Killer Classics Read online

  “It was an act of God.” It wasn’t like I had control over the skunk entering the store.

  “Your pet led that thing right to me!” Liza continued to stalk me.

  “But you’re the one who tried to kick it and threw your phone at it.”

  “It was going to spray me!” she sputtered. “And I wouldn’t have thrown my phone if it hadn’t been for someone kicking my foot out from under me!” Liza’s face was pinched. For a pretty woman, she was rather unattractive when she was angry.

  As she rounded the passenger side of the car, Mateo stepped in front of her. “I told you not to move,” he said.

  “I thought you were denying the freedom of the press!”

  Mateo winced at the high pitch of her voice. He held her back as he shot me a warning with his eyes over the top of his car.

  “I’m sorry you got sprayed, Liza. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. If you’d like, I’ve got a bunch of leftover tomato sauce that wasn’t used at the spring picnic. You can use our outdoor shower at the back of the Barn.”

  Liza’s eyes bulged into saucers, then turned to slits as her voice filled with indignation. “Your outdoor shower!”

  My hands rose in surrender. “Sorry, I just thought you wouldn’t want to go home smelling like…”

  Liza tried to step around Mateo, but he blocked her path once more.

  I’d offered enough help for one day. “I’m just going to go check out the store,” I said and made my escape.

  The moment I walked in the front door of the bookstore, however, I was hit with remnants of Princess’s bad choices in friends. The entire store reeked of skunk. I coughed then coughed again. Airing the store out was going to be brutal. I flipped the sign to closed and propped the doors open. I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth and made a beeline for the tearoom. I didn’t want to open the side door and let anyone wander inside and see Cade’s stuff, so I opened the two windows and headed for the back door.

  “O.M.W.,” Scarlet gagged. “I ran into Liza and Mateo, but I had no idea they’d had an encounter inside the Barn.” Scarlet was holding her beauty shop apron over her face. She had on a one-piece, sleeveless, summer pantsuit that hugged all her curves, and her ginger-colored hair fell in loose ringlets over her shoulders, accentuating her rosy complexion.

  “You may want to go back to the beauty shop,” I yelled to her as I made my way to the back door and propped it open.

  “I have an industrial fan if you’d like to use it,” she responded.

  I coughed as I passed the loft. “I would love it, thank you.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  An hour later, Scarlet’s fan was clearing the air, and I was boxing up Cade’s signs that had spilled all over the floor in the loft. Sugar had volunteered to help, but she was working at the Tool Shed that night, and I honestly didn’t think it was fair to ask her to stay. No one would tip a waitress whose hair smelled like skunk. She was better off staying away.

  The buzzer sounded at the front door, and I looked down to see Mateo enter the store. He looked tired and frazzled. If I wasn’t mistaken, the scent of skunk got stronger the closer he got.

  “I thought you’d be up here,” he said as he came up the stairs.

  “You haven’t showered yet, have you?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  I backed up. “Don’t you think you should?”

  “I lost my sense of smell almost an hour ago. It doesn’t really bother me anymore.”

  “Too bad all of us aren’t so blessed.”

  “Are you saying that I stink, Charli Rae?”

  “You’ve smelled better.”

  He stalked me, and I put the table between us. “We haven’t reached that place in our relationship where I can embrace the type of stink you’re emitting.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to get past that odor—even if my own child wore it. Which was a sure sign of me not being ready for parenthood.

  Mateo stopped. “I’m not sure I’d be able to handle it if you smelled like Liza Twaine did this morning.”

  I laughed. “At least we’re on the same page. Would you like to use our outdoor shower?”

  “That’s why I’m here. It’s either that or my office, and I’d rather not go there. I’ve received enough ribbing over the radio to last through the rest of my career.”

  I grinned. “Daddy called and said he’d heard it over the scanner.”

  Mateo groaned as we headed downstairs. I grabbed the tomato sauce before we went out the back of the store. All the businesses on Main Street had backyards butting up to the Brazos River. The Barn had a privacy fence on two sides, so the yard was only semiprivate. We used the shower fairly often after kayaking, but I never stripped down naked when I used it despite the small wooded enclosure surrounding it. Mateo, on the other hand, wasn’t afraid to get down to his birthday suit.

  I handed him the first jar of tomato sauce, and he dumped it over his head and worked it into his hair.

  “You wouldn’t look half bad as a ginger.”

  Mateo peeked with one eye. “You want me to dye my hair red?”

  “I didn’t say that…”

  “Dios mio, you’re a fickle woman.” He continued to scrub his head with his eyes closed and held his hand out for another bottle of sauce.

  “Excuse me? Did you just call me fickle?”

  Mateo’s lips were pressed together in a firm line. With his palm open and his fingers arched, his arm bounce on top of the wooden shower wall, punctuating his impatience for the next bottle. The jar opened with a pop, and I poured it over his head and waited in silence for him to respond.

  He didn’t. Possibly the wisest decision he could have made. I took pity on him and decided he’d had a bad enough day without me compounding it. After all, the man now smelled like a skunk bathing in tomato sauce.

  “That’s not working,” I said.

  “I’m well aware of that,” he ground out. “Have you used it before?”

  “No.”

  Mateo glanced up at me, his face and arms tinged orange. “I thought you knew what you were talking about.”

  “They say to bathe in tomato sauce.”

  His hands stopped scrubbing and dropped to his sides. “Who’s they?”

  “Everyone.”

  Mateo closed his eyes and sighed heavily before asking in a controlled voice, “Could you Google how to get rid of skunk scent?”

  I looked it up on my phone. “Oops.”

  Mateo froze. “What do you mean ‘oops?’”

  “It says that tomato sauce doesn’t work. It just turns your hair and skin orange.”

  He shoved his head under the spray of water and began rinsing his body without looking at me. The only sign of his irritation was the force he used to scrub his head. I needed to find the right recipe—fast.

  Chapter 3

  The Tool Shed Tavern should have been packed. Instead it was uncharacteristically empty. Granted it was a Wednesday night, but what the heck else was there to do in Hazel Rock, especially when Joe and Leila held an extra-long happy hour for hump day? My daddy didn’t work most Wednesdays, so I usually opened and closed the bookstore. Today, however the store had closed so early, and I’d been stuck dealing with cleanup instead of customers all day. A little downtime with Scarlet was well deserved.

  Sugar walked up with margaritas and put them on the table in front of us. “This day started out as a stink bomb and is going to end the same way.”

  “It couldn’t be any worse than this morning,” I said.

  “Oh yeah? Look who’s sitting at the bar…with her paws on Dean.”

  Scarlet and I turned and looked at who had Sugar’s flowing blond tresses all knotted up.

  The woman sitting next to Sugar’s boyfriend could have been Sugar’s twin, or older sister. She had t
he natural beauty of a California Barbie and the pleasant smile to match. Unlike Sugar, however, Maddie MacAlister had perfect teeth. But it was the imperfection in Sugar’s smile that made her beautiful. Plus, she had an angelic personality—that disappeared when Maddie rubbed her chest on Dean’s arm.

  “That does it,” Sugar exclaimed. “I don’t care if she’s the mother of his child! I am tired of trying to help that woman. I’ve invited her to events, I’ve tried to be a friend to her, but she’s got no desire to be my friend. She wants Dean back. That’s her number one goal. That woman has pushed me too far, and I am not going to tolerate her moving in on my man like that.” Sugar stormed off with her tray under her arm and the angry swagger of a woman scorned.

  Woman scorned.

  I thought about Nathan Daniels’s book and the conversation in the Barn with the mystery moms that morning.

  “Sugar is not Candy and Maddie is not a victim,” Scarlet assured me, as if reading my mind.

  “The similarities are beginning to freak me out,” I said. I watched as Sugar and Maddie squared off, their expressions anything but friendly, while Dean hunkered down lower into his beer.

  “He should put a stop to that,” Cade Calloway said as he walked up to our table. The mayor was one of the best-looking men in town—next to Mateo, of course—and at his height, he was hard to ignore. But I wasn’t taking my eyes off the trio who looked like they were in the middle of a love triangle.

  Dean didn’t want any part of the argument brewing between the two women. Maddie was his ex-wife, and Sugar was his girlfriend. No matter what he did, he would lose.

  I looked up at Cade. “You better go over there.”

  Cade’s hazel eyes turned toward me, and he grimaced. “This day is just going to keep getting worse and worse, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. There was no reason to argue a moot point. I got up and followed Cade just in case he needed my support.

  “Sugar McWilliams, you got no right to interrupt my conversation with Dean. Do your job and bring me another drink.” Maddie turned and ran her hand up Dean’s arm. She was wearing a white sleeveless blouse with a tight, red, leather skirt that showed off her shapely legs. The hemline had creeped up to an almost indecent height, but Maddie didn’t seem to mind in the least. She wiggled her foot that was clad in red-and-black suede ankle boots against Dean’s thigh. The blatant suggestion wasn’t missed by many.

  Dean winced, pulled his arm back, and scooted off his bar stool, but Sugar only saw the too familiar way in which Maddie was handling her man. She didn’t like it one bit. Sugar leaned between them and grabbed a set of keys from the bar then shoved them into the half apron she wore around her waist. “I’m cutting you off, Maddie. You’ve had too much to drink. I’m calling you a cab.”

  Maddie whipped around, her blond hair flying like a model in a hair commercial—it was too bad Scarlet hadn’t recorded it to use for her salon.

  “Don’t you—”

  “Ladies, please.” Cade’s tone was gentle. Too gentle. Neither one of them heard him.

  Maddie grabbed for Sugar’s arm, but I slid between them as Cade pulled Sugar away.

  “We’ve got this, Sugar. Why don’t you call Maddie a cab?” I asked.

  “I don’t need no stinking cab!” Maddie yelled. “You may have taken my man, but you ain’t taking my keys!” Maddie’s words slurred as she lunged toward Sugar and knocked me back into Cade.

  “I’m not going to let you drive when you have a baby at home.” Sugar jutted her chin out in defiance.

  Finally, Dean stood up and paid attention to what was really happening. “I’ll take you home,” he said. His forty-something face was pinched with worry. Worry that Sugar wouldn’t understand and worry that Maddie would read too much into his offer. But most of all, worry for his child who might end up being a victim to Maddie’s overindulgence and drinking and driving.

  Maddie beamed while Sugar scowled.

  Dean held his hand out for Maddie’s car keys, and for a moment, it looked as though Sugar was going to smack his hand away. The pleading in his eyes, however, changed her mind, and she slammed the keys into his palm before stomping away.

  “Do you want me to take her?” Cade asked.

  I looked at him like he’d lost his mind. The last thing he needed was to get in the middle of this drama. Maddie had a well-earned reputation as a woman who always had a bank account within her sights, and Cade had the biggest bank account in town. Besides, we had enough drama of our own going on.

  Dean shook his head and grabbed Maddie’s arm as she swayed toward him. “No. I got her. This is my mess to clean up.”

  Maddie’s brows drew together, but despite the consternation in her words, her tone was frisky as all get-out. “Are you saying I’m a mess, Dean MacAlister?”

  Dean gave his ex-wife a sad grin. “I’m saying I’m the mess darlin’. Not you, and certainly not Sugar.”

  I didn’t hear Maddie’s response as they made their way to the door, but I saw the anger on Sugar’s face. She was one unhappy girlfriend.

  When I’d first returned to Hazel Rock, Sugar threw a beer in my face because she thought I was making a move on her man. Tonight, I had to give her credit. If anyone deserved to wear the beer sitting on Sugar’s tray, it was Maddie Macalister. Yet, as they walked past Sugar, Dean tipped his ball cap in her direction, and Sugar held her tongue.

  “Why haven’t you returned my calls?” Cade asked, interrupting my observations.

  I turned and looked up at him. “Why didn’t you return my call?”

  “Look at your phone. I’ve called you multiple times since six o’clock.”

  “I’ve been in here since six. Why didn’t you call earlier?”

  “I was catching a flight back home.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know you were out of town. You should have told me.”

  We worked our way back to Scarlet, who had already finished her margarita and was working her way through mine. “I ordered you a double. I figured you could use it.”

  Scarlet was the best friend a woman could ever have.

  Cade pulled out my stool for me and joined us. After Cade placed an order with another waitress for a beer he leaned over and asked, “How much damage did you sustain today?”

  “Most of the books on the second floor are a total loss. Luckily, they’re all used books.”

  “Was anything else damaged?” he asked.

  I knew he was referring to his boxes we had stored in the loft and the tearoom. “The two boxes we put in the loft are a complete loss.”

  Cade sighed. “I suppose the boxes were spilled open and were quite a mess to clean up, huh?”

  Cade wasn’t necessarily concerned about the physical mess, he was worried about the fallout from his stuff being in the Barn. He was a politician through and through.

  “Mateo knows…everything.”

  “That’s it? No one else?” he asked.

  “That’s it. Liza Twaine was too busy worrying about the smell of her clothes. And her hair. And skin.”

  The Cade I knew and loved grinned and began laughing, until the politician in him took over and covered up his smile as he tried to wipe it off his face. The rumble of humor escaped between his fingers.

  “What was in the boxes?” Scarlet asked.

  “Nothing,” Cade and I said in unison.

  Scarlet raised her eyebrows and looked as if she was about to call us out, but Cade steered the conversation in a different direction.

  “You’re going to recycle those books, aren’t you?” Cade had run his campaign with the slogan: A greener Hazel Rock, a greener Texas. Considering our town was mostly brown, it was an appealing promise.

  “Do you think I could?” I asked.

  Cade nodded and took a drink of his beer that had just arrived. “Go see Dallas Dover at the recycl
ing plant. He’s a little crude, but he knows how to get the job done. We gave him the city contract eight months ago. I’m sure he can help you out.”

  Finally, a solution to my problem. I could get rid of the books that smelled worse than roadkill.

  * * * *

  The next morning, I borrowed my Daddy’s truck at the crack of dawn and made my way to the recycling plant located off County Road 57. A couple of trash trucks were in line to turn onto the dirt road that led to the facility on the other side of the hill. It was one of the reasons the people of Hazel Rock had approved the permit for the business. They didn’t particularly want a trash collection site in their neck of the woods—no one did—but Bin Dover Recycling was out of sight and out of mind. It didn’t get any better than that.

  After a guy in a company shirt unhooked a chain from across the drive and waved us through, I followed the two trucks into the lot with a third one behind me. As I passed, I returned the friendly gesture and proceeded down the drive to where it opened up on the backside of the hill into a parking lot. I parked in front of a tan mobile trailer that had two small windows. The backside of the hill had been excavated sometime through the years and the office sat in front of the off-white cliffs. There was no grass around the office, nor were there any bushes. Just the sand rock cliff, the gravel driveway, the parking lot, and huge bins for customers to deposit their recyclables. Two pickup trucks were parked in the lot that I assumed belonged to employees.

  Directly opposite the office sat a large metal building with several large garage doors that led to the sorting area for the recycling. I waited for the trash trucks to park in front of the bins marked glass, paper, and plastic then made my way up the metal staircase of the trailer. A picture of white cliffs with a large green bin sitting in front them was painted on the front of the door of Bin Dover Recycling. It was the same logo they used on their trucks.

  I tried the door, but it was locked, and then noticed the hours of operation sign down below the window.

  Fuzz buckets. They didn’t open for another two hours, and I needed to get back to the Barn. Scarlet and I had a book art class scheduled and were going to teach seven women how to make book wreaths that I needed to reschedule for the next day. I could not be late. Yet I didn’t want to bring back the smelly books in the back of the truck either. The odor was overwhelming.