finally she broke the news to me, “People are animals, Miz Jefferies.”

  I sighed. I sigh a lot more often now that Sarah is living with me. “That’s true enough, but dogs are a different kind of animal.”

  “But if the rule says no animals and doesn’t say just not certain kinds of animals, I shouldn’t be allowed in.”

  “I don’t think the rule says ‘no animals,’ if it’s even written down. It’s probably more something at the teacher’s discretion. She might think dogs are disruptive.”

  “Sounds like the ‘do what I say’ loophole,” she said with a frown.

  “Exactly. Besides, you like school; if there is a no animals rule, you should be glad she makes an exception for you.”

  Sarah chewed on that, then said, “Fin is better behaved than a lot of the other animals in this school. By that I mean kids,” she explained. “He just sleeps all day.”

  Logic isn’t always the best line of attack with Sarah, because she is wickedly smart and rather good at cutting to the simple core of things. “If they let Fin go to school, then he’d have to do homework. I don’t think he’d like it if you changed that about his life. As you said, he prefers sleeping.”

  Accepting my argument far more seriously that I’d expected, she squatted down and looked the dog in the eye. “Finnegan, would you do your homework?”

  Fin stuck out his tongue and panted. I saw this as an opportunity to capture what was always a swing vote. “I’d take that as a no, Sarah. Besides, my customers need him at Teasen and Pleasen.”

  “Why?”

  “So they can either spoil him rotten or complain about him.”

  Sarah straightened up. “Okay.” I wasn’t sure this topic wouldn’t come up again and thought maybe I should call Mrs. Lacey. We could talk about this and see if we could come up with a variation on the rule that Sarah would accept or at least give her a heads up that she could expect a lengthy interrogation on the subject. Sarah is tenacious.

  Mrs. Lacey's school is really a house that is used for a school. Knockemstiff is too small a town, with 768 people, to actually have a school. There is one in Epps – Epps High School, even though Epps only has 843 people, but it is what they call a consolidated school attended by students from all over the Parish and despite the name it is actually kindergarten through high school. With around 300 students total it is number 630 in enrollment in Louisiana. The youngest have a short school day and the bus ride from Knockemstiff to Epps, assuming we had a bus, wouldn’t make sense. So, Mrs. Lacey, who is a retired teacher, started a private school in Knockemstiff for the littlest kids—kindergarten through fourth grade. After that they go to Epps High, or the middle school in Delhi.

  Sarah, in third grade now, is Mrs. Lacey’s star student.

  The population of towns around here is a big deal, believe me. We all watch those numbers the way the Federal Government watches unemployment rates. It’s an indicator of how towns are doing. Epps brags about its 843 souls, although they used to boast more than 1,000 before the economy tanked when their gas fields played out.

  The people who live in Knockemstiff are here because they like being in a small town, but there are disadvantages. If it gets too small, then it can't support any of us. If it gets too big, we start having actual traffic and noise and you can’t know everyone. So, it's an issue for us, one that resembles Goldilocks’s search for comfort at the Three Bears’s house — you don't want the town to be too big, or too small, but just right.

  We manage to make it work with our 768 people. Of course, we used to have a population of 772 people, but then Annie Simmerson was killed and Connor O’Sullivan confessed to the murder and went to prison. August Anderson left us for San Francisco and married a software billionaire, and Dr. Cason was convicted of insurance fraud, so that brought us down to 768. I don’t count Bee and Lester being in New Orleans for a while. They'll be back. At least I think they are coming back. If it turns out I’m wrong, if they never come back, I would have to look at my own life a little differently.

  Maybe a lot.

  ***

  It’s no exaggeration to say that Annie’s murder shocked everyone in town. We don't get much in the way of crime around here and what we do have is usually tied to strangers arriving in town, most often teenagers bored out of their skulls and desperate to let off steam. So the events were rather staggering. Having one of our own, the late Annie Simmerson, turn out to be a bad apple and another her killer... We’re still absorbing all that. Even though the entire thing was settled with Connor pleading guilty a few months back, a lot of the gossip in the salon still revolves around questions like: Why was it that most of us never noticed Annie’s purely evil streak? Or why didn’t the ones who did notice it never mention it? And the ever-popular question about whose body Annie had stuck photos over to make it look like August Anderson was playing sex games with Burl Botowski and Dr. Cason?

  Of course those questions aren’t the kind that have actual answers when discussed in the salon. Still, answers aren’t the real reason to talk about such things and it takes a lot of conversation, a lot of coffee before they lose their gossip value, and even when they are as stale as month-old bread you can expect them to pop up now and again. After all, murder is something that isn’t supposed to happen in tiny, sleepy, comfortably backward places like Knockemstiff, Louisiana.

  Even after the sentencing some of the best conspiracy theories managed to linger on like smoke over an extinguished campfire. My personal favorite is still the alien invasion idea. It has legs too. It was proposed by a fishwife who lived out by the bayou who reported seeing the aliens herself. Some of them were in airboats, and some apparently looked a lot like Nellie’s husband Rudy. Even Connor’s confession couldn’t dampen that one. When confronted with his admission of guilt the fishwife simply smiled as if she’d been waiting for the question and said, “They mighta taken him up in their ship and done things to him, to his head — things we can’t begin to understand that made him kill Annie.”

  “She was poisoning someone he cared about,” Nellie Phlint said. She nodded her head toward Finnegan who was, as usual, curled up in a ball and sound asleep. In addition to being our person for nails, makeup and hair coloring at Teasen and Pleasen, Nellie was one of my oldest friends. She was convinced that Finnegan would understand our talk and wouldn’t appreciate being reminded of his brush with nausea, if not certain death, or his former master’s run in with the law.

  When you get to know Nellie’s family it’s easy to understand why she isn’t quick to judge people, even if they’ve been tried and convicted of a crime. Or maybe especially if they have.

  The fishwife wasn’t accepting Nellie’s response at face value. “Or Connor thought Annie was doing the poisoning,” she said. “Them aliens do abduct hounds, I’ve heard, and influence the hound’s people in mysterious ways.” Then she nodded as if that settled matters completely.

  Who knows? Maybe aliens did get inside Connor’s head and rewire him somehow. Certainly August got in his head as much as his bed and, until he actually admitted it to me, I had trouble believing Connor could kill anyone.

  At any rate, the modified alien theory, the one that says it was the aliens who made Connor kill Annie for some nefarious reason, gave that idea new life
on the gossip circuit.

  This bright morning I was prepared to face my regulars and the usual gossip. I was still coming down from the emotional part of it, and a little monotonous, boring, small-town gossip could settle you down nicely. Besides, although I wasn’t looking forward to hearing all the old stories rehashed, modified, and improved, there is almost always some new nugget of “information,” a bit of trivia that a person can take in and puzzle over, wondering what it means, or will mean, and whether it will change life here.

  For instance, some of the details of what had happened, things leading up to the murder, were still unclear. Once Connor O’Sullivan confessed to the murder, the police had lost interest in the “blackmail photos” that had shown August Anderson playing sex games with Dr. Cason and Burl Botowski. The police were the only ones who lost interest in that. Nellie’s boys worked out that the photos were messed with, and it wasn’t August at all. Once the investigation lost steam no one official was curious about who the woman actually was.

  Mrs. Botowski was, of course, very interested in finding out who that was. Ultimately she did exactly that, and it turned out not to be that difficult to determine. After she nearly dismembered Burl Botowski, her husband, with a brand new Stihl chainsaw, he decided it would be safer to fess up. The woman in question, it turned out, had nothing to do with the murder, or Connor. It was a young woman named Dawn Devereaux, who lives in Delhi (the one in Louisiana) part of the time, and the rest in Knockemstiff. She is a knockout blonde who does the books for several small businesses. Among her clients were Botowski Hardware and Dr. Cason’s medical practice, or, as the Bald Eagle now refers to it in his standup comedy routine at the Knockemback Tavern’s open mic nights, Dr. Cason’s Medical Malpractice Emporium.

  I knew Dawn pretty well since she does my books too. She takes part of her pay in trade, which helps us both. After Burl fessed up, naturally people asked her about what was actually going on. She was unrepentant and didn’t mind people knowing she was carrying on (in rather kinky ways) with both men. She thought it somehow hilarious that Annie had used photos of her with her play toys to attempt to assassinate August Anderson’s character.