Love Can Be Murder

opposed to the idea, saying he had other plans for the empty half-acre lot, but Penny had had the distinct feeling her husband had been trying to undermine her business, which he had pooh-poohed from the beginning. When she'd first suggested they convert the small rental house across the street that his father had given him into a retail business, Deke had made her feel foolish.
    "A health food store in Mojo?" He'd laughed until his eyes had run. "Maybe a fish and chips joint. In case you haven't noticed, honey, the deep south really means the deep fried south."
    Hurt, but determined to put her rusty nutrition degree and homeopathic know-how to good use, Penny had persisted. After a rocky start, her enterprise had taken off. As it turned out, the residents of Mojo preferred home remedies to fancy doctoring, and The Charm Farm's inventory of roots, herbs, and vitamins fit the bill nicely.
    But while her business had grown steadily, the law practice Deke had taken over from his father had started to slide. Two of his big manufacturing clients had jumped to more tony law firms in nearby New Orleans. Deke had begun to supplement his client list with personal injury cases, and supplement his diet with bourbon.
    The downturn in his business had coincided perfectly with a midlife crisis. One day he had driven home a new fire engine red two-seater Lotus Elise. That was about the same time Penny had found brochures for hair transplants in his briefcase. With new lingerie and lots of TLC, she had tried to head off what had seemed to be an inevitable affair, but in the end, terminally tanned and ferociously feminine Sheena Linder had been too much for a simple man like Deke to resist.
    Penny and Sheena weren't complete strangers. The women had met once when Penny had visited Sheena's Forever Sun tanning salon and asked that Sheena give her customers a flyer on the dangers of tanning so they could make a more informed decision before roasting themselves. Sheena had called her the "c" word and had thrown her out of Forever Sun, threatening to sue for trespassing and mental anguish. Penny found out later her trip to the tanning salon had prompted Sheena to see Deke about possibly filing a lawsuit against some crazy woman named Penny Black. Apparently Deke had overlooked Sheena's inability to figure out her new attorney and her intended defendant shared the same last name and might be related or, in this case, married. Thankfully, Deke hadn't filed a suit against Penny on Sheena's behalf. Instead he'd started porking Sheena, and now Penny's last name was no longer Black.
    Life was nothing if not ironic. Penny had secured the barracuda of an attorney from the city who had handled her friend Liz's divorce. After much legal wrangling, Deke had gotten the Victorian and the property it sat on, and Penny had gotten The Charm Farm and the property it sat on. When the final papers had been signed earlier in the week, Penny had staked out the premeditated garden with pink flags. Those flags symbolized her own growth and filled her with a sense of purpose.
    And she also gained satisfaction in knowing one day, Sheena Linder would crawl out of one of her tanning beds looking like a dried-apple-head doll. Penny's skin, on the other hand, would still be lily white and un-wrinkled...but lightly veined...and...freckled. She frowned suddenly, trying to remember why she had felt so victorious.
    Across the street, a faded green sedan pulled into her former driveway behind Lou Hall's painting van. Probably another workman hired to do something else unconscionable to her beloved house. She started to turn away when the car door opened and a tall man she didn't recognize climbed out. With the binoculars she could see he was long-limbed and well built. Unbidden, a spark of appreciation flared in her stomach. The man was dark-haired, dressed in boots, brown leather coat, and faded jeans he tugged higher as he approached the steps leading to the front porch of the house. His loose-hipped walk suggested an affinity for...something other than Pilates.
    Penny's tongue lodged firmly in her cheek. What was a handsome man doing at the house at an hour when Deke was at his office and Sheena was purportedly indisposed with an injury from the Yoohoo spill? Maybe Sheena was already bored with Deke's fumbling foreplay and dense back hair and had decided to call in reinforcements.
    The fact that the thought cheered her immensely proved just how much the nasty divorce