Let Sleeping Dogs Lie (Magnolia Steele Mystery #5)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

“ M agnolia, you got the coleslaw covered?”

Tilly asked me this as I was stirring some mayo into a giant metal mixing bowl full of shredded cabbage and carrots, apple cider vinegar, and a few other secret ingredients handed down through Momma’s family for generations.

I gave her a stern look. “What’s it look like to you?”

She was standing over a fry basket full of breaded chicken in the Southern Belles Catering kitchen in downtown Franklin, Tennessee, waiting for them to reach the perfect shade of golden brown before she plucked them out. Pointing her metal tongs at me, she said, “I swear to all that is holy, you sound more and more like your momma every day, Alabama accent and all. God rest her soul.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I sassed back. Well, sort of. Tilly was like an aunt to me, and while I could get away with all kinds of nonsense with her—always had—I wouldn’t truly sass her. I loved her too much to show her disrespect.

“It is when you’re living with her,” a male voice said behind me. I turned around to face him.

Colt Austin. Blue-eyed, blond, and much too handsome for his own good, he looked like a country music star waiting to be discovered…which he was. Women all over Nashville adored him. Thankfully, I was the only woman Colt adored.

Propping a hand on my hip, I gave him an ornery grin. “I don’t hear you complaining about me much. Quite the opposite.”

He walked over and snatched the spoon from my hand, tossing it into the bowl, then wrapped an arm around my back and pulled me hard against his chest. A playful grin tugged at the corners of his lips. “Good point.”

I understood the reason for that grin. He liked that I was being sassy. It was better than being perpetually mopey.

“Get a room,” groaned Rita, one of the catering staff, but she followed it with a laugh.

“I’d do just that if we didn’t have to feed one hundred and fifty people in about two hours,” Colt said, giving me a quick peck on the lips, then releasing me. Lowering his voice, he said, “You got another one of those official letters, Maggie. This one’s from the attorney’s office in Sweet Briar.”

Picking up the spoon, I started stirring the coleslaw again. “So?”

“So? Aren’t you curious what it’s about?” he asked in disbelief.

“It’s probably the mayor asking me to be in a parade again,” I said dismissively, hoping he’d drop the subject. But no, I wasn’t that lucky.

“That one was from the Sweet Briar mayor’s office. The last two have come from an attorney.”

“So?” I countered.

“Why don’t you just open it and see what it’s about?”

I shot him a glare. “No.”

It was just one more unknown I wasn’t prepared to deal with. I was barely managing to hang on without adding to my problems.

“Maggie…” he pleaded. I knew curiosity was getting the best of him. Frankly, I was surprised he was respecting my privacy and hadn’t just ripped it open.

“No means no, Colt,” I said, focusing on mixing the slaw.

“But—”

“You heard ’er,” Tilly said in a tone Colt wouldn’t dare defy. “Leave it be.”

The rest of the staff glanced around at each other as Colt gave me a soft kiss. “Sorry, Mags.”

Then he set to work so we’d be ready to shoot out the door in an hour to head to the corporate event we were catering.

I nearly groaned in frustration. So we were back to treating poor Magnolia with kid gloves.

It was so damned infuriating.

Sure, I’d been stalked and tortured by a serial killer nearly six months ago. But I was over it. Done. I was sick to death of people gawking at me as they walked by, nudging the person next to them so they would notice me too. I knew what they said as soon as I was out of earshot (or, in some cases, before). There’s Magnolia Steele, the disgraced Broadway star who was tortured by a serial killer twice and somehow lived to tell the tale. What do you think he did to her exactly?

Lucky for them, they didn’t have to look too hard to find out.

The press had gone wild with the story, and a few podcasts had put out several episodes on it. Then a couple of radio hosts, Molly and Mo, had seen fit to launch The C-Mark Serial Killer Podcast . ( Seriously? They couldn’t come up with a better name than that ?) They’d set out to do what should have been impossible—to put a humorous spin on the events while offering up all the gory details people craved.

How did you make what happened to me and those other women funny?

Molly and Mo had talked at length about Tripp Tucker, of course, and what my father, the notorious Brian Steele, had done to drive him to murder. But they hadn’t stopped at that. They’d discussed, also at length, my involvement in the whole situation. They were practically gleeful over the fact that I was the one who’d pulled the trigger on my father in that awful final showdown.

There was nothing more mortifying than knowing people were casually listening to the details of your tortures. Yes, plural. How many times I’d been slashed by a butcher knife. The C’s he’d carved into my legs to literally brand me. The way he’d hung me up like a Christmas ham from the very same rafter he’d used to string up the woman he’d tortured and killed ten years before. These listeners gasped and clutched their pearls, entertained by my torment as they drove to work or worked out or watched their kid’s Little League game, hiding their earbuds under ballcaps.

But what was worse was that the people close to me knew how it was affecting me and felt powerless to stop it. They treated me like I was about to fall apart before their eyes.

Truth was, maybe they weren’t so far off.

Two hours later, we were at the Hawkins Financial corporate fundraiser, serving Nashville hot chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, coleslaw, and rolls buffet-style.

Tilly had a clipboard with assignments, and she read them off like a drill sergeant. If anyone was channeling my mother, it was her.

“Rita, Colt, Devin, and I are manning the buffet line. Maggie stays in the back.”

“There’s nothing to do in the back,” I countered. “Absolutely nothing.” Shoot, half the time we didn’t even have anyone stationed in the back when we served buffet-style.

“I think we need someone watching the food,” she said, refusing to meet my gaze. “Can’t be too safe.”

But I knew it wasn’t the food she was keeping safe.

I started to protest, then stopped. I was only arguing for the sake of it. Truth be told, I didn’t want to be here at all, but even if I did suck at this job, it was my only source of income.

I wasn’t much good at cooking, and the only reason I worked for Southern Belles Catering at all was because my momma had left part of her share of the business to me.

Okay, not entirely true. I’d started working there before her death. When I’d come home from New York City, Momma had forced me to earn my keep. Part of me had wanted to work there, to be close to her. But now I felt stuck.

Outside of catering, I was good at waitressing and acting, and the only acting gigs coming my way at the moment were off-off-off-Broadway shows (like a production of Little Women in Scranton, Ohio), and the only reason they were interested in hiring me was because they figured people would show up to see the woman who’d been tortured. Sure, I was getting offers to pose nude or seminude so people could see my scars, but I’d rather live on food stamps than become even more of a circus sideshow.

A month after my attack, I’d tried to go back to my job at the boutique I’d worked at part-time, but people had kept coming in to gawk at me. It had made me anxious, to say the least. The owner of the Rebellious Rose had been thrilled at the extra business, not to mention featuring the center of the buzz of gossip, but one day a shopper had dropped a vase behind me, and the sound of it shattering had given me a major panic attack. I’d quit on the spot.

Tilly, on the other hand, wanted to keep me hidden, but it wasn’t because of my scars. My father had stolen money from several people in the Nashville area in the name of “financial planning.” I suspected he’d tricked more than a few people at this event into investing in one of his schemes, and they wouldn’t be the first to hold my father’s sins against me. He had to be fresh on their minds given everything that had happened. Of course, everyone likely knew my mother had been half owner of Southern Belles, but Tilly was probably hoping they wouldn’t dwell on it if they didn’t have a Steele scooping their mashed potatoes.

But I was tired of hiding. Tired of being forced to feel guilty for what other people had done.

Weren’t the scars from the sixteen long gashes and the two C’s Tripp Tucker had carved into my skin and muscle punishment enough? Or the lingering paranoia that someone was going to snatch me at any moment of the day? At least I’d gotten a little better. For the first three months after the incident, I couldn’t be alone without having a panic attack. Even now, I was terrified Tripp Tucker was hiding around the corner of the kitchen. Didn’t matter that I’d watched him die. Colt had shot him to save me, and now he was stuck dealing with my recurrent nightmares as well as my fear of the dark.

After five months of intense therapy sessions with my psychologist, I was still a hot mess. I’d gotten better—at first—but then that damned podcast had come out. Each episode that aired led to a big lunge backward in my recovery process.

The podcast had renewed the public’s interest in me and the killer, and I’d gotten interview requests from just about every media outlet possible. The most insistent were Molly and Mo themselves, who’d left me countless emails and voicemails requesting an interview, and so far, they had refused to accept no as my final answer.

Hell would freeze over before I talked to those two jackasses and let them laugh in my face about the worst two nights of my life.

Now, as everyone else bustled around, I stood as if my feet were cemented in place. I could feel Colt watching me closely. Looking for the cracks in my pretense of being fine. He’d become quite adept at spotting them.

“How about we call Belinda?” he said softly. “You two can have a girls’ night.”

Tears stung my eyes. “You think I can’t handle being alone in the back?”

He opened his mouth to speak, then promptly closed it.

That was a no, but to be fair, he had reason to doubt me. I did too.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t going to let Tilly pay me to drink margaritas at Pueblo Real while everyone else was working, Colt included. Especially since I knew he’d passed up the chance to sing at Turner’s country bar to be here tonight. Colt was talented, and I truly believed someone would realize it someday, but the catering job paid more, and we needed cash. Sure, my mother had left me our family home and a $50,000 life insurance policy, but both were currently tied up in litigation. After a three-week stint in a rehab clinic for his anger issues and drinking, my brother Roy had decided to contest our mother’s will since it had been created and signed less than two weeks before her cancer-related death. Even if it did give him the majority of her estate.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, getting irritated, more with myself than him, but I wasn’t so sure he could tell the difference.

He gave me a sad smile and whispered, “I love you, Maggie Mae.”

“I love you too,” I said, then headed to the back before I broke into tears. He deserved better than to be stuck with me and my neuroses. He’d fallen for me before I’d become a basket case.

Maybe it was time to give Colt a lifeboat so he could make his escape.