Page 29 of Fish and Chip

We end the night at Storybook Hollow again, near Swan Lake, a small man-made pond surrounded by weeping willows and benches shaped like giant mushrooms. The water reflects the orange Halloween lights strung overhead, and just as we settle onto a bench, the fireworks start.

Dexter pulls me close and wraps his arms around me as bursts of orange, purple, and green light up the sky above the castle.

“Did you talk to any suspects today?” he asks quietly, his chin resting on top of my head.

I sigh. “Eulla Bell Nightwind. The Southern belle with the sassy cat. She basically said that Belladonna and Felicity Graves got into it hotter than a pepper sprout in a cast-iron skillet.”

“I speak fluent Southern,” Dexter says. “That’s bad.”

“That’s very bad. And for the record, Salem sat in on the entire conversation with her tail twitching the whole time. I’m planning a follow-up interview. With the cat. She struck me as the honest one of the pair.” Not that he knows I can converse with kitties everywhere.

“And?”

“And Eulla Bell says they had an argument at a luncheon before the event. Something about a book and you can’t publish that.” In my admittedly cursed experience, sentences that start with you can’t publish that have a way of ending with somebody face down at my theme park.

Dexter’s arms tighten around me. “Interesting.”

“Also, get this, Felicity’s daughter and Belladonna’s son knew each other. Maybe dated? Eulla Bell wasn’t sure of the details.”

“We notified Belladonna’s children this morning,” Dexter says. “Her daughter flew in from Washington. The son, Trevor, lives locally. He seemed genuinely shocked.”

“Seemed,” I repeat. In my limited yet surprisingly robust history with murder, that word does an awful lot of heavy lifting. “What about her husband?”

“She was widowed a few years back. Belladonna was alone.”

The words land heavier than I expect them to. A woman came to my park with her books and her big personality, and nobody was waiting up for her to come home. A particularly loud firework explodes overhead and showers the sky in sparkling gold, which feels rude, timing-wise.

“Let’s not talk about murder anymore,” I say and tilt my head back to look at him. “Let’s talk about us. About Halloween night. The girls are bringing Jack and Emma. Fair warning, McKenna is lobbying hard for a group costume theme. Her current front-runner is a murder of crows, and I’m choosing to believe the girl means nothing by it.”

Dexter smiles. “Should we do a couples costume? His-and-hers detectives?”

“I think we wear those costumes daily.”

Somewhere across town, Delora Drake just felt a cold chill at the thought of us in matching outfits. She won’t know why. She’ll blame the weather.

“Fair point.” He leans down and kisses me, soft and sweet and completely at odds with the chaos of fireworks overhead. He pulls back an inch. “How about this—you pick the costumes, I’ll show up, and we’ll call it a night.”

“You’ll show up and look devastatingly handsome. It’s the one thing I can count on around here.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“You won’t have to try. That’s the annoying part.”

I laugh and pull him down for another kiss, longer this time, as the grand finale of fireworks explodes above us in a cascade of color.

When we finally break apart, Dexter squints at my forearm, where a tiny vampire Chip glows green against my skin, a souvenir from my earlier wrestling match with the tattoo shipment.

“You’re glowing,” he says.

“It’s an aftereffect of making out with you.”

“Good to know my work is visible from space.”

He laughs at his own joke, and then that detective seriousness creeps in around the edges of his smile. I know that look. That look has never once preceded anything fun.

“Josie,” he says gently, “I need you to stay out of this investigation.”

I blink up at him. “I’m sorry, I think the fireworks damaged my hearing. It sounded like you just told me to stay out of a murder that happened at my park, involving people I’m hosting, with evidence I literally had blood on my hands from.”