“Me? Why me?” she asked.
“All those cakes and pies and brownies.”
“Well, you don’t have to eat them.”
I flung the skirt away and reached for a roomier dress. “Okay, sure. I’m just going to pass up the world’s most famous baking podcaster’s food.”
She chuckled. “Famous. Okay, Miss Hyperbole. Someone sounds bitter.”
“Well, why are they all skipping over me and listening to you?” I asked, exasperated. The dress slipped down over my form easily. I sighed with relief. Except I looked like a box. A box with flowers on it. “Poisoning is interesting.”
“True,” she said. “But maybe not to everyone.” Willow crawled toward the edge of the bed— Daisy grabbed her and slid her back into place, whipped a toy out of nowhere, and handed it to her. “Have you noticed that once one person started listening to our podcast, suddenly everyone was listening? That’s the way it works in Parkwood. We want local. I’m local. They can listen to my recipes and then ask me about them at the Hibiscus. They can buy my muffins there. It makes them feel like they’re part of something greater.”
“They could ask me about poisonings when they see me at the Hibiscus,” I said, but even I knew that wasn’t ideal.
Maybe I needed to rethink my plan. We’d mentioned the coach’s death here and there, but we’d never really presented the story. Maybe if I gave the mystery more focus, play up the “local” aspect of it, listeners would want to ask questions when they saw me around town. Maybe they would stop ignoring my part of the podcast if it was talking about something more directly related to their lives.
No. Our lives. Because I was local now, too. And this story mattered to me for different reasons than the stories I covered in Chicago. It wasn’t only that a murder happened, but that a murder happened on my turf. There was a feeling of connectedness in Parkwood that I’d never felt before. Not just that I had connected to the town, but that we were all connected to each other. The objectivity that used to be so easy to me wasn’t easy anymore, because I had changed. Because Parkwood had changed me.
“Do you have a belt for that?” Daisy asked, her nose wrinkled.
I grunted and whipped off the dress, tossing it right over Willow’s head. She giggled and pawed at it, falling over backwards into her mother’s lap. “I have no idea what to wear to this…this…whatever it is.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘date,’” Daisy said. She uncovered Willow, said, “Boo!” and covered her back up to more giggles.
“It’s not a date date,” I said for the thousandth time since I’d accidentally called it one in front of her. “That was a figure of speech. You know, like ‘Have your people call my people.’”
“Uh-huh, I’m not sure that’s what he was thinking. Your handshake may have been, ‘Have your people call my people,’ but his handshake was definitely, ‘Let’s fall in love and get married and have babies.’” She uncovered Willow again and blew a raspberry on her cheek.
“His handshake said no such thing!” I said, but in the back of my mind I was afraid she may have been right. There was definitely something a little…more…in that handshake. I had been ignoring it. It was difficult to tell whether Brooks’s intentions were to keep me out of trouble or if they were about something else. And it was even more difficult to tell what my intentions were. Brooks was…confusing. “We’re information-sharing. I want to know what he knows about the Farley case. And I’m sure he wants the same.”
“Okay, sure,” Daisy said. “I would say those capris are perfect. You should go with them.”
I picked up the black silk capris with the long tassel belt that I’d bought for a journalism conference two years ago. I’d worn them with a pink top and black kitten heels and had felt so very cosmopolitan and international and important. Trace had worn a tie that matched my shirt, and the pink reflected off of his olive skin beautifully. We’d shared a glass of wine that night and talked about possibly getting married someday after our careers had settled. I felt a tug in my heart for the past. The outfit was full of memories.
But the capris also had an elastic waistband, so Daisy was a genius.
An hour later, I emerged from the bedroom ready to go.
Daisy looked up from the recipe book she was flipping through. “Very nice,” she said. “That’s an outfit that just screams for impersonal information-sharing about perps and forensic evidence.”
I picked up a pillow and threw it at her. “You’re going to be fired as my personal dresser.”
“Promise? But the pay was so good,” she teased, catching the pillow and tossing it back. She stood and smoothed a wayward wave on the back of my head. “Seriously, Hollis, you look awesome. He is going to be eating his heart out. Speaking of, what are you ordering at Mister Woks?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I just hope there aren’t giblets involved.”
There weren’t giblets involved. Just egg rolls and crab Rangoon and stir-fried wonderfulness.
Brooks was wearing a crisp pair of jeans and a tight polo shirt. His hair was combed neatly and he smelled like soap and aftershave and leather seats.
“I hope you like Mister Wok’s,” he said, handing me a menu. “I didn’t think to ask. We can hop over to China Steve if you don’t. I just thought it might be good to get out of Parkwood for some privacy.”
“No, this is great,” I said. “I’ve never eaten here. I didn’t even know it existed until recently.”
To be fair, to know this place existed meant to know that there was a Highway B that
