Free Polished Off by Lila Dare Page B

she hung up, deep grooves bracketed her mouth. “They want to talk to me. Now.”
    “I’ll drive you,” I offered with a glance at my watch. We were due at the theater by ten to prep the contestants for the swimsuit competition. It was only eight now. If Agent Dillon kept it reasonably brief, we could be back from Kingsland in time to beautify the girls.
    “Is this about Miss Faye’s murder?” Rachel asked, still admiring her new ’do out of the corners of her eyes.
    “How did you know about that, Rachel?” Mom asked.
    The St. Elizabeth Gazette only came out once a week—on Thursdays—so news of the death hadn’t been publicized in the newspaper.
    Rachel gave her the kind of “how can you be so out of it?” look that only a teenager could perfect. “A tweet from my friend Shannon whose mom works in a funeral home. And Tabitha’s blog. And an e-mail from Miss Keen this morning, saying the pageant would continue as scheduled. But we can’t use the theater today. Everything’s down at the yacht club.”
    I hadn’t even stopped to think that the pageant might get cancelled.
    “Goodness,” Mom said faintly. “What’s a tweet? I thought it was part of a stereo.”
    Stella and I left Rachel explaining the intricacies of twenty-first-century communications to Mom.
    My cell phone rang before I got off Mom’s veranda.
    “How come I have to hear about you finding dead bodies secondhand?” Marty greeted me.
    Martin Shears, political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution , was plugged into so many news sources, including the GBI and coroners’ offices around the state, that I didn’t even bother asking how he’d heard.
    “It’s good to hear from you,” I said. Something in my voice made Stella smile and she continued to the car to give me some privacy. “I was going to call you later today. It’s been hectic.”
    “Are you all right? Do you need me to come down there?”
    His concern warmed me and I smiled into the phone. “I’m okay. It was gruesome, but I didn’t know the victim very well. I want you to come down, if that counts.”
    He chuckled. “Maybe this weekend. I’ve got a new lead on the Lansky story—a developer who says he’ll talk on the record about kickbacks—and I’ve got to chase that down.”
    Marty had a real bee in his bonnet about our governor, Beau Lansky, who had originally come from St. Elizabeth. We were convinced he was involved in the disappearance and murder of Althea’s husband William twenty-someodd years ago—whose body had only been found this last spring—but he was slippery and we hadn’t been able to prove it.
    “You can come down and cover the ‘Beauty Pageant Murder,’ ”I said, investing the words with headline caps.
    “Was Lansky sleeping with one of the contestants?”
    “Not as far as I know.” I laughed.
    “Then I probably can’t justify the trip. That would make a great angle, though,” he said.
    I heard clicking in the background and knew he was typing on his keyboard. “Look, you’re probably on deadline so I’ll let you go. If you come down this weekend, I’ll get you a ticket to the pageant final.”
    “And if you think of a way to give the story a political spin, let me know. I’ll drive right on down.”
    “Deal,” I said.

Chapter Nine

    STELLA SAT SILENTLY IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF my Ford Fiesta as I headed out of St. Elizabeth on SR 42 toward Kingsland, a small town about twenty miles southwest. St. Elizabeth inhabits a point on Georgia’s southeast coast bounded by the Satilla River to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, so you pretty much have to go west to get anywhere unless you go by boat. A couple miles out of town, I-95 connects us to Jacksonville, Florida, forty-five minutes south, and Savannah to the north. When I lived in Atlanta, I was only four hours from home, but it felt like another universe.
    Stella still hadn’t said a word by the time I parked in the lot fronting the Georgia Bureau of