Crab Outta Luck by Ellis Quinn

Author:Ellis Quinn [Quinn, Ellis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-11-08T06:00:00+00:00

THAT AFTERNOON

At the end of a grocery aisle, she ran into Marcus Seabolt. Literally.

Her startled quip, looking up at him, into his blue eyes, both of them half-smiling? “Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter.”

The two of them’d come around the bulb-nose end of the aisle, each with just a hand basket, eyes down, and bumped into each other, her shoulder into his chest.

Marcus frowned, said, “What? . . .”

She’d come into the village to get some food and supplies, stopped into the Cove Grocer, walking around remarking to herself how it was like the same shop as when she left just a little fancier. Now here she was in front of the big side window, all the bounty of fall beginning to appear on the nursery racks outside; mums in oranges and yellows and deep roses, anemones, sunflowers, gourds, and even the first pumpkins.

A blush came to her cheeks from the flopped quip and she ran hair from her face saying, “Oh, uh, just . . . sorry—don’t you remember that old commercial? We used to say that, you and me.”

Marcus laughed, his head gently cocking in an unexpected way that relieved her. He said, “Yeah, you just . . . caught me off guard.”

“Cop like you’s not always at the ready?”

“Only for the bad guys, Bette. You a bad guy?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “I mighta scuffed your shoe.”

They both looked down at their feet. Marcus wore nicer off-duty boots in a soft brown leather, pair of jeans that fit him really well, worn-in work jacket over a flannel. Interesting—no wedding ring.

“I’m not a bad guy, you know,” she said when they looked up again.

“S’why I’m glad I ran into you—I was going to come by the Fortune in the morning, let you know some good news . . .”

“Are you serious? . . .”

“I crossed you off my list, Bette. You’re no longer a suspect in the murder of Royce Murdoch.”

She knew it’d bothered her, but not how much till he’d said she was off the hook; the relief was palpable, like a nasty old spirit lifting out her body and floating up into the rafters of the old grocer’s. She slumped, sagged, leaned a shoulder against the shelving, bumping jars of pickles and letting out a whisking exhale, chuckling, laying a palm on her forehead; playing it up a little for her friend, but also kind of meaning it, too.

“That a relief?” he said, smiling warmly for the first time since she’d come back to the Cove, showing a hidden facet of the old Marcus she’d hung with. It’d been a long time since seeing him, and though Marcus’d become a man in that time, here on his day off with a shade of stubble on his hard jaw, traces of squinting lines at his eyes, he still could somehow seem boyish—but only like you could see it now if you’d seen it in the past.

“Yeah, I’d say it’s a relief. You put it on

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