Last Chance Christmas (Last Chance #5)(4)
Author: Hope Ramsay

“You can run that woman out of town.”

Stone thought about playing it straight and asking Lee who he was talking about. But he just didn’t have the energy for one of Lee’s cat-and-mouse games.

“Lark Chaikin is sick right at the moment. Can’t exactly do anything about her until she recovers.”

“Well, it’s damnably inconvenient.”

Stone said nothing. Arguing with Lee about the state of the Chaikin woman’s health was just a waste of time.

“When she recovers, you need to tell her what’s what.”

“Okay, Lee, you mind telling me what’s what first, so I get it right?” Damn. He hadn’t bothered to disguise the sarcasm in his voice.

“You’re asking me that seriously? After what happened? I would think your people would be happy to see her leave.”

Stone made no comment on the snide reference to his people. “I get why my daddy wants her gone, but why you?”

“You know as good as I do that this woman is a walking time bomb. We don’t need to revisit that sad time in our history. It would be a distraction.”

“A distraction from what?”

Lee glowered. “Don’t be stupid. Last Chance has a new mayor who doesn’t want to deal with this woman. And I don’t want Kamaria to have to. So, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll run her out of town. You got that, boy?”

Stone fixed his expression. There was no point in letting Lee know just what he thought of him. Lee was an a-hole, but he was powerful. His son, Jimmy, owned Country Pride Chicken, the biggest employer in the county. And the Marshalls had been running this town for as long as anyone could remember.

To make matters even more complicated, Daddy was now beholden to Jimmy Marshall’s wife, Hettie, who chaired the Committee to Resurrect Golfing for God. Jimmy and Hettie had been estranged for the last several months, but the scuttlebutt around town was that they had reconciled. So making nice to Lee, Jimmy, and Hettie was in Stone’s best interest.

Not to mention the fact that Kamaria LaFlore, the mayor-elect and soon to be Stone’s boss, had her own good reasons for wanting Lark Chaikin gone.

“I hear you, Lee,” Stone said.

“That’s good. You keep me apprised of this situation, and you have a real nice day.”

Stone knew a dismissal when he heard one. He turned and headed back to his cruiser, his annoyance growing with each step he took.

He was not going to be pushed around by Lee Marshall, or Jimmy, or Hettie, or even Mayor-Elect LaFlore. In fact, the more they protested, the more he was starting to think that Lizzy was right.

Maybe he should dig up those old files and see what had happened in 1968.

Chapter 3

Lark opened her eyes. Pale winter sunshine slanted through the curved turret windows to her right. Spanish-moss-laden branches waved beyond the windowpanes. The dance of branches and sun made a pattern across the dusky green carpet of the room where she had been sleeping and sweating out a raging fever. She didn’t feel feverish anymore. Just tired. The nightmares had taken a lot out of her.

“You feeling better?” a voice asked from her left.

Lark shifted her gaze from the oak windowsills to the wizened lady sitting beside her bed.

“You remember me, don’t you?” The little old lady gazed at Lark from behind a pair of upturned trifocals decorated with rhinestones. She wore her white hair parted down the middle, with twin braids pulled up over her head like a crown. Her skin was ivory, with a network of lines radiating from her eyes and the corners of her mouth. It was a good face, a kind face. The lines and wrinkles told of a life well lived. Lark wanted to capture her portrait.

This old lady had been holding Lark’s hand on and off during the nightmares.

“How long have I been out of it?” Lark asked.

“Oh, a day or so. It’s Sunday, December sixteenth. Christmas is almost upon us.”

Lark studied her surroundings: old-lady wallpaper and Victorian furniture. “Where am I?” she asked, pushing herself up in the bed.

Lark’s caregiver rested a pair of arthritic hands on an aluminum cane. Her nails were painted bright red, which clashed with her 1980s-vintage, purple plaid pantsuit. “Oh,” the lady said, waving one hand, “this is Randall House. Back a hundred years ago, it used to be a hotel for the folks who traveled the railroad. We sometimes take in boarders for short periods. Doc Cooper sent you here because there was no room at the nursing home, and the hospital in Orangeburg didn’t think you were sick enough to take in. We’ve been nursing you for a couple of days.”

“Who’s we?”

“The ladies of the Christ Church Auxiliary.”

Oh. My. God. She was in the hands of good Christian women. Who knew the Bible Belt was really like this? She pasted a smile on her face. “Oh. Well, thank you.”

“It’s nothing, darlin’. Helping out poor wayfarers is a joy, especially this time of year.”

The woman wasn’t even being ironic or sarcastic.

“Thank you,” Lark said again because it seemed appropriate.

A pang of grief hit her chest as Lark fluffed up her pillows and leaned back on them. For a little while she had forgotten that Pop was dead. Where the hell was Pop?

“You wouldn’t happen to know where my car is?”

“Oh, don’t you worry. Your car’s in the lot down at Bill’s Grease Pit. Your daddy’s remains and your camera equipment have been removed, of course. No sense in tempting fate.” The old woman gestured toward a rosewood armoire that matched the dresser and the bed. “We reckoned you’d want to keep your daddy close. And, what with all the upset forty years ago, Stony felt it might not be a good idea to leave his ashes laying around. No telling what some folks might do, even if we have, more or less, turned the page on the past.”

“Stony? The chief of police?” A mental image of Carmine Falcone filled Lark’s head.

“Yes, ma’am. He is.” The little lady gave Lark a smile as mysterious as Mona Lisa’s.

“Um… I didn’t get your name,” Lark said.

“Oh, darlin’, I’m sorry. I’m Miriam Randall, and this is my house.”

“Oh. Well. I’m sorry for imposing. I—”

“Oh, it’s no imposition. You were pretty sick. I’m guessing you let yourself get worn out in the days before your daddy passed. What did he die of? He wouldn’t have been very old.”

“Cancer, and he was only sixty-two.”

“I figured it had to be something like that. And you were at his side?”

Lark nodded. Miriam Randall might look like a harmless old lady, but she had mad skills as an interrogator.

“And your momma?” Miriam asked.

“She died a long time ago, when I was a kid.” Lark looked down at herself. She was wearing a pink cotton nightgown that didn’t belong to her. It looked exactly like the sort of thing a little old lady would wear. If the guys at the Baghdad Hilton ever saw her in something pink and frilly like this, she’d be laughed right out of the brotherhood of war correspondents.

“You should know that everyone in town is dying to know why your daddy wanted to have his remains scattered on the eighteenth hole,” Miriam said.

Lark looked up. “And how does the entire town know of my father’s last request?”

“Darlin’, this is Last Chance, South Carolina,” Miriam said. “News travels faster here than it does on The Facebook, or whatever you young ’uns call that thing. Of course, the speed of the gossip probably has something to do with the fact that, around here, your daddy is somewhat notorious.”

“Notorious? Really? I didn’t think his books were that controversial.”

Miriam frowned. “Books? What books?”

“Pop’s pen name was Vitto Giancola. He was the author of the Carmine Falcone mysteries.”

Miriam’s brown eyes lit up. “Oh, my goodness. I just love Carmine Falcone.”

“Of course you do.”

Miriam must have heard the sarcasm in Lark’s tone. “Honey, I wasn’t talking about that pretty-boy actor who plays Carmine in the TV show. I was talking about the Carmine Falcone in the books. Now, there’s a man who is sexy and complicated. You know, the kind of man who doesn’t say much, but manages to speak volumes with his actions.”

For an old lady, Miriam was remarkably with it. “Yeah,” Lark said, “but being an author didn’t make Pop notorious.”

“Well,” Miriam replied, “when I said notorious, I meant that back in 1968 he took Nita Wills to breakfast at the Kountry Kitchen. I tell you, Lark, when Nita sat down at that lunch counter she stirred up a big heap of trouble. See, Nita is black.”

“But it was 1968. Wasn’t the Civil Rights Act passed in ’64?”

“Well, we aren’t at the cutting edge of things here,” Miriam said. “By ’68, Clyde Anderson, the owner of the Kountry Kitchen, had taken down his offensive ‘whites only’ sign. But no one really wanted to test Clyde’s commitment to integration. The irony is that a year later Clyde died, and T-Bone Carter bought the place. It would probably have served us right if T-Bone had put up a sign saying ‘African-Americans only.’ The Kountry Kitchen is the only real café in town, unless you count the doughnut shop.”

“And people here still remember that? After all this time?”

The little lady leaned forward. “You know, darlin’, we probably would have forgotten all about it, but your daddy disappeared the same day he challenged our social order. And that would be the same day Zeke Rhodes died. You can imagine how people put two and two together.”

“Just because he left the same day?”

“Well now, you see, your daddy was what some folks referred to as a no-good Yankee hippie. And some ignorant folks believed that Nita wouldn’t have done what she did except that your daddy put her up to it. God help us when the ignoramuses band together—they go looking for someone to blame. And since Zeke had let your daddy camp out at Golfing for God, I’m thinking old Zeke might just have gotten himself in the middle of trouble that wasn’t his. Of course, that’s not the official story. The official story is that, within a twenty-four-hour period, the rednecks ran your daddy out of town. Nita’s mother put her on the next bus heading toward Chicago, where her aunt lived. And Zeke died in an accidental fall out at Golfing for God.”

“That’s a lot.”

“Yes, ma’am, it is. So you can imagine that there are some folks in this town, notably Elbert Rhodes, the current owner of Golfing for God, who think your daddy was responsible for Zeke’s death. There is another group of folks who think maybe Zeke got into an altercation with a group of idiots. So, you see, any light you could shed on this would solve a long-standing town mystery.”

“Mrs. Randall, I hate to disappoint you. I don’t know a thing about Pop’s stay in Last Chance. All I’m sure of is that Pop didn’t murder anyone. He could be a real pain in the neck, but he wasn’t mean or violent.”