by Tegan Maher
Magic like that took energy, so not only were we exhausted after an hour, but we were hungry again, too. Fortunately, Hunter had grabbed a giant cheesecake from Costco, and Addy had made a blueberry sauce to drizzle over the top of it.
Will had gone home, but Gabi, Hunter, and Matt were still there. Anna Mae, who was dating Matt, had shown up while we were practicing. She had an empty plate in front of her, but she was a good southern girl—there was always room for cheesecake. Or any cake. Or pie.
"So what have you found out about the murders," she asked once we were washed up and settled with dessert and coffee in front of us.
I took a bite and washed it down with coffee after savoring the creamy deliciousness for a second. "Not much, and too much," I said.
She drew her brows together and shook her head, her platinum bob moving against her pixie face. "How can both of those be true?"
"What she means," Hunter said, "is that we have plenty of suspects, but nothing tying any of them to the crime. And the two main suspects, besides Coralee of course, are both missing."
My gaze shot to him. "You couldn't find Delilah Merryweather?"
"Who's that?" Anna Mae asked. "And why can't you find her?'
"She got in an argument with Loretta a night or two before she was killed," I said. "It seems she didn't approve of Loretta's way of doing business."
"And who's the other suspect?" she asked.
"Jenny Jacobs, who owned a restaurant Loretta sued into bankruptcy," I said and gave her the Reader's Digest version of the story.
"What about the realtor lady she beat out of a commission?" Shelby asked. "She should be at the top of the pile as far as I'm concerned. Especially considering she was a hairdresser before she was a realtor."
Anna Mae nodded. "Yeah, my money's on her. So you have three solid suspects besides Coralee, but no way to link them to her?"
"Pretty much," Hunter said. "I can't even find Jenny Jacobs. She's at the top of my list because her last address was in Keyhole Lake, but she's disappeared into thin air."
"Why did she come here?" Anna Mae asked.
Hunter shrugged as he reached for the coffee carafe and refilled his cup. "I have no idea. Peggy Sue's been trying to track that down."
"Maybe she's from here originally," I said, dishing a little more blueberry topping onto my cheesecake.
"I thought about that," he said. "Peggi Sue's tracking down whatever she can find out about her. So far, all we have is the one last name—Jacobs. Her tax forms show her as divorced."
"How old is she?" Anna Mae asked, motioning toward the filling. I handed it to her.
"Late thirties," Hunter said. "Thirty-eight, to be exact."
"If she was from here, then I'd have gone to school with her. Jennifer Jacobs?" Anna Mae passed the filling to Matt, who dished out a healthy glob and plopped it onto his second piece of cheesecake.
"No," Hunter said, "which is what gave me a little problem. Her name's not Jennifer. It's Genevieve."
Anna Mae furrowed her brow in thought. "I knew a couple Genevieves, but I don't remember any last names." Her face lit up. "I do have my yearbooks, though, if I can find them. I'm sure I kept them."
Hunter huffed a breath out his nose and shook his head. "At this point, I don't care if somebody pulls a name out of a rabbit's hat or a crystal ball."
"Anna Mae snapped her fingers. "That's it! Genevieve Ball!"
Hunter looked at her, his face blank. "Say what?"
Anna Mae laid her fork down. "Genevieve Ball—that's the name of one of the Genevieves I went to school with."
I set down my fork and reached for my phone, then typed in the search terms I'd used to find the articles in the first place. There had been a picture of the owner in the article that quoted her. I scrolled through 'til I found it, then passed the phone to Anna Mae. It was a good picture, so if it was her, hopefully she'd recognize her.
She squinted at the phone, then used her fingers to zoom in. "That's her," she said, excited. "She's older, but other than a few wrinkles and a jaded expression, that's definitely her."
"Ball, huh?" Hunter asked. "You don't by chance remember her parents' names do you?"
Anna Mae shook her head. "Sorry, I don't. She was a year behind me in school, so we ran in different crowds."
"Surely you can track her down with that, can't you?" Shelby asked, reaching for the coffee carafe and topping off first her cup then Cody's.
"There's a Ball family who have a bunch of horses," Cody said. "They live on the other side of town, and I've been with Will a couple times when he went to their farm. Nice people, and they're about the right age to have a daughter that age."
"Have I been there with you?" Shelby asked.
He shook his head. "I don't think so. We haven't been there in a while—it was when I first moved to town."
"Where do they live?" Hunter asked. "Do you remember their names?"
Cody shook his head. "No sir. Will always just called them Mr. and Mrs. Ball. No first names, but I'm sure he knows them. Or at least has them on file. As far as where they live, I don't remember exactly. Since I was new to town, I didn't have my bearings yet. I do know it's sort of far out."
Hunter put down his fork mid-bite and reached for his phone. If my man was putting down cheesecake, it was a sure bet he thought he was onto something.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WILL HAD ALREADY GONE home, so he didn't have access to his database. He didn't really need it though. He confirmed they had a daughter named Genevieve, and gave us detailed instructions on how to get to their farm.
Hunter glanced at his phone, then pushed back. "I have to go," he said. "I don't want to leave this 'til tomorrow because I want to track down Delilah Merryweather to see what she and Loretta argued about and talk to Leighann Cooly first thing in the morning, too. I can't imagine she was too happy about losing sixty grand."
"No," Gabi agreed, "I can't imagine she was. I think Jenny is the best bet, especially if she took such a hit that she had to move back in with her parents. I know what that's like, and it sucks."
Gabi had lived on the horse farm where she'd boarded her horse and had become close to the owner—so close the owner left her Mayhem, who was worth a fortune, and a horse trailer to put him in. And her most treasured heirloom, but that's another story. Anyway, the woman had passed, leaving Gabi with no place to live. She'd moved back in with her mother, but the two had never gotten along. It had been a stressful few months for her.
Addy had joined us a few minutes prior but had missed the conversation about the Balls. "Who are her parents again? I probably know them if they have horses." Addy'd been active in the local horse community almost all her life, and if they ever went to a local show or even sold more than a handful of horses, she'd likely know about them.
"Ball," Beth said. "The name's familiar to me, but I can't place it."
Addy rubbed her chin, shimmering a little and floating a few feet off the chair she'd been "sitting" in as she focused more on thinking and less on keeping track of her form. "I've heard of 'em too. If I'm not mistaken, they're sorta backwoods and keep to themselves. I only ran into them a handful of times at the feed store, and they didn't stand around jawin' like most of us do. There's not much I can tell you about 'em."
"Did they have a daughter?" I asked.
She lifted a translucent shoulder. "I don't rightly remember. Like I said, I only ran into 'em a few times. I don't recollect ever seein' a kid with 'em though."
I glanced at my phone—it was almost eight and farmers tended to go to bed early.
"Hunter, you may do better going to the hotel now and droppin' in on the Balls tomorrow. They're probably already tucked in for the night and you want them cooperative, not meeting you on the porch with a shotgun. Plus, if Delilah or Leighann decide to cut and run early tomorrow, you'll miss them."
He nodded. "I don't know if I'll ever get used to people going to bed at dark-thirty, but that's a good idea."
> "Can I go with you?" I asked. "Two of us may pick up more, and they may be more prone to talk to you if I'm with you. Plus, I have my BS meter." One of my abilities was picking up on lies. Though it wasn't infallible, it was pretty darned accurate, and we didn't have time to do it the old-fashioned way of following up on stories, at least until my meter went off.
He gave me a sideways glance but didn't say no. After a couple minutes, he nodded. "May as well. Anything that'll help at this point will be good. We only have until tomorrow afternoon, so we need to wrap it up if we can."
"I wish she was being buried here," Beth said, scraping the last of the blueberry filling from her plate. "Those are always a great place to get a feel for how people really felt about the dead person."
Funerals and weddings—the two places where people aired their dirty laundry the best.
"Yeah, but it's not. It's in Atlanta."
"What about her husband?" Rae asked, waving her fork. "I haven't heard anything at all about him. You know, in most cases of homicide, it's the spouse."
Hunter rolled his eyes at her. "You don't say? I'm glad you've brushed up on your CSI because otherwise, I would have never known."
She scowled at him. "No need to be snarky. I was merely pointing out a fact."
Addy tilted her head at Hunter. "So have you talked to him?"
Hunter huffed. "Of course I've talked to him. He's devastated."
I snorted. "Of course he is. She was such a jewel."
"Hey," Gabi said. "Everybody has somebody out there. They could have had a great marriage. Maybe he's as shallow as she was. After all, didn't you say he represented her in the lawsuits? Sounds to me like they were two peas in a pod."
"I guess," I said. "Though ... ick. They outta be ashamed of themselves."
"Some people have no shame." Addy's form shimmered a little, something she did when she got upset. "That's okay though because Karma will take care of them."
"Looks to me like she already got one of them," Shelby said, gathering the empty plates. "As bad as I hate to leave such a titillating conversation, Cody and I have studying to do."
Beth swatted at her. "Go ahead there, Miss Smartypants. Take your fancy words and go make us proud. And don't forget to put the plates in the dishwasher, unless of course that's beneath you. In that case ... do it anyway."
Hunter pushed back from the table too. "Noelle and I need to get a move on, too. I don't want to miss them, but I don't want to talk to them when they're in robes and curlers, either."
"Ha! Curlers," Rae said. "Nobody wears curlers to bed anymore. You may catch them in cucumber face masks, though. That's all the rage with the city women who think it's the end of the world if an eye wrinkle shows up."
He shuddered. "I get the premise, but how do they sleep with that gook on their faces without getting it all over their pillows?"
"Valium," Beth and Addy said together, their tones matter of fact.
My eyebrows shot up. "And how do you two know that?"
Beth waved me off. "Don't go thinkin' we're part of that crowd. But if you remember, we've been making herbal blends for decades. One of the most popular is our anti-anxiety sleeping blends. Women who don't want to take a sleeping pill use it instead. Same results, almost, without the addiction or stigma that comes with popping a pill. They think it's all new-age hipty, dipty stuff, so it's an easy sell. They don't realize healers have been using it for eons."
I snorted. "I think that's part of the draw. Just look at commercials nowadays. Everything the snake oil industry sells has been used for generations. It's one of their talking points. Toss some lavender and coconut oil in horse poop, tell the world it's been used for a thousand years, and every rich chick in the country is dialing the eight-hundred number. Shoot, pay a celebrity to get behind your proprietary blend, and you've got a gold mine just layin' out in the barn."
Rae laughed. "Maybe we should get on that. You have excess material and a hefty college tuition bill coming up. Sounds like a case you can solve with savvy marketing to me."
The sad part was, she was right. Some people were just natural followers. Give them a pocket full of money, and you could sell them anything.
"Okay there, ladies. I hate to break up your plans to corner the beauty market, but we've got suspects to interrogate. Table your get-rich-quick theme 'til we don't have a killer on the loose."
"Pht," Addy said, shaking her head. "The way things have been goin' around here, they'll die poor if they wait 'til then."
The sad part about that was that she was right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
By the time we made it to the hotel, it was eight-thirty. Surprisingly enough, the downstairs bar was full, and people dressed in business-casual took up the entire space and spilled over into the lobby. Everybody had a drink in hand and looked like they were having a good time. As we snaked through the crowd looking for either of the two women, I picked up conversations about everything from current property values to potty training kids. What an odd mix, though I supposed they couldn't talk real estate all the time.
"Do you see Leighann Cooly anywhere?" Hunter asked.
I scanned the crowd for her. My gaze bounced over her twice because instead of wearing the no-nonsense bun and glasses she'd had on that morning, she now had her long hair down and was either wearing contacts or had foregone the glasses altogether. "There," I said leaning my head in her direction. "The blonde in the corner talking to the tall guy."
Hunter changed course and I followed, wondering how he was going to approach her. When we got there, he didn't mince words or try to find a polite opening, though he wasn't particularly rude, he did interrupt her mid-sentence.
"Ms. Leighann Cooly?" he asked.
She stopped talking and looked at him, one brow arched in a and who the heck are you? expression. He obliged.
"I'm Sheriff Hunter Woods of the Keyhole Lake PD. I need to talk to you"—he glanced at the guy she'd been talking to—"in private, please."
Leighann excused herself and moved in the direction Hunter indicated toward a small alcove in the corner.
Once we were there, she turned to him, partly irritated but mostly curious. "What's this about, Sheriff?" She glanced at me but didn't ask who I was.
Hunter cut straight to the chase. "I'm sure you've heard about what happened to Loretta Higgins. In the course of our investigation, we've discovered that she encroached on a significant property sale and that her behavior cost you sixty thousand dollars. Can you tell me about that?"
Her face reddened and she drew her brows together. "Yeah, I can tell you all about it. I was meeting a couple to show them a property with a sticker price of two million dollars. It was my first major sale, and I'd worked toward it for months, getting the house staged just right, helping the owners value the property—every detail. A couple had contacted me several times with questions about the property, and I finally finessed them into an appointment. When they showed up, Loretta was with them. They said she'd contacted them that morning and told them they needed their own agent because I was working for the owners and didn't have their best interests at heart." She put the last little bit in air quotes, and the look on her face would have soured milk. "I couldn't do anything other than show the house and bite the bullet."
"And how did that impact you?" he asked, and she rolled her eyes.
"How do you think it impacted me, Sheriff? I spent almost a year in real estate school, going part time because I still had to work during the day. My mom's been sick and is about to lose her house because she hasn't been able to work and she's fighting with the disability board. Oh, and did I mention I'm living in that house? I hadn't made a significant sale since I graduated. I lost my car. I lost my apartment. The salon I was working at went under and I had to resort to renting a booth in a discount store, making less than I'd make working at a fast-food joint. I'd pinned everything on this, and just when I thought my hard work was going to pay off, she swooped half of it out from undern
eath me."
The poison in her voice almost made me take a step back. This was a woman with a lot of anger simmering inside her.
Hunter, on the other hand, maintained a blank expression. "Still, sixty grand is nothing to cough at."
"No," she said, "it's not—if I actually got that much. I'm an agent, not a broker, and I'm at the bottom of the totem pole. I only make forty percent of the commission, so I got twenty-four thousand. And I'm grateful for it. I managed to get my mom's mortgage caught up and bought us some more time on her medical treatment. I bought a semi-respectable car so I wasn't showing up to viewings in a cab. What I didn't get was enough padding to get me through to the next sale, or to help me sleep at night knowing mom's next round of treatment is paid for."
After hearing that, I sorta wanted to kill Loretta myself. Then I reminded myself that it was Leighann or Coralee. Or at least somebody or Coralee. And between the two of them, I knew for a fact Coralee was innocent. This woman had a hell of a motive and the opportunity to do it.
"Can you account for your time on the night she was killed?" Hunter asked, studying her face. A wild range of emotions crossed it so fast I could barely decipher them. Anger, fear, a desperate race for an answer. So far, everything she'd said had rang true, but I tuned in on her answer and was ready for the one that would inevitably come. They were ones I'd really come to see here.
"I can't. Not for the entire night," she finally admitted.
Hunter shook his head. "You don't need an alibi for the entire night. Just for the hours between four and six." Coralee had taken her trash out at four, and the body hadn't been there then.
Leighann's gaze became shrewd. "Why are you asking me these questions? It's my understanding you already have a suspect." She glanced at me. "And who are you? Aren't you the muffin girl from the coffee shop? One of the ones who were here this morning?"