Murder of An Open Book: A Scumble River Mystery (Scumble River Mysteries Book 18)

by Denise Swanson

  Actually, support was too strong a word. I was present only because Boone St. Onge, one of my best friends, had nagged me into attending. Normally, I would have refused to squander one of the last perfect summer evenings listening to Mayor Geoffrey Eggers drone on and on about rooming houses bringing down the tone and ambience of Shadow Bend, but Boone had been hard to refuse.

  At some point, his ninety-seven text messages, phone calls, and Facebook posts had gotten to me, and I’d given in to his relentless campaign. Our other BFF, Poppy Kincaid, was made of sterner stuff.

  Certainly, Poppy had a better excuse than mine—business rather than pleasure. My dime store closed at six on Tuesday nights, but her nightclub, Gossip Central, was open until two in the morning. I wasn’t buying it, though. She could have left her bartender in charge of the place. Instead, she claimed that the local motorcycle club’s monthly get-together required her personal touch.

  Translation: She was afraid if she wasn’t there to sweet-talk them, the bikers would tear the joint apart. And the last thing she wanted was to have the cops called in to break up a fight. Poppy’s watering hole had originally been a quarter mile outside the city limits, thus in the county sheriff’s jurisdiction. But now, because of some recent restructuring of law-enforcement districts, Gossip Central was in her police chief father’s territory.

  Since the change, Poppy had been extra careful to keep things calm in her club. No grown woman wants her daddy coming around to save her, especially a bad girl who wasn’t on speaking terms with her father.

  Which left me sitting between my friend Veronica, aka Ronni, Ksiazak, and a stranger. Ronni owned the local bed-and-breakfast, and for the last ten minutes, she’d been hunched over, listening intently to the mayor’s long, boring monologue. I wondered if she was concerned that if the council refused the rooming house permit, they might decide to rezone and disallow her B and B as well.

  I’d tried to chat with the guy next to me, but he didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. After a couple of icy glares and his aloof silence, I reluctantly restrained myself from voicing any more of the many snarky comments running through my head about Hizzoner.

  I would have preferred to sit as far in the back as possible—the better to sneak out after Boone’s pet project was discussed. But because I had no idea this meeting would be so doggone popular, I had arrived only a few minutes before its scheduled start and had been lucky that Ronni had saved the chair beside her for me. Too bad it was so close to the front that I could count the nose hairs sticking out of Hizzoner’s beaklike schnozzle.

  I was nearly dozing off as the mayor droned on and on about the types of indigent people a rooming house would attract, when Ronni leaned over and whispered, “Dev, what do you think about an SRO moving into the old Desoto Hotel?”

  The Desoto Hotel had opened in 1850, and for the next hundred years, it had been the town’s social center. Supposedly, the hotel threw a party when Robert E. Lee visited Shadow Bend, and during the War for Southern Independence, it had housed Confederate troops in its fifty-five rooms. The place had run into hard times during the eighties and had been sitting empty for the past thirty years.

  “I think Hizzoner has something up his sleeve. Something that will put money into his pockets.” I raised an eyebrow. “Politics might be the second-oldest profession, but it manifests an extremely close similarity to the first.”

  “You are such a cynic.” Ronni snickered.

  “That’s not true.” I lifted one shoulder. “I’m just an optimist with years of experience.”

  Ronni giggled, then said, “The Desoto is pretty close to your store, right?”

  “Yep. It’s two doors down.” Actually, I had been thinking about that. “While I’m sympathetic toward the economically disadvantaged folks who often live in boarding houses, I’m concerned that their presence might drive away my regular clientele.”

  My shop ran on a very thin profit margin, and I couldn’t afford to lose any customers. When I had quit my consulting job at Stramp Investments and bought the dime store, I had reduced my round-trip commute from two hours to fifteen minutes and cut the time I spent at work almost in half. Too bad I had also shrunk my income from six figures to nearly poverty level. Which meant that no matter what, I had to keep my books in the black.

  My altered lifestyle had been worth it because by making the change, I’d been able to spend extra time with my grandmother, Birdie Sinclair. About eighteen months ago, her doctor had informed me that Birdie needed me to be around more due to her memory issues; and knowing that it was my turn to help her, I had immediately begun to search for other ways to make a living. How could I do anything less when she had been the one who had taken me in and loved me when I had nowhere else to go and no one else who cared?

  When I was sixteen, my mother had dropped me on my grandmother’s front porch with fifty dollars in my pocket and two suitcases containing all that remained of my previous life. My father had just been sent to prison, and Mom had been unable to handle the shame, loss of income, and reduced social status resulting from her husband’s conviction. Having disposed of her burden, she’d headed to California to start over, leaving my grandmother and me to face the town’s censure by ourselves. In the thirteen years she’d been gone, I’d heard from her less than a dozen times.

  Ronni’s elbow in my side brought me back from the past, and as I jerked my head toward her, I heard someone drawl, “As I live and breathe. Devereaux Sinclair. What are you doing here? You’ve never given any previous indication of being civic-minded.”

  “Wasting my time,” I grumbled, glancing past Ronni to see Nadine Underwood sweep by me, trailed by her health aide, aka Mr. Eye Candy.

  Up until a few months ago, Nadine had been a thirty-five-year member of the city council, but because of a mysterious illness that none of her doctors could diagnose, she’d withdrawn. Her son, Dr. Noah Underwood, had been appointed in her place.

  Nadine had never been one of my biggest fans, and now that I was dating Noah, she really had it in for me. I was not the daughter-in-law she envisioned. I wasn’t sure who was, but I suspected it was a mini-me version of Nadine. Someone who would step into her shoes as belle of the country club and president of the Confederacy Daughters of Missouri. Someone she could bully.

  Nadine had managed to convince Noah to dump me when we had gone steady in high school, but he claimed to have learned his lesson and told me that he’d warned his mother to back off. He thought she had acquiesced, but I knew better.

  Although there wasn’t anything in particular I could point to, my guess was that Nadine had seen her son’s words as a challenge and had taken her crusade to get rid of me and to destroy my family underground. Nadine had never been one to surrender that easily. After all, she still thought the South would rise again.

  As I watched Nadine and Mr. Eye Candy take the reserved seats in the front row, Ronni narrowed her blue-gray eyes and muttered under her breath, “I wonder what Nadine’s scheming about this time.”

  I smiled. Ronni may have been a fairly recent resident of Shadow Bend, but she’d learned quickly that Nadine always had an angle.

  “I doubt Nadine is in favor of allowing a place that would attract the underprivileged and homeless to Shadow Bend’s village square.” I kept an eye on Nadine as she settled in, placing her Louis Vuitton satchel on her lap. “So I’m guessing she’s here to make sure the council votes against the rooming house.”

  Ronni grunted her agreement, and I realized that Nadine and I were on the same side on that issue. Feeling an unpleasant twinge, I wondered if I should reconsider my position on the matter.

  No! As uncomfortable as it was to think that Nadine and I had anything in common, my family’s livelihood was on the line. Without my income, my grandmother would experience financial hardship, and if my store went under, my father would be unemployed.

  When he�
��d been released from prison a few months ago, he’d come to work for me at the dime store. And let’s face it: Ex-cons didn’t have a lot of employment opportunities, so finding another job would be tough.

  As Mayor Eggers finally started running out of steam, I saw Boone and Noah put their heads together for a whispered conversation. The tête-à-tête seemed affable, which surprised me. The rivalry between the two men was legendary and had started back when Noah was elected class president in sixth grade.

  The animosity had continued throughout high school and into their adult lives. During the years Noah and I were dating, he and Boone had pretended to get along. But the minute Noah had betrayed me, Boone’s true feelings reemerged. And from then on, he’d never bothered to hide his contempt for the good doctor.

  Now that Noah and I had reconciled and were going out again, I knew that both he and Boone were trying for a détente in their hostilities, but I was suspicious about their new friendliness. Did it have anything to do with a certain ex–U.S. Marshal named Jake Del Vecchio, the other man I was seeing? Or the woman he had brought back to Shadow Bend after his last case?

  Both Boone and Poppy believed that I was crazy to tolerate Jake’s ex-wife, Meg, living with him and his uncle Tony on the Del Vecchio ranch. Privately, I thought I was a little deranged, too, but it was hard to fault Jake for rescuing Meg from a psychiatric facility. She was nearly catatonic, and had been that way since being kidnapped by a serial killer and held captive by him for months.

  According to Jake, Meg had no family and few friends. Her doctors had said that there was nothing physically wrong with her, but she needed rest and time to recover emotionally from the trauma. If Jake hadn’t brought her home with him, she would have had to be put in a nursing home, where she would have been at the mercy of strangers, with no one to make sure the staff was treating her okay.

  The irony didn’t escape me that while I had convinced Noah and Jake to tolerate my dating both of them, Jake was now living with his ex-wife. I hated irony.

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