Love Can Be Murder

his side mirror.
    Penny tingled like a teenager over the chance encounter. The man had no idea she knew of his connection to Sheena. Worse, because of his connection to her ex-husband's girlfriend, she should have been repulsed by him...instead of standing there feeling as if her fuse had just been lit. Pushing aside her uncharacteristically wayward thoughts, she puffed her cheeks out in a cleansing exhale and turned her mind to something much less hazardous: delivering Hazel's mail.
    Instead of walking along the sidewalk past her store to the corner and down a half-block to the locked museum entrance, she retraced her steps to The Charm Farm parking lot, turning left past the tiny herb garden, to the new area that had been staked off for her planned expansion. She could take a few enjoyable minutes to imagine what the new garden would look like, then cut through the rusted opening in the iron fence along the tree line that separated her property from the property on which the museum sat.
    Penny surveyed the area with pride and anticipation. She'd marked the boundaries herself with limber wire stakes topped with pink plastic flags. The flags danced in the wind, waving happily. The staked-off area, about a half acre, was covered in thick underbrush, thorny blackberry bushes, and waist-high weeds. Deke had sworn the soil underneath was rocky, clay-filled, and useless, but she was determined to make it work. He'd also warned her that the zoning commission would never allow a garden to be planted, but she'd learned a little while working in Deke's office. She knew how to decipher city ordinances...and to find loopholes that even her ex-mother-in-law the mayor couldn't deny. When the land next to her had been rezoned to mixed use to allow the museum to open, the land that Deke's father had given him had been zoned for mixed use as well, which meant that gardens and buildings were supposed to peacefully coexist.
    She picked up a long stick and made her way through the brush, keeping an eye out for copperheads, which, Deke had warned, nested in the thicket. They would be slow-moving in the lower temperatures but deadly nonetheless. At the edge of her property there was a shoulder-high cast-iron fence, which was almost completely obscured by vines and heavy foliage. She had found the break in the fence when she had staked off the garden. There was an opening in the barbed hawthorne trees just large enough to squeeze through to the other side. It was her little secret, a shortcut to visit or just to study the house that had morbidly fascinated her ever since she'd moved to Mojo. It seemed like fate that she had wound up owning the property adjacent to the museum.
    Part Victorian, part Tudor, part Gothic, the massive house was slate blue and dreary gray and faded black in various places, the kind of house that Penny imagined in the story of Hansel and Gretel. Surrounded by a tangle of trees and vines, the mansion was spooky enough to fuel all kinds of musings about secret passageways and hidden dungeons and, considering the rumored history of the Archambault family, the perfect setting for the Instruments of Death and Voodoo Museum.
    From the back, the mansion was a peculiar-looking structure. Over the years, owners had built onto the monstrosity, uncaring about the appearance from the rear since it was seldom seen, leaving it with jutting, uneven roof lines, mismatched windows, and hodgepodge siding. Protruding off the back was a large garage for the three employees—Hazel and her mentally deficient son, Tilton, who did odd jobs around the museum and drove an old hearse for his occasional freelance work with the town's two funeral homes; and Troy Archambault, the last remaining Archambault, a dermatologist who lived in New Orleans and oversaw the museum's trust, stopping in occasionally to check on his family landmark. Alongside the almost medieval house, the contemporary garage, with its driveway and gate exiting to a side street, seemed an unfortunate but necessary appendage, like a colostomy bag.
    A few feet inside the breached fence, among fallen leaves, she located stepping stones that were nearly hidden from years of leveling into loamy ground. The air was quiet here, except for the creak of ancient, ropy vines and the whisper of leaves overhead, which sent ghostly voices swirling around her. A cold chill skated over her arms. She might have been the only person in the vicinity, but she had the unearthly feeling that