For Love and Cheesecake

by Misty Simon

  Her smirk did not help my attitude when I said, “And just whose side are you on anyway? I’m not completely inept. I’ve done fine before, blunt or not.”

  “Yeah, but never intentionally. You always seem to fall into the answer. This time we’re going to do things differently. We’re going to do them my way.”

  I couldn’t say why exactly that scared the bejesus out of me.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Anyway, Penny,” Bella said, buffing another fingernail and smoothing the cuticle. “It’s so important to take care of yourself during a trying time like this. At some point you’re going to have to come out the other side, and it won’t do if you’re feeling and looking terrible the whole time.”

  Bella dipped some sort of stick into a strong smelling chemical, and I took another step back, which put me into a window seat. I decided to sit down, since my stomach had started rolling a little. The chemical had set something off in my brain earlier, so I couldn’t assist Bella the way she had wanted me to.

  But actually this seemed to be working out better anyway. Penny had the illusion of being all alone with her stylist—one of the few people everyone would confide in—and I got to sit in an unobtrusive corner and take it all in.

  “I simply don’t know what to do or where to even start. The funeral’s tomorrow and I don’t have a thing to wear. I don’t even know the right purse to take with me.”

  She sniffled, and Bella used her free hand to deliver the tissue box. Again. This woman had gone through more tissues than I ever did while watching Practical Magic. And yet she was more concerned about current fashion than the fact that her soon-to-be husband was no longer going to be anything soon.

  Then again, maybe this was the way she dealt with her grief. Who was I to judge?

  Well, I was the one trying to read her body language and what her current state of mind was. I was also trying to wait patiently for Bella to get around to asking this woman if she’d known that her soon-to-be husband had been dipping his wick in more than one place.

  Penny pulled her manicured hand back from the table to peer at Bella’s work. I hoped she was smart enough not to say anything other than that it was absolutely perfect. Especially since Bella was providing it free of charge.

  “Dream-crushed discount” she’d called it in the car. “A special for the grieving,” she’d said to Penny, who ate it up like it was ants and she a starving anteater. Which surprisingly was what she reminded me of. Her nose was very long, and her eyes were kind of squinty. From the pictures I’d seen of the mistress and past girlfriends Ben had pulled up, I was surprised she was not as over-the-top attractive as some of the others.

  Not that I was saying she couldn’t be a perfectly lovely person, no matter how she looked. Please. I was attractive but wouldn’t stop traffic, so who was I to say what another person wanted. Ben wanted me to distraction, even though there were plenty of more beautiful women in town.

  But she seemed to not have a lot of redeeming qualities under the surface, either, and that was worrying. Why had Aaron wanted to marry her? Maybe that would give us a clue. It would be our first, since it didn’t appear Bella was getting anything out of Penny.

  Not that I had much to show for myself, either, but still.

  “So how did you and Aaron meet?” I asked, finally coming out of my self-imposed corner. I got a steely glare from Bella, but tears glistened in Penny’s eyes, and a soft smile hovered on her lips.

  She started babbling so fast I had to concentrate really hard to get what she was saying.

  “He swept me right off my feet. One day he came in to fix some of my plumbing, and we got to talking about all the things he’d done with his life. It was like a light bulb went on in my head, and I thought, now here’s a man that perhaps isn’t up to my level as far as money goes, but he certainly has some brains going for him.” She looked at Bella. “You know how stupid some rich men can be, especially if they’re third generation. There’s something about that generation that screams ‘spoiled rich boy,’ and although I might have a lot of money, that doesn’t mean I only shop and get manicures and pedicures all day.” She snickered.

  I snickered, too, but only inside my head, since she was getting a manicure and pedicure today, and told us she had just returned from shopping when we arrived. As far as I knew, she didn’t have anything else planned for today, either. So there you had it, I guess.

  Waiting to see if we could get any more information out of Penny seemed to go on forever. I mean, honestly, I thought everyone opened up to their hairstylist or nail technician. It was like a rule or something. And yet she only talked about inane things. Her dog, the way she thought she’d like to rearrange the furniture now that she wasn’t going to have a male lumbering around in the house, the way her garden would bloom this summer, the way her grandmother was waiting to see if Penny could pay off her bills so she could go to the Greek Islands with her new boyfriend who was twenty years younger.

  That last one caught my attention. I had heard of people having a mid-life crisis, but her grandmother couldn’t be less than eighty-something, and there was no way she was living until she was 160.

  “Where did she meet this guy?” And why would she think that Penny was going to be paying off all her bills? Unless she thought she would get some of the money that supposedly Aaron had lying around, though he hadn’t exactly acted like he had a ton of it.

  Of course I was going off all hearsay at this point. I had left Mr. Winnet, the lawyer I had inherited along with the shop, a message earlier today but had yet to hear back from him. He had bent the rules for me several times so far, but I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to do it for me again. Especially when my personal well-being wasn’t exactly in jeopardy this time. I didn’t even know if he was going to call me back at all, but I was still waiting on pins and needles, hoping that eventually he would so I could probe his big brain about what the numbers involved were and what happened now that Aaron was dead and we couldn’t find Heather. Looked like Mark was all by himself, and I wanted to know what the tune of all that cash was.

  But I still had to pay attention now, because Penny was talking about the man her grandmother had met and how he had swept her off her feet with compliments and phrases that were lovingly close to the way her dead husband had talked to her when they were still together.

  Personally, I found that eerie, but hey, that was me.

  “So how long have they been together?” I asked, totally ignoring the way Bella kept shooting me looks. I felt I was on a roll, and no foul look from her was going to change my mind.

  “About two or three weeks?” She said it with the lilt at the end of the sentence, something I hated about myself but made her almost endearing, though her hair was way too frosted and I felt she was a gold digger of the classic kind. I didn’t care if her whole face had lit up when she talked about Aaron. In a town this small, there was no way she didn’t know about an extramarital affair that resulted in a pregnancy.

  Had Aaron really thought he was going to be able to keep two families and not have them cross paths at the grocery store or even the post office? There was only one of each in the whole town, after all.

  I almost asked her if she was that stupid, but then I realized I had only been having that conversation in my head and it would sound totally random, not to mention incredibly rude. Probably a complete conversation stopper, too, when you came down to it. Not a good move.

  “That’s fascinating,” Bella said, bringing me back from my reverie. Seriously, I had found my mind wandering an awful lot lately. I needed to get myself back under control if I wanted to be useful at all in this ongoing murder investigation. And now I was starting to sound a little like my dad. Please smack me if I say something about a perpetrator committing a 187. Please.

  “Isn’t that fascinating, Ivy?” Bella said, kicking me in the ankle for good measure.

  “Of course it is, Bella.” I covertly rubbed my ankle because she had h
er spiky heels on, and that had really hurt. I have to say I was actually pretty proud of myself for not breaking down and crying. Or throwing up, which seemed to be my new MO.

  Fortunately, there was no puke, and we moved on to the next subject. Which happened to again be Aaron. Much better than more shopping.

  “Anyway, I’m going to miss my Aaron-baby. Who’s going to take care of me now? How am I going to get along in life without my pooky-bear?” And the tears started.

  I left Bella to deal with the tears while I wandered the house, supposedly in search of more tissues. I didn’t do well with tears, and I didn’t know Penny beyond the surface stuff. I had no real desire to know her better, either. Which sounded horrible in my own head, but I really just wanted to get this whole mystery thing done so I could rest for about the next seven or eight months. Hell, a year would be nice, after the roller coaster ride of a year I’d had. So many things had changed. Not as much as Penny’s life was changing, from the things she was complaining about, like her car being repossessed and the possibility that she would have to send back her brand new bedroom suite. But it had been a long year, and I wanted some down time without more complications. Without other murders would be nice, too. I swear, sometimes I felt I should get a complex living here, since there hadn’t been a murder for ten years and all of a sudden we had five in one year.

  I think we’d all had about enough.

  That, of course, didn’t change what we had to do now, but I thought we needed a break after all this.

  After I got back with the tissues, ten or fifteen minutes later, I was met with Bella packing up all her gear and Penny looking mighty pleased with herself.

  “We’re done here,” Bella said before I could open my mouth. With her back to Penny, she mouthed the words, Move now.

  Well, I didn’t have to be told twice, at least not this time.

  I grabbed up my puffy coat from the back of the floral couch Penny had wanted to recover or replace, gave a brief wave, and was hustled out the door and into Bella’s car.

  I arranged myself in the front seat as I listened to the trunk lid slam. I had no idea if she was going to be mad at me for ducking out to look around the house. Not that it had done me much good. I didn’t find anything but a completely overstuffed closet with a ton of clothes—some of them even still had the tags on them.

  Of course the first statement out of Bella’s mouth was that I’d better have used my time wisely and found something, because she had an earful for me about leaving her alone with that loon.

  “Loon? Really?” I mean, yeah, she might have been a shopaholic, but I hadn’t found her to be as strange as, say, the old batty woman who had lived down the street from me when I was growing up. The woman who had chased me down the street on more than one occasion just because I liked to smell her flowers.

  “Loon, but she didn’t get like that until after you left. It was like something snapped in her brain, and all of a sudden she’s talking in a higher-pitched voice and preening, saying she couldn’t wait for someone named Tommy to come pick her up for their date. Maybe he would be able to make her scream this time.”

  “Oh, hmm, that is pretty freaky.” And a little worrying. Who was Tommy, and how did he fit into what I had already thought was a complicated love knot with Aaron, the pregnant mistress, and Penny? But to find out there was another player… That sucked.

  Speaking of which, “Are we headed to the mistress’ house now?”

  “Sure, sure,” Bella said, flipping on her turn signal. “Just call me the house doctor. I get to give out free manicures and pedicures all day while you nose around and find a whole lot of nothing.”

  “It’s not all nothing,” I said, crossing my arms and letting a fierce scowl form on my face. “I found out I’ve never seen a woman with more clothes or really funky wigs.”

  “Wigs?” Bella stopped at a red light and turned to face me full on. “I didn’t see any lines. That’s strange. I would have noticed.”

  “What do you mean, lines? And what does that have to do with wigs? I wonder if she’s been sneaking around in disguise.” I remembered the black Morticia Addams’ wig I had worn once when Ben and I were sneaking around during another murder investigation and wondered if I had lines on that day.

  “Lines on the forehead and at the base of the skull. Most wigs leave some kind of marking if they fit right.”

  “And she didn’t have any?”

  “No, but maybe that means she hasn’t worn any of the wigs lately. Maybe she inherited them or something. Everyone seems to inherit something from someone around here.”

  “True,” I said, thinking about my own inheritance and how it had finally allowed me to start my life 3000 miles away from the emotional rut I had not been enjoying on the other side of the United States. My new life that included Ben and Bella, my shop, and a livelihood I never would have imagined for myself. Then again, my father had followed me here, and that hadn’t exactly been in the original equation.

  “So the wigs are nothing at all, then.” Bella took her foot off the brake and applied it to the gas, a little too hard for my taste. Obviously a little too hard for the taste of the cop sitting on the side of the road, too, since the sirens were wailing and the lights were flashing before we made it to the next stop sign in our little town.

  “Dammit!” Bella said, slamming her fist onto the steering wheel. “Jared told me I couldn’t get any more tickets or he was going to cut me off.”

  That sounded ominous.

  But I didn’t know how much of a problem that was really going to be, since the man currently striding up to the side of the car was the very man Bella feared would stop being her sexual fantasy. As if that would ever happen.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be a prob—”

  “Ma’am, I’m going to need to see your license and registration.”

  A secret smile flitted across Bella’s face as she looked down and to the right at her gearshift. Raising her gaze to mine, she gave me a slow wink. “You might need to get yourself home.”

  What?

  But then she turned fully to Officer Jared in his uniform. What was it about men in uniforms? I was totally taken, and yet even I had to wipe a little drool from the side of my mouth.

  His arms bulged as he leaned into the driver’s side window. His face was stern, but his eyes twinkled. “I’m going to have to ask you to step outside the car, ma’am. I believe I’ll need to do a strip search.” That famous leer came out, and with it, I jumped out of the car.

  It was a far walk back to town, but I certainly wasn’t going to stick around for this. If you know what I mean. There were clear sounds of wet kisses that followed me around the hood. I gave a backward wave without actually turning around.

  After about ten minutes of walking, I would have gladly welcomed someone coming along to pick me up. This body was not made for walking. Another ten minutes and I was seriously contemplating hitchhiking. Which would have been a lot easier if someone, anyone, would actually drive by on the road. I hummed to myself to take my thoughts off the fact that my feet hurt like the bejesus. I had definitely not worn the right shoes for hiking along the road without a sidewalk in sight.

  And then I heard the whir of tires on the road behind me. I turned to see if I knew the car or the driver, and to hopefully flag them down whether or not I did know them. I was a big girl and could certainly handle any person.

  But I didn’t get a chance. I only had a brief glance, but I’d almost bet my last Tastykake that the woman bopping away behind the wheel was the missing Heather, and she looked way too happy to be lost.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It occurred to me as I approached the main drag in town that I could have easily whipped out my cell phone and called for Ben to come pick me up. Duh. But I used it now to call him and tell him about the possible Heather sighting. We agreed to meet at Mad Martha’s Milk and Munchies for some pie and shop talk, and then I hung up and called my dearest friend Bell
a.

  I still couldn’t believe she had never ended up coming by, the whole time I was walking. What on earth were she and Jared doing? Then again, when she answered the phone panting, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

  I nearly hung up, and in fact had the phone away from my ear with my finger hovering over the off button, when I heard her scream my name.

  “What? What? What’s going on?” I hadn’t heard that kind of panic since she hadn’t been able to find the perfect dress for her elopement.

  “Where are you? Never mind. You have to come back out and get me.” She said it all in such a rush that it took a moment for my brain to catch back up with what she was saying.

  “I just made it into town. I can’t come back and get you until I get my car. And that’s going to take at least another five minutes or so.” I lived close to the middle of town, but was now on the outskirts. Not that Martha’s Point was huge or anything. I also didn’t walk very fast, unless someone was in hot pursuit, and not always then, either.

  “I’m scared, Ivy. I’m hiding in the bushes, and I’m scared.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper.

  Typical me, I also dropped to a whisper, though there was no earthly reason for it. “What’s going on, and where’s Jared?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on. I need you out here right now. I can’t get a hold of Jared, and I just saw Heather go by in her little car. She stopped, and I can see her turning around to come back, I think. Holy shit!” She ended on a yell. Then I heard pounding feet and huffing breath.

  I want to take a second here to mention that, as terrible as this was, I was happy to hear that I wasn’t the only one not in fantastic shape.

  But that didn’t help my friend.

  “I’m coming,” I yelled, clapping my phone closed, ready to call Ben and his fast car.

  Fortunately, something went my way for once. Ben was only a block away, and he hauled around the corner before I could get my phone closed again. I threw myself in the car before he came to a full stop and yelled, “Go! Go, go!”