Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 04 by Mortal Remains in Maggody Read Free Book Online Page A

heroes?"
    I stood up, kicking over the mug in my haste, and headed for the door. As I reached it, though, I stopped and attempted to sort through the anger and indignation swirling inside me like fierce red sparks. "I don't know what's bothering you," I said without turning around (and thus startling a baby-faced corporal so badly that he bumped into a wall). "All we do is go to the movies or have dinner maybe twice a month. What you do the rest of the time is your business -- since I sure as hell have no part in it."
    "I thought that was what you wanted."
    I made myself look back at him. "I didn't say it wasn't, Plover. You're entitled to privacy, just as I am. For all I know, you've got a wife and three kids stashed somewhere, or an insatiable passion for some college girl."
    "You're the one who's in a self-inflicted cocoon."
    I thought of several devastating retorts, but I realized my face was flushed and my eyes were beginning to sting. I hurried down the hallway and out into the parking lot, willing myself to do so with no more than professional briskness. Chief of Police Ariel Hanks had places to go and witnesses to question. She did not have time to engage in a childish exchange with a man who fancied himself an amateur shrink.
    She drove all the way back to Maggody and parked in front of the PD before she burst into tears. One tough cookie, that Chief of Police Ariel Hanks.
     
    -- ==+== --
     
    "A house across the road from Raz's place?" Ruby Bee said into the receiver. "There's nothing directly across, but Dahlia O'Neill and her granny don't live but a hop and a skip north of there.
    "Fantastic," Carlotta said. "Can we use the house? We've had to do a few more revisions and add a character. She doesn't have to live in the immediate vicinity, but it would make the shooting go faster."
    Ruby Bee didn't bother to tell her that everyone in town not only knew about the latest addition to the cast but also knew what she intended to wear and how she planned to have her hair fixed. "I don't reckon Dahlia's granny will mind, since she's down in Jessieville visiting kin. Dahlia can be right ornery, though."
    "What'll it take? We can go one hundred dollars, one-fifty max. It's only two interiors, so we'll be done in no more than a couple of hours."
    Ruby Bee wasn't sure how to break the news to this nice woman from Hollywood. She finally decided there was no tactful way to go about it. "Dahlia has her heart set on being in the movie. She's been moping around like a motherless calf ever since she heard about it, and poor Kevin's fit to be tied."
    "There's no other house near the shack?"
    "Sorry, honey, but the only other persons who live out that way are Perkins and his eldest, and I'd sooner cozy up to a grizzly bear as ask him."
    Carlotta was also renowned for her flexibility. "Okay, we'll go with this Dahlia woman. Give me a quick rundown: How old is she, and what does she look like?"
    Ruby Bee did so.
    The ensuing silence crackled all the way from Hollywood to Maggody, and you could almost see people in New Mexico and Arizona gazing up at the telephone lines, asking themselves what in tarnation was going on. Ruby Bee was wondering if they'd been disconnected when Carlotta said, "Tell me you're kidding."
    " 'Fraid not," Ruby Bee said sadly.
    "Oh," said Carlotta in a faraway voice, which was not surprising in that she was in what most of Maggody considered nigh on to a foreign country, where folks ate raw fish and sat around naked in oversized buckets of boiling Water.
    Estelle came into the bar and grill and glanced curiously at Ruby Bee, who was clutching the receiver but not saying a word. Her expression was impossible to make heads or tails of, except that she looked perturbed.
    "Is there someone on the line?" Estelle asked. When there was no reply, she went around the bar, poured herself a glass of sherry, and sat down on her stool to wait for further developments, such as a word being spoken into the receiver.
    It was a