Folk Around and Find Out (Good Folk: Modern Folktales #2)(108)
“I do not. The laces are complicated.” Eyes of an indetermined color swept over me. He lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t suppose you have any tea?”
“I could put some on.” I tossed a thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the kitchen. “Do you want black, green, or herbal?”
“Earl Grey?” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his coveralls. “I’ve got a taste for Earl Grey.”
“I have that.” I turned, motioning for them to follow. “Sienna, do you want any tea?”
“No, thank you. Cletus, Charlotte and I want to understand something and I figured you would know,” she pressed.
I glanced at them, watching as she followed closely on his heels, her gaze narrowed and intent.
“Well, this is unexpected. But, uh, I’ll do my best.” As we arrived in the kitchen, Cletus claimed a spot on one side of the kitchen island and braced his hands against it. He cleared his throat and, looking quite somber, said, “You see, when a woman and a man love each other very much, they—”
Sienna hit him on the shoulder. “Very funny.”
He flinched and rubbed his shoulder but said nothing.
She crossed her arms. “This is important. You remember how people treated Hank after Kevin Buckley left town? How, like, completely bananas they were, talking about closing down his club, calling it a menace and all that?”
I filled the electric kettle and set it to boil while Sienna spoke, returning to the kitchen island as she finished with her questions.
“I do recall something about it,” he said noncommittally, his expression vacant.
I frowned. I didn’t know Cletus Winston well at all, and the conversation we’d had in the foyer just now had been our longest interaction that I could recall. But whenever I did see him, he was messy. His wife was an amazing baker, and she seemed sweet but also harmless. That’s how I thought of him, too. Sweet and harmless.
Why Sienna seemed to believe the sweet, generally harmless man in my kitchen could help, I had no idea. But at this point, I was willing to give anything a try.
“What I want to know is, why people in town blamed Hank Weller so much for Charlotte’s divorce?” Sienna asked, titling her head toward me. “That makes no sense to me.”
Cletus lifted his chin, his eyes drifting to mine. “Charlotte can’t tell you why?”
“Me?” I pressed my fingers to my chest. “It doesn’t make any sense to me either.”
Sienna’s brother-in-law frowned, it looked thoughtful, then he said, “Your ex-husband’s family systematically launching a smear campaign against Hank Weller, Carli Duvall, and The Pink Pony to shift the blame to an infamous—yet, ultimately harmless—local ne'er-do-well and an exotic dancer in order to redirect public uproar and blame from their son and his disgusting behavior to literally anyone else doesn’t make any sense to you?”
I gawped at him, completely flabbergasted, and stuttered, “I-I’m s-sorry. What—what did you say?”
“I said, your ex-husband’s family systematically launching a—”
“Yes, I heard you. But how—why—why would you think that?” This possibility had never occurred to me.
“Because that’s what happened,” he said simply, as though nefarious conspiracies to destroy a person’s character were hatched every day. No biggie.
“But how would they even go about doing such a thing?” I asked, stunned by the likelihood that this might be true.
His eyebrows pulled more completely together, but his mouth behind his bushy beard seemed to curve the faintest bit. “The fact that you can’t conceive of how a powerful, wealthy family who does big business in ‘family values’ and who has a New York PR firm on retainer might run a propaganda campaign against private citizens in this little town of ours speaks to either the purity of your heart or your na?veté.”
Well. There you go. Me being na?ve seemed to be the answer to all my questions.
Cletus shifted his attention to Sienna. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that JT MacIntyre is still the head of the Chamber of Commerce? Or that he and Flo McClure are such good friends?”
Sienna and Cletus shared a look, the meaning of which went completely over my head.
So I asked, “What does Flo McClure have to do with anything?”
Cletus’s features registered disbelief for a split second as he faced me, the emotion quickly eclipsed by an expression of blandness. “Are you kidding me?”
“Flo McClure is the dispatch at the sheriff’s office and a huge gossip,” Sienna filled in, her smile sympathetic. “Even I know that.”
“Oh. That’s right!” I did know that. My mother had said so a hundred times. But Flo’s status as a gossip in this town didn’t put my kids to bed on time, pay the bills, or fold my laundry, thus it wasn’t information I’d worked to retain.
“If anyone wanted to poison the well in Green Valley against a person, that’s where to start.” Sienna chewed on her thumbnail, her gaze distracted. “She’s more respected than Karen Smith and, you know, nicer.”
“Bingo,” Cletus said, pointing to Sienna.
I peered at Cletus, working to wrap my mind around it all. “How did you know the Buckley PR firm is based out of New York?” I’d worked with them plenty of times when coordinating events in Vegas.