Scoop to Kill: A Mystery a La Mode - By Wendy Lyn Watson Page 0,30
something akin to admiration. “Brilliant,” he said.
I elbowed him—gently—in the gut. “Despicable.”
“Despicably brilliant. Or maybe brilliantly despicable. Either way, this guy’s got it all figured out.”
Emily bobbed her head from side to side. “Mmmmm, not entirely. Like I said, the Board of Trustees of Dickerson is pretty conservative. A lot of good Southern Baptists. A good old-fashioned sex scandal might tarnish the golden boy over there enough that the Board would give him the boot.
“But,” she added, waving her glass in a general salute to the Bar None, “the Board of Trustees does not do honky-tonk.”
For a second, we couldn’t hear a thing as the crowd went wild. Bree had taken the stage and slipped the shrug from her shoulders to reveal her wondrous buxomness in her tangerine tube top. She knew just where to position herself, so the lights turned her hair to a fiery halo and cast her face in seductive shadow.
She stood very still, her head bowed, until the room grew quiet.
Into the near silence, the dramatic opening chord sounded followed by the trilling piano run. Bree raised her head, her gaze searching into the distance above the audience’s heads.
“First I was afraid. I was petrified,” she sang, her voice clear and vulnerable. She built the emotion of the song like a virtuoso, until the high hat disco beat kicked in and my cousin’s sexy hips began to sway back and forth in time.
The crowd went crazy, hooting and hollering as Bree belted out Gloria Gaynor’s defiant lyrics. The song crescendoed to its powerful conclusion, and Bree brought the house down.
As applause rocked the room, Emily hopped down from her stool and raised her arms. “Wooo!” she screamed, bouncing up and down like a groupie at a Bon Jovi concert.
She took her seat again, leaning forward to close the distance between us. “She’s amazing,” Emily said, yelling to be heard above the demands for an encore.
“Oh, yeah. She’s got a voice on her,” I replied.
To be honest, a lot of Bree’s appeal was pure showmanship. If you closed your eyes, you could hear when she went flat. But she could put on quite a show, no doubt about it.
“About Jonas,” I said, dragging the conversation back to more pressing matters. “If Bryan knew that the Board of Trustees wouldn’t approve of Landry’s shenanigans, do you think he might have blackmailed him?”
Emily’s smile faded, and I felt bad for bringing her back to earth. The whole point of the evening was to give her a break from her worries, and I kept reminding her all about them.
“I doubt it,” she said. “I mean, maybe. But if Bryan was blackmailing Jonas, it was probably for advancement in the graduate program. And he got what he wanted from Jonas.”
I looked at her sharply, and I saw the moment she realized what she’d said. Without meaning to, she’d intimated that Landry had voted to pass Bryan on his exam. Whatever the vote, it hadn’t been unanimous. And if Landry supported Bryan passing, that meant Emily’s insistence on failing the boy would look all the more suspicious.
“Let’s just drop it,” Emily said.
I nodded. After all, we were out to have fun.
But even Bree’s sex-on-a-stick rendition of Madonna’s “Material Girl” couldn’t banish my feeling that I’d learned something important at the Bar None.
chapter 11
The next morning, as I nursed a bit of a sore head from my evening at the Bar None, Cal McCormack called and asked me to meet him for lunch at Erma’s Fry by Night Diner. I had a horrible feeling he wanted to discuss Alice’s ill-fated espionage attempt. As much as I wanted to weasel out of it, the goody-two-shoes angel who’s always whispering in my ear made me go.
Erma’s is just a couple of doors down from the A-la-mode. It’s not a fancy place, just a standard-issue diner with Formica tables and wobbly wooden chairs, air thick with the scent and sounds of food frying on an industrial grill. Erma’s didn’t serve nouvelle anything, just heaping plates of hash browns, chicken-fried steak, and cream gravy. All the food tended to shades of beige, but it was delicious.
Dr Pepper bottles filled with plastic daisies nestled against the table caddies of off-brand artificial sweeteners and big bottles of hot sauce. The Dalliance old-timers—judges, plumbers, doctors, and cobblers—crowded the long counter that fronted the kitchen, bumping elbows as they sipped black coffee, traded gossip, and made the deals that kept the town running.