As I stood outside the bathroom with Justice and Chief Ainsley Burrows, Coco pulled up in her little red Golf, screeching to a gravel-spitting halt. She flew at me the second her high-heeled feet hit the ground after exiting her car.
“Lemon!” she cried, throwing her arms around my neck and burying me in a cloud of warm vanilla-sugar perfume and gray-and-pink scarf. “Oh, thank the stars you’re okay!” She lifted my chin, her green eyes widening when she caught sight of the cut on my forehead. “He hit you, didn’t he? That son of a dirty, rotten, Dumpster-diving slimeball! Where is he? Is he in handcuffs? He’d better be! Ohhh, you can bet I’m going to let him have a good look at my fist just before I—”
“Coco!” I gripped her shoulders and looked at her through the film of light rain that had begun to fall. “Easy, Holyfield. There is no murderer.”
Or more accurately, there wasn’t one yet. No one scooped a decent enough man’s brains out of his head if murder wasn’t involved.
Her pretty face fell when she let me out of her python-like grip. “What? But all that scuffling and blood…and you used code word Twizzlers, Lemon. You scared the ever-lovin’ stuffing out of me. Why would you let me get all worked up like that?”
Coco never realized until much later that the working up she was talking about was almost always a solo effort. I admit, sometimes I can go along for one of her Mad Hatter rides, but today wasn’t one of them.
“Coco, listen carefully. There was never a murderer. Not in the bathroom with me, anyway. All that scuffling was just me chasing after Jessica Fletcher because she was throwing toilet paper around like confetti,” I said, and explained what happened. “Anyway, I’m fine. But Myron? He’s not so fine.”
My stomach lurched again, thinking about poor Myron. Okay, sure, he was a lying, cheating cheat, if you listened to one May Layne—a.k.a. my mother, by the by. And I’d agree, he’d done her so wrong. But he’d been a nice enough cheat, and he certainly didn’t deserve to end up dead.
Coco gave a quick glance at the doorway of the bathroom and visibly gulped, wrapping her arm around my shoulders and turning me away. Soggy toilet paper was strewn from one end of the sidewalk to the other as the police combed the area where Myron still lay.
Some of the officers had moved to the thickly wooded area hugging either side of our station, searching for evidence in Myron’s car parked just at the end of the station’s driveway, their voices muffled. I couldn’t believe I’d missed seeing his car, but I guess I wasn’t paying much attention so early in the morning.
I looked over to the front of the station’s store, a rundown shack my dad had converted into a charming, almost shop-like façade, complete with brick on the upper half of the building and white siding on the lower portion.
Add in a matching white picket fence under the quaint window by the cash register, where tulips and daffodils would bloom in the spring and mums with heads the size of a newborn baby’s fists would sprout in the fall, and you had my mother’s version of what essentially is a gas station with some sundries and such and awesome brisket and smoked catfish.
But Mom, a gardener at heart, insisted that small bit of flowers below the window gave the place a charming accent, making it look less like a convenience store and more like a place someone truly cared about.
I took a deep breath as more of the local PD poked about the pumps in the middle of the parking lot, sitting between the station and the road. Some had even ventured as far back as our completely renovated Victorian house, located four or five hundred feet behind the store.
The smoke from the smokers under the portico at the back of the store wafted upward in thin tendrils into the darkening skies, making me long to be inside mixing spices together, just doing something menial and normal.
I hoped the police didn’t disturb the koi pond—the pond I’d give my eyeteeth to be sitting by, mulling over this morning’s tragic events.
Coco shivered, tucking her scarf under her chin. “Do they know what happened to him yet? Why the heck was Myron in the gas station in the first place? Oh! You don’t think he was,” she wiggled her eyebrows, “visiting your mom behind Fabritzia’s back, do you? You know, maybe he found out his svelte, super-young Latvian bride wasn’t all she claimed to be? The grass wasn’t really greener and so on?”
Fabritzia was Myron’s new wife, Latvian born and bred, and almost forty-five years younger than Myron.
“Are you kidding me? Do you remember what she did when she found out Myron was cheating on her with Fabritzia? She launched his DVDs out the window of the house like flying saucers and shot them with my dad’s shotgun like shooting skeet. She threatened to—” I stopped short when Chief Burrows looked up and stopped writing on his pad of paper.
His tiny eyes set deeply in his head and almost swallowed whole by his plump red cheeks, devoured me. Or they sure felt like they were devouring me, but then he went back to his pad of paper and the local coroner, Vern Scheffler who was also Coco’s boss.
Dang. You’d better remember to shut up, Lemon. You know how easy it would be for anyone who didn’t know her to misconstrue Mom’s words.
My mother really had threatened to kill Myron four months ago when she’d found out he’d been two-timing her.
“He’s been all over the interweb highway like some stray dog in need of a bone, Lemon. I’m going to kill him, and then I’m going to hire a voodoo priestess to raise him from the dead and kill him again!”
Those had been her exact words. But she didn’t mean them. She threatens to kill me on a regular basis when I forget to make the barbecue sauce for the smoked meats we offer, and I still have my brains.
I instantly clamped my mouth shut and shook my head when I looked at Coco. “No. I’m pretty sure Mom wouldn’t even consider taking him back. I don’t know why Myron was in our bathroom. But I know I locked that bathroom door last night on my final round at about nine thirty. I’m as sure of it as I’m sure I’m standing right in front of you.”
Fig Harbor, its shops with thatched roofs and colorful boats lining the docks peeked out at me from the clearing in the woods across the street from the station. Justice handed something gold and shiny in an evidence bag to the chief. Then he strolled over to me, JF still happily perched on his shoulders, still running her fingers through his thick hair.
“So a couple of questions, if you don’t mind?”
I don’t know why JF on Justice’s shoulder irritated me so. Likely because she didn’t give him any guff, but more likely it was due to the fact that he’d brought up my mother and Myron’s ugly breakup and I felt a little petty.
He’d known my mother all his life. She’d fed him grilled cheese sandwiches after we all played football in my backyard. She’d picked us up from school and more basketball games than the two of us had fingers and toes, and even one night when Justice got too drunk to drive.
May Layne was as likely a suspected killer as a deaf, blind mute.
So, I crossed my arms over my chest and gave Jess a pointed glance to the place on my shoulder where she knew she should be sitting. Then I shot her the ultimate death glare. The one that said, “ignore me and lose your pineapple sauté for dinner.”
Of course, she happily ignored me, twirling her tail around Justice’s head and covering his eyes with the bushy end, chirping her love noises at him.
Pointing to my shoulder, I reiterated, “Now, Jess.”
She must have sensed my distress because she actually listened this time. She slipped off Justice’s shoulder and scurried her way up over the length of my body until she was perched on my shoulder.
“So some questions, Lemon,” Justice prompted again, sucking in his cheeks.
Coco, always ready to defend me, clucked her tongue as she positioned her purse in front of her and folded her hands over it. “Shouldn’t she have an attorney present?”
Justice widened his stance as the rain began to fall harder. “I’m not interrogating her, Coco. I’m just asking her what she found and when.”
My heart began to pound in that harsh throbbing way again. I didn’t want to relive out loud what I’d just seen, but I put a hand on pit bull Coco’s arm and squeezed. “It’s okay, Coco. This is just procedure.”
Her plucked eyebrows knitted together as she magically made an umbrella appear, popped it open, and held it over our heads. “You know what procedure is how, Lemon? Just because you watch a bunch of crime shows doesn’t mean it’s all real—”
“No. She’s right, Coco. It is procedure,” Justice assured her. Then he turned to me and hitched his jaw. “You okay?”
I nodded back, stroking Jessica’s tail for comfort. Justice, Coco, and I had all gone to school together. We’d known each other almost since birth. We’d hung out, we all had our first taste of his father’s whiskey under the bleachers of our high school together, we boated, swam and caught fish from the docks as far back as I can remember.
Justice and his questions didn’t intimidate me, but I’ll admit, I was a little put off by Policeman Justice—so stoic and in charge, as opposed to Good Time Charlie Justice, who used to chugalug an entire gallon of milk without taking a breath while we pounded the dining room table with our fists and cheered him on.
To be fair to him, I’d never been on this end of anything more serious than reporting the occasional shoplifter or poking at him about police procedure.
Justice pulled out a pad and a pen, poised to write my statement. “Start from the beginning, Lemon, and tell me what happened when you came outside this morning to do rounds.”
As I relayed everything exactly as I remembered it, our very small local police force continued to gather and bag evidence, trudging through the rain in their plastic-covered hats and shoes.
“What are the latex gloves about?” He used his pen to point to my hands.
“I clean up after stinky boys, that’s what they’re about. I always have them on me because I serve food and clean the bathrooms. But you know that, Justice.”
He ignored my reminder that we hadn’t just met. “So you said you didn’t hear anything last night or this morning? Nothing suspicious. Nothing out of the ordinary? No strange noises?” he probed.
Okay, now I could identify what was bothering me. It was his tone I wasn’t skipping through fields of buttercups about. He sounded very skeptical, almost cynical, and it was rubbing me the wrong way.
I couldn’t help but wonder if he was asking these questions in that manner of authority just to impress his boss. He knew me well enough to know I would have told him if I’d heard or seen anything the first time he’d asked, while we waited for Chief Burrows to show up.
Obviously, his tone was rubbing Coco wrong, too. “She was on the phone with me when she found Myron, RoboCop. So if you’re going where I think you’re going, I’m here to tell you, Lemon’s not that good an actress. Or don’t you remember our eighth-grade play? So just take that notion right out of your head and get your questions over with.”
I’d prefer not to relive the horror of my thespian debut as a grapefruit in the eighth grade, so I tugged Coco’s arm as a signal to relax. “Not a lot goes on out here at night, Justice. I would have called you if I’d seen or heard anything. You know that, too.”
We’re just on the outskirts of a busy but small beach town, with plenty to do during the tourist season.
In season, the Smoke and Petrol closes at eight p.m. sharp Monday through Saturday and at six on Sundays. Most of the locals know to give the tourists who’ve come to try our made-semi-famous-by-a-YouTuber barbecue a head’s up about our sort-of banker’s hours—hours that are the exact opposite of your average 7-Eleven.
But it was early January now, meaning we’re closed earlier during the week and on Sundays. So, there wasn’t much to report.
“I understand that,” he said in an almost whisper-yell, glancing over his shoulder at Chief Burrows. “But I have to ask these questions so it’s official and on the record. So help a dude out, would you, Lemon?”
Coco rolled her eyes and sighed, but I actually got it. No special treatment because we’d seen each other naked as babies and had the pictures to prove it.
I looked up at Justice and shook my head, spitting a curl from my mouth and putting my glasses back on. “I didn’t hear a single thing. Like I said, last night I was on the phone with Coco until about ten-thirty. I did my last rounds at nine thirty like I always do and hit the sack about ten forty-five. This morning, I already explained.”
Justice cocked his head as though I’d dropped some sort of crime spree hint. “So you went for coffee this morning. Can that be verified?”
“Yep. I got coffee from Gabby herself at Gabby’s Grind, and crazy Cappie was out and about. He saw me, but we didn’t talk.”
“So before you left for coffee, you didn’t notice the bathroom door was open or Myron’s car?”
Suddenly, I felt defensive again. The hairs on the back of my neck were actually standing up. I wanted him to get these facts down with some amount of accuracy.
I did, indeed, watch a lot of crime shows. Not just of the fictional variety, but of the real, reenacted variety, and I’ve witnessed a statement go askew because of some small glitch—like an overzealous cop gauging my reactions on paper with the wrong adjective.
So I set him straight as I wiped my face free of the rain. “I didn’t say it was open, Justice. I said it was ajar. Lou-Lou’s parked around the other side of the station, as you can see.” I pointed over my shoulder to our dirt parking lot just to the left of the store, where my yellow Volkswagen was parked by the Rose of Sharon tree. “There was no reason why I’d see it ajar if I went straight to my car from the house out back. I didn’t walk around the curb that lines the pathway to the bathrooms.”
He cleared his throat. “Right. And that didn’t seem suspicious to you? I mean, when you did see it?”
“What are you getting at here, Columbo?” Coco asked, fishing her phone out of her pink-and-gray purse. “Because I’m this close to forgetting you were once my date to the eighth-grade dance and calling an attorney.”
Justice straightened, his mouth pinched. “I’m just doing my job, Coco. And it wasn’t the eighth-grade dance, it was the sixth.”
Waving my hand between the two of them like a white flag, I answered Justice’s question. “Not suspicious. No. You know how Jessica Fletcher is, always stealing stuff and hiding it. Though now I know that wasn’t possible, at first I figured she’d nabbed the keys and opened it. She does make the best of her crazy long fingers, and she’s been opening doors since she was with Sissy. You also know that.”
JF once belonged to our closest neighbor, an aging circus performer named Sissy Feldman. She housed and rehabilitated primate circus performers who were no longer up to the grueling schedule of the circuit.
Sissy also took in many a monkey from families who’d mistakenly thought they made good pets, and that’s the circumstance under which Jessica came to her sanctuary. She’d taken JF, who, by the way, is a product of improper breeding and happens to be a runt in the spider monkey community, weighing in at just under thirteen pounds, because her mother had abandoned her and Sissy couldn’t bear that.
When she arrived, I fell in love—hard. Sissy was so convinced Jess and I had a special bond; she’d even let me rename her. When Sissy moved to Seattle two years ago to be with her children due to her diabetes worsening, Jess was the last of her rescues she was unsuccessful in rehoming, so she asked me to take her.
Jess was pretty well trained by the time I inherited her, thanks to Sissy, but she was still a monkey who really belonged in the jungle somewhere with those of her ilk. It was only by poor choices on her ex-owner’s part that she’d never survive in her natural habitat now. She’d bonded with humans, considered me her mother, and loved a good toothbrush massage.
There was an awkward silence as Justice scribbled on his pad, and Coco glared daggers at him.
Justice then went about examining my forehead with a critical eye before handing me a couple more wadded-up paper towels. “So you didn’t get into a fight with anyone? Because that sure is some cut.”
Seriously? Was he seriously considering me a suspect? I pressed the towels to my forehead to thwart any residual bleeding. “If you’re wondering if I got into an argument with a seventy-something-year-old man and it came to blows, then the answer is no. We weren’t out here cage fighting. Promise,” I said, trying really hard to keep the sarcasm from my voice. “Check the toilet paper dispenser yourself. I’m pretty sure a patch of my skin’s still on it.”
Coco snickered before she reminded me, “Seventy. He just turned seventy. Don’t you remember? We stumbled into his birthday party a month ago at Shrimp Cocktails when we went for drinks.”
Oh, yes. I remembered. “I do.”
“Best German chocolate cake I’ve ever had. Layer after layer of caloric suicide. Remember the layers, Lemon?”
“I remember the layers, Coco.”
“Ah.” Her voice suddenly went low with regret. “But then do you remember your mom, too? She was pretty mad at us. I knew we should have burned those party favors.”
I rolled my eyes. You bet I remembered that, too. “It wasn’t our fault we stumbled into her ex-boyfriend’s surprise birthday party hosted by his brand-new Latvian mail-order bride.”
“Which is the Dollar Store version of a Russian mail-order bride, according to your mom,” Coco said with a giggle.
“So your mom was pretty angry about Myron marrying Fabritzia? Where is she, anyway?” Justice interjected the question, his eyes as sharp as beacons from the lighthouse on the peninsula.
Darn. Shut up, Lemon.
I gave Coco the girlfriend warning sign with my eyes—meaning, say as little as possible about the things my mom had spouted. We knew each other well, so I knew she’d get the message.
Yet, Justice daggone well knew my mom had been angry. The whole town knew she’d been angry. Who wouldn’t be angry if you invested six months in a relationship, only to find out you were being left for someone your lover had never actually met? Someone with a sexy accent and no foreseeable need for Botox?
And all because mom didn’t want to get married. Sometimes even I couldn’t believe how far Myron had gone to spite her after she’d turned down his proposal on at least three separate occasions.
And then it hit me.
My mother!
I’d been so shaken over finding Myron like that and chasing after Jessica, I’d forgotten she was just inside the station.
She’d been fast asleep in the recliner at the back of the store when I’d left. It’s where she always waited for the Today Show to come on and for Leon, one of our part-time employees, to come open the store. I made sure she was up and ready to go before I left because I had to take her to the doctor’s appointment she so despises to have her blood pressure check, but I’m guessing like always she fell back to sleep.
What if this had happened to Myron while I was out getting coffee and she’d heard something? What if she’d come outside to investigate the noise—the kind of noise that must surely occur when you break into a gas station bathroom and dump a body as big as Myron’s?
Had whoever killed Myron encountered my mother first? What would he have done with her?
In just those ten seconds, I thought of a million scenarios where Myron’s killer could have also killed my mother and disposed of her elsewhere.
I realize it doesn’t make a lot of sense from a murderer’s perspective. Why not just dump my mother on top of Myron and make it a two-fer? But all rational thought left my head where my mom is concerned. She’s all I have left since my dad died.
Fear rushed like a wave of clammy fingers along my spine, blocking all else out.
Everything stopped for me at that moment. I didn’t bat an eye when Justice attempted to keep me from running toward the station by shouting at me. I didn’t care that Coco’s mouth was saying the word “no.” Her words sounded warbled and under water.
I barked an order to Jessica to hang on and made a break for the front of the store, leaping up over the curb, dropping the key in the lock faster than I ever thought possible and bursting through the glass door, pushing it open to the tune of far more incoming customer warning bells than even a deaf cashier needed.
That was Mom for you. Her suspicious nature was legendary. She always worried we’d be robbed due to my penchant for getting lost in a daydream or a new barbecue recipe and forgetting my immediate surroundings.
If there were a way to ward off danger—be it bells or whistles, sage burning or séances—she’d found it on the Internet and made good use of it after I’d moved back from Seattle and we’d taken over running the station together as two single women.
After what I’d seen today, all sorts of gruesome thoughts flitted through my brain. Panic rose and fell in my stomach like a swift tide of terror as I ran down the row of chips and candies with Jessica Fletcher clinging to my head.
I skidded to a halt—to find Mom in her favorite recliner, positioned just left of the long counter filled with lollipops and treats from the local bakery. The slight rise and fall of her chest had me reaching out for the scarred countertop in blessed relief.
Straightening my wobbly legs, I heard the pound of Justice’s feet, followed by the clack of Coco’s heels as they raced right behind me just as I reached down and squeezed her shoulder.
I composed myself, or tried to enough not to frighten her. Inhaling the distinct smell of the brisket in our smoker, I was glad to replace the damp, coppery smell of death.
“Mom? Wake up.” I nudged her again before giving her shortly cropped hair a gentle run through with my fingers, smiling fondly at the electric-blue fuzz she’d dyed to match the color of her eyes.
Mom, or May to the rest of the world, is eccentric, to say the least. To say the most would need way more time than I had to spare.
She popped upright, her bright blue eyes wide open just as I exhaled a whoosh of air in relief. I love my mom something fierce. She’s seventy, but she has the spirit of a fifteen-year-old, and the hairstyle to match. Sometimes I wonder if some Freaky Friday-like thing happened to us when I was born.
I’ve always been practical and cautious, and some would say I act more my mother’s age than my own thirty-three. May, on the other hand? Totally throw caution to the wind and watch it whizz by you as you jump out of a plane.
Which she had, by the way. Jumped right out of that airborne piece of metal and wings like she was “Free Bird,” and from the headcam footage, giggled like a teenager with a schoolgirl crush the whole way down.
Mom grabbed my hand, looking up at me. “What happened to your head, Sugarbuns?”
I waved off my head wound. “I tripped and hit my head. No big deal.”
Her sleepy eyes darted toward the flat screen TV I’d had installed in the far corner just so she wouldn’t miss her shows. “Did I miss it?”
I closed my eyes and swallowed the lump of undeniable love in my throat for this whacky woman who was nothing like me, but everything to me. “Well, define missed, Mom. You definitely missed something this morning. If you’re wondering if it’s your doctor’s appointment, then no. You didn’t miss that.”
“Damnation,” she said with a pout of her neon-pink lips and genuine disappointment in her reply.
“What is this I hear in your voice?”
Like I mentioned, my mother hates the doctor, but if it kept her blood pressure down and her life expectancy up, by golly, she wasn’t going to miss a single appointment. Not on my watch.
“Duh, Lemon. Look at the time.” She pointed to the big rooster clock on the wall above the TV. “It’s almost eight, which means, I missed The Rock on The Today Show. He’s so muscly, and he makes me melty. I tried keeping my eyes open, but that damn Ambien always leaves me woozy the day after I take it. I figured I’d just nap until Leon got here.”
“You missed something way bigger than The Rock.”
“What’s bigger than The Rock?”
“Mrs. Layne?” Justice stepped around me, putting his body in Mom’s line of sight.
A grin spread across my mother’s heart-shaped face. “Well, if it isn’t my boy, Justice Carver. What brings you here before lunch, handsome? And Coco? Shouldn’t you be at that persnickety, dark overlord’s office by now, getting him coffee and washing his delicate socks in the sink or something? Honestly, that Vern thinks he’s the cat’s PJs since he became coroner, doesn’t he? When we all know all it takes to become King of the Dead is a course online.”
My mom loved Justice, and I was going to try really hard to keep him from ruining that with his official line of questioning. I wanted to be the one to tell her Myron was dead.
“It takes more than that, Mom. Vern’s just—”
“Fanatical? Radical?” she asked with a chuckle. “He’s plain old power crazy. That’s what he is.”
I set Jessica Fletcher on her lap and gave Justice a dirty look that said ease off the NYPD Blue routine, while steadfast Coco followed up with a pinch to his arm.
“Vern and his heavy hand aside, I have something to tell you, Mom. But I want you to promise to stay calm, deal?”
Her eyes, covered in silver and green glitter eye shadow, still heavy from sleep, assessed me. “Did you forget to set the timer on the smoker, Lemon? Do you have any idea what it’s like when the boys from the fire station come in here, looking for a rack of ribs, and all I have to offer them is Cheetos and Boston peanuts?”
Okay, guilty. Sometimes I get wrapped up fixing a car or poring over an old Corvette manual and forget to set the timer before I go to bed. “No, Mom. It has nothing to do with the ribs. So I need you to promise you’ll stay calm.”
She stroked Jessica’s back, straightening the newborn T-shirt around JF’s legs in a motherly fashion, and nodded. “You got it, Sugarsnap. I’m like a cucumber.”
“Myron’s dead, Mom.” I held my breath along with her hand, smoothing my fingers over the wrinkled softness of her skin.
For a brief moment, her sharp blue eyes registered sadness, and then her self-defense snark kicked in. She looked right at me and scoffed, “Was he cheating on Febreze, too?”
Oh, my mother. Such a funny lady. She’d thought she was all shades of hysterical when she created that nickname for Myron’s wife.
I sighed and sat on my haunches alongside the chair. She was, of course, implying maybe he’d done Fabritzia wrong like he’d done her, and the Latvian beauty had taken it upon herself to kill him. But I really wanted her to can the mention of any kind of killing while Justice was in cop mode.
“No, Mom. Rather, I don’t know if he was or not. That’s beside the point. I found him in our men’s bathroom this morning.”
Her eyes widened as she pushed the recliner down and slid to the edge of the tan leather seat. “Why, of all places on earth to die, would he choose our bathroom? Oh, that man! It wasn’t bad enough he was sticking his gordita where it didn’t belong, but he had to come back here and ratchet up my humiliation a notch by making our bathroom his final resting place?”
“Mom!” I chastised, frowning at her. Sometimes she has no filter. Most times it’s a laugh-riot. Today? No bueno. “First, you promised you’d be calm. Second, be nice. You know you don’t really mean that. Third, it doesn’t look like Myron chose our bathroom to die in just to spite you post-mortem. It doesn’t look like he chose death at all.”
She harrumphed me in only the way my mother can. “I hear you, but you’re not making any sense t’all, Lemon.”
I grimaced. “Okay, straight shooting here. I found Myron this morning on my bathroom rounds. It looks like someone killed him. We don’t know if it happened in the bathroom or if it happened before and he was just dumped there.”
Now her eyes went wide, and she gripped Jess to her chest. “Killed?”
There was a commotion at the front door as it opened and shut, the chilly wind whispering its way across the store, with the scent of more rain to come in the air. The bells on the door clanged like church chimes, but it felt like they were warning me of something much bigger than a customer.
Chief Burrows plowed his way down the aisle with that evidence bag in his hand and Leon, one of our cashiers, hot on his heels.
Coco rushed over then, kneeling down in front of my mother and squeezing her hands. “Mama Layne, Justice and Chief Burrows might have some questions for you, but say nothing. Hear me?” she whispered, her eyes intense and bright.
Mom looked astonished. “Questions about what, Coco?”
Chief Burrows plodded toward us. The hard look on his face made my heart begin to race all over again.
Mom hopped up from her chair and pointed to the evidence bag. “You found my earring! I’ve been looking for that everywhere. Give it here, Ainsley,” she ordered, handing JF back to me.
My stomach did a backflip. The vibe was all wrong as the chief stared my mother down, his small eyes roaming her face. “This is yours, Mrs. Layne?”
Mom rolled her eyes. “I just said that, didn’t I? Now give it here, please.”
Coco gripped Mom’s arm as a warning, but Mom wasn’t catching on.
Chief Burrows popped his lips and rocked back on his heels. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mrs. Layne. I need you to come with me to the station, please.”
I stepped in front of my mother to shield her, reaching behind me to find her hand, entwining it with mine. Her fingers shook, and that made me angry. “For what? What’s going on, Chief Burrows?”
He pointed to the evidence bag with a flourish, his thick lips forming a grim line. “We found this on the floor under Myron. If you look closely, it has blood on it. Your mother just admitted it was her earring. Not to mention, we have an eyewitness who says they heard her threaten to kill Myron. Now Myron’s dead in your bathroom, Lemon. I think that’s cause enough to bring May down to the station for questioning, don’t you?”
Mom gasped behind me and yelled, “You think I knocked off Myron? You bloomin’ idiot! I’m not going anywhere. You hear me, Ainsley Burrows?”
A flash of the chief’s handcuffs, gleaming under the store’s lights, sent my stomach into a nosedive.
He postured, letting the handcuffs swing on his forefinger. “We can do this nice and easy and you come willingly, or I can cuff you and put you in the cruiser. Up to you, May.”
Pushing me out of the way, Mom narrowed her gaze and approached Chief Burrows, hands on her hips—never a good sign where Mom’s concerned. “You’d better make sure you make ’em nice and tight, buddy!”
Before I could stop him or my tiny terror of a mother, the chief was reading Mom her rights. “May Layne, you have the right to remain silent…”
Now, I don’t know if I mentioned this, but JF is very good at reading emotions. Spider monkeys have a pack mentality. They don’t like when they or any members of their pack are threatened. They’re very possessive and territorial, and because Mom and I we’re essentially her parents.
And one of her parents was being threatened.
JF lunged from my shoulder to Chief Burrow’s face with a long yowl. She landed on him in a crab-like clutch, clinging to his face and adhering to it like a jellyfish, looking to suck his soul from him by way of his nose.
Digging her claws into his balding head, she gripped the fringe of hair surrounding his skull like a three-quarter bowl and screeched her displeasure.
And Chief Burrows wailed an ear-piercing scream in return as he tried to knock JF away. “Get it off! Get it off!” he bellowed, waving his arms, blinded by Jessica’s body clinging to his face.
“Jessica, no!” I hollered as I dove for her, but I crossed streams with Coco, who was doing the same, and we collided, stumbling and falling into Justice.
We crumbled like dominoes, toppling to the ground in grunts and limbs clashing together, knocking over a stand of postcards with a loud clatter.
As we all rolled around like some kind of human bowling ball, attempting to untangle ourselves, a flutter of paper fell from Jessica Fletcher’s T-shirt.
I caught it out of the corner of my eye just before Coco stuck one of her pointy high heels in my thigh, making me yelp in pain.
But that wasn’t going to stop me from getting whatever Jessica had.
I rolled to my side and scooped the paper up with quicker fingers than I’d have given myself credit for.
A swift glance showed it was from Lester’s Pawnshop in town.
And it had Myron’s name listed as the customer.
I hastily stuffed it inside my sweats for further investigation and began the tedious process of peeling Jessica Fletcher from Chief Burrow’s face.
“Jessica Fletcher! You let go of Chief Burrows right now, or there’ll be no NCIS for you!”