It wasn’t long before the guest pastor took the altar to begin the service, and still no sign of Archer. Maybe he was busy with work, or maybe he’d never gotten in the habit of attending church after his years as a child forced him into it. Either way, he wasn’t here, and for that Cordelia could breathe a little easier.
After the service, during which Cordelia had to elbow Arline in the ribs several times when she began to snore, they headed outside. Daisy filled a coffee cup with sugar donut holes while she promenaded around the lot like a Pomeranian at a dog show. Stewart Combs, the man they’d been hoping to question, wasn’t anywhere to be seen either. After standing around long enough to fulfill her duty, Arline clomped back to the car.
Cordelia sidled up next to Belinda Sue. “Are you about ready?”
“In a few,” Belinda Sue whispered out of the side of her mouth. “That’s Edwin Combs Daisy is talking to. I’ll bet she’s finding out where Stewart’s gone off to.”
While she waited for Daisy to finish her conversation, Cordelia took in the small clusters and groupings that made up the town’s social networks. The handful of ladies whose husbands weren’t allowed near the Chickadee stood together in a tightly knit pack, staring down their noses at everyone else around them. Their husbands stood in their own circle talking about thelatest high school football game and rehashing their own glory days. Edna and Corbin were among them, which didn’t surprise Cordelia in the least.
On the other side of the parking lot stood a larger group of women. The ones who did allow their husbands to frequent the Chickadee. They flitted around the smaller circles they made, laughing louder than was acceptable by the standards of the buttoned-up crowd. Their groups of men and women mingled. In general, they seemed more relaxed. More comfortable in their own skins. Probably because they were all getting what they needed out of life.
And separated from the two groups were Stella and Gladys. Cordelia would’ve thought that being the previous pastor’s wife gave Stella some standing. But it didn’t seem like either group tried to bring her into their fold, and she didn’t appear to make an effort to gain their favor either. Occasionally, people from the other side would cross the lot and talk to people who had pull in the community, like the bank manager’s wife or a councilman, but none of them approached Stella. It was like she was on an island. Cordelia wasn’t sure what to make of that.
She’d just taken a step forward to speak to Stella when Daisy grabbed her elbow. “I got the goods on Stewart. Let’s get back to the Chickadee before the folks who don’t want us here decide to toss us in the river to see if we float.”
Chapter Twenty
DAISY REFUSED TO TELL THEM ANYTHING UNTIL THEY GOT BACK TOthe Chickadee. They stopped at the H-E-B and picked up a plate of fried chicken, potato salad, and cowboy beans. They wanted to have a proper lunch for surviving their first Sunday at church.
Cordelia wanted to do a picnic and spread a blanket out on the concrete around the pool, but none of the chicks wanted to sit on the ground on account of not being sure if they’d be able to get back up. So they pulled chairs around a table with a pink umbrella and ate in the shade.
Arline tore into a drumstick, lips smacking as she stared Daisy down.
“I’m getting there.” Daisy scooped a dainty spoonful of beans onto her paper plate. “Just hold your horses. There’s a lot going on in the Combs camp.”
“Such as?” Belinda Sue tapped a single bloodred nail against the clear tabletop, refusing to take any food until they had a good handle on their current lead.
“Okay.” Daisy draped a napkin over her lap. “Apparently, Stewart and Martina are still very much a thing, and the reason he wasn’t there today is because they do a lot of anti–book banning work in San Antonio on the weekends. Not by his choice.”
“What do you mean, not by his choice?” Cordelia asked.
“According to Edwin, Mack Baker and Dean Hernandez cornered Stewart at the Orb one night and told him the pastor sent them to say he wasn’t welcome at church if he was going to continue seeing that purveyor of porn. That’s what they call librarians now. Can you believe that? For giving kids access to books. I’ll never understand. Anyway, they told him this a week before the poisoning, and he wasn’t in church that first Sunday after the pastor turned up dead.”
Arline dropped her drumstick. “What are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything.” Daisy held out her hands. “I’m just passing along info.”
“It sounds like we ought to add Stewart to our suspect list.” As much as the saltwater tank and Dew Valley threw off Cordelia’s equilibrium, she couldn’t see Martina as a killer. Much easier for her to picture Stewart Combs, whom she didn’t know and had no relationship with.
“Maybe.” Daisy tapped her lips. “But I don’t think the pastor would’ve removed Stewart. Mack and Dean like to throw their weight around and act bigger than their britches.”
“The pastor wasn’t innocent.” Mack and Dean didn’t sound like good people, but Cordelia couldn’t forget how firm the pastor had been on banning her momma from church, never opening his doors or his heart, even when she was struggling to get clean.
“We can talk about this until the cows come home,” Belinda Sue said. “But we’re not going to solve anything by arguing about the character of a man who is dead and gone. What we need to do is establish Stewart’s and Martina’s whereabouts the night the pastor was poisoned. Daisy, are you sure he got that bottle of wine the night he came to see you and not before?”
Daisy nodded. “He said he got it as a gift on his way over and thought about bringing it home, but wanted to drink it with me instead. I had to decline, though, because of the rules.”
“Why don’t you pull up the community events website?” Arline asked. “The church is always doing this and that in town. Find out where the pastor was before he came here and make a list of who would’ve been with him before that.”
Belinda Sue turned to Arline, resting her cheek on her fist. “You really ought to speak up more often. You end up being the smartest of us all.”
“And I stay that way by staying quiet.” Arline grunted. “Kids these days just want to hear themselves talk. Got no respect for listening.”
Belinda Sue, Arline, and Daisy gathered around Belinda Sue’s tablet to look into community events, while Cordelia used her phone to go on the library’s website. She hoped to find an event that crossed over with the church. Instead, what she found proved Martina’s and Stewart’s innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt.
“Have a look at this.” Cordelia handed the phone to Belinda Sue.
The three of them enlarged a picture of Martina at a national library conference in Oklahoma the day the pastor was killed. She hadn’t returned until that Sunday afternoon. A man with a wide grin and thinning hair stood next to her with his arm around her shoulders.
