Color Me Dead Read online

  Betina didn’t mean anything bad, of course and she wasn’t even gossiping. Not by her own standards. She talked about her own love life, sometimes rather graphically, as a matter of course. A lot of the customers who came to Teasen and Pleasen wanted their appointments on Monday mornings because it was the best chance to hear Betina tell about her weekends—there was a cachet to hearing the stories first hand, and the girl could be rather explicit when it came to talking about what she liked and didn’t in men—both in terms of his behavior and his physical assets. Some of the ladies of Knockemstiff knew things about the men in neighboring towns they really shouldn’t know.

  That sort of talk embarrassed me. But then I’d resigned myself to the truth—when it came to talking about my private life I was irredeemably old school. Private was private. Others didn’t think the same these days and all I could do was ignore the good-natured teasing of my friends.

  “I’m enjoying myself,” Betina said. “I’ve always wanted to see more of the world and getting out of town to new places is hard. So no matter how the rest of you feel, I’m looking forward to a few days of seeing what other stylists are doing, seeing the new looks and then going back to a nice room that has maid service. And we can meet new people.”

  “She means men,” Nellie said.

  “Seriously,” Betina laughed.

  “There is the little matter of the competition,” Pete said.

  Betina looked positively bouncy. “Yes and that’s exciting, Pete. Tomorrow you will give me a stunning new hair style that I can astonish everyone with.”

  Pete swallowed. “That’s the plan.”

  “I’ve been letting my hair grow out for a while now, so everyone can enjoy the before and after contrast. I intend to enjoy myself. It should be a great weekend.”

  I would be happy if it was and wanted to encourage her. “That gorgeous red hair of yours looks good no matter what, but I have to say that I’m excited about seeing it after Pete works his magic too. Speaking of that, after we get settled we need to check in with the officials and set up for the competition. They want everything that you’ll use at the station before dinner. So we can unpack and then go down and get it ready.”

  “I really want to shower and change clothes first,” Betina said. “Can we meet in an hour?”

  “I’m good with that,” Nellie said.

  “Fine then.”

  Pete and Betina had the room closest to the elevator. Pete pulled their bags off the luggage cart as Betina opened the door. “This is fantastic,” she said, holding the door for Pete to carry their bags in. “We will see you downstairs in an hour,” she said.

  As Nellie and I got to the door of our room a voice called out. “Savannah Jeffries!”

  I spun around and saw a face I hadn’t seen in years. “Victoria!” As the woman approached from down the hall, I grabbed Nellie’s arm. “It’s Victoria Russel, my old boss and mentor from Baton Rouge.”

  “A hairdresser at a salon expo? I’m shocked,” Nellie said. “I’m delighted to meet someone from your other incarnation though. Blasts from the past are always… interesting.”

  As the woman approached, I made the introductions. “Victoria, this is Nellie Phlint, my best friend before and after my time in Baton Rouge. Nellie meet Victoria Russel.”

  “Glad to meet you, Nell,” Victoria said half heartedly.

  “You too, Vicky,” Nellie snapped. I smiled as I saw Victoria pull up short, looking as if she’d been slapped.

  She readjusted her smile. “Call me Victoria, please. Vicky is… just dreadful.”

  Nellie shrugged. “Fine. Call me Nellie, please. Nell, is a character from the Dudley Do-right cartoons.”

  That the two would not become fast friends was immediately obvious. In fact, seeing them thrown at each other this way, it struck me that these two women couldn’t be more opposite—other than both had wicked tongues that could take the skin off you at times. Watching them sizing each other up was like watching two animals squaring off for a turf fight. I groaned at the new challenge. Surviving this weekend would mean doing my best to keep these two as far apart as possible.

  “How have you been, Victoria?” I asked.

  Victoria waved a hand. “There is so much to tell… I want to hear all about you too, what you’ve been up to—all the dirty little gossip. Can you come to my room later?”

  Nellie waved her passkey. “Why not now? I think everything is under control here. Why don’t you toddle along with your old pal. You two can have a catch up chat. I’ll drag our stuff in the room.” I started to say something, to object, but she stopped me. “I need to call my kids and make sure the town still stands, then I want to take a long soak in what damn well better be a deep tub.”

  “Okay… thanks.”

  She leaned close. “Make a tape. I’d like to hear the dirty little gossip about you myself. I didn’t even know there was any.”

  I ignored that. “We have to do the setup for the competition.” It was lame.

  “Savannah! Do you think Pete and Betina still don’t know how to set up a workstation to cut hair without adult supervision?”

  “No, I…” This conversation wasn’t going well.

  Victoria broke into a huge, incredibly fake smile. “Are you competing too, Savannah? I didn’t see your name on the list.”

  “No. We are here supporting Pete Dawson. He’s competing.”

  Victoria made a face as if she was trying to remember if she’d heard of him. “Pete Dawson?”

  “He works for me. At my salon.”

  “You have a salon?” The idea seemed to amuse her. “Oh, in Knockemstiff, you mean.” That explained the anomaly in her mind. “Well, I’m competing and I haven’t set up yet either. So why not take little Nell’s advice and come to my room so we can have that talk now? Afterward we can go downstairs and see what hoops we have to jump through to satisfy the organizers. I swear it’s different every year and I can’t seriously trust my assistant to take care of things properly.”

  A complete lack of faith in her underlings fit in perfectly with my memory of Victoria. “Well…”

  “Go for it,” Nellie said. She turned to open the door and I held it as she pulled the luggage cart into the room.

  “Nellie…”

  “You go have a nice talk with Miss Vicky,” she said. “I got this.”

  When I turned back to Victoria, she smiled and tucked her arm in mine. “My room is just down the hall a few doors. I have a bottle of chardonnay chilling. We can drink and gossip, like the old days.”

  As we walked I wracked my brain, but couldn’t recall Victoria ever sharing gossip with me when I worked for her. She obviously remembered the old days differently than I did. Maybe she thought we’d been girlfriends. That would be almost funny.

  # # #

  As we sat I took a good look at Victoria, taking her in, letting memories flooded back. She had the way that some women do of always looking good in an elegant way.

  “You look really good,” I told her as she poured us each a glass of wine.

  “I look good?” The compliment pleased her.

  Her smile brought back memories and the recollection that this woman had intimidated me from the moment I’d first met her. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was poised. She was tall, dark haired, and her bearing seemed almost regal. She’d changed, of course, and had a modern hair style and an expensive dress that managed to be casual, yet sexy.

  Even though Victoria was only a couple of years older than I was, she’d been my boss. Even without that I would always have seen her as being more worldly and more sophisticated.

  In the beginning I’d admired her confidence and envied her the ability to take on the world. I learned a great deal from her, but we’d never even approached being girlfriends. In fact, I didn’t think she had any close friends in the time I knew her. She kept me at arm’s length, and I thought Victoria wasn’t comfortable letting anyone get close. She had boyfriends from time to time.
Always affluent, well-dressed men, but she had a high turnover. I wasn’t sure if they considered her high maintenance, or she got rid of them when they got too serious. Ultimately I think they always failed by either boring her or getting serious. Victoria was a one-woman show.

  Still, she let herself bask in my compliment. “Well, time is a tyrant, as you know, and I’m sure what you see as looking good is partly simply the glow of success.” She gave me a conspiratorial wink.

  “So business is going well?”

  “Oh yes, the salon is doing fine. It will be even better after this weekend. I’ve developed a killer new hairstyle. When I win this competition I should be able to snag a couple of celebrity clients.” She winked again. “Now that you are a salon owner I’m sure you know how that works.”

  “We do the mayor’s hair,” I shrugged.

  She considered that. “Excellent. Anyway when I win that sets up the year.” She’d won this contest several times before. “Of course, the young stylists will be all over themselves to work with me, so I might need to expand.”

  Hearing that I had to bite my tongue to keep from bragging about Pete. It wouldn’t help anything. Let him do his thing and then she and everyone else would see that all the talent wasn’t in the cities. “I’m happy for you then.”

  “Of course, when I spoke of glowing… that wasn’t the success I meant.”

  Victoria loved being enigmatic, saying things in ways that made you feel as if you’d skipped a class at some point. Back when I worked for her, my first job when I was fresh out of Charlie Winchell Beauty school, that way of saying things seemed to reinforce her position of authority. Now, even though I understood the game the woman played, it still tended to make me feel off balance—as if I was on the back foot. At least now I’d come to understand that Victoria did it to make me feel that way. It wasn’t just me, either—she pulled it on everyone. If you wanted to talk to the woman, well, that was who she was, so I swallowed my pride and asked: “What success do you mean then?”

  Victoria refilled her glass of wine and sat back. She’d been building up to this, wanting, waiting for me to ask and she intended to savor it. “I meant success in the bedroom.” She paused a beat before adding, “I have a delicious new lover.”

  I knew that my eyebrows had raised without my permission. At that moment she hated them for it. Bad enough to be coming from behind without seeming prudish. “I’m happy for you.”

  “Me too, sweetie.” I’d always hated it when Victoria called me that but then Victoria called most people sweetie. That was part of why I didn’t like it. “This guy is perfect.”

  “Not too serious? Besides no one is perfect.” I couldn’t help myself, and as Victoria raised her eyebrows, she could tell that there was some sarcasm intended in the comment.

  “This one is perfect.” She licked her lips. “He knows how to satisfy me, and wants to. He is rich, wonderful, a good talker, and best of all… he can’t get too serious. He is married.”

  “That’s the best thing? How is it even a good thing?” Even for Victoria that she saw that him being married as a benefit sounded extreme. Sure it would keep him from being serious, but…

  Victoria hesitated. “It’s not just romance, Savannah. It’s better than that.”

  “Hot sex?”

  She laughed. “Even better. Sometimes things work out so that you can pay back old debts. And there are methods of payback that are better, incredibly more delicious than others,” she said.

  It started to make some sense now. It wasn’t simply that he was married. “He’s married to a rival and cheating on her with you?”

  Victoria simply smiled and sipped her wine. “No comment,” she said. “Take what I’ve said any way you like.” She licked her lips again. “And feel free to use your rather vivid imagination to embellish it.”

  Suddenly I realized that I’d been dismissed. Victoria hadn’t wanted to meet to chat. She’d asked me here because I was someone she could brag to about her conquest. What wasn’t clear was why she wanted me to know. Then it dawned on me that the wronged wife would be someone I knew, someone we both knew. It would be someone in their business, and someone she would likely run into at the convention. She wanted me to try and figure out who it was. Somehow that would add to the pleasure she already seemed to get from seducing the husband of her enemy. That probably meant that she was getting ready to dump him. He’d served his purpose.

  She was clever and played it so that there was no way I could help but wonder who it was she was getting revenge on. There had to be several candidates. I could think of any number of women that Victoria had a beef with. And it could be a new grievance with someone I didn’t know. She wasn’t going to say, and after a moment having her stare at me with an enigmatic smile, measuring my reaction, started getting to me.

  “Well, I should get a move on,” I said, standing. “Thanks for the wine. Now I need to find out what Nellie did with my things and see how Pete is doing with his setup.”

  She stood too. “And I need to go down there and see that my station is setup properly too,” she said. “By the way, I think it’s awfully sweet of you to be entering one of your young men in the competition. Transparent, but cute.”

  The catty comment caught me off guard. “What?”

  “This young man who works for you—you said you entered him in the competition. That’s so clever, helping him that way.” She flashed a wicked smile. “Young men should stay grateful in many ways for the opportunities we give them. And since you are going to all this trouble for him, I have to assume he is providing great satisfaction to his employer? I’m happy for you.”

  As the implications dawned on me, I started to speak out, to tell her exactly how wrong that idea was on so many levels. Then I stopped. Denying that Pete was my lover, insisting that I talked him into entering because she thought it would be good for him, would just make Victoria even more certain she was right. The woman didn’t have many generous bones in her body and assumed other people’s motives were based on self interest.

  “He is good,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and her words noncommittal. “Very good.” I wondered briefly what her reaction would be if I added, “and gay.”

  As Victoria closed the door behind me, she smiled through the still open crack. “If he is good, you best keep him on a short leash around here. There are a lot of hungry kitty’s on the prowl for more than a new pair of scissors or styling gel.”

  As I walked away from Victoria’s room the anger that had begun to fulminate dissipated. I had forgotten how easily Victoria could get to a person. Besides, she was setting herself up. I pictured Victoria gossiping, telling people that Savannah Jeffries was sleeping with the help, and then finding out that Pete was gay.

  That was almost funny.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “That was quick,” Nellie said when I came in.

  “Don’t sound so disappointed. I thought you’d be glad I wasn’t hanging out with Victoria.”

  “I’m just surprised, that’s all. She hinted about wanting to gossip and gossip usually oozes out.”

  “It seems the times we were going to catch up on are rather limited. She is concerned mostly with the recent history of Victoria Russel and not much else.”“It seems the times we were going to catch up on are rather limited. She is concerned mostly with the recent history of Victoria Russel and not much else.”

  “So she’s self absorbed. I hope you aren’t surprised by that.”

  “Not really; it just seems more extreme than I remembered.”

  Nellie held up her phone. “They’ll be starting dinner now. I have to call home.”

  “Are you going to cook their dinner over the phone?”

  “Look, leaving those four on their own while I’m at work is scary enough. Now they are doing what they refer to as fending for themselves. That’s okay with me when that means sending out for pizza, but for some reason they’ve decided to prove to me that they can actually prep
are meals for themselves. Not only do I want to ensure they don’t poison themselves, I need to make sure a responsible adult is in charge while they are playing with the gas stove and oven. If something happened I’d never forgive myself.”

  “And Rudy qualifies as a responsible adult? Talking to him will accomplish something?”

  At the mention of her husband, Nellie stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Actually, checking with Rudy never occurred to me. I was planning on calling Aubrey.”

  “Aubrey. Your son who is now sixteen, I believe?”

  “That’s the one. He’ll make sure Rudy doesn’t try to barbecue soup or something.”

  That was something I could imagine happening. “That sounds relatively safe… for Rudy. It would just put out the coals.”

  “Oh. I guess I didn’t mention that Rudy built himself his own gas barbecue?”

  “No.” Now I was petrified.

  “Probably because I didn’t want to be told how many county fire ordinances his design probably violates.”

  “He built it?”

  “From scratch. He said he didn’t like any of the ones at the store because they had wimpy flames. I’ll say this for the one he made… if you like blackened beef it does the trick. He gets impatient waiting for food to cook.”

  “Say no more. Call Aubrey. Tell him to chain the thing shut.”

  As Nellie made her call, I decided to call Sarah. Not that she was normally getting into the dangerous sorts of mischief Nellie’s family was known for, but just to say hello. And of course to quell that nagging parental upset stomach. She was staying at her friend Ginny’s house. Ginny’s mom answered. “Hello Paula, how are the girls doing? Are they driving you crazy yet?”

  “They are being delightful,” she said.

  “Uh oh. And quiet?”

  “It’s got me nervous, so I’m keeping a close eye on them. These two are individually wicked smart, in such interestingly different ways. I don’t think they are actually up to anything, just being little girls, but they are forming quite a bond. Together, a few years older… well with Ginny and Sarah becoming such close friends, I hope the universe has good insurance.”