Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
D owntown was pretty busy when I pulled into a parallel parking spot in front of my office. Of course, downtown was a relative term. Sweet Briar had a population of a little over 2,000 and consisted of the two-block Main Street, and a less busy street behind it, but it had the essentials—a café, a coffee shop, a bank, a gym, and a pizza place.
And of course, Darling Investigations, the name of my PI business.
My office was one of the few things the reality show staff had gotten right. The walls were painted in shades of pale yellow and sage green, and the large windows overlooking the street offered plenty of light. The front room held our desks and some visitors’ chairs and was where most of the office scenes were filmed. Mostly because I couldn’t see them ever filming in the small bathroom, or the back room filled with a couple of tables and chairs that the editors sat at while working on the previous day’s footage. I had a real business license with my name on it—which was framed and hanging on the wall—which meant the business was mine.
It hadn’t always been like that. My producer Lauren had tried to railroad the entire thing by filming fake cases sprinkled with a handful of real ones. I’d gone against her wishes and solved an actual murder behind her back, but it had been that investigation that had catapulted the show into success. I renegotiated my contract, and one of the sticking points was that the lease to the office was turned over to me. Lauren had tried to be sneaky and move the show to the train station during season two, but the downtown office had stuck.
I climbed out of my car and walked over to the coffee shop to pick up a latte. Main Street was lined with trees, and the leaves were changing to bright yellows and oranges. Concrete planters were interspersed up and down the block, full of mums and pansies. I hadn’t been in Sweet Briar during the fall for well over a decade. Which meant I hadn’t really had an autumn since I’d been living in LA, and I was enjoying every minute of it this year.
A couple of the townspeople were in the shop and said hello when I entered, but a tourist family standing in line did a double take when the woman realized who I was.
“Oh, my word!” she shouted, pointing her finger at me. “You’re her .” She looked to be around my age, maybe slightly younger—the core demographic for my old TV show.
I gave her a hesitant smile. Some of my old fans were a bit overzealous. “Welcome to Sweet Briar.”
“I knew you got coffee here,” she said, barely containing her excitement. “I saw it on your show.”
So she was a Darling Investigations fan.
I waved a hand toward the counter. “It’s the great coffee that keeps me coming back. Are y’all passing through Sweet Briar?”
“We’re on our way to Pensacola, and I made Brad swing through.” She clasped her hands together and stepped closer to me, while her two kids hung back with their father, a guy in his late twenties to early thirties who looked like he’d rather be stalled in construction traffic on the highway than here.
“I used to love you on Gotcha! ,” she continued, “but I really like your new one. I’ve seen every episode. Multiple times.”
“Thanks.”
I worried what might be coming next—more people than I could count asked me to recite my old show’s catchphrase—but she surprised me by glancing toward the door. “Is Dixie around?”
“Sorry,” I said, genuinely meaning it. “Dixie’s in Atlanta today.”
She shot a glance to her husband and then back to me, lowering her voice. “What about Teddy?”
“Sorry,” I said again. “Teddy’s not around either.” I’d learned the hard way not to tell people he was out on the farm. Some of them took it as an open invitation to drop by, since the location was a matter of public record. Meemaw had run off more than a few tourists.
“Is there any way I can see him?” she asked with a sheepish look, then lowered her voice to slightly above a whisper. “He’s my free pass, and I want to take advantage of it while I’m here.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, taken aback. Was she serious?
“You know,” she said with a nod, “my freebie that’s not considered cheating.”
This was a first. Plenty of women had tried to come on to Teddy, and he’d been nothing but polite when he’d turned all of them down, even though some of them hadn’t taken it well. It pissed me off that they thought he was like a breeding stallion just waiting to be ridden.
She moved closer with a conspiratorial smile. “Do you think you can call him? Maybe have him meet me at the motel here in town?”
I blinked hard. “Say what?”
“You know.” She winked, then nodded to her husband, who was manhandling the wrapped muffins on the counter, weighing them in each hand to see which one was the biggest while his two kids were tossing around a couple of water bottles in a game of catch. “Brad can stay busy and be none the wiser.”
I cocked my head. “I thought Teddy was your freebie.”
“Well, he is,” she whispered dramatically. “But I don’t want Brad to barge in and interrupt anything. You know?”
“What about your kids?” I asked, certain there must be cameras hidden somewhere, and I was being pranked.
“Brad can take them out to the lake. You know, where you found that body. Brad’s into those true crime podcasts, and Mo and Molly had a limited-run series about your cases. He wants to see the place where you found that poor man from the big mystery on your first season of Darling Investigations .”
I knew all about Mo and Molly. They’d spent more time than I liked trying to convince everyone I was a fraud, but thankfully, they’d moved on to Magnolia Steele and The C-Mark Serial Killer Podcast .
“Do you know if there are any maps in town showing where all your investigations took place?” she asked with a hopeful look. “That would surely keep Brad and the kids busy for a few hours. Because I really want to spend some quality time with Teddy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “No maps. Sorry.” I knew I didn’t sound like I meant it, but… really! How dare she! “Teddy’s all tied up today.” But as soon as the words left my mouth, I instantly regretted them.
Her eyes lit up, and she licked her upper lip. “Yum. Yum. I could get into that.”
I took a step back in horror, refusing to think of my cousin in some kind of bondage situation, and then the door dinged behind me. I backed into the broad chest of my boyfriend, Luke Montgomery, the Sweet Briar police chief.
He grabbed my upper arms to steady me, then moved to my side and wrapped an arm around my lower back, tugging me into him.
“Hey, darlin’. You that happy to see me?” he asked with a wide grin.
“You have no idea,” I said, keeping my eyes pinned on Teddy’s biggest fan.
Her eyes brightened, and it only took me a hot second to realize she would happily exchange my cousin for my boyfriend.
“Good mornin’, Sheriff,” she said, batting her eyelashes, then flashing him a come-hither look she couldn’t quite pull off.
Luke leaned a bit closer. “That’s chief, not sheriff,” he said distractedly, keeping his gaze on her. “You got something in your eye, ma’am?”
She looked slightly put out. “What? No.” Then she sidled closer to him and squeezed his bare bicep just beneath the short sleeve of his uniform shirt. “You sure do grow ’em big here, don’t you?”
“Well,” Luke said, taking a step back and casting a questioning glance at me. “It’s all the clean country air.”
“Who are you talking to, Mommy?” her little girl asked her, latching on to her leg.
The woman sighed as she glanced down at her daughter. Brad was now sniffing the muffins through the plastic while Sandy, the cashier, was not so patiently waiting.
“I take it y’all are visiting our fine town?” Luke asked, laying on his usual charm, but it sounded strained.
The woman’s head bobbed. “When Brad said he was taking us to Pensacola for fall break, I said, ‘Brad, we have got to stop in Sweet Briar and see that Gotcha! girl.’ And Brad, well, he knows better than to put up a fuss, so here we are, and as I said, he liked that podcast and all.”
Luke stiffened at the mention of the podcast. Mo and Molly hadn’t been very kind to him either, but he’d seemed more affronted about them questioning my character.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” he said, not even trying to sound like he meant it.
“I’d like to file a complaint,” the woman said in a deep voice that she’d probably intended to sound sexy, but instead it smacked of a truck driver who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day inside his truck, sucking in plenty of secondhand smoke to boot. “Can I stop by your office to talk to you in person?”
“How about we talk about it here?” Luke said, casting a glance back at the woman’s husband, who was still oblivious. He’d left the muffins and was now sniffing bananas.
She batted her eyelashes again. “We need privacy for what I need to talk to you about.”
His arm tightened around me.
I forced a smile. I’d love nothing more than to tell this woman off, but my temper had been what landed me in Sweet Briar in the first place. I took Luke’s hand, linking our fingers, and realized that things hadn’t ended up so badly. Nevertheless, I didn’t need the bad press.
“Actually,” I said, “he’s busy today, but y’all have a great time in Sweet Briar.” Then I dragged him out the door and down the sidewalk, not stopping until I’d locked us in my office and had taken him into the back room.
He grinned down at me, mischief filling his eyes. “Missed me, huh?”
I reached up on my tiptoes and gave him a quick kiss, but he wasn’t having any part of that. He slipped an arm around my waist and pulled me to his chest, deepening the kiss.
“I missed you last night,” he murmured against my lips. “Makes me want to pawn off night duty on Willy and the sheriff’s department.”
He had night duty once or twice a week, which usually consisted of being on call, but lately, the department had been busier. Sometimes I stayed with him while he was on call, but last night I’d stayed out at the farm.
“How’d your shift go?”
“Not too bad. I only had a couple of calls—a flat tire and a disturbance over on Greenly Street,” he said, giving me another kiss. “Bobby Jeppers drank too much beer and ended up in his neighbor’s chicken coop, and his neighbor damn near shot him. How was your night?”
“Meemaw was fit to be tied over Teddy and the organic chickens he’s putting in next spring, and then whining about Dixie living in sin and complaining about me redoing the overseer’s house, so basically, par for the course,” I said with a chuckle.
“I ran out to the farm to check it out yesterday afternoon. Looks like it’s close to bein’ done. Guess you lit a fire under your contractor’s ass after all.”
I grinned. “Something like that.”
His smile faded, and his eyes looked guarded.
“What?” I asked. When he raised a quizzical eyebrow, I said, “I hope you have a better poker face when you’re interrogating criminals.”
“You’re not a criminal,” he said. “You’re my girlfriend, and hopefully wife soon, if you’d ever accept my proposal.”
I rolled my eyes. “Luke…”
I knew he wanted to marry me, but it felt like we were moving at light speed, and I needed to go at a snail’s pace. He said he understood, yet he kept bringing it up, making me wonder if his plan was to try to wear me down.
He held up a hand. “A discussion for another day. I was lookin’ for you to tell you what I found out before someone else told you.”
“Well, hurry,” I said, feeling irritated anyway. “I have a client coming in about five minutes.”
As if on cue, there was a knock on the front door.
“Damn,” I grumbled as I pulled free and headed for the hallway, figuring the woman from the coffee shop had tracked Luke down here. “That tourist is bound and determined to screw you or Teddy before she leaves town.”
“ What? ” he asked.
But it wasn’t her at the door. Instead, it was a young woman with shoulder-length, strawberry blond hair. Another woman stood behind her.
“She’s early,” I said, heading for the door. I really hoped this was a real case and not another dud.
“Summer,” Luke said. “I really need to tell?—”
I ignored him, instead flipping the lock and opening the door. “Good morning,” I said in a cheery voice. “You must be my nine o’clock appointment.”
The woman gave me a warm smile. “I’m Belinda Steele, and this is my sister-in-law, Magnolia.”
“I tried to warn you,” Luke grunted in my ear, low enough that hopefully they didn’t hear.
“I don’t understand,” I said in a little bit of awe, and if I were honest, a speck of jealousy. The mayor and some of the townspeople claimed Magnolia Steele as a resident, despite the fact that the woman had never set foot within the city limits. But that hadn’t stopped Maybelline from dedicating part of a wall to her. A wall that used to have been fully mine.
“We need your help,” Belinda said earnestly. “Magnolia’s mother left town right after her high school graduation and never came back. We want you to help us find out why.”