A Bad Day for Romance (15 page)

“You know what sounds amazing right now?” Leif said, ignoring her question, having arrived at the elevator and attempting to stab the “up” button to death. “Biscuits and gravy. You know what I’m saying, Sheriff? I’m gonna call down and get us some. On me, don’t worry about it. We’ll catch the last of the movie and have a little snack.”

Goat’s skin turned a shade of green at the thought. “You know, Leif, I’m really beat. I think I’ll just…” His eyes flicked to Stella’s, and they held some sort of promise she couldn’t wait to take him up on.

But Leif seized Goat’s arm as though he were drowning in the lake and intended to be pulled to safety. The doors opened on the second floor and Leif gave a mighty tug, and Goat stumbled after him into the hall. “You’ll never get any sleep out in that truck. Cold as a witch’s tit, and they’ll be running those leaf blowers at the crack of dawn. We’ll just have our little snack and conk out, be good as new for our tee time.”

“Our what?” Goat gave Stella one last glance over his shoulder—part regret, part frustration, part something dark and simmery and delicious—before the doors closed on him.

But not before Leif got the last word in, something Stella figured happened more often than not.

“I’ve got a noon tee time! We’ll rent you some clubs and we can get in nine holes before they open the bar.”

Despite the hour, it took Stella a while to get to sleep. She tried to banish thoughts of Goat, the way his big callused hands had felt on her ass on the two occasions when they’d roved southward, the silver chest hairs she’d once glanced peeking out of his chamois shirt. She imagined the rest of that broad torso, hard-muscled from Goat’s habit of paddling his kayak all over the lake to clear his mind. She wondered what it might be like to trace a path down to his belt with her fingernails, or how it would be to grab ahold of those shoulders for balance if, for instance, she should find herself on top of him.

It was when she began imagining what awaited the woman who managed to separate Goat from his pants that she knew she’d never sleep if she didn’t force herself to think of something else. Besides, an innocent—most probably—young woman was under suspicion for a heinous crime, and surely that deserved a little cogitation.

Tilly had texted her at some point in the evening, and Stella thought about her terse message.
Taffy planning 2 sue Q. Valley sheriff dept. Pearline 99% sure she can get Div out but not interested in suing, thx for the rec BTW. Div says check Lexie Halburtson stage name Knight. Call me XOXO

It wasn’t the first time Stella had worked on one of her cases while flat on her back with her eyes closed. In her mind, she lined up the suspects she’d rounded up so far.

Divinity—there was still the matter of what she was doing with a bow in the woods, but if Chrissy was right, there was no way that a hundred-pound girl had been capable of killing Bryant with a crossbow. The bigger question was why she’d bothered lying at all if she was surprised by Bryant’s sudden demise.

The mysterious hunter—Stella figured this was as much a product of Divinity’s clumsy defense as her lame attempt to hide the bow under two inches of leaves.

Lexie Halburtson/Knight—since Divinity had called her “plus-size,” maybe the girl had the strength to operate the crossbow.

Surely Goat had thought of that, as well; he was no slouch, even if his approach to the law tended to be far more by the book and less out of the box than Stella’s. Of course, the case belonged to Quail Valley and the crime-scene team from Fayette, but she had to count on Goat’s professional curiosity spurring him to do a little sleuthing of his own. Tomorrow, they could compare notes and—

And that got her right back to where she’d been before, imagining sitting cozied up in a booth in the hotel coffee shop, heads bent together as Goat sketched out his thoughts on a place mat, their knees brushing against each other under the table. His hand would graze hers, and their eyes would meet; Goat would lose his train of thought and Stella would give him a little encouraging smile and gently guide his hand back to the paper, where the solution would be unfolding. She would be wearing the fuchsia sweater set with the rhinestone zipper—the tank top dipped scandalously low, revealing an acre of cleavage—and her skinny jeans and her cute little croc-embossed boots with the wedge heels. Maybe a little body shimmer dusted on her collarbone. All of which would prevent Goat from doing much more than stare helplessly as Stella examined the facts of the case and came up with—

Damn, she’d made a full circle and gotten nowhere further. Because while she had no idea who the true culprit was in Bryant’s death, she knew exactly how she wanted Goat to congratulate her, and it involved him dragging her up to her room and sweeping her Bernina and sewing box and all that pink satin to the floor, and taking her right there on top of the borrowed banquet table, in front of the picture window overlooking the sparkling lake far below.

Stella rolled over and pounded her pillow in frustration. She closed her eyes tightly and took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and then imagined a pasture full of sheep, which she started counting backward from a hundred.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SOMEHOW THE HUNDRED SHEEP MORPHED INTO
a hundred doors, and as Stella finally drifted off to sleep, she dreamed that she walked down the hotel corridor knocking on each one, trying to find the one behind which Goat awaited her, propped up on her bed like that old shot of Burt Reynolds from the seventies, wearing nothing but a seductive smile. But every door she tried swung open to reveal one of her parolees, each one proclaiming themselves innocent in Bryant’s death.

There was Phil Rivka, whose car Stella had burnt to cinders as a favor to his wife, Irma, after Phil beat her once too often.

Trip Thayer, who had three permanent stripe-shaped scars on his ass, one for each of the three women he’d jilted only after bilking them out of their life savings.

Ferg Rohossen, who still had trouble standing up straight after Stella gave him comportment lessons in an abandoned shed.

Stella woke a little before nine, feeling less than refreshed. It took her a minute to realize that someone was knocking on her door. She flung back her covers and padded across the room, muttering that she was coming as fast as she could.

When her hand was on the door handle she froze. What if it was Goat? What if he’d been up all night with Leif and had finally escaped when the man finished his room-service breakfast and fell asleep?

What if he’d managed to ferret out the clue that would result in solving Bryant’s murder?

What if he simply couldn’t wait one more moment to see her—and here was Stella, her hair slept on and pillow marks on her face, and she hadn’t even brushed her teeth? She was trying to calculate how long it would take her to run to the bathroom and chew some toothpaste and run a comb through her hair when her visitor knocked again.

“Come on, Stella, I brought you a muffin!”

Chrissy. Stella opened the door, chiding herself yet again. “I ain’t hardly slept a wink,” she complained, but left off whining when she saw that Chrissy was holding a cardboard tray with two enormous cups of coffee. “Oh sweet Lord in heaven, please tell me those are for me.”

“One of ’em, anyway,” Chrissy said, sweeping into the room and heading for the sofa. She started unpacking muffins and little containers of cream and packets of sugar. “But that ain’t the best thing I brought you. Come eat something while I get this queued up.”

She pulled her tablet from her purse and started tapping at it. Stella knew there would be no further conversation from her assistant while she stared at the thing, so she helped herself to a raspberry streusel muffin and took a deep, satisfying sip of the coffee.

Chrissy spun the little device around as a YouTube video started playing. It featured a woman whose face was hidden by an oversize white cowboy hat. She was wearing pristine cowboy boots and a raincoat with, as far as Stella could tell, nothing underneath it, and sitting astride a bored-looking horse. It was clear that the woman was unfamiliar with the equestrian sciences from her inability to get situated comfortably, a problem that was not helped by the fact that she was attempting to sit sidesaddle while coming into contact with as little horseflesh as possible.

She suddenly jerked up her chin, a frozen, rather frightened smile plastered to her face—and Stella recognized Divinity Flycock.

“What the—”

“Hang on. Bryant comes on in a minute.”

“This is just about the sweetest thing you bought me yet,” Divinity said, in an exaggerated hillbilly accent that came off about as authentic as her hat. “My own
pony
!”

The horse looked a little too flea-bitten and long in the tooth to be called a pony. It flicked its tail at a fly, hitting Divinity’s bare thigh, and she flinched and tried to scramble farther toward the front end of the horse, nearly falling off in the process.

Bryant jumped into the camera’s view, grabbing Divinity’s leg to steady her. “Why don’t we ride out the back forty and take a look at the baby calf?”

“Oh, I
love
helping the mommy cows give birth,” Divinity said, looking as though she’d rather kiss the horse on its rubbery lips, from which hung a ropy string of drool. “That’s one of the best things about farmin’.”

Bryant clearly had a little more experience with horses, since he was able to get on behind Divinity after only a few near tries, suffering a sly kick from the horse that, luckily, only grazed his shin. When they were finally in the saddle, Bryant got the horse moving at a surly ambling pace down a dirt road. Chrissy paused the video. “I’d play you more, but it’s all just about that bad.”

“What the hell
is
it?”

“Their audition tape. For
Hillbillies in Love
.”

Stella smacked her forehead. “You’re kidding. That was
terrible
. I’ve heard of
Hillbillies in Love
but I got to admit I haven’t ever tuned in.”

“It’s the one where they follow the happy couple around seeing all the dumb shit they get into and in the end the guy pops the question. It’s pretty disrespectful—they make country folks look dumb as a stump. Somebody ought to call the ACLU on ’em.”

“Uh… or else maybe your sister Danyelle could get on there with Ed, they could show off how they make that dandelion wine they nearly killed your dad with.”

“Hey!” Chrissy chided. “Although, come to think of it… but no, these couples can’t already be married. ’Cause that would be
cheating
. Which is what Divinity and Bryant were up to.”

“Why, they were once in love. However briefly.”

Chrissy snorted in disgust. “Yeah, maybe, but they’re about as country as that skinny gal Prince William married. Though she probably knows how not to fall of a horse. I mean, come on, Bryant’s accent was so bad you can still hear the Windy City in it. But that ain’t the point—check this out.”

She tapped the screen a few times and a different video started playing. This time, Bryant—dressed in a business suit that he looked a lot more at home in than the stiff new jeans and plaid shirt with the creases still showing—strolled along a city street with a pretty bespectacled woman with her hair up in a bun, who towered over him by a couple of inches. They were looking adoringly into each other’s eyes until suddenly they both looked into the camera and shouted, in unison, “We want to bet your house!”

“Oh, I know this one—it’s where a couple of business types have to talk the bank out of foreclosing on somebody’s house, right?”

“Yeah. It’s called
Bet the House
—if they lose, they have to move into a house with them and the bankers, and then they follow them around with cameras. They always lose. It’s got a huge audience share the first season.”

“So, any chance that’s Lexie on there? I wouldn’t exactly call her plus-size, just tall. Just how tall is she, anyway?”

“I think she’s an inch or two shy of six feet but she wears high heels all through this thing,” Chrissy said, fast-forwarding. The video showed Lexie in a tight navy dress and platform pumps, poking at a pie chart with a pointer while Bryant droned on about interest rates and amortization.

“Okay. So you’re saying…”

“Bryant’s made a whole little sideline out of this. He didn’t get anywhere with Divinity, which, I mean, please—but supposedly he got Lexie on
Bet the House
. They stand to split half a million dollars if they win. And his website says he’s got a few other credits, mostly singers down in Nashville who did the shows on the side. He got someone on
Bridalplasty
and someone else on
Extreme Couponing
.”

“Okay.” Stella thought. “So I can see where Divinity was pretty irate when he didn’t get her on that hillbilly show, and then dumped her to boot. Still, there he was in the woods, giving her another chance, but maybe she was just hiding her feelings.” She told Chrissy about what Leif had said the night before about Divinity’s surprising grief at being dumped.

“Well, she could have been faking being all friendly-like to set up an alibi. Or what about this—Lexie found out Bryant was still seeing Divinity. He’s supposed to just be managing her career, but if he’s managing more than that—”

“Yeah, maybe… I guess I could go see if Lexie’s got here yet, talk to her some.”

“Don’t bother,” Chrissy said. “Now that Kam and Dotty have scaled everything back to that little ceremony on Monday, Lexie ain’t coming. She’s got a weekday gig singing backup for some fella out of Kansas.”

Stella finished the muffin and licked sugar crystals off her fingers. “Well, I ain’t got anything else to do today, I’m gonna buzz down to Branson, go pay her a visit.”

“You sure? Now that Goat’s here…”

Stella blushed. “Uh. Well, he didn’t get in until real late last night and he spent the night with Leif.”

“Aw, honey—you must be crushed. To be thrown over for a city slicker. I never thought Goat was the type to go in for all that flash, but I guess the human heart’s a mysterious thing.”