Love Can Be Murder (boxed set of humorous mysteries)

by Stephanie Bond

  "Is everything alright, Miss Penny?" Jimmy asked as he loped up next to them.

  Penny turned, floundering for words. "F-fine, Jimmy. There was a little accident, but everything's under control."

  "Accident, my ass," Sheena said with a snort. "Did you see her push me in front of those cars?"

  Jimmy narrowed his eyes at Sheena, then spat on the ground. "No. I didn't see a thing."

  But when he looked at Penny, she had the feeling that he was lying to protect her. "Jimmy," Penny said calmly, "please...leave us."

  He frowned, but nodded and waited until two cars went by before crossing the street, thankfully distracted by Henry, who had escaped from the truck bed and looked as if he might run after Jimmy. Penny turned back to Sheena, fighting desperation. "Sheena, I'm sorry. I was angry, but I didn't mean for you to get hurt."

  "Right." Sheena lifted her dirty foot—did the woman ever wash her feet?—and shoved it into her shoe. "I'm calling Chief Davis to have you arrested for assault."

  Penny's stomach bottomed out. Jail...prison. So after a lifetime of scrupulous behavior, she had finally succumbed to her family destiny. All of her well-kept secrets would be revealed....Deke would be extra glad he'd left....

  "It'll be my word against yours," Penny said on an exhale.

  "Not when you fail a polygraph."

  Penny felt the blood drain from her face.

  The blond looked triumphant. "Then I'll file a civil suit for every piddly dime that Deke let you keep!"

  Penny's throat constricted. Not only had she pushed a woman in front of a car but she'd also pushed a woman who would sue her own mother in front of a car.

  Sheena adjusted her neck brace with a savage twist. "You attacked an injured woman—a jury will give me anything I want." She emitted a harsh laugh. "Just wait until Deke hears about this."

  Penny's mind raced. God help her, the thought of Deke and everyone in town believing that she was so jealous that she would try to kill his mistress made her ill. She could lose her freedom, her business...not to mention what was left of her tattered pride. Sweat beaded on her hairline. But what could she do? She was guilty, and she had nothing to bargain with, no way to convince Sheena to keep quiet.

  Then a memory chord stirred. Or did she?

  Penny pulled herself up and summoned strength while giving Sheena her most level stare. "Speaking of Deke, wait until he hears about your visitor this morning."

  At the stiffening of the woman's spine and the panicked look in her eyes, relief zigzagged through Penny's chest—leverage. Thank you, God.

  "What visitor?" Sheena asked lightly.

  "You know—tall, dark, and handsome, brown leather jacket. Driving a green sedan. I assume you were good friends since you answered the door in your nightgown." Penny angled her head. "Oh, and you weren't wearing your neck brace then."

  Sheena's jaw dropped. "You were spying on me?"

  "I, um, just happened to be looking out the window."

  Sheena's red mouth tightened, and Penny steeled herself for a verbal onslaught. Then magically, Sheena's mouth curled into a repentant smile.

  "Maybe I overreacted just a tad." She emitted a hollow little laugh as she smoothed her hand over her stiff platinum hair. "After all, no one was hurt when you accidentally stumbled and pushed me off the sidewalk." Sheena studied her nails. "So maybe I'll just forget this little episode happened...if you forget I had a visitor this morning."

  Entering into a pact with the woman sent a finger of unease up Penny's spine, but she had no choice. "Agreed."

  Then Sheena's eyes narrowed. "Just so that we're clear—this doesn't mean that you and I are friends, Granola Girl."

  Penny nodded. "Clear."

  "And spying on me is really pathetic," Sheena added. "You need to get a life."

  Penny's mouth watered with the words You got my life, but she swallowed them.

  Sheena turned on her high heels and marched toward the pink house, her full hips swaying. Penny watched her go, flooded with relief but fighting an undertow of frustration and sudden, mounting fear.

  Not fear of Sheena Linder but fear of herself, of what she was capable of. Deke's description of her timidity wasn't flattering, but it was more true than not, she admitted. Growing up in a family of hell-raisers, she had learned that the best way to escape notice was to fly below the radar. She was generally the kind of person who lived her life and let other people live their lives, because she'd learned that sticking her neck out usually led to messy situations...like confronting Sheena Linder about the dangers of her tanning beds.

  The woman still had her tanning beds—and now had Penny's husband to boot.

  But pushing Sheena in front of a car...that was more than sticking her neck out. That was submitting to dark impulses that she entertained only in the wee hours of the morning....

  A horn blasted, stealing her breath. Penny jerked her head around to see that Lou's painting van had returned and she was blocking the driveway. She was being honked like a stranger out of the driveway that used to be hers. She stepped aside, then looked down as one of the envelopes that she had been going to take to the museum blew across her sandal. She spotted the other two pieces of mail just off the sidewalk, dirty and damp. She picked them up as she made her way back to her side of Charm Street, her pulse thudding in her ears as realization bled through her about how differently the pushing incident could have ended, and how a person's life could be forever changed by one impulsive decision.

  This time she'd been lucky.

  "Excuse me, Red."

  Penny startled from her musings and turned her head, then nearly swallowed her tongue. Sheena's mystery man sat in his faded green car with the window rolled down, his head and one arm leaning out. Now that she was in a position to get a good look at his face, she immediately identified his relationship with Sheena: lover. He was breathtakingly handsome, with a darkened, chiseled jaw and glittering black eyes that hinted at danger despite the fact that he was smiling. No one had called her "Red" since grade school. Ridiculously, she shoved a strand of unruly hair behind her ear, thinking she must look frightful after rolling around in the street.

  "Y-yes?" she managed, darting a nervous glance toward the pink house. If Sheena was watching, the woman might think she was gathering information to take to Deke.

  He angled his head in a way that made her think he was used to getting what he wanted out of people—women, in particular, she guessed. "I was wondering if you could recommend a decent motel." His smooth Cajun cadence made him sound as if his jaw was double-jointed.

  So, whatever Sheena said hadn't scared him away—apparently he was settling in...with plans to harass Sheena? Penny wet her lips and stared at the long, blunted fingers of his hand draped casually next to the side mirror. A man's hands always fascinated her, and she liked the look of his—powerful...capable...ringless. Sexual awareness sprang to life in her midsection and she wondered crazily if Marie's love potion had something to do with her bizarre reaction to this stranger, or perhaps her body was playing tricks on her because she already had him so firmly entrenched in her mind as a playboy.

  "It doesn't have to be fancy," he added with a wink, "but clean sheets and a firm mattress would be nice."

  Her mind spun off into wild tangents, conjuring up visions of him tangled in clean sheets and performing erotic gymnastics on a firm mattress. She could feel the heat climbing her cheeks and the amused look on his face told her that he'd noticed her blush. Giving herself a mental shake, she tried desperately to be composed and act as if she were immune to the libidinous vibe he emitted.

  "Try the Browning Motel," she said, pointing in the opposite direction of downtown Mojo. "Stay on Charm Street, go past the interstate, and it's on the left."

  He nodded curtly and gave her a savagely sexy grin. "Much obliged." Then he pulled away from the curb, although she caught his reflection as he drove away when he glanced at her in his side mirror.

  Penny tingled like a teen
ager over the chance encounter. The man had no idea she knew of his connection to Sheena. Worse, because of his connection to her ex-husband's girlfriend, she should have been repulsed by him...instead of standing there feeling as if her fuse had just been lit. Pushing aside her uncharacteristically wayward thoughts, she puffed her cheeks out in a cleansing exhale and turned her mind to something much less hazardous: delivering Hazel's mail.

  Instead of walking along the sidewalk past her store to the corner and down a half-block to the locked museum entrance, she retraced her steps to The Charm Farm parking lot, turning left past the tiny herb garden, to the new area that had been staked off for her planned expansion. She could take a few enjoyable minutes to imagine what the new garden would look like, then cut through the rusted opening in the iron fence along the tree line that separated her property from the property on which the museum sat.

  Penny surveyed the area with pride and anticipation. She'd marked the boundaries herself with limber wire stakes topped with pink plastic flags. The flags danced in the wind, waving happily. The staked-off area, about a half acre, was covered in thick underbrush, thorny blackberry bushes, and waist-high weeds. Deke had sworn the soil underneath was rocky, clay-filled, and useless, but she was determined to make it work. He'd also warned her that the zoning commission would never allow a garden to be planted, but she'd learned a little while working in Deke's office. She knew how to decipher city ordinances...and to find loopholes that even her ex-mother-in-law the mayor couldn't deny. When the land next to her had been rezoned to mixed use to allow the museum to open, the land that Deke's father had given him had been zoned for mixed use as well, which meant that gardens and buildings were supposed to peacefully coexist.

  She picked up a long stick and made her way through the brush, keeping an eye out for copperheads, which, Deke had warned, nested in the thicket. They would be slow-moving in the lower temperatures but deadly nonetheless. At the edge of her property there was a shoulder-high cast-iron fence, which was almost completely obscured by vines and heavy foliage. She had found the break in the fence when she had staked off the garden. There was an opening in the barbed hawthorne trees just large enough to squeeze through to the other side. It was her little secret, a shortcut to visit or just to study the house that had morbidly fascinated her ever since she'd moved to Mojo. It seemed like fate that she had wound up owning the property adjacent to the museum.

  Part Victorian, part Tudor, part Gothic, the massive house was slate blue and dreary gray and faded black in various places, the kind of house that Penny imagined in the story of Hansel and Gretel. Surrounded by a tangle of trees and vines, the mansion was spooky enough to fuel all kinds of musings about secret passageways and hidden dungeons and, considering the rumored history of the Archambault family, the perfect setting for the Instruments of Death and Voodoo Museum.

  From the back, the mansion was a peculiar-looking structure. Over the years, owners had built onto the monstrosity, uncaring about the appearance from the rear since it was seldom seen, leaving it with jutting, uneven roof lines, mismatched windows, and hodgepodge siding. Protruding off the back was a large garage for the three employees—Hazel and her mentally deficient son, Tilton, who did odd jobs around the museum and drove an old hearse for his occasional freelance work with the town's two funeral homes; and Troy Archambault, the last remaining Archambault, a dermatologist who lived in New Orleans and oversaw the museum's trust, stopping in occasionally to check on his family landmark. Alongside the almost medieval house, the contemporary garage, with its driveway and gate exiting to a side street, seemed an unfortunate but necessary appendage, like a colostomy bag.

  A few feet inside the breached fence, among fallen leaves, she located stepping stones that were nearly hidden from years of leveling into loamy ground. The air was quiet here, except for the creak of ancient, ropy vines and the whisper of leaves overhead, which sent ghostly voices swirling around her. A cold chill skated over her arms. She might have been the only person in the vicinity, but she had the unearthly feeling that there were many souls about.

  She attributed the sensation to the spooky lore surrounding the Archambault family—that old Dr. Archambault, Troy's great-grandfather, had conducted bizarre experiments on transients and anyone who needed extra cash...and that some reportedly never left the house to spend their hard-earned money. At least those were the stories that Hazel Means embellished for tourists who paid six dollars for the forty-minute tour, and the tales were fodder for local gossip at Caskey's bar when a homeless person disappeared, although migration to the city was the far more likely scenario.

  The phantom moans continued as she stepped onto the footpath that ran along the side of the house and followed it to the crooked stone walkway that meandered in front.

  The Instruments of Death and Voodoo Museum had become quite the attraction since it had been added to an interstate sign a couple of years ago (Troy's brainchild). Dark and hulking and surrounded by the same shoulder-high, iron fence that she had slipped through, the structure resembled every haunted manor in every classic horror movie. The many additions over the decades had left it looking like an architectural experiment gone wrong, with accidental arches, railed walkways, mismatched gargoyles, landings that went nowhere, and occasional stained-glass windows. The asymmetrical structure was topped with various turrets and finials and a cupola worthy of Rapunzel, except for the fact that bats had taken up residence in its ceiling and could be seen flapping around at dusk. The tourists loved it.

  In honor of the festival, a large sign had been posted near the steps announcing when voodoo rituals would take place in the main parlor—harmless fun and child friendly in comparison to the more serious rituals that would take place in a specially constructed peristil, a shelter of sorts, in the town square. For a week at least, the town would be steeped in voodoo.

  A noise startled Penny. A man dressed in a dark business suit emerged from a set of stone steps that appeared to lead to the museum's basement, which housed, if she remembered correctly, the tools of torture display, like the chair of nails and the human stretching machine, complete with a sound track of inhuman screams.

  The man mopped at his forehead with a handkerchief, his gaze down, his movements jerky. Penny blinked in astonishment. "Deke?"

  Chapter Five

  A spoonful of surprise...

  DEKE LIFTED HIS HEAD, and surprise replaced the worry lines on his forehead. "Penny...hi."

  Emotions stabbed at her. She hadn't seen him since the divorce papers had been finalized at a brief courthouse meeting with little eye contact. He looked lean and artificially tanned and, thanks to the hair transplant, much the way he had looked in college when they had fallen in love ten years ago. But the laid-back, smiling young man who had convinced her to sneak him into her dorm room on hot, steamy nights was long gone. These days he seemed alternately anxious and arrogant. Instead of his usual slacks and sport coat, his suit had a European cut and the tie, a funky, trendy print. His business must have picked up, she thought wryly...or maybe Sheena's many personal injury settlements were providing extra cash flow for the designer duds.

  By comparison, she felt ugly and awkward in her overalls and wet sandals, silently wishing she'd taken the time this morning to smooth a flatiron over her curls and put on a little mascara. Feeling self-conscious under his gaze, she gestured to the building behind them. "What are you doing here?"

  "Business," he said abruptly, tucking a blue folder under his arm.

  She knew that the museum kept him on retainer, but she couldn't resist a jab. "Let me guess—Sheena took a tour and is suing for mental anguish?"

  "Jealousy isn't becoming to you, Penny."

  A flush ran up her neck, spreading over her face. She had asked for that one.

  He turned to walk away, and she shook her stick at his back in mute frustration, then followed him, blurting out what was really on her mind. "Did you have to paint the house pink, for God's sake?"

&nbs
p; His shoulders drooped. "That damned house." He turned to face her, suddenly looking tired. "It's my house now, remember? I wanted the rental property, but you wouldn't budge. Besides, the color isn't that bad."

  "Are you smoking crack? The color is revolting."

  "It's what she wants."

  He sounded so protective that a lump formed in Penny's throat. What about what I want?

  Then Deke glanced at the padlocked front gate and back to her. "How did you get in here?"

  She squirmed. "I found an opening in the fence when I staked off the garden."

  He rolled his eyes. "Not the garden again." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Look, I have to warn you—Mother is rallying the city council for a zone restriction. She said a garden in the downtown area will look out of place and will attract rodents."

  Penny frowned. "Can she do that?"

  "You know Mother."

  Penny set her jaw, then swallowed her pride. "Deke, can't you help me out here? I'm trying to grow my business."

  He shook his head, as if the matter was inconsequential. "Sorry, I tried to tell you the idea wouldn't fly."

  Her throat closed, and she averted her eyes lest he see how his casual dismissal—again—hurt her.

  "Anyway," he admonished, "you shouldn't be snooping around over here. The back gate was vandalized last week. Chief Davis added an extra patrol, and I'd hate to have to bail your bony ass out of jail for trespassing."

  Anger pinged through her chest. "I wasn't snooping. I was dropping off mail that landed in my box by mistake." She held it up, and the tire imprints across the envelopes reminded her of the incident with Sheena and how close she'd come to having to call Deke to bail her bony ass out of jail for murdering his fat-ass hussy.

  Folding the letters into her hand, she forced a smile. "I understand congratulations are in order."

  His eyebrows shot up. "Congratulations?"

  "I, um, ran into Sheena. She told me that the two of you are going to be married."