They barreled into my legs, knocking me over. I hit my head on the receptionist desk hard enough to see stars. It usually took a lot to make me angry; trashing my salon and nearly knocking me out was enough to do the trick.
I shook off the stars and quickly got to my feet. “That’s enough, Nadine and Georgia!” They completely ignored my yelling, so I made a grab for whoever was on top as they rolled on the floor. Instead of grabbing ahold of one of them, I got a fist to the eye for my effort.
It took me and my three stylists to break the women up. They stood panting like rabid dogs as they glared at one another. Georgia then turned her gaze on me and looked at me with wounded eyes. “You betrayed me by allowingherinto your salon,” she said, her voice filled with hurt. She pointed her finger in Nadine’s direction and raised her voice when she added, “I made you, Josh. You were nothing when I first walked into your cheesy salon five years ago. Your success, this beautiful salon,” she gestured around at my pride and joy with both hands, “is all because of me.” Her eyes narrowed at me and her normally pretty face twisted with rage. “I will just as easily destroy you. Do you hear me?”
Not waiting for a response, she whirled around and left the salon. The autumn breeze kicked up as she walked down the front steps, making the cape she still wore billow up in front of her body. She looked down at the cape then whipped it off her body and tossed it to the ground before she stomped on it with her feet.
“She left without her coat or purse,” Meredith said softly beside me. “I’ll take them out to her, honey.”
I turned to face Nadine while Meredith retrieved Georgia’s things. I knew that I should’ve been the one to take them to her, but I also knew she needed time to calm down before we spoke again. Georgia had been very instrumental to my early success, but she did not make me. She might’ve gotten a lot of clients to my door, but I was the one who pleased them and kept them coming back for five years. Still, I didn’t want there to be any animosity between us. I decided to wait until the morning and then I’d give her a call or stop by her house.
Someone had brought Nadine a towel to hold to her bleeding nose. I could hear her mumbling about pressing charges beneath the cotton. She turned her eyes on me when she felt my attention on her. She must’ve seen how angry I was feeling because she at least had the smarts to look a little nervous.
“You are not welcome here again, Nadine.” She removed her towel in preparation to argue with me, but I held up my hand. “This is not up for debate. This is my salon and I decide what clients I will and will not see. I am aware that Georgia threw the first verbal barb, but the things you said to her were cruel and uncalled for. You are persona non grata around here from now on.”
She stood taller in her indignation over my criticism. “Wait until my husband hears about this. He’ll destroy you for talking to me like this.”
“I really don’t care what your sleazebag for a husband thinks about me,” I replied. “I’d like for you to leave now or I’ll be forced to call the police. I could press charges for the property damage.” I gestured to the broken glass all over the floor. “Or even assault,” I added, pointing to my eye that was starting to throb.
“Fuck you,” Nadine said, flipping me the bird on her way out the door. Such a classy act from our town’s first lady.
I shook my head and turned back to face my employees. “Back to work, everyone.”
It wasn’t long before the normal buzz of the salon returned. Since Georgia left early, I had a few hours before my next client. I got out a broom and cleaned up the mess before I retreated to the sitting room between the salon and massage areas with a cup of coffee.
“Fucking cunt!”
I looked up at my blue macaw, Savage, and grimaced at what he just said. He already had the filthiest mouth on the planet when I took pity on him and bought him from the pet store. His previous owner had died and his family didn’t know what to do with him, so they took him to the pet store. Brook, the owner, took him in before she realized what his vocabulary was like. I walked into the pet store one afternoon to buy treats for my Siamese cat, Diva, and my ferret, Jazzy, and was immediately propositioned by the bird for a blow job. It was love at first sight.
Normally, his raunchy talk made me laugh and brought a smile to my face, but not right then. It reminded me of how hurt Georgia was when she left the salon. I wanted to go find her and make things right between us, but I had several more clients on my schedule, and I figured she needed more time before she would want to talk to me.
I tried calling her when my day was over and I was alone in my living space on the second floor, but my call went to voicemail. Instead of leaving a message, I hung up. I decided to go over to her house in the morning before my workday began and talk to her in person.
IT WAS A RAREoccurrence for me to get called into work on a Saturday once I moved to Blissville two years ago. My then-boyfriend, Kyle, wanted to move back home and take over his grandfather’s veterinary practice when he retired. At that time, Kyle and I had been together for two years and lived together for one. Our relationship had become strained by both of us working such long hours and we both thought the move to a smaller town was what we needed to repair our relationship. We tried for another year, but realized the chasm between us had grown too large to bridge. We parted on good terms and I decided to stay in the quaint town, rather than start all over someplace else.
It had been pretty sleepy until Bianca Dragomir was murdered in her home by a client who didn’t like the results of a love potion she gave him. Not only did her murder shock the community of just over six thousand citizens, it also brought a new person into my life who confused me on every level. I pushed thoughts of Josh Roman aside as I jogged up the steps of the mini-mansion that belonged to the town’s former first lady, as they referred to a mayor’s wife in Blissville.
“I figured Bianca’s murder would be the quota for our community for the next twenty years,” my partner, Adrian Goode, said once I reached the wide porch. “Sadly not.”
“Let’s take a look at what we have,” I said to him. We slipped on blue booties to make sure we didn’t contaminate the crime scene then entered the house.
There was a team of officers dusting for fingerprints and looking for any signs of evidence or blood that might belong to someone other than our victim. A killer was often caught because of a negligently tossed cigarette or the victim making their attacker bleed during the struggle. Those were the cases where you got lucky; other crime scenes were clean and offered very little in the way of clues. We found our medical examiner, Melissa Chan, in the upstairs master bathroom.
We stayed outside the bathroom door until she said, “Come on in, Detectives.” She looked up from the body and offered us a strained smile. Dr. Chan was a petite woman with shrewd, dark brown eyes and a rapier wit. I enjoyed talking to her, but not over top of a dead body. “Gentlemen, this is Georgia Beaumont.” She gestured to the woman who was lying in bloody bathwater with a pair of scissors protruding from her neck. “It looks like she was taking a hot bath while reading a book and drinking a glass of wine when she was attacked.”
“Murdered and not self-inflicted?” Adrian asked.
Dr. Chan pulled one of Mrs. Beaumont’s hands out of the water and showed us the cuts on her palms and the outside of her hand. “Defensive wounds. She held her hand up to ward off the attack,” she explained, then she gestured to the book floating in the water. Then she pointed to the scissors and said, “The angle is all wrong for a self-inflicted wound and it’s not likely she would’ve stabbed herself more than once.” She pointed to the other puncture wounds on the victim’s neck with her gloved finger. “The carpet was dry by the time the police arrived this morning to arrest her, but it was obvious that the blood-tinged water had been splashed all over the carpet around the tub. That indicates foul play to me, fellas.”
“Arrest Mrs. Beaumont?” I asked. I knew of her, of course, but didn’t know her on a personal level. I had heard she was quite a force to be reckoned with, but the idea of her getting arrested was absurd somehow to me.
“Apparently, she and the new Mrs. Rocky Beaumont got into an altercation yesterday and charges were filed against Georgia. The officers downstairs could tell you more,” she said then returned her attention back to the body. “I’ll have tox screens and a preliminary report for you guys as soon as possible.” We were being dismissed so she could finish her work, have the body removed, and sent to the morgue.
Adrian and I went downstairs and asked around until we found the responding officers, Hank Jones and Marley Kasey. “What brought you to Mrs. Beaumont’s door so early this morning?” I asked Hank.
“She and Nadine Beaumont got into a huge fight at the salon yesterday.” I almost visibly flinched when Hank mentioned the salon, because I knew exactly which one he was talking about. An image of Josh’s platinum blond hair and hazel eyes popped up in my brain and I had to force him out of my head to focus. There had never been another guy who tied me up in so many knots than Josh did. “Rocky and Nadine stopped by the police station last night and Nadine insisted on pressing assault charges against Georgia. It was quite obvious that her nose had been broken and she said it was from Georgia head butting her. It was equally as obvious that Rocky had tried to talk her out of it, but she wasn’t having any part of it. She wanted Georgia arrested and that was final.”
“We showed up this morning to arrest Georgia, but she didn’t answer the front door,” Marley told us. “We noticed that the door was open when we came around back and knew something wasn’t right. Temperatures dropped to nearly freezing last night so she wouldn’t have left it open to let in some fresh air.” Temperatures were abnormally colder than usual for that time of year and I agreed with their decision to enter the premises. “We found her dead in her bathtub and called it in.”
