by Amy Lillard
“Are they coming here?”
“Who is they?”
Chloe tugged on a curl, then wrapped it around her finger. She pulled her finger free and the curl bounced back into place. “They. Daisy. Or Inna. Scratch that. Just Daisy.”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?” Chloe’s fidgeting was starting to put Arlo on edge. Despite all her theories about Wally’s death, Mads was ruling it a suicide and that was good enough for her. Never mind that it would keep her friend out of a lineup.
“Of course it matters.” Another curl popped back into place.
Arlo grabbed Chloe’s fingers, stopping her mid-fidget. “You don’t have anything to worry about.” And how she hoped that remained true.
“Oh, yeah? I’ll have two very pissed-off women coming after me if they find out I was the last one to see Wally alive.”
“And how are they going to know that?”
“It’s in Mads’s report. I gave a witness statement. You think Andie Donald is going to let something like that escape the front page?”
“I suppose not.” Arlo took a large drink of her punch and tried not to wince as it went down. Super reporter Andie Donald was worse than a nosy neighbor. She lurked all over the place, instead of just next door. Arlo had never had a problem with her before, but that was…before.
“The second glass is better,” Chloe remarked and lifted her blue plastic cup in salute.
Arlo could only hope that Chloe was still on her second serving of punch, but she doubted it. “Just tell the truth. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “You’re beginning to sound like my mother.” She reached for the punch ladle, but Arlo stopped her from pouring.
“Girl, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Yes.” Chloe eyed her coolly and started in for the punch once again.
“Don’t you think it would be better to face off with Daisy sober?”
That brought her up short. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Not counting all the grams of sugar in this stuff.”
Chloe looked into her empty cup with wistful eyes. “Nice knowing you.” She tossed her cup into the trash and dusted her hands off.
“Other than Daisy, what’s got you in such a state?” Arlo could probably guess, but she thought it best for Chloe to say it all out loud. Maybe then it would put things in context. Problems were rarely as large as they seemed in a person’s head.
“Look at everybody.” Chloe gestured toward the clusters of people milling about the gym floor. Someone was playing an odd mix of music that Arlo assumed was from the individual years that the guests had graduated. There was Prince, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, even Buddy Holly. Except for the music, the gym was as hushed as a funeral.
“I thought we had more RSVPs than this,” she commented.
“We did. But with Wally…” Chloe’s eyes filled with tears and she reached into the bodice of her dress and pulled out a tissue. She daintily dabbed her eyes as Arlo stared.
“Did you stuff your bra out of nostalgia or are you on the prowl?” She was hoping to get a laugh out of her friend, or at the very least a punch on the arm, but Chloe shook her head. “My dress doesn’t have any pockets.”
“Ones like that never do.”
Chloe had chosen a dress Arlo knew was to show Wally exactly what he had been missing the last couple of years. Short, tight, black—it was a little much for an afternoon cocktail mixer, but Arlo understood Chloe’s need for ammunition, even with Wally gone. And honestly, she looked as good as Daisy and Inna even on their best days. But to Wally, Chloe and a baby were too much a part of the Sugar Springs he wanted to escape. Arlo wondered if he would have gotten the message Chloe was sending.
So why now, after all these years, did he want to see Jayden? It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t like Jayden was a secret. Wally had known all along. Heck, everyone in Sugar Springs knew that Jayden was Wally’s son, though most people were careful not to mention it. At least not where Chloe’s mother could hear. But if someone did mention it, since Wally was back in town and all, it was very possible that word had gotten ’round to Daisy, or even Inna.
Chloe elbowed Arlo hard in the ribs, startling her out of her thoughts. “She’s here. I mean, they’re here.”
Arlo swung her gaze around toward the gymnasium door in time to see Janitor Moore block Daisy and Inna’s way into the gym. He gestured toward their feet and then to the line of shoes belonging to the guests. For a moment she wondered if they would refuse and have to leave, but finally they slipped out of their shoes and headed toward the refreshment table.
“Oh, shoot.” Chloe ducked behind Arlo as if that would block her from the women’s line of vision. “They’re headed this way.”
“Because we’re standing right by the food.” She gestured toward the table, laden with all sorts of appetizers, half of which looked as if they had indeed come from the freezer section at Sam’s Club, the fancy “thaw and eat” kind.
“I’m going to stay like this,” Chloe said from her crouched position bent nearly in half. “You walk toward the bathrooms and I’ll—”
“Stand up,” Arlo said in a stage whisper. “Face the music and get it over with.”
“Right. Fine.” She straightened. “How do I look?”
Arlo fixed the curl that Chloe had tugged particularly hard on and smiled. “Like a million bucks.”
Chloe sucked in her stomach and held her breath as Inna and Daisy came closer. She practically vibrated with nervousness as they approached. The smile on her lips was forced, brittle, her eyes a little too bright from all the punch.
Daisy and Inna came closer, closer until they were right in front of Arlo and Chloe. Then without a backward glance, they walked right past.
Chloe looked almost disappointed as she glanced toward Arlo.
Arlo shrugged.
Together they watched the two most important women in Wallace J. Harrison’s life fill little blue plates with half-frozen hors d’oeuvres.
Chloe looked to Arlo. She stared back. “What do I make of that?” she asked Arlo.
“No idea.” Arlo shrugged. “They might not believe that you had anything to do with Wally’s uh…fall. Or they could be biding their time until they can get you alone.”
Chloe swatted Arlo’s arm with the back of one of hers. “Stop it. Now I’m not going to be able to go to the bathroom all night.”
“Not without a chaperone.”
Chloe chuckled, and Arlo was glad to hear the sound. It seemed like forever since she had heard her laugh, when in fact it had only been two very long days.
“Seriously though,” Arlo said. “Do they even know that you and Wally, once upon a time…?”
Chloe shrugged. “Probably not. At least not unless Wally or someone in town said something.”
Arlo cast a sideways glance at the two women. They seemed totally unconcerned with both Arlo and Chloe. “They don’t know.”
“If you say so,” Chloe said, but her eyes were still clouded with worry.
Thankfully, Daisy and Inna moved away from where they were standing. Chloe visibly relaxed.
Arlo allowed her gaze to float around the room once more. People she hadn’t seen in years milled around drinking green or pink punch, talking in subdued tones as they flitted about. So many people had RSVPed for the event, but not nearly as many as expected had made a special trip back to Sugar Springs for the reunion once word of Wally’s death had gotten around.
It took Arlo a minute to notice that Chloe was wandering away. “What are you doing?” she whispered loudly.
Chloe cocked her head to some point behind her. Arlo realized her friend was indicating Inna and Daisy. Chloe waved to Arlo with the flap of one hand. “Come here,” she whispered in return.
“Are you eavesdropping?” sh
e asked as she scooted closer.
Chloe lifted one finger to her lips and cocked her head to the side.
“Stuffed mushrooms.” Inna held the hors d’oeuvre in front of her, turning it this way and that as if inspecting it from each angle. “Do you love them, Daisy?”
“They’re okay, I guess.”
“But I thought your family owned a mushroom farm.”
Daisy James-Harrison came from a farm?
Arlo did her best not to whirl around in surprise, but she had to see the woman’s face. Daisy was about as far from a farm girl as Arlo herself.
Daisy’s beautiful face flushed a perfect pink as she murmured something incoherent. So it was true. And for some reason, she didn’t want anyone to know. A rural snob.
“Well, I for one thank your family for their endeavors. A mushroom farm is not exactly a clean place. And the smell.” Inna shuddered. “Even worse, how do you tell the difference between ones that are poison and ones that aren’t?”
A war of to answer or not to answer waged on Daisy’s face. To answer won the first round in three short seconds. “It’s not like you have to go out into the forest and forage for them. They’re grown there for a purpose.”
“And you only grow the ones that aren’t poisonous?”
Not to answer won round two. “I need to powder my nose.” She brushed past Inna and walked over to the door that led to the locker rooms.
Inna caught Arlo watching and a ghost of a smirk crossed her lips. She shrugged. “Some people are so sensitive, yes?”
“I suppose so,” Arlo murmured and turned back to Chloe.
“What was that all about?” she whispered.
Arlo waited for Inna to move away before she answered. “I have no idea. But it seems weird, don’t you think?”
“Not any weirder than the widow and the mistress arriving at the party together.”
“Touché,” Arlo said. But something about the entire exchange seemed off. And she couldn’t figure out if that feeling came from Daisy or Inna.
* * *
Despite the hors d’oeuvres coming from a discount box store, Arlo started to enjoy herself at the reunion. She hadn’t realized how tense she had been over Wally’s death until she started to relax. The pink punch was a big help. The food might have been a little pedestrian, but the drinks were first-class.
“There you are.”
Arlo turned as the man came near. It took only a heartbeat for her to recognize him. “Sammie Tucker?”
“You know it.” He scooped her into his arms as if they had been separated for a long time and he couldn’t get enough of her. Well, they had been separated, but the thing between them had been over a long, long time.
He set her back on the floor and kissed her soundly. More than friendly but not too familiar. A tease from the past, improved by time.
She and Sam had chemistry way back when, both in their class schedule and in their relationship. She had broken up with Mads knowing that he was destined for the NFL. In senior year, he had already secured a scholarship with the Crimson Tide. One more year and he was out of the town he seemed to hate. Away from his drunkard of a father, his runaway mother, and every bad thing he knew. Arlo had loved him the way only a teenage girl can love the boy of her dreams. But she knew he wanted out of Sugar Springs and all she wanted to do was stay. Enter Sam Tucker, who wasn’t on the football team, wasn’t a track star, didn’t play baseball. How was she supposed to know that he would leave too? On an academic scholarship all the way to Northwestern in Illinois. She wouldn’t say either of them were the reason she hadn’t gotten married yet. When you lived in a town the size of Sugar Springs, your choices were limited.
“Man, it’s good to see you.” He held her at arm’s length and smiled.
Behind him she could see Mads. But the look on his face was unreadable. It was prom all over again and despite the years that had passed since that fateful night, Arlo felt herself blush. She pulled her gaze from Mads and centered her attention on Sam.
Living up north hadn’t changed him at all and yet he was completely different. Same sandy-brown hair, same electric smile. The creases fanning out from his green eyes only served to add a maturity to his boyish charm. He had grown up, but not too much.
“How’ve you been?” he asked, still holding her hands in his.
She wanted to pull away, and yet she didn’t. It felt good, that gentle touch. “I’ve been…fine,” she said. “Real good.” And she had been. “You?”
“Can’t complain. I saw your store on Main Street. It’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
And just like that, the conversation dwindled. The boy she couldn’t stop talking to had turned into the man she had nothing to say to.
“Let me get you a drink.”
She nodded. “Green.” She had had enough of the pretty pink punch.
Arlo could feel Mads’s gaze on her as she waited for Sam to return. That was the thing about reunions: they dredged up old memories. Good and bad. Like prom night so long ago when a girl threw over one boy for another only to have both of them head out of the town that she had adopted as her own.
It seemed to take forever before Sam returned, but she refused to move out of Mads’s line of vision. And she definitely refused to look at him and acknowledge his stare. With Sam gone from Sugar Springs, she could pretend that prom night had been nothing but a dream. Now that he was back in town, for however long, pretending was out of the question.
Maybe she was being hypersensitive. Maybe Mads had looked away long ago and his hard gaze was a figment of her imagination.
Only one way to find out.
“Here ya go.” Sam sidled up to her, effectively stopping her from checking to see if Mads was still staring.
“Thanks,” she murmured and cast him a forced smile.
“So a bookstore, huh?” He took a sip of his punch, then stared into the pink depths of his cup. “Wow.”
“That’s why I’m drinking this.” She lifted her cup.
“Maybe if we mixed it together?”
Arlo shook her head. “Chloe and I already tried that. It makes this brown sludge. We thought it might be like drinking a chocolate milkshake, but since it’s fruit flavored it sort of ruined the fantasy.”
“Huh.” He looked into his drink once again.
“My suggestion is switch off. One pink, then a green, and so forth.”
“Good plan,” Sam said with a grin and drained his cup. He winced. “Not so bad once you know what to expect. But that pink…”
“Throws a person off.”
“Completely.” He looked to her and their gazes locked. Time seemed to stand still for a moment, then Sam grinned, and those lines creased out from his eyes and brought her back to the present.
She pulled her gaze from his and allowed it to wander around what remained of the mixer. A few people still milled about. Chloe had gone over to talk to Charla Sampson, cheer captain circa 1990. Mads was deep in conversation with Dan Bachman, the school’s football coach. But for the most part, the people she wanted to see, and some of those she didn’t, including Inna and Daisy, had all gone to wherever they were staying—with family, the motel, or Helen’s B&B.
There would be a banquet that evening. Wally was to receive an award for his contributions to society. It was sort of a Sugar Springs High School Hall of Fame, though the only people Arlo knew to be in it with him were Mads for his football career and General Lilly, who put the town on the map back before the Civil War. Of course he didn’t graduate from SSHS, but no one complained about that oversight. Arlo supposed now Daisy would accept the award for Wally.
“So that third floor of yours,” Sam said. “What are you doing with it?”
“What?” His question took her off guard. She whipped her attention back to him. “Why?” The third floor was tap
ed off as part of the crime scene, since Wally had stopped there and had a pastry before doing himself in.
The weirdest thing among all the weirdness was that Wally was in her third-story storage floor without her knowing about it. What was up with that?
“I’m looking for some office space, and I heard you were wanting to lease your third floor.”
“Office space?” Why did she suddenly feel as if she had lost thirty IQ points?
“Yeah, I’m thinking about hanging around for a while.”
“And doing what?” Why did the thought of having Mads and Sam in the same town again send shivers of dread down her spine?
“I’m a private investigator.”
6
“Really?” And what would a town like Sugar Springs have to offer that would need to be privately investigated? Maybe the fact that Imogene Sanders liked to steal her neighbor’s tomatoes? But everyone knew that. Even the neighbor. As far as Arlo could see, said neighbor planted too many tomatoes to begin with. On purpose? Who knew?
On second thought, maybe having a private investigator around might not be so bad. But did it have to be Sam?
“I’m just ready to come back home, you know.”
Arlo nodded. Home was the most important thing to her. Staying in one place. Having roots. It was all she had ever wanted from life. “I heard about your mom.”
A dimness washed over his features, but in an instant it was gone. “Yeah. Cancer sucks.”
She clinked her cup to his. “Amen.”
“She’s a fighter though.” And Sam would be there to support her. Even if it meant moving back to Podunk, Mississippi, and investigating missing cats and cheating spouses. That was just the way he was.
He cleared his throat. “About that third floor…can I take a look at it? That is if you’re willing to rent out the space.”
“It’s a crime scene.” The words slipped out before Arlo could stop them.
