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She giggles. “Thanks! Oh my god, who cut your hair?”
Well, that segue just handed itself to me on a silver platter, didn’t it?
“Hattie, of course,” I say.
I watch as the strange look falls over Rachel’s face.
“You and Hattie go way back to high school, don’t you?”
Rachel turns away and dabs at her eyebrow in the mirror.
“Yep,” she tries to say breezily.
“And Tanner Murphy, too, right?”
Rachel sighs. “I can’t believe he’s back. He just left town after everything, with no explanation….”
She’s a pretty good actress, but not that good.
I’m just going to ask her straight out.
“Who put you up to lying about Tanner?”
“What?” The poor girl turns as white as a sheet.
“You and I both know that man never cheated on Hattie Wilkins. Who put you up to it?”
“…I don’t know….”
This time I use a motherly tone. “Rachel. You are a grown-ass woman. That all happened when you were teenagers. It’s not like you all found a dead body. Spill it.”
She presses her thumbs absently into her eye sockets and heaves a sigh. “Fine. It was Hattie’s husband, Ennis McRae.”
“What?”
Rachel groans and then nods. “Ennis was jealous and was trying to break them up. He paid me $500 to say I made out with Tanner to get Hattie to break up with him. I didn’t know I’d cursed him and made him cost us the championship!”
Ah crap, I made Rachel cry.
I grasp her shoulder. “Sweetie, nobody made Darling Creek lose that championship except Tanner himself. Curses are imaginary. I think it’s time to move past the guilt you’ve been carrying, don’t you?”
She sniffles and plucks a piece of lint out of my hair.
“You clean up real good, Ms. Hicks.”
Even though I hate that phrase, I smile and thank her politely, complimenting her on her earrings because I feel like that’s the thing that civilized women do in the bathroom.
“Thank you! People say you’re a little strange and keep to yourself a lot. But I think you’re real nice,” Rachel says. “And I’m so glad you won that bid at the cowboy auction instead of me.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
She nods. “Yeah. That was me bidding against you. I don’t know why I did it. It must have been the guilt that got to me. I felt bad, and I thought driving up the bid would mean Tanner’s matching donation would be bigger, which would break the curse.”
This is either absolutely dotty or absolute genius.
And that’s my cue to leave the bathroom before I learn anything more about what the people in Darling Creek believe.
Leaving the ladies’ room, I spot Hattie and her husband by the bar. She turns and waves me over.
