“Welcome to the Knock ’em Dead podcast!”
“Where murder and muffins meet!”
“I’m Hollis.”
“And I’m up to my eyeballs in pie!”
I had given up on trying to make Daisy conform to a script. In fact, I’d given up on making Daisy do a lot of things. I figured it was her podcast, too, and people liked her exactly as she was. In fact, most people in Parkwood still believed this was a cooking podcast and I was interrupting her with my murder stories.
Hey, success was success, and I would be a fool to fight it.
“That’s Daisy, for all you pie-lovers out there.”
She held up a gorgeous dessert toward the microphone as if the audience could see it. She knew they couldn’t, but still did it out of habit. Or superstition. I wasn’t sure which. “Huckleberry,” she said. “Now, I know that’s a summer pie. But I don’t see any reason why we can’t have summer in our podcast nook—”
“Corner.”
“And, don’t worry. Next week I’ll dish up something special for your Thanksgiving Day menu planning. I think everyone’s going to be feeling a little energized after their turkey dinner with the recipe I have in store. But first, huckleberry. I have a story about huckleberry pie—”
“So listen, Daisy, before we get into any stories or today’s secret ingredient or our new theme, I need to do something.”
She looked panicked. Last time I’d hijacked the podcast with something serious to say, we’d ended up angry at one another.
“I have a retraction I need to issue. I didn’t say any names in my last podcast about the Coach Farley murder, but some people were pretty convinced that a certain person ran down Coach Farley. But police have cleared him—in fact, he was never an official suspect—and Coach Farley’s own wife, Wilma Louise, has plead guilty to one count of attempted assault with a deadly weapon and one count of voluntary manslaughter. My apologies to everyone for prematurely reporting.”
“Hollis, that was really nice,” Daisy said.
“It’s the right thing to do,” I said.
My phone rang. It was the Chronicle Weekly.
“Hollis?” Joyce’s voice came out tinny and urgent. “Mary Jean wants you to come in asap. There’s some breaking news coming in over the scanner, and she wants you to be our lead reporter to follow it.”
“Wait, what? What kind of news? Lead reporter? Me? Not Ernie? Are you sure? Did she really say that?”
“Are you going to ask questions all day or are you going to come?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
I whipped off my headphones and dropped them on the table, then turned off the recording equipment.
“What’s going on?” Daisy asked, taking hers off, too.
“Breaking story, I don’t know what. Gotta go.” I grabbed my bag, double checked for my notebook and pencil, and then stopped at the front door. “Is Mike home?”
Daisy grinned. “You bet he is.”
“Let’s go.”
I opened the front door just in time to see Brooks pull up in front of my house. He was back in uniform. He got out, stood by his car, folded his arms, and shook his head.
“We’re going to have to shake my babysitter,” I said with a sigh. Though I couldn’t help smiling just a little when I said it. I would have been disappointed if he hadn’t shown up.
“Not a problem.” She fired off a quick text to Mike, then joined me at the front door. “Look at us—editing our podcast, making pies, solving crimes, shaking the fuzz. Girl, we are legit!”
We high-fived.
That was all I wanted from the very beginning, really.
The End