What a Nunderful World

by Dakota Cassidy

  That appeared to let the air out of her angry bubble because she blinked, swiping her fingers over her wet cheeks. “Your ex-nun-ness? What does that even mean?”

  Smiling at her less-intense tone of voice, I said, “It means I was a nun, and now I’m not. But I can assure you, I’m also not a snitch. I thought about this on my way over, and I’m betting Corinne was in the bathroom stall, hiding there when we were talking. Did she leave the table before you? I didn’t notice. I was too busy cringing on behalf of our waiter Gary’s sake.”

  Susie gasped, tucking her mussed hair behind her ears. “She did! Oh, that rat. If I get my hands on her, I’m going to—” She stopped mid-threat and gave me a guilty look. “I feel like the only way you’ve seen me is in a rage or hysterical, and I’m always threatening someone. I sound like a maniac, don’t I? I feel like my hormones have me doing things I wouldn’t normally do.”

  Flapping a hand at her, I dismissed the notion. “You’ve had a rough few days, but I would be careful with how often you threaten to kill people. Especially seeing as how people are dead or at least in the ICU.” I watched her process my words, her facial expression relaxing, and then I asked, “Any word on Ames?”

  Wringing her hands together, Susie shook her head and let out a loud exhale. “Nothing other than what’s been on the news and Corinne’s channel. I heard he’s pretty banged up, though. It’s very serious, if you listen to the reports. I didn’t like Ames for various reasons, but I’d never want to see that happen.”

  I hitched my jaw to the back of the store. “Hey. You want to grab a cup of tea and we can sit and talk about the fallout I’m sure you’re experiencing from this latest tangled mess? I promise to check in the broom closet and under the table for YT gossip vloggers with phones.”

  Susie laughed, rolling the sleeves of her oversized raspberry sweater over her elbows. “I’m so sorry, Trixie. I didn’t really think, or even consider giving you chance to explain. I just rushed to judgment. I’m not usually so hotheaded or flaky, but these days…”

  “No worries. You don’t have to explain. It’s been a difficult few months for you, and it doesn’t help when half the world is breathing down your neck. C’mon. I’ve got some peppermint tea that’s sure to ease your troubles. Decaffeinated of course.”

  Susie smiled warmly and nodded. “I’d like that…but what about your friend? I did come in here like a raving lunatic. He’s pretty upset, and I don’t blame him.”

  “Knuckles? He’s a total pussycat, but very protective when riled up. You have nothing to worry about. I mean, as long as you’re not threatening to kill me, that is,” I teased.

  I grabbed her by her cold hand and began to pull her toward the break room when someone burst through the door, bringing with them a rush of cold air and sopping-wet footsteps.

  “Susie!” a male voice roared, making us both turn around.

  “Who is that?” I asked as he rushed toward us, soaking wet and enraged.

  Susie’s voice trembled when she whispered, “Luca.”

  I stood between Luca and Susie, my eyes fixed on him and his red face. Susie hadn’t mentioned how good-looking he was, though, I suppose that was the last thing on her mind at this point, feeling the way she did about him.

  But I’m here to tell you, wow. He was one handsome devil, with dark hair, gaunt cheeks and razor-sharp cheekbones, deep set eyes the color of chocolate and a long, lean frame. His skinny jeans hugged him in all the right places, his casual shirt and even more casual ivory blazer had the look of someone who was used to expensive clothing.

  Even soaking wet, he still looked as though he’d just walked off the pages of an Armani ad.

  I hadn’t looked him up last night because I was so tired from the previous evening’s shenanigans, I had to walk away from my laptop. I’d all but forgotten about him today until seeing Corinne’s video where she’d flashed all kinds of pictures of the players in this drama with funny bubble comments, and even then, I didn’t really look at him very closely, but it was easy to see how he got away with so much debauchery.

  As he stomped toward us, his eyes full of fire, he attempted to lean around me and reach for Susie, but I blocked his motion. “If you touch her, you won’t like what happens next.”

  He scoffed at me, his face twisting into a smirk. “And all one hundred and twenty pounds of you is going to do what to me?”

  One-twenty? Hah! I’d kiss him if he wasn’t such a mooching letch.

  As if by some sort of osmosis, Knuckles and Goose appeared behind me, and each placed a protective hand on my shoulder.

  “Problem, Trixie girl?” Goose asked.

  Luca threw up his hands in surrender. “No problem here, guys. I’m just here to talk to my girlfriend.”

  “Your girlfriend?” Susie squealed with a hiss of breath from behind me. “I’m not your girlfriend, you cheating jerk! Your girlfriend’s dead.”

  I fought an outward cringe. Susie could be really harsh given just a little rope to hang herself with, and while I understood she was feeling a bit raw due to an overabundance of hormones, and Luca probably didn’t care about Mitzy’s death as much as he’d pretend for the vloggers and news reporters, when she took a shot, she aimed to hurt.

  “Go away, Luca! Leave me alone!” Susie yelled at him, gripping my arms.

  Her fingers dug into my flesh, and her hands were shaking. She was afraid of him—and that angered me. I wouldn’t have him terrorizing her in my very own store.

  Lifting my chin, I gave Luca my scorched-earth look. “I think it’s best you leave, Luca. Susie will contact you if and when she wants to talk. I’m only going to ask once…” I warned with a finger pointed toward the door.

  He shifted from foot to foot in a jittery hop of nervousness. “Who are you to tell me whether she wants to talk to me or not? She’s gonna have my baby!” he yelled. “I have a right to talk to her!” He made another move to reach over my shoulder, but Goose grabbed him by the wrist.

  His gnarled fist gripped Luca’s flesh, and his eyes narrowed when he growled. “The lady doesn’t want to talk. If the lady says no, the answer is no. Skedaddle, boy, or I’m gonna show you how we talk ’round here. You understand?” Goose gave him a pointed look. “Now, you get on outta here before you frighten my customers and I have to call the po-lice.”

  Luca yanked his hand out of Goose’s iron grip, his eyes glittering with rage. “Fine, but I’ll be back, Susie! I have rights, too! I have rights!”

  “Get outta here, boy!” Knuckles hollered in a tone I don’t think I’ve ever heard before as he ran toward Luca, who crashed through the door and out into the pouring rain—running right into Higgs’s solid frame.

  “Whoa! What’s the rush, buddy?” Higgs asked with a furrowed brow, gripping Luca’s shoulders with strong hands.

  But Luca shrugged him off. “Get off me, dude!” he shouted before shrugging his way out of Higgs’s grip and taking off.

  Higgs entered the shop and looked at me with concerned eyes. “What the heck was that about?”

  I let out a deep breath and shook my head. “Higgs, this is Susie Masters. Come have some tea with us and I’ll explain.”

  He gave us all an expectant look, as though he wasn’t moving an inch until we gave him an explanation, but I held out my hand and shot him a coy smile. “I have donuts.”

  He grinned that handsome grin and took my hand, sending a small tingle along my wrist. “Well, then,” he growled, deep and resonant. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

  I chuckled. Men and their stomachs, right?

  Chapter 12

  As we sat at family dinner later that night, Coop was still down in the dumps, her appetite virtually nonexistent, and to boot, it was roast chicken night. Coop loved Knuckles’s roast chicken, glazed in a lemon sauce that left the skin crispy, coupled with tiny new potatoes basted in butter and rosemary, roast carrots, stuffing, gravy and hot buttered rolls.

  Who am I kidding? I loved K
nuckles’s roast chicken, and I could probably eat Coop’s if she wasn’t interested. But it was her disinterest that worried me, and I’d mentioned as much to Higgs this afternoon once we’d sent Susie home safely.

  We’d sat with her for a while, having some tea and donuts and talking about her options at this point. She was furious that Corinne had outed her, but when I showed her the page for her channel, and all the lovely comments of support, she’d calmed a bit.

  Sure, there were tons of jerks who had something to say about her age, but there were far more who supported her. She’d left us to go home and consider what to do next with her publicist and manager in a much better frame of mind.

  Higgs had offered to escort her home, but she’d grabbed an Uber with the promise she’d let us know she’d arrived home safely.

  So far, there hadn’t been any new information from any of the YT gossip vloggers. What there had been a lot of vloggers sending love to Ames and tons of speculation on his diagnosis and a huge debate over how serious his injuries were.

  Anyway, Higgs had compared Coop’s response to the events of the past couple of days as the phases of adolescence, and that made perfect sense.

  “Pass the carrots, would you, Coopie?” Goose asked as he wiped his mouth.

  She did so, but with very little energy, her arms limp, her shoulders slumped.

  “Hey, Coop. You okay?” Higgs asked from across the table, where he dumped a big spoonful of Knuckles’s stuffing onto his plate.

  Folding her hands in her lap, Coop sighed. “I’m fine, thank you, Higgs.”

  Wow. We really were going full-on teenager here. Though, it was an odd mix of teenager laced with a very adult view. On the one hand, she was mopey as all get out. But on the other, she was very polite about it.

  “Would it help if I told you I heard a little gossip about Ames today, Coop?” Higgs asked hopefully as he poured a big glob of delicious gravy over his stuffing and grabbed a third helping of potatoes.

  She shrugged listlessly. “I’m not sure, Higgs. Trixie says to gossip is bad.”

  Higgs paused a moment, peering at her over the short candles we’d lit, his dark hair gleaming, his eyes concerned. “Okay, how about we call it a small clue then? Actually, it’s two small clues.”

  I wanted to jump up and scream, “Yes! I want to hear the gossip,” but I restrained myself, stuffing a piece of deliciously moist chicken into my mouth to keep from appearing too eager.

  Coop dragged her fork through her gravy, making a line down the middle of it as it cooled and congealed. “Okay. Then yes. I’d like to hear.”

  “I have it on good authority that Tansy and crew have a serious lead on the person who hit Ames, and it has nothing to do with Mitzy at all. Apparently, they think it was some guy leaving the scene of a crime somewhere else. They have a person of interest in custody as we speak.”

  Huh. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t “take out a hit on makeup guru” week. I wasn’t sure how it fit anyway. Nothing fit at this point. Nothing but the theory that this was all an accidental death. Yet, I’d still like to talk to Ames, given the opportunity.

  “That’s good to know. I hope if this person really did it, he goes to jail for a long time,” she murmured, barely looking up from her plate to acknowledge him.

  Okay, I couldn’t take this sullen Coop any longer. It was hard enough dealing with emotionless Coop, but emotionless and mopey, too? Could you be those two things at once? It was getting to be hard on my heart. And I know I should just let her feel the way she feels, but it was painful to watch.

  I guess my way is to nurture, and I want to make everything all better for her, even knowing I really couldn’t. This? Much like her hangover, and everything else that went with life, I had to let it be.

  Thus, I turned my attention back to Higgs. “So what else did you hear, Higgs?” I couldn’t help but encourage with a little exaggeration for good measure.

  He winked at me. “Well, Trixie, I heard that the early toxicology reports do, in fact, prove Mitzy died of an allergic reaction to peanuts, but it wasn’t from her lipstick or any of her makeup. They suspect it was transferred—skin to skin. There were traces of peanut oil on her cheek and hand.”

  I’d done a little research tonight before dinner about what having a deadly peanut allergy can do, how quickly it can kill you, and how little effort it took to go into anaphylactic shock from sometimes merely the scent of peanuts. Without an EpiPen, Mitzy hadn’t stood a chance.

  Sipping at my water, I leaned back in my chair. “So that means someone could have done nothing more than shake her hand?”

  Higgs bobbed his head up and down. “Or kissed her on the cheek or brushed against her. Which, if this is a murder case, it’s going to take a million years to process every single person she came into contact with her seconds before she died. Any evidence of it is long gone by now.”

  Goose and Knuckles had been sitting very quietly as they listened to us, until Knuckles spoke up. “You know, had another artist friend who had a severe allergy like that. Darn near died. We were all at a shop I used to frequent in LA, and a customer came in for a tat. She’d had peanuts before she came in. Didn’t do anything more than touch his arm to say hello, and he was swellin’ up like a bloomin’ monster truck tire. Phew, it was a heck of a thing. Thankfully, one of the guys knew about it and had his EpiPen handy, but it was a scary few seconds. It all happened so dang quick.”

  Folding my hands under my chin, I looked to Higgs. “So Tansy and everyone else thinks this was just an accidental death—even though all the pens were either in the purse that was dumped in a dumpster or locked up in the janitor’s closet? And let’s not forget, someone swapped out Mitzy’s purse for a dummy. Then the coroner finds traces of peanut oil on her skin that had to have been transferred skin to skin? But nah. Why would all that suspicious activity ever lead anyone at Portland PD to believe this was murder?” I asked with sarcasm.

  “Easy there, Sister Trixie,” Higgs teased, his tone light as he buttered a roll. “I’m not the enemy here. I’m just passing along what I heard through the grapevine. I don’t know why they’re not calling Mitzy’s death a murder. I thought the DA would be all over this like butter on toast. I do know, there were a ton of kids at that event, if you listen to what the guys working the case said. There’s a lot of video to sift through at this point. I don’t envy them having to try to prove this was murder with no physical evidence to back it up.”

  “That she died of a peanut allergy with no EpiPen in sight isn’t enough physical evidence?” I asked, fighting more sarcasm in my tone.

  “You know it’s not, Trixie. Okay, sure, she died of exposure to peanuts, but who exposed her? You told me she shook a lot of hands before she took a quick break, right? But then she came back and didn’t touch anyone, but fell off the stage almost immediately after her break.”

  I nodded. “That’s correct. Though, how sure are we all peanut allergies cause an immediate death?”

  “That’s a fair question I have no answer for, but we do know it was severe. That leads me to believe her death would have been immediate. If we go with that theory, it could have been anyone who was backstage during the break. But according to the rumblings from the guys who told me about Ames, there aren’t any video cameras back stage.”

  Of course not. That would be way too easy. “Are you telling me this was the perfect crime?”

  “Nope. I’m telling you Tansy and the precinct are swamped and the likelihood of them having the time or manpower to go through all that video footage, identify everyone in the footage, and then bring them in for questioning is wishful thinking. According to some of the guys, they don’t even have very clear video footage because the crowd was insane.”

  My spidey senses were on high alert, but there wasn’t a lot I could do either. If Portland PD was swamped, imagine one lone ex-nun, trying to talk to all those people.

  Also, there was the fact that I had to stay off Tansy’s radar, too. I
didn’t want to hinder our working relationship. Working with her fulfilled my need to be of service to my community.

  So what was a girl to do but look up places some of these gurus might hang out and put myself in the same vicinity? Surely they were as good a place to start as any. They seemed to have all the piping hot tea, as Coop would say. Maybe some of that tea would lend to some valuable information.

  I’d seen a post on Instagram from Mixin’ Vixen, a.k.a Sally, who’d declared tonight they were all celebrating Mitzy’s life at one of the more trendy nightclubs in Portland called Baby’s.

  Among the many posts toasting the brilliance of celebrating her life at a nightclub rather than her demise, I saw two of the volunteers who’d been locked in the janitor’s closet post that they planned to be there. Apparently, there was nothing else to do while they waited to see if they could leave town or not.

  Naturally, Nikki was one of them, and I don’t know that she’d be caught anywhere near me after I scared her off the other night, but I was sure going to try to talk to Julie, the girl who’d found the hammer for the guy who’d help set them free from the room.

  I don’t know why I couldn’t let this be. Maybe I just wanted it all to go away for Coop, so she wouldn’t linger in this negative space she was in. I won’t fib and say the mystery of this isn’t intriguing and that it’s not part of the reason I’m skulking like some creeper in the background of this mess like a stalker—that would be untrue.

  Yet, I think what bugs me the most is the idea that if, in fact, someone had murdered Mitzy, they’d get off scot-free just by virtue of how overloaded Tansy and crew were. It smacked of an almost perfect crime.

  The very thought made me angry. Coop left hanging and sad made me angry. So right then and there, I decided to do something about it.

  I couldn’t help it if I ended up in the same place as some of the key players in this drama, could I? Coincidence was a real thing. Who’s to say—maybe I wanted to go dancing and I happened to end up at a place meant for twenty-somethings who like loud music, exotic drinks and dark corners?