Can't Judge a Book by Its Murder
Also by Amy Lillard
CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
Brodie’s Bride
All You Need Is Love
Can’t Buy Me Love
Love Potion Me, Baby
Southern Hospitality
Southern Comfort
Southern Charm
The Trouble with Millionaires
Take Me Back to Texas
Blame It on Texas
Ten Reasons Not to Date a Cop
Loving a Lawman
Healing a Heart
AMISH ROMANCE
Saving Gideon
Katie’s Choice
Gabriel’s Bride
Caroline’s Secret
Courting Emily
Lorie’s Heart
Just Plain Sadie
Titus Returns
Marrying Jonah
The Quilting Circle
A Wells Landing Christmas
A Mamm for Christmas, The Amish Christmas Collection
A Summer Wedding in Paradise, The Amish Brides Collection
A Home for Hannah
A Love for Leah
A Family for Gracie
OTHER MYSTERIES
Unsavory Notions
Pattern of Betrayal
O’ Little Town of Sugarcreek
Shoo, Fly, Shoo
Stranger Things Have Happened
Kappy King and the Puppy Kaper
Kappy King and the Pickle Kaper
Kappy King and the Pie Kaper
HISTORICAL ROMANCE
The Wildflower Bride
The Gingerbread Bride, 12 Brides of Christmas Collection
As Good As Gold, The Oregon Trail Romance Collection
Not So Pretty Penny, Lassoed by Marriage Collection
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2019 by Amy Lillard
Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Adrienne Krogh/Sourcebooks
Cover image © Brandon Dorman/Peter Lott and Associates
Internal images © Shutterstock
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
To Linda and Mary Beth, thanks for being such faithful readers, beautiful neighbors, and always having a smile for me. I appreciate you both more than you will know!
1
This was the last thing she needed.
Arlo Stanley hurried around the building, barely missing the crumbling spot at the edge of the street. Her foot twisted, and a sharp pain shot from her toes up to her ankle. This was not the day to break in new shoes. And heels at that. Now she had a bum ankle to add to the equation. But she had already been dressed for work when the police called.
A dead body! Right there on the sidewalk! Directly in front of her bookstore!
Things like this didn’t happen in their little town. Just. Didn’t. Happen.
She could hardy grasp it. Yes, people died, but not on Main Street. At least not as long as she had lived in Sugar Springs. It was unthinkable.
And to make matters worse, this weekend was important to the residents of Sugar Springs and all the Main Street merchants. This weekend was the Tenth Annual All-School Class Reunion. Not many people usually came out for that sort of thing, just a few locals and whoever happened to be in the area. But this year they had a special guest, the most famous person ever to leave Sugar Springs, Mississippi: Wallace J. Harrison. Known as Wally to those who had graduated with him, he was an upcoming star in the mystery-suspense genre with ten consecutive weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. Wally was a national sensation. And he was back in town.
Arlo had managed to convince Wally’s assistant that he should do a signing at her newly opened bookstore. She was even going to host a special Sunday opening for the event. Now the store was currently sectioned off with bright-yellow police tape.
She picked up her pace, mincing along and trying not to grimace in pain. She needed to get to her shop as quickly as possible, but City Ordinance 52-B stated that all shop employees had to park in the alley behind their stores to allow for ample parking in the front for their paying customers. Joni, the town’s petite meter maid—sorry, “traffic specialist”—was something of a stickler when it came to Main Street. So Arlo’s slightly dented, vintage VW Rabbit was parked in the alley behind her shop.
Arlo groaned when she saw the crowd of people in front of her store. It might be 9:00 a.m. on Friday, but everyone was already out and about. No one was looking at the new display she had created of Wally’s book along with choice murder weapons, making her window resemble an extra-large game of Clue. They were staring at the body. The one she could just see through their shuffling feet. Not quite a body, more a tangle of arms and legs, grotesquely twisted as if this poor soul had jumped from the third-story rooftop and fallen to the sidewalk below. Not just a death, but a possible suicide.
Arlo stumbled. A body. A real live dead body. On the sidewalk in front of her store. Goose bumps skittered across her skin. This was nothing like watching crime TV or reading about a death in the latest mystery. This was something altogether different.
There was one resident who wouldn’t get to engage in the weekend festivities. Though she didn’t know who it was. When the police had called, dispatch hadn’t told her the identity of the person, only that it was a man and she needed to get down there fast. But Sugar Springs wasn’t a big place. There wasn’t any doubt
Arlo would know the person who lay there on the sidewalk. Maybe she had even sold them a book. The thought was sad and sobering.
Yet she couldn’t continue to stand there. She had to be professional, move forward, find out why this person felt the need to fling himself from the roof. See what needed to be done next. Keeping focus would help her handle the ordeal. At least she hoped it would.
Arlo tugged on the tails of her button-down shirt and smoothed her palms over the sides of her gray dress slacks. She pushed her waist-length, chocolate-brown hair over her shoulders and straightened her back. One deep breath in and she started forward.
“Excuse me.” She nudged past Dan the grocer, Phil who owned the video store next door, Joyce the florist from across the street, and Delores the gum-smacking clerk from the jewelry store down the way. Arlo didn’t bother with the niceties; she simply pushed through. She had to talk to Mads, the chief of police. She had to have him clear up this…mess? Disaster? Crime scene.
“Mads.” She greeted him on a rush of air, then stopped when she got a good look at the body. “Is that…?”
He nodded, his normally stern face grim.
“But…” The one word was all she could manage. She looked back to the twisted form.
Wally Harrison lay dead at their feet.
* * *
Arlo’s ears began to hum as Chief Matthew “Mads” Keller shooed everyone away from the body. “Go on now,” he said.
Mads, so nicknamed from his high school football days, crossed his arms so everyone would know he wasn’t budging. Most turned and trudged back to their stores, spinning around once or twice as if to make sure the scene was still the same, that their eyes weren’t playing tricks on them.
“Do you think he jumped?” Jason Rogers, Mads’s first officer, nudged the body with the toe of one boot.
“Would you stop violating my crime scene?” Mads growled.
Jason held up both hands and backed away. “Sorry, big-city cop.”
Mads rolled his eyes.
Arlo rocked in place, staring in horror. Wally Harrison was dead. In front of her store. And dead.
“Well?” Jason asked.
Mads squatted down next to the body and used the end of his pen to lift the baseball cap from in front of Wally’s face.
“The Yankees,” Jason scoffed. “Of course he liked the Yankees. He left here and got all big-time on us. Too good to root for the Braves.”
Mads let the cap fall back into place. Arlo knew he wanted to say something to Jason, but he was too controlled for that. One day though…one day he was going to blow. She hoped she was around to see it.
People continued to walk past, pretending to be shopping as usual, but slowing down to take in as much of the scene as they could.
The crime scene. In front of her store.
She had to get ahold of herself.
“Did he?” she finally asked. “Kill himself?”
It was a stupid question. Why would a man like Wally Harrison kill himself? He had a successful life. He was raking in the dough from his book; he was handsome. Once upon a time, he had been everything in their small town. He wasn’t the geek who made it big. He was the golden boy, the one that got away. The one who would put Sugar Springs on the map if he ever admitted to being born there.
Well, Mads could have had that kind of life too, if he hadn’t blown out his knee in the first game of the AFC playoffs his third season in the NFL. After that, he became a cop in Memphis and eventually made his way back home to Sugar Springs.
“Looks that way,” Mads said on a breath of a sigh.
“Arlo.”
She turned at the sound of her name. Chloe Carter stood in the doorway of the store they shared. Her face was a contorted mask of disbelief and horror with a little disgust thrown in for variety. After all, there was a strange past between Chloe and Wally, but that was a long time ago.
“Have you been in there all morning?” Arlo asked.
Chloe ran the “more” of Arlo and Chloe’s Books & More, which included a coffee bar, cake counter, unique gifts, and fine chocolates. She had, on occasion, been known to offer flowers, but that had given Joyce at Blooming Blooms an apoplexy and so Chloe had dropped the idea before the roses even wilted.
Chloe nodded, but before she could say anything, a loud voice rang out, bouncing off the Civil War–era brick that lined Main Street.
“Bozhe miy!” Inna Kolisnychenko, Wally’s trophy assistant approached from the end of the block. Her thick Ukrainian accent added a hard edge to every word she said. “What is going on here?”
“Ms. Kolisnychenko.” Mads stood and Arlo could tell by the look on his face that he would rather be anywhere but there, anywhere but telling this woman that her employer was dead—most likely by his own hand. Arlo had to give Mads points for correctly pronouncing Inna’s name though.
“Is that—?” She stopped, almost as if posing, as she stared at the body on the sidewalk, one hand on her hip as she bit her lip in confusion. She was a study in beauty.
Inna was statuesque, with dark hair and a pouty mouth, like a Ukrainian Jane Russell, but she carried herself more like a half-asleep Marilyn Monroe. Though she was much taller than most men, including her boss, she had a tendency to make them want to take care of her. There was something a little helpless about her. At least that’s what Arlo thought Inna wanted people to see. Arlo wasn’t sold on Inna’s presentation, though she wasn’t certain why.
Inna wore her deep-plum-colored wrap dress like an Amazonian queen. She had paired it with platform stilettos that gave her another four and a half inches easy. In those shoes, she was nearly as tall as Mads. Her exotic blue eyes seemed almost impossible in her face, as if they could see straight through to a person’s secrets, to their soul.
She was more than beautiful, a fact Inna already knew. And anyone who knew Wally knew Inna, the trophy assistant. Too beautiful to be much more than arm candy, Inna probably pulled in more in a week than Arlo had all last year.
The strange thing was Daisy, Wally’s wife, was even more stunning than Inna, leaving the average person to wonder why Wally was fooling around. And the average person did know about his affair…or affairs, plural. He had all but admitted his dallying with Inna on Good Morning America. Everyone knew that she was nothing more than ornamentation. That much was obvious in her lack of skills, other than the savvy way she tucked her hair behind her left ear.
Wally’s wife, on the other hand…
“Oh. My. Gawd.” Daisy James-Harrison stood at the end of the block, fingers pressed to her mouth, but not so hard as to smudge her lipstick. Her kelly-green dress set off her blond hair and brown eyes to utter perfection.
Then Arlo remembered why the woman was there. Daisy was going to inspect the store and give Arlo the final instructions on how Wally liked his book signings set up. A job that Inna should be performing. But now…
“Mrs. James-Harrison…” Arlo breathed, completely unsure of what she was going to say. She felt like she needed to say something, but what? No one had taught her anything about this in business school.
“Is that…?” Daisy looked hard at the man lying on the ground at the officer’s feet.
Arlo bit her lip and turned to Mads.
He cleared his throat. “Yes. Uh…” Mads jerked his head toward the woman, but Jason, as dense today as he ever was, didn’t pick up on the gesture. Mads sighed, cast a backward glance at Daisy, then approached Inna. Arlo figured he was aware that Inna was inching closer to Wally’s body. After all, there wasn’t much that Mads missed.
“Is that my Wally?” Inna pronounced his name as if it began with a V instead of a W, her normally thick accent even more distinct as the truth set in.
Mads clasped Inna’s elbow and tried to steer her away from the crime scene. “Jason,” he called over one shoulder.
Thi
s time the officer picked up on the chief’s hint and moved toward Daisy. With no one standing near the body, Wally Harrison was strangely exposed. Arlo couldn’t help but stare.
She had seen Wally a thousand times during school, a hundred more these last few weeks. His face was on every publication that came across her desk. But he looked different in death. And it had nothing to do with the New York Yankees cap Jason so opposed. Yet it seemed strange to her as well. Maybe because every time she had seen him over these last so-successful weeks, he had been wearing a black turtleneck sweater—very cosmopolitan and utterly un-Mississippi, for a man at least. Still, he wouldn’t have been wearing a turtleneck today. It was almost May and the heat was already starting to get to some folks. Hot enough that no one was going around in a snug black turtleneck like a sixties’ beatnik.
Wally was wearing jeans, an army jacket with the collar turned up, and that baseball hat. It was nothing like what she had seen him wear during their high school years, and certainly not how he dressed in his countless interviews and media photos. But she knew as well as anyone that most writers had a persona they showed to the public, an image they wanted to portray. So he wouldn’t always dress that way. Case in point, today.
But it was more than his clothes. He had a bruised look as if he had landed face-first when he fell—or jumped—from the roof. Or maybe that was because he was dead. Did all dead bodies look like that? Why would he choose to throw himself off the building as his means of ending his life? Wasn’t jumping a rare form of suicide? She had no idea.
She reined in her whirling thoughts and dragged her gaze from Wally. Looking at him wasn’t helpful, so she focused on the building in front of her. Her store, like every other one on the street, was made from worn and weathered brick. It gave Main Street a soft yet dependable look. Most of these buildings had managed to remain standing even during the Civil War and the siege on neighboring Corinth. Two large plateglass windows flanked each side of the double doors. Those doors were possibly as old as the building itself and wore their thick layers of paint like badges of honor. There had been some debate between Arlo and Chloe as to whether or not to replace the doors for security reasons, but sentimentality had won out. Instead, they added new locks, another coat of paint, and relied on the honesty of small-town living to do the rest.