Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
I woke at four thirty with a French bulldog sitting on my chest, staring at me with the unblinking intensity of a creature who had decided that this was a reasonable hour for breakfast and would accept no arguments to the contrary.
My body didn’t care that the tea shop was still closed.
Years of pre-dawn alarms had carved a groove in my internal clock that a few weeks of forced vacation couldn’t touch.
“Off,” I said.
Chowder did not get off. He shifted his weight forward so that his wrinkled face was approximately two inches from mine, his breath a warm and deeply personal commentary on whatever he’d managed to eat off the sidewalk last night when I wasn’t looking.
“You are seventeen pounds of pure audacity,” I told him, and got up.
The house was dark and still, that deep before-dawn quiet when the rest of the world is sleeping and you’re the only fool awake because your body refuses to accept that it doesn’t have scones to bake and a shop to open.
I let Chowder out the back door to attend to his morning business. While he conducted his own investigation of every blade of grass, I put the kettle on and leaned against the doorframe, breathing in the salt air off the harbor before the heat turned it into something you had to chew.
He trotted back to the stoop with something muddy clamped triumphantly in his jaws that turned out, on inspection, to be the corner of a magnolia leaf he had decided was an enemy of the state. I made him drop it on the porch. He looked betrayed.
Once he’d waddled back inside and been rewarded with his breakfast, I started the dough for biscuits, covered the bowl, and put it in the refrigerator so the biscuits would be fat and flaky. Then I headed upstairs and turned on the shower.
The hot water helped clear away the cobwebs.
It always did. I stood under the spray and let the last traces of sleep wash away, along with the memory of fireworks and Dash’s mouth and how my whole body had hummed like a tuning fork for an hour after he’d left.
I’d lain awake longer than I cared to admit, staring at the ceiling, feeling things I hadn’t felt in a decade and not entirely sure what to do about them.
I dried off, wrapped myself in my robe, and sat at my vanity. Tinted moisturizer, bronzer, blush and mascara—a Southern girl’s guide to not looking like your face was melting off. Then I topped it off with my favorite shade of red lipstick that wouldn’t budge or bleed for the next twelve hours.
My hair took longer. The humidity was no one’s friend, so I pulled it back into a loose chignon and hoped the loose pieces around my face looked sexy and artful instead of like a founding father in distress.
I chose my outfit with care because of the weather and because of the man who’d be sitting across my breakfast table.
I chose a vintage halter-neck romper in red with a watermelon-print bodice on gingham that tied at the nape of my neck.
The high-waisted shorts hit mid-thigh with a row of pearl buttons down each hip.
I finished off the look with red open-toe wedges that added two inches to my height.
I checked the full-length mirror, adjusted where the bodice gathered, and decided I looked like a woman who had her life together, which was at least seventy percent true and would have to do.
Chowder was waiting at the top of the stairs in his morning attire, a lightweight seersucker bandana in blue and white that made him look like a tiny Southern gentleman who’d been denied entrance to the country club and was plotting his revenge.
I’d ordered it from a shop in Savannah, along with a matching leash I hadn’t used yet because Chowder considered leashes a form of oppression and I was too tired to argue.
“Breakfast,” I told him, and he launched himself down the stairs with the graceless enthusiasm of a bowling ball in a bandana.
The kitchen was my favorite room in the house.
I’d renovated it to my own tastes after Patrick died, and it was the one room that felt entirely mine.
Textured brick walls, exposed beams, butcher-block counters worn smooth from years of rolling dough, and a farmhouse sink deep enough to hold my largest tea urns when I brought work home.
The heart pine floors were scuffed in all the right places, and the morning light came through the windows facing the garden in long golden slats that made even the dust motes look intentional.
I had fresh herbs on the windowsill, a large butcher-block island that was great for baking or entertaining, and a pub table that sat four sitting off in a niche where I like to drink my morning tea and make my lists for the day.
Most mornings I’d have been at The Perfect Steep by now, flour on my apron and the ovens already hot. But the shop had been closed for a few weeks because of the fire, and I was climbing the walls with boredom. I wasn’t meant for a sedentary life. Or a solitary one.
Despite being a successful tea shop owner, I’d somehow added a new title to my LinkedIn account.
I, along with the Silver Sleuths, had been deputized and brought on to solve cold cases that had been sitting in a forgotten file cabinet during the former sheriff’s term.
Fortunately, Milton was rotting in a prison cell and Dash had been brought in by the county council to replace him.
Dash was here to clean things up and set things to rights.
I’m not sure how I got roped in as even being remotely qualified to investigate cold cases, but apparently I had a knack for it.
And I provided top-notch refreshments and snacks.
Our last case had ended with a killer in handcuffs and my back room in ashes.
Someone had poured gasoline with cold precision, targeting every piece of evidence the Silver Sleuths had gathered, and if a group of evening walkers hadn’t spotted the smoke and called it in, I’d have lost the whole building instead of one room.
The contractors had promised it would be done this week. Soon, I could get back behind my counter, back to the chalkboard and the tea canisters and the spotless display case filled with pastries in the mornings and sandwiches for lunch.
The air-conditioning hummed its quiet war against the July morning, and I tied on my apron.
I took the biscuit dough out of the fridge, floured the island counter, and then rolled it out and used my biscuit cutter to make perfect circles.
While the biscuits baked, I wiped down counters that didn’t need wiping and checked my phone twice for messages from Dash before putting it down because I’d already texted him good night and good morning in the span of six hours and even I had limits.
The timer chimed. I pulled the biscuits from the oven, golden and risen and filling the kitchen with the smell of butter and home.
I set them on the wire rack and then pulled a tray of bacon from the other oven.
I had a bowl of fresh eggs on the counter I’d whip up as soon as Dash arrived. Which should be any minute.
I was getting out the honey and jams for the table when the doorbell rang.
“That’s him,” I said to Chowder, but he wasn’t prone to enthusiasm.
My stomach did its usual gymnastics, and I checked my lipstick in the hallway mirror out of habit before opening the door.
It wasn’t Dash.
The woman on my porch stood in the July heat as if she’d made a private arrangement with the weather and it had agreed to leave her alone.
She was somewhere in her early eighties, though she wore her age with the upright defiance of someone who considered aging a minor inconvenience rather than a surrender.
Her white hair was pinned in a French twist so precise it could have been done with a ruler and a level.
She wore a cream silk blouse, pressed linen trousers, and pearl earrings that were either very good costume jewelry or the real thing passed down through enough generations to have their own provenance.
In the heat that was already making me feel like a damp dishrag, she looked like she’d been refrigerated.
She carried a leather portfolio under one arm with both hands.
“Mrs. McCoy?” Her voice was low and clear, the accent old Charleston money. The kind that didn’t drawl so much as glide.
“That’s me.” I untied my apron and draped it over my arm, because my grandmother had taught me that you didn’t greet company looking like you’d been elbow deep in flour, even if you had been. “Can I help you?”
“My name is Josephine Wainwright Hale.” She said it with the air of someone accustomed to the name carrying weight, though she didn’t seem to expect recognition. “I read the article about you in the Gazette. About your group that solves cold cases.”
“The Silver Sleuths,” I said. “Would you like to come in? I’ve got fresh biscuits and a kettle on.”
Something in her expression shifted. Not a smile, but a softening around the eyes that suggested she hadn’t expected kindness and was recalibrating. “Thank you. I would.”
I led her to the kitchen because the kitchen was where I did my best thinking and my best listening, and because the living room felt too formal for a woman who was carrying something heavy in that leather folder and heavier still in the set of her jaw.
I directed her to the table I’d set for Dash, and then poured hot water into the china teapot and brought it to the table along with two matching cups and saucers.
I set creamer and sugar in front of her, and then I put out a small plate of biscuits to finish the presentation.
Because in the South, presentation is everything.
Josephine Wainwright Hale sat at my kitchen table with the rigid composure of someone who had rehearsed what she was about to say and would not be derailed by hospitality.
Chowder investigated her shoes, deemed them acceptable, and settled at her feet. A good sign. His instincts about people had proven reliable enough that I’d started treating them as a screening tool.