Tressed to Kill by Lila Dare Page B

me down the stone path to my apartment. It sat back a little ways from the house and gleamed with the same pale yellow paint. Azaleas, hibiscus, and oleander flourished along the sides and back, and a huge pecan tree shaded the apartment and screened it from the house and street. Unlocking the door, I let myself in and immediately punched on the window air-conditioning unit. After my absence of more than twenty-four hours, the apartment—single bedroom, old-fashioned bathroom, and kitchenette with a two-burner stove—smelled musty. The answering machine’s blinking light caught my eye, and I listened to the messages while standing in front of the air conditioner, letting the cool stream play over me.
The messages were evenly split between those who wanted to know if Violetta was in jail and those who proclaimed their faith in her innocence. Vonda was among the latter. She ended her call with a brisk, “Call me.”
I picked up the phone to call my best friend, but then thought better of it. Right now, people were behind Mom, sure of her innocence. But I’d lived in St. Elizabeth long enough to know that if the police didn’t arrest someone else pretty soon, people would begin to talk. The mere association of the words “Violetta Terhune” and “murder” would make people think twice. Business at the salon would drop off. Friends would call less often. I’d seen it happen to a high school teacher, Tim Moore, who coached the girls’ softball team. The police had questioned him when Debbie MacArthur disappeared; he’d apparently been the last one to see her after practice one Friday. Everyone protested his innocence at the beginning, but as the weeks went by and Debbie remained missing, the rumors turned ugly. Someone egged his house. He moved away before the start of the next school year—to Biloxi, I think—and got a job with a Catholic school. Debbie turned up a year after that with a baby boy. She’d run away when she’d found out she was pregnant by her boyfriend. Then, everyone said they knew all along Tim hadn’t done anything, was a great guy, but it was too late. I wasn’t going to let something similar happen to my mom. Reaching for the phone book, I started calling hotels.

I FIGURED DEL RICHARDSON, MR. MORESTUF, AS A room service and valet parking kind of guy, and I was right. The clerk at the Sea Mist Plantation Inn, the largest and swankiest hotel in St. Elizabeth, immediately connected me to Richardson’s room when I asked for him. After I fed him the story about needing some data from him about a Morestuf’s impact on the local economy, he agreed to meet with me. I assumed we’d meet in the hotel lobby or café, but he had other ideas.
“Meet me at the Morestuf site. You know where it is, darlin’? Just north of the intersection of SR 42 and Forest Boulevard. You need to see the land to get a feel for what we can accomplish in your community. Say, in an hour?”
I took some care dressing for the meeting, wanting to strike an appropriate note between businesslike and casual enough for a building site. I finally settled on a sea green linen pantsuit that brought out the green in my hazel eyes and that I hadn’t worn since leaving Atlanta. A cream shell went under the three-quarter-sleeve jacket, and low-heeled pumps finished the look. I pulled my light brown hair into a quick French twist and even applied a little mascara and lip gloss. There. No one would mistake me for a high-powered Wall Street executive, but I looked professional enough that Richardson would take me seriously. I hoped.
The building site was a field bounded on one side by the road and on two sides by scrub pines and kudzu, the imported Japanese vine that smothered everything that couldn’t outrun it. I was pretty sure that campers who spent the night outdoors would awaken to find their tents overgrown by kudzu. A boggy area sulked to the east of the site, studded with cat tails and scummed with algae. It looked like prime alligator territory,