Mom and I follow because we’re apparently committed to this chaos.
The clip rolls right out the back door, and we burst into the employee area—rightthrough the parking lot, past the dumpsters, and into the landscaping bushes that are trying very hard to look expensive.
“Got it!” Georgie lunges for the clip.
Her foot catches on something.
She goes down hard, landing on her hands and knees in the mulch.
“Ow! What the?—”
She looks down at what tripped her.
It’s a leg.
Attached to a body.
Tamsin Rowe is face-down in the bushes behind her own gym, and there’s a knife sticking out of her back.
We all scream.
Another body. Another knife. Another suspect gone before I could ask her what she knew.
Tamsin Rowe is dead in the bushes behind her own gym with a knife in her back, and the only witness to her final moments might be Georgie’s twelve-dollar feathered roach clip—which somehow feels like the most dignified thing about this entire disaster.
CHAPTER 14
Once the screaming died down—or at least on my end, because Mom and Georgie really do have a set of pipes—I called Jasper, who in turn called every sheriff’s deputy in Seaview County, all of whom were present and accounted for in what felt like ten seconds flat.
Suffice it to say, Jasper was not amused that I stumbled upon another corpse.
“Technically,” I tell him as he stalks toward me, looking like a homicide detective who’s had enough of his wife’s extracurricular activities, “Georgie did the stumbling. I was just a witness to the stumbling.”
“That’s not helping your case.”
“I’m trying to be accurate.”
“Try being somewhere else when people get murdered.” He winces like he only partially meant it.
Okay, so he meant it. But he loves me too much to want to reprimand me.
The parking lot behind Sculpt and Slay Studio is chaos. The summer heat’s still going strong despite it being lateafternoon, and the smell of hot asphalt mixes with someone’s coconut sunscreen and the faint chemical tang of eucalyptus from inside the gym.
Red, white, and blue streamers are tied to the light posts—because apparently even luxury gyms in Seaview are not immune to getting patriotic—and one of them has come loose and is fluttering in the breeze like it’s waving goodbye to Tamsin.
“I think I’m in shock,” poor Mom says, sitting on the curb in her hot pink leotard and leg warmers, fanning herself with Georgie’s feathered roach clip. “Do people in shock need water? I feel like I need water.”
“Oh Mom,” I coo, making my way over. “I honestly think you’re fine.”
“I just saw a dead body, Bizzy. I am not fine.”
“You’ve seen dead bodies before,” I point out without thinking. Not that I’m wrong, but still.
“That doesn’t make it better!”
Georgie paces back and forth, her bedazzledNAMASTEkaftan catching the light with every step. “I can’t believe this. We came here to ask questions and someone beat us to it. The killer beat us to it. With a knife.”
Mom grunts, “Thanks for pointing out the obvious.”
