I frowned, dreading what was coming next, mostly because I wasn’t a fan of people in general and snobs in particular. Also, I knew that every single girl in there had been trained to keep family laundry in their own houses. Reputation was everything because the slightest hint of scandal could be financially and socially devastating, but those rules only extended to their own front doors.
The one thing you could count on in a crew like that was they’d be willing to gossip anybody who wasn’t related, especially now that Jaime was dead and couldn’t spill their dirty laundry.
Let the games begin.
Chapter 5
We left through the same doorway we’d entered through, and I stopped to read the room. Women were scattered around in little clusters, some dabbing dry eyes with expensive handkerchiefs and others whispering amongst themselves. One girl—a redhead who didn’t have the same air of sophistication that the rest of the room shared—stood out to me. She was off by herself and was legitimately crying, or, more precisely, trying not to.
It didn’t take long to figure out the pecking order. A brunette dressed to the nines in a red dress and black stilettos leaned against the bar in the corner flanked by two other women. They were amongst the ones dabbing dry eyes, though with the amount of waterproof makeup and fake lashes they were wearing, it was possible tears just couldn’t escape.
“There,” I said almost under my breath. “The woman in red is at the top of the pecking order here. James, you talk to her. She’ll be the one with the most information. Luther, you take the cluster of three on the couch, and I’m going to talk to the redhead sitting by herself.”
“But why wouldn’t you want to talk to the leader?” James asked.
“Because she won’t tell us what we need to know,” Luther said, giving me an approving smile, “but she’ll have information that you might need just to fill out the paperwork to show you did your due diligence.”
“Right,” James said, sighing, “because this isn’t about solving her murder, it’s about finding the artifact.”
“Bingo,” I replied, then moved toward my mark.
“Hey,” I said with a gentle smile as I approached her. Unlike the others, this woman was grieving. She looked lost.
“Hey,” she replied with a watery smile. “I suppose you need some answers, but I don’t think I have any. It was so bizarre.” She gave me the once-over, but there wasn’t any judgment in her gaze. “Are you a cop?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Goodness, no. I’m an independent consultant who specializes in this sort of thing.”
She raised a brow. “You mean weird crap?”
I had to give it to her for being a straight shooter. “Yeah, that about sums it up. What’s your name?”
“Allison Gray. Jaime and I’ve been best friends since the fourth grade.”
They didn’t strike me as two people who would have had much in common, but stranger things happened, especially in small towns.
She gave me a wry half smile. “I know what you’re thinking, but Jaime wasn’t always a glamour girl. She had a hard time fitting in when she was younger because she didn’t fit the ideal. Back then, she was a little overweight, wore glasses, and hadn’t gotten her braces yet, so her front teeth were crooked.” She inclined her head toward the other women. “They wouldn’t give her the time of day.”
“But you did, and you’ve stayed friends since then?”
She wobbled her hand from side to side. “Eh, sort of. We’ve remained acquaintances with a past connection. We still chatted whenever we’d run into each other, but once money became more important than looks to that crowd, they decided Jaime was one of them, and that’s the way she went. I am most definitely not one of them, so she left me behind.”
“So what are you doing here, then?” I asked.
“As I said, we’ve stayed friendly, and we ran into each other at the bridal boutique the other day. She was getting a fitting, and I was helping my cousin pick out a dress. Jaime invited me.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “On to the not-so-pleasant questions. Can you describe for me what happened? Was it sudden? Did she say or do anything out of the ordinary before she died? When did her skin take on the green hue? Was it all at once, or did it set on slowly?”
Alison held up a hand. “That’s a lot of questions, so I’ll just walk you through it, and if I miss anything, we’ll go back. She was fine through the whole reception. When we sat down to open gifts, she was still fine. The first few were great. She and William have traveled quite a bit, so I got a few pics from her mom and made her a collage, which she really seemed to love.”
That told me a little more about our victim, but I kept that to myself.
She smiled. “I was a little worried because it wasn’t some big, expensive espresso maker or something like I knew everybody else would get. Somebody else got her a couples spa package at the hotel they’re going to for their honeymoon, and she loved it, too. The next few were more generic gifts, and she seemed to get agitated. That’s when I noticed her color start to go off a little.”
She paused and chewed on her bottom lip. Her gaze drifted off like she was seeing something I couldn’t. “Then she got snippy about how Lindy—that’s the girl in the red—didn’t spend as much on her gift as she had for one of the other girls. The more impersonal or less extravagant gifts she opened, the more agitated she got, and the more her color changed. She went on this tangent about how she’d made registries at several places but that nobody had followed it. Finally, she actually threw a silver serving
