“What? That’s ridiculous. Why would anyone think that?”
Kit Kat scratched the side of her forehead with the pinkie finger of her cigar hand. “Well, we tried to tell you earlier about all the scuttlebutt around town this week. And it seems there’s been a development.”
“What scuttlebutt?” I asked, looking back and forth between them. “What development?”
The twins looked nervous. “Well, you know all the gossip about Grady and Candace?”
“No, I really don’t know.”
“I thought you of all people would know what’s going on,” Kit Kat said.
“Just tell me!” Then a horrible thought occurred to me. What if they said Grady and Candace were getting married? No … surely I would have noticed a ring on Candace’s finger. And what about their brouhaha earlier? Not that it was any of my business, because we weren’t meant to be. But what if they—
“They’re breaking up.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said before I could help myself.
The twins chuckled.
“Tell us how you really feel,” Tweety said, picking up her tumbler and taking a sip.
“I can’t believe you didn’t know,” Kit Kat said again.
“Well, I can’t believe you two didn’t tell me!”
Tweety shrugged. “You’re always over at Freddie’s.”
“You could have texted me. I know you know how to text.” The twins had somehow discovered adult emojis and thought it was hilarious to send me barrages of them at weird hours of the day.
“Yeah,” Tweety said, shooting her sister a look. “Truth was, we didn’t know how you would react.”
“How I would react?” I asked, really confused. It’s not exactly like my feelings for Grady were a secret in this town. Nothing was a secret in this town … unless you were me! “Are people blaming me?” I gasped. “Are they saying Grady’s still in love with me? Is that why he’s breaking up with her?” In all honesty, I would have never been so happy to be hated in my life … or at least that’s how I would have felt if I hadn’t moved on.
“Yeah, no,” Tweety said. “That’s not it.”
Dammit.
“And for the record, it’s Candace who’s breaking up with Grady.”
“Tonight,” Kit Kat jumped in. “If you believe the rumors.”
“What? That doesn’t make any sense. Why would she do that? At a party of all places?”
“Yeah, that’s the crazy part.”
I waited. I was getting pretty tired of prodding these two for information.
“Apparently.” Kit Kat paused to take a deep breath. “It’s because she’s afraid of how he’s going to react. She wants lots of people around. Everybody to know. In case he’s thinking of doing something crazy.”
I blinked. “Come on.”
They just looked at me.
“You can’t be serious.”
Kit Kat shrugged.
I once again looked back and forth between the two of them. They weren’t kidding. “Nobody’s going to believe that. I mean, Grady’s … Grady.”
“Hey, you don’t have to tell us,” Kit Kat said. “I’m just saying it’s the rumor.”
Tweety frowned. “And now you’re saying someone is trying to poison Candace. People will have a field day with that.”
“I’m not saying that. Freddie’s saying that because he’s upset about his dog.” I did not like this at all. Okay, I mean, fine, Freddie and I were occasionally prone to flights of fancy, but this could not be one of those times. I needed to shut this down now.
“Well then, you had better stop him from spreading it around,” Tweety said. “You of all people know how rumors can get out of control in this town.”
Kit Kat nodded. “And let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.”
“Okay, I gotta go. You two behave yourselves,” I said, pointing at them both.
Tweety snorted. “Yeah, ’cause we’re the duo that’s going to get out of control.”
* * *
I hurried back to the hallway that led to the conservatory. I got a text from Freddie saying to meet him there. I almost texted Grady to join us, but I needed to think on how to tell him about all of this. He’d be really hurt if he knew what people were saying. But maybe it was better if he got a heads-up from me? No, I couldn’t do it. I’d talk to Candace first. That seemed like a better idea. Maybe she could kill all this gossip before it reached Grady. I couldn’t help but think that all the rumors about the threatening letter had somehow morphed into this accusation against Grady—kind of like a game of broken telephone. Candace could clear this all up. Yeah, I’d talk to her—once I got Freddie back on the leash.
The door to Matthew’s bedroom was open just a smidge as I passed by. Stanley was still asleep in the middle of the bed like the princess and the pea. Oh, and wasn’t that sweet. Matthew and Jessica were chatting by the fireplace across from his bed. They looked so cozy. Not that I cared. Much. I had way bigger fish to fry.
I was actually kind of angry that the people of this town would let the rumors get this far. Everyone knew that Candace doted on Grady. She put every picture of him she could up on social media. Just the other day she had posted a photo of him drinking coffee on his snowy porch. Not that I was anonymously stalking her pages or anything. She had blocked me from her social media a while back. And everybody knew that Grady was definitely not the type of guy you needed to be concerned about when it came to breakups. I mean, we had certainly done it enough. It was really easy. We hadn’t even had a real conversation about our last split. Just bam! Broken up. I probably should have asked the twins who was spreading all of this talk in the first place.
I spotted Freddie walking by the wall of stained-glass windows at the far end of the conservatory with his fingers pyramided under his chin. At the sound of my footsteps he whirled around. “Where have you been? Grady got away from me. I’ve tried texting him, but he’s not answering. And the glass is gone. Maybe we can find whoever cleaned it up. Hopefully it hasn’t been washed yet, or we can get the cloth that—”
“No. No. No.” I sliced my hands in the air. “There has been a change of plans.”
Freddie arched an eyebrow.
“The investigation’s off.” I filled him in on everything the twins had told me. When I finished, he didn’t say anything right away. I prepared myself for the onslaught of protest. I was holding firm though. We couldn’t make things worse for Grady. I mean, that was kind of like a hobby for us given that we were always investigating crimes we shouldn’t be and he was sheriff. But this was personal.
Finally, Freddie nodded and said, “I can see where you are coming from.”
“You can?”
“Well, yeah.”
I shot him a sideways look. “Really?”
“Of course,” he said. “I mean, I’m still pretty upset about Stanley, but given this new development, it would be extremely reckless to spread unfounded rumors.”
Relief washed over me. “Exactly.”
“I think we should still tell Grady what happened, though, just in case someone really is trying to kill Candace, but otherwise we need to shut this entire operation down.”
“Great, I—”
“Well, well, well,” a voice said from behind me. “Erica Bloom.”
Freddie brushed by me. “We shut everything down just as soon as we talk to him.”
My stomach dropped as my skeevy meter went through the roof.
Nuts.