Noah tips his head back. “Of Gilmore Investigations?”
The man sheds a warm grin. “That would be me.”
Noah shakes his hand. “Noah Fox. I used to see your name around the private investigative circuit when I first started out as a PI myself in Honey Hollow.”
“Congratulations to you, son. I’m toying with retirement.” Nelson rocks back on his heels. “I’ll leave crime fighting to the young guns. Hey? Did you say Honey Hollow? You wouldn’t happen to be drumming up business for yourself in those parts? Word on the street is Honey Hollow is the deadliest town in all of Vermont.”
I can’t help but groan at the thought.
It’s true. Our sweet, scenic town has had its fair share of murders—and coincidentally, each victim was last seen noshing on one of my sweet treats.
Every muscle in my body freezes at the thought. Come to think of it, I might have been cursed for a lot longer than that hex Serena Digby placed on me. Not that I believe in hexes. And I don’t believe Serena, the self-proclaimed witch, has any supernatural powers either.
The lights dim in the entire convention center before coming back full strength and a shiver runs down my spine at what it could mean. The same thing happened the other day at the bakery right after I had a similar thought about Serena. I bet it’s the other side trying to warn me about how wicked she really is. And, believe me, it is duly noted. I got the memo loud and clear when she kidnapped me last week.
Rusted bathroom door indeed.
I don’t buy that rusty dusty excuse for a minute.
Everett and I shake Nelson’s hand as well.
“Judge Baxter.” Nelson snaps his fingers. “That’s right. I sent quite a few perps your way over the last few years. I believe you owe me a drink for that,” he teases and we break out in a laugh.
Leslie shimmies her shoulders. “Count me in on that good time.”
Everett’s chest thumps with another laugh. “How about I get you each a slice of the most delicious devil’s food cake you’ve ever tried? It was catered all the way from the Cutie Pie Bakery and Cakery.”
Noah leans in. “That’s Lottie’s bakery. She made the cake.”
Everett ticks his head to the side. “No need to be a know-it-all, Detective Fox. They’re all great investigators. They would have figured it out eventually.”
We share another laugh and migrate over to the refreshment table where, much to my delight, Lily has almost doled out half the cake. As a baker, there is nothing better than seeing someone enjoying your sweet treats. And looking around at all the moaning, satisfied people, I can tell they’re doing just that.
The refreshment table laden with coffee urns is our first stop. The coffee is so aromatic, I can’t wait to take a sip. Since there’s a mass of people gathered for the heavenly-scented java, a few men and women up front help to expedite the process. I spot Perry, the gray-haired man I met earlier, standing up front.
A brunette about my age with bangs that fringe her forehead and glowing green eyes passes me a cup.
“Thank you,” I say as I take in the amazingly rich scent.
I can’t help but shake my head at the steaming latte in my hand. “If this tastes half as good as it smells, we are in for a real treat.”
Noah takes a careful sip from his. “Mmm, very good. But I’m betting your cake is better.”
We migrate over to the cake table where I watch as Noah, Everett, and their friends each take a slice.
“Detective Lemon.” Lily smirks my way as she offers me a piece as well. “So? Did you see anything out there that might help you in catching the bad guys? A few of those killers almost got away from you, Lottie. You really should step up your game.”
I make a face at her without meaning to. “I haven’t checked out any of the booths yet.”
“What’s this?” Tim’s entire face brightens as he looks my way. “Lottie, are you both a baker and a detective?”
Everett tips his head my way. “That’s right. She catches them. Noah hauls them in. And I send them up the river.”
We all share a quick laugh.
“Actually”—I look to Tim as he drains his coffee—“I’m nothing more than an amateur sleuth.”
“Nothing more?” Leslie belts it out as if the words affronted her. “Honey, you’re a woman—and women can do it all.” She lowers her lids a notch as she looks to Everett. “Every which way, if you know what I mean.”
Nelson Gilmore glowers over at Leslie a moment. I’m guessing he’s tired of seeing her flirting her way through the symposium himself.
Noah’s dimples dig in deep. “I’ll be the first to say, Lottie is an excellent detective.” He winces. “I just wish she’d steer clear of danger.”
Everett lifts his cup. “I second that motion.”
I’m about to say something when that Doberman Pinscher catches my eye as he strolls right between Noah and me and right through Everett.
I suck in a quick breath as I look at the handsome judge.
“Whoa.” Everett shakes his head. “Good cake. I think it just gave me a jolt.”
The rest of them nod in agreement.
“Excuse me,” I say as I pull Everett to the side a moment. “Everett,” I hiss his name like a punishment without meaning to. “That jolt didn’t come from my cake. It came from that perilous pooch who just walked right through you.” I point to the crowd that the specter just wandered into.
“What?” Everett turns his head in that direction before looking back at me. “Lemon? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
I give a guilty nod. “There’s a ghost in our midst. You know what that means.”
Everett presses those cobalt blue eyes into mine. “Tonight will end in murder.”
Chapter 9
Everett vows not to leave my side. In fact, he goes as far as picking up my hand as if I were a child prone to wandering away—and he might be right about that, at least the wandering away part.
“Oh, Lottie!” a female voice cries from over by the booths and I spot Mom jumping up and down in her hot pink power suit. “Lottie, over here!”
I spot Wiley next to her and he elicits a frown from me on cue. Despite the fact he looks exactly like Noah, I don’t trust the guy as far as I could throw him. And boy would I love to throw him—right out of Vermont. Maybe the country.
“What kind of a man fakes his own death?” I whisper to Everett as we head on over.
“The kind you can’t trust.”
I give a curt nod. “That’s the kind, all right.”
Everett still hasn’t forgiven Wiley for making off with a good chunk of his mother’s millions. Although, honestly, Eliza Baxter is a hotel heiress who might just be worth billions. She hasn’t so much as batted a lash at the missing money. She’s still living high off the hotel hog.
“Mom. Wiley.” I wrinkle my nose at him while I offer my mother a quick embrace. “What brings the two of you here?” I realize that Mother mentioned she wanted to come, but I had no idea she’d follow through.
Wiley gives a wistful shake of the head. “I’ve always had an interest in crime.”
Everett’s chest thumps. “Spoken like a true criminal.”
Mom waves off Everett’s comment. “Guess what?” Her eyes percolate with mischief, and already I don’t like where this is headed. “Wiley had another brilliant idea on how to drum up more business at the B&B.”
My mother’s happily haunted B&B is where Wiley is staying at the moment. My mother has been selling tickets to what she calls the Haunted Honey Hollow B&B Tours for eighty bucks a pop for close to a year now. That is, until Wiley’s latest brainstorm.
Just last month, he came up with the idea of bumping up the prices to a hundred dollars apiece, and in exchange for the price hike, he helps my mother serve my innocent cookies along with hard liquor to the tourists until they’re sugared up and shnockered.
Everett groans, “What’s this brilliant idea?”
Wiley ex
tends a hand toward my mother. “I defer to the lovely lady.”
Mom giggles like a schoolgirl. “It’s a séance.”
I lean in. “A say what?”
She nods. “A séance. Wiley said the ghosts at the B&B are very good at what they do and we should be expanding how we showcase them.”
Wiley gives a slight bow. “Of course, I’ll have a full cocktail bar open for those who wish to imbibe. That’s an extra stream of revenue, you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” I say, quickly looking to my mother. “Mom, are you insane? The haunted B&B tours are enough for those poor ghosts. What more could you ask of them?”
“Oh”—she touches her hand to her chest—“that’s the great thing about a séance, Lottie. You can ask the ghosts just about anything.”
“No, you can’t.” My voice spikes without meaning to. I happen to personally know the ghosts in question. A girl about my age who died just last year by the name of Greer Giles, her two-hundred-year-old boyfriend who was once a pig farmer, Winslow Decker, a little girl who is scarier than most adults named Lea, and a black cat named Thirteen. “Believe me when I say, those ghosts have no interest in speaking to anyone.” Not only do I know this firsthand, but I also know that they’re not capable of being heard by anyone but me. “Besides, it’s against your religion to try to communicate with the dead.” I suppose I’m the exception to this rule since I never really sought out to speak with them to begin with.
Mom twitches her lips. “Oh, it’s all in fun, Lottie.” She scowls into the crowd as if she were angry with me for foiling her good time. “We’ll just try it once and see how it goes. Tickets are two hundred dollars apiece and we have sixteen takers.”
“You mean suckers,” I correct.
Everett eyes them both suspiciously. “Who exactly is going to be speaking to the dead?”
Wiley lifts a hand and winks. “Been dead once myself. I guess you could say I’ll be a natural at it.”
I’ll make sure he comes close to death one more time.
That stately beast that’s roaming the grounds filters through my mind once again for no apparent reason.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll be there. Excuse us.”
“Wednesday night,” she calls as we take off into the crowd once again. “It will be to die for!”
“Someone is going to die, all right,” I mutter to myself—and even though I meant that quip toward Wiley, I’m afraid it extends to some unfortunate soul right here at the symposium. “Hey?” I look to Everett as we drift through the crowd. “Maybe it’s Wiley’s neck up on the chopping block tonight?”
Everett shakes his head. “We’re not that lucky, Lemon.”
A hand plucks me out of the crowd, and both Everett and I sail toward a booth selling medieval looking torture devices.
Carlotta pops up in front of me. “Well, if it isn’t Honey Hollow’s crime fighting duo—alive and in the flesh. The Bimbo Baker and Mr. Sexy.”
I shoot her a look. I won’t even go near the nickname she just gifted me.
Mr. Sexy, however, is a bona fide nickname that was given to Everett by baristas the world over. And it’s fitting if I do say so myself.
“Lookie here.” Carlotta holds up a pair of illuminated handcuffs. “A little something to add a little spice to the bedroom.”
“No, thank you.” It comes out flat and curt, partially because I don’t want to ever discuss what I do in the bedroom with Carlotta.
She pulls the cuffs close to her chest. “I meant for me.” She nods to her left where we see Mayor Nash rifling through a basket of what looks more like naughty accouterments than anything that could potentially bring down a suspect.
“Look at this.” He pulls up a fuzzy pink blindfold victoriously. “Oh hey, kiddo. Judge Baxter. You want in on this?”
“We’ll pass,” I say.
Everett leans in. “I could work with those.” His voice cuts through me, quick and heated, sending a shiver right down to my thighs. Truth be told, Everett can make just about anything work in or out of the bedroom.
Carlotta leans in. “Did you see that handsome dude roaming the grounds? About yea high”—she holds her hand to her hip—“pointed ears, dark as midnight, a necklace to die for?”
I suck in a quick breath. “You saw him, too?”
Carlotta and I are both transmundane, further classified as supersensual. Truth be told, I didn’t know what I was until my grandmother Nell explained it all to me before she died. All I knew was once I caught a glimpse of a ghost—mostly furry little creatures who have crossed the rainbow divide, bad things would happen to the people who once held an affection for them. Usually it was nothing more than a twisted ankle or a scraped elbow, but as of late it almost always spells out murder. With the exception of the ghosts holing up in my mother’s bed and breakfast. Their lot in the afterlife isn’t to solve any big crime, rather to entertain the masses at their leisure. The ghosts that do help solve a homicide always get taken back to paradise right afterwards. Greer and the gang at the B&B seem to be keepers, and I’m glad about it, too.
Carlotta gives a quick nod. “I sure did see him. Now go on”—she does her best to shoo me away—“get. I don’t want to be anywhere near a dead body.”
I can’t help but scoff at her. “Carlotta, just last month you were begging me to lead you to a corpse.”
“It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind.” She curls her lips at Everett. “Bet you’ve never heard that one before.”
“No. I haven’t.” He flexes a seldom seen smile.
Carlotta’s eyes widen at someone behind me, and I turn to find a beefy trio of men in dark suits.
“Who are they, Carlotta?” I whisper. “Do you recognize them?”
She leans in close. “It’s Luke Lazzari’s men. Luke and I used to date way back when.”
“What?” I squawk in horror. The Lazzaris are a notorious crime family that battle for turf and other ridiculous things with another crooked crime family in Leeds, the Canellis.
Carlotta smacks me. “Pull yourself together, Lot. Those kind men were out looking for you last week. When you went missing, I dialed up good old Love-Me-Like-Nobody’s-Business-Luke.”
I glance over to Mayor Nash who seems too preoccupied with frilly pink things to notice our dicey conversation.
Everett steps in close. “Stay away from them, Carlotta. Both the Lazzaris and the Canellis are not to be messed with.”
Carlotta twitches her head. “Funny you should say that. The Canellis are here, too. I saw both Louie the Lion and Jimmy Canelli themselves. Word to the wise, stay away from the weapons department if you don’t want to bump into any of them.”
“Or get bumped off,” I point out. “They have a lot of nerve showing up.”
Everett shakes his head. “They’re posturing. That, and apparently shopping, too.”
“That’s terrifying.” I shudder at the thought. “Hey? You don’t think that cute ghostly puppy is here because one of them is about to bump someone off, do you?”
Everett cranes his neck into the crowd. “I don’t know. But I have a feeling we’d better tell Noah.”
“Noah.” I land my fingers to my lips. Everett and I drifted a little longer than anticipated.
“What’s the matter, Lot?” Carlotta chortles away. “Did Mr. Forgettable just so happen to cross your mind?”
“Would you stop?” I all but swat her. “Noah is not forgettable in the least.”
Carlotta bleeds a dark smile. “That must be why you scream his name at all hours of the night.” She looks to Everett. “Hear that, Judge Baxter? You’ve got some stiff competition.”
“We’re leaving now,” I say, hauling Everett off with me.
“Oh, wait!” Carlotta hustles her way into my path. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t I use my Lazzari connections to help you track down your kooky stalker? See what I did there? Kooky? Cookie? Get it?”
Everett growls at the thought. “That’s a
hard no, Carlotta. And I don’t want to hear another thing about it.”
Carlotta fans herself with her fingers as if the reprimand made her weak in the knees, and I’m betting it did.
Everett whisks us back into the crowd.
“There’s Noah,” I say, pointing near the refreshment table where he’s still talking to Tim, Nelson, and Leslie. “He’s right where we left—” I stop cold midsentence as I spot that tall, vexing looking Doberman as he bares his fangs my way. “Everett, I see the dog again.”
The snarling spirit jumps right through Tim and disappears in a spray of sparkling stars just as Everett and I come upon Noah and his friends.
“There she is.” Noah pulls me in and dots a kiss to my cheek.
“Sorry about that,” I say, looking to his friends. “I spotted my mother.” Both of them, but Carlotta is always too much information to share.
“Your mother?” Tim smiles my way before coughing. “Sorry.” His forehead is beaded with sweat as he holds up the plate of my chocolate cake in his hands. “Second piece. And I’m already looking forward to my third.”
Our small circle shares a quick laugh.
Tim coughs again and takes a sip from his coffee. “Excuse me,” he coughs through the words.
Nelson touches his hand to his stomach. “Geez. I think I may have had too much cake.”
Leslie moans, “Me, too. It feels as if my heart is racing. How much chocolate did you put in that thing?”
My mouth falls open as I glance to Noah and Everett. “It was—it was what the recipe called for. I’ve baked this cake a thousand times. I can assure you it’s a tried-and- true—”
Tim drops the plate cold and crushes the Styrofoam cup in his hand, spilling his coffee down the front of his shirt.
“Oh my goodness,” I say, trying to wipe the coffee off his suit. “I’ll get you a napkin.”
Tim staggers backward while both Nelson and Leslie let out horrific moans.
“What’s happening?” I cry just as Noah begins to grip his own belly.
“I don’t know, Lot.” Noah blows out a hard breath. “But I’m not feeling so great.”
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