Love Can Be Murder (boxed set of humorous mysteries)

by Stephanie Bond

  "If you say so. Now, how do I go about finding Melissa Cape?"

  A hollow laugh escaped her. "You must be joking."

  With one blink, his mood changed—for the worse. "I'm deadly serious, Ms. Beadleman. I intend to find the woman, and I intend for you to help me."

  Panic licked at the nape of her neck. This man was someone to be reckoned with. "If Melissa Cape disappeared to escape a psycho, then what does that make the man who would send her back?"

  A rueful smile curled his mouth as he shook his head. "I think that people like you believe you're doing the right thing, but pardon me if I believe the police are in a better position to help Melissa Cape than a bunch of bra-burners."

  Quiet anger sparked in her belly, but she knew he was trying to get a rise out of her, hoping she would let something slip. "If Melissa Cape turned to Rescue for help, she obviously thought different."

  His chest ballooned out with a deep inhale, then he rubbed his shoulder, as if it were bothering him. His knuckles on his right hand were scabbed—she hoped that whoever had been on the receiving end of his punch had actually deserved it.

  "Look," he said wearily. "Your little secret do-good organization is a burr on the ass for people like me, but right now, I couldn't care less about the father's visitation. The Cape woman has knowledge of a crime that can't be prosecuted without her testimony."

  "What kind of crime?"

  "An armed robbery, during which a police officer was critically wounded. We suspect her husband pulled the trigger."

  "All the more reason the louse shouldn't have been granted visitation with his daughter, and all the more reason for him to want Melissa dead—to keep her from testifying." She shook her head. "I can't help you."

  He frowned. "I didn't finish my coffee, so I'm a little cranky."

  "I was just fired, so I'm a little cranky."

  A muscle ticked in his neck, red with razor burn. "At least tell me if the Rescue people relocated her."

  "I know enough about the organization to know its clients are promised confidentiality."

  A mocking light flamed in his eyes. "I guess I could hope that the Cape woman has a change of heart like the lady in the newspaper article."

  Roxann lifted her chin. "If Melissa Cape sought refuge through Rescue, she must've had reason to believe her life or her child's life was in danger. By pursuing her, you could be making things worse."

  "That doesn't change the fact that I have a comatose cop on my hands."

  "Better a comatose cop than a comatose cop and a dead witness."

  He opened his mouth, then wiped away whatever he'd been about to say and sighed. "Ms. Beadleman, the best way to keep Melissa Cape safe is to put her ex-husband behind bars, but we can't do that without her testimony."

  "And she'll have your personal guarantee that he won't get off on a technicality?"

  His neck muscle ticked.

  "And even if the man is convicted of armed robbery and attempted murder, he faces what—a few years?"

  "Six to ten."

  "So what happens when he gets out early due to prison overcrowding? He'll kill her for sure."

  "We'd protect her."

  "Right." Roxann shook her head. "Detective, what makes you think I would help you even if I could?"

  He pursed his mouth, then shrugged. "I guess I'm counting on whatever sense of duty drove you to work for this organization in the first place." Then he angled his head. "Unless you're a fake."

  Without knowing it, he'd hit a nerve. After the legal system had deprived her of her mother, an innate sense of judiciousness had embedded itself in her belly. She rooted for the underdog, adopted the strays, gravitated toward the outcasts, and in general, tried to build her life on the foundation of doing what was right. And except for a couple of deviations—

  "Come on, Ms. Beadleman, I'm running out of patience."

  She blinked, then looked him over. A big man with a badge whose loyalty lay with a fellow uniform. She admired his allegiance, but she wasn't about to betray Melissa Cape out of sympathy for the wounded officer. Melissa was safe, and she deserved to be left alone to start a new life for herself and her daughter.

  "Goodbye, Detective. I have an appointment with the want ads." She pivoted and attacked the path with her trusty blue Adidas.

  "The next time I see you," he shouted, "I just might arrest you for assault and obstruction of justice."

  She didn't look back, but her skin burned from his gaze. Had she seemed as vulnerable as she felt? When she looped around the quarter-mile path, she half expected to find him lounging by the tree again, but he was gone. Had he retreated to watch her? To follow her? The police had come sniffing around the organization before, but usually to follow up on a missing-person report, not because the client was wanted for questioning.

  Filling her lungs with the perpetually fish-scented air of Biloxi, Roxann forced herself to slow down, to finish her five-mile run at her normal pace. Afterward she showered and launched Goldie on a winding route toward 255 Amberjack, Unit B, checking occasionally to make sure she wasn't being tailed by the cop—again.

  Few people knew her address since the duplex was leased through the agency's network. She had lived all over the southeast, although over the last five years she'd migrated back toward the Mississippi Valley—guilt over her father, she presumed, which was alleviated somewhat by being on the same page of the atlas.

  She received her mail through a post office box, and her phone was unlisted. She relied on pay phones to conduct most business with Rescue, whom to meet and where, setting up details of a relocation, arranging transport. The only people who knew the number for her cell phone were her father and her Rescue supervisor. In a desperate attempt to contact her, Melissa Cape had obtained the number from a friend who worked for the wireless company. Roxann hadn't recognized the number on the display, and should've known better than to answer, but she'd been afraid not to. Afraid something had happened to her father, afraid...

  She sighed. Maybe she would take this opportunity to visit her father. Try to reconnect. An outlandish notion, considering they'd never really connected in the first place. Disparate relatives, sharing a roof, both longing for a black-haired woman long gone.

  Perhaps her recent restlessness was rooted in the shakiness of the relationships with the people she should be closest to. Working odd jobs and operating covertly didn't lend itself to forging intimate liaisons. She thought she'd found a friend in Elise, who also worked for Rescue, but that had ended disastrously. Other facilitators in the organization who worked in tandem were often hundreds of miles apart, communicating in as streamlined a manner as possible. The women she helped she never saw again. It was the perfect pursuit for a loner.

  But lonely.

  Leaving town for a few days might throw Capistrano off her scent for a while. Or maybe it was time she moved again, although she rather liked Biloxi and had even fancied living here for a while. Make friends, look for a permanent job—something more challenging than waitressing or retail or temp work. She'd even painted her bedroom, a first. The thought of moving again put a stone in her stomach she'd never felt before. Loading all her worldly possessions onto a U-Haul trailer and looking for a new place to live had seemed so romantic in her twenties. Now she fretted about finding a new gynecologist and if the neighbors had a noisy pet.

  Wrestling with her decision to take a roadtrip, she stopped at her post office box to retrieve a week's worth of mail. Bills, junk mail, two Notre Dame University alumni newsletters, both dated and forwarded many times, and—she squinted at the thick ivory-colored envelope and held it up to the light. A wedding invitation?

  Very curious, considering most of the women she knew were trying to escape marriage.

  Chapter Three

  THE INVITATION ORIGINALLY had been sent to her post office box in Atlanta, then forwarded to the one in Montgomery before being forwarded on to Biloxi. The return address, written in black slanting script by a calligraph
er, read "Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Ryder, One Portobello Place, Baton Rouge, Louisiana." Her address, oddly, had been scribbled in blue ink in a different, and less princely, handwriting that seemed vaguely familiar.

  Roxann smirked. Her cousin Angora was finally getting married? It seemed likely since she was the only child of Jackson Ryder and Dixie Beadleman, Roxann's father's sister. Of course when Dixie had caught the eye of the Jackson Ryder, heir to the Ryder Hotel empire, she'd shortened her name to Dee. More fashionable, and more appropriate, considering all the wonderfully wicked D names Roxann had made up for her.

  She slid her nail under the flap of the grubby envelope—a little worse for the rounds—and pulled out the origami-like invitation. Impressive. Extensive. Expensive.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Ryder request the honor of your presence as their daughter, Angora Michele, is united in marriage to Dr. Trenton Robert Coughlin...

  Leave it to Angora to snag a doctor. A little late, considering she was approaching thirty-two, but Roxann assumed the man was just getting his career underway. By now Angora would be the perfectly schooled society wife. She'd been born to it, the upper-class life. Unlike Aunt Dee, who'd had to finesse her way into the Baton Rouge Junior League, Angora was groomed from toddlerhood to look and behave like a white-gloved debutante. When they were in college together, though, even the sweater-wearing tennis players preferred the girls who put out, so Angora and her lily-white virtue had gone ignored. The debs who wised up were engaged by graduation, but Angora had clung to her virginity.

  Roxann shook her head. The girl could never please her parents, no matter how hard she tried. Born pretty, and made beautiful through braces, jaw surgery, and rhinoplasty—all before the age of fourteen—she'd had the self-esteem of a leper. True, Angora wasn't the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but she wasn't a bad person. Infuriatingly feminine and a bit of a fibber, but not a bad person.

  Their parents, Roxann's father and Angora's mother, hated each other. Well, maybe hate was too strong a word for brother and sister, but they certainly maintained a resilient aversion to one another. Walt Beadleman thought his sister had gotten above her raising, and Dee thought her brother was a clodhopper. (During a rare visit when Roxann had overheard her aunt say as much to a neighbor, she'd evened the score by peeing in Dee's bottle of Chanel No. 5.)

  Proximity and class distinction had effectively separated the girls until they were seniors in high school. Roxann had been working part-time in an upscale dress shop, and in marched Dee followed by Angora, shopping for a graduation dress. Dee had proceeded to trot Roxann from rack to dressing room for two hours before buying a dress worth what Roxann earned as a shop girl for an entire year. In between fittings, however, she discovered that she and Angora had both applied to Notre Dame. She'd been praying for a scholarship; Angora had confided she was dreading the entrance exam. After that, Angora dropped by the dress shop often to chat—she'd been a prim little thing, and Roxann had felt sorry for her, caught under Donkey Dung Dee's thumb.

  They'd both made it into Notre Dame, and signed up to room together, against Dee's wishes. It was the first and last time that Angora had defied her mother, but with good results. The girls had become fast friends—Angora was a neophyte in all things wicked, and Roxann had been happy to tutor. But when Angora had been busted for low grades, her parents had pinned the blame on Roxann (even though she herself was a straight-A student), and whisked their little princess into a chaperoned sorority house.

  Subsequently, the girls' paths had crossed only when necessary, although she sensed that Angora missed their late-night pajama powwows consulting the Magic 8 Ball as much as she. After graduating with a liberal arts degree, Angora had returned to Baton Rouge to work for a stuffy art museum. Roxann hadn't seen her in seven—no, nine years.

  Oh, well, she was sure her cousin would be happy with Dr. Trenton. If not, Dee would be happy enough for both of them to have a titled man in the family.

  She turned her attention to more pleasurable reading—the university newsletters. Occasionally, Dr. Nell Oney, the ethics professor who'd mentored her and suggested she become involved with Rescue, wrote a feature column. And sometimes Carl Seger's name was mentioned within the pages since he was active in coordinating alumni activities. Roxann rolled down Goldie's windows and scoured the newsletters while loitering in the United States Postal Service parking lot.

  Homecoming week was just around the corner, with lots of activities planned to raise money for a new student counseling center—a brick sale, a bike-a-thon, and a bachelor auction. Her heart skipped a beat when she spotted a black-and-white candid of the man who hadn't been far from her thoughts today.

  Dr. Carl Seger, theology professor and coach of the varsity soccer team, will be the guest bachelor auctioned off as part of the Homecoming fund-raising events.

  The man still had all of his glorious salt-and-pepper hair. She rubbed her finger over his handsome face, his winning smile, and nostalgia warmed her limbs. Assuming the picture was current, he'd barely aged a day in the decade since she'd seen him. The fact that he was still single surprised her, since the man wasn't exactly short of admirers. If his classes were still eighty-percent female, he'd probably fetch a hefty sum at the auction.

  She'd counted herself among the smitten. Dr. Carl had held her spellbound from the first moment she'd walked into his freshman theology class. Handsome, thoughtful, articulate. In comparison, most of the college boys were hopelessly immature. She and Angora had attended his class together as freshmen and whiled away many pajama powwows spinning fantasies about the man.

  But because Angora had moved out of the dorm, she wasn't privy to the relationship that developed between Roxann and Dr. Carl during their senior year.

  "After you graduate," he'd murmured once in the library stacks, "we won't have to hide our feelings." The unrealized sexual energy between them had been palpable, and had left her damp and sleepless more nights in the dorm than she cared to recall.

  But mere days before graduation, Nell Oney had paid her a visit. Carl was being brought before the Board of Regents to defend allegations of impropriety with a student. He was, after all, a professor of theology, and a deacon of the university church. Knowing she herself was the student in question, Roxann agreed to leave until things settled down.

  At Nell's urging, she'd joined the Rescue program, and moved to Memphis, where a facilitator was needed, but remained poised to leave as soon as Carl called. Except when he'd called, it was to beg her understanding for choosing his job over her. If he were ruined, he'd told her in a tortured voice, he'd have nothing to offer her, and honor dictated that he stay. Of course she understood. She'd cried for a month, then thrown herself into her volunteer work, determined to prove something to Carl, even if he never knew.

  Seeing his picture brought all that pent-up longing flooding back to her. Everybody had one person in their past, one person who evoked questions of what might have been. Other men had come and gone, men who on the surface appeared to be concerned with the state of the world but, when it came right down to it, were unwilling to do more than write a letter or don a T-shirt for the cause.

  Her former lover Richard Funderburk fit that category—he made the bar circuit with his guitar and his backpack, singing about the indulgences of man, then took his pay in Canadian beer. She would lie in bed after cryptic sex and wonder if she would ever again meet someone who moved her as much as Carl had without even touching her.

  She closed the newsletter, then blinked her eyes wider at an old photo of herself on the back page under a caption that read "We Remember." In the dated photo, her mouth was open, delivering a yell, and she hefted an unreadable protest sign. In 1994 political-science student Roxann Beadleman led a protest against modesty discrimination in the art department that resulted in policy change.

  Roxann smiled wryly, remembering the rally. The art department had sponsored a show of nudes drawn from live models, but the drawings of the male models had featur
ed little flaps of canvas over their privates that observers had to lift for a peek. The drawings of the female models, on the other hand, were free of the "modesty flaps." Roxann had been outraged at the discrepancy and led a march to have the flaps removed.

  When political cartoons in national papers began to parody the issue, school officials caved. But her newly won notoriety made it difficult to see Carl on the sly. Then the allegations against him had ensued and she'd left South Bend to embark on what now seemed a fairly aimless path.

  Roxann drove toward her apartment wrapped in a swirl of bittersweet memories, trying to ignore the clench of yearning in her stomach. The road not taken taunted her—marriage, family, a permanent address, Sunday pot roast. Maybe she hadn't fought hard enough for Carl. She'd told him countless times that she didn't believe in marriage. No wonder he hadn't put his career and church appointment on the line...

  She hadn't given him reason to believe she was commitment material.

  And how could she be? Then or now. Between her parents' fiasco of a marriage and her exposure to the underbelly of relationships through Rescue, she was much more familiar, perhaps even more comfortable, with dysfunction.

  Feeling prickly, Roxann parked in a multilevel garage, then walked two blocks before slipping between two houses. After veering right, she tramped through high grass to get to the backyard of her duplex. With one last look over her shoulder, and Capistrano's threat running through her head, she climbed the small stoop and removed her door key from her bag.

  "Hi, Roxann!"

  She nearly swallowed her tongue before she realized that Mr. Nealy was standing at the rear entrance of his side of the duplex, leaning on a broom. "Hello, Mr. Nealy."