Chapter 12
“And I worked in the kitchen of the prison.” Revonda Gail had me enthralled with her tale of where she’d been the past ten years. “My mama couldn’t ever bring herself to tell anyone the truth, so she’d tell people I was traveling in an RV with my very rich and wonderful boyfriend.”
“Yeah. She always told me you were off on an adventure. But the postcards?” I asked.
“Mama would buy them off various places from out west, and once she’d get them in the mail, she’d address them to herself and actually drive to the next town to mail them to herself.” Revonda Gail could’ve knocked me over with a feather.
“I can’t believe it.” I sat there in shock and recalled all the packages from the various states out west. Gertrude told me she loved to request things from the states where Revonda Gail was with her boyfriend so they would have something to talk about when Revonda called her every Sunday night. “She said you called her every Sunday night, and it made her week off to a great start.”
“Oh, I called her.” Revonda laughed. “Collect from the state pen.”
“And you were in jail for a crime you say you didn’t commit?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm. The part about having a boyfriend was right. But the part about traveling with him was wrong. You see, I had no idea he was hooked up with smuggling drugs, so when the FBI raided his house, he told them I had the drugs in my car and I worked at a local bank. They came in the bank and had a warrant for my car, and they did find drugs taped up under the car.” She shook her head. “I had no idea they were there, but I still got ten years.”
“Your poor mama.” Iris slowly shook her head. “I bet she’d about died when you came back.”
“There’s one thing I know about my mama. I knew she’d never tell people where I was. When I got out, I knew I couldn’t call her, so I hopped on a bus and rode it all the way back to Kentucky.” Revonda giggled. “You should’ve seen her face when I knocked on her door. Priceless.”
“I bet. I’d have paid anything to see that.” Iris laughed so hard.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now I help you get Iris off the hook, and Iris is going to give me a baking job at Pie in the Face. I can bake. That’s one thing I did in the big house. She said Geraldine Workman doesn’t bake, that she only runs the register, so if I’m working there, Iris can leave me to bake while Geraldine works the store.” It sounded like a perfect plan to me, and Iris nodded in agreement. “What better person to help solve a crime than one who’s been accused of one and been put in the slammer for ten years? I’ve seen a lot of things, and from what Iris has told me about her history with Piddy, I think we can come up with the real killer.”
“Great. You two can get started while I go to work.” I noticed they’d written some things on the paper. “After work, I’ll come to the bakery, and we can use Iris’s wipe-off board to get all the clues down.”
“Yeah. We like to do that.” Iris smiled. “We also like to eat something sweet while writing it all down too.”
“Wonderful. I can make up something real special for us that the girls liked.” Revonda Gail had a sordid past that I could tell hadn’t been completely uncovered, and I couldn’t wait to pepper her with questions.
But the answers to my curiosity were going to have to wait. The mail wasn’t going to get delivered on its own. Plus, I had to keep my ears to the ground to see just what everyone was saying about Piddy Satterly’s murder, if it was truly murder.
“Are you sure you can trust Revonda Gail?” I questioned Iris when we walked together to Main Street, where she’d left her car after Angela had come to the bakery to fetch her.
“I will trust anyone right now.” She was right. Any little bit of information could be found useful. We just had to weed through it all to get to the truth.
It wasn’t going to be easy, but I was confident we could get some answers. Maybe not the killer, but some answers.
“What exactly happened after I continued to walk to the football game?” I’d yet to ask Iris, but right now was the time to find out.
“Piddy had addressed the crowd that the bookstore was closing. I waited until Stella Jane had left and Piddy completely locked up. Elton was outside waiting for her in his truck, so when Stella Jane slipped out, I told her I needed to see Piddy and walked in.” Iris let out a deep sigh. “I bet it was that Stella Jane who told Angela I was there. That’s why they hauled me in. No mind you that Elton got all over Piddy for not coming out to the car as soon as the bookstore’s lights turned off.”
“Huh?” I wasn’t following Iris at all. She was so mad and on fire about this that she rambled, her words strung together.
“When I was talking to Piddy.” She glanced at me. My brows rose. “Okay, yelling at Piddy,” she corrected her wording. “Elton got out of his car, and he yelled for her. She kept telling me she had to go. But I kept on. Then he finally yelled, ‘Woman! Get in this car now!’”
“Really?” I hadn’t even heard it, and it offended me that he’d talk to his wife that way.
“That’s when the conversation turned.” Iris sucked in a deep breath. “It was then that I felt sorry for Piddy, and no wonder she cheated on Elton with Bobby Peters. Bobby Peters might be a lot of things, but he never raised his voice or talked down to me. I told Piddy, why do you let him speak to you like that? And she just kept saying that she had to go. I said to her that Bobby Peters was still single, and if I had a husband that spoke to me that way, I’d be out of there and back in Bobby’s arms.”
“You did?” This was a huge turn of events in Iris’s feelings. “So that’s when your feeling that something bad happened turned?”
“Yes. I think I had a feeling about Piddy Satterly, and I needed to make peace with the poor woman before she. . .” Iris dragged her finger along her neck. “Now here I am accused of killing her when it turned out I was trying to help her. I even gave her my phone number to call me so I could get her out of that house.”
“I guess Angela thinks you killed her because of the affair she had with Bobby, right?” I had to get my p’s and q’s straight before I made my deliveries today because not only did I need to deliver the mail for the funeral home, where I’d snoop a little, but also for the sheriff’s department, where I’d snoop a lot.
“Angela’s line of questioning was all about that night. I told her if I wanted anyone dead, I’d have done it that night.” A deep sigh escaped her before she looked up the street toward Pie in the Face. “I reckon the scorned woman is always looked at, but I told Angela how Elton had treated Piddy when we were standing there, and he saw with his own God-given eyeballs it was me.” Her brows knitted. “Maybe he told Angela about me, not Stella Jane.”
“It would make sense for him to tell her because maybe he killed Piddy. You were there at the right time and the right person to stick her death on.” It seemed like I needed to get in front of Elton Satterly. What would my excuse be? I wondered.