Most people spend their entire lives without ever stumbling across a dead body, but I’d found two corpses in about as many months. It would be nice to go a decade or two between gruesome discoveries. Was that too much to ask? Apparently so.
I waited in the hallway for the police after I’d called them. I’d shouted to Pete, but he didn’t respond. I wondered where he had gone—the building wasn’t large. He should have been able to hear me, and I didn’t want to leave Mayor Bob alone long enough to go looking for him. I knew the mayor was beyond caring about such things, but I wasn’t, so I parked myself on a bench opposite the open door and tried to distract myself from thinking about the dead man in the office chair.
Still clutching the iced coffee I’d made for the mayor, my gaze roamed the strangely bare walls. They were dingy and in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint. The portrait of Bob and his wife smiled mockingly at me. It was a large photo in an even larger frame. Rather than being hung in the middle of the otherwise empty wall, it was offset, closer to the door than the center of the room where visitors couldn’t miss it, but Bob himself would hardly see it from behind his desk.
Thinking of his desk drew my thoughts back to the dead body. There was no sign of violence. Mayor Bob was getting up there in years, but he’d acted fine this morning at the DJ booth. It all seemed so sudden. I was hit with a wave of sorrow for a man I barely knew, and rather than dwell on it, I focused on the bookshelf to distract myself. The books were all a uniform size. The only difference was a slight variation in the colors on the spine from reddish-brown to brownish-red, as if Bob had bought the lot of them as a set.
Granted, I wasn’t the neatest person in the world. If you asked my sisters, they’d claim I was a slob. Whatever. Either way, compared to the mayor’s, my bookshelves were pure chaos. Books were stacked wherever they fit with no consideration for size, color, genre, or author. Mysteries were shelved with sci-fi, cozies, and romance all willy-nilly. And any space between, in front of, or above the books was filled with knickknacks, from old Beanie Babies to a lopsided bowl I’d made at a pottery and wine place I’d gone to with Tansy.
There were no knickknacks in Mayor Bob’s office. Not on the bookshelf. Not on top of the cabinets. Not on the desk.
Trying to ignore the body of the dead mayor just a few feet away, I turned my attention to the filing cabinets, wondering what they held. Plain manila folders, I presumed, if the rest of the office was any clue. Who even kept paper files anymore? Everything was digitized now.
My curiosity almost got the best of me. I was one breath away from going back into the office to open one of the drawers—just to take a quick peek, I wouldn’t have taken anything—when I heard my name.
“Juniper Jessup,” a familiar male voice drawled. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
The man walking toward me, leading a small procession of emergency personnel including a uniformed officer and two people wheeling a stretcher between them, wore a large cowboy hat tilted back on his head. His cowboy boots echoed as they clacked against the hard floor.
The automatic lights turned on as the EMTs headed inside the office to check on Mayor Bob. I could have told them it was a waste of time. I was no expert, but even I could tell he was beyond help. While we waited for them to do their job, I turned my attention to the man in charge.
“Detective Beauregard Russell,” I replied. “Thanks for responding so fast.”
Beau was Cedar River’s only official detective. He pulled double duty as a uniform cop when crime was slow, and could usually be found lying in wait in speed traps coming into town or helping little old ladies cross the street. He was polite. Cocky. Whip-smart. Funny. He always had just the right amount of stubble and a wicked smile that could disarm a rock.
We dated back in high school and all throughout college. Then he dumped me—over text. He later claimed it was to keep me from turning down a dream job out of state, which I guess was chivalrous according to his logic, but at the time it had hurt. Bad. Since my return to Cedar River, he’d tried his hardest to pick back up where we’d left off, but until I knew what I wanted, I was keeping him at arm’s length. Which was a challenge, since Beau Russell was my kryptonite.
He stopped a foot away from me, which was unfortunate because after finding Mayor Bob’s body, I really could have used a hug. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at the Bluebonnet Festival with everyone else?” he asked.
I held out the coffee. “I came by to drop off a drink and found him like that.”
The paramedics joined us at the door. “He’s gone,” the woman said. “It’s hard to tell with the air conditioner blasting cold like that, but he’s been dead a while.”
“Thanks,” Beau said with a curt nod.
“Poor Bob,” I said. “I swear it’s not my fault.”
“Uh-huh,” the Black woman next to Beau said. She was my height, but looked petite next to Beau. Officer Jayden Holt held herself like she was in charge, even when everyone else in the room outranked her. She liked classic R&B music, ate salads with the dressing on the side, and was the first person Beau called whenever there was a problem.
“Miss Jayden,” I said, nodding at her. Anywhere outside of Cedar River, it would be disrespectful to call a police officer by their first name, but that’s just the way things were done around here. If I’d addressed her as “Officer Holt,” she would have given me her signature glare, the one rumored to make grown men cry.
She returned my nod. “Was the light on when you got here?” I guess she’d noticed the automatic lights switch on when the paramedics entered the office.
I shook my head. “Nope. Not until I walked in.” I was having a hard time concentrating on her question with a dead body just a few feet away from us.
Jayden pulled out a notepad. “How long have you been waiting out here?”
I pulled out my phone and looked at my outgoing call log. “About five minutes.”
“How long before we got here did the lights go off?”
I had to think about that. Up until I saw Beau and company coming down the hall, the lights were on. I remember that because I was staring at the spines of his books and contemplating the contents of the filing cabinets. I was relieved I hadn’t acted on my impulse to snoop. Getting caught riffling through a dead man’s files wouldn’t have looked good for me, not even if I was the lead detective’s ex-girlfriend.
Although, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that was the best label for Beau and me. Beau certainly didn’t think so. He seemed to believe us getting back together was inevitable. And then there was Teddy. Why did everything have to be so complicated? And to make matters worse, now I had that Avril Lavigne song stuck in my head.
“Juni?” Jayden prompted.
“Yeah, um, just trying to remember.” I shrugged. “The lights must have gone off about the time y’all arrived.”
“Did you touch anything?” she asked.
“Not much. The door handle, from the outside.” I thought hard, trying to recall the seconds between opening the office door and realizing that Mayor Bob was dead. “Honestly, it’s all a blur. I don’t think so, no.”
“Holt,” Beau said, drawing her attention. “Give me a hand.”
The paramedic who had pronounced Mayor Bob dead stood in the doorway, blocking my view of the proceedings. I was okay with that, to be honest. I’d already seen enough. “You need us?” she asked Beau.
“Not yet,” Beau replied. “Take five. Grab a coffee or something.” He paused. “Then again, maybe you’d be better sticking with water.”
The tone in his voice sent a jolt up my spine. I strained to see around the paramedic. Beau crouched in front of the dead mayor, hands gloved as he directed Jayden to take pictures of the to-go coffee cup in Bob’s hand. The Sip & Spin Records coffee cup. “Why don’t you find a quiet place for Miss Jessup to sit,” he continued. And I thought it was bad when he called me Juniper. “I’ll want to talk to her later.”
In a daze, I let the paramedics guide me back to the main entrance. I sunk into one of the chairs in the lobby with a paramedic seated on either side of me as if they were worried I would pass out or make a run for it. My phone rang, startling me. I glanced down at it and saw it was Tansy, probably wondering where I was.
I started to answer my phone, but one of the paramedics put her hand over the screen and gently took it away from me. “They can leave a message,” she said, placing my phone on the chair on the other side of her, where it continued to ring until it dumped Tansy into voicemail.
“That’s my sister,” I explained.
“I know,” she said.
I studied her face. The paramedic didn’t look familiar, but in a town like Cedar Creek, even if I didn’t know someone, they probably knew who I was. I glanced at her name tag, which read “Kitty Harris.” It rang a bell. “You’re J.T.’s cousin,” I said, my brain filling in the blanks. My sister Maggie’s husband, J.T., had mentioned that his cousin Kitty was moving to Cedar River to work at the local hospital. “Why haven’t you come to family dinner yet?”
“I’m the noob, so my schedule’s all over the place,” she said with a shrug. “Pulling a double today.” She looked down the hallway to where I assumed Beau and Jayden were documenting the crime scene. “Lucky me.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, letting my head fall back to rest on the wall behind me. Then I realized that I was sitting in the same position as Mayor Bob had been in when I found him, so I jumped up and started pacing the lobby. At the far end, I studied the off-brand candy bars in the vending machine, but nothing grabbed my attention. Next to it was an automatic coffee dispenser with an Out of Order sign on it.
I shivered. The image of Mayor Bob sitting with his back to his desk and one of my coffee cups in his lifeless hand was going to haunt me for a long time. Since I poured coffee for a living, I’d be reminded of his death every day. “At least he didn’t get decapitated by a record,” I muttered to myself.
“Excuse me?” the other paramedic asked.
I recognized Rocco O’Brien. He’d been a couple of years behind me in high school. Our paths didn’t cross socially, but he was one of the paramedics who had responded when I found a dead woman in the supply closet at Sip & Spin. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to get myself a reputation.
Pretending I hadn’t heard his question, I resumed my pacing.
“Maybe you should sit down,” Kitty suggested. “You’re probably in shock.”
“I’m good,” I assured her, even as Rocco said, “She’s fine. It’s not the first time she’s found a dead body.”
“What?” Kitty asked.
“It’s getting to be a bad habit,” he said with a chuckle.
I guess it was too late to worry about my reputation. “You were at both crime scenes, too, Rocco,” I pointed out.
He glanced down at his uniform, as if confirming that he was a first responder. “Yup, I sure was, wasn’t I?”
After a while, I heard the familiar clack of Beau’s boots on the tile floor as he and Jayden returned. He jerked his chin at the paramedics. “He’s all yours.” They stood and headed back to the mayor’s office. I reached for my phone, but Beau scooped it up before I could. “Not so quick. I need a word.” He glanced over at Pete Digby, who was hovering nearby. “Bingo hall open?”
“I’ll unlock it,” the security guard said.
We followed Pete. He flipped through his key ring until he found the right key. He unlocked the door for us and held it open. “Knock yourselves out.”
“Thanks,” Beau told him. Then to me, he said, “Take a seat.”
I sank down into one of the plastic chairs, the kind that always reminded me of elementary school. Beau took the chair next to me, spun it around, and sat down backward with his hands propped up on the back of it. “You okay, Junebug?” he asked.
A tiny part of me melted every time he called me by that old nickname. Junebug was the girl who used to sneak out of the house to make out with Beau in his truck, not someone who found dead people. “Is Jayden joining us?” I asked, looking at the empty doorway.
“She’s got her hands full,” he said. Unlike his officer counterpart, Beau didn’t pull out a notepad or look at me like I was going to spontaneously confess to some heinous crime.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis.
He nodded and took off his cowboy hat, letting it dangle from his hand over the back of the chair. “I reckon I know that. Just walk me through what happened from the beginning.”
“You ever notice how you sound just a wee more country when you want something?” I asked.
“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said as the corners of his mouth twitched just a bit.
“I reckon you don’t,” I said, imitating him. Then I cut to the chase. “Tansy and I were setting up the DJ booth at the festival this morning with Mayor Bob. He was supposed to emcee the event, but he had to take care of some business. Before he left, he complained about our coffee selection, so I whipped him up something and was going to drop it off here.” I held up the iced coffee. The ice had mostly melted and the whipped cream had dissolved. The result was less than appetizing.
“I’ll take that,” Beau said. He plucked the drink out of my hand and set it on the floor next to him. “I figured Sip & Spin would be closed today, with the festival and all.”
“It is. But I went back to grab some stickers we’d forgotten. While I was at the shop, I made him a drink,” I explained, feeling like we were talking in circles.
“And when you got here, how’d you get in?”
“Door was unlocked. Pete said it was okay.” I gestured at the doorway, but Pete had already returned to his post.
“When you found Mayor Bob, why didn’t you call Pete before calling me?”
“I tried to. I shouted for him. He didn’t answer and I didn’t want to…” My voice trailed off.
“You did right, not leaving the scene.” With his free hand, Beau reached out and touched my knee. “But next time, you might want to call 911.”
“Huh? I did,” I insisted. “I told you. When Pete didn’t respond, I called the police.”
Beau chuckled. “You called me direct, Junebug.”
“I did?” I guess I’d been more shaken than I realized. Then again, Beau was always the first person I thought of in an emergency.
He nodded. “You did.”
“Sorry.”
“Shucks, Juni, you can call me anytime,” he assured me. Beau squeezed my knee before removing his hand. “Did you see or talk to anyone this morning other than Pete?”
“Tansy was at the DJ booth, of course. And Teddy dropped by Sip & Spin while I was brewing coffee for the mayor.”
“Of course he did,” Beau said affably. I searched his face for any sign that he was bothered that Teddy and I were together this morning. Beau knew I’d gone out with Teddy, and vice versa. Both of them assured me that they were fine with me seeing anyone I wanted to, and seemed content to let me take things at my own pace. Frankly, they were both handling the whole situation a lot better than I was. It was low-key suspicious.
“I know you’ve had a rough morning. I have just one more question for you and then you can be on your way,” Beau continued. “If your shop is closed, and you never had a chance to deliver this drink, how did Mayor Bob get the Sip & Spin coffee he was drinking when he died?”