Page 3 of The Villa

“That’s my best friend you’re talking about, bitch.”

The rest of the lunch passes by quickly, so much so that I’m actually surprised when the check comes. Chess swipes it up before I even have a chance to pretend I was going to pay, and then we’re outside on the sidewalk, the late May afternoon warm and rainy.

“I’ve missed you, Em,” she tells me, giving me another hug, and I smile against her collarbone, shrugging when I pull back.

“I’m always here,” I tell her. I don’t mean for it to come out quite as sad sack as it does, but it’s the truth. Chess is the one who is always on the go, but I’m still here in Asheville, the same town where I grew up. We only managed this lunch because Chess had a signing at the local bookstore this weekend.

“Well, good,” she tells me now, flashing me a wink. “That way I always know where to find you.”

CHAPTER TWO

I don’t expect to hear from Chess again for a while.

That’s always been her style. Okay, to be fair, it’s always beenourstyle. We were in each other’s pockets every day for such a long time, all the way through our years together at UNC, but after college, that changed. It happens, right? Lives go in different directions, you make new friends, new connections. Chess had moved to Charleston with Stefanie, both of them working at some fancy restaurant while Stefanie worked on getting the website off the ground, and I’d come back to Asheville with a B.A. in English, and not much else. Chess had invited me to move to Charleston with her, had even insisted she could get me a job at the same restaurant, but I missed home, and my parents thought it would be smart for me to save some money by moving back in with them. Dad was still holding on to his dream that I’d go to law school, but I hadn’t been ready to commit to anotherexpensive degree, and had ended up substitute teaching and occasionally answering phones at Dad’s accounting firm.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been a little bit jealous, watching Chess’s life unfold through social media. I mean, sure, she was just waitressing then, but she was living somewhere new, meeting new people, and I felt like maybe I’d somehow fallen back in time, still sleeping in my childhood bedroom under a poster of Justin Timberlake.

It had all worked out for the best, obviously. If Chess hadn’t been living with Stefanie, she wouldn’t have started writing for Stefanie’s site, and if I hadn’t been so depressed staying at home and contemplating law school, I never would’ve randomly picked up a cozy mystery I saw at the library, drawn in by its colorful cover and silly title, wouldn’t have read dozens more just like it and then, finally, started writing my own. Petal Bloom owes her whole existence—and I owe my whole career—to the fact that my life had diverged from Chess’s.

Even if we are ships in the night most of the time, she is still my oldest and best friend. Which these days means we text when we can, call hardly ever, and see each other once a year if we’re lucky.

So, I’m surprised when I get a notification from her the day after our lunch.

I have a crazy thought.

With Chess, that can mean pretty much anything. She might be thinking of marrying a stranger or it could just mean she’s thinking about reintroducing carbs to her diet. Hard to say.

I leave it on read, telling myself that it’s only because I’m supposed to be working right now. My phone technically shouldn’t even be in my office—that’s usually a strict rule of mine. It stays in the kitchen, sitting on the counter until I’m through with my work for the day.

But I’ve been slacking lately, spending more time looking at my phone or dicking around on Twitter than I do actually writing. That must be why my intrepid heroine, Petal Bloom, is still stuck in chapter five ofA Gruesome Garden, caught by her private investigator not-quite-a-boyfriend, Dex Shanahan, as she hangs out of the window of the murder scene.

I read the last sentence I wrote again.

Of course it was Dex.

The readers will like this, Dex showing up again. I’d kept him way in the background in the last book, and had the angry emails to prove just how popular a choice that had been. I should be excited about writing him again, about getting Petal and Dex back together.

Instead, I kept thinking that maybe Petal should turn out to be the murderer in this book. Maybeshe’sthe one who couldn’t deal with Mrs. Harrison, queen of the garden club, found dead with a pair of hedge trimmers in her back?

That was a detail I was pretty sure my editor was going to make me cut—you can get away with some violence in a cozy mystery, but for the most part readers want their victims very cleanly dead. No blood, no mess, certainly no horror or pain. A quiet, picturesque death by poison, and not one of the ones that made you vomit or, god forbid, shit yourself. Just enough for you to give a dramatic croak at the Christmas party or the cider pressing or the spring wedding, whatever festive occasion required an untimely death for my plucky heroine to solve.

In the previous book, Mrs. Harrison had been a real bitch to Petal. Maybe this was her revenge, and Petal’s pluckiness was actually just a deep well of rage against the town of Blossom Bay and the Mrs. Harrisons of the world. Maybe Dex, who always thought he knew better than Petal, had finally reached the end of his rope.

I let myself type it out for thirty minutes. Thirty glorious minutes, and over a thousand words of Petal Bloom hauling herself through that window and doing away with the frustratingly noncommittal Mr. Shanahan before revealing her big plan to wreak vengeance all over Blossom Bay.

It is fun.

It is bloody.

It is the most I’d written in three months.

And when I’m finished, I sit back, read it over, and then, sensibly, delete every single word.

No one reads my books for chaos and bloodshed. They want small-town atmospherics and familiar plot beats. They want Petal Bloom to save the day while Dex looks on indulgently.

And that’s what I’ll give them.

But I spend another thirty minutes trying to start a new chapter, one where Petal lets Dex pull her up through the window, and of course there’s a moment when they almost kiss, but oh no! What’s that? A sound from outside! They must go investigate!

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