“Where’d you disappear to last night? The police are looking for you.” Should I call the police, try to detain him? I gave the thought up almost immediately. No way could I keep the six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound Lonnie here if he didn’t want to stay.
“Let ’em look.” Lonnie gave me a slow, lazy smile, green makeup caking in his smile creases.
“Ooooh, the po-po,” the pirate girl said with a mock shudder.
“C’mon, Lon,” said a short Obama. Tyler Orey. “Let’s split, dude. The party starts in an hour.”
“Happy Halloween,” Lonnie told me and Mrs. Jones. He poked a green finger at me. “You. Don’t go messing with stuff that ain’t any of your business. You hear what I’m saying?” He sauntered back down the stairs and followed his friends across the street.
I stared after him in disbelief. Had he just threatened me?
“There goes a bunch of kids who’re going to get into mischief before the night is over,” Mrs. Jones said, shaking her head so the witch hat tilted rakishly over one eyebrow. “Just you mark my words. They’ll be TPing houses or knocking over mailboxes or worse.”
I dialed the police number on my cell phone and asked for Officer Parker. Not that I wanted to talk to Hank, but he and his partner were working the case.
“There’s no point in calling the police on them yet, dear,” Mrs. Jones said. “I don’t think the police will take action until those kids do something. And maybe not even then,” she ended.
“Hi, darlin’,” Hank said loudly into my right ear. “Did you want to pick up where we left off last night?”
The smirk in his voice slimed my ear. I sighed and moved the phone an inch from my head. I quickly told him about Franken-Lonnie.
“Now, Grace,” he said, a tsk-tsk note in his voice, “you shouldn’t be trying to do our job for us.”
I’d heard that before, from Special Agent Dillon, and it stung. “I’m not—”
“We interviewed Alonso Farber this morning at his home in that trailer park south of the old cemetery. He ’fessed up to setting off the fireworks without a permit and we ticketed him. Case closed.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good,” I said, feeling a bit foolish. I remembered the sheet. Before Hank could hang up or, worse, ask me out, I told him about Spaatz and me finding the sheet. “I can bring it by in the morning,” I said.
“You know I always enjoy seeing you,” he said, “but we don’t need that sheet. That boy’s fall was an accident, pure and simple.”
I hung up with a growl.
“You sound quite ferocious, dear. What is it?” Mrs. Jones asked.
“Nothing,” I gritted between my teeth.
More trick-or-treaters arrived, and I had calmed down by the time they left with their bags a bit fuller of teeth-rotting booty. I handed out candy for another fifteen minutes, chatting with Mrs. Jones between waves of Hannah Montanas, stormtroopers, witches, ghosts, and Disney princesses. She was happily quizzing an aluminum-foil robot when I said good night and strolled toward my apartment. I hadn’t reached the door when a horn honked. I turned to see my friend Vonda Jamison’s old station wagon with its Magnolia House logo on the side panel. A vampire waved from behind the steering wheel.
“Vonda?” I approached the car and peered in through the passenger window. “What did you do to your hair?”
My best friend had had me dye her hair red a few weeks back after a spat with her ex-husband, Ricky, who was also her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Now, Vonda’s short hair was jet-black and spiked around her gamine face. Her heavily made-up eyes twinkled.
“It’s not permanent. I’m making a grocery run . . . we’ve run out of candy for the trick-or-treaters. Wanna come with?” She lisped the words around a pair of plastic fangs.
Why not? I hadn’t talked to Vonda all weekend. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said, sliding onto the station wagon’s bench seat and buckling up.
“I know. It’s just been crazy at the B and B this week. Which is a good thing, I guess. But I was missing my best bud.” She patted my hand. She and Ricky owned a twelve-bedroom B&B, Magnolia House, and lived on opposite sides of it so they could run the business and share custody of their son, RJ.
“You and Ricky . . . ?”
“We’re good.” She turned her head to grin at me.
“Good.” I was relieved. Vonda and Ricky belonged together, but they both had tempers and their arguments were the stuff of legend in St. Elizabeth. As Vonda slid the car into a slot at the Winn-Dixie, I told her about my weekend. “I should’ve kept a closer eye on the kids.”