Blind Dates Can Be Murder (21 page)

Bible study ended at ten o’clock, which was later than usual. Still, despite the time, a few of the girls hung out for a while. They sat around in Jo’s living room, eating the rest of the cheese and talking about the all-time worst rejections they’d ever had. Of course, Jo’s jilting-at-the-altar won the biggest prize, but the others also had some doozies. They all expressed dismay at the latest trend—guys who broke up with girls via e-mail.

“Can you imagine anything more gutless than that?” Anna demanded. “At least be a man about it. If you don’t want me, tell me to my face. Don’t send it over the Internet.”

They all nodded in agreement.

“Now that Denise is gone, I guess I can tell my rejection story,” Tiffany said, grinning sheepishly at Jo and Marie and Anna. Tiffany wasn’t usually a part of their inner circle, but she’d been coming to the study for about a month and seemed to be getting a lot out of it.

Tiffany had found the group through Danny, who worked with her at a photography studio in downtown Mulberry Glen. Tiffany and Danny were friends, and according to her, one day when she was complaining about yet another date who had turned out to be a jerk, he had suggested that she join this group. Jo looked at Tiffany now, at her sexy hair and her tight top and her low-cut pants, and was glad that no one had made Tiffany feel unwelcome. She might not look like the average churchgoer, but she had every right to be there too. If being one of the Lemon Pickers was helping her to make better choices, then God bless her for stepping outside her comfort zone far enough to join them.

“Why don’t you want Denise to hear?” Anna asked. “You know we can tell her anything.”

“Yeah, except this is about her brother.”

Jo’s eyes widened. She knew that Tiffany worked closely with Danny, but her impression was that their relationship had always been strictly professional.

“Danny?” Marie asked, seeming very intrigued. She always loved to get the inside scoop on any situation, especially one that involved a friend. “Do tell.”

“Well, I work with the guy three days a week. How could I not have feelings for him? He’s no lemon, am I right?”

Marie and Anna nodded vigorously. Jo didn’t respond at all. For some reason, she didn’t want to hear this, wherever it was going.

“Anyway, no big story or anything. It’s just that we went out one time for coffee after work. There was a misunderstanding, and I thought he was all into me and then later I found out he definitely was not. It hurt so bad. I played it cool and all, but I was really devastated.”

Marie expressed sympathy and then launched into her own Danny tale, about how they tried kissing once, in the ninth grade, behind the chart rack in history class. He stuck his tongue in her mouth and she squealed and they both got into trouble.

“Nobody ever told me
that
could happen!” she laughed. “I thought it was a mouse or a lizard.”

They all laughed, and then Anna shared her Danny story. They had actually dated for a while, senior year, and in fact had gone to the prom together.

“I remember when the two of you walked into the room, you both looked so gorgeous,” Jo said, recalling Anna’s midnight blue dress and Danny, all stiff and uncomfortable in a tuxedo. He had spent most of the night running a finger between the tight collar and his neck, asking if everyone was hot or was it just him. As it turned out, it
was
just him—he had mononucleosis, and he was running a temperature of 102.

“So much for that romance,” Anna laughed. “He spent the next month at home in bed with mono, and my parents were so afraid I would catch it they wouldn’t let me go near him.”

“So what finally happened?” Tiffany asked.

Anna shrugged.

“Things fizzled out. I went away to Princeton that fall anyway, and then on to law school. Once he got well, he moved on to someone else.”

“And someone else and someone else and someone else…” Marie added, smiling.

“You have to wonder if he’s picking lemons too, or if he just doesn’t want to settle down,” Anna said.

“Oh, he wants to settle down,” Tiffany said, a sound of authority in her voice that Jo found irritating.
She
knew Danny best, not Tiffany. “He has very strong feelings for someone, in fact. I think he’s going to do something about it soon.”

Jo looked at Tiffany, who was smiling like a Cheshire cat. Jo could feel the heat creeping into her cheeks, but she wasn’t sure if it was a blush of embarrassment or anger.

Danny had strong feelings for someone?

Since when?

Would it have been too much trouble for him to tell her?

“Who, who, who?” Marie demanded, scooting forward in her chair. “You have to tell us!”

Tiffany simply smiled and shook her head.

“It’s not my place to say,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll all find out soon enough.”

11

J
o sat in a pew, legs crossed, one toe tapping furiously. She had hardly slept at all, and now that she was here in church, she wasn’t exactly in a spiritual mood.

All night long she had thought about Danny, tossing and turning, getting more and more worked up. Finally, deep in the middle of the night, she had gotten up and done some work, even rewriting her blog and loading it back in the queue. In the blog, she had worked hard to make her words light and happy and carefree, but all the while she was seething.

The nerve of him!

To have some big romance going on and not even tell her! Didn’t he feel any obligation at all to inform the person who was supposed to be his best friend in the world about this new love of his life? Jo had racked her brain all night, and she couldn’t come up with a single possibility of who his love interest might be. She couldn’t even recall Danny going on any dates lately. Besides, how big of relationship could it be when he spent all of his free time with Jo?

She crossed her arms with a huff and swung her foot even more rapidly until finally the woman in front of her turned around and gently asked her if she would mind not kicking the back of her pew.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Jo whispered back, blushing furiously, uncrossing her legs and stilling her movements.

The service was about to begin. As the last few stragglers continued to come into the church, Jo closed her eyes and tried to focus. This was the Lord’s house. She had no business bringing her petty anger in here.

Silently, she prayed to herself.

Thank You for the opportunity to worship, Lord. Please take away all distractions and keep me focused solely on You. Forgive my unrest and unkind thoughts. Help me to approach Danny in a Christlike way, and always to be more like You in everything I do. Amen
.

As Jo opened her eyes, she thought about yesterday. Danny had wanted to talk to her, but she had been busy with her Bible study and had to put him off until this afternoon. Is that what he had wanted to tell her? He’d said he had two bits of big news, so what were they?

He was in love and he was getting married?

He was in love and he was already married?

He was in love and, by the way, he was replacing Jo with Tiffany as his best friend and confidante?

Jo just couldn’t believe that someone else in Danny’s world knew something important about him that she didn’t. As much as she liked Tiffany, she couldn’t imagine why Danny would have taken her into his confidence and not Jo. That hurt.

But that’s not all that hurts
, Jo thought, trying to be honest with herself.
You’re not just jealous of Tiffany, you’re jealous of the mystery girl, whoever she is, for being the object of Danny’s affection
.

Jo swallowed hard, thinking about that. So what if Danny was in love? What did that have to do with their relationship? For the first time, Jo understood how Danny must have felt when she became engaged to Bradford—as though the rug had been pulled out from him. It was simple: What right did she have to feel that way? She and Danny were just friends.

They’d always be just friends.

Danny’s family band, Regeneration, was playing for the service this morning, and as Jo sat there and tried to sort out the confusion in her mind, they came out from the door up front, filed onto the platform, and slipped into their positions. It took Jo a minute to recognize the man who sat in Danny’s seat behind the drums.

Jo sat forward, blinking, wondering what was wrong with her eyes.

It was Danny, though it was like the alien version of Danny, the one who lived in an alternate universe.

The Danny she knew lived in jeans and T-shirts, his only concession to playing in church on Sunday mornings being to make sure the T-shirt was clean and had no holes. The Danny she knew had gorgeous blue eyes and a terrible mess of curly brown hair, and he managed to shave only once every few days.

Instead, the man who tapped out their intro and then launched into the opening worship song was wearing gray slacks, a blue shirt, and a tie—a tie! More than that, the face was smoothly shaven and the curls were gone. In their place was a neat, slightly spiky new haircut. Who was he trying to impress?

Jo swallowed hard, a sense of despair suddenly overwhelming her. In an instant, she knew who his new love was: Monica O’Connell, the cop, the one who said just yesterday that if Danny ever cleaned up his act, she’d be “all over him like the peeling on a potato.” Danny must have been seeing Monica without Jo’s knowledge and decided to take her at her word.

Jo, on the other hand, felt like turning both of them into a pile of hash browns.

Lettie wasn’t sure she was in the right place. The sign out front said “Trinity Church,” but inside it sounded more like a rock concert. She stood in the doorway in her nicest dress and shoes, surprised to see that most of the people there were attired much more casually than she. They were all standing and clapping along to a song about Jesus, but the Jesus Lettie knew about surely couldn’t have been too pleased! This wasn’t one of the slow, drawn-out hymns of her youth. This was something else entirely.

“Welcome!” a smiling man whispered to her as he handed her a program. He was obviously an usher, and he began scanning the crowd, trying to scope out a seat for her, when Lettie felt a hand at her other elbow.

“Hey, girl!”

Lettie turned to see Marie, the woman from the tennis courts yesterday, just slipping keys into her purse and beaming widely.

“What a pleasure to see you here,” she whispered loudly over the music. “Are you with someone?”

Lettie shook her head.

“Come sit with us, then. Thanks, Sean, I got it.”

Marie nodded at the usher and then led the way up the aisle to a pew where there was just enough room for the two of them to slip in, Marie going first.

“I knew I’d be held up,” Marie said, cupping a hand toward Lettie’s ear so she could be heard. “So I had Jo save me a seat.”

They put their purses on the floor and then Marie joined in the singing and clapping. Lettie looked past her to the girl on Marie’s right. Heart pounding, Lettie recognized her from the picture on her website. It was Jo Tulip.

Jo Tulip.

Right there, just one person away.