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Natalie shook her head. “Nada.”
She glanced over at the clock. Fifteen minutes until go time.
Olivia bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from groaning out loud. She was used to shit going south fast—what Sweet wasn’t?—but this was ridiculous. “Too many coincidences for me.”
“Yep.” Miranda nodded. “I think someone is trying to submarine the fundraiser before we even get a chance to train volunteers.”
It would’t be the first time. The Sweets hadn’t exactly been welcome in Salvation since…oh, since the town had been founded. Cattle thieves. Moonshiners. Rabble-rousers. The family was guilty on all counts. But Olivia and her sisters had been on the up and up since birth. Well, her sisters had been. Olivia had embraced the Sweet family crazy.
“Who would do it?” Natalie asked.
“Isn’t that the million-dollar question?” The list was long—with Mateo and his “usual” with the uptight Salvation mayor right at the top of it. He hadn’t been shy about his opposition to the fundraiser even after he’d agreed to help. Add that to the blowup last week and he made for a decent suspect.
“We need to cancel.” She sank down into the closest chair, wishing she could sink below the floorboards. So much for her grand plan.
“Don’t cancel. Postpone.” Natalie grabbed her clipboard from behind the bar and hustled over to the table where Olivia sat contemplating her latest failure. “Call it a rainout and say that you’ll reschedule the volunteer training.”
As far as believable excuses went, it made sense. Still, the abject failure of the day had her trigger shy. “What makes you think anyone will show up next time?”
“Because you won’t give them a choice.” Miranda sat down beside them. “You busted your hump to get something put together in two weeks. Imagine what you could do with a couple more?”
If she could turn the fundraiser into the event of the year in Salvation, there was no way the people in town could stay away. She just had to give them something they couldn’t get anywhere else. She needed to use her Sweet-inherited flair for the extreme for good and everything would work out.
“I could call in some favors from my friends in Harbor City, get some great raffle prizes.” Her modeling days had left her with a phone filled with contact information for some of the coolest photographers, artists and creative types in the industry. “Maybe Steffano would agree to do a makeover in between his styling gigs.”
Natalie began forming a list of possible giveaways on her clipboard. “See, this is a good thing.”
It was, but Olivia couldn’t shake the itchy feeling at the back of her neck that something more than freaky coincidence had happened to sink the fundraiser, and she was going to find out exactly what—or who—it was.
Olivia pushed open the front door of The Kitchen Sink. The diner was packed, extinguishing her last flicker of hope that aliens had kidnapped every single citizen of Salvation and thus explaining why no one had showed for the volunteer meeting.
Ruby Sue looked up from her perch on a stool behind the cash register. “Oh good, you brought me one of those growly things.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind putting this up here?” She put the wide-mouth growler down by the register, next to the sign warning those with bad attitudes would be charged a pain-in-the-butt fee.
“What fool would have a problem collecting change for a good cause?”
“Every other person in Salvation.” What had she been thinking, trying to throw a fundraiser that would get the town to stop crossing the street to avoid rubbing elbows with the Sweets? Maybe Mateo was right. Maybe this was more than she could do.
“Volunteer meeting didn’t go so well, huh?” Ruby Sue asked, but the sympathetic look on her face said she knew the answer to that.
“It didn’t go at all. No one showed up.” Failure formed a lead weight in her stomach.
Ruby Sue shook her head. “Idiots.”
“That’s one word for them.” She pinched her lips together before she gave the dozen or so other words that would fit the close-minded, gossiping, grudge-holding people in her hometown.
It would be one thing if she or her sisters had ever actually done anything to raise the town’s hackles, but it had been like this for as long as Olivia could remember. She and her sisters had been born in the backseat of her parents’ Chevrolet parked in front of the Stop and Sip. Salvation’s citizens had taken that as proof that this generation of Sweets was just as trashy as the moonshine runners, naked protestors and possible DMV arsonists who’d come before. The whole situation sucked.
A couple approached the register, bill in hand, and Olivia made her way over to the pie case. Two pieces of pecan pie were left. Finally, something was going right. One for her and one to bribe some information out of Mateo. She’d bet her designer stilettos that he knew who the head of the snake was, and just how she could chop off its head.
“Hey, Ellen.” She smiled at the waitress beside the pie case. “Can I get these two to go?”
“Sure,” she said. “Just let me take a couple of sweet teas out to table four and then I’ll get them wrapped up for you.”
“Thanks.” She settled down on the stool and took out her wallet. Her last ten dollar bill until her first Sweet Salvation Brewery paycheck came in tomorrow, but the pie was a necessary expense.
“Hope you’re not planning to snarf down both of those,” an all too familiar voice said from behind her. “You know how the camera puts on ten pounds.”
