You could say that winning a beauty pageant and solving a murder have some similarities. In a pageant, you’re competing to beat the other contestants. In a murder investigation, you’re competing against a killer to bring him or her to justice. You work hard to achieve a goal, and in the end, you’ve got a crown or a criminal.
Emotionally, however, when someone is killed, you have to deal with something far more serious than a rival queen or a broken zipper. Seeing a dead body, even if it’s someone you don’t know, is disturbing no matter how many times it happens. And this has happened more times than it should. Like right now. A body stretched out at my feet in the evening light…
***
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
When my husband, Jerry Fairweather, inherited his eccentric Uncle Val’s old house in the small town of Celosia, North Carolina, and we moved from the much larger city of Parkland, I’d taken a big leap of faith, followed my dream, and opened a private investigation service. I thought I’d be finding lost objects, or at worst, trailing unfaithful spouses. And I did have cases like that, looking for lost umbrellas, tracking down overdue library books, and hunting through attics to solve elaborate riddles. But Celosia, like most small towns, was full of secrets and family feuds and long-held grudges. Really long.
Now, most police departments don’t want amateur sleuths getting in the way, but I was fortunate to make friends with Chief Gus Brenner. He appreciates the fact that I’m able to see things from an outsider’s perspective, and as long as I share my findings, he’s willing to let me poke around. I don’t have access to his crime lab or his network of contacts, but I have my own resources. I tend to find little things that are overlooked—things that, at first, don’t appear to be clues.
But Jerry was still figuring out what to do with his life and needed plenty of things to keep him occupied. Gus’ daughter, Nell Brenner, our resident handywoman, didn’t want him helping her with home repairs because he was always tripping over ladders and tracking paint everywhere. He’d worked for a while as a salesclerk at Georgia’s Books, but Georgia didn’t need him except on the occasional weekend. I was concerned that all this inactivity would lead to a rebound into his shadier world of fake séances and cons. In fact, I knew it would.
Jerry and I met in college and had been best friends for years before he realized that he was in love with me. We had worked through most of our emotional baggage—mine from being hauled around to Little Miss pageants from the time I could sit up, and his from a mistaken belief that he’d been responsible for the fire that killed his parents. I’d solved that mystery, so he had closure, and my success as a private investigator had proven to me that I was more than a pretty face in an overly sequined gown. Thanks to Jerry’s insistence, I’d taken up painting again, something I’d always loved and needed to rediscover.
However…Jerry comes from a very wealthy family and never had to work. Add that to his past feelings of unworthiness, a mischievous nature, and an open, trustworthy face, and you have the perfect con man. For about three years after we graduated, I lost track of him, hearing from him only occasionally. What he did during that time has kept coming back to haunt us.
He also had a great deal of musical talent. I kept trying to steer him toward jobs that took advantage of that. I may have given up all the pageant nonsense, but I was still competitive. I was going to reform him if it killed us both.
Jerry and I have problems and differences to sort out, but our little troubles can’t compare with the labyrinth of tangled relationships and emotions I uncovered in my new hometown. That web soon led me here, into another betrayal and murder.