Read Online Wedding Bell Blues by Ruth Moose - Free Book Online Page B

jumped down and pushed the button to lower the gate, all the while checking to see if Ossie or Bruce had seen me or heard something.
    All was still. All was quiet.
    I slipped back in the office to lay the keys exactly where I found them on Bruce’s desk. I tiptoed in and was ready to lay the keys very carefully and without a single jangle when I felt a big, heavy hand hot on my shoulder. “Ohhhhhh,” I said and pivoted into a tall and wide masculine body. Bruce Bechner.
    â€œHey there,” he said. “Admiring my babies?”
    I held my breath, backed up and very slowly laid the keys on the desktop. Not a single jingle jangle sounded. Whew.
    â€œBa-babies?” I stuttered.
    â€œMy violets.” He smiled and lifted his chin. “There,” he indicated. “On the windowsill. The light is perfect. Aren’t they amazing?”
    â€œBeautiful,” I said. “Just beautiful.”
    He walked to the window, lifted up a fluffy pink African violet, said, “This pretty little girl is my Apache Primrose. One of my best sellers. At home I got two basement rooms filled with these violets in every shade of pink, purple and white. Some double, triple, some big, some small. Every week mama and me ship out dozens … all over the country. You’d be surprised how popular these things are.”
    â€œI’m sure,” I said. “You really must have a green thumb.”
    â€œNot green.” He placed the potted African violet back on the sill, “They’re easy to grow.”
    I told him about the wallet I’d just given Ossie, that it was proof the man Reba thought she killed was not the one she was engaged to, who was a Butch Rigsbee who sounded like one of Allison’s regulars and whose presence in Littleboro was unaccounted for.
    He scratched the side of his face, but listened intently, thanked me and headed down the hall toward Ossie’s office.
    In the parking lot, I jumped in Lady Bug and scooted back to the Dixie Dew. Those keys on that desk were too easy. Too deliberate. They were either meant for somebody to find or simply there because Littleboro’s “trained professionals” were totally inept.
    Either way I’d found something, but I didn’t know what I’d found. Certainly no body and no money. But I had recovered that wallet and turned it over to Ossie and that was one step toward finding out what was going on with this latest crime caper, maybe even a murder, in Littleboro. Not good stuff.

 
    Chapter Twelve
    In the Dixie Dew kitchen Ida Plum poured me iced tea and put the pitcher back in the fridge. At the Dixie Dew we don’t use the regular pound-of-sugar-per-tea-bag recipe. We leave it unsweetened and offer a sugar syrup, and always have fresh lemon at the ready. Mama Alice used to say, “We boil water to steep it, ice to cool it, sugar to sweeten it and lemon to spike it.”
    â€œI think one of our guests may be a judge for the festival. Or both of them,” Ida Plum said. “They seemed to know each other.”
    Festival. I was so involved with Reba and her God thing and the missing Butch Rigsbee that I’d pushed the whole shindig out of my mind. Not only did the Green Bean Festival have Scott gainfully employed for odds and ends but all of Littleboro was buzzing both pro and con. Who would come to our little town to celebrate the green bean? Who cared? Who even liked the stuff? We might as well salute something that had more guts and glory, like the black-eyed pea, for gosh sakes. Or as Ida Plum had said, “Creasy greens. Now they are something special. Or collards.”
    Littleboro’s lady mayor, the Honorable Calista Moss, had hatched the idea for something to put our “precious little village” on the map: a Green Bean Festival. What did we grow in Littleboro that grew better and more abundantly than anywhere else? Green beans! There was to be a cooking contest, a parade