Free Chili Con Carnage by Kylie Logan Page A

lit. Not like she was happy to see me. More like there was a fire burning in her belly and the flames were about to pop through the top of her head. “It’s about time you showed up,” she said. “Now that all the work is done.”
    I headed for the RV, and maybe it was Gert’s herb tea that mellowed me, because even I was surprised when I did my best to explain what I was up to. “I’ll be back before the show opens,” I promised Sylvia. “I’m just going to get—”
    “Back before the show opens?” Oh yes, she might look like an angel, but Sylvia had a harpy side, and she showed her true colors when she leaned over the front counter. It might have been a trick of the light, but I swear, I saw smoke coming out of her ears. “I never would have agreed to run the Palace if I knew I’d be doing all the work by myself,” she said, her words all the more brutal because of the way she kept her voice down. Her jaw tight was so tight, I heard her teeth grind. “Here I am doing everything. And there you are . . . again. There you are doing nothing but wasting time.”
    I screeched to a stop directly in front of her and wished there wasn’t a counter separating us. It would have been plenty satisfying to go toe-to-toe with Sylvia. That way, maybe it would have sunk into her thick skull when I said, “For your information, I was asking around. About Jack. Unlike some people who’d rather build pyramids out of spice jars . . .” I glanced at the perfect formation that glittered in the morning sun. “. . . I’m more interested in what happened to our father. So you see, I’m not wasting my time.”
    “Or you are, and you’re just not willing to admit it to yourself.”
    It wasn’t until I opened my mouth and nothing came out that I realized I was speechless. Me! Instead of standing there looking stupid, I stomped into the RV and into my bedroom. Just like I had the day before when Nick was there, I squeezed myself between the bed and the wall, got down on my belly and felt around under the bed.
    I pulled out the shoe box I’d stashed there soon after I arrived at the Showdown and while I was in there, I grabbed my purse, too, just in case I needed a fix from the vendor down the way who sold chocolate-covered chili peppers. Then I went back outside with it. Instead of going past the Palace again, I headed the other way, skirting the motorhome still parked next to us, the one with yellow crime scene tape strung around it.
    Off the main drag, there were picnic tables set up where folks could rest and enjoy their chili and salsa samples, and I found one in the shade of a scraggly tree and plunked down. I’d been through the contents of the shoe box a dozen times before, but in light of what Gert had recommended, I was hoping that away from the noise of the last-minute setup, maybe—just maybe—it wouldn’t hurt to do it again.
    One by one, I plucked the familiar items from the box and set them on the table in front of me.
    Every single receipt of Jack’s that I’d found lying around the RV and the Palace, receipts for things like gas and groceries and the bottle of booze he bought occasionally and enjoyed sharing with any and all.
    The photograph that had been tucked into the visor of the RV, right where Jack could see it as he drove from town to town. It showed me at ten or so and Sylvia a gawky couple years older. Jack must have caught us on a good day (or more likely at a good moment); our arms were looped around each other’s shoulders and we were both smiling. Sylvia had braces on her teeth. I’d forgotten I used to call her Metal Mouth.
    Jack’s notebook. It was one of those garden-variety, spiral-bound ones, and like I always did when I pulled it out of the shoe box, I flipped through it. Back in the days before MapQuest and GPS, Jack kept a scrawled list of directions to the cities the Showdown visited, and looking at it was like seeing the history of the Showdown itself. Memphis to Little Rock.