Color Me a Crime (2 page)

I tell Erin which suitor will be the best match for her client based on their aura compatibility.

The clients don’t see me, but I will be able to see their auras. She has to do this, one suitor at a time, or my senses go all haywire. This is one of the other reasons I started Splitsville.com. If I focus on too many people at once, I pass out. And that becomes very hard to explain once you do it several times a day. Plus, passing out makes me a liability, so the employer usually lays me off, when I know good and well that they mean
fire
. Shit-canned and out of a job.

“Hello? Hello?” Isla screams in the phone, bringing me back to the reality that I just dropped on her. She is getting shit-canned out of a relationship.

There is a little panic in her voice which makes me pause and wonder if I’m going to have to go through the steps in ‘The Process’, but hope it’s just a little minor shock and she quickly accepts, because I have to get an “I understand” before I can let her off the phone.

“Do you mind holding on a second?” I ask, not waiting for her response.

Taking the earpiece out of my ear, I leave my little office behind the safety of the mirror and go out to the front of Color Me Love, where the client is waiting for Erin.

“Hi.” I glance over the woman’s shoulder, careful not to look at the six different aura colors radiating from her body. Her bright yellow dress makes her look like a big rainbow. All of those colors completely confuse me and will totally make me pass out. “Can I help you?”

“I’m here!” Erin rushes out of the back, her purse dangling off the crook of her elbow, coffee in her hand and her black hair flying behind her. “Traffic.”

Suspiciously, my eyes narrow. Erin is a crystal aura…always…unless she is lying. And her sickly yellow-green outer aura is saying she’s just laid a big fat lie on me and Rainbow Bright. Besides, who is Erin trying to pull the wool over on? There is
never
traffic in Park City, Ohio.

I guess I should never say never. In fact, there is traffic during the annual Spring Fling parade, but that is months away.

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, Felicia.” She puts her coffee on the table and drops her elbow. Her purse crashes to the floor, and she sticks her right hand out for Rainbow Bright to shake while she uses the left hand to give me the client file. “I know you came in early to meet with me and I’m late. But we will set you up on some great dates. I know you won’t be disappointed.”

“
I’m
counting on it.” Felicia draws out the ‘I’ in ‘I’m with her deep southern accent, making a two-syllable word out of it.

Felicia Evans.
Hmm…I prefer Rainbow Bright. I place the file under my arm.

“Have a seat.” Erin picks up her purse. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Yes. Two sugars and two teaspoons of cream. You do have cream? Not milk, but cream.” Felicia’s sweet southern accent is followed by a smile that isn’t the least bit genuine.

Aunt Matilda always preaches to me to follow everything up with a smile, even if you say something negative. That’s the way southern women do things. And we sometimes like to throw in a little “God bless her heart” when we gossip. It seems to make the gossip not feel so much like, well, gossip.

“I’ll get it.” I roll my eyes, knowing I’m going to have to go to The Coffee Shop next door and grab Felicia her special order. Erin knows we don’t have a coffee pot. I’ve never understand why she offers things to clients that we don’t have. And it always comes out of
my
pocket.

I rush back to my little office in the back and grab the earpiece.

“Are you there, Isla?” This entire breakup is a mess.

“I’m here and I tried to call JR, but he keeps sending me to voicemail. So who are you again?” Her words are firm.

“I’m Jenn, and of course JR didn’t take your calls. He has broken up with you using my online service, Splitsville.com.” I grab my wallet out of my bag and go out the back door into the alley behind Color Me Love. “Do you understand he is breaking up with you?”

“Wait. No way would he break up with me.” Her nasally laugh rings in my ear.

“Can you please blow your nose?” Sometimes I have to be flat-out honest, and she needs a good nose blowing. I picture a stream of snot dripping out of her perfectly shaped nose.

“I told you I have a cold. And if he wants to break up with me, he can do it himself.” A loud buzz rings in my ear.

“Oh, no. You did not just hang up on me.” I grip my wallet and walk into The Coffee Shop.

The place is packed as always. The only other coffee house is on the other side of town, owned by the same people. I haven’t been in there since I was accused of murder a year ago and had to track down the killer on my own or I’d be someone’s “bitch” in jail right now.

A couple of bucks ought to do it. I take out a few dollars and put it in the honesty cup on the coffee bar. I make Linda’s precious cup of coffee, adding an extra cube of sugar. She needs a little more
genuine
sweetness in her personality and two cubes won’t cut it.

I hit the redial on my phone while walking back to Color Me Love.

“Hello?” Isla answers. I swear I can detect a little bit of annoyance.

“Isla, I lost you. Did you go through a tunnel?” I do enjoy toying with some of the clients. After all, who goes through the trouble of using an online breakup service to dump someone? Good for me. It makes a great living.

“No.” She blows her nose into the phone. “I hung up.”

Rude!

“I’m glad we got that out of the way.” Erin meets me at the back door and takes Felicia’s coffee. She gives me
the look
. She knows exactly what I’m doing. “Now let’s get on with it. JR said that you make him get man waxed. Is that right?”

“Man waxed?” Erin laughs and points up to the front. “Aura.”

I nod and mouth ‘I know.’ I can already tell Erin that Felicia is high maintenance and has her claws out, ready to snag a wealthy guy.

“How did you know this?” Isla is in the defensive stage of “The Process.” Only four more stages to go. And I thought she was going to be an easy one. They never are.

I look out the mirror and see Aunt Matilda hunched over Felicia and I snicker. Aunt Matilda is pulling out all the stops today by wearing her best headscarf dangling to the side. Fringe and all. I smile at my psychic aunt.

“JR put it on his application he filled out when he hired me to break up with you.” Isla’s picture JR sent was taken in front of a lake house. Her bikini body, I’m positive, doesn’t have one hair on it. “What is a man wax anyway?”

The sound of it makes my follicles hurt.
What kind of man lets a woman do that to him?

“Listen, I want my man to look good and he should take pride in that.” All of a sudden, her nose clears and her inner diva immerges. A mental image of her, shaking her head to the left and the right pops into my head. “If he is going to be with me, then he needs to look good.”

“Guess what? He doesn’t want to be with you
and
he wants to be hairy.” That is my clue to hammer it home. “Do you understand JR is breaking up with you?”

I have to have the yes.
Say yes,
I tap the picture.

“Listen. There is nothing wrong with wanting my man to look good.” She speaks in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Isla?” It’s time to put an end to this. She is a conceited little thing.

“And if he is going to wear flip-flops, he needs his feet pedicured.”

“Isla?” I try to interrupt her.

“And he should thank me for making his gorilla back go away.” She spews like a volcano.

“Isla!” I scream into the little mic of the ear buds. Erin shoots me a look from the other side of the one-way. “There are two people in this conversation, you and me.”

“You know what?” Isla questions me about what I know and what I don’t know.

“What, Isla?” There’s no sense in trying to get a word in; she’s only going to interrupt me.

“He can’t groom himself. He can’t dress himself. He can’t even break up with me himself.” Her voice is reasonable, which makes me think we are near the end of this call.

“Well, you are right. So I’m breaking up with you for him for the low-low price of fifty dollars because he doesn’t look good and you do.” This needs to speed up. I’m going to have to slam her into a brick wall. Erin and Aunt Matilda are almost done with their assessment of Linda and I’d better be done with mine before she walks out that front door.

“I do look good. And I deserve someone who does.”

“Yes you do.” Here goes nothing. “Isla, do you understand that JR is using Splitsville.com to break up with you?”

“Yes!” She screams and slams down the phone. I guess it’s her way of getting back at me. I pluck the earpiece out of my ear and quickly type JR an email that the deed has been done, pleasure doing business with you, and let your hairy freak flag fly.

Chapter Two

“Well?” Erin walks into my office and picks up the client checklist.
The
checklist that I didn’t bother writing anything on about Linda.

“Well, what?” I play dumb, and don’t look at her. I did promise to keep both jobs separated, but since Color Me Love has become such a successful business, the cliental has soared, leaving me little time to make the dumps on Splitsville.com.

And
it is successful thanks to me. I’m the reason behind all the twenty-five successful couples Color Me Love has paired in the last three months.

There are a lot of people trying to break up with each other, but who knew how successful matching them would turn out to be.

“Did you get Linda’s love color?” Erin holds the sheet up in front of me. “Obviously not.”

Meekly, I shy away.

“Olivia?” She shakes the paper. “You didn’t fill anything out.”

“I’m sorry, Erin.” I take the paper and pick up the pen next to my computer. “It’s just that I’m so overwhelmed with dumps that I had to bring my Splitsville.com files with me today. Isla was a very important dump.” I jot down a few notes on Linda’s profile sheet to make Erin somewhat happy. “If Linda had been on time and not early, the two jobs would have never conflicted.”

“I made arrangements for her to come early.” Erin looks over my shoulder, glancing at the sheet. “I didn’t think you saw anything.”

“I saw plenty.” Which is the truth. From the moment Linda walked into Color Me Love, her aura colors completely clashed with the bright yellow sundress she was wearing.

“What color is she?”

I turn the paper over and draw an outline of a body with six balloons around it. I write a different color in each balloon.

“What is that?” Erin’s nose curls, causing a corner of her lips to lift in an Elvis sort of way.

“I read auras; I never claimed to be an artist.” I roll my eyes and point to the picture. “This is Linda.” I grab the yellow highlighter out of my bag and fill in what I hope looks like a sundress, but far from it. It looks more like a yellow triangle. “Felicia is one of those hard to please women and will never really be satisfied.”

Granted, a person’s aura colors change with the tide, but the two colors closest to their physical body are their true colors.

“She’s a green.” I write green on the balloon closest to her body. “These other colors are about what she was feeling at the time she walked into Color Me Love.” I put a checkmark next to the red, blue, and violet. “Plus she has a few undertones which we won’t worry about.”

“Green is good?” There is a little apprehension in Erin’s voice.

“Not here it isn’t.” I pull out my little aura chart I had created for Erin when she decided to open Color Me Love.

Aunt Matilda gasps. All her rings bang up against each other as she plants her hand across her open mouth, her bangles jingle down to her elbow.

“What?” Erin cries out.

“She’s going to be a tough one to match up.” Aunt Matilda’s blue painted eyelids almost pop off her face. “Aura dating might be the new big thing, but you have to keep in mind that we are not going to be able to match everyone. This one is not good.” Aunt Matilda’s eyes drop, casting a shadow down her checks.

Believe it or not, aura reading is becoming very popular in the matchmaking field. Especially in older adults. Recently, I read an article about how someone later in life is more open to aura dating because they’ve been around the block a time or two and don’t feel like going around
tha
t block anymore. They also claim they can have a deeper connection with their aura mate and a better understanding of one another.

Hell, sounds good to me, so we ran with it.

“What do you mean
not good
?” Erin has a way of emphasizing words she doesn’t seem to understand.

Aunt Matilda nudges me. Even though she’s a retired palm reader and read Linda’s palm, she isn’t going to give Erin any bad news. She leaves the down and dirty work to me.

I point to the green aura on the chart. “Green means money. Donald Trump and Bill Gates are both greens. They have drive and ambition.”

Erin smiles with a glowing satisfaction in her eyes. “That’s great!”

“No. No, it’s not.” I point to the chart. “Green doesn’t get along with many people other than violets. They are intrigued with violets because violets are here to shift the earth. They are visionaries. With the violets’ dreams, greens can take their money and turn the dream into a very lucrative reality, leaving the violets in the dust.”

Erin slowly nods, lifting her brow. “What about a yellow? We seem to get a lot of yellows.”

“NO!” I raise my brows. “They are the worse combination. Most men are yellows because they are little kids and they don’t like to be told what to do or be controlled.”

“Oh.” Erin plops down in the seat. “So we can’t help her?”

“I’m not saying we can’t fix her up on a few dates. I’m saying it’s going to be hard to make a perfect match.” I look for Linda’s file on my desk, but can’t find it. “Where is her file?”

“Right here.” Erin has it underneath her arm. She hands it to me.

“What does she do? Maybe we can fix her up with someone in her field.” I open up her file and run my finger down the profile page. My mouth drops. “Are you kidding me?”