Page 31 of Brimstone Hollow

He shakes his head, staring at the door, apparently baffled. I turn to go and he says, “You could ask Thelma when you see her. She keeps track of the church expenses.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll do that.”

Back in the Bronco, I bring up Thelma Worley’s address on my GPS and start on my way. Nearly twenty minutes later, I pull onto her road, and I’m almost to her drive when my phone rings. It’s Tina.

“I’m almost to town,” she says. She sounds grumpy and over-caffeinated. I realize I probably sound exactly the same, so I can’t blame her.

“That was fast,” I say.

“I can haul ass when I feel like it. Why don’t you tell me where Honey is?”

I do. I give her a mile marker and tell her about the skid marks, the guardrail.

“I don’t think you can miss it,” I say. “It’s in a place called Brimstone Hollow.”

NINE

THELMA WORLEY LIVES INa little brick ranch house set back from the street and, as it turns out, she’s expecting me. She emerges from the side door into the carport and waves at me as I pull the Bronco in behind her old Toyota Corolla. A round little woman, probably in her early seventies, with short white hair and silver glasses perched on top of her head, she watches—hawkeyed—as I park. She wears a red-and-white-striped apron and smart blue skirt set over white compression leggings. Her tiny feet are nestled in those extra-bouncy, well-padded sneakers that give me vertigo just to look at.

“You’re the lady private investigator, right?” Without waiting for an answer, she says, “I need you to give me a hand in here.”

“Sure,” I say, though I have no idea what she wants a hand with, and I follow her inside.

Thelma’s kitchen is sparkling clean and decked out in summertime decor, including a red ceramic pitcher full of white lilies on the kitchen table. When she sees me looking, she says, “I snagged those from Brother Ezra’s funeral, bless his heart. I didn’t think he’d mind, though. Now, come over here, honey, and get these hand pies out of the oven for me.”

She gives me a dish towel and an oven glove and I prepare myself before the blast of heat smacks me in the face. She talks the whole time, fanning herself with another dish towel.

“I made three trays and, as I was pulling out the second one, I felt my back start to go. Lord, I was dreading getting that third pan out but then I saw you pull up and I thought, the Lord does work in mysterious ways.”

I wrangle the pan out of the oven and rest it on the stovetop. Thelma chuckles to herself as I click on the vent hood, and then she leans closer to the pan and says, “They look like they turned out good.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

“I was scolding myself earlier,” she says. “Thinking I should’ve made no-bake bars. Cheesecake maybe. These are for the picnic in town, of course. The church is having a bake sale. Always needing to raise money. But you know, I thought, won’t everybody be making no-bake desserts today? Might as well do something folks won’t get otherwise. I should’ve made them last night, but Lord, my grandbabies were here and I couldn’t get a moment’s peace.”

“I think they’ll be worth the effort,” I tell her.

She beams at me and then we both look down at the pan of perfectly formed pockets of golden-brown pie crust crimped around hot lemon curd. The citrusy scent wafts up and I’m reminded instantly of church basement food. I remember filling my plate twice, then wrapping hand pies just like these in napkins, slipping them into my jacket pocket to take home.

“Now, honey, you want some tea?” she asks. “We can go out on the porch. I think it’s cooler out there than it is in here.”

“Sure,” I say, and a few moments later we’re sitting where a breeze can find us, tall cups of sweet tea sweating on the glass-topped picnic table in front of us. I look around at her well-manicured yard, a vegetable patch in the back, all of it surrounded by the brightest blue hydrangeas I’ve ever seen.

“It’s the sulfur,” she says with a chuckle.

“What?”

“The sulfur in the soil around here,” Thelma says. “That’s what makes the hydrangeas so blue. But, now, you’re not here to talk about flowers, are you?”

“No, ma’am. I hate to have to ask, but I’m told that you were the one who found Ezra King’s body?”

“That’s right,” she says. “I go over every Saturday morning around eight o’clock to prepare the church program, get the hymns put up on the board, do whatever little paperwork needs doing. Brother Ezra always put the list of hymns and whatever else I might need on the desk in the church office but every now and then, he’d forget. I’d have to go bang on the door of the parsonage and wake him up and ask him for it.”

“So that’s what you did on Saturday morning?”

“Yes, honey. I knocked and hollered for him. I was about to give up and leave, but then I saw the curtain was open so, well, you know, I just took a peep through the window.”

“And you saw him?”