A crowd had gathered on the first floor landing of the stairs, looking down into the Gossip Inn’s foyer, with its chandelier and nooks containing tables bearing trinkets. The guests clasped their throats, covered their mouths or looked on in horror at the spectacle unfolding before their eyes.
If it could be called that. Folks in Gossip had a penchant for blowing things way out of proportion. I wasn’t sure if every small town was the same, but drama hung over the town in a nearly perceptible mist.
A woman kneeled in the middle of the foyer, right on the gorgeous Persian carpet, clutching her skirt in two fistfuls. Her dark hair fell around her shoulders in glossy waves, and her young, beautiful face was stricken with grief. She sobbed theatrically then threw herself forward, stretching her arms out in desperation, reaching for me.
Honestly, it reminded me of a scene out of a telenovela, and I was both alarmed and entertained.
“Ma’am?” I came forward and stopped just short of her scrabbling fingers. “Ma’am, are you OK? Do you need medical assistance?”
She choked out three hiccuping sobs. “I-I-I-I need your h-h-help.”
“With what?” I asked.
A quick assessment told me that she wasn’t injured. And she could talk and seemed lucid. I wanted to rule out a head injury, but then she had just flung herself onto the floor at my feet.
“Please.” She pushed herself upright then shifted hair from her face, looking up at me through teary eyes. “Please, you must help me. I can’t… I need… Please!” Another dramatic sob and bout of writhing on the floor.
Knowing that I hadn’t vacuumed all week made this worse. A cold wind, thankfully, it was never too bitterly cold in Texas, drifted through the inn’s front doors.
I straightened my apron, sighed, then extended a hand to the woman. “Come on,” I said. “You’re clearly in shock. You need some sugar.” I helped her up, and she clung to me, still weeping. “Sorry about this, everyone.” I called that to the guests. “I’m just going to make sure this woman is all right, but lunch will be served on time today, as usual.”
No one replied.
At least they’d get lunch and they’d had a show, right?
I wish Gamma was here. Gamma would’ve taken control of the situation instantly, perhaps even sent everyone off to their rooms before incapacitating the emotional woman with a pinch to the correct nerve cluster in the neck.
I guided the weeping woman into the kitchen and fed her into a chair at the square table. She bonked her head down on the table and continued to cry.
“Goodness, Charlie,” Lauren said, “you know the rules by now. No guests in the kitchen. It’s illegal.” Not technically true, but then again, Gossip had a lot of strange laws.
“It was this or I threw a bucket of water over her, and I didn’t want to ruin the carpet.” Gamma was particularly attached to her new carpet. She’d found it online at what she claimed was a “steal.” Knowing her, she’d really gotten it from one of her illegal contacts. They dealt in everything from RPGs to state of the art truth serums to ancient artefacts.
“I suppose,” Lauren grumbled. “Fix her some hot chocolate. I’ll take the food out to the dining room.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean, you might need—”
“Don’t worry about it.” Lauren gave me a sweet smile, and I returned it. Lauren was often willing to take on loads that she shouldn’t, and it was my fault, once again, that she was in this position.
The fact that the weeping woman had called out my name had to means he was here because she’d heard I was a “fixer.”
I prepared a mug of hot chocolate for her then brought it back and set it on the kitchen table. “There you go,” I said. “Drink up.” I wasn’t the best with emotional conversations, but I had learned a few things from Lauren and Gamma. “It will help you feel better.”
The woman lifted her head from the table, slowly, and gave me a bleary-eyed stare. Her bottom lip trembled. “T-t-thank you,” she whispered.
I wanted to feel sorry for her, but I’d had a similar encounter with a woman a couple of weeks ago and it had been because she’d lost her designer handbag. Needless to say, I would retain my cynicism until I had a reason not to.
The woman lifted her mug and took a sip. A chocolate mustache remained on her top lip.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“M-M-Mia Cruz,” she said.
“Right. Mia. Nice to meet you. What can I help you with?” I sat down in the chair opposite hers and rested my elbows on the table.
I was sure this would either be an interesting case or about something completely mundane.
“My boyfriend, Donny, has been murdered.”
An interesting case!
“And the police think I’m the one who did it!” Mia finished, releasing it as a wail. Though, I couldn’t help noticing that her stammer was gone. “You have to help me. I can’t stand the thought of them accusing me of this when I’ve done nothing wrong, and I’ve lost my dearest Donny. My love. The man who was going to be my husband.”
She couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one. That seemed young to be married, but, then again, I was a commitment-phobe at this point.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s start from the beginning.” This wasn’t my first time talking to a family member or loved one who was involved in a murder case. We had to progress through this step-by-step. If Mia wound up being the one who had done it, it wouldn’t be the first time I had been approached by the victim of a crime who was actually the perpetrator. People were weird like that.
“The beginning,” Mia said.
“Yes. Tell me what happened.”
“It’s all so confusing. I don’t even understand how it happened. One second he was serenading me, the next he was…” She made a choked noise in her throat.
“Wait, he was serenading you?”
“Yes,” she said, and her eyelashes fluttered. “My Donny loved to serenade me. He adored me, you see, treated me like I was his princess.”
“What’s Donny’s full name?” I asked.
“Donny Braxton.”
“OK. And now, when was the last time you saw him, and what happened to him?”
Mia took a deep, shuddering breath. “So, he, well, I—”
“It’s OK. Take your time.” It’s not like your boyfriend’s corpse is cooling somewhere or anything. Man, I really did have too much of a cynical side sometimes. It was the ex-spy, the Charlotte Mission part of me, rearing her head.
Mia fortified herself with another sip of hot chocolate. “Donny came over to my house last night,” she said. “I-I didn’t let him in because we were in the middle of a fight.”
“A fight? Over what?”
“I don’t really see how that’s important, right now,” Mia half-sobbed.
“You never know what might be important in a case like this,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “I need to know everything I can before I even decide to help fix your problem.”
That got her attention. She straightened in her chair and placed her Christmas mug off to one side. “Right, OK. Right. Donny and I had been arguing because I was tired of waiting for him to propose. I told him that either he had to give me a ring or it was over. He came by last night to try to win me over again.”
“OK, so he came by and then what happened?”
“He started singing underneath my window,” Mia said. “One of my favorite songs. ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’ by Snoop Dogg.”
I swallowed a snort. That wasn’t exactly the most, uh, appropriate song around. “Did you invite him in?”
“No,” she said. “My mother hates Donny. Thinks he’s a player or whatever, which is a total lie, but that’s beside the point. I was still mad at him, so I threw a shoe at him, and then I shut my windows and went to bed. He stopped singing about a half an hour later. And then—oh, it’s just, it’s terrible. My mom woke up this morning and found him on the front lawn. Dead!” That came out in another emotional screech. “And now the cops think that I did it. Because of my shoe. I just… I need your help, please. Help me figure out what really happened to Donny. My mother will pay you to help me.”
Why would your mother pay me when she couldn’t stand your boyfriend? That alone intrigued me.
I had gotten to the point where I could deny new cases if I wanted, even murder cases, especially if it meant I would step on Detective Goode’s toes.
My heart did a gymnastic flip at the thought of the handsome detective who had kissed me on Thanksgiving Day.
I swallowed, shoving that thought aside.
“Please. Help me.”
I stared at Mia for a few seconds, taking in the expression of wide-eyed innocence that I was fairly certain was fake. “OK,” I said. “I’ll take the case.”