"Sure," I said. "The least amount of lying is us pretending to be a couple."
"You want my help or not, Bergeron?"
I did. Desperately.
And I was frighteningly intrigued by what it would feel like to pretend to be his girlfriend. My heart was hammering away at my chest way too fast.
"Fine," I said. "Try to look like you like me."
"I'll have to dig deep," he said.
That wasn’t a great start.
Teddy chittered his agreement from somewhere near Hollis's ankle.
I texted Hyacinth from the porch twenty minutes later, keeping it breezy, the way you'd text someone you were only mildly curious about instead of someone you suspected of taking money to help kill their childhood friend's grandmother's best friend, or whatever tangled knot of relationships that actually was.
Hey, it’s Harper! I need caffeine and girl talk. Coffee today? My treat, penance for being nosy at the gala.
She wouldn’t be able to resist the exclamation point.
She said yes within four minutes, which either meant she had nothing to hide or meant she was the kind of woman who never turned down free coffee. Dorothy did say the divorce had wrecked her finances.
We met her at a little café on Royal, the kind of place with marble tabletops gone soft at the corners and a ceiling fan that had clearly been fighting a losing battle against the heat since the Eisenhower administration. Hollis installed himself two tables over with basketball playing on his phone, but muted.
Hyacinth arrived in linen, sunglasses pushed up into hair that looked freshly blown out. She slid into the chair across from me with a smile that didn't quite make it all the way up.
"This one’s yours.”
Hyacinth was nothing if not efficient. When I texted her “here” she’d given me her latte order.
"Thanks. I haven't been sleeping." She wrapped both hands around her cup like she needed warmth despite the fact that it was eighty-one degrees outside and the coffee was iced. "It's been a horrible weekend, Harper. God, what a disaster."
"It has." I let a beat sit there, the way Dorothy had over her ranunculus, the way Maggie did on mic. "I keep thinking about the bracelet."
Her hands went very still around the cup. "I told you. It was an earring, and I told the detective?—"
"I know what you told him." I kept my voice soft. "I also know somebody wired you fifteen thousand dollars two weeks before the gala. And another two thousand three days before Evelyn died."
The color went out of her face so fast it was almost theatrical. For one wild second I thought she might actually slide out of the chair onto the floor. Two tables over, I watched Hollis not look up from his phone, which was its own kind of impressive.
“How the bleep do you know that?”
She actually said bleep.
It struck me as hilarious.
Who was hilarious now, Hyacinth?
“A little birdie told me.” God, I had always wanted to say that.
"That's private," she finally managed, barely above a whisper. "Divorce sucks. Don’t do it.”
"Noted. Somebody overheard you and Evelyn fighting about an arrangement twenty minutes before the toast," I said, as my pulse climbed. I knew I was pushing her too hard right out of the gate but I was a woman possessed. I wanted answers.
Besides, she’d been a mean girl in high school and I wasn’t over it.
"You were telling her she couldn't keep doing this to you. Her telling you that you knew the terms."
