Chilled to the Bone (Mabel McCoy Mystery #3)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

The first firework split the sky like a crack in dark glass, and five thousand people tilted their heads toward heaven. I was not one of them. I was watching Chowder try to eat a stranger’s funnel cake.

“Chowder, no.” I tugged his leash. I had been negotiating with a seventeen-pound French bulldog for years and losing most of those negotiations. “That is not yours.”

Chowder disagreed. He strained against his harness, determined that all funnel cake was, by divine right, his funnel cake.

Tonight he wore a stars-and-stripes bow tie and a miniature Uncle Sam top hat that refused to stay put, because Chowder had no chin and therefore no relationship at all with the laws of physics that governed hats.

It had already slid sideways and now sat at a jaunty angle over his left ear.

He looked like a tiny, wrinkled politician running on a platform of unlimited treats and no bedtimes.

“Ma’am, your dog is licking my powdered sugar,” a tourist said, holding his plate above his head.

“I’m so sorry.” I scooped Chowder up with one arm, pressing him against my hip. He snorted his disapproval and left a smear of powdered sugar across the navy fabric of my dress. “He has no shame and very high cholesterol. It’s a dangerous combination.”

The tourist moved away in a hurry. I set my dog down, wiped the sugar from my sailor-stripe swing dress, and reminded myself that I had chosen this life with all of its parts, including the parts that left powdered sugar on vintage cotton.

The second firework exploded in a shower of gold and red, and the crowd along the Grimm Island harbor let out a collective gasp that sounded like the island itself was breathing in.

July Fourth on Grimm Island was the reason people stayed in small towns.

The whole harbor had been transformed. White string lights were threaded through the live oaks along the waterfront, turning the Spanish moss into something luminous and otherworldly.

Food vendors lined the municipal pier, their grease-scented smoke mingling with the salt air and the lingering perfume of sparklers that children waved like tiny wands.

A bluegrass band played on the gazebo stage, though nobody could hear them over the fireworks.

The fiddle player kept sawing away with great enthusiasm.

He played like he was being paid by the note.

The heat hadn’t broken, even at nine o’clock.

It sat on the island like a wool blanket nobody had asked for, thick and damp and impossible to escape.

I could feel my hair rebelling against the pins I’d used to secure my vintage waves, individual curls staging a jailbreak in the humidity.

My red lipstick, the one constant I never abandoned, was holding steady, but the rest of me was wilting like a peony in August.

“You look like a recruitment poster,” Bea said, appearing at my elbow with a plastic cup of something that was almost certainly not lemonade.

She wore a flowing white caftan embroidered with silver stars, and her red hair had been swept up and threaded with tiny American flag pins that caught the firelight.

On anyone else it would have been absurd. On Bea it was a statement of intent.

“Did you bring a flask to a family fireworks show?”

“I brought two.” She patted her purse, which was the size of a small suitcase and could have contained anything from cocktail ingredients to classified documents.

“One for socializing and one for emergencies. This island’s idea of a mixed drink is a Bud Light with a lime wedge.

I like to think I bring a little class to this place. ”

A third firework bloomed across the sky in cascading blue and white, its reflection shimmering across the harbor like scattered sapphires. Somewhere behind us, a child screamed with delight. Somewhere to our left, Walt was loudly critiquing the pyrotechnic display to anyone within earshot.

“The timing is off,” he announced, his Navy veteran’s cap sitting at its usual precise angle despite the crowd pressing around him.

“A proper fireworks display should have a three-second interval between launches for maximum visual impact. These people are firing them like they’re trying to win a war, not put on a show. ”

“Walt, for the love of all that’s holy, it’s a party,” Dottie said.

She stood beside him in white linen pants patterned with tiny red lobsters and a navy blouse, her jet-black bob immaculate, her red cat-eye glasses reflecting the fireworks like tiny television screens.

“Can you not turn everything into a military briefing?”

“Negative. Discipline doesn’t take holidays.”

“Neither does indigestion,” Hank muttered from the folding chair Dottie had insisted he bring.

His cane leaned against his knee, a carved wooden thing with a brass handle shaped like a gavel.

He claimed a former defendant had sent it to him from prison as either a peace offering or a threat, and he’d chosen to believe it was the former.

The bandage was gone from his head now, but I could see the thin scar along his hairline where the stitches had been, a souvenir from Douglas Sutton’s attempt to silence us.

He was eating a corn dog one slow bite at a time.

Dottie had told him he could come to the fireworks as long as he sat down and didn’t overdo it. She’d used those exact words.

“Where’s Deidre?” I asked, scanning the crowd.

“Over there.” Bea pointed with her bourbon.

“Cornered the mayor’s wife by the snow cone stand.

She’s been lecturing her about the historical inaccuracy of the decorations for twenty minutes.

The bunting pattern is more appropriate for a Victorian funeral than for celebrating two-hundred and fifty years of America’s freedom. ”

I followed Bea’s gesture and spotted Deidre’s silver curls bobbing with the intensity of her lecture, her red culottes visible even in the dim light. The mayor’s wife wore a glazed expression and looked like she was contemplating escape routes.

“Should we rescue her?” I asked.

“The mayor’s wife or Deidre?”

“Fair point.”

Another firework exploded, this one a massive starburst that painted everything in shades of violet and gold. The crowd cheered. Chowder pressed against my ankle, less impressed by the spectacle than by the dropped hot dog he’d spotted three feet away. I tightened my grip on his leash.

“Don’t even think about it,” I told him.

He thought about it.

And then Dash was there.

I felt him before I saw him. There was a change in the air around me, like the shift in weather before the clouds arrive.

His hand found the small of my back, warm even through the cotton of my dress, his fingers spreading across the curve of my spine with a familiarity still new enough to steal my breath.

“Hey,” he said, low and close to my ear, and the sound of his voice beneath the fireworks and the crowd and the distant bluegrass did something to my pulse that had nothing to do with patriotism.

“Hey yourself.” I turned to face him. He was in uniform, which meant he was technically working, but he’d loosened his collar against the heat.

His dark hair was slightly damp at the temples and his sleeves were rolled to his forearms, showing tanned skin and the muscles that moved beneath it when he braced his hands on his duty belt.

The scar along his jawline caught the firelight, a thin silver line that I’d traced with my fingertip three nights ago on my piazza while the crickets sang and my common sense had almost packed its bags and left town.

“You look…” He paused, his dark eyes moving over me with attention that felt like a physical thing, warm and unhurried. “Like trouble in a sailor dress.”

“If you’re trying to make me blush in front of the entire island, it’s working.” My cheeks were doing something traitorous and warm that had nothing to do with the July heat.

His hand was still on my back. He hadn’t moved it. I hadn’t asked him to.

“Having a good time?”

“Chowder tried to steal a man’s funnel cake, and I watched Jimmy Carson eat twenty-two hot dogs and throw up on the winner’s podium all over the mayor. So it’s been entertaining.”

He laughed. It was a real laugh, one that reached his eyes and crinkled the corners and made him look younger and less guarded.

Every time he did it I wanted to bottle the sound and keep it somewhere safe.

I’d been collecting his laughs like other women collected jewelry, hoarding each one as proof that beneath the badge, there was a man who could let go, sometimes, with me, when nobody was looking.

“I’ve got about four minutes before Harris needs me at the south barricade,” he said, and there was an apology in it.

“Then stop talking and watch the fireworks.”

We stood there, his hand warm against my back, the crowd pressing around us, Chowder’s leash wrapped around my wrist. A massive cascade of white and gold opened across the sky, and in the light of it I could see every face along the harbor turned upward, illuminated and awed.

Coach Delacroix from the high school had his twin granddaughters on his shoulders, one on each side, easy as anything after forty years of keeping teenagers in line.

Clarence Beaumont stood outside his bakery handing out free sparklers.

Tommy and Ruthie Sullivan were slow dancing on the pier to “God Bless the U.S.A.”

The whole island was here, gathered along the water’s edge, watching the sky crack open with color and sound.

Dash’s thumb traced a small circle against my spine. One slow revolution, then another. It was a touch that made promises his mouth hadn’t formed yet.

His radio crackled. He dropped his hand.

“I have to go.”

“I know.”