A Nip of Murder--A Moonshine Mystery by Carol Miller

Author:Carol Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250019288
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER

15

“That sure is a load off my mind,” Brenda said with a weighty exhalation.

“What is?” Daisy asked.

“We won’t have to be the ones to tell Rick about Caesar. He must have seen him in the ambulance or found out from a deputy.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, look at him. Look at how Laurel is comforting him.”

Daisy blinked at the pair. Laurel Page was pressed against Rick Balsam’s chest. There wasn’t a sliver of daylight between their bodies. She blinked again, hard. The scene didn’t change.

“Or maybe Rick is comforting Laurel,” Brenda added after a moment. “Maybe it’s given her a shock.”

The embrace continued—and showed no sign of weakening.

Doubt began to creep into Brenda’s voice. “Laurel’s marrying Bobby, right?”

“As far as I’m aware,” Daisy replied, echoing her misgiving. “Or at least she was the last I heard.”

Brenda frowned. “I wonder about that, Ducky. I think there might be trouble.”

Trouble was a very fitting word for the Balsam brothers. There were plenty of other words also, but treacherous was not one that Daisy would have used, which was why the lingering embrace surprised her so much. Although Rick and Bobby had certainly had their share of spats and disagreements over the years—some more and some less serious—she had never seen them be truly disloyal to each other. And fooling around with a fiancée was most definitely disloyal. Daisy remembered how a couple of days earlier in the bakery she had noticed Rick admiring Laurel. At the time she had thought that the admiration went on a little too long and a little too intently to be appropriate for a future brother-in-law, even an irrepressibly rakish one like Rick. The current level of intimacy between him and Laurel appeared to go well beyond admiration, and it piqued her curiosity.

As though he could sense that she was thinking about him, Rick’s gaze suddenly shifted to her. Daisy met his eyes. They were black with wrath. It shook her slightly. She had expected him to be mad about what had happened to Caesar, of course. In her experience, Rick was just as loyal to his friends and associates as he was to his brother. It was, in fact, one of his finer qualities. But there was something more to the darkness in his eyes than plain anger. Brenda really had used the right word. There was trouble.

Rick held Daisy’s gaze for a long minute, then his arms finally loosened their grip around Laurel. She looked up at him, and they spoke briefly. Although Daisy couldn’t hear what either of them said, she saw Laurel smile and nod. Maybe Brenda was right about that as well. Maybe Caesar’s dead body had been too much of a shock for Laurel, and Rick had been trying to comfort her.

Together the pair turned away from the steadily growing crowd at the side of Sweetie Pies and started to walk across the gravel toward Daisy. Watching them, Brenda clucked her tongue.

“Something sure is strange there,” she said.

Daisy agreed.

“I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, Ducky, but—” Brenda clucked her tongue again.

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