“Dad! Mom! Uncle Noah!” an all too familiar voice shouts from behind and we turn to see Evie running toward us, her dark hair streaming behind her and her blue eyes bright with excitement. She’s tall and gorgeous in that effortless college girl way that makes me remember when I once had energy for things other than finding dead bodies. Behind her, a blonde with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever keeps pace, her bestie and roomie at Ashford University, Dash Johnson.
“Hey, Cray Cray.” Evie nods briefly to Carlotta as she lets her term of endearment fly. Cray Cray suits Carlotta much better than something as pedestrian as Grandma.
Evie is Everett’s biological daughter, and you can bet I adopted her as my own as soon as I could. We found her a few years back after discovering her psycho of a mother had hidden her existence from Everett and basically the world.
Evie catches a glimpse of the corpse and gasps. “Oh, wow. Another one?” Her eyes light up as she looks my way, and I can’t help but frown. “We can totally help solve this murder.”
“No way,” Everett, Noah, and I say in unison.
“Yes way,” Dash sings back, looking just as anxious to dive into the deep end of a homicide investigation as Evie does. “We have nothing else to do on Spring Break anyway!” Dash adds with the kind of bubbly enthusiasm that suggests she thinks murder investigations are some sort of interactive entertainment. And knowing these two, that’s exactly what they’d make it.
“CSI: Honey Hollow, here we come!” Evie grins.
“No!” Everett, Noah, and I say in perfect unison once again, our parental veto powers combining like some sort of supernatural force.
“Head back to whatever you were doing and enjoy your murder-free Spring Break,” I command, using my best mom voice that says there will be no arguments. I may not have pushed Evie out of my body, but I’m every bit her mother and she knows darn well that I mean what I say.
The girls exchange disappointed looks, but begrudgingly obey, probably heading back to whatever college students do when they’re not trying to insert themselves into homicide investigations. They’ve both got boyfriends; certainly they can figure something out that doesn’t involve a cold body. I cringe a little at the thought.
Mayor Nash runs up next, slightly out of breath and looking like a man who’s just realized this hippity hop free-for-all has been upgraded to a crime scene.
“Geez,” he shouts once he spots the victim and then slaps his eyes with his hand as if he wishes he could take the visual back. Don’t we all. “Okay, nobody panic,” he says with a shrill cry, and well, obvious panic in his voice. “I’ll try to control the crowd and keep people back. The last thing we need is half of Honey Hollow trampling evidence.”
He heads off to manage the growing crowd of curious festivalgoers, and Carlotta shouts after him, “You know what they say, nothing spices up a spring festival like a little bloodshed. Gets the heart racing—and my libido going.”
“Carlotta.” I swat her over the arm for even going there.
“Okay, fine,” she grouses. “Don’t let anyone else get stabbed on your watch, Harry.” She shouts after him once again, “It’s bad for tourism!”
Noah dives right into his investigation by way of photographing the scene and inspecting for clues.
“Everett,” I all but whisper as I pull him closer. “You don’t think Muffin did this, do you?”
No sooner do I say the woman’s name than the new widow comes up on us, breathless and red-faced, and her auburn curls disheveled.Presumably from the public humiliation her husband caused her, but well, a good stabbing would probably tussle a curl or two as well.
She takes one look at Duncan’s body and cups her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror.
“Oh my word,” she whispers, her voice muffled behind her palm.
I reach out to her instinctively, because despite the public humiliation she just endured, nobody deserves to see their husband with a knife in his chest.
“Muffin, I’m so sorry,” I start, but she’s shaking her head frantically.
“Who did this?” she shouts, her voice cracking with grief and shock. “Who would do this?”
Before I can answer, she breaks down completely, tears streaming down her face as she turns and runs back through the crowd, leaving me standing there feeling helpless.
A crowd quickly gathers as gasps and loose screams break out and the inevitable whispers begin, and I’m sure in the next ten seconds all of Vermont will be apprised of what’s happened.
Another set of footsteps approaches, and this time it’s the remaining Whitmore family members—Bunny, Gina, and her husband Fairbanks—moving as a group with expressions of appropriate shock and horror.
These poor people.
“Oh my goodness! Duncan! What happened?” Bunny gasps. That earth-mother serenity I witnessed earlier is nowhere to be found.
“This is horrible! Who would do such a thing?” Gina adds, her designer perfection momentarily forgotten in the face of family tragedy—or at least in the face of witnesses.
Fairbanks staggers forward as far as the deputies will allow and he pants out of breath at the sight, staring at his brother’s body with an expression I can’t quite read. He looks like a younger, far more polished version of his brother.
