Page 1 of Rest In Pink

Chapter One

I’ve spent every Sunday night for the past five weeks with a cop. He is technically not on call on Sunday nights, which doesn’t stop people from calling him anyway, but he’s stopped picking up the phone, especially if we’re in bed when it rings. We see each other on other nights, but he picks up when people call then because it’s his duty. Sundays are the nights we do not answer the phone.

I love Sunday nights.

I’d padded out to the counter of the old diner he lives in, stark naked because the idea of being naked in a diner turns me on. Also, the idea of the diner’s owner turns me on. Put the two of them together, and Sunday nights have gotten really satisfying for me, especially since this diner is private, transported on a flatbed truck to the woods on the banks of the Ohio River by the aforesaid cop, who will shoot anybody who comes near the place on Sunday nights. I have heard that he has actually said this to people, so he’s serious.

I’d come out to the counter to check my phone because the cop was asleep, and my employer, the fabulous Anemone Patterson, sometimes has brilliant ideas that she needs to share with me at all hours, and evidently Vince hasn’t given her the good news about not bothering us on Sunday nights yet. So, I sat down at the counter in the empty diner—did I mention I was naked? It’s so great—and checked the phone to look at my messages.

There were a lot of them.

Please don’t let anybody be dead,I thought, which was not out of the realm of possibility given recent events in Burney, Ohio. I tapped the one person I absolutely trusted, my cousin Molly. Who is also my sister. It’s been a rough five weeks since I came home to Burney.

I checked the voicemail, and Molly’s voice said, “I just texted you a Facebook URL. Go thereright now.And thencall me.”

That was it, that was the whole message. Given the urgency in her voice, I didn’t think it was cat videos, so I went to my texts, found hers, and hit the link.

“What do I have to do to keep you in bed?” Vince said from behind me, and I patted the seat next to me. He sat down, as naked as I was, and yawned as he read the screen over my shoulder, the heat from his body distracting me. “What the hell is this?”

I leaned back into his solid shoulder and all that good warmth and felt his hand hot on my waist. “This is the Burney Community Facebook page, the one Aunt ML used to run. Faye Blue took it over while ML is otherwise incarcerated.”

“And she put that up?”

I got to the dour Burney cop part and snickered. “I don’t think this is her.” Vince is not dour. He is often unexpressive, but he never looks like a basset hound. I snickered again as I finished reading. “No, she didn’t put this up. Looks like somebody hacked the page.”

“What exactly is illicit sex?” Vince said, sliding his hand up my bare back as he read.

“Adultery? I don’t know. Keep doing that.”

“‘An attempt to subvert the law’,” Vince read over my shoulder, close to my ear. “You subverting me, Magnolia?”

“Every chance I get.” I frowned at the screen as I saw the URL, something I’d missed before when I’d clicked on it. “Oh,hell.This is Thomas Thacker. He’s that moron who was Anemone’s ghost writer before me. She fired him for being horrible, and he’s been harassing me for money for his research, which I do not want and for which Anemone has already paid him.”

Vince rubbed my back slowly. “I don’t see how this gets money from you. He’s insulting you.”

“Oh, not really. I kind of like having a shady past. Makes me more interesting.”

“You do not need to be any more interesting.” Vince stopped rubbing and took my phone to read the post again. “The interesting thing here is that this is mostly true. Except the arson thing, unless he’s referring to the fire at the factory a while ago.”

“Where’s Thacker getting his info?”

Vince shrugged. “It’s Burney. Anybody in town would tell him anything. It’s not a secretive burg. When was the last time he hassled you for money?”

I took the phone back and scrolled through my e-mails as he put his hand on me again. I love it when he puts his hands on me. “About a month ago. There was one every day and then they just stopped. I was so busy coping with everything else that I thought he just got tired and gave up.”

“He stops that and he starts working on this.”

I nodded. “If he keeps going, people will be upset.”

“Anybody we care about?”

“No. Anemone will love having a lurid past.”

“I would like to have a lurid present,” Vince said in my ear.

“You justhada lurid present,” I said, but I turned my head so my mouth was close to his.

“More,” he said, and kissed me—the man has a great mouth—and he took my breath away so I dropped my phone on the counter and kissed him back because I couldn’t not kiss him back. He is compelling.

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