Free Lalla Bains 02 - A Dead Red Heart by RP Dahlke

ordered food. "BLT on white, and don't go light on the mayo, fries, a glass of Roxy's sweet ice tea, and a nice big piece of that chocolate chip pie, please."
    Linda served my food with a sweet smile to those of us too dumb or too stubborn to eat at home. "How're you holding up, Lalla?"
    "Fine, fine," I replied, clutching my hands tightly on my lap to keep her from seeing the shaking. "Bring some mayo on the side will you?"
    I like mayonnaise with my fries instead of ketchup, but if I continue to eat like this I'm going to have to start doing my shopping in the full figured section of Macy's.
    I was mopping up the plate with a scrap of bread when Roxanne showed up and basically asked the same question. "I see you got your appetite back. You hungry, or just eating on nerves?"
    "Better than smoking, isn't it?" Between Roxanne and Caleb, I'd quit smoking and only after days like today did I still regret it.
    "Uh-huh," she said, watching me pick the last of the pie crumbs off the china plate with my fingers.
    "Other than being accused of murder," I said, "by the newspaper, the victim's mother, and the entire populace of Modesto, I'm just fine and dandy." I wiped a dollop of mayonnaise off my lips. "Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, my dad's dating my third grade teacher, my job may be in the toilet if that elementary school goes in at the end of our runway, and Caleb had a young and beautiful new police officer to interview me about Billy Wayne's death. Like I said, I'm fine."
    "No, you're not. Your hands are shaking," she said, reaching over and covering my trembling fingers with her own warm, brown hand.
    "Yeah," I said, flexing my fingers in front of my face and willing them to behave. "Some of me seems to be on strike today."
    "What happened?"
    I took a deep breath and told her everything. "I don't know why I feel compelled to go off half-cocked the way I do. First I try to warn Billy Wayne off so he won't get into trouble with Caleb, so much for that good deed. Now every time I turn around Detective Rodney is there leering at me."
    Roxanne reared back and snapped, "Say what?"
    "His words may be completely by the book, but it's the delivery makes me feel like I've been slimed."
    "Then tell Caleb."
    Feeling around my back molars for a little more of that comfort food I'd just wolfed down, I said, "Can't. I think—I think we just broke up."
    "Now what did you do?" Roxanne, knowing my penchant for backpedaling, made sure I understood that it was a rhetorical question.
    I ducked my head and blushed. "He asked me to marry him."
    "Oh, yeah, that'd do it for me. Best looking, smartest white boy in town been mooning after you for half your life—and you dump him? Your emotions get into motion again, Lalla Bains?"
    "Yeah, okay, but you weren't there to see how he proposed; in his cruiser, in front of half the sheriff's department milling around wondering why I wasn't already behind bars."
    "Billy Wayne's murder?"
    "Not exactly," I said, then told her the rest of it; getting the phone message and a note that Billy Wayne's aunt wanted to talk to me, and how I thought   maybe she had been kidnapped.
    She looked away for a minute, then said, "We'll get back to Miss Cook in a minute. You love him, but you're scared to become Missus Caleb Stone. Think you'll disappear behind his back, become a nobody, did I get that right?" She waggled a forefinger at my nose. "Fine by me, don't marry him. Just remember, you keep turning him away, he's going to start looking elsewhere."
    I thought of Pippa Roulette and how she filled out her uniform so very well. "Yeah, well that new deputy at the police station would step into my shoes in a hot minute, though she'd bust out of anything else I own. You should see her, drop dead gorgeous and all of twenty-nine. What sane man wouldn't want a twenty-nine year old? I'm about to be forty-one, and married so many times they ought to revoke my license."
    She rolled her eyes. "Not that old tape again. You have the