A Sampling of Murder
Poison-Spiced Cupcakes
Cat and Mouse Whodunit
A Tail of Murder
Of Mice and Murder
Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Catastrophe
A Rash Decision
The Purrfect Murder (coming 2024)
For Susan. When you reach a point that you’ve been friends for more than half your lives, you become more like family. Thank you for always having my back no matter what life throws at us.
With lies you may get ahead in the world — but you can never go back.
Russian Proverb
1
I was starting to think I should have driven back to Washington, DC, to buy my wedding dress. Even though I’d never been a bride before, I suspected that my dress should fit better than it did by the fourth fitting—especially since my wedding was less than a month away.
“Don’t worry.” Mark’s mom tugged at the side of my bodice. The large gap in the front that would have allowed me room to hide tissues—or a small cat—vanished. “We’ll get them to fix this. There’s still time.”
She’d said the same thing when they’d hemmed my skirt two inches too long, assuming I was going to wear stilettos to my wedding, and when they sewed straps into my strapless gown. I was starting to lose faith, especially considering this wasn’t the first time we’d pointed out that the bust of my dress was gaping in the front.
But Ever After was the only bridal shop in Fair Haven. A grandmother-granddaughter team owned and ran it. The granddaughter had been the one to help me select my dress, instilling confidence in me with how she helped me find a dress to fit my style.
Then her grandmother the seamstress took over. From that point on, what I wanted hadn’t seemed to matter.
Mark’s mom released my dress. “Wait here. I’ll go talk to them.”
She marched off toward the counter, where the grandmother owner rang up a purchase for another customer. Mark’s mom had no daughters of her own. Since my own mom was over six hundred miles away, Mark’s mom had launched herself into this wedding as if she were the mother of the bride rather than the mother of the groom. I couldn’t have organized this wedding without her.
The faint tones of my cell phone ringing carried from where my purse nestled on a chair.
Mark’s mom was still waiting to speak to the store owner. I grabbed the sides of my bodice to keep my dress from slipping off and picked my way carefully down from the display stand they’d had me climb onto. I had a suspicion that bridal stores used them to make brides look taller and therefore skinnier in their dresses so they’d like them better.
I snagged my phone from my purse without even stopping to look at the display.
“This is…” I started to say Nikki, but now that I was officially a partner in Anderson Taylor’s law firm, I should get back into the habit of answering my phone more professionally. “Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes.”
“Don’t let on that anything’s wrong,” Mark said. “I don’t want to scare my mom.”
A zing of pride hit me that he felt I could handle whatever was coming, then my blood felt like it pounded through my body hard enough to burst my skin. The Cavanaugh family tended to view keeping secrets as akin to treason. He wouldn’t ask me to keep his call from his mom unless the consequences of her finding out would be worse than the fallout from not telling her. No, not fallout. He expected her to be afraid.
“What’s going on?” I called on all my training as a lawyer to keep my tone steady and light as my words even though it was the opposite of what I felt. “We’re still at the bridal shop.”
“I need you to make up an excuse to leave right away and come to my place.”
Voices approached from behind me—Mark’s mom returning with the shop owner. I couldn’t even press him for more details.
But I trusted that he wouldn’t do something like this unless it was important. Had we been another engaged couple, I might have thought it was a ruse to surprise me with something good, but Mark knew I didn’t like surprises. The nervous lead-up to them was rarely worth the payoff.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I disconnected the call, dropped my phone into my purse, and turned around, trying to act as if I’d only been checking my text messages.
“Who was that?” Mark’s mom asked. She had the owner with her.
“Scammers,” I blurted, then struggled to lower my heart rate and hoped my vocal pitch would follow. “Trying to tell me there was a problem with my Windows PC.” I rolled my eyes. “I own a Mac.”
Great. Lying to my future mother-in-law. It was a good thing I didn’t believe in karma because that would have definitely earned me a black mark in return. But Mark had been insistent, and even I couldn’t come up with a near-truth that fast.
“I got a call from Latvia the other day.” Mark’s mom made a brushing motion as if she could shoo away the callers. Her slightly amused expression vanished, and she pointed a finger at my chest, then made a go-ahead motion toward the seamstress like she would forcefully move her toward me if the woman didn’t move on her own. “You can see for yourself. There’s still too big a gap. It looks like she’s wearing a dress that’s two sizes too large.”
The shop owner was even shorter than I was, with frizzy hair that she styled into almost a bulb around her head. I’d put her age at somewhere around sixty.
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “The problem is not with the dress.” Her accent sounded German or Austrian. “She’s wearing it wrong.”
She wriggled my chest and the dress around until half of my bosoms bulged out the top. All the ideas I’d been working on for escaping from here and getting to Mark slipped out of my head as if she’d pushed them out along with my bust. I could not walk into my church on my wedding day with that much cleavage showing. Forget church. My bathing suit covered more skin than this.
I laid a hand across my exposed cleavage.
