Deadly Notions Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Sewing Tips

  Sewing Patterns

  Everyone’s a suspect

  Tori was standing behind her desk, looking out over the town square, when he showed up, the squeak of his shoes and the pace of his gait solidifying what she knew to be true—the police car parked in front of the library was not a coincidence.

  Not by a long shot.

  Word had gotten out about the party moms and their feelings toward the victim. Of that she was sure. But it was the who behind the crime she couldn’t figure out, particularly in light of the fact that each and every person at Sally’s party had uttered a derogatory word under their breath where Ashley Lawson was concerned.

  Including her.

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Elizabeth Lynn Casey

  SEW DEADLY

  DEATH THREADS

  PINNED FOR MURDER

  DEADLY NOTIONS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  DEADLY NOTIONS

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / April 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47765-6

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my friends, Lynn Cahoon and Joe Richardson.

  There’s no one I’d rather stash a body with than the two of you.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, writing is largely a solitary endeavor. It means long conversations with myself and even longer periods of time hunched over the computer—alone.

  That said, the most wonderful bursts of sunshine creep through the process in the form of my family. Without them, I wouldn’t be half the writer I am.

  And then there are my readers, the people who make writing this series all the more fun. Thank you. Your emails and letters mean the world to me. Keep ’em coming!

  Chapter 1

  Tori Sinclair held up the next picture in the pile and looked around at the fourteen kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the braided rug. “Who drew this face?”

  A hand shot into the air. “Me!”

  “Okay”—she dropped her gaze to the nametag slung around the child’s neck—“Bobby. Can you tell us what this face is feeling?”

  “He’s mad as a bear with a sore backside.” The redhead rose onto his knees, swiping the back of his hand across his nose as he did.

  “Mad as a bear with a sore backside?” she repeated.

  Bobby nodded. “Uh-huh. Means he’s real mad. ’Cept when my daddy talks ’bout the bear, he doesn’t say backside , he says butt.”

  “Ah, I see.” She pointed at the picture, mentally filing away yet another southern expression to add to her evergrowing list—a list that had started the day she moved to Sweet Briar, South Carolina, and that still showed absolutely no sign of completion more than a year later. “Can you tell us how you chose to show his anger?”

  The little boy jumped to his feet and came to stand beside her, his moment in the spotlight no doubt responsible for the face-splitting smile that boasted two missing front teeth. “I made his mouth go down right here like this.” He poked at the face on his drawing then lifted his finger up to the curlicues shooting out from the sides of the perfectly round head. “And see this part? That’s the smoke comin’ out of his ears.”

  “Wow! He is madder than a bear, ain’t he?” Sally Davis sat up straight in her spot near the center of the circle, her large brown eyes round as saucers. “My mee-maw says Jake Junior”—the child paused and looked around at her classmates—“that’s my big brother in case you didn’t know that, gets smoke out his ears when he’s mad, too. ’Cept I ain’t seen it yet.”

  “Keep lookin’, Sally. If it’s there, you’ll see it.” Bobby turned back to Tori and flashed yet another smile. “I did good, didn’t I, Miss Sinclair?”

  “You did a very nice job, Bobby, thank you.” Shifting his picture to the bottom of the pile, she looked back at the rest of the class, her voice a poor disguise for the laugh that was becoming harder and harder to stifle. “And who drew this one?”

  Jackson Calhoun skipped back into the room from his bathroom trip, his dark brown hair curling at the ends in an exact replica of his father. “Ooooh, that’s my picture, Miss Sinclair!”

  She waved him over. “Would you like to tell us what your face is feeling, Jackson?”

  “Sure I—” He stopped midway across the room and stared at his drawing, the corners of his mouth slipping downward. “Could I c
hange one—no, two things first? Please? Pretty, pretty please? I’ll do it mighty quick. I promise.”

  Waving off his teacher’s hesitation, Tori nodded and handed the little boy a pencil. Two seconds later the picture was back in her hand, this time sporting a few lines on each side of the eyes and a long rectangle draped across the center of the mouth. “Those are interesting changes, Jackson. Would you like to tell us about it?”

  Jackson nodded. “My face is worried.”

  “Worried?”

  Again, the child nodded. “My mamma says that’s what happens when grown-ups give small things big shadows.”

  “That’s the same as being worried,” Bobby interjected.

  Tori nibbled her lip. “Have you ever considered being an interpreter, Bobby?”

  “What’s that?” Sally asked.

  “That’s someone who translates words from one language to another,” explained Tori. “For example, if I spoke Spanish yet your class spoke only English, I would need an interpreter to explain what I’m saying so you could understand.”

  “Nah, I wanna be a race-car driver.” Bobby grabbed his make-believe steering wheel and moved it back and forth, car noises emerging from between his lips. “And I’m gonna be so good I won’t never be worried like Jackson’s face.”

  Jackson’s face.

  She motioned toward Jackson’s picture with her head. “Okay . . . tell us.”

  “Well, his eyebrows come down here and he’s got lines right here”—Jackson imitated the illustration with his own face—“and this right here? Why, that’s his finger pushed up against his mouth. Like he’s trying to figure something out to make it all better . . . but he can’t.”

  “That’s very good, Jackson.”

  “Mrs. Morgan helped me.”

  “Hey! That’s not fair,” whined a blonde from the back of the group. “You said we had to draw these faces on our own.”

  “Mrs. Morgan helped you?” she echoed as her gaze left Jackson and traveled around the children’s room of Sweet Briar Public Library. Not seeing her assistant, she looked back at the little boy. “When?”

  “Just now . . . when I went to the potty.” Placing his hands on his hips, Jackson turned to face the little girl who’d questioned his integrity, his voice taking on an injured quality. “She didn’t tell me what to draw. She didn’t even talk to me.”

  “Then how did she help you?”

  He looked back at Tori, his eyes wide. “You said to close our eyes and try to think how someone looks when they’re happy or sad or worried . . .”

  “Or mad, don’t forget mad,” Bobby reminded.

  “Yep, mad, too. And well, I closed my eyes and I did what you said and that’s why the eyebrows are upside down like that.” Jackson pointed at the squiggly caterpillar-like marks on the top half of his drawing. “But when I went to the bathroom, Mrs. Morgan helped me think of the lines and the finger.”

  The little girl in the back stamped her foot, dislodging a golden blonde tendril from her perfectly coiffed little head in the process. “No fair! I’m going to tell my mother!”

  Jackson’s hands found his hips once again. “She didn’t tell me, Penelope. She showed me . . . like this.” Scrunching up his face, he stuck the index finger of his right hand in front of his mouth.

  “Did you ask her to demonstrate?” Tori asked as she looked from Jackson to his teacher and back again, her mind warring with itself over the urge to laugh at the child’s demonstration.

  “No. She didn’t even see me. She was just standing there behind the desk like this.” Again he made his worried face and again she tried not to laugh, only this time she wasn’t any more successful than his teacher.

  Forcing her attention onto the task at hand, she painstakingly went through the rest of the pile giving each kindergartener a chance to point out the expressions they opted to use to illustrate their chosen emotion. When they were done, she handed the pictures out to their rightful owners. “Bobby, how did you know what a mad face looked like?”

  “I just do.” Bobby shrugged. “Everybody gets mad.”

  She looked at Jackson. “And you knew how to draw worry because of Mrs. Morgan’s face?”

  The little boy nodded.

  Shaking off the questions that followed in her thoughts, Tori stood and gestured toward the various shelves in the center of the children’s room, her time with Mrs. Tierney’s class drawing to a close. “As you get older, some of the stories you read won’t have pictures. But that’s okay. Because if you use your imagination and your own personal experiences—as you just did with your drawings—you can still picture the characters and the places in your mind based on what’s being said in the story. And you want to know something?”

  Fourteen heads nodded as fourteen sets of eyes fairly glued themselves to her face, waiting.

  “Sometimes books are even more fun without pictures. Because then you can imagine a character the way you want to imagine them.”

  “Wow!”

  “That’s cool!”

  “I still like pictures best.”

  You win some, you lose some . . .

  Mrs. Tierney clapped her hands softly, bringing instant calm to the room. “Class? What do we say to Miss Sinclair for spending time with us this morning?”

  “Thank you, Miss Sinclair,” chorused fourteen voices as Sweet Briar Elementary School’s morning kindergarten class lined up at the door, the promise of snack time under the hundred-year-old moss trees more than enough to keep them quiet.

  One by one the students filed out of the room like baby ducks waddling after their mamma. And, true to form, the last of the bunch strayed from the pack. “Miss Sinclair?”

  She looked down, a smile tugging her lips upward at the sight of her friend’s son. “Yes, Jackson?”

  “Will you make sure she’s okay?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Morgan.”

  Smoothing back a strand of soft brown hair from the little boy’s forehead, she nodded. “Of course I will. But I’m sure she’s okay. She was probably just trying to answer someone’s question. We get a lot of those at the library.”

  Jackson shook his head, displacing the same strand of hair once again. “She was all by herself. There wasn’t anybody else in the li-berry ’cept Sally’s mom.”

  Melissa.

  She squatted down to the child’s eye level and gave him a quick hug. “I’ll check on her, okay? But I don’t want you to worry. I’m sure Mrs. Morgan is fine.”

  For a moment he looked as if he was about to protest but, in the end, he was lured back to the line by the promise of a snack with his friends. “Mommy said she packed me a chocolate cupcake.”

  Her stomach growled at the thought of Debbie’s chocolate cupcakes . . . and her black-and-white cookies . . . and her pies . . . and her—

  Shaking off the mental inventory of her friend’s bakery, she tapped the tip of Jackson’s nose. “Then you better hurry along before I take a taste and end up eating the whole thing.”

  “Okay.” He took three steps toward the door and then stopped once again. “But you’ll really check, right?”

  “I’ll really check. Now run along before Mrs. Tierney gets worried.”

  And with that Jackson was gone, his little white and blue sneakers smacking softly against the tiled floor that led from the children’s room to the main library, Tori’s own heels making a pitter-patter sound just a few steps behind. When he turned left toward the door, she continued on, her gaze riveted on her assistant’s face.

  Her worried face.

  Tori hurried across the room and over to the information desk, her eyes making a quick sweep of her surroundings. “Nina? Is everything okay?”

  The woman shook her head, her finger pointing in the direction of a solitary figure hunched over a stack of books. “I tried to help but it was no use. She kept saying she had to come up with something special. Something better than last year’s.”

  Tori bobbed her head
to the left, the long dirty blonde ponytail registering in some dusty corner of her brain alongside Jackson’s sweet voice . . .

  “She didn’t even seem to notice that Sally’s class just walked out the door,” Nina continued, her eyebrows furrowed. “And she’s not the kind of mamma that doesn’t notice her own babies.”

  “I’ll take care of this, Nina. Why don’t you go ahead and take your lunch break.”

  Nina pulled her attention from Melissa’s weary form and fixed it on Tori. “Are you sure, Miss Sinclair? Because I can wait if you need a moment to relax after the class visit.”

  She touched her assistant’s shoulder with a reassuring hand. “I’m sure. The kids were great, they really were.”

  “Okay. But if you need anything I’ll be right outside.” Reaching down, the woman pulled a brown paper sack from the bottom shelf of the information desk and held it into the air. “I’m hoping a little fresh air will help chase away this sluggish feeling I’ve been having lately. Though the thought of food doesn’t sound terribly appealing at the moment, either.”

  “Are you feeling sick?”

  Nina shrugged. “A little under the weather, maybe, but nothing to worry about.” Flashing the shy smile that was as much a part of her as the thick hair that hung to her shoulders, Nina made her way across the room and out the door, her lunch sack clutched tightly in her petite hands.

  Turning back to the object of both Jackson’s and Nina’s worry, she made a beeline over to Melissa’s table. “Melissa? Is everything okay?”

  Slowly, the thirty-something mother of seven lifted her head from the eight-book-high stack and shook her head. “I’m done.”

  “Done?” Tori echoed as she plopped into a chair on the opposite side of the table, her eyes skimming the various titles in front of her friend.