Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
chapter 1
chapter 2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
chapter 10
chapter 11
chapter 12
chapter 13
chapter 14
chapter 15
chapter 16
chapter 17
chapter 18
chapter 19
chapter 20
chapter 21
chapter 22
chapter 23
chapter 24
chapter 25
chapter 26
chapter 27
chapter 28
chapter 29
Pink Pepperberr y Milk Shakes
Peanut Butter S’mores Ice Cream Cake
Teaser chapter
Praise for I Scream, You Scream
“This lighthearted peek into small-town secrets and rumors carries enough good humor, emotional honesty, plot twists, and recipes to entertain and satisfy.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A delightful amateur sleuth that is not only exciting but also never melts down.”
—Midwest Book Review
“Watson takes the mystery reader on a wild Texas stampede in I Scream, You Scream. . . . Humor abounds and the novel features lively, interesting characters.”
—Gumshoe
ALSO BY WENDY LYN WATSON
I Scream, You Scream
OBSIDIAN
Published by New American Library, a division of
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First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,
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First Printing, September 2010
Copyright © Wendy Watson, 2010
All rights reserved
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Peter, Always
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to my agent, Kim, and my editor, Sandy, for their patience and guidance through some very rocky waters. Fingers crossed there’s smoother sailing ahead. I absolutely could not have written this book without the love and support of my friends and family: Patty Watson, Karen Watson, Lois Clary, Cleone and Stuart Hawkinson, Elizabeth Oldmixon, Lisa Solowiej, Emily Clough, and the Lit Girls. And I can’t do much of anything at all without the love and support of my husband, Peter.
Some special people have come into my life since I began writing the Mysteries à la Mode, people who have shown me the meaning of selfless generosity: Thom Anderson, Heather Webber, Misa Ramirez, Lorna Barrett, Jennifer Stanley, Leann Sweeney, and the amazing folks at Beth Marie’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream.
chapter 1
“I can’t even believe that womanis related to me.”
“Alice, honey, I hate to tell you, but you and your mama are like two kits in a litter. Hardheaded, tenderhearted, and too smart for your own good.” I ran a hand through my hair and sighed. “Too smart for my own good.”
Alice folded her arms across her chest and cocked a skinny hip. She still looked more like a child than a woman, and I had a tough time remembering that she was finishing up her first year at Dickerson University. “That is so not true, Aunt Tally. I would never in a million years show up at a formal event looking like a hoochie.”
I studied my cousin, Alice’s mama, trying to see her through her precocious teenage daughter’s eyes. Bree Michaels wore a vibrant pink tank dress that clung to every luscious curve of her statuesque form. A beam of late-afternoon sunlight filtered through the atrium windows of Sinclair Hall, brightening her bouffant updo to a glossy maraschino cherry red. And when she threw her head back and laughed at one of her admirers’ quips, her abundant décolletage frothed like freshly whipped cream until I thought she might overflow her D cups. She looked like a sexy strawberry sundae, and the men surrounding her—from adolescents to octogenarians—practically drooled on her three-inch spike heels.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Alice tugging on the cuffs of her prim white cotton dress shirt, and I smothered a chuckle.
“In your mama’s defense, the invitation called this shindig a ‘reception,’ and they’re serving barbecue and ice cream. Not exactly black tie and tails.”
“You know what I mean,” Alice huffed. “You dressed appropriately.”
I glanced down at my own outfit, a knee-length black skirt and French blue wrap shirt. “I look like a waitress,” I muttered.
“Better a waitress than a call girl.”
“Show a little respect, Alice. And cut your mama some slack. She’s terrified she’s going to embarrass you today.”
Alice snorted.
“Seriously. Bree was a hot mess this morning. She tried on three different outfits and spent an hour on her hair, and she was still shaking so bad I thought she’d collapse the minute we walked in here and saw all the posters and displays.”
My niece nibbled on her lower lip, and I could see the wheels turning behind eyes as
wide and blue as the prairie sky. “Mom’s no shrinking violet,” she insisted.
“You’re right. Bree’s cocky as heck when she’s on her own turf. When she’s singing karaoke at the Bar None or scooping cones at Remember the A-la-mode. But Honor’s Day on a college campus? Scares the piddle out of her.” I wrapped an arm around Alice’s scrawny shoulders and pressed a kiss to the silky hair at her temple. “Your mother is so freakin’ proud of you, little girl. Just turned seventeen and you’re presenting a research project at a prestigious private university? When she was your age, your mama had just gotten hitched to husband number one and was living in a camper in her in-laws’ side yard. She doesn’t want to hold you back, kiddo.”
Alice leaned in to me, and I gave her a little squeeze. Underneath the eighty-pound attitude, she was a great kid.
Before we could get any gooier, a smartly dressed woman emerged from the curtained platform that ran along one side of the atrium and made a beeline for us. I put her somewhere in her early to midthirties. Her caramel-colored hair fell just past her angular jaw in a chic asymmetrical bob, and funky tortoiseshell glasses rested on her aquiline nose. As she strode closer, I could see the nubby weave of her ankle-length gray dress and eggplant jacket, maybe linen or hemp. The name tag pinned to her breast read DR. EMILY CLOWPER, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.
“Alice, have you seen Bryan?” she snapped. Like a pit viper on speed, she vibrated with barely controlled energy.
“No, Dr. C.,” Alice said. “Reggie said he was still running off programs.”
Emily glanced at her watch, clearly irritated. “Figures. Go find him, will you? It’s time to get this show on the road.”
Alice slipped from under my arm and trotted off without a backward glance.
I held out my hand. “Hi. I’m Tally Jones.”
Emily looked at my hand like it was a riddle to be solved before grasping it and giving it a single bone-wrenching shake.
“You make the ice cream,” she said.
I smiled. “Have you tried it? The university is serving cones of honey-vanilla bean, raspberry mascarpone, and chocolate truffle out by the barbecue.”
“Diabetic.”
“Oh.” Alice raved about Emily Clowper’s brilliant mind, but she sure couldn’t carry a conversation.
She looked at her watch again and sighed.
“Uh, thank you for taking Alice under your wing. She loves working for you.”
Emily’s mouth softened into something approaching a smile. “The pleasure is mine. This paper she’s presenting today on the misogynist subtext of Robin-son Crusoe is graduate-level work. I’m not a Freudian, but she’s made a compelling case for the island as a symbol of dehumanized female sexuality.”
“Oh.”
“Her mother?”
“What? Oh, no. Aunt. Well, actually first cousin once removed.” One of her eyebrows shot up, and I felt like I’d got caught passing notes in class. “I’m her aunt.”
I glanced nervously across the room to where Bree continued to hold court. This woman would make Bree cry.
When I looked back at Emily, her attention had moved to something—or someone—behind me. Now there was no mistaking her smile or the crinkling at the corners of her eyes, the subtle softening of her posture.
“I didn’t expect to see you here, Finn,” she said.
My heart did a somersault in my chest as I turned to find Finn Harper standing at my shoulder, a camera hanging from a strap around his neck. His mouth curled in a devilish smile, and I couldn’t tell whether the heat in his velvet green eyes was for me or for Emily.
Either way, I wanted to curl up in a tiny ball and die.
My relationship with Finn remained uncertain. After a near twenty-year absence, he had returned to Dalliance about six months ago to take care of his ailing mother. A bizarre set of circumstances threw us together, and I flirted with the notion that we’d pick up our teenage romance right where we’d left off.
But, of course, real life didn’t have fairy-tale endings. I still needed to unload a lot of baggage from my marriage and divorce, and I struggled to untangle the dreamy memories of my high school heartthrob from the man he had become. Bottom line, we’d both done a lot of living since I broke his heart in the Tasty-Swirl parking lot when I was eighteen.
I still saw him out and about, at the cafés and shops that circled the courthouse square of Dalliance, Texas, and at the various events he covered as a reporter for the Dalliance News-Letter. But every single encounter reduced me to a stammering, gelatinous mess.
Dr. Emily Clowper held out her arms, and Finn stepped awkwardly into her embrace. I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I studied her, instead, seeing her this time the way a man would see her. Like the eye doctor switching from one lens to the next, my perception of her shifted from awkward and angular to tall and lithe, from cold and abrupt to smart and edgy.
When Finn stepped back, he looked at me, eyes narrowed and appraising. I prayed I didn’t look as miserable as I felt.
“Emily and I met when I lived in Minneapolis,” Finn offered.
Her smile widened into an almost girlish grin. “Many years and three moves ago. Back in my wild gradschool days.”
Finn held up a hand in protest. “Not that long ago. And not that wild.”
They both laughed, and I forced myself to join in. No matter how long ago they’d been together, their relationship was more recent than ours. And certainly more wild. Emily Clowper had known Finn as an adult, as a self-sufficient man, a person I’d only recently met.
I tried to find something clever to say. “How convenient that fate landed you both in the same Podunk town,” I said, then cringed. Even to my ears, my words sounded bitter. “I mean—”
A piercing scream rang through the room, echoing off the high ceiling and leaving an unnatural stillness in its wake.
Alice.
My legs were moving before my brain even finished the thought, but still I was three steps behind Bree as she sprinted across the tile floor of the atrium in her tight dress and hooker heels. I sensed movement behind me, others running toward the cry of distress, which had now settled into a keening wail.
Ahead of me, Bree took the half flight of steps from the atrium into the main body of Sinclair Hall two at a time, then disappeared through the heavy oak doors propped open for the festivities.
I took the corner onto the first floor in a blind panic and nearly fell over Bree, who’d come to a dead stop, staring in horror at the scene in the hallway.
Alice, our baby girl, stood beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, face the color of chalk, her prim white cotton dress shirt covered in blood.
“Bryan,” Alice gasped. “It’s Bryan.”
She raised one frail arm to point an accusatory finger, bone white and smeared with gore, toward the open doorway at her side. She looked like a grim apparition from a Shakespearean tragedy, a ghost come to torment the guilty and the damned.
My first thought was that this Bryan person had better run like the wind, because when Bree got her hands on the boy stupid enough to hurt her baby girl, she’d tear him limb from limb. Then Alice took one stumbling step before finding her sea legs and bolting down the hall into her mama’s arms. That’s when I realized that the blood streaking Alice’s shirt was not her own.
By then the guests from the Honor’s Day festivities, along with a hodgepodge of black-robed faculty and disheveled-looking students, had crowded into the hall around me. A few brave souls, including both Finn and Emily Clowper, rushed forward to peer into the office from which Alice had emerged. A bright red placard with gold lettering hung beside the door: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.
“Someone call 911,” Finn yelled, as Emily staggered back and slumped against the corridor wall.
A bluff man in a Kelly green golf shirt and a navy blazer, surely the proud dad of one of the honored students, pushed past me. “I’m a doctor,” he declared.
Finn held out a hand to
stop him. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” he said. “And I don’t think the police would want us mucking up their crime scene.” He looked past the good doctor’s shoulder and caught my gaze.
It seemed murder had come to Dalliance, Texas, once again.
chapter 2
It may be blasphemy to say it here in Texas, but if William Travis and his men had defended the Alamo the way Bree defended Alice that day, General Santa Anna would have scooted back to Mexico with his tail between his legs. I’m telling you, Bree was a sight to behold: half naked in her skimpy pink sundress, her hair teased seven ways from Sunday, purple-painted toenails peeping from three-inch-high strappy silver sandals, and a look in her eyes that could have brought a grown man to his knees.
If, that is, that grown man had been anyone other than Detective Cal McCormack. He’d heard the call come in over the scanner—that twenty-six-year-old doctoral student Bryan Campbell had been bludgeoned to death, apparently with an industrial-sized stapler— but he wasn’t on the case. The victim, Bryan, was Cal’s nephew, his older sister Marla’s boy.
Cal and I go way back, back to summer games of kickball and capture the flag. We weren’t close anymore, but I knew Cal McCormack as well as anyone. Laid-back, laconic, law-abiding Cal. That afternoon in Sinclair Hall, though, I saw a side of Cal McCormack I’d never seen before.
He was incandescent with fury.
“What the hell happened here?” he bellowed, towering over Alice as she huddled in the shelter of her mother’s arms.
Bree angled her body between Alice and the colossal cowboy and raised her chin to stare him in the eye. “Don’t you take that tone with my child, Cal McCormack.”
The Cal I knew would be chastened by a Southern woman asserting her motherly credentials, and would have tipped his hat (metaphorically speaking) and begged pardon. But this new Cal spun like a force of nature.
Scoop to Kill Page 1