Helene shook her head. “Does it matter? They’re all dead now.”
The words were so flat, so cold. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “A couple of them committed suicide. After their disgrace.”
I frowned. She shrugged, then slid the log book of all the calls toward her, to do her night’s reading.
“Their disgrace?” I asked.
“Different for all of them, of course,” she said as if she were discussing the weather. “You know how it is. They come to Madison for graduate school or to work in government, and then they go home to Chicago or Des Moines. And then the press finds some story—true or not—and hounds them. Just hounds them.”
She smiled just a little, her hand toying with the edge of the log.
“Those tearful interviews with the female accusers. Readers used to love those.”
Then she stood up, nodded at me, and asked me if I wanted coffee. As if we were in the basement of a still functioning church. As if we weren’t discussing the unsolved murder of a woman who had been Helene’s friend for decades.
A shiver ran through me, and I looked at my half-finished room, that still smelled of sawed wood.
Sob sisters.
The things we did to live with our pasts. The things we did to cope with the violence.
The things some of us did for revenge.
ALLIGATOR IS FOR SHOES, by C. Ellett Logan
People’ll knock off anything. That’s what I was thinking as I waited on the porch of the big, obviously faux country house, not in a rural area at all, but behind tall brick fencing and ferocious iron gates in a suburb of Atlanta. Before I could bang the bronze armadillo-shaped knocker, a rangy man with skin as wrinkled as alligator hide appeared in shorts that seemed to billow without a breeze, black socks, and those rubber shoes they stick you in at the spa.
“Um…I’m Nonni Pennington?” Not used to sounding professional, since this was my first job (unless you count marrying up), the end of my statement came out like a question—an affectation I thought I’d shed after high school ten years ago. I cleared my throat and continued, “Mr. Shelbee is expecting me.” Mr. Shelbee was Chef Clyde, the Citchen Critter’s star, who’d become famous cooking unusual dishes featuring game or farmed exotic animals.
“That’s right,” the man said and turned back inside. I followed.
After a few paces in his wake I yelped, “What is that?”
“That would be simmering fish heads,” he replied. “For stock.”
I wasn’t talking about the smell, only, God knows, it was awful. Frozen in mid-flight on top of an armoire in the foyer loomed a stuffed bird with its splayed talons pointing at my head.
My guide, unmoved, continued across the dining room as I scurried to keep up.
A voice from the next room called out, “Emmett, why are you hollering?”
The back of Emmett’s bony hand stopped me beneath the archway to the kitchen, its frame gleaming with intricate wood carvings of fruit and fowl.
“Chef, that P.I. my daughter hired for us is here,” Emmett said. “Should we come in?”