Love Can Be Murder

and Liz had known about it. That would explain a lot....
    Marie nudged Penny playfully. "Want me to invite Mountain Man?"
    Penny looked over her shoulder in the direction of Jimmy and Guy, then looked back to Marie. "I don't think that would be a good idea."
    Marie angled her head. "He might not be too bad if he had a bath."
    Penny ignored the others' chuckles, then retrieved three pieces of mail for the museum that had been misdelivered. "I think I'll drop off Hazel's mail."
    "Good excuse to leave," Marie murmured.
    "Hey, Penny," Steve said as she was leaving. "What do you think about the color Deke's having the house painted?"
    His eyes seemed cool, almost mocking. Again Penny was assailed by the feeling that she didn't trust him. And the thought that Steve would report to her ex-husband that her best prospect for a postdivorce affair was with a man who could find water with a forked stick made her shrivel inside. But Penny managed to feign a look of disinterest. "Is he painting the house? I hadn't noticed."
    Marie gave her an approving smile. Penny turned and strode to the front door of the store and out, underneath the hood-shaped red canopy that welcomed customers to The Charm Farm, and into the small parking lot in the breezy sunshine. It was a perfect fall day—blue sky, drifting white clouds that made one want to look for animal shapes, and just a hint of crispness to the air.
    In the parking lot sat Marie's red bicycle with its wire basket, leaning benignly on its kickstand. Locks were unnecessary in Mojo. Steve Chasen's white BMW sat next to Guy's impeccable black Lexus and Jimmy's battered blue Chevy pickup. Jimmy's bloodhound, Henry—the mighty truffle hunter—stood up on his hind legs in the bed of the truck, whining for attention. Penny walked over and scratched his elephantine ears. He closed his eyes, and one leg started to jerk spasmodically. Penny laughed; maybe she should get a pet. Deke had a bizarre aversion to animals—she'd bet it had something to do with having Mona the Stone for a mother. Remembering her errand, she gave the dog a final pat.
    In the distance to her left, the steeply pitched roof of the hulking three-story Archambault mansion that housed the Instruments of Death and Voodoo Museum was barely visible through the trees. Penny checked her watch—ten minutes before eleven. Hazel Means, the manager of the museum, wouldn't be in yet, so Penny would just drop the mail through the door chute. Hazel wouldn't have time to chat anyway, not with readying the museum for tourists, the number of which would balloon for the weeklong festival and remain steady through Halloween.
    Which would, in turn, be good for her own business.
    The house she had renovated for The Charm Farm faced east, toward downtown Mojo, with her former house to the right, facing the side of her business. She held off looking at it, instead staring out over the small town where she'd lived for the past eight years. Nestled in a little bowl the size of six city blocks by six city blocks, Mojo was the perfect town for a Disney movie...or a horror flick.
    Once populated by families with long, peculiar lineages (like Deke's), the brick-sidewalk community with matching streetlights and little nylon banners that changed with the seasons (and now heralded the festival) had been gentrified by New Orleans upper-class, double-income couples who gladly traded the thirty-minute commute for safer, smaller classrooms for their children and safer, larger homes for themselves. Vintage houses in town had been gobbled up, sending property values skyrocketing and displacing locals who could no longer afford the taxes. Storerooms and attics over businesses had been turned into pricey apartments.
    The one-bedroom hovel she leased over Benny's Beignet shop in the center of town three blocks away was easy to spot because of the giant spinning brownish square speckled with white paint that was supposed to resemble a beignet—a gob of fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar...a French doughnut. She lifted her sleeve for a sniff and grimaced—the sickeningly sweet scent had permeated the rugs and the curtains of her apartment, and now her clothing. Even if someday doughnuts were miraculously declared to be healthy, she would never eat another one the rest of her life.
    The rest of her life. The phrase sounded so benign, but the rest of her life was going to be so different now, she thought with a twinge of sentimentality. Deke...
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