I suck in a quick breath. “Jasper. That’s terrible.” My mind reels at the thought of putting Leo’s career in jeopardy. “Please don’t threaten him. I’ll leave him be. I won’t ask him for any more favors.”
I’m glad about it. But I’m not saying a word. A thought comes to me. “You’re going back to utilizing Macy and Emmie, aren’t you?”
“You forgot Georgie.”
“Bizzy.” He’s right back to closing his eyes. “Okay. Fine. That just means I need to solve the case quicker. Let’s crack this nut.” He wraps his arms around me. “What happened with Luke today?”
“The guy is a character.” I quickly fill him in on the fact Luke implied that Ginger and Shelby had something they were hiding. “He said he really didn’t want to admit to anything—that it was bad enough that he told the cops what he did. He said he felt terrible for Nessa. Oh, and he also said that if Shelby wasn’t dead, he would be. He made it sound as if whatever Shelby was furious with him about that night was enough to end him.”
Jasper blinks as if he were surprised. “You got him to say all that? You’re pretty good at getting people to open up.”
As much as I want to smile, my lips knot up instead. The truth is, Luke didn’t share half of that with me. I took it right from his mind.
“Ginger and Shelby had a secret.” Jasper jots it down into his phone. “Luke has a secret, and he’s glad Shelby isn’t around to tell it.” He looks my way. “Is there anything else you can remember? Anything at all?”
I think on it a moment.
“Yes, actually.” I lift a finger with the memory. “He mentioned someone named Sarah. He said Sarah contacted Shelby in the middle of Ginger’s seminar, and that’s what made Shelby flip out.”
Jasper’s eyes widen a notch. “Boy, you really cast a spell.” He picks up another mini muffin. “You didn’t feed him one of these, did you? Are you lacing them with truth serum?”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious. It’s as if you strolled into Luke Parker’s office and read his mind or something.”
My stomach rolls at the thought of being exposed. Although, in truth, I’d love nothing more than to fill Jasper in on my secret. It’s always felt heavy keeping my lips sealed. But now with Leo in the know, it suddenly feels as if I’ve got a battleship on my shoulders.
Fish, Sherlock, and Peanut all scuttle forward and sit in a line as they watch with bated breath.
Fish lets out a fierce meow. Are you going to do it, Bizzy? Are you going to tell him he’s right?
Sherlock lets out a little bark. This is exciting. Jasper will know! Jasper will know!
Peanut whines, What will happen when he finds out? What will happen to you, Bizzy? What will happen to us?
Peanut has me giving some serious pause—or should I say paws to the situation.
“What do we do with this information, Jasper? How do you make heads or tails out of the pieces?”
He furrows his brows. “Do you have your laptop handy?”
“I sure do.” I pluck it from the sofa table and open it up. “Now what?”
“Let’s do a quick search on Luke Parker.”
I type in his name and nothing.
“Wow,” I say. “I’ve never seen anyone with such a small cyber footprint.”
“Huh.” Jasper leans in. “Okay, so we’ll mark him off as a dead end for now. Type in Shelby Harris.”
“That will be a contrast. She was basically the queen of the internet.” I look her up, and sure enough she’s everywhere.
“Head over a few pages. I find the deeper I dig, the more interesting things get.”
The first few pages are all links that lead back to her social media sites. That is, until we stumble upon something out of the ordinary.
“Jasper, look at this,” I say, clicking the link that says Whaler’s Cove Community College. “It lists Shelby Harris as an English TA about five years ago.”
Jasper leans in. “Now there’s something new.” He jots it down into his phone.
“Do you think it’s important?”
“One thing I have learned after doing this for nearly a decade is that you never know what little detail can turn the whole case on its ear.”
“Then I’ll tuck it in the back of my mind.” We do a quick search on Ginger and yield nothing. “Do you see the irony here between Luke and Ginger? Luke has zero info out there compared to Ginger who has at least fifty pages, and yet we yield just about as much on her as we did on Luke. It’s just a bunch of selfies and info on that gold digger’s guide she’s pushing. I can’t believe she’s making a killing off telling girls how to marry a rich man.”
“Evidently, it’s information some women are willing to pay for. At the end of the day, Ginger King is a businesswoman.”
“Yeah, and a darn good one.” Chelsea comes to mind. “I’ll look up Chelsea Ashley.” I input her name, and both Jasper and I hold our breath at what the first page exposes. “Jasper, is this a real mug shot?”
“Sure as heck looks like it. What was she arrested for?”
I click into the article. “Top millennial influencer busted for shoplifting fine jewelry.” My mouth falls open. “Do you think this is the dark secret she was keeping for Shelby?” Another thought comes to me. “Ginger mentioned that Shelby stole from the open houses Scout was conducting. But when they got busted, it was Scout who took the rap. Shelby was vindictive in making sure she kept her secret. I bet she did the same thing to Chelsea. Would that be a big enough motive for murder?”
“Sure. Revenge. Damaging a reputation. It all fits. But with so many different motives, we need to somehow winnow it down to who really did it. I’ll tell you right now, it makes things tough when there was so much strife between Shelby and her friends.”
The name Luke was thinking about comes back to me. “What about that Sarah woman Luke mentioned? How do we find anything on her?”
“That’s a tough one. Maybe type their names in together.”
“Sarah and Luke Parker,” I say as I input their names and a group of images pop up just above a scant number of links. “Jasper, that’s Luke.” My adrenaline spikes as I click into the picture, and just like that my mouth falls open. “Oh my God, Jasper. This is why Luke Parker has no cyber footprint.”
He takes a deep breath. “And now we know exactly who Sarah is.”
Chapter 15
Luke Parker isn’t Luke Parker at all. He’s Luke Abernathy—a very much in debt, very much married, father to four-year-old twin boys. No wonder he didn’t want his picture anywhere near Shelby’s social media. It would have been a dead giveaway.
“Wow.” Georgie shudders as I run all this by her. “You and Detective Hot Stuff felt all this out last night?” Her left brow hooks into her forehead. “What else did you happen to feel out?” She elbows me in the ribs as she tries her best to find out if we moved the needle on our relationship.
“Don’t get too excited, Georgie. We’re still firmly planted on first base.”
Georgie makes a face just as a small crowd moves over toward the register in the Country Cottage Café and we step aside so that they can put in their orders. Emmie is at the helm and the entire café holds the hypnotic scent of fresh pumpkin spice mini muffins.
Georgie grunts, “Okay, so first base isn’t a bad place to be. But get busy, would you, Bizzy?” She howls with laughter. “See what I did there?” She steps in close. “What do we do now?”
Fish wraps herself around my ankles and I pick her up. “Right now, I want to track down his wife, Sarah Abernathy, and grill her a bit. You know, get into Luke’s psyche from another angle.”
Fish licks her lips as she looks up at me. Good thinking, Bizzy. I’ve met my fair share of fat cats who like to run around. And he sounds like one of them.
I nod down at her. Fish has always been wise beyond her years—or months, considering she’s just a kitten.
“I wasn’t talking about the killer.” Georgie scoffs as
she tucks her fists into her hips. “What do we do about you and Detective Kisses-a-Lot? Macy’s already scored three home runs in the past week alone. You’re down three, and next up at bat, Biz. I say we spruce up your nighttime accouterments and slam one out of the park.”
I make a face as I look past her at the crowd. “Never mind about Jasper and me. He still needs to call off his ex. And maybe his mother. Until then, we’re still not officially official, so the people in the grandstands can put away their mitts. I’m not knocking anything out of the park anytime soon.” And every cell in my body is protesting the idea.
“You’re no fun,” she grunts as she pulls out her phone. “I’ll do a little digging and find out where to find this Sarah chick.” She strays off to an empty table just as Emmie’s brother, Jordy, heads this way. Both his flannel and jeans look as if he was rolling around in the grass. His face looks as if it has just enough grime on it to make his blue eyes glow like lanterns.
“Hey, Bizzy. I just cut back the hedges, mowed the lawn, and fixed the fountain out front. The Montgomerys sent another truck full of pumpkins. They said they had a surplus and thought you could use them. Where do you want them?”
Fish smacks me with her tail. Put them in front of our cottage. I do like to hide and give the dogs a decent fright every now and again. I need the cover.
“Another truck full? We’ve already blanketed the front and the back of the inn. Not to mention I’ve dotted them everywhere I can inside. Aside from putting a few big ones in front of my cottage”—I land a kiss to Fish’s furry head—“what do you think we should do with them?”
Jordy thinks about it. “You’re having that party in a couple of days, right?”
“The mixer. I almost forgot all about it. Ginger King invited all her fans, and Carter O’ Riley is coming in strong with his testosterone brigade. It’s a costume party. I have a feeling things are going to get wild. I just hope the ballroom can contain them all.”
This is going to be fun, Bizzy. Good luck trying to lock me up in the cottage for that one. I’ll be front and center. I’ll keep an eye out for a madman with a gun in the event they come back to claim another victim. You never know. It could be you.
I wrinkle my nose at Fish before setting her down.
Jordy shakes his head. “The ballroom might get stuffy by the end of the night. How about we open the back doors and have the party flood out into the courtyard? We can use the pumpkins to decorate it. I’ll fill the planter beds and as many empty baskets as I can. I’ll call some friends and we’ll carve the rest and have them lit that night. If you let me get really creative, I’ll turn the forest that butts up to the courtyard into a haunted woods for the night. I’ve got a fog machine and purple twinkle lights. It’ll look like magic. Black magic.”
“Sounds terrifyingly perfect. Do it,” I say.
Jordy takes off and I spot Camila just finishing up a conversation on her phone before hanging up and walking this way.
“Camila.” I try my best to sound perky. “Can I speak with you a minute?”
She shakes out her long dark hair as if trying to ward off a gnat. Why do I get the feeling I’m a gnat?
“What?” she snaps in annoyance.
“It’s just, I, uh—my brother, Huxley, subscribes to Gear Head magazine, and he’s such a good customer they’ve already sent him a calendar for next year.”
She sucks in a quick breath and drags me off into the quiet hush of the hallway.
“You know, don’t you?” Her eyes sparkle like shards of glass, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say they were tears. God, I wish I never met Shelby Harris. If she wasn’t already dead, I’d—I’d… She sags as if she couldn’t possibly finish the thought.
“I know.” I give a guilty shrug. “But I won’t say anything to Jasper.”
“You bet you won’t.” The words come out like a threat, and somehow I think she means it just that way. “Look, I made a huge mistake. It could cost me everything. I’ll lose my position at the school. I’ll have nowhere to turn.”
“You have my word. Your secret is safe with me.” As safe as it can be until February. “Camila, can I ask why you would do something like this? I mean, you said yourself it could cost you your career.”
She closes her eyes a moment. “Would you believe me if I said I had no idea the picture would be published?”
“Did you sign a release? Are they using your image illegally? My brother, Huxley, is a lawyer. I’m sure he can—”
“Yes, I signed a release,” she snips. “And I don’t care very much for your brother, Huxley, at the moment. He can shove his legal degree. Those pictures were taken after a very long day of shooting very demure pictures for a women’s catalog. At the end of the day, the photographer asked if I wanted to have a little fun and I said yes. The release was for all images. I didn’t realize that at the time. And ironically, none of the demure pictures made it into any catalog.”
“Camila, you were taken advantage of.”
She glares at me a moment. “Thank you for pointing that out. And now, I would like to forget it. In the meantime, I’ll be running scared for the rest of my time as a high school guidance counselor because obviously my days are numbered.”
“And Shelby Harris was the one to connect you with the photographer.” I nod as all the pieces come in crystal clear.
“Don’t get any funny ideas, busy bee. I didn’t kill anybody. And if you so much as whisper the idea to anyone, I’ll make sure that on the day I lose my job—you lose yours.” You’ll lose Jasper regardless. “Whoever killed Shelby is still out there.” And if she cost them as much as she cost me, I just might be rooting for them to get away with murder.
She stalks past me and heads back upstairs in a flurry.
Camila sounds innocent. But that doesn’t mean I’m so willing to wipe her off my suspect list.
As much as I’d like to gnaw on everything that just happened, I spot my not-so-sweet floozy of a sister talking to Emmie, so I head on over.
“Heard you hit a triple header,” I say before making a face at this older, questionably wiser blonde-haired version of me. “Wait, that’s not right. I meant, I heard you hit three homers.”
Macy tugs a lock of her short hair. “You had it right the first time. But I’m done with him now.” She flicks her wrist as if it were a passing faze.
“What? You can’t be done with him. That’s Jasper’s brother. You can’t use him and lose him. It’s going to make Thanksgiving dinner really, really awkward.”
Macy blinks back. “Relax. We were having a good time. It’s not like we have twelve kids and I’m kicking him to the curb.”
Emmie leans in. “He’s the lawyer, right? Kick him my way. I saw him at the Haunted Harvest Festival. I wouldn’t mind sinking my fangs into him.”
“That’s because he looks exactly like Jasper,” I’m quick to point out. “And we’ve always liked the same thing.”
“You want him?” Macy tips her head to Emmie and coos as if she were giving a puppy away to a good home. “He’s all yours. Just remember, don’t feed him after midnight. Unless, of course, you don’t have an early schedule.”
Emmie claps like a seal. “Hear that, Bizzy? I’ve got me a Wilder.”
My eyes widen a notch. “Emmie, you don’t want Macy’s sloppy seconds. And Macy, what if he’s still into you? You’re going to break his heart.” I’d like to break her neck, but I leave that fun little homicidal fact out of it for now. “A part of me wishes you never threw your unmentionables at Jasper’s brother.”
Macy rolls her eyes. “Clam down, panty patrol. Besides, Emmie deserves to have a little fun.” She turns to Emmie. “And Jamison is all about making sure you have a very good time.”
Emmie squeals at the racy revelation. “Invite him to the party this Saturday night. The inn is hosting its first Halloween rager.”
A fountain of words tries to bubble up my throat all at once. “I seriously doubt this will be a rager. And i
t’s not our party to invite people to.”
Look who’s here, Bizzy! Fish says from somewhere below. She tried on the witch’s hat in front and it fit! Peanut says she’s the real deal. He said I should watch my furry back before she makes me her familiar.
A sugary breeze catches my attention as Ginger King with all her fiery redheaded glory pops up next to me.
“Are you talking about my party?” Ginger spikes a black glossy fingernail into her chest. “Please, invite whomever you want.”
Fish claws at my boot and I quickly pick her up.
“Thank you, Ginger,” I say. “That’s kind of you to offer.”
“I mean it.” She makes a sour face at Fish. “I’m having the café cater the event. Just add whatever you think we’ll need. Carter is bringing the boys. So I don’t expect any one of you to be single by the end of the night.” She gives a sly wink to Emmie and Macy, both of whom gurgle with titillation at the prospect.
Wonderful.
Macy plucks out her phone. “I’ll invite all the Wilders since we’re pretty close now. Plus, that way I can try out Dalton. A man who specializes in touchdowns should never be underestimated.” She takes off toward Georgie. “I’ll invite Mom, too!”
Good Lord. Jasper will never speak to me again after Macy runs his brothers over with her unstoppable libido.
Emmie leans in. “How about you, Ginger? How’s your love life? I bet you’ve got a line of rich men a mile long all waiting to make you their own.”
“I’ve got my sights set on someone in particular, and I’m about to head over to the Seaview Sherriff’s Department to extend a personal invite to the party.”
Emmie gasps, “Is it that hot deputy that’s been hanging around? Leo Granger?”
Ginger looks as if she’s been offended. “What’s a Granger? Anyway, no. It’s Detective Wilder.”
Emmie and I exchange a quick glance, and Fish yowls right at Ginger for even thinking of conducting the malfeasance.
Don’t let her near him, Bizzy. She’s bound to cast a spell on him.
Dog Days of Murder Page 15