Still, Coop wasn’t ready to acknowledge Mitzy’s part in all those clapbacks (see me use hip words) and pot-stirring comments on Instagram and Twitter. She still loved her, and with that love came romanticizing her memory rather than seeing it without her rose-colored glasses.
I gave her a light nudge. “Hey, how come you didn’t tell me about the peanut allergy thing? What if I’d had peanut butter and jelly for lunch? Or a Snickers bar?”
“First, you don’t really like peanut butter and jelly, and second, I knew you wouldn’t bring anything but M&Ms in your purse, and I also knew Mitzy always has EpiPens with her at all times. She talked about it quite often on her YT channel. So if there was an emergency, someone was supposed to always have her covered.”
I nodded. My demon knew me well. “Oh, look, her phone…” I muttered, curiosity eating me up.
Gosh, I wanted to yank it out of its purple nest and see if she’d really sent the text to Nikki and the others to go to the janitor’s room in the basement in order to collect their swag. I mean, of course anyone could have gotten hold of her phone and sent the text.
The question was, had her purse been missing before she went onstage?
“I know what you’re thinking, Trixie, but I’d almost bet Mitzy has password protection on her phone. It looks like it’s run out of charge anyway.”
“Dang,” I murmured, my disappointment obvious. “So I guess we should call Tansy and let her know what Solomon found.”
Yes, that’s reluctance in my voice. My salivating for a good mystery aside, I wanted to know what had happened to Mitzy for Coop’s sake. I felt like maybe finding out what happened would at least give her some closure.
Coop nudged me, taking the spoon so she could continue digging. “Is that remorse I hear in your voice?”
My shoulders slumped. “Not really remorse so much as disappointment we didn’t find anything terribly significant that we can use to point toward whether this was a murder or not. I mean, there’s nothing physical, anyway. Though, I have to ask myself who would steal her purse and dump it two blocks over from Cobbler Hall, and why?”
That was when Coop gasped, her body stiffening, her eyes wide.
“What?”
“Look what was under the phone.”
I gasped when I looked, too.
EpiPens. Not one, but three…
“Trixie, love? What have you got for me?” Tansy asked as she barreled her way into the shop, whipping past Knuckles and Goose—deep in the midst of tattooing twins for their thirtieth birthday—with a brisk nod of her head.
I waved her back to the break room and pointed to the table. “I think we have Mitzy’s purse.”
She cocked her bleached-blonde head, tipping it from side to side to work out the creaks, indicating it had been a long night. “How do we know this is hers and where did you find it, Miss Trixie?”
I knew that tone. That was the tone that said she thought I’d stepped over the line and had gone digging around, doing my own investigation. It was the tone that said, can’t you keep your nose out of anything?
I looked up at her and grinned with a shake of my head and a wag of my finger. “No, no. I had nothing to do with this. Solomon found it in the dumpster over on Monroe, by the ice cream shop. He brought it to us because he thought it might cheer Coop up, knowing how much she loved Mitzy. He knew it was hers because he saw her go into the hall last night with it. That’s all. Promise.”
Tansy’s face instantly softened. She really liked Coop, and the reverse was true for my demon. She wanted nothing more than to please Tansy by abiding the law.
“How is the lass today? I can never bloody well tell how she’s feeling from the outside. She’s always so stone-faced.”
“She’s quite sad. As you well know, Mitzy was her makeup idol.”
Tansy glanced at the purse and mumbled, “Hmmm. Mitzy certainly had her share of fans, didn’t she?”
I snorted when I remembered the number of followers on her Twitter. “No kidding. She has upward of ten million followers on Twitter alone.”
“Hah! You ought to see her Insta followers. All as rabid as the youngsters here last night. What a nightmare that was.”
“You mean having to question all of them?” I couldn’t even imagine how hard that must have been.
She brushed a tired hand over her forehead. “Indeed I do. Scallywags, the lot of them. None of them could stop howling long enough to get a full sentence out of their wee mouths. I think we went through more tissues than Costco has on its bloody shelves.”
Poor Tansy. I sympathized with her plight…but I also was hoping to get some information out of her. So, I tread lightly, but tread nonetheless. I wanted to know if we were officially calling this a murder.
“And?”
“And what, Angela Lansbury?” Her eyebrow lifted, but there was a glint of amusement in her eyes.
I rolled my eyes at her and made a face. “And…did you find out anything interesting when you questioned those kids? Geez, Detective Primrose, you behave as though we’ve never done this before. The routine is thus: I stumble onto a dead person. I experience shock and horror, then I pray for their soul’s safe passage. Then I call you. You come to investigate. I observe and help the bereaved if needed. And then I poke around because I don’t know how to stop myself. We’ve both been to this rodeo. So saddle up, cowgirl, and tell me what’s happening in the coral.” I planted my hands on my hips and she stared blankly at me. “Okay, fine. I’ll just ask. Are you guys calling this a murder yet?”
She looked down at her notepad, undoubtedly to avoid eye contact. “We don’t have enough evidence to call it
