Gia slid a plate filled with three scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and home fries onto the counter in front of Earl Dennison. The older man had been her first customer when she opened and had since become a close friend. Cole’s words from the previous day came back to her and filled her with joy. Earl had become more than a friend. She smiled as she added a plate with two biscuits, a bowl of gravy and one of grits. “You know you’re going to clog your arteries with all of this, right?”
Earl laughed, as he always did when she admonished him. His wife, Heddie, had always told him the same thing before she passed away, and he’d taken to eating his breakfast out. “You sound like one of my kids now.”
“Well…” Gia refilled his coffee cup. “Did you ever consider maybe they’re right?”
He raised a brow. “Not a once.”
She laughed as she refilled her own coffee cup and grabbed a can of Diet Pepsi from the fridge beneath the counter and set it in front of Savannah. Satisfied everything was ready for her to unlock the doors and open up for the day, Gia settled onto the stool between Earl and Savannah. She’d come to enjoy the moments spent with Earl, Savannah and sometimes Cole or Willow, before she opened the café each morning. It had become routine, like spending time lingering over breakfast with family before the rigors of the day demanded her attention.
“Oh, Gia,” Savannah slid one long maroon nail beneath the tab of her soda and popped it open. “Did you ever get a chance to look up belladonna poisoning last night?”
“No, I didn’t. By the time we got home and finished hanging out and doing the tree, I forgot.” But there was a another, more immediate situation she needed to discuss with Savannah, and now was as good a time as any. Probably the only quiet time they’d get before tonight. “You know, Savannah, I’ve been thinking…”
“Uh oh.” She grinned as she scrolled through something on her phone.
“Hey! What happened to no one likes a smart aleck?”
Savannah just laughed.
Gia braced herself. She had to somehow steer the conversation where she needed it to go without Savannah figuring out what was on her mind. And since Savannah pretty much knew what was on Gia’s mind before it came out her mouth, and sometimes even before she thought it, that would be no easy task. It would have been easier if Savannah hadn’t been privy to the conversation with Trevor about Mallory, but she had been present, so there was a better than average chance her mind would follow the same path Gia’s had as soon as she started asking questions. “Have you given any thought to where you and Leo are going to live once you’re married?”
Savannah lifted her gaze from the phone to stare at Gia. “I have, but every time I think about it, I change the subject on myself.”
“I mean, you are both more than welcome to stay with me, if you want to?” She slid her crossed fingers behind her back. She really hoped they’d decide to stay with her. She’d gotten used to Savannah living in her spare bedroom.
“I know, and thank you, Gia, that means a lot.” She shrugged and went back to staring at her phone. “But we do need a home of our own. Unfortunately, the thought of looking at houses always sends a wave of anxiety crashing through me.”
Savannah had always loved showing houses, finding that just perfect home for each couple she worked with, until she’d been drugged and kidnapped from a mansion she was showing. After that, going into empty houses with strangers no longer appealed. Gia took the easy dismissal for what it was, apprehension she wasn’t quite ready to deal with.
“Well, I just wanted to let you know that you are also welcome to the apartment over the café if you want to stay there until you guys find something instead of staying at my house.” Other than Gia staying over now and then when she worked late, no one had used the apartment since her last tenant didn’t work out.
“Really?” Savannah shot to her feet and flung her arms around Gia’s neck. “I hadn’t thought of that. Thank you.”
“You bet.” Now for the tricky part. “I know it won’t be permanent, but at least it’s somewhere to get started and have some privacy until you find something.”
“It’s awesome. I can’t wait to tell Leo. Of course, we’ll pay you a fair amount of rent—”
Gia held up a hand. “You can just stop right there. You’ll pay me no rent, and you’ll save all of your money for a down payment on the house of your dreams.”
“Gia—”
“Speaking of the house of your dreams,” Earl interrupted. “Where do you think you’ll end up buying? Somewhere in town or out by your dad or Gia, maybe?”
Gia shot him a silent thank you look. She’d shared her plan to speak to Mallory about a house out by her while Savannah was in the back room, and he’d intervened at the perfect opportunity. Not that Savannah seemed to be paying enough attention to catch on anyway, since she was once again fully engrossed in whatever she was reading on her phone.
“I don’t know. I was kind of thinking of finding something out by Gia’s. It’s quiet, peaceful, has plenty of land for as many dogs as I want, and would be a nice place to raise a family.”
Gia choked on her coffee and sputtered. “Family?”
“Uh huh.”
She grabbed a napkin and patted her mouth. “Like in kids?”
Earl laughed out loud. He set his fork on his plate. “Yes, Gia, that’s what she means by a family. And for the record, I think you’re right, Savannah, it would be the perfect neighborhood to raise kids.”
Since Savannah came from a large family, it wasn’t surprising she’d want kids, but Gia hadn’t really thought about it. Kids. Huh. She warmed to the idea. Savannah would make an amazing mother. Now Gia had all the information she needed, and thanks to Savannah’s distraction with her phone and Gia being caught off guard with the whole kids thing, she hadn’t tipped her hand. “Well, I’d love to be an aunt.”
“Yup.”
“Okay, enough is enough.” The distraction had served its purpose, but now Gia’s curiosity was piqued. She tapped Savannah’s phone screen. “What has you so enthralled with that phone?”
“What? Oh…” She finally looked up with a sheepish grin. “Sorry. I was just reading about belladonna.”
“The poison?”
“Uh huh.” She cleared her throat and read from the phone. “Atropa Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade, gets its name from Atropos, one of the Three Fates in Greek Mythology. Legend has it, Atropos has your life in her hands as she snips the final thread of your life’s tapestry after her sisters have spun and measured it. And then you die. And the term belladonna comes from the Italian for ‘pretty lady’ because women during the Renaissance used the juice of the berries in eyedrops to dilate their pupils and make them more seductive.”
“Hmm…” While Gia found the history interesting, she was more focused on who could have gotten it and used it to poison Robyn.
“It seems odd they’d use such a toxic substance for things like cosmetics, medicine, and even at one point, love potions,” Savannah continued.
“Do you think that has anything to do with why Robyn was killed?” Try as she might, Gia couldn’t think of a motive to give someone belladonna, other than to kill her. And if someone had given it to her as a love potion, then who? Surely, not her fiancé, as Isaac claimed repeatedly.
Savannah shrugged and dropped her phone into the bag hung on the back of her stool. “Probably not, unless it was her fiancé, Jeremy, who gave her the potion to make her fall in love with him. Then again, why would he need to do that? Surely, she wouldn’t have been marrying him if she didn’t love him.”
Unless she had an ulterior motive. Savannah always assumed the best in people, always saw everything in innocent terms. Unfortunately, not everyone was as innocent as she was.
“Anyway…” Savannah gestured to the front door, where the Bailey sisters, Esmeralda and Estelle, stood staring in the window, then rounded the counter, stuck her bag beneath the register, and grabbed two menus. “Time to go to work.”
Gia unlocked the door and greeted Boggy Creek’s two unofficial gossip mongers. “Good morning, ladies.”
“Gia.” Estelle nodded.
“Good morning, dear.” Esmeralda didn’t wait for Gia to seat her, just made a beeline for the table in the exact center of the café, where the two would be sure to hear everything that went on. Not that there was much at the moment, since no one other than the Baileys had come in yet. Which meant they had news they were willing to share.
“How have you both been? I haven’t seen you since…” Gia riffled through her memory for the last time the Bailey sisters had been in. Oh…right…last weekend, just hours after Maureen and Clifford Harris had an all out blow up in the middle of the bowling alley after Maureen’s mother showed up unannounced and declared she was moving in. “Last weekend.”
“Oh, right, yes.” Esmeralda patted her perfectly coiffed blue updo. “I heard Clifford’s still sleeping on the couch.”
“Well, where else would he sleep, dear?” Estelle winked at Gia. “Maureen’s mother took the bed. Poor Maureen is stuck sleeping with her youngest.”
Gia made a mental note never to let these two know anything personal about her. She had no idea where they got their information—she had visions of them sitting in front of a control panel to rival NASA’s with TV screens showing every house in town bugged—but the pair were a menace.
“Anyway…” Estelle waved a hand in the air to dismiss the old news in favor of something new. “Did you hear Isaac Hackman got arrested?”
Gia hadn’t heard, as her few conversations with Hunt since he’d left with Leo the day before hadn’t included the case. Which had been a nice change.
“Again.” Esmeralda added knowingly.
Gia’s interest perked up at the sudden shift in the conversation. “You know Isaac? He’s been arrested before?”
“Oh, please. That man has been arrested more times than I can count.” Estelle looked to her sister for confirmation.
With a nod, Esmeralda took up where Estelle left off. “Usually for fighting with someone or another. Isaac spends too much time in bars, squandering his mama’s inheritance, and he is not a pleasant drunk. More often than not, a night out for Isaac ends in a confrontation.”
Gia ignored the comments. As much as she enjoyed chatting with the Bailey twins, she knew all too well what it was like to be on the wrong end of their rumors. “Did you know Robyn?”
They both nodded, and their eerily similar expressions turned somber as if on cue.
Savannah poured the sisters coffee, then returned to the front door to seat a young couple dressed in business suits. Gia didn’t have much time before she’d need to head back to the kitchen.
“Robyn was a sweet girl. And her husband treated her like gold before he was taken from her in a car accident.” Both sisters made the sign of the cross, and Estelle said, “Bless his soul.”
“And hers,” Esmeralda added. “After the accident she withdrew, stayed to herself for several months.”
Estelle harumphed. “Not long enough to be appropriate, if you ask me.”
Esmeralda only nodded at the interruption and continued. “Spoiled that no good son of hers something awful.”
“Then one day, she just snapped out of it…” Estelle’s snap caught the attention of a few customers who turned to look. “Next thing you know, that man was on her arm everywhere she went.”
“Man? You mean Jeremy?” Gia watched Savannah move through the room, pouring coffee and orange juice, taking orders. It was time to wrap this up and get in the kitchen.
“Yes, that’s the one.” Estelle fished her glasses out of her bag and perched them on the edge of her nose.
All right, one more question. “Did he and Isaac get along at first?”
“Oh, goodness, no. Like oil and water…” Estelle started.
“Went at it from the day she brought him home, those two, with absolutely no regard for how it upset her so.” Esmeralda lifted her menu and began to peruse her choices, signaling the end of their conversation. It was time for the sisters to listen for new dirt and for Gia to get to work.
She stopped briefly to say hello to a group of college students who were friends with Willow and sometimes came in early to study for exams. With the semester ending, she figured they were either cramming or celebrating.
She then left them to Savannah, said good-bye to Earl, with a quick whispered thank you for his help with Savannah, and went in the back to cook. She’d already preheated the grill, so she washed her hands, donned gloves, and waited for Savannah to put up the first order.
While she waited, her thoughts wandered to Mallory, and her excitement grew. Would she be working this soon after her friend died? Maybe not. But if her office handled a lot of the sales up by Gia’s development, she didn’t necessarily have to speak to Mallory. Maybe someone else in the office could help her. It didn’t matter, since she wasn’t investigating, but she had to admit to a certain amount of curiosity about the woman.
Anyway, when Gia had been ready to flee New York, between her divorce, her ex’s trial, and the constant stream of death threats, she hadn’t had much time to make it down to Florida. Savannah had handled finding the building for the café and setting most of it up. While Gia would have been perfectly content to live in the small, one-bedroom apartment upstairs, Savannah had insisted she needed a home.
So she’d hunted for something affordable with the scant amount of savings Gia had left. She’d sent Gia pictures of the three-bedroom Spanish style ranch, its cream-colored stucco walls contrasting beautifully with the scalloped terra cotta roof tiles. The house was surrounded by woods that brought to mind what the world must have been like before the intrusion of skyscrapers and city blocks, more peaceful than anywhere she’d ever known. Gia had fallen in love instantly.
Of course, she hadn’t known about the critters then. But that was beside the point. She’d managed a sort of peace with them as well. She’d learned to use bear-resistant garbage pails—who even knew that was a thing?—kept a careful eye out for snakes as she walked the property, and had even come to terms with using the butterfly net Savannah gave her to catch the occasional lizard that found its way into the house and release him outside. But when it came to spiders the size of her hand, all bets were off. She still screamed and ran every time one skittered across the wall, its hairy legs tap, tap, tapping as it ran. Savannah and Hunt had both tried to tell her the spiders were more scared of her than she was of them. They were so wrong.
“Hey, Gia.”
She screeched and whirled toward the sound of Savannah’s voice.
“You okay?” Savannah lifted at brow at her, the same expression Hunt often used, and stuck the first two tickets above the grill.
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” Her heart pounded wildly, and she pressed a hand against her chest. “You caught me off-guard.”
“Mm…hmmm.” Savannah scanned the floor. “You had that horrified look on your face, the one usually reserved for when you find spiders or other scary critters.”
“No, no critters. Not this time.” Gia laughed out loud, glad to see she and Savannah were back on the same page again. “Thanks, Savannah.”
“For what?” She tilted her head, her brows drawn together as she stared at Gia like she might have lost her mind.
“Just for being you and for always being by my side. I’m going to miss you.” Tears she wouldn’t let fall prickled the backs of her lids. She blinked them away.
“Don’t worry. You’ll still see plenty of me. Probably so much you’ll get tired of me.”
“Never happen.”
Savannah smiled as she whirled toward the door and went to visit with the customers she so adored.
Gia grabbed a bowl and started cracking eggs to scramble for several omelets. Time to get to work. At least until Cole arrived and she could slip away to her office to call the real estate office.