Chapter 1
One Week Earlier
Nothing wrecks a girl’s wedding day like the spray of brain matter all over her white dress.
A glare off the portrait’s glass hides the bloodstain, until I shift just enough to reveal the splatter of burgundy caught in a swish of white chiffon.
Tucked behind a gilded picture frame, I’m smiling in my wedding photo, unknowingly wearing a dress that looks like someone took a paintbrush to my fairytale dream and smeared it in red.
Tragically, it’s not paint staining my dress.
I wait for him to notice and correct himself, but when he doesn’t, I say, “Thanks. That is what today’s photography lesson will be about—wedding portraits.”
“Very good. Maybe someday I will wed…” he replies, glancing over his shoulder at the cluster of women gathered near the entrance to my studio where I offer photography classes.
Several ladies join us, and my heart squeezes with an anxiety that never lets up.
I don’t fit in here on Hemlock Drive, where the grass is emerald green all year long and the women wear two-hundred-dollar workout outfits instead of the sports bra and swishy shorts I’m used to.
I inhale a reassuring breath, then turn around to face my students, who mostly consist of busybody neighbors and bored housewives with a knack for underdeveloped ISO knowledge and overdeveloped gossip.
The group trickles into my 411 Hemlock Drive studio that has my business name printed across the glass door: Shoot to Thrill.
The studio is attached to my house, which I’m not exactly happy about, but it was the only way I could open up a business without hurdling the red tape of a background check and year-long lease.
Always early is Ali Azad, an Iranian refugee who has the biggest crush on Zala, whose last name I can never seem to remember and lives two houses down.
Giving herself an extra three inches of height, she’s wearing shoes with so much arch support they could only have been designed by a structural engineer.
In her mid-fifties, Zala tends to take too many pictures of birds and is convinced that every blurry shot is avant-garde.
My best friend and across-the-street neighbor, Ivory Cobb, hangs at the edge of the small gathering.
In front of Ivory, a girl wearing red leather head to toe stomps in with the subtlety of a drumline.
She’s painfully Gen Z and wearing an expression like the whole world just said something offensive.
Grimacing at my bridal photo hanging on the wall, Ivory lifts one hand to shield her eyes from the golden glare streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling window of the studio where I host classes to aspiring photographers.
Most of them are neighbors who pity me—and Ali, who only comes to orbit Zala because he’s too nervous to ask her out.
In fact, the whole class has been trying to help him muster the courage for months.
Truth be told, most assume Zala would be out of Ali’s league if she had better style, especially with footwear.
Ali is short and pudgy, while she towers over him with her high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and hair so platinum it’s debated—behind her back, of course—if she dyes it.
I tend to think they’d be a great match, that the heart yearns for what completes it.
That’s what made me first fall in love with my husband, then more recently pick Ivory as a best friend: We are absolutely nothing alike.
To the residents of Hemlock Drive, paying for my lessons is akin to charity and gives them bonus points of good karma to balance out all the packages—and much worse secrets—they’re hiding from their husbands.
Or what their husbands are hiding from them.
Secrets are why mine is dead. They don’t realize that I know about the skeletons in their closets, mainly because I’m also an expert skeleton hoarder, so I’m familiar with the tells.
“Shari, honey, I swear I’ve seen this photo a hundred times and never noticed this.
” Ivory’s pointy fingernail scratches against the glass, as if she’s trying to scrape off the bloodstain from the image beneath it.
Her voice is laced with a curious bewilderment.
“Please tell me that’s not blood on your wedding dress. ”
I gently set my vintage 1953 Polaroid land camera down like it might explode.
It took me months scouring the internet to find this exact model, of which less than a hundred still exist. I don’t want to tell Ivory the truth about what happened on my wedding day, because secrets are like cockroaches.
Where there is one, there are a hundred more ready to scatter from the corners.
“Why would you assume it’s blood and not red wine?” I answer her question with one of my own. “You know how clumsy I am.”
Ivory tilts her head, her ponytailed braids brushing her collarbone. “That’s not merlot, Shari. That’s arterial.”
If anyone would recognize blood spatter, it’s Ivory.
Although her field was in cybersecurity, the Doomwood Falls Police Department outsourced her on numerous occasions to handle overflow work on unsolved cases.
You wouldn’t believe the graphic images she had been exposed to—ha!
I can’t resist a good photography pun even if I tried.
“Fine, you got me,” I concede. “Yes, it’s blood, and no, I’m not telling you how it got on my wedding dress.”
“Seriously?” Her frown is so natural I can’t tell if she’s upset or just resting her face. “You’re not going to tell me the story behind that?”
“I like having a little mystery.”
If Ivory knew just how much of a mystery my life actually is, I doubt she’d still be my friend.
She’s always been an open book to me, from the moment she sauntered—and I do mean sauntered at five-foot-eleven—across the street to introduce herself to me the day after I moved in.
The first thing she did was hand me a plate of burnt homemade brownies along with a bottle of Kahlua, then proceeded to introduce herself as Ivory Cobb, my new best friend.
Half an hour later she was in my living room unpacking moving boxes with me, while refilling our glasses and retelling an abbreviated version of her life.
By the end of the day, I knew pretty much everything about her.
Including that she had dozens of uses for Kahlua, including in coffee, over ice cream, and on yogurt.
She had the lightest skin tone of five siblings, hence the name Ivory, and she gave up a thriving full-time cybersecurity career to be a part-time headhunter and stay-at-home mom to her ungrateful teenage daughter.
“Best friends aren’t supposed to keep secrets from each other,” Ivory says, jabbing me with her elbow. “Especially ones involving a wedding that looks like a crime scene.”
Oh, if only she knew the half of it.
“My wedding day was very traumatizing.”
“I can tell,” Ivory says, then graciously drops the subject and glances at the girl whose outfit looks nearly identical to Eddie Murphy’s in his Delirious stand-up comedy special. “So who’s the new girl?”
The red-leather girl’s expression remains sour. “Uh, you can ask me directly. I do know how to speak.”
“This is Wren.” Zala steps in, swishing her hair behind her shoulder as she introduces her. “She just moved to our neighborhood. I invited her so she could get to know everyone.”
I hold out my hand, but Wren hits it with her knuckles in an awkward one-sided fist-bump. “Welcome to Shoot to Thrill. I’m Shari Catalano, resident photographer and studio owner.”
I get an unimpressed look in exchange. “You call this a studio? It looks more like a clearance rack for ugly backdrops.”
Admittedly, I didn’t have much in the way of décor, but being bad at decorating didn’t make me bad at photography, did it?
“Well, this space is only used for lessons, not actually taking portraits,” I explain.
Wren idles by my photography wall. “These look amateur to me. How can I trust you to teach me proper photography technique when it looks like a kid shot these?”
“Look, kid.” Ivory floats up to us like she’s the queen of suburbia and merely letting me borrow the castle. According to most of Hemlock Drive, that’s pretty accurate. “If you want to do paint by numbers, there’s a craft store in town. The rest of us actually appreciate Shari’s expertise.”
Ivory fiddles with her necklace that matches mine—a delicate gold chain holding two handcrafted lilies, a symbol of beauty and our special friendship talisman that Ivory had custom made on our first girls’ trip to the beach shortly after I moved to Doomwood Falls.
“So either show some respect, or leave.” Ivory points to the door.
“Down, girl,” Wren mumbles before slinking into the corner. “No need to get volatile. I don’t have money for the class anyway.”
Seriously? Zala brought a broke girl who is going to give me trouble. Not my ideal customer.
“I’m covering the cost of her session today,” Zala explains.
Some days the money just isn’t worth dealing with people like Wren.
But I paste on a smile and begin class with the usual pep in my step because I need to eat.
I take coats, pass out lidded coffee cups, and direct everyone to the table of cameras to use at their disposal.
Did I mention I can’t resist a good photography joke?
“So you’re teaching us how to take wedding portraits.
” Ivory examines my photo wall—also known as my Wall of Exile—that gives examples of all types of photography I teach my class, from portrait to landscape to wildlife.
I don’t include photojournalism, which is my professional background, for good reason. It nearly got me killed.
“So exciting, yes?” Ali glances longingly at Zala as he says this.
Ivory shrugs. “There’s no reason for me to learn this because I have no intention of getting married again.”
“Third time’s a charm, right?” I glance at her.
“Third time is till death do him part.”