Mother pointed me to the gooiest-looking selection. “That one’s for you, Honeybunch.”
“And here’s your coffee.” Chris handed me the cup he had just poured. I accepted with sincere gratitude and tried not to act too shocked when he leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Merry Christmas Eve, Jessie.”
I Merry Christmas Eve’d him back, and we all clicked coffee cups to the holiday.
Mother scowled at my ball cap. “Any luck?”
I mumbled something about my new affinity for hats while Wilson tried to take everyone’s mind off my troubles. He announced our Christmas gift to the group—a helicopter tour of the island after lunch.
Mother squealed in delight. “I’ve never been in a helicopter before!”
Come to learn, none of us had except Wilson. But he assured us the tourist helicopters of Hawaii were far fancier than those he had experienced long ago in the Air Force. “They have six passenger seats. Six!” He shook his head in dismay.
I turned to Chris. “Which means the five of us and Emi, if you’d like to invite her.”
I would,” he said, and winked at my mother. “Then afterwards she can stick around to take pictures.”
I put down my pastry. “Pictures?”
“Of our surfing lesson,” Mother explained. “Isn’t it a shame we missed our lesson yesterday? What with you two being kidnapped and such?”
“We’ll make up for lost time today,” Chris reassured us.
Louise and I blinked at each other. “Fantastical,” we squeaked.
***
As Bee Bee would say, “La La Land.”
Oh, my Lord, Hawaii is beautiful. Our pilot guided the helicopter in and out of lush gullies, and up and down through deep gorges, while the rest of us oohed and aahed in all the appropriate places.
Far be it for me to disagree with Wilson and his son, but this was clearly the best way to see the island. I tore my gaze away from the spectacular views to smile at my beau. “No heebie jeebies,” I mouthed into the din of the helicopter engine and pointed to a particularly lush patch of ferns below.
Wilson grinned, and as we leaned forward to watch the show, my imagination took off.
I pictured Skylar Staggs diving from each wondrous waterfall, and Urquit Snodgrass stashing his loot in each hidden alcove. Oh, and over there? That field of purple and pink wildflowers would make a lovely setting for Auntie Eleanor’s estate. And that secluded beach? The perfect place for a picnic…and a proposal. Indeed, that would be the exact spot where Skylar invited Delta to sail the world with him. No dreary settling down for those two!
But I was getting ahead of myself. Yes, I could certainly draw on these gorgeous details as I put the finishing touches on My South Pacific Paramour. But what about the basics? Like how the lovers were going to vanquish the altogether evil Urquit Snodgrass?
The helicopter took a zig-zagging dive right into Kekipi Crater, and my mother squealed in delight. Or maybe that was me. Whoever it was, Adelé Nightingale decided to worry about the pesky particulars of her mandatory happy ending some other day.
***
If only her surfing lesson could have been postponed so easily.
But no. At four o’clock sharp we were out on the beach. Some of us were smiling at our surfboards, some were frowning, and the luckiest of us was taking pictures instead.
I pointed to the waves and appealed to Emi. “Make me look good out there?”
“Absolutely.” She gave me a thumbs up as Chris handed me my surfboard.
“Come on, Jessie,” he said. “Even you have to admit this is better than spending the afternoon with Ms. Huge and Hairy.”
“With my luck, she probably swims.” I winked at Emi and stumbled into the waves.
I passed Louise, who was frolicking at water’s edge and clearly had no intention of getting in over her head, either literally or figuratively. But of course my mother was giving it her all. I pushed out toward her as yet another wave knocked her over. I waited for her smiling face to emerge from the depths before struggling out to Wilson.
Not that he had much competition, but he was still the star student of our group. He hung ten several times, giving Emi ample opportunity for some terrific action shots.
Boy, how I wished she could get just one shot of me being vertical. And to my credit I did manage to stand up once or twice. That is, if you count one-tenth of one nanosecond as standing up. Alas, it was never long enough for Emi to get a good picture, but Chris insisted it still counted, and that I was “doing great.”
Eventually, all of us geezers gave up and sat exhausted in the sand as Chris and Emi took to the waves. They hung ten and did some general showing off—more for the benefit of each other than for those of us on shore.
Louise looked up from the camera she was now in charge of. “How can people look that good?” She was genuinely perplexed.
Mother patted her knee. “You girls give me a few days and I’ll draw some nice pictures. We’ll all be hanging ten by the time we leave Hawaii.” She giggled. “At least on my drawing tablet.”
Louise directed the camera toward us Hewitts and snapped a few pictures. “Like mother like daughter,” she said. “Great imaginations and gobs of creativity.”
“One draws improbable scenes, one writes them,” Wilson agreed.
“We Hewitts do like happy endings, don’t we?” I smiled at my mother, but noticed she was frowning. “You’re thinking about Buster?” I asked, and she forced herself to perk up.
“I’m sure he’ll will get the help he needs, now that the extent of his problems is understood. Ki’s a good brother.”
“And maybe Ki and Carmen will end up halfway happy,” Wilson added. “It seems likely she and her kids will inherit Davy’s house.”
“So they’ll get a new home,” Mother said. “Won’t that be nice?”
“Bee Bee’s getting a new home, too,” Louise said and waited for us to connect the dots.“Louise!” I cried. “You aren’t?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes I am, Jessica! I’m adopting him! Isn’t that fantastical?”
Mother squealed in delight, and Wilson offered more subdued congratulations, as Louise explained, “Let’s face it, that magnificent creature is practically an orphan. Pono’s dead, Buster’s gone, and Ki?” She shrugged. “I’m sure he’d take care of him if need be, but there is no need. I’ll take him!”
“Have you ever had a pet before?” Mother asked.
“Never, never, never!”
But even so, Louise seemed to know what she was doing. While I had been busy washing my hair, she was wading through the legalities and logistics of transporting an animal to the mainland. “Bee Bee will soon be a New Yorker!” she announced proudly.
I thought about the bird’s new digs. “It will be a big change for him,” I said. “Maybe he should live at your office?”
“Exactly, Jessica! Bee Bee will have lots of company since I’m almost always there. And won’t he simply adore the atrium? Adore, adore, adore?”
“He’ll love it,” I agreed and described Louise’s expansive reception area for everyone else. “It has a huge skylight, and a water fountain, and scads of plants and trees.”
“Scads of palm trees, even,” Louise said. “It’s like the jungle itself!”
“It’s far more elaborate than my rooftop garden,” I added as Chris and Emi finally abandoned the waves to join us. We summarized all the good news for them.
“Looks like you get a happy ending too, Jessie.” Chris pointed to me, and everyone stared aghast.
My eyes darted from person to person. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My heavens,” Mother murmured.
“I cannot believe we didn’t notice before now!” Louise said.
“Who would have thunk it?” Wilson asked.
“Thunk what?” I asked.
He reached over and tugged at a tuft of my hair. “It’s blond again, Jessie. Must be the salt water did the trick.”
&nb
sp; I blinked twice and turned to Chris. “Okay,” I said. “So maybe I do like surfing after all.”
He grinned and asked if he could fetch me a pink drink.
Epilogue
“A ukulele contest, a full moon, and a midnight stroll on Halo Beach. What better way to spend Christmas Eve?” I asked Wilson as we plopped ourselves down in our favorite spot in the sand.
“But the Hoochie Coochie Brothers didn’t win.” He gestured back to where we had just left the Yuletide Ukulele Jamboree.
I shrugged. “Maybe, but third place isn’t so bad.”
We gazed up at the moon until Wilson broke the silence.
“So, Jessie.” He cleared his throat. “Chris tells me you guys talked about Dianne Calloway yesterday.”
“I thought I was going to die, Wilson. And I refused to do so without knowing your deep dark secrets.”
He nodded and actually admitted he was glad I knew the truth. “Dianne wasn’t who I thought she was.” I could barely hear him over the waves.
“That’s when you moved to Lake Lookadoo?” I, too, spoke quietly. “After Dianne?”
“Once Chris got settled at college, I changed departments.”
“You had too much history in Raleigh, I suppose.”
“Yep. The Clarence force was organizing a new homicide squad just as I decided to leave Raleigh. They hired me to head it up.”
“But you weren’t about to live right in the center of things. In Clarence, I mean.”
“I wanted some peace and quiet. At least when I wasn’t at work.”
I shook my head. If one were looking for reliable indoor plumbing, Wilson’s shack on the banks of Lake Lookadoo would not be the best option. But for peace and quiet? It was just the spot.
“Will Dianne ever get out of prison?” I asked eventually.
“Hard to believe, but she’s up for parole pretty soon. Her lawyer got her sentence reduced to manslaughter. I’m still convinced it was first degree murder.” He shrugged. “But.”
“Will she come looking for you?”
“Who knows?” He gave me a quick glance and then looked away. “But even if she does, I intend to be happily settled with someone else by then.”
I put an index finger under his chin and turned his face in my direction. “Oh?” I asked.
He grinned and reached into the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt. And I blinked twice at the small sparkly thing he pulled out to show me.
The End
Cindy Blackburn is hard at work making more trouble for Jessie. She’s also busy creating another series set in rural Vermont of all places. Find out how she’s doing at
www.cueballmysteries.com
Just in case you’ve missed either of Jessie’s other adventures …
Book One: Playing With Poison
Pool shark Jessie Hewitt usually knows where the balls will fall and how the game will end. But when a body lands on her couch, and the cute cop in her kitchen accuses her of murder, even Jessie isn’t sure what will happen next. Playing With Poison is a cozy mystery with a lot of humor, a little romance, and far too much champagne.
Book Two: Double Shot
Jessie Hewitt thought her pool-hustling days were long gone. But when uber-hunky cop Wilson Rye asks her to go undercover to catch a killer, she jumps at the chance to return to a sleazy poolroom. Jessie is confident she can handle a double homicide, but the doubly-annoying Wilson Rye is another matter altogether. What's he doing flirting with a woman half his age? Will Jessie have what it takes to deal with Tiffany La-Dee-Doo-Da Sass and solve the murders? Take a guess.
Playing With Poison
Chapter 1
“Going bra shopping at age fifty-two gives new meaning to the phrase fallen woman,” I announced as I gazed at my reflection.
“Oh, Jessie, you always say that.” Candy poked her head around the dressing room door and took a peek at the royal blue contraption she was trying to sell me. “Gosh, that looks great. It’s very flattering.”
I lifted an unconvinced eyebrow. “Oh, Candy, you always say that.”
“No really. I hope my figure looks that nice when I’m old.”
Okay, so I took that as a compliment and agreed to buy the silly bra. And before she even mentioned them, I also asked for the matching panties. To know my neighbor Candy Poppe is to have a drawer full of completely inappropriate, and often alarming, lace, silk, and satin undergarments.
I got dressed and went out to the floor.
“Temptation at Twilight giving you trouble?” she asked as she rang me up. Candy hasn’t known me long, but she does know me well. And she’s figured out I show up at Tate’s whenever writer’s block strikes.
I sighed dramatically. “Plot plight.”
“But you know you never have issues for very long, Jessie.” She wrapped my purchases in pink tissue paper and placed them in a pink Tate’s shopping bag. “Even after your divorce, remember? You came in, bought a few nice things, and went on home to finish Windswept Whispers.” She offered an encouraging nod. “So go home, put on this bra, and start writing.”
I did as I was told, but wearing the ridiculous blue bra didn’t help after all. The page on my computer screen remained stubbornly blank no matter how hard I stared at it. I was deciding there must be better ways to spend a Saturday night when a knock on the door pulled me out of my funk.
“Maybe it’s Prince Charming,” I said to my cat. Snowflake seemed skeptical, but I got up to answer anyway.
Funny thing? It really was Prince Charming. I opened my door to find Candy Poppe’s handsome to a fault fiancé standing in the hallway. But Stanley wasn’t looking all that handsome. Without bothering to say hello, he pushed me aside, stumbled toward the couch, and collapsed. Prince Charming was sick.
I rushed over to where he had invited himself to lie down and knelt beside him. “Stanley?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Candy,” he whispered, and then he died.
He died?
I blinked twice and told myself I was not seeing what I was seeing. “He’s just drunk,” I reassured Snowflake. “He passed out.”
But then, why were his eyes open like that?
I reached for his wrist. No pulse. I checked for breathing. Nope. I shook him and called his name a few times. Nothing.
Nothing.
The gravity of the situation finally dawned on me, and I jumped up. “CPR!” I shouted at the cat.
But Snowflake doesn’t know CPR. And I remembered that I don’t either.
I screamed a four-letter word and lunged for the phone.
***
Twenty minutes later a Clarence police officer was standing in my living room, hovering over me, my couch, and Candy’s dead fiancé. I stared down at Stanley, willing him to start breathing again, while Captain Wilson Rye kept repeating the same questions about how I knew Candy, how I knew her boyfriend, and—here was the tricky part—what he was doing lying dead on my couch. I imagined Candy would wonder about that, too.
“Ms. Hewitt? Look at me.” I glanced up at a pair of blue eyes that might have been pleasant under other circumstances. “You have anywhere else we can talk?”
Hope drained from his face as he scanned my condominium, an expansive loft with an open floor plan and very few doors. At the moment the place was swarming with people wearing plastic sheeting, talking into doohickeys, and either dusting or taking samples of who knows what from every corner and crevice. Unless Officer Rye and I decided to talk in the bathroom, we were doomed to be in the midst of the action.
“I’ll make some tea,” I said. At least then we could sit at the kitchen counter and stare at the stove. I glanced down. A far better option than staring at poor Stanley.
“Ms. Hewitt?”
“Tea,” I repeated and pointed Officer Rye toward a barstool. I turned on the kettle and sat down beside him while the plastic people bustled about behind us, continuing their search for dust bunnies.
“Let’s try this again,” he said. “
What was your relationship with Mr. Sweetzer?”
“We had no relationship.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“No, really. He was Candy’s boyfriend. She lives downstairs in 2B.”
The kettle whistled and I got up to pour the tea. Conscious that this cop was watching my every move, I spilled more water on the counter than into the cups. But eventually I succeeded in my task and even managed to hand him a cup.
“How do you take it?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Your tea. Lemon, cream, sugar?”
“Nothing, thank you.” He frowned at the tea. “So you knew Sweetzer through Ms. Poppe?”
“Correct.” I carried my own cup around the counter and sat down again. “She and I met a few months ago.”
“Where? Here?”
I sipped my tea and thought back. I had met Candy in the bra department at Tate’s of course. It was the day after my divorce was finalized, and she had sold me a dozen bras spanning every color in the rainbow. Candy had even mentioned it that afternoon.
“Ms. Hewitt?”
“We met in the foundations department at Tate’s.”
“The what department?”
So much for discretion. “The bra department,” I said bluntly. “Candy sold me some bras.”
Rye’s gaze moved southward for the briefest of seconds, and I remembered the brand new, bright blue specimen lurking beneath my white shirt.
My white shirt.
If there had been a wall handy, I would have banged my head against it. Instead, I mumbled something about not expecting company.
Rye cleared his throat and suggested we move on.
“Candy and I got to talking, and I told her I was in the market for a condo, and she told me about this place.” I pointed up. “I took one look at these fifteen-foot ceilings and huge windows and signed a mortgage a week later. We’ve been good friends ever since.”
“And Stanley Sweetzer?”
“Was Candy’s boyfriend. He had some hotshot job in finance, and he was madly in love with Candy.”
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