Death by Chocolate

at the grocery
store a few times when she had a headache. I don’t take any kind of
prescription medications.” He thought for a moment, then perked up. “I’ve seen
a little white delivery car from The Rx Shop parked up at Louise’s—for a long
time, too. In fact, I was wondering if...”
    His voice trailed away and
he looked uncomfortable. Dirk and Savannah both leaned forward a bit.
    “Yes?” Dirk asked.
    “Well, I don’t know for
sure, so I hate to say anything.”
    “Say it,” Savannah prodded.
“Louise just canned you and threatened to dump your stuff in the trash. Now’s
not the time to be worrying about discretion.”
    “Okay,” he said. “A few
times last month I saw that car up there for a long time, like more than an
hour each time—longer than you need to make a delivery. And then I saw this
young, skinny kid come out of Louise’s with a big, sappy grin on his face. I
wondered at the time if maybe.... you know…”
    “Louise was gettin’ a
little extra-special attention with her deliveries?” Dirk supplied.
    “Yeah. It wouldn’t be the first
time,” Sydney admitted. “Louise gets around.”
    “So I gather.” Savannah
thought of the various affairs she had learned about in the past few days and
decided that the inhabitants and visitors to the Maxwell estate weren’t exactly
hard up in the hanky-panky department. “So, where is this Rx Shop?” Dirk asked.
    “Oh, I don’t know.” Sydney
gave a vague wave of his hand. “Down the road a ways, I think, in one of those
strip malls north of here on the highway.”
    “Thanks,” Dirk said. “I owe
you one.”
    Savannah walked over and
laced her arm through Dirk’s. “And we know exactly how you can repay him,” she
said. ‘You see, somebody needs to have a little talk with Miss Louise about
what she can and can’t do with…”

Chapter

20
     
     
     
    R x Shop in the Sunset View Mall
was a member ofan endangered species: a privately owned
pharmacy that still served ice cream cones, sundaes, and malted shakes at a
marble-topped counter. The place reminded Savannah of the tiny drugstore in
McGill, Georgia, where she had been treated to a one-scoop cone on Saturday
afternoons while running errands for Gran. It had been a rare treat and one
that she had savored deep in her soul.
    Over the years Savannah had
become quite the connoisseur of ice cream, having sampled all the Baskin Robbins
flavors as well as the Ben & Jerry’s assortment and Breyer’s best. But
no ice cream had ever tasted as good as that single scoop of strawberry served
at a cold marble counter, in an air-conditioned store on a hot and humid
Georgia afternoon.
    It was a simpler, sweeter
time, when five cents could buy complete happiness.
    Like that store, this one
had that distinctive drugstore smell, a mixture of ice cream and candies,
perfumes and soaps, mothballs and an underlying, clinical scent of
pharmaceuticals.
    She followed Dirk to the
back of the store where the wall bore one sign that said prescription drop-off and another that
said prescription pick-up. There
was a grim determination in his walk and a grouchier than usual frown on his
face, so she decided to just coast along in his wake, to watch and listen.
    Behind the counter stood a
large, stout, elderly woman in a white smock who made Grouchy Dirk look like
Mr. Smiley Face. A small plastic name tag on her lapel identified her simply as mildred. Her steel gray hair
matched the color of her eyes, as she glared at Dirk over the wire-rimmed
glasses that rested on her long, narrow nose.
    “What?” she snapped.
    Standing behind Dirk,
Savannah wondered if she was this crabby with her paying customers, or if she
could sense that Dirk wasn’t there to fork over money. But Dirk wasn’t the sort
to be deterred by a chilly greeting. He flipped out his badge and shoved it so
close to the end of her nose that she had to take a step backward just to see
it. “SCPD,” he barked back, just as curtly.
    “I’m busy,” she said,
turning away from him and occupying herself with her pills and bottles on the
other side of the counter.
    “So am I,” he said. “I’m
investigating a murder. You wanna talk here or down at the station?”
    Savannah grinned to herself.
Dirk wasn’t likely to haul any hardworking pharmacist off to the station house
just to answer a few simple questions. Unless, of course, she really pissed him
off.
    The druggist didn’t reply,
but she laid down the bottle she was filling