Cutting Loose in Paradise

  CUTTING

  LOOSE

  IN PARADISE

  MARY JANE RYALS

  A LARUE PANTHER MYSTERY

  Copyright © 2015 by Mary Jane Ryals

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Inquiries should be addressed to:

  Pineapple Press, Inc.

  P.O. Box 3889

  Sarasota, Florida 34230

  www.pineapplepress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ryals, Mary Jane.

  Cutting loose in paradise / Mary Jane Ryals. — First edition.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-56164-784-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3568.Y25C88 2015

  813′.54—dc23

  2015001120

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Design by Carol Lynne Knight

  Printed in the United States

  This book is dedicated to

  Barbie Ryals and Sue Cerulean.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Despite what we think, books need lots of people to get from the imagination to the page.

  Most writers need writing groups, yours truly included. Thus, I’m grateful to the Black Dog Java Girls—Lynne Knight, Donna Decker, Laura Newton, and Melanie Rawls; also to the Horsewomen of the Apocalypse—Lynne Knight, Anne Meisenzahl, and Jane Terrell.

  For assistance and inspiration from hair stylists, thank you Barbie Ryals and Michael Moncrief.

  For the space, time, and solitude away from this noisy, fast world, I thank Hambidge Center and the Bowers House.

  Most writers need employment. Thanks to institutions that pay me and allow me to interact with others about reading and writing all the time: the TCC Learning Commons and College of Communication and Humanities; Flagler College Tallahassee; and the FSU Business Communications Program.

  Agent John Sibley Williams is a literary angel. Thank you.

  Pineapple Press, the largest independent press in Florida, I thank you for publishing my work. June Cussen, thanks for your genius editing and encouragement. Jesse Rice, owner of Backwoods Bistro, thanks for your open and generous use of the restaurant for cover photos. Al Hall, thanks for the rad photos. Beauties Pam Ball and Sherece Campbell, thanks for modeling. Lynne Knight, thanks for the artful cover design and masterful layout.

  I couldn’t do this without my family—Dylan Ryals-Hamilton and Ariel Ryals-Trammell, my cool kids who as adults still teach me; my new Strauss family, in particular Susan and Katherine Strauss who, when I broke my foot, said I’d be writing a novel in bed. Such confidence galvanized me to continue.

  And how grateful I am for my husband, Michael Trammell, ingenious writer, who encourages and reads my work, and who makes me laugh and loves me through everything.

  CHAPTER 1

  I STOOD IN FRONT of the closed double doors of the funeral parlor clutching the cut and style bag I carried for house calls. I pushed on the doors. They gave easily. When I reached the coffin of my friend Trina, I laughed aloud.

  I know, my sense of humor is skewed. But Trina was one of us, a regular person who liked a glass of wine, and she could quote Darwin with scientific aplomb. Yet here, her arms were folded in prayer, she wore a high-cut Victorian blouse, and a green Gideon bible perched on her skirted stomach. This was not my irreverent friend. Neither had the news of her suicide fit her character. She’d shot herself in the chest, they said.

  I went sober and glanced around to see if anyone had heard me laugh. In the wood-paneled room, I felt Trina’s complete stillness now. Her stone china face was so silent, the certainty that I was alive, so terribly here.

  I recovered. I had a job to do. A client, my friend, had died, and she’d requested long ago that I do her hair when the time came. People do have pride, even anticipating the casket.

  And employment was in the dumps after the oil spill all over our Gulf, so on these St. Annes Islands I took work wherever I could get it. But as much as I needed the cash, I wouldn’t take money from a dead client. This was Trina, substitute grandmother for my kids. I was bringing them up alone, and I needed all the help I could get. I should say Trina’d been a close friend, but I couldn’t. She kept her life private. My kids knew her better than I had. Her body had been found on a foggy early November Monday night, driven to the funeral home on Tuesday, embalmed Wednesday, now time for the new updo today, funeral Friday.

  I touched her cheek. Trina. Trina’s pale cheek. Cold and hard. Not Trina.

  We’re brought into this world with nature’s violence, with blood and ocean fluid, with pain. So why would we think dying might prove different? A flush of heat went to my cheeks, and I got to work.

  Blonde-streaked Trina had doted on my kids. Her flaxy hair had lengthened an inch since I’d last seen her. The roots had grown in brown. I’d coaxed her into those blonde glints a year before. They lightened her face, making her look younger.

  “Trina, I’m sorry,” I said. “Fresh blonde color is out of the question.” The crease between her eyebrows had relaxed. Instead of cutting, I decided to pull the hair all up at the crown of her head and then use a curling iron to soften the fringe around her face. I’d curl the strands that strayed.

  Being a hairstylist in a small island community meant people told me stories they wouldn’t tell their best friends. How they were plotting to run away from their husband and children as soon as they found a way off of these islands. The great affair they were having with the guy down the street, their best friend’s boyfriend, the one with the new trailer hitch. How they really felt about the new town mayor. Who was running drugs now off their fishing boat, or trying to, due to the dry-up of money. Yet I’d never figured that Trina was troubled. I thought Trina was in the prime of her life, middle-aged, in control, traveling a lot. Living in a nice house up at Live Oak Key. You never know about people, the mystery in them.

  But most people did tell me secrets deep as springs. And why? I attributed it to touch. I’d learned this majoring in psychology. A degree that got me jobs waiting tables in my youth.

  Even though I had a monopoly in the hair business on St. Annes, the tourist part of our string of popular islands, winter seemed to slow business down in north Florida during the chilly months. Fog could get thick as cotton, wind could rasp and slap in from the ocean like huge cats howling. Rain might fly in sideways, pinging off the skin like ice shards sometimes. Tourists didn’t take to such weather. But we were only easing into those cold blue nights. The sun still slanted sideways into our windows. We only now began to think about when to turn on the heat
.

  Last week had actually brought a warm wind from the south, when Trina Lutz, pronounced lootz, had still been alive. She’d been composed, a beloved fixture in our community, the best sort of accountant, unlike Enron and Lehman Brothers. She knew red from black and had the cajones to call the city commission out when they wanted to go into debt to build a new shopping center on the dock. She was also a woman who knew her county commission husband Fletcher Lutz tried to get everything he could lay his hands on, from women to boats to land. That other-women thing bothered Trina most, of course. Fletch caroused most every night in the bars, something we offered plenty of in a town mostly in the fishing and tourist business.

  But Trina had always gone about her way with dignity. A loner who worked from home, she had a put-together character. She sported a tan slacks and black blouse style—uncommon for us islanders, who were as often as possible, casual. We were flannelled and long-jeaned in the winter and tank-topped and short-jeaned in summer while Trina always showed up tidy and crisp. She had nice hair, too—and a hair stylist does know. Even tousled, her pageboy never looked unruly.

  When we’d moved back from Jacksonville, Trina had always asked after Taylor and Daisy, my kids. She’d given my sixteen-year-old Taylor a rebuilt computer she’d found on the web and paid for my eight-year-old Daisy’s dance lessons. When the news broke about her suicide, the town of St. Annes went into utter shock. No one wanted to talk about it. At first, we’d run into each other at the post office or in the cafe, glance, shake our heads and say nothing. People spoke in small clumps, always in hushed tones, theorizing about her death.

  Of course, the school counselor gave a lecture at the town hall on death the night after the suicide. I dragged my kids, and they slumped like beached manatees in the back, miserable. The bars filled, too, but without their usual back-slapping rowdiness, and without people standing on bar stools yelling and playing drinking games at tables. Why? was everybody’s question. Such a good woman. Did Fletch’s maneuvers with other women finally get to her? My kids had walked around those first days gloomy as crows over gray winter, both refusing to talk about it. Wednesday, Daisy knocked on Tay’s door, and he whisked her inside. Half an hour later, they’d come out to dinner swollen-eyed. At least they could confide in each other.

  Now I picked up Trina’s stiff head to lift the back of her hair towards the crown. Her rigid neck freaked me out. This was only my second remembered encounter with death. I was six feet tall and could reach in and around, brushing her kitten-soft hair straight up with one hand, holding her head with the other. I gently lowered her neck down on the silken pillow. Next, I whooshed the sides and front up and back towards the crown. Easy enough to do with someone alive in the chair telling you about the new rich guy up the road restoring the old black church. Not so with your dead friend’s hair in your hands.

  I stepped away from the casket and wiped my hands on my hips—as if you could wipe away death. I glanced around the low-ceilinged room and searched in my bag for bobby pins. A sappy scent of pumpkin spice, like a waxy furniture polish or cheap candle, turned my stomach. Dark brown carpet covered the floor. The wood paneling was dark, too. Those cheesy, orange-yellow beach sunset paintings you see in motels were arranged on three walls without windows. Why do funeral homes always have an element of spook mixed with sap?

  Trina’s hair felt long and uneven. I put bobby pins in my mouth and began winding a rubber band tight around the hair I’d gathered. Sweat ran down my forehead like an oysterman in noon’s sun as I pulled together loose strands and tried to half hide the pins anchoring the hair in place. Freed of the bobby pins, I unpursed my lips and breathed in gasps.

  “Dang, Trina, aren’t you hot?” I said. The egg-blue blouse had a collar buttoned up to the neck. “Too formal,” I said shaking my head and plugging in the curling iron. “You look Victorian.” I glanced out the door to see if the funeral home guy could see me. No, behind me through the doors, just the hallway and a blank wall.

  This next part sounds insane. I undid the first button of the shirt to cool her off. Then I picked up the hot curling iron and brought it to the tendrils in front of her waxy face.

  What I saw sent a burn soaring from my heart to my hand. I dropped the curling iron, which bounced to the floor. I looked again at her neck. A razor thin cut, raised and stitched up neat as a shirt hem. Slashed all the way across her neck, just above the collarbone. Though the cut was covered in makeup, I could see plastic stitches precise and black as moorhen feathers.

  She was supposed to have shot herself in the heart. A clear case of suicide, the St. Annes Chronicler had said. My fingers shook. I laid the iron back into its metal rest and grasped the shirt’s third button. I unbuttoned down to the base of her rib cage. Please forgive me, Trina, I said in my head. I opened her blouse and pulled up her beige stretchy bra. No blown-out chest, just a hard breast. I checked the right side. Nothing unusual.

  Has she slashed her neck? I checked her wrists. White as bone and untouched. How could the paper have gotten it so very wrong? I glanced behind me to the door again.

  Suddenly, my cell phone rang. I jumped at the high-pitched chirp, then grabbed it in hopes that the funeral home guy wouldn’t hear it. I didn’t want to be caught undressing a corpse.

  “Hello?” I said, forgetting to use my business name, Cutting Loose. My fingers shook as I tried to button up Trina’s blouse, the phone cradled awkwardly between my ear and shoulder.

  “Mama, there’s nothing to eat. Nothing in the ’frigerator.” Daisy. Home from school, singing her anxious whine-song—the verse about wanting me in the apartment to list out the snack items. Children have a conservative streak in them. Mothers need to perform that job 24-7, kids seem to think. As my fingers somehow pushed the next button through its hole in Trina’s blouse, I cleared my throat, swallowing sharp fear.

  “Honey, yes there is,” I said, low. “Potato chips.” Guilt guilt guilt. Bribing children with junk food. Desperate measures. “Yogurt,” I added.

  “I hate yogurt,” she whined. “And the peanut butter’s gone. That pig Taylor probably ate it all.” I wanted to scream. Kids wanted minutia at the worst times. And in a flash I knew I’d forgotten how to pluck life from the small pleasures like after-school snacks. But who could handle a lyrical life with a dead body beside them?

  “Honey, there are grapes, cinnamon bread and butter, chocolate milk, something. I can’t talk right now, but I’ll be home soon.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said, picking up on panicked, rapid-fire speech. At eight years old, she possessed a native shrewdness, emotional intelligence. Her brother had his own intuition, but he didn’t pick up on voice strain.

  “I’ll tell you when I get home,” I said, buttoning all but the top button. “Everything’s okay. I’ll see you soon. Bye.” I pressed END on the phone just as she said, “But—” Cutting her off made me as queasy as the funeral home’s fake-floral scent had.

  The parlor director walked in. I could smell the beeswax and mineral oil of the old-school Brylcreem on his deep brown hair. He slicked it straight back like Cary Grant. He looked familiar, like a distant relative or somebody I’d seen year after year at one of the St. Annes art festivals. He wore glasses thicker and nerdier than Clark Kent’s, square, dull black. But he had a clear complexion and a noble nose, kind of a refined face. Even in the black suit. He was the real Mad Men thing.

  “How’s it going?” he nodded.

  “Oh, swell.” I swallowed, grabbed the curling iron and wrapped a straight stray strip of Trina’s hair to soften her stone china face. “I’m done with the cut—haircut—just curling this around the face. No need to worry.” I gave him a smile, hoping he’d wander back out. He didn’t. He stood a few feet away on the other side of the casket. His arms were folded in front of him.

  “Strange request,” he said, “wanting her hair done up. Most want it falling down around the shoulders. Women, I mean.” He stared in the middle distance. He made me thi
nk of ice. Frost.

  “Some people want to look good and composed regardless.” I sounded too high-pitched and cheery. Swell? Had I really said swell? I loosened the updo, pulling the band out a little. It slowed me down, made me feel less scattered, reminded me to be deliberate about Trina’s hair.

  “Sad about the suicide,” he said as if studying the floor’s carpet. “Quite a lady.” His eyes shifted to me, then darted away. He licked his lips, and his Adam’s apple slid up and down hard. He paced slowly towards the lower end of the casket.

  “You just never know, do you?” I glanced at him as I curled another wisp of hair around her face. Surely he knew—he’d read the newspaper and seen the body. The body told a different story. Was he hiding the scar with the button-down blouse? Calm yourself, I thought. Surely the slash was an autopsy scar. Or there’d been a mistake in the paper. I was no detective, no doctor, no funeral home director. Still, my mind couldn’t switch off the speculating. Maybe her death had been more gritty than Fletch’s family wanted others to know. But this funeral home guy wouldn’t have left me alone with the body, would he have, with a cover-up? Yet why did the newspaper state such incorrect information?

  Now the Clark Kent of funeral homes was pacing back and forth, staring down at the floor. His eyes never lit on Trina, and he held his arms tight across his chest. “Once, I had this lady whose medicine had given her bruises, all over, you know? And her husband had wanted to hide it.” My stomach turned over and then over again. I wished he’d shut up. “Makeup can’t cover everything, you know?” he said. “The bruises looked kind of green by the time I got finished. The green gal, I called her.” He laughed half-heartedly as he combed his hand through that Cary Grant hair. Somehow, he seemed disturbed. Maybe because of it, cruel.

  I gave the last curl on Trina’s hair an extra twist, made sure the updo was secure by tugging it mildly. I unplugged the curling iron. Trina’s top button still wasn’t fastened. The blouse stood slightly agape, almost showing scar. I couldn’t button it without his witnessing the move. I stood waiting for him to leave. He stood, arms still stiff, folded across his chest, waiting.