by Carrie Doyle
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2021 by Carrie Doyle
Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks
Cover design and illustration by Patrick Knowles
Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Doyle, Carrie, author.
Title: It takes two to mango / Carrie Doyle.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series:
Trouble in paradise! ; book 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048785 | (paperback) | (epub)
Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3604.O95473 I87 2021 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048785
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Excerpt for Something’s Guava Give
Chapter 1
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For Liz, who is always my first reader, second reader, third reader, and so on. I would never be able to publish a book without you.
Chapter 1
Plum Lockhart sat at her desk on the twenty-sixth floor staring down at the blaze of neon lights illuminating Times Square. It was only four thirty, but it was already dark outside and as cold as it could get without snowing. A pity, thought Plum. At least snow would have made the filthy streets look pretty. The endless frigid winter days had blended together, and it felt to Plum like it was the forty-seventh day of January, yet it was only the first week. The weather matched her mood: gloomy, negative, and uninspired.
It had been a particularly grim afternoon. Plum had been forced to lay off Gerald Hand, her art director, and he had made a scene (predictable) and accused Plum of being “an opportunistic cold-hearted wannabe” (uncalled for) and was escorted out by security (not her idea). The entire editorial staff was now on edge and regarded Plum with weariness and suspicion, which she resented. She felt they should be grateful to her for keeping them employed in this treacherous market. It was no secret that Travel and Respite Magazine was hemorrhaging money—the entire publishing industry was collapsing—and downsizing was inevitable.
There was a knock at Plum’s door, and she swiveled her chair around and espied Steven Blum through the glass wall. She motioned for him to come in, although he was already halfway through the door. Seeing as he was her boss, he really didn’t have to wait for permission.
“How did it go with Gerald?” asked Steven, taking a seat across from her.
“Brutal.”
Steven nodded. He was squat, bald, overweight, and hardly fit the profile of head of the magazine group at the glamorous Mosaic Publishing, but he was a numbers guy who had been promoted from accounting.
“It couldn’t have come as a shock to him. The magazine is doing terribly.”
“He has an inflated sense of self,” sighed Plum, taking a sip of her white chai latte. “But people are delusional.”
“Yes, I have often found that.”
“He really didn’t have to take it personally. He was very catty and churlish. He could have at least left with dignity.”
“Yes, that’s the way to go. Take your leave graciously.”
“Well, what’s done is done,” she said and began flipping through some of the files on her desk. “The good news is that I finalized the feature on Mongolia. I’ll actually be heading there myself for ten days. I ordered all of my horseback riding paraphernalia online. If you look over there, you can see a box of whips… Just to clarify they are for riding, not—”
“Plum…”
“Yes?”
“We need to talk.”
“What’s up?”
“Travel and Respite is basically a pamphlet these days.”
“And I choose to see that as a positive. It is easier for people to pop in their suitcase and bring with them when they travel.”
“We are shutting it down,” Steven announced.
“Completely? Not even turning it into a website?”
Steven shook his head. “It’s done.”
Plum had suffered enough disappointments in her thirty-five years of life to quickly adapt and turn setbacks into opportunities. She folded her perfectly manicured hands and placed them on her desk. Once, she had skipped a manicure and a nasty editor at a competing magazine asked if her nails were jagged because she had scratched her way to the top. While it was true that she was ambitious and had succeeded, she had done so through hard work and plunging ahead when the chips were down. She was proud of her efforts. And she had kept her nails perfectly polished ever since.
“All right, then. What’s the plan?” she asked brightly.
“No plan. As of this afternoon, everyone is released.”
Plum glanced sideways out the glass doors at the remaining skeleton staff.
“We can’t move them over to another magazine?”
He shook his head.
“How about Panda Love? I heard the plushie market is brisk.”
“No. When we shut down Mansions and Hovels, we put the editors there.”
“Steven, if there is one favor I ask of you, and only one, it’s to find them jobs. My team means a great deal to me. I want to do what’s right by them.”
/> “Okay, but it’s unlikely.”
“This will be a blow,” she said. “Where will you move me?”
Steven stared at her without saying a word. His mouth formed into a sort of flat line, the crude type that a child would draw when first putting pen to paper. “Nowhere.”
“Nowhere?” asked Plum. “Enough joking. Seriously.”
Steven didn’t respond.
“I thought you were grooming me to take over one of the bigger magazines?”
“You thought wrong.”
“Are you telling me that I’m…laid off?” she asked, her voice rising.
“Yes.”
A thought occurred to her. “Steven, if you were going to fire me, why did you have me fire Gerald? Why didn’t you do it?” she asked, looking up and blinking through her trendy fake eyelashes.
“I knew he would make a scene. I didn’t want to deal.”
“He hates me now!”
Steven shrugged. “Calm down, he’ll get over it.”
She glared at him. “I find it very insulting when men tell women to calm down.”
“Just act like a lady.”
“I am a lady, and this is how we act.”
“Now, don’t you make a scene,” cooed Steven, as if speaking to a toddler. “Didn’t we just say not to be churlish? To take your leave graciously?”
Plum felt as if her head were about to spin off and go flying all the way down to Broadway. She imagined it splattering right at the feet of some tourists from Des Moines who were on their way to see Phantom of the Opera. Then they would really have something to tell their friends back home.
“What does grace have to do with this? This is my livelihood we are discussing. I have financial responsibilities.”
“Like what? You’re single, no kids.”
“True,” she conceded. “But I sponsor an animal shelter in Long Island. I don’t know what they would do without my assistance. There are a lot of abandoned older dogs, hard to find homes for…”
“You’re whining about animals? Let’s not be a drama queen.”
Oh, really, thought Plum. She would show him a drama queen. She instantly recalled the way women on reality shows handled their rage, which was flipping over tables, so she rose and put both of her hands under her glass desk and tried to hoist it on Steven’s lap. But sadly, the desk was so heavy that she couldn’t even lift it an inch and merely exerted a tremendous amount of useless effort in her attempt. After awkwardly huffing and puffing while trying to lift the table—while Steven watched with amusement and contempt—Plum finally sank into her chair, certain she had caused blood vessels to pop in her brain with her futile endeavor.
“Just go,” she said sadly. “I need to process this.”
“Unfortunately, it is you that needs to go.”
Plum glanced up and saw that two security guards had miraculously materialized at her door. “You’re throwing me out?”
“You can take your whips and riding helmet with you.”
***
Ten minutes later Plum found herself standing on the chilly streets of New York, holding boxes of impractical crap, being jostled by throngs of people clutching Playbills and briefcases, and waiting for her Uber. And of course, now it was starting to rain. She was bristling from the indignation of being escorted out and not being allowed to say goodbye to her beloved team. The looks of horror she received as she teetered by in her high heels would haunt her forever. It reminded her of her childhood when she was unjustly accused of throwing gum in Brad Cooke’s hair on the school bus. She was summoned to the principal’s office during science class and had to walk past all of her snickering classmates. She had been set up by a vicious girl named Mandy Garabino—one of her popular classmates, who was renowned for her indoor pool. But that was another lifetime ago, when she was poor, shunned, and ostracized. She was not that girl anymore.
By the time her Uber came, the rain was teeming, and she dove into the sedan soggy and dejected. Her phone buzzed, and she pulled it out of her pocket optimistically. It was a text from Benji, the IT specialist she had been on a date with the night before. They had met on Connect—one of the many dating apps Plum subscribed to—and had engaged in lighthearted cyber banter before converging at a dimly lit bar on the Lower East Side. It wasn’t a promising location (Benji chose it for the craft beer), but Plum was determined to be more open-minded in her forays into the dating world. It was her New Year’s resolution, in fact. She glanced at the text.
Yeah, got your message. It was fun last night, but I don’t think I want to see you again. You were giving me a cold, stuck-up vibe. We’re not really a match, so let’s defriend and move forward. Cheers.
He was dumping her? Benji, with his wispy goatee, wrinkled pants, and predilection for using literally and like in every sentence, was defriending her? And signing off with the word cheers even though he wasn’t British? What a poser! He couldn’t be serious!
For the second time in an hour, Plum’s blood boiled. She quickly sent Benji back a text telling him exactly what she thought of him (homunculus; infantile; wannabe) and then pressed on the dating app Connect to start swiping through prospective guys. She zeroed in on a handsome surgeon named Manish and was about to swipe right on him when she realized they had gone on a date the previous year and he had never called her back. She had thought it had gone well, which was the odd part. Whatever, next case. There was Jeremy, a lawyer. But then Plum remembered she had exchanged emails with Jeremy, and although it was initially promising, he ultimately told her she sounded too high-maintenance for him. After several minutes of swiping, Plum was inundated with rejection. How could she have not noticed that her dating life was a disaster? Had she been so consumed with her job that it didn’t matter?
By the time she had returned to her apartment and opened a bottle of white wine, Plum was engulfed in self-pity, which after a few large pours turned into anger, an emotion better suited to Plum because it fueled her into action. She had always been resilient—she hadn’t had a choice, considering her gloomy childhood. Raised in a dingy house in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Upstate New York, she had the two most indifferent parents the world had ever seen. She was an only child; her parents had been old when she was born and always seemed surprised they even had a daughter, whom they promptly neglected. They worked full time, disappeared to casinos on the weekend where they squandered their small salaries, and often forgot to feed or buy new clothes for their daughter, which subjected her to much derision and ridicule at school. She knew at a very young age that she would have to fend for herself, and her dream was to escape to the city, land a prestigious job, and travel the world. And Vicki Lee did just that.
Yes, Plum’s birth name was Vicki Lee. She had selected the name Plum when she read an article about a fashionable author named Plum, who said it was short for Victoria, as Queen Victoria was known for her love of plums. She quickly ditched Vicki Lee and reinvented herself as Plum (short for Victoria) Lockhart.
And now Plum blinked around her sparsely furnished living room and knew she couldn’t waste any time. She had to get ahead of the news that she was laid off and secure a new job before she was irrelevant. She fired off emails to everyone she knew in the publishing world and went to bed feeling productive and hopeful.
The next week passed in an eerie quietude. After that first morning, Plum had awoken with cheerful optimism and rushed to scan her emails, confident that someone would want to hire her. But it was a steady stream of rejection and deference. “We’re not hiring,” or “We’re downsizing,” appeared to be common refrains. The worst was, “I’m also looking, any ideas?” If she had any ideas, would she be writing them? The few remaining publishing folk with any sort of hiring capabilities were mysteriously silent. She tried to ask people to lunch, to coffee, to drinks, but everyone refused. The few friends Plum reached out to appeared to h
ave vanished with her job. She had never felt more alone.
The once desired snow materialized and dumped six feet on the ground. Plum barely ventured out, and because she had never learned to cook, she was basically subsidizing the local overpriced Chinese delivery restaurant, dining on a steady stream of soy sauce dishes that kept her ankles bloated and her bank account low. Last year at this time, she was in Kenya on safari, consorting with giraffes and flying in hot air balloons. How quickly life had changed.
On a gray Tuesday morning, Plum awoke at eleven thirty and wandered into her bathroom. She caught a look at her reflection in the mirror and almost didn’t recognize herself. Plum knew that her looks were polarizing. She was tall—five foot ten—and had long, red ringlets, pale skin, and high cheekbones. Her one serious boyfriend, Jake, had remarked long ago that she was “a Botticelli painting come to life,” and she chose to perceive herself as such. But her detractors considered her too chalky white, too tall and Amazonian. She would have to agree with them this morning. Her hair, which she usually took pains to blow out straight or at least get coiffed, was a complete frizz ball, sticking out all over the place, as if channeling Nicole Kidman circa 1990. The dark circles under her eyes were tinged blue, and there was a nest of lines popping up on her forehead. Her fake eyelashes were hanging by a thread, and she had no choice but to peel them off. Due to the fact that she barely moved off the couch, her body was unusually flabby, and the elastic on her pajama pants was tight. This won’t do, Plum thought. She at least had to make an attempt to keep up appearances.
Plum was tweezing her eyebrows when her phone rang, and she was so immersed that she absentmindedly answered, forgetting it was the first call she had received in a week.
“Plum? It’s Jonathan Mayhew. How are you, darling?” came the posh British voice through the phone.
“Oh, hi,” said Plum without enthusiasm. A week ago, Plum had been dodging calls from the likes of Jonathan Mayhew, who ran an eponymous luxury villa rental agency on the Caribbean island of Paraiso. It wasn’t that the resort was not fashionable or exclusive—it simply had been covered in magazines a million times over, and there were so many other exciting destinations.
