Between a Book and a Hard Place

PRAISE FOR THE DEVEREAUX'S DIME STORE MYSTERIES

“Delectable . . . with a plentiful cast of suspects, this was a fast-paced page-turner of a mystery that I couldn't put down.”

—Jenn McKinlay,
New York Times
bestselling author of the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries

“Delightful. . . . readers will look forward to seeing more of the quick-witted Dev.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Swanson puts just the right amount of sexy sizzle in her latest engaging mystery.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“A spunky new heroine with a Missouri stubborn streak.”

—
Library Journal
(starred review)

“Much to enjoy.”

—Kings River Life Magazine

“Peopled with unique characters, Ms. Swanson's books are always entertaining.”

—Fresh Fiction

“Quite the caper. [Swanson] is masterful in her storytelling.”

—
RT Book Reviews

“A fabulously entertaining read. The pace is quick, the prose is snappy, and the dialogue is sharp.”

—The Maine Suspect

“[An] entertaining mystery series. . . . With a touch of romance in the air, readers will enjoy this delightful cozy.”

—Genre Go Round Reviews

“Swanson has a gift for portraying small-town life, making it interesting, and finding both the ridiculous
and the satisfying parts of living in one. I wish Dev a long and happy shelf life.”

—AnnArbor.com

Also by Denise Swanson

DEVEREAUX'S DIME STORE MYSTERIES

Dying for a Cupcake

Dead Between the Lines

Nickeled-and-Dimed to Death

Little Shop of Homicide

SCUMBLE RIVER MYSTERIES

Murder of an Open Book

Murder of a Needled Knitter

Murder of a Stacked Librarian

Murder of the Cat's Meow

Novella:
“Dead Blondes Tell No Tales”

Murder of a Creped Suzette

Murder of a Bookstore Babe

Murder of a Wedding Belle

Murder of a Royal Pain

Murder of a Chocolate-Covered Cherry

Murder of a Botoxed Blonde

Murder of a Real Bad Boy

Murder of a Smart Cookie

Murder of a Pink Elephant

Murder of a Barbie and Ken

Murder of a Snake in the Grass

Murder of a Sleeping Beauty

Murder of a Sweet Old Lady

Murder of a Small-Town Honey

OBSIDIAN

Published by New American Library,

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

This book is an original publication of New American Library.

Copyright © Denise Swanson Stybr, 2016

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.

ISBN 978-0-698-41128-9

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

To all the librarians who keep the information and entertainment
flowing.

T
he Shadow Bend, Missouri, city council meeting didn't typically draw much of a crowd. Generally, fewer than a dozen of the community's four thousand twenty-eight citizens showed up, but tonight the residents had turned out in droves.

I wasn't sure what had sparked more interest—the application to turn a historic hotel on the village square into a rooming house or the UFO sightings east of town. But I was willing to bet the deed to my shop, Devereaux's Dime Store and Gift Baskets, that the majority of the folks hadn't come to discuss the same agenda item I was there to support.

Actually,
support
was too strong a word. I was present only because Boone St. Onge, one of my best friends, had nagged me into attending. Normally, I would have refused to squander what might be one of the last perfect summer evenings listening to Mayor Geoffrey Eggers drone on and on about rooming houses bringing down the tone and ambience of Shadow Bend, but Boone had been hard to refuse.

At some point, his ninety-seven text messages,
phone calls, and Facebook posts had gotten to me and I'd given in to his relentless campaign. Our other BFF, Poppy Kincaid, was made of sterner stuff.

Certainly, Poppy had a better excuse than mine—business rather than pleasure. My dime store closed at six on Tuesday nights, but her nightclub, Gossip Central, was open until two in the morning. I wasn't buying it, though. She could have left her bartender in charge of the place. Instead, she claimed that the local motorcycle club's monthly get-together required her personal touch.

Translation: She was afraid if she wasn't there to sweet-talk them, the bikers would tear the joint apart. And the last thing she wanted was to have the cops called in to break up a fight. Poppy's watering hole had originally been a quarter mile outside the city limits, thus in the county sheriff's jurisdiction. But now, because of some recent restructuring of law enforcement districts, Gossip Central was in her police chief father's territory.

Since the change, Poppy had been extra careful to keep things calm in her club. No grown woman wants her daddy coming around to save her, especially a bad girl who wasn't on speaking terms with her father.

Which left me sitting between my friend Ronni, aka Veronica Ksiazak, and a stranger. Ronni owned the local bed-and-breakfast, and for the last ten minutes, she'd been hunched over, listening intently to the mayor's long, boring monologue. I wondered if she was concerned that if the city council refused the rooming-house permit, they might decide to rezone and disallow her B & B as well.

I'd tried to chat with the odd-looking guy next to me, but he didn't seem to have much of a sense of
humor. After a couple of icy glares and his aloof silence, I reluctantly restrained myself from voicing any more of the many snarky comments running through my head about Hizzoner.

I would have preferred to sit as far in the back as possible—the better to sneak out after Boone's pet project was discussed. But because I had no idea this meeting would be so doggone popular, I had arrived only a few minutes before its scheduled start and had been lucky that Ronni had saved the chair beside her for me. Too bad it was so close to the front that I could count the nose hairs sticking out of the mayor's beaklike schnozzle.

I was nearly dozing off as Eggers droned on and on about the types of indigent people a rooming house would attract, when Ronni leaned over and whispered, “Dev, what do you think about an SRO moving into the old Desoto Hotel?”

The Desoto had opened in 1850, and for the next hundred years, it had been the town's social center. Supposedly, the hotel had thrown a party when Robert E. Lee had visited Shadow Bend. And during the War for Southern Independence, it had housed Confederate troops in its fifty-five rooms. But the place had run into hard times during the nineteen eighties and had been sitting empty for the past thirty years.

“I think Hizzoner has something up his sleeve. Something that will put money into his pockets.” I raised an eyebrow. “Politics might be the second-oldest profession, but it bears an extremely close similarity to the first.”

“You are such a cynic.” Ronni snickered.

“That's not true.” I lifted one shoulder. “I'm just an optimist with years of experience.”

Ronni giggled, then said, “The Desoto is pretty close to your store, right?”

“Yep. It's two doors down.” Actually, I had been thinking about that. “While I'm sympathetic toward the economically disadvantaged folks who often live in boarding houses, I'm concerned that their presence might drive away my regular clientele.”

My shop ran on a very thin profit margin and I couldn't afford to lose any customers. When I had quit my consulting job at Stramp Investments and bought the dime store, I had reduced my round-trip commute from two hours to fifteen minutes and cut the time I spent at work almost in half. Too bad I had also shrunk my income from six figures to near poverty level. Which meant that no matter what, I had to keep my books in the black.

My altered lifestyle had been worth it because by making the change I'd been able to spend extra time with my grandmother Birdie Sinclair. Eighteen months ago, her doctor had informed me that Birdie needed me to be around more due to her memory issues; and knowing that it was my turn to help her, I had immediately begun to search for other ways to make a living. How could I do anything less when she had taken me in and loved me when I had nowhere else to go and no one else who cared?

When I was sixteen, my mother had dropped me on my grandmother's front porch with fifty dollars in my pocket and two suitcases containing all that remained of my previous life. My father had just been sent to prison, and Mom had been unable to handle the shame, loss of income, and reduced social status resulting from her husband's conviction. Having disposed of her burden, she'd headed to
California to start over, leaving my grandmother and me to face the town's censure by ourselves. In the thirteen years she'd been gone, I'd heard from her fewer than a dozen times.

Ronni's elbow in my side brought me back from the past, and as I jerked my head toward her, I heard someone drawl, “As I live and breathe. Devereaux Sinclair. What are you doing here? You've never given any previous indication of being civic-minded.”

“Wasting my time,” I grumbled, glancing past Ronni to see Nadine Underwood sweep by me, trailed by Mr. Eye Candy, aka her health aide.

Up until a few months ago, Nadine had been a thirty-five-year member of the city council. However, because of a mysterious illness that none of her physicians could diagnose, she'd withdrawn, and her son, Dr. Noah Underwood, had been appointed in her place.

Nadine had never been one of my biggest fans, and now that I was dating Noah, she really had it in for me. In her view, I was not daughter-in-law material. I wasn't sure who was, but I suspected it was a mini-me version of Nadine. Someone who would step into her Prada shoes as belle of the country club set and president of the Confederate Daughters of Missouri. Someone she could bully.

Back when Noah and I had gone steady in high school, Nadine had manipulated him into dumping me, but Noah claimed to have learned his lesson. When we had started seeing each other again, he'd warned his mother to back off. He thought she had acquiesced, but I knew better.

Although there wasn't anything in particular I
could point to, my guess was that Nadine had seen her son's words as a challenge and had taken her crusade to get rid of me and to destroy my family underground. Noah's mother had never been one to surrender that easily. After all, she still thought the South would rise again.

As I watched Nadine and Mr. Eye Candy take the reserved seats in the front row, Ronni narrowed her blue-gray eyes and muttered under her breath, “I wonder what Nadine's scheming about this time.”

I smiled. Ronni may have moved to Shadow Bend only a year ago, but she'd learned quickly that Noah's mother always had an angle.

“I doubt Nadine is in favor of allowing a place that would attract the underprivileged and homeless to Shadow Bend's village square.” I kept an eye on Noah's mother as she settled in, placing her Louis Vuitton satchel on her lap and nodding regally to those around her. “So I'm guessing she's here to make sure the city council votes against the rooming house.”

Ronni grunted her agreement, and I realized that Nadine and I were on the same side on that issue. Feeling an unpleasant twinge, I wondered if I should reconsider my position on the matter.

No!
As uncomfortable as it was to think that Noah's mother and I had anything in common, my family's livelihood was on the line. Without my income, Gran would experience financial hardship. And if my store went under, Dad would be unemployed.

A few months ago, after the truth had finally been discovered about my father's innocence and he'd gotten out of prison, he'd come to work for me
at the dime store. And let's face it: Ex-cons didn't have a lot of employment opportunities, so finding another job would be tough.

As Mayor Eggers finally started running out of steam, I saw Boone and Noah put their heads together for a whispered conversation. It surprised me that their tête-à-tête seemed so amiable. The rivalry between the two men was legendary and had started back when Noah was elected class president in sixth grade.

The bitterness had continued throughout high school and into their adult lives. During the years Noah and I were dating, he and Boone had pretended to get along. But the minute Noah betrayed me, Boone's true feelings reemerged. And from then on, he'd never bothered to hide his contempt for the good doctor.

Now that Noah and I had reconciled and were going out again, I knew that both he and Boone were trying for a détente in their hostilities, but I was suspicious about their new friendliness. Did it have anything to do with a certain ex–U.S. Marshal named Jake Del Vecchio, the other man I was seeing? Or the woman he had brought back to Shadow Bend after his last case?

Both Boone and Poppy believed that I was crazy to tolerate Jake's ex-wife, Meg, living with him and his uncle Tony on the Del Vecchio ranch. Privately, I thought I was a little deranged, too, but it was hard to fault Jake for rescuing Meg from a psychiatric facility. She was nearly catatonic, and had been that way since being kidnapped by a serial killer. She had been held captive by the psycho for months, and he had threatened to carve her into a human statue.

According to Jake, Meg had no family and few friends. Her doctors had said that there was nothing physically wrong with her, but she needed rest and time to recover emotionally from the trauma. If Jake hadn't brought her to the ranch with him, she would have had to go into a nursing home, where, with no one to make sure the staff was treating her okay, she would have been at the mercy of strangers.

The irony didn't escape me that while I had convinced Noah and Jake to tolerate me dating both of them, Jake was now living with his ex-wife. I hated irony.

Having learned early not to put the key to my happiness in someone else's pocket, I pushed aside my messed-up love life and refocused on Boone and Noah. Both men were now looking at me. What were they up to?

I sure wished Poppy were here. Few secrets ever remained hidden from her. Considering that her club was the most popular watering hole in the area, she was up on all the gossip. And if that didn't work, she had listening devices concealed by nearly every table.

Poppy liked to be aware of what was being discussed in her bar. She never shared the information with anyone except occasionally Boone and me, but she enjoyed the power of knowing facts others didn't. She had serious control issues—a gift from her father. Chief Kincaid made a drill sergeant seem like a laid-back surfer dude.

Digging my cell from my purse, I sent Poppy a quick text. She was probably too busy making sure the Brothers of Revolution didn't turn her tables into kindling or send one another to the emergency
room to answer, but I was bored, so it was worth a shot.

While I had my phone out, I noticed a message that I'd missed from Jake. After I was finished with the meeting, he was supposed to come over to my house for pizza and a movie, but he was canceling. Meg was having some sort of crisis and he couldn't leave her alone.

Looking heavenward, I muttered, “Lord, give me patience.”

I would have prayed for strength, but then I'd have to ask God for bail money, too, because I was beginning to wonder if Meg was less incapacitated than she was pretending to be. And if she was faking, I might not be able to control my impulse to slap her silly.

Maybe I was being unreasonable, but Meg seemed to have an emergency whenever Jake and I had a date planned. Was it possible she was trying to break us up and get her ex-husband back into her clutches? And if so, other than challenge her to a duel, what could I do about it?