Page 3 of Tessa's Trust

To be honest, I didn’t think Bobbo was around either, but I was about to find out, considering Sadie had arranged for us to meet for dinner in a few hours. I told Sadie that I hadn’t dressed for a dinner date, but she said I looked fine and that I shouldn’t appear as if I were trying too hard.

I didn’t want to try at all. I’d given up on romance after a disastrous time with a jerk of an ex-boyfriend. He’d ended up getting murdered, and even though I didn’t think anybody deserved that, nobody really missed the guy.

“Huh,” Anna said. “What else did you agree...?” She stopped mid-sentence. “Oh.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “That’s the other reason you’re here.” Anna had a penchant for solving crimes. She was a big-shot lawyer in the city—or what constituted a city in my small northern Idaho life—and when helping out clients, she usually solved a crime or two.

Tendrils of her shiny brown hair fell out of her ponytail. “Tessa, Lenny Johnson was murdered nine months ago. It’s still an active case.”

“I know,” I said, my shoulders hunching until I remembered to straighten them. Lenny Johnson had been a vagabond and drunk in our small town. His body had been found in the cellar of Silver Sadie’s. I needed Nana O’Shea to perform a sage cleansing down there as soon as possible. “I promised her we’d do our best to figure out who killed him.”

“We?” Anna’s eyebrows rose.

Yeah, Sadie was no dummy. She knew the Albertini girls stuck together, and that if I signed the contract, Anna would help me. “Sure. You solve crimes all the time.”

“I’m a lawyer,” she muttered, looking more like a teenager headed out for a sleepover.

“I know,” I said. “All I did was say I’d try to solve it. As you can read in the contract, I was sure not to promise.” Because, honestly, I’d never solved a crime in my life. I hadn’t even gone to college. Not that you had to go to college to solve crimes, but my sister had a law degree, which meant she’d been to college for seven years and knew a lot more about crime than I did.

“I didn’t know you were going to buy a restaurant in Silverville,” she murmured.

We had both grown up in the small Idaho mining community and then moved over the pass to the bigger metropolis of Timber City, where she worked as a lawyer, and I had waitressed at Smiley’s Diner until, well…next month, after I trained two servers to take my spot. But I knew if I opened a restaurant, I wanted to be closer to home. And something about Silver Sadie’s called to me.

Women had owned it from the beginning, and I was talking probably from 1890 until today. Strong women fighting upstream and making their dreams come true. I wanted the place, and now, it was mine. To keep it, all I had to do was go on a date with three guys I barely knew and solve a murder.

What could possibly go wrong?

Chapter 2

I had just finished mucking out what had been the bar area when my phone rang. I looked toward the windows and the vast blizzard spinning snow around outside and shivered. Had I found enough space for my tables? I wasn’t sure. I may have been a little exuberant when I purchased them the month before.

“Hello?” I said absently, wiping dust off my jeans. At least I’d flipped my white T-shirt inside out before moving items around.

“Tessa, it’s Nonna. I heard you just bought Silver Sadie’s.”

I jolted and looked toward the expansive windows again. Nope, nobody was out in the blistering weather. The snow bombarded the area, covering the icy sidewalk. “That was quick.”

She chuckled. “This is Silverville. When did you sign the papers?”

“About two hours ago.”

“Huh, I must be losing my touch,” she murmured. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

I chewed on my lip. “I wanted to do it myself, Nonna,” I said. “It’s not that I didn’t trust anybody, I just...”

“I get it.” A slight Italian accent came through the phone. “That’s fine. Tell me you at least had your sister look at the contract.”

I turned my head and sneezed. Man, this place was dusty. “Anna signed as a witness.” There was no need to go into more detail than that.

“Oh, good.” She sighed. “That Sadie, she can be a shyster, you know.”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, I know.” I sneezed again.

“Bless you, sweetheart,” she said. “Well, what can I do to help? If I recall, that place needs some work.”

I loved my nonna. She looked like Sophia Loren, acted like the queen of England on a mission, and loved us with all her heart. She was fully Italian and often kept a wooden spoon in her purse in case she needed to smack somebody.

“I think I’m good for now. I have a date with Bobbo Brando tonight.”

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