Act One (What Doesn't Kill You Prequel): An Ensemble Mystery Novella Read online

  Act One (What Doesn't Kill You Prequel): An Ensemble Mystery Novella

  Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  SkipJack Publishing

  Houston, TX

  Act One (What Doesn't Kill You Prequel): An Ensemble Mystery Novella Copyright © 2016 by Pamela Fagan Hutchins.

  To Sherry Tavejie.

  Thanks for planting the seed.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Accolades

  Preface

  ACT ONE

  Ava

  Katie

  Laura

  Maggie

  Emily

  Ava

  Michele

  Katie

  Laura

  Maggie

  Emily

  Laura

  Michele

  Maggie

  Ava

  Katie

  EXCERPTS

  Excerpt from Saving Grace

  Chapter One

  Excerpt from Heaven to Betsy

  Chapter One

  Excerpt from Going for Kona

  Chapter One

  Excerpt from Puppalicious and Beyond

  I am not a whackjob.

  Froggy Went A' Courtin'

  Excerpt from How to Screw Up Your Marriage

  Bring me a bucket.

  There's nothing under the canoe, honey.

  Excerpt from How to Screw Up Your Kids

  Despite Our Best Efforts

  How did the Bradys do it?

  Excerpt from The Clark Kent Chronicles

  "My mother is ruining my life."

  Where It All Began: Lacrosse Gloves Make Sense to Me

  Excerpt from Hot Flashes and Half Ironmans

  I don't ask much.

  Putting The Fun Into Dysfunctional

  Excerpt from What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?

  1 • EARN (NO) MONEY ALL BY YOURSELF {On the financial implications of traditional versus indie publishing}

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Fiction from SkipJack Publishing

  Other Books from SkipJack Publishing

  Accolades

  For Pamela Fagan Hutchins:

  2015 & 2016 WINNER USA Best Book Award, Cross Genre Fiction

  2014 USA Best Book Award Finalist, Cross Genre Fiction

  2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Quarter-finalist, Romance

  2013 USA Best Book Award Finalist, Business: Publishing

  2012 Winner of the Houston Writers Guild Ghost Story Contest

  2012 WINNER USA Best Book Award, Parenting: Divorce

  2011 Winner of the Houston Writers Guild Novel Contest, Mainstream

  2010 Winner of the Writers League of Texas Manuscript Contest, Romance

  What Doesn’t Kill You: Katie Romantic Mysteries

  “An exciting tale . . . twisting investigative and legal subplots . . . a character seeking redemption . . . an exhilarating mystery with a touch of voodoo.” — Midwest Book Review Bookwatch

  “A lively romantic mystery.” — Kirkus Reviews

  “A riveting drama . . . exciting read, highly recommended.” — Small Press Bookwatch

  “Katie is the first character I have absolutely fallen in love with since Stephanie Plum!” — Stephanie Swindell, Bookstore Owner

  “Engaging storyline . . . taut suspense.” — MBR Bookwatch

  What Doesn’t Kill You: Emily Romantic Mysteries

  “Fair warning: clear your calendar before you pick it up because you won’t be able to put it down.” — Ken Oder, author of Old Wounds to the Heart

  “Full of heart, humor, vivid characters, and suspense. Hutchins has done it again!” — Gay Yellen, author of The Body Business

  “Hutchins is a master of tension.” — R.L. Nolen, author of Deadly Thyme

  “Intriguing mystery . . . captivating romance.” — Patricia Flaherty Pagan, author of Trail Ways Pilgrims

  “Everything about it shines: the plot, the characters and the writing. Readers are in for a real treat with this story.” — Marcy McKay, author of Pennies from Burger Heaven

  What Doesn’t Kill You: Michele Romantic Mysteries

  “Immediately hooked.” — Terry Sykes-Bradshaw, author of Sibling Revelry

  “Spellbinding.” — Jo Bryan, Dry Creek Book Club

  “Fast-paced mystery.” –—Deb Krenzer, Book Reviewer

  “Can’t put it down.” — Cathy Bader, Reader

  pre·quel

  (prē′kwəl)

  noun

  A literary, dramatic, or cinematic work whose narrative takes place before that of a preexisting work in the same series.

  en·sem·ble

  (ŏn-sŏm′bəl)

  Noun

  A unit or group of complementary parts that contribute to a single effect.

  no·vel·la

  (nō-vĕl′ə)

  Noun

  A short story with a compact and pointed plot.

  ~ OCTOBER 2007 ~

  Five years before Saving Grace (What Doesn’t Kill You, #1): A Katie Romantic Mystery

  ACT ONE

  Ava

  Maggie teases her brunette hair with its chunky blonde streaks into a bigger rat’s nest. She leans in a nose length from the mirror, eyes unfocused and crossing, then hefts an industrial-sized can of Aqua Net and blasts her roots. Instant stink. Her ballast shifts, and she loses her balance, stealing a quick glance every which way, not realizing I see her bobble from where I stand behind a rolling costume rod. When she’s steady-ish, she flips her hair over and bends at the waist. I get an eyeful of ripped fishnet hose under her miniskirt and learn two things I wish I didn’t know: she doesn’t wear panties, and she shaves her girlie parts. She starts spraying again like she’s wielding Raid and her hair’s full of jack spaniards, but this time she clutches the wooden ledge in front of her.

  The woman is a Grade A drunk, and when she isn’t drunk, she’s high. The bitch of it is she’s drop-dead gorgeous and has more talent than anyone in this dime-store-turned-murder-mystery-dinner-theater. Including me, because Jah hates me. Or God, as they say here in Wack-o, Texas, aka hell.

  “Careful,” I say. “You’ll break your head.” I keep my voice light and use my pretend-helpful tone.

  Maggie stands up quickly, swaying, looking for me, not fooled even three sheets to the wind. She tells me she thinks I’m number one with a middle finger salute from her left hand. “Diva,” she says in a hiss.

  Maybe she’s right, but it takes one to know one. “Watch you’self. You fangs showing.” I play up my island accent and drop the continental diction I normally use here in the states. “Yanking,” we call it on St. Marcos, where I’m from, as in “talk like a damn Yankee.”

  From behind me, the director—if you can give such a hoo-ha title to the cat herder in charge of It Happened One Weekend in Waco—scolds me. “Ava! Leave Maggie alone. We need her at her best tonight. It’s a sold-out crowd.”

  The director’s always talking down to me. I’ve been stuffing cash in a pillowcase for a move back home, and I’m so close I can taste fresh island mango on my lips. I’d followed a no-count sumbitch named Zach from NYU to Vail to here, where he suddenly ups his game to a pill-popping, trailer-park-ho-banging, credit-card-stealing, bank-account-hacking loser who’s about to feel the long arm of the law.

  I swallow the tone I’d like to use. “Yah, mon,” I say to the director, and I curtsy.

  Lizbeth, as in no-E-no-A-because-I’m-not-Elizabeth, gazes at me, her expression vacant. Then her eyes shift
, and she gets a load of Maggie. Her face sours, lips puckering. She turns back to me, and her tone is pure pain. “I was going to have Maggie take the lead tonight since Julianna called in sick, but”—she shakes her head—“I don’t think that’s gonna work. Can you take the role?”

  Before I can answer, Maggie staggers forward. “That’s bullshit!” Her words are full-on slur. “I’m the first understudy.”

  First understudy? What does she think this is, Broadway? I rake the crappy dressing room with a quick glance. Plywood walls with exposed wiring. Cracked linoleum squares on the floor. Bare lightbulbs dangling overhead. It’s dingy and low rent, and I almost gag on the stench of cigarettes, body odor, and old garbage underneath the Aqua Net. Ah, but how the mighty have fallen. Maggie used to be a bona fide rock star, Texana folk version, on the cover of Texas Monthly not even that long ago. She looks like a younger, hotter version of Shania Twain and sings like a folksier Natalie Maines. I hear tell she plays every instrument better than her band. Sometimes it’s her licks on their tracks. Yep, she was on an express train to Nashville and the big time, until she got kicked out of every festival she was booked to play at in the last year. Scuttlebutt is her band members up and quit on her, as did her manager, her agent, and her record label. Maggie’s sunk down with us bottom-feeders now. But she has to pay for that expensive Jack and coke habit somehow.

  I ignore her and to Lizbeth say, “Irie,” the island version of “It’s all good.”

  Lizbeth raises an over-tweezed set of eyebrows. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  It’s better than a yes, because if I kill it tonight, I might steal Julianna’s part out from under her. That could mean a big fat raise and put me a few weeks closer to the Promised Land.

  From across the room, I hear another cast member and her boyfriend shouting at each other. It’s Becky, a mousy thing, but nice and not catty and stabby like Maggie. A secret admirer had sent her a huge bouquet of long-stemmed red roses earlier, and her man’s none too happy about it.

  She yells, “I’ve got a show, Randall. Get over it, and get out of here!”

  Lizbeth doesn’t allow anyone but cast backstage before a show, so I know Lizbeth is upset about Maggie being wrecked, since she doesn’t notice Randall. I keep a straight face as I watch Randall leaving in a huff from the corner of my eye. I didn’t know Becky had it in her.

  The director goes on, speaking to me, but she’s eying Maggie. “Becky will cover your part, Ava. I’ll go tell her now.”

  Lizbeth walks over to Becky, but stops short. A pale-skinned woman in sodden clothes, her freckles the color of her dripping hair, is rifling through the costumes, her face hidden. But everybody knows who she is. She tried out for my part, and she still can’t quite accept that I got it instead of her. The woman needs some Prozac.

  “Cast only—you know the rules. You’ll have to leave now, Sandra,” Lizbeth says, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  The space between all her freckles turns bright red. Sandra nods and scurries out the way Randall had a few moments before. She leaves little puddles behind her. It’s supposed to rain like a sumbitch out there tonight. Must be already.

  Just as Sandra’s leaving, Maggie starts throwing a tantrum like a spoiled teenage girl, tossing her hair over her shoulder, fussing some more with her makeup, and muttering snotty and loud enough for everyone backstage to hear. “Nobody in the audience is going to buy some no-count black karaoke singer from the Islands playing a Baylor sorority girl.”

  The room descends into an awkward silence, which I break with a sweet smile, Yankin’ in my best Texas drawl. “Chi-O, Chi-O, it’s off to bed we go.” I smooth my hair, which is shaved nearly to my scalp.

  That brings the house down, or the back of it, anyway.

  I skip off to change my costume and put on the blonde high-ponytail wig. I’ve always looked damn fine in red and yellow.

  Katie

  “Katie Connell,” I enunciated again to the young law student sitting behind a folding table in the lobby of the Bear Country Dinner Theater—formerly the downtown JCPenney. The refurbished lobby looked imitation 1920s with rain-slippery white-and-gray faux marble floors, fat papier-maché columns, floral swags that had smelled dusty and dank when I passed them, and red velvet-like wallpaper. Umbrellas lined one wall in the entryway. The law student was sweating in the heat and humidity, perched on a metal chair, working the A-D section of the alphabet for the five-year reunion of my law school class. Tonight we kicked the weekend off with a murder mystery dinner.

  A stubby finger traced down the list as he searched for my name. “Oh, right, here you are. And your significant other is . . . ?”

  “Oh no.” I snorted. “No significant other. A plus one. Emily Bernal.” I reached around behind me and gave Emily a teensy push between the shoulder blades.

  She smirked at me, then purred at him. “She doesn’t like people to know we’re a couple.”

  I whacked her with my black clutch. The young man’s ears turned red, and he pushed his silver wire-framed glasses up his nose.

  Emily closed in on the poor fellow, her voice sotto voce. “I’ve told her she shouldn’t worry. I’m sure her classmates will embrace her lifestyle.”

  I shouldered my way back in front of her, beaming at him. “It’s bad enough I’m not married with two-point-five kids, but the friend I bring to save me from people thinking I’m pitiful is trying to make me a subject of gossip.”

  He handed me a name tag without meeting my eyes.

  They’d misspelled my name. K-A-T-E-Y. “Can I borrow your pen?” I said to him.

  He slid it over to me and handed Emily a name tag that he’d made for her. He’d spelled her last name B-U-R-R-N-A-L. I raised an eyebrow at her.

  She shrugged, lifting one shoulder of her modest blue satin sheath. She had no boobs to speak of—not that I was one to talk—but she made up for it with her tight, perfectly proportioned body. Who knew rodeo could produce a figure like that? I sucked in my gut, very conscious I had just hit the big 3-0.

  I crossed out the E-Y on my name and replaced it with an I-E. “There isn’t a chance that you’ve got the equipment to reprint this correctly, is there?”

  He looked around him, searching for a lifeline but found no one. “Uh, no.”

  Emily took my name tag from me, peeled the back off, and smacked it onto my shirt. “It’s gonna be fine, Kate-Y.” She emphasized the second syllable. “Let’s go.”

  The woman behind us said, “Finally,” as she moved up.

  We were three steps away from the table when I stopped, cocking my head and studying Emily. “Wait.”

  She had French-braided her blonde hair into one glossy fat tail down her back. Unfortunately, she hadn’t worked her bangs into the braid, so they stood their normal two inches off her forehead, even slightly wetted by the rain. I patted them down. “You had a few hairs out of place.”

  They popped right back up.

  She swatted my hand away. “I may be your employee during the week, but not when I’m your significant other.”

  A smaller body ran into me, knocking me into Emily, who didn’t give an inch. It was a soggy woman in black pants and a white tuxedo shirt, with red hair and big freckles.

  “Hey!” I said to her.

  She barely glanced at me. “I’m late. Move out of my way, please.” She barreled on, and I watched her, mouth agape. She ran into several more people before she was out of sight.

  “How rude,” I said, mostly to Emily.

  She raised her eyebrows at me. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I let it go. We moved into the lobby area beyond the registration tables. There was music, but I couldn’t identify it over the din. If they’d have put me in charge of the soundtrack, “As Good as I Once Was” would have been blasting. Waiters darted through the crowd with trays of hors d’oeuvres. I peeked at one as it zipped by a good foot and a half below me. It wasn’t that I was that tall. The waiter was just really short.

  “
Pigs in a blanket,” I said, snagging one and popping it into my mouth. Little bursts of warm grease shot out as I chewed. Yum scrum.

  Emily groaned. “My favorite.”

  She’d gone vegetarian with Rich, her metrosexual trust-fund husband. Just thinking about him made my nostrils flare. It wasn’t that he was from Colombia, although right or wrong I was suspicious of the source of his family’s big bucks. It was his rigidity. I thought I was OCD until I met him.

  “Why don’t you have one? Rich isn’t here to see you eating outside his plan.”

  “It’s not his plan. It’s our plan.” She shook her head. “Maybe they have some carrot sticks.”

  Better her than me. What I wanted was a glass of wine. I spied a bar set up against the far wall. “Come on,” I said to Emily.

  I shimmied my way through the throng, shortening my steps. My feet already hurt. I couldn’t understand why they’d made this event semiformal. I loved my Donna Karan silver wrap dress, but I cursed the stilettos. They’d been great in Nordstrom, but not for traipsing through street lots, over sidewalks, and across hard floors. I leaned against the bar, easing my weight off one foot and then switching to relieve the other.

  A muscle-bound bartender with piercing blue eyes and Fabio hair put two napkins in front of us on the damp black-laminate bar top. “What can I get you?”

  I squared off the napkins. “Two white wines.”

  Emily shook her head. “I want red.”

  “Then order it,” I said. “Those are for me. I don’t want to have to stand in line twice.”

  She raised her eyebrows, pressing her lips together like my kindergarten-teacher mother, but she didn’t say anything.

  “What? I’m cutting down when we get back to Dallas.”

  “You’re a big girl. And that’s why I won’t be holding your hair when you’re tossing your cookies tonight.”

  The bartender handed me the drinks. “Ten dollars,” he said.