Mickey’s real grievance against Louise wasn’t the murder. No, he was mad at her for not talking for all those years. He thought she couldn’t talk and used the chalk and blackboard for a real reason—not because Louise was afraid if she talked she’d confess what she did.
He’d only lived with the squeaky chalk for a couple of years. Louise had to live with it for most of her life. Wasn’t that punishment enough?
Luci squeezed out of the truck and leaned over the side of the bed, digging through the grocery sacks, looking for the items that needed to go into the freezer. It wasn’t the same freezer her aunts had kept in the garage for so many years.
Mickey had hauled that one to the curb before the last aunt was cold in her grave, even though Louise had cleaned it very thoroughly after the body was removed. Okay, so it had been a naked body and it was kind of icky to think of the frozen bare buns against the bottom, but it still worked. Seemed a waste to buy a new freezer when there were so many other things they needed to buy.
If finding bodies was the criteria for getting rid of something, then the bougainvillea should be history, too, but it was still blooming in the garden. And they still had the chimney in their bedroom. And that chair in the sitting room…
Luci paused to think. Yeah, she was pretty sure that was all the locations bodies had been discovered—if she didn’t count the spot in the garden where Miss Gracie had been killed, but there was some dispute about the actual spot. Luci had studied the crime scene photos, but the garden had changed a lot in fifty-plus years.
Usually Luci could think about Miss Gracie and she and Delaney would materialize close by. She missed them, but they deserved a vacation, now that the house had central air conditioning. Their death chill had been a godsend during August. The pair planned to be back in time for Halloween, though.
Luci had some ghost hunters booked. With any luck, the aunts would put in an appearance, too. Mickey had booked himself into a cop convention in Vegas for that weekend. Family reunions made his eye twitch, particularly if most of the family in attendance was dead.
Luci lifted the lid of the freezer and tossed the frozen stuff into the wire basket fixed near the top. She turned back to the 4x4 to get the non-freezer stuff and was actually bending to pick up a sack when what she’d seen finally registered.
She stopped. Started to turn around—stopped.
Did she really want to verify what image her eyes had sent to her brain? Because if she’d seen what it seemed she’d seen…
Mickey’s eye was going to start twitching again.
And they’d need a new freezer.
“You all right, Miss Luci?” Saffron tipped her brightly colored head to the side, then flopped it to the other. “You look like you seen a ghost.”
Luci blinked a couple of times, then shook her head. A ghost wouldn’t be a problem. She was used to seeing ghosts.
“I’m fine.”
For now. Not only was there a body in the new freezer, it was one of her guests. The guy in the Miss Weena suite. Charles Stewart. He’d checked in early for the mystery weekend, but she’d bet money he hadn’t planned on being the body.
While Luci mused, words bubbled out of Saffron’s mouth, a wandering discourse that took her from the time she thought she’d seen a ghost, through some gastric distress, eventually arriving at the recipe she wanted to try out for breakfast tomorrow. When she paused for air, Luci broke in.
“I need to call Mickey.” She didn’t want to call Mickey. She could call her dad, but he tended to twitch worse than Mickey. And he and Lila were babysitting Gracie. She looked at her watch. If she hurried, they’d be at the zoo until CSI finished with the crime scene.
She started down the hall to her little office, but just as she reached the door, the front door opened and—Charles Stewart came in—minus the bullet hole between his eyes.
Luci felt her eye twitch.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Ross. Beautiful day, isn’t it, but a tad on the chilly side.”
“Yes.” Luci felt herself nod and sort of smile.
“Thought I’d pop back and grab a sweater.”
He started up the stairs, but paused part way up to look back and say, “By the way, thank you for the Benadryl. Those fire ants are really nasty!”
“Yes, they are.”
He turned and continued on up the stairs, his bite-dotted foot in view for what seemed like a long time. Luci noted that the bites looked like pimples now.
He passed from view and she heard him unlock the door to his suite and go inside. She looked back the way she’d come, then turned and retraced her steps. Once again in front of the freezer, she hesitated, before lifting the lid.
No body.
Apparently he’d climbed out and gone to get his—sweater.
Mickey looked at Luci, wondering if he needed to be worried. She was awfully quiet this evening.
He’d been anxious she wouldn’t be happy giving up law enforcement when Gracie was born, but then she’d decided to do the bed & breakfast thing. Then he’d been concerned about how that would work out, having strangers in the house, as opposed to just having strange people in the house. But so far it was going fine. Even the most annoying guest had a hard time making any headway against Luci when she went Seymour. And she seemed happy with the project.
Their private quarters were isolated from the guests and, with his schedule, he was lucky to see his girls, let
