Love Can Be Murder (boxed set of humorous mysteries)

by Stephanie Bond

  B.J.'s intent gaze didn't miss a thing, lingering on the erotic items a little longer than necessary. Then he walked over to remove a piece of paper taped to her refrigerator.

  "What's that?" she asked, hugging herself.

  "A list of what was removed during the search." He scanned the paper. "The voodoo doll you mentioned...a photograph album...an inflatable life-size male doll..." He looked up, eyebrows raised.

  She squirmed. "Another gag gift."

  His expression was dubious. "Whatever you say." He glanced back to the paper. "And a handgun."

  Penny's eyes went wide. "What? That's impossible. I don't own a gun."

  "It says here that you had a .45." He gave her a piercing look. "That's a pretty big handgun to forget about owning."

  She frowned. "I'm telling you, I don't own a gun! There must be some mistake."

  He pursed his mouth. "I suppose the police could have planted it, but that doesn't compute, since your ex-husband was stabbed."

  "It's a mistake, that's all," she said, taking the paper. "Everyone who knows me knows how I feel about guns."

  He gave her a little half smile. "Then you'd better stay out of my pants."

  Surprise and arousal blazed across her skin. "Excuse me?"

  He patted a bulge at his waistband, and her discomfort level ratcheted higher. Could she trust this man? Could she trust her own instincts anymore?

  "Anyway," he said, drawing the word out into fourteen syllables, "you should have your attorney check out the gun report first thing in the morning."

  She nodded and hid a yawn behind her hand.

  "Is there someone you can stay with for a while? I'll drive you."

  Faces of friends and acquaintances filed through her head—Marie, Guy, Hazel, Liz—but she discarded them one by one. She didn't want to get them involved, to implicate them in the ugly gossip that was already making the rounds. "Not really."

  "Boyfriend?" he asked lightly.

  Heat rushed her neck. "No."

  He nodded curtly, as if filing that tidbit of information. "How about getting a hotel room?"

  "The few places in town are probably full from the festival."

  "There's my room—"

  "I'd feel better here," she cut in. "Especially since the night is almost over."

  He worked his mouth from side to side. "I could sleep on the couch."

  She swallowed. "Th-that's not necessary."

  He nodded. "Okay, then I'll take off so you can get some rest." He glanced around. "Is this door the only way in and out?" He opened the door they had just entered and checked the dead bolt with a frown.

  "There's a Juliet balcony off the bedroom, but there's no access to it from the street."

  "Will you show me?"

  She nodded and padded through the mess. When they entered her bedroom, her stomach pitched—her bed linens were torn from the bed, her underwear was hanging out of drawers.

  He opened the doors leading to the tiny balcony, then stepped outside and looked down before stepping back inside and closing the doors. "You should have new locks installed on both doors."

  "Are you kidding? I can't even get lightbulbs installed."

  He turned. "I'm serious."

  She swallowed. "Okay. It's just that Mojo is so...safe."

  "Except for the occasional murder?"

  She winced.

  "Whoever killed your ex-husband is still out there. Do you have something to protect yourself with?"

  Her thoughts strayed to the box of condoms on the dining room table, but she forced herself to focus. "Um...no?"

  He walked back through the apartment to her kitchen. She followed and watched as he pulled out drawers. At length he withdrew a butcher knife and walked back toward her. At the sight of the large knife in his hand, panic sliced through her chest as she once again questioned how much she should trust this man. She took a step backward.

  He stopped, then extended the knife to her, handle first. "Sleep with this...and your cell phone."

  "I don't have one."

  His eyebrows shot up. "Get one. Do you still have my number?"

  She looked around at the mess. "It's here somewhere."

  He wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it to her.

  "Call me if...something comes up. Will you be here tomorrow?"

  She shook her head. "I think I need to be at work. I want to reassure my employees—and my customers—that everything is okay."

  He nodded. "It's best that you stick to your normal schedule as much as possible...if you feel up to it."

  At the concern in his eyes, her senses stirred...until she realized it was the same look he'd had when he'd talked about the missing girl from the flyer. It was B.J. Beaumont's job to rescue people, and she just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time.

  She followed him to the door, her heart clicking in her chest as she reluctantly handed him his leather jacket. "Thank you, B.J. I barely know you, but..." She looked into his dark eyes and felt an entirely inappropriate urge to press her face into his chest. "Thank you for agreeing to help me," she finished lamely.

  He donned his leather coat slowly. "I have to be honest," he said in his cottony drawl, "a business relationship isn't what I had in mind when I first saw you." Then one side of his mouth lifted. "But I'll take it...for now. Sleep tight, Red."

  When the door closed behind him, Penny wanted to run after him. It was, she realized, desperation in the face of turmoil, the compulsion to cling to the most stable thing in sight. Her head buzzed from exhaustion and a host of emotions pulling on her, draining her. She couldn't bear climbing into the bed that the police had torn apart, so she grabbed her pillow and a blanket and curled up on the couch with her butcher knife and cordless phone, then stared at the shadows on the ceilings. Her mind would not be quieted.

  Deke was dead. The finality of it simply wouldn't sink in. He was too young, too arrogant, too special to die. In truth, her own death would have come as less of a surprise to her, especially considering the environment in which she'd been raised.

  A dark, niggling thought slid to the forefront of her mind: What if the police looked into her background, found out what kind of stock she came from?

  She burrowed further into the couch, making herself as small as possible, closing her eyes tight. If that sordid bit of information came to light, it would virtually notarize her arrest warrant.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Make a generous portion because everyone will want some...

  PENNY WAS JARRED AWAKE by a loud clanging noise. She sat straight up, sending the butcher knife and the cordless phone crashing to the floor, her heart in her throat. For a few disoriented seconds, she couldn't remember why she was so afraid...then it all came flooding back...Deke...dead. The phone rang, and she realized with relief it was the noise that had awakened her.

  She stood up, grabbed her aching head, and got to the phone on the fourth ring, wondering what time it was. Daylight was just beginning to filter through the lead glass windows. "Hello?" she croaked.

  "Is this Penny Black?" a man asked.

  "Penny Francisco," she corrected.

  "You're on live with Kenner on WYNO news radio—will you give us a statement on the murder of your ex-husband?"

  Her mouth opened and closed as her mind spun. Of course the media had gotten wind of Deke's bizarre death. In a small town like Mojo, murder was big honking news.

  "Ms. Francisco, did you put a hex on your ex?" the man demanded. "Do you have some kind of mystical power?"

  She squinted. "What?"

  "Did the voodoo ceremony that you performed on your husband have something to do with the festival that's taking place?"

  "Ex-husband," she muttered on an exhale. "And no!" She hung up the phone in a panic, but it rang again a few seconds later. She yanked the phone cord from the base unit, her chest heaving.

  Rubbing her gritty eyes, she went to the kitchen for a drink of water. It was just after 7:00 a.m. She
leaned into the sink, welcoming the cool of the stainless steel against her flesh, fighting nausea as the previous day's events came back with jarring clarity. Fending off the remnants of a hangover and dealing with the most shocking news of her life was not a good combination. She felt as if she'd been dragged by her heels over some very rough terrain; the last thing she wanted to do was go out for her morning run, but she knew it would help to clear her head. For energy, she downed a tall glass of orange juice, then she went into the bedroom, trying to ignore the mess while she rifled for running gear. She dressed in record time.

  When she opened the door and stepped onto the sidewalk, the scene was dank and depressing. Everywhere people lay sleeping, unwashed clumps covered with dew. Food containers littered the ground. From the shelter rose a sickening smell of chicken flesh and smoke. Penny swallowed and took off on her usual route, toward Charm Street. B.J. had said to act normal.

  As her feet hit the pavement, her thoughts went to the man who so quickly and so willingly had come to her aid. She pondered her strong attraction to B.J. Beaumont and told herself it was because she was still stinging from Deke's rejection...and death.

  As she bounded onto Charm Street toward the Victorian, she stayed on the side of the street of her business. Her store was quiet, and probably would be until Marie opened at 9:00. Business should be good...unless people decided to avoid her store because of the rumors that were bound to have spread about Deke's murder. The residents of Mojo were a suspicious, unforgiving lot—take Diane Davidson, for instance. In the same situation, Penny wasn't so sure she'd have the guts to stay...and she hoped she wouldn't have to find out.

  She tried, but she couldn't resist a glance at the pink house as she jogged by. The yard was flattened and marred with muddy tire tracks from the many police vehicles that had parked wherever they could the night before. She wondered if Deke's office had been cordoned off with police tape, if Sheena had spent the night in the house. When the memory of Deke's staring eyes rose in her mind, she dug her heels deeper into the pavement. When the vision of the wire stake imbedded in his chest haunted her, she pumped her arms and picked up speed. Her brain couldn't dwell on those horrific details if it was occupied with processing pain signals from her straining calves.

  She ran to the corner and turned right to jog past the Instruments of Death and Voodoo Museum. The museum loomed ominously in the predawn light, separated from the sidewalk by the shoulder-high iron fence and the padlocked gate. As she ran by, a flicker of light in one of the stained-glass windows on the top floor caught her eye—a strobe of some kind? A fire? When she slowed, however, the light disappeared. She resumed running, deciding that the rising sun was playing tricks on her eyes. She shook her head, reminding herself that she had plenty of intrigue in her own life without imagining more.

  She crossed a quiet street and inhaled deeply to prepare her body for Hairpin Hill, which led up into the new suburbs that surrounded Mojo. The curvy road was quiet and deserted, hemmed with thick hawthorne trees and white camellias at the peak of their perfume. With its three hairpin curves traversing the side of the small manmade mountain before looping back to the road on the other side, Hairpin Hill was the most challenging leg of her run, but also her favorite...usually.

  This morning the darkness of the tree canopy seemed menacing instead of shady, the air stifling instead of aromatic. She blamed her unease on B.J.'s warning that a murderer was still on the loose, and on her own fatigue. Without proper sleep and nourishment, her energy was flagging, her muscles tightening, her lungs constricting. Halfway through the last hairpin turn, she stopped, gasping for air, and leaned over to grasp her knees.

  A loud crack exploded in the air, startling her. From the echo, the noise sounded amazingly like a gunshot. She pivoted, thinking a car had backfired, only to find herself alone on the road as far as she could see in both directions. Another loud crack split the air. This time, whatever it was, was close enough for her to hear the whizzing noise as it sped by, and it caused wood to splinter on a tree next to her. In the fraction of a second that it took for her to register the fact that someone was shooting at her, her feet, thank goodness, had already figured it out.

  An enormous surge of adrenaline sent her sprinting back down the hill faster than she'd ever run in her life. A couple of times the momentum alone nearly took her down, but terror kept her upright and moving, her arms and legs pumping. The stretch of road had never seemed so long. A frightened, keening sound erupted close by, then she realized the noise was coming from her throat. Someone was shooting at her, trying to pick her off like a duck in a carnival game. Her back burned with the overwhelming sensation that someone was bearing down on her.

  At the bottom of the hill, she flung herself across the road blindly, her only thought getting to the other side and into town. A car horn blasted the air. She turned her head to see the blur of a white car and braced for impact. The driver locked the brakes, but the car still grazed her hip, knocking her to the ground. The tang of burned rubber filled the air. The driver's side door sprang open, and Steve Chasen jumped out. "Penny?"

  Shaken, she picked herself up off the road. She was so relieved to see a familiar face, though, that she practically fell into him.

  "Are you okay?" he asked. "My God, I almost didn't see you in time to stop."

  "Someone...was...shooting...at me," she said, her teeth chattering.

  "What?"

  "On the hill," she said pointing.

  He frowned, his expression wary. "It was probably someone playing with fireworks."

  "No," she said stubbornly. "It was gunshots."

  Steve was quiet for a few seconds. "Penny," he said gently, "I heard about Deke, that the police questioned you."

  She read his expression. He thought she was guilty...and perhaps had snapped. "I didn't kill Deke, Steve. And I wasn't imagining things just now."

  He nodded and led her to the passenger side of the car, as if she were a small child. "But you're understandably upset. You might have heard something and thought it was a gunshot."

  Penny opened her mouth to object but recognized the futility of arguing. "Will you please just take me to my apartment?"

  "Of course," he said, opening the car door and helping her inside. While he walked around the front of the car, she glanced back toward Hairpin Hill. Nothing seemed amiss. Had she mistaken the wild shots of a woodsman or a car backfiring for someone trying to kill her? She sank deeper into her seat, her mind racing.

  Steve was quiet as he drove her back toward town, although she felt his gaze upon her. He slowed at the pink house and stared before driving on.

  "I can't believe he's dead," he murmured.

  "Neither can I," she said.

  "Did he really die like everyone is saying?"

  "If everyone is saying that he was stabbed, then yes."

  "With a garden stake?"

  His eyes glittered with excitement, and a finger of unease tickled the back of her neck. Steve had seen her stab the voodoo doll and might have had his own reasons for wanting his boss dead.

  "That's right," she murmured.

  "It's kind of spooky that you stabbed the voodoo doll at the party, and then Deke winds up dead the same way."

  "Uh-huh. By the way, did you bring the doll as a gag gift?"

  "No," he said quickly, then looked sheepish. "I didn't have time to buy a gift." Then his eyes widened. "Do the police think it was someone at the party?"

  "They don't know," she said carefully. "The doll might be some kind of bizarre coincidence. Was Deke having trouble with any of his clients?"

  Steve shrugged. "He was having trouble collecting fees from a couple of people, but otherwise...Wait—Diane Davidson threatened Deke."

  Penny frowned. "Threatened him how?"

  "She said he'd be sorry that he didn't take on her case."

  "That's hardly a death threat."

  "It was the way she said it," Steve said. "She was giving him the evil eye...and she was
at the party. Maybe she brought the voodoo doll."

  Penny didn't want to think the quiet woman had anything to do with Deke's death, but Diane, too, had seen Penny stab the voodoo doll, and Penny really didn't know her very well. "Are you going to open Deke's office today?"

  "Yeah, even though I'm out of a job unless someone takes over the practice." He flushed. "I know that sounds selfish, considering what's happened."

  "No," Penny said charitably as he pulled up in front of the beignet shop. "You have to take care of yourself." She opened the door, eager to get out of the car. "Thanks for the ride, Steve. I...maybe I was overreacting about the sound I heard. I didn't get much sleep last night."

  Steve nodded sympathetically, and she climbed out of the car. "Penny, do you know anything about a funeral service for Deke?"

  She swallowed hard and shook her head. The only tie she had to Deke now was as a murder suspect. "I'm assuming Mona will handle everything...or maybe Sheena. Bye, Steve." She closed the door before he could ask more questions. For some reason, she still didn't trust him. When she picked up the morning Post that had been delivered while she'd been out running, she realized her hands were trembling. Even if those gunshots hadn't been meant for her, they had come too close for comfort.

  When she entered her apartment, the clutter only further reminded her of the chaos in her life. She took a few minutes to clear the dining room table of the gag gifts, shaking her head at the condoms and the vibrator, thinking she'd be using one before the other...if her life ever returned to normal.

  She unrolled the newspaper and stared in horror at Deke's photo under the headline "Voodoo Festival Incites Murder." The story cited "official sources" as reporting that Deke Black, noted attorney in Mojo, had been stabbed in the chest with a long sharp object after his ex-wife, Penny Francisco, had purportedly stabbed a voodoo doll in a "divorce voodoo ceremony." The article went on to say that Penny owned a charm and spell shop in Mojo, and was, coincidentally, the person who had found the body.

  She crunched the paper closed. From the newspaper account, she could almost be convinced that she'd killed Deke. She stood and paced, gnawing on her nails. This couldn't be good.