Murder in the Mansion Read online

  I set the sander aside when I couldn't see through the tears anymore, and pulled off my mask to swipe my cheeks. Erol floated in, his eyes tearing up, too. "Oh, honey. It's gonna be okay. I promise. I'm gonna miss her too, and so is everybody else. I'm not gonna say you'll find something to fill the hole she'll leave behind, but I will say you'll find other things to bring you joy. And it’s not like she’s leaving forever. Don't think of it as the end; think of it as the next chapter."

  I nodded, knowing he was right, but I couldn't quite convince my wayward heart that life as I knew it wasn't crashing to an end. I brushed the tears off my cheeks and sniffed. "I know. It's just hard."

  "Of course it is, sweetie. Otherwise, they wouldn't call them growing pains. But you'll see. She's going to be fine, and you'll be able to focus on taking the next steps in your own life. I'm not saying Shelby's been a burden, but you've been a parent for the last three years. That wasn't particularly fair of fate to thrust that on you when you were barely starting your own life as an adult, but now you'll be able to get to know who you are, outside of being Shelby's big sister and guardian first."

  His eyes twinkled. "Just think—you can stay out all night, and go on trips without worrying about whether some magical force is going to attack while you're gone. Or whether or not Shelby will get into any human trouble because you're not there to keep an eye on her."

  It almost felt like a betrayal to be excited about all those things, but it was there, anyway, underneath the sadness and regret.

  I gave him a watery smile and would have shoulder bumped him if he'd had a body. "How'd you get to be so wise?"

  "Six younger brothers and sisters," he said, and I turned to him, surprised.

  "You have that many siblings?"

  He nodded. "Yup. I'm the oldest, and there are ten years between me and my youngest brother. I watched my mom go through this, first with me, then with all of them. Well all of them except for the youngest. Mama passed before he graduated, and he lived with me for the last two years of high school."

  "So you really do know what I'm going through."

  "I do, and it sucks. I wish I could shoulder it for you, or at least give you a solid shoulder to cry on."

  "You're perfect just the way you are," I said, even though not a day went by that I wasn't at least a little angry at the gods for cutting his life so short.

  Six brothers and sisters, though. That brought a dozen questions to mind. I'd gotten the shop for back taxes, similar to the way Marybeth had gotten the houses over on the east side. That was before we knew Erol had been murdered and was still lingering in the shop, and I'd sworn when I'd handed the check over that if anybody ever came forward, I'd pay them a fair price.

  He waved his hand and shook his head. "I already know what you're thinking, so stop. Two of my brothers and three of my sisters are all doctors or engineers or lawyers, and they're scattered all over the country. They don't need the few thousand bucks this place would bring, and I want you to have it anyway."

  That was only five. "And what about the sixth?"

  A dark cloud passed over his face and bitterness laced his tone. "As far as I'm concerned, there is no sixth. He rejected me completely when he found out I was an aberration against God, to use his words."

  My phone rang, interrupting the choice words I was going to say about his brother. I pulled it out of my pocket.

  "Hey, Coralee," I said when I answered.

  "Hey, Noelle. I found Norm and Sammie."

  Erol must have heard, because he floated closer so he could listen in.

  "Thank heavens," I said. "Are they okay?"

  "Yeah, but only because Marge came in for a haircut before she went to dump them out in the country."

  "Say what?" I asked.

  "She caught them in the hardware store. It seems they've been going in and trying to filch sandwiches and whatnot out of the trash and she caught them in one of those humane traps. She was just on her way to take them to the country and dump them out."

  I breathed a sigh of relief. "Tell her I'll be right over."

  "I done told her that," she said. "I figured you'd head over there lickety split as soon as I called you."

  "Thanks, Coralee. I owe you one."

  "Nah," she said. "I love 'em just like you do. I'm just glad the two little troublemakers are okay. Give 'em what-for, though. They should know better than to do that, and it's not like they don't get enough to eat between me, you, Raeann, and Anna Mae."

  "Will do," I said, my heart suddenly lighter.

  I unplugged the sander and put it back on the shelf, then washed to fine layer of old stain off my hands and forearms before I headed over to rescue our wayward rodents.

  At least there was one problem I could move to the solved column.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEN I BROUGHT NORM and Sammie, who wore matching remorseful expressions, back into the shop, Erol did what any parent would in that situation. He fawned over them and made sure they were okay, then gave them a blistering lecture.

  I just filled up their food bowl and put a few fresh crackers out, then left him to it. I figured he had the situation under control, and from the way the pair had jumped from Marge's cage and into my hand, I had a feeling they weren't going to be pillaging anybody else's trash for a while.

  Hunter wasn't quite ready to leave when I went to his office, so I sat in the chair across from him and flipped through Reddit on my phone while he finished up his paperwork.

  I giggled when I came across a picture of a squirrel sitting on a German shepherd’s nose, captioned "For six months, you've been yelling at me to come out of my tree. Well here I am. Now what?"

  He glanced up at me, his sea-green eyes sparkling. "What's so funny?"

  I turned my phone toward him and showed him the meme, and he smiled.

  "Is that Wiz, or what?" Wiz was Matt’s German shepherd, and he tormented the squirrels on the farm endlessly. Or maybe they tormented him. I wasn't too sure.

  "It is." His gaze searched mine. "Listen Noe, I know things have been a little tense lately. I've just had a lot on my plate here at work, and the attack did freak me out, but I’m trying to working through it. I'm sorry I've been less than a ray of sunshine."

  I opened my mouth to reply, but snapped it shut when I heard his voice in my head.

  I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to her.

  My brain stuttered over what I'd heard, and I hovered between embarrassed that I'd heard his private thoughts and guilty that my baggage was causing him stress. The worst part was that I couldn't do anything about it.

  I had to admit, though, that I was a little relieved that the stress in our relationship wasn't because he was getting bored. Worry, we could work through. Lost interest, we could not.

  "I haven't exactly contributed to your piece of mind either, so there's no need to apologize."

  He closed the folder in front of him, then came around the desk and offered me his hand. "I think I hear a cold beer and pizza from Duck's calling our name. What say we get out of here?"

  "You've got it," I said. "After the day I've had, that sounds just like what the doctor ordered. Except maybe it'll take two beers to put today behind me."

  "Oh, yeah?" he said, casting a curious look down at me as we left his office. "And what happened to make it a two-beer kinda day?"

  I went through the whole Norm story, playing it up because I didn't want to tell him about my accidental psychic eavesdropping incidents. He was already struggling with the magical side of things, and I didn’t want to throw more gas on the fire. If it didn’t resolve, well, I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.

  He shook his head. "They're lucky she was using humane traps instead of plain old off-with-your-head ones."

  "Believe me, I know. Erol was really giving them an earful when I left, and if he hadn't, I would have. He was beside himself when I got there."

  For once, Peggy Sue, the woman who pretty much ran the courthouse s
ingle-handedly, wasn't at her desk, and I found I missed seeing her cheery face.

  "Where's Peggy Sue? She never leaves before five."

  "She took the day off," he said. "She and her sister went to Atlanta on a shopping spree. Some store is having a going-out-of-business sale, and they're making a mini-vacay out of it."

  "Good," I said. "She deserves it." Peggy Sue had been through a lot when Hank was still the sheriff, and now that she was free of him, she was happy and carefree—the complete opposite of the miserable person she'd been while working under his thumb.

  "She does," he replied. "And I'm thinking about taking a week or two off soon, too."

  I glanced up at him, surprised. He'd taken a day here and there since he'd become sheriff, but never a chunk like that. "Seriously?"

  He nodded. "I need a break from everything. I'm thinking about getting a cabin in the mountains to just soak in the peace, be alone with my thoughts, and take a good look at where things are heading."

  My heart sank. That didn't sound encouraging at all, and he'd said I, not we. I wondered if our relationship was part of what he had to take a look at. I wanted to ask, but chickened out.

  "That sounds like a fabulous plan," I said, for lack of anything better to say.

  "I think so, too," he said, then leaned down and gave me a peck on the nose.

  Talk about mixed signals.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WE DECIDED TO GRAB three pizzas instead of one once we got to Duck's, the best pizza place in town. We'd both skipped lunch, so part of it was that we were starving, and the other part was that we had hungry teenagers waiting for us. We debated four, but figured we could eat fast enough to at least get a couple slices in before they cleaned us out.

  Shelby, Cody, Emma, and Becki were relaxing on the porch, cokes in hand, when we pulled up. They looked like they'd just run a marathon, or more accurately, gone through one of those under-the-wire bootcamp exercises. They typically avoided doing anything that might cause them to break a sweat, so I wondered what had caused the crack in the mold.

  I furrowed my brow. "What's up?" I asked. "Y'all look like you've been through the wringer."

  Shelby scowled, then pressed the cold bottle against her cheek. "Mayhem is what happened."

  Uh-oh. Mayhem was our friend Gabi's horse, and she couldn't have picked a better name for him if she'd tried. The horse could unlatch any gate and open any lid. We had to Mayhem-proof the entire place by putting clips and extra locks on the gates, and keeping anything edible locked up.

  Becki had hay stuck in her blonde hair, and Emma's face was streaked with dirt.

  "All hell was breaking loose when we got here," Becki said. All the horses were loose, and three of them were in the hay barn, opening every single bale in there. The other ones was running loose, some of them in the yard, some in the back pasture, and some in the front pasture."

  "Everybody was easy to catch except for Lila," Shelby said, "and she was an utter rip. We chased her for a half hour until we cornered her in the arena, then we had to clean up the hay mess."

  "That really sucks, guys," I said. I knew how they felt—it wasn't the first time Mayhem had caused trouble, but we'd thought we had it solved when we started clipping his door shut.

  "How did he get out?" I asked, my mind automatically going to a worst-case scenario. I was afraid somebody had been here messing around, which was something I'd never worried about until a few months ago, when Katrina started stalking me. Since then, even something small was tainted with a sinister cloud.

  "The clip broke," Cody said, brushing sawdust off his arm. "It looks like he gave the rope a good yank and it gave."

  Relief washed over me when he presented me with a perfectly innocent explanation—and one that wouldn't require me to buy a new gate.

  "I swear," Hunter said, "we need to buy padlocks for the gates and his stall."

  "Don't think I haven't thought about it," I said, an eyebrow raised. "The only reason I haven't is because if, God forbid, something happened and we needed to get him or the other horses out quickly, we'd have to mess with a lock first. Otherwise, this place would be locked down tighter than Fort Knox."

  Hunter held up the pizza boxes. "Unless I miss my guess, it's a good thing we picked up plenty of food, then."

  "Amen," Emma said, pushing out of the rocking chair. "I'm starving and ready to get into the AC."

  As predicted, the pizzas didn't stand a chance. Within minutes, it was as if a swarm of locusts had descended. I'd pulled a box of brownies I'd made the day before from the freezer, and most of those were gone too. We were sitting around the table trying to find the energy to move when Hunter's phone rang. He groaned when he saw the number.

  "It's JP," he said, referring to his second-in-command. "I swear, he's a damned good cop, but he has no confidence. He's afraid to make the smallest decision without consulting me first. He made Skeeter wait last week while he called me to make sure it was okay to change the front brakes as well as the back ones on his cruiser."

  He sighed and slid his finger across the screen to answer. "Hey JP. Is everything okay?"

  His spine straightened and the irritation on his face morphed into single-minded focus.

  "Where?" he clipped.

  "Okay, when was that?"

  After a couple seconds, in which we could here JP's exciting chatter but couldn't make out the words, Hunter said, "Preserve the scene. I'll be right there. I'm at the farm, so give me fifteen minutes."

  He disconnected and jumped to his feet. "I have to go," he said, leaning down to give me a quick, absent-minded peck.

  "Wait! What's going on?" I asked. "Is everything okay?"

  "I'd say not," he said, his hand on the screen doorframe. "Not unless you call murder okay."

  Shelby shot a look at her friends, and the color rose in her face. Her green eyes became just a tad more luminescent than they usually were—one of the signs her magic was bubbling to the surface. "Murdered?" she asked. "Who was murdered? Who did it? Was it magical?"

  She'd been every bit as on edge as I had been for the past month, ever since Katrina and her band of crazy crones had held her captive right in that very living room a month or so before.

  The problem was that I wasn't sure if she had full control over her powers or if she'd been having any problems with them. If she didn't have a strong handle on them, or if they were as wonky as mine, that could spell disaster. Melody, an angel who had rescued her from one colossally bad decision that had led to her being stuck in the in-between, had given her a wide array of angel magic along with the juice to use it. Though she'd been working hard to master them, if she lost control for even a second—like, say, if her friends and family were at risk—the cost would be high. She could probably blow up the house without much effort, so a stray spike brought about by high emotions could be disastrous.

  I held out my hands. "Calm down, Shel," I said. "Let's get the details first."

  She took a couple deep breaths and her eyes returned to normal, though her cheeks remained flushed.

  I turned to Hunter, who shook his head. "It's Grace Murphy. The cleaning crew just found her dead in Jim Simpson’s mansion."

  Frowning, I said, "The real estate agent? What happened to her? How do you know she was murdered?"

  "I'm guessing the banister ball didn't fling itself at her head," he said, brows raised. "So the only real alternative is murder."

  "Did they see anything?" I asked. "Was anybody else there?"

  He avoided my gaze and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  I wish she wouldn't have asked. She's going to run headfirst into another mess.

  "Yes," he said aloud, sighing. "The maids said they passed Marybeth on their way in. She was heading back toward town.

  I rolled my head on my shoulders, trying to relieve the tension that had suddenly gathered there when I’d overheard his thought. "But you don't believe she did it, right?"

  Hunter held his hands out
, palms up. "I have to follow the evidence. And right now, it's pointing a tad in Marybeth's direction. She just got into it—in a fairly heated fashion—with Grace over a substantial chunk of cash, and she was seen leaving the scene. And I've met her. I have no doubt she has the temper to do it."

  "Just because she was on the road doesn't mean she was even at the house. She did just buy several other properties out there. She could have been at one of them."

  Cheri Lynn popped in right then, and I couldn't help but notice how she looked like an American Eagle model in a checkered shirt and jean shorts. "Yeah," she said, sounding out of breath even though I knew that was impossible. "She’s been at Tassels for the last hour."

  "Cheri," I said. "How did you know to come here?"

  She shot me a duh look. "Because you're spending all the time with Shelby that you can, and he's spending as much time with you as he can." She shot a quick glance at my little sister. "Sorry, Shel. Of course he wants to spend time with you too." She gave her head a shake as if to clear it. "Besides, I have a sort of radar that helps me find you. Anyways, that's neither here nor there. I wanted to let you know she's been at Tassels, so she couldn't have killed Grace."

  Hunter gave a curt nod. "I'll keep that in mind, but since we have no idea when she was killed, we can't rule her out just yet."

  Cheri's face fell. "Well I'm telling you, she's a good person. She didn't kill nobody."

  He glanced helplessly between the two of us. "I'll do what I can, but I have to follow the trail."

  I nodded. "Can I come with you?"

  "I'd rather you didn't," he said.

  "Okay," I replied, pulling in a deep breath and pushing it out through my nose. His words from earlier about going away to the cabin and his thought from just a couple minutes ago crept into my mind. I didn't want to push him away, and he was a good cop. He'd find out who did it.