Murder in the Mountains: Destination Murders, #2

By Karen Cantwell, Cathy Wiley, Leslie Budewitz and 6 more

Whether you love spring, summer, fall, or winter in the mountains, you'll be elevated by nine new stories from award-winning and bestselling cozy mystery authors Gretchen Archer, Leslie Budewitz, Karen Cantwell, Barb Goffman, Eleanor Cawood Jones, Tina Kashian, Shari Randall, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Cathy Wiley.

With mountainous murders galore around the world, this anthology is full of peaks and valleys!

Climb every mountain, search low and high

For clues to a murder, and try not to die

Four seasons of Murder:

Spring

DOUBLE BLUFF by Gretchen Archer. A new short story in the Davis Way series. Two trophy wives and one dead body equals a trip to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee for Davis Way and her co-worker.

FIVE DAYS TO FITNESS by Barb Goffman. A visit to a fitness camp in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains was supposed to be a new beginning for Bree Winterbourne. Instead, it's a final ending for one of the attendees.

Summer

THE SOUND OF MUZAK by Karen Cantwell. Another short story in the Barbara Marr series. When Barb and friends take a trip to the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts, they are asked to help uncover the owner's dark past—one that may involve murder. 

THE PICTURE OF GUILT by Leslie Budewitz. A new short story in the Food Lovers' Village series. Erin Murphy loves her town of Jewel Bay, Montana, which attracts artists, foodies, and other tourists. But one artist's visit turns deadly.

Fall

THE LYIN' WITCH IN THE WARDROBE by Eleanor Cawood Jones. Lorrie George and friends visit the Land of Oz theme park on Beech Mountain, North Carolina, filled with celebrities and jealousy and murder, oh my!

A KILLER POCONO HIKE by Tina Kashian. A short story in the Kebab Kitchen series. Lucy Berberian is desperate for a break from the stress of wedding planning, and the Poconos should have fit the bill. But finding a body in a sinkhole leaves Lucy with a sinking feeling.

Winter

A PERFECT CLIMB by Shawn Reilly Simmons. A skiing trip in the Australian Alps was supposed to be the perfect start for Caroline Cabot's perfect marriage. Unfortunately, everything quickly goes downhill, as sore muscles, fighting couples, and a murder ruin the perfection.

THE EDELWEISS EXPRESS by Shari Randall. A new short story in the Lobster Shack series. Allie Larkin was looking forward to her trip to Austria: the snow, skiing, and a Sound of Music Tour. But she wasn't expecting that the hills would be alive with the sound of…murder?

ONE FLEW OVER THE COCOA'S NEST by Cathy Wiley. A new short story in the Food Festival Fatalities series. Former celebrity chef Jackie Norwood was invited to judge a Hot Cocoa festival at a Utah ski resort. Instead, thanks to a blizzard and a murder, she ends up judging the guilt of her fellow guests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cathy Wiley
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201444204

Book preview

Murder in the Mountains

Murder in the Mountains

A Destination Murders Short Story Anthology

Gretchen Archer Leslie Budewitz Karen Cantwell Barb Goffman Eleanor Cawood Jones Tina Kashian Shari Randall Shawn Reilly Simmons Cathy Wiley

Destination Murders

Contents

Spring

DOUBLE BLUFF, by Gretchen Archer

FIVE DAYS TO FITNESS, by Barb Goffman

Summer

THE SOUND OF MUZAK, by Karen Cantwell

THE PICTURE OF GUILT, by Leslie Budewitz

Fall

THE LYIN’ WITCH IN THE WARDROBE, by Eleanor Cawood Jones

A KILLER POCONO HIKE, by Tina Kashian

Winter

A PERFECT CLIMB, by Shawn Reilly Simmons

THE EDELWEISS EXPRESS, by Shari Randall

ONE FLEW OVER THE COCOA’S NEST, by Cathy Wiley

Copyright of each individual story is held by the author

Praise for Murder on the Beach

Spring

DOUBLE BLUFF, by Gretchen Archer

On any given night when I call it a day, I go to bed with thousands of overnight guests. Total strangers under my roof. Because I live in a hotel twenty-nine floors above a casino on the beach in Biloxi, Mississippi. So, in a way, my house never sleeps; someone is always awake. One clear, starry, and unseasonably warm March night, I was wide awake with the someones. I couldn’t sleep. I slept fine from ten o’clock until midnight, but as the clock clicked to a new day, something woke me and I couldn’t fall back to sleep. After a restless hour of lying statue-still, not wanting to wake my husband, and another hour of tiptoeing to the living room, not wanting to wake my dogs, then yet another hour of scrolling through muted infomercials on television, not wanting to wake my twin daughters, I gave up. But only after ordering a countertop air fryer/instant pot/cappuccino-maker combo, in shiny slate gray, and a fat stick of something called Bangnectar™ that would remove sticky label residue, repel mosquitoes, and make me look ten years younger. By the light above my stovetop in the kitchen, I made a cup of hot chocolate and carried it down the dark hall between two silent guestrooms, gathering a pillow from one and a blanket from the other. I slipped out to the lanai between the guestrooms, still wide awake.

I settled into a cushy lounger high above the Bellissimo Marina. I raised the shades and opened the windows, hoping the night air, the moon reflecting off the quiet Gulf, and the gentle lap of water against the boat hulls would send me back to bed. So I could sleep. Instead, I watched two women wrestle an unwieldy luggage cart to a Boston Whaler docked in the last marina slip.

I sat up a little straighter.

I sipped hot chocolate.

I angled for a better view.

The boat woke up. Outboard, onboard, navigation, and deck lights glowed, fore and aft. The women carefully tipped the luggage cart to land something solid onto the dock. They positioned themselves at opposite ends of what looked like a large piece of luggage. Not a suitcase. It didn’t have the bulk of a suitcase. Not a trunk. It didn’t have the structure of a trunk. It looked more like a hanging bag. And the hanging bag was stuffed full. Of something.

They clumsily hefted it, adjusted their grips, then swung the heavy bag back and forth gaining momentum each time—one, two, three—before lobbing it onto the boat deck. In the still of the night, I heard the thud. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind it was the thud of a dead body.

My name is Davis Way Cole. I’m thirtysomething, pushing fortysomething, and I’ve been in one form or another of law enforcement my entire adult life. So when a luggage cart was rolled down a lonely marina dock, then something weighty was tossed into a boat in the dead of night, naturally, I assumed it was a body. The only thing I knew for certain was that one of the women—the one who sailed the evidentiary luggage cart off the end of the dock, the one who climbed into the captain’s seat at the helm of the Boston Whaler, the one who started the outboard engines and maneuvered the boat out of the slip to roar away for deeper darker waters—was wearing a sweatshirt that spelled out in large reflective letters, SEE RUBY FALLS.

I woke my husband, Bradley, President and CEO of the Bellissimo to my Undercover Security Operative at the same, to tell him a watery body dump was happening that very minute from our very marina. He said, Davis, get some sleep.

I didn’t. But after getting our girls, Bexley and Quinn, off to preschool the next morning, I went to my office thirty floors, three different elevators, and three hundred feet down a dark sub-basement tunnel from my home. I’d been at my desk five minutes when I found the women. Their names were Boofie Whittaker and Mary Thatcher Huntington.

You’re lying. My partner, Fantasy Erb, dropped her purse and woke her computers. Those are fake names. No one is named Boofie and no one is named Mary Thatch.

Mary Thatcher. Our desks were side by side. I tilted my screen and showed her their Bellissimo guest profiles. See for yourself. Mary Thatcher Huntington. And she was the one wearing the Ruby Falls sweatshirt.

She clicked away on her own screen and pulled up surveillance video of the women checking into a double suite at the VIP desk the day before. She tilted her screen my way.

That’s her. I pointed. Mary Thatcher. And if I had her kind of money, I’d have hired someone to dump the body.

How do you know how much money she has? Fantasy asked. Have you pulled her financials?

Look at her, I said. Look at her friend. Look at their jewelry. Look at their blowouts. Look at their makeup. Look at their designer yoga clothes. One’s wearing Louboutin sneakers and the other Balenciaga. I tapped the screen to change the surveillance angle so we could see them from behind. Look at their bags. There’s a Chanel, a Fendi, and all the luggage is Gucci.

It looks to me like they spend a lot of money, Davis, which isn’t the same as having a lot of money. It looks to me like they either married money or won the lottery. If they’d earned the money, or were born into it, they wouldn’t waste it on Gucci luggage. Their money would be in the bank, the stock market, or buried in mayonnaise jars in their backyards, and they’d be rolling around Samsonites.

She was right. I’d been in the casino business long enough to know that with the exception of celebrities, real money didn’t flash it.

One thing I don’t see, she said, is these two bleached blonde logo queens having the wherewithal to dispose of a dead body in the Gulf. Did you eat a banana last night?

No. Why?

Because my grandmother always said if you ate a banana before bed you’d have nightmares.

I was wide awake in the middle of the night on the lanai between my guest rooms, Fantasy, not in the kitchen eating bananas. I saw what I saw.

Davis, you were hundreds of feet above the marina. And you’re telling me you could read the words on the back of a shirt? She switched the surveillance shot back to the women’s impatient expressions at the VIP desk the day before. These two wouldn’t be caught dead in a sweatshirt unless it had Tiffany & Co. spelled out in diamonds across their backs. I don’t know what you think you saw, but it wasn’t one of these women wearing a See Niagara Falls sweatshirt.

Ruby.

Who’s Ruby?

It was Ruby Falls. The sweatshirt said ‘See Ruby Falls.’

What’s a ruby fall?

I minimized the women and maximized Google. It’s a tourist trap. Seen on barns all over the Southeast.

Her eyes narrowed. You ate a banana.

Ruby Falls advertisements, I explained. Thousands of barns and billboards all over the south say ‘See Ruby Falls.’

Davis. She shook her head. Never have I ever.

Trust me.

What is it? she asked. An amusement park?

It’s a cave with a waterfall under a mountain.

It is not.

I assured her it was. I pulled up the Ruby Falls website to let her see for herself. And right there on the landing page was a warm welcome from the owner, Conrad Theodore Huntington. Beside him, a foot shorter and at least forty years younger, was his wife, Mary Thatcher Huntington. It took ten additional minutes to find her friend, or more to my point, her partner in crime. Boofie Whittaker was on the About Us page of See Rock City’s website under the heading Our Owners. In the photo, she was hand on hip, opposite shoulder thrust, one foot poised in front of the other, beside her equally geriatric husband, Cornelius Graham Whittaker IV.

I’m sensing a theme here, Fantasy said. See Ruby Falls. See Rock City. See Trophy Wives. She turned to me. What’s a rock city?

Huge rock formations.

And people pay good money to look at waterfalls and rocks? Can’t you see them free all day long?

There’s fudge and taffy too.

How do you know all this? she asked.

How do you not know all this? I asked back. It’s not on the other side of the world. It’s on Lookout Mountain. In Tennessee. Two states away.

Are you sure Lookout Mountain isn’t in Georgia? Two states away?

I thought you’d never heard of it, I said.

I’ve heard of the mountain. Not the tourist traps.

The mountain is in both, I said. The state line cuts through.

We watched more footage of Boofie and Mary Thatcher checking into our hotel. Eyes darting. Fidgeting. Heads bent whispering to each other. Waving off the bellman who offered to help them with their tower of Gucci luggage.

Are they moving in? Fantasy asked.

That’s a lot of Gucci.

Which one did you say was wearing the sweatshirt?

I tapped Mary Thatcher’s image while she came around to seeing things my way. Something was up with these women. You do the coffee honors, I said. I’ll pull up marina surveillance video.

She stood. Be right back.

Watching surveillance video was boring and we never attempted it without coffee. When she stepped back into our war room—think hacker cave: desks, monitors, keyboards, motherboards, battery backups, cables, routers, and servers everywhere, but neater and cheerier than a hacker cave—I had the video cued up for exactly three a.m. and we watched almost nothing. Mary Thatcher Huntington and Boofie Whittaker were indeed transporting what was surely a body in a large leather hanging bag down the marina dock, but they were wearing anti-surveillance hats. To the naked eye, the hats looked like black ball caps. But they had battery-operated infrared technology that blinded night-vision cameras and turned the women’s heads into brilliant orbs of light. There would be no positively identifying Mary Thatcher or Boofie at the scene of the crime. And there would be no positively identifying the body they disposed of without dredging the Gulf.

I turned to Fantasy. What were you saying about banana nightmares?

We went to work. We traced their every electronic and surveillance step through the Bellissimo from the moment they checked in, deposited their Gucci and body bags in their double suite, then took their assigned seats at our Double or Nothing Texas Hold’em Partners Tournament. We didn’t expect to find anything as interesting, or incriminating, as the body dump, but shockingly, we almost did. Mary Thatcher Huntington and Boofie Whittaker handily won the Hold’em tournament the night before by bluffing their way through. They’d played every trick in the book. We watched them expertly steal blinds, bet light, and float flops on almost every hand.

Where’d they learn to do that?

We kept watching as they and their winnings disappeared into the double suite at two a.m. only to emerge a half hour later pushing and pulling a luggage cart with what was surely the body of Cornelius Whittaker IV. Or maybe that of Conrad Theodore Huntington. Because the headline we found posted on the Lookout Mountain Gazette’s website three days earlier read, Dynamic Duo Remains in Dire Peril. It went on to say the mountain’s beloved Cornelius Whittaker IV was still in a coma after a near-fatal black-ice slip while his lifelong best friend and Lookout Mountain legend, Conrad Huntington, still hadn’t regained his memory after cracking his skull on a rock. According to the article, the husbands had suffered the life-threatening injuries within moments of each other a month earlier while on a hike with their wives on Lookout Mountain’s Bluff Trail.

Boofie Whittaker was quoted as saying, Y’all pray for Cornie.

Mary Thatcher Huntington was quoted as saying of her husband, He don’t know what day of the week it is. He keeps calling me Sheila.

Fantasy could have been quoted as saying, Who takes their eighty-year-old husbands on a mountaintop hike in January?

I could have been quoted as saying, Women who want to get rid of their eighty-year-old husbands. I looked up to a monitor above our heads full of live surveillance of the Bellissimo front entrance. Mary Thatcher and Boofie were climbing into an executive car. I pointed. These two.

We didn’t fly out the front door, flash badges, confiscate a guest’s car, and peel out after the limo. For one, casino spies didn’t carry badges, and for two, after all our years on the job, we knew better than to chase cars without any idea of where they were going. What we did know was the women had left the building without checking out of their double suite or taking a single piece of Gucci luggage. That meant they planned on returning. We decided to toss their guest rooms while we had the chance. On the way from our sub-basement office to the twenty-seventh floor of the hotel, I ran the executive car plates and found it registered to Chauffer Services out of New Orleans, ninety miles to our west. I dialed. I introduced myself, told the dispatcher on the other end of the line I was with security at the Bellissimo (very true), and that I was looking for their limo that just left our property with two of our guests. (Also true.) After giving me a spiel about discretion being their number one priority, then me pointing out passenger safety and cars well-stocked with good snacks should be their number one priorities, he asked why I needed the information. I told him the guests who’d left in one of their cars were witnesses to a crime committed the night before (somewhat true), and we needed to talk to them before the details floated out of their overprocessed blonde heads. After assuring him there’d be a reward in it for him (not true at all), he said, Their destination is Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

By then, we’d reached the door of their double suite. For protocol’s sake, and to keep the casino’s legal department off our backs, we knocked, dinged the Room Service doorbell, and yelled, Housekeeping before we entered. After counting to ten, I swiped my all-access passkey across the keypad above the Do Not Disturb sign. The perfume almost knocked us back out the door.

My eyes burned.

Fantasy, who’s allergic to just about everything, had a sneezing fit.

I looked at her through perfume tears. They’ll be easy to find.

She said between achoos, Are they trying to cover up the smell of a second dead body?

We batted our way through the extreme fragrance fumes while dodging discarded clothing, Bellissimo bathrobes, four empty champagne bottles, and the dregs of what must have been their dinner—three empty party-sized bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and two empty giant bags of Reese’s Miniature Peanut Butter Cups—to the in-room safe located behind the bar in the studio parlor. There, we waded through spent French Roast coffee K-Cups and empty energy drink cans.

Fantasy said, These two were raised in a barn.

I said, I bet the barn said See Rock City on one side and See Ruby Falls on the other.

The safe we cracked into, because we had the override code for every room safe in the hotel, held the two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar Texas Hold’em jackpot payout in twenty-five banded ten-thousand-dollar stacks. (Pretty.) We tossed the money aside and found their passports on top of a small leather portfolio containing a travel itinerary for four aboard something called The Residence, another luxury two-bedroom suite, but that one on a Formula One jet from New York to Abu Dhabi. Price tag $25,000. The flight was in two days. So whatever they left the Bellissimo to do, clearly their plan was to return in time to grab the cash, the luxury flight documents, and all the Gucci, then make their way to the other side of the world. Under the Air Elite itinerary, we found a boat rental agreement for the Boston Whaler they’d taken out the night before for a three-a.m. joyride, and under that, a note. A single sheet torn from a pad. Printed at the top were the letters LMP inside the shadowy outline of a police badge. Below that, the words, Covering Lookout Mountain Assets Since 1952. Handwritten in the middle of the page in tight letters leaning far right, we read, 6:00 a.m., 2.24.

That’s tomorrow, I said.

What happens tomorrow at six in the morning?

Let’s ask Mr. Google. I pulled my phone from my back pocket, searched until I found the Lookout Mountain Gazette’s website, clicked on the most recent issue, then swiped right and left until I reached the Community Calendar page. I clicked on Tuesday, February 24 and found it packed with meetings. The LookOut Ladies Club, the OutLook Welcome Club, the Fort Stephenson Book Club, the West Brow Garden Club, the Fairyland Supper Club, the Point Park Community Service Club, and the Incline Festival Club all had brunch, lunch, or cocktail-hour meetings scheduled. One contained a hyperlink which led to a note from the West Brow Garden Club’s president, Charlotte Elder Jones. She regretted to inform her members that they’d need to take an alternate route to their scheduled brunch at Scenic Tea Time because of road closures due to construction of the mountain’s new parking lot to accommodate Ruby Falls and Rock City tourists. Club members were advised to park behind the tearoom, because Scenic Way would be hosting concrete trucks from six in the morning until noon.

Fantasy, reading over my shoulder, said, They’re going to bury the other husband’s body in wet cement.

I shook the note. And the Lookout Mountain police are in on it.

What do we do?

We See Rock City, I said. We See Ruby Falls.

Flying wouldn’t do us any good. For one, we had to fight our own tourist traffic for twenty miles to reach the Bellissimo hangar at Million Air, then convince a Bellissimo pilot to fly us to Lookout Mountain, which a quick internet search told us we couldn’t even do. We’d have to land in Chattanooga, Tennessee, then rent a car and drive to the mountain. The commute would be almost five hours. We could drive it in six. And we loved a good road trip. Mary Thatcher and Boofie had a head start on us, but executive cars were slow. We weren’t. And if we didn’t stop for coffee at every exit between Biloxi and Lookout Mountain, we might arrive before them.

I called my husband. Bradley, can you pick the girls up from preschool today?

He said he could.

Can you take them to preschool tomorrow morning?

Are you going somewhere?

I am.

Is this about what you think you saw last night?

This is about what I know I saw last night.

Hurry back, he said. Something just hit my desk I need you to look into.

What?

The women who won the Hold’em tournament?

What about them?

One, they used to work here.

Are you kidding?

They were cocktail waitresses in our VIP poker room for four years, he said. They’ve since changed their names, so our system didn’t flag them when they registered, but using aliases doesn’t exempt them from disqualification. They can’t play in a Bellissimo Hold’em tournament after four years of Hold’em school in our VIP poker room. Two, they’re wanted for questioning in three states.

Why?

Between them, they have four dead husbands.

It was more like five dead husbands. Soon to be six if we didn’t hurry up Lookout Mountain.

Six hours and twelve minutes later, we took the Lookout Mountain exit off I-24. The entire harried way, we passed See Rock City and See Ruby Falls advertisements. Fantasy pointed out the painted barns, because I’d been nose to laptop reading decades of gossipy Lookout Mountain Gazette articles all written by the same woman, Gwin Tugman (just to get a feel for the place), while running the fingerprints I’d pulled off the Cheetos and Reese’s bags from the floor of our suspects’ double suite. I tracked the blondes all the way back to a reform school for girls in Wichita, Kansas. Before they changed their names and married old men with old money, they’d been busy padding their misdemeanor records with petty theft, solicitation, and attempted carjacking charges. The four dead husbands were a curiosity I didn’t have the bandwidth for in the car other than the very basics: they’d married in pairs and the husbands had died together. The first husbands were second cousins who’d died fourteen years earlier on the same November day while off-road four wheeling. The third and fourth dead husbands had been half-brothers. They met their demises barbequing. They lit a backyard gas grill that blew them both sky high, killing one instantly and the other the next day.

Are they serial husband killers who cut brake lines, sabotage propane tanks, and push old men off hiking trails, or are they truly that unlucky?

They won a Hold’em tournament last night, Davis. How unlucky is that?

That wasn’t luck, Fantasy. That was four years of high-stakes poker school on us. Hey, I clicked away, guess where they met their current rich old husbands? I scrolled through the list of Bellissimo VIP poker players and quickly found Conrad Huntington and Cornelius Whittaker IV.

We discussed pillars of the Lookout Mountain community returning home from a poker trip with cocktail waitress wives. We discussed tacos because we were hungry. We discussed the odds of two women in their early forties losing three teams of husbands to suspicious accidents. We discussed the pressing issues all the way to the top of the world.

How does anyone live on a mountain? Fantasy had a death grip on the steering wheel as she made a hairpin turn onto a residential street.

What do these people do? I traded my laptop for my phone, clicking away as I took photos to show my husband, and shared a non-homicidal tidbit with her from my road-trip research. This zip code has the state’s highest household income.

How many filthy rich people live on this mountain?

A little more than a thousand.

Cozy.

On East Brow Road, we slowed down at a discreet For Sale sign in the corner of a cozy front yard the size of a football field. I entered the address into my laptop. This house has two and a half kitchens, two master suites, eight additional bedrooms, fifteen bathrooms, two elevators, three spools, a six-car garage, a guest house, and a separate staff residence.

What’s a spool?

A small pool.

How small?

I don’t know.

How much? she asked.

Twenty-one million, I answered. Apparently you can see seven states from each of the spools and that’s one million per state per spool. This isn’t a single-family residence, Fantasy, this is a single-family resort. And guess who’s selling it? I flipped my laptop so she could see.

She said, Well, hello, Mary Thatch.

Mary Thatcher.

Mary Whatever.

The yelp of a patrol car siren behind us interrupted our sightseeing, which was the worst thing that could have happened just then considering we already suspected there was at least one bad apple in the Lookout Mountain Police barrel. Fantasy pulled her car up a foot and over an inch, parked, then waited patiently while the officer—young, no more than five years out of police academy—ran our plates.

He’s not on the website. I clicked and scrolled.

What website?

The Lookout Mountain Police website.

So?

That means he’s green.

I’m green too, Davis, from driving up this mountain. What’s your point?

He probably isn’t the officer who wrote the note to Mary Thatcher and Boofie telling them when to have the second husband’s body ready for death by cement, because he hasn’t been on the force long enough to get his hands that dirty.

Or he could be exactly who told them, because he hasn’t been on the force long enough to know better.

We watched him from our side mirrors as he ambled up to the car.

Are you ladies lost?

I leaned in. We’re looking for Ruby Falls.

You drove right by it on your way up the mountain. There’s no missing it.

We hadn’t missed it. The abundant signage, stone waterfall entrance shouting RUBY FALLS, and the live uniformed bodies on both sides of the road trying to usher us in with synchronized upper-body gyrations were impossible to ignore.

Is there a problem, officer? Fantasy asked.

Before he could answer, his radio interrupted. Davenport? The Lupton dogs are loose again.

My red hair hit the headrest in relief. At no time during his grueling officer training had Officer Davenport imagined himself chasing neighborhood dogs. He took a step back to answer the call. Sir, I’m tied up with—

Wait! I cracked my laptop open and hurried to the photo of Mary Thatcher and Boofie at the VIP desk checking into the Bellissimo. I flipped the screen around to show the officer. He stared at the women, then at me. I said, We’re looking for these women.

His shoulder said, Davenport. Do you copy?

Davenport took a sharp breath and tapped his earpiece. Copy, he said, Davenport on dog duty. I’m with two women in a black Range Rover, Mississippi tags, who just saw the dogs. They’re tourists, they don’t know the roads, so I’ll be with them. I’ll get the dogs back home. He put a hand on the roof of Fantasy’s car and leaned in. Who are you? he whispered. And what do you want with Mrs. Huntington and Mrs. Whittaker?

While clicking to another screen to show him ten-year-old mugshots of Mrs. Huntington and Mrs. Whittaker minus all the money, along with their names way back when which they’d never bothered to legally change, Ashlie Black and Ashlee Simon, I told him who we were.

The officer scratched behind an ear—processing—while admiring miles of immaculate landscaping that went on for as far as the eye could see. Gwin. I barely heard him. You need to talk to Gwin. Follow me.

He turned on his heels and hurried back to his squad car.

Davis, who is Gwin?

She’s the editor of the Lookout Mountain Gazette. And we need to be careful with her. Tread lightly.

Why?

Just the feeling I got from reading what she writes about her neighbors.

A subtle and decorative black iron sign that matched all the other subtle and decorative black iron signs on Lookout Mountain quietly announced we’d reached the Mountain Gazette. Nestled on a side street in a two-story chalet made of stone, it was beside a boutique, Mountain Treasures, and behind a wine bar, Mountain Canopy. (Packed. Standing room only. At three in the afternoon.) Of the two parking spaces reserved for the Gazette, only one was occupied, and with a custom pink golf cart. Inside the double-glass doors, we found the golf cart and Gazette owner, Gwin Tugman. Seated, she looked to be at least six feet tall. She had a cap of short silver hair. She was lanky, perpetually tanned, and sporty. She wore leggings under sweatshorts under a long-sleeved all-weather Spandex t-shirt under a puffy vest. Every stitch on her long frame was a shade of pink ranging from powder puff to flamingo. Every square inch of the small office around the pink of her was accounted for. Her desk was piled high with unopened mail, stuffed file folders, and stacks of printed Gazettes. All four walls were covered with framed photographs of Lookout Mountain events. Other than her desk and chair, the only furniture in the room was a frayed and fragrant pink suede recliner, daybed to an old hound dog, who didn’t acknowledge our entrance. Gwin, on the other hand, did. She raised her head from her work and studied us carefully. Then her eyes shifted to the officer responsible for the intrusion. Davenport?

He cleared his throat. He rocked on his heels. His hand brushed the leather that hid his service weapon as if he might need it to protect himself. From her. "If you