Burned in Broken Hearts Junction: A Cozy Matchmaker Mystery (Cozy Matchmaker Mystery Series) (16 page)

He looked deep into my eyes again, one last time.

“A damn fool.”

He departed. Walking quickly down the front porch steps and out into the foggy night.

I stayed in the doorway a long while after he’d disappeared into the fog. The night air rumbled with the sound of an approaching train, and I suddenly felt incredibly cold, all the way to the very core of my being.

Hank howled as the train passed.

And I worried that the stranger was cold too.

Before closing the door, I thought I heard the sound of a car engine starting up, somewhere in the distance. 

Chapter 46

Sometimes you can spend countless hours looking for somebody. And then just as you’re about to give up the search, out of nowhere, they just tumble out of the heavens right into your lap.  

That’s what happened when I pulled up into the parking lot of the still-closed Cupid
the next day.

I’d been thinking all morning about the stranger. About what he was really doing here in Broken Hearts Junction. About why he seemed to have taken an interest in me.

About how he really got that busted nose. About why his left hand was scarred and mangled like that.

And about why I felt so drawn to him.

Everything about him was a mystery. He was good at not answering my questions. I didn’t know one thing about the man except his name, and even that I didn’t know for sure.

Raymond had said something about Fletcher not being who I thought he was.

And for all I knew, the stranger could have been Dale’s murderer.

Yet… yet I couldn’t take my mind off of that kiss.

About the way I felt when he ran his hands through my hair and pulled me to him.

And I couldn’t take my mind off the sadness behind his stormy grey eyes.

I got out of the truck, Hank following close behind. I walked across the parking lot, to the front door, where a man seemed to be waiting.

At first, I thought he was one of our regular bar patrons, jonesing for a drink, unaware that we were closed.  

But then I realized that I didn’t know him. At least, not in real life.

I had, however, seen him before.

“Well, I’ll be,” I muttered, looking him over.

The short stocky man with the frizzy black hair, caterpillar eyebrows and thick glasses turned toward me as I approached the front door of The Cupid.

“Excuse, me, Miss?” he said, coming over to me. “Do you work here?”

I suppressed a grin.

I’d finally found him. Or more accurately, he’d found me.

Now the trick would be to get him and Beth Lynn to cross paths, and I’d be home free.

“Can I help you?”  I said, being overly friendly.

He pulled out a notepad and a pen from the pocket of his trench coat.

“Robert Reese with the
Broken Hearts Bulletin
.”

He held out a hand and I shook it with a slight hesitation.

Beth Lynn’s soulmate was a reporter. Now that was something I wouldn’t have guessed.

“Loretta,” I said, having a feeling that he wasn’t hovering outside The Cupid to find his soulmate.

He jotted something down in his notebook.

“And what do you do here, Loretta?”

“I’m… well, I used to be the bartender.”

He scribbled that down too.

“You know, I read the paper, but your name doesn’t seem familiar,” I said.

“I’m new to town,” he said. “Just moved here earlier this month for the job.”

So that was why he’d been so hard to find.

“You see, the police just sent out a news release this morning about Dale Dixon’s death. About it being a probable homicide.”

He scanned my face, looking for a reaction of some sort, I gathered. But I didn’t give him anything.

“You see, I was hoping to get a better idea of who Dale was as a person for a feature piece. Maybe I can ask you a few questions about him?”

“Well, I’d, uh, I’d like to help,” I said. “But you ought to check with his wife, Courtney, first.”

“I’m afraid she was a little hostile when I asked,” he said. “Told me to get the hell away from here, or... well, I’d rather not repeat it.”

“Yet you’re still here,” I said.

“Well, it’s my job to be persistent,” he said. “So how about helping me out? How long did you know Dale for?”

I bit my lip.

I didn’t really want to rehash it with a reporter.

Besides, I quickly figured out that there would be a better way of doing all of this.

“Listen,” I said. “I can’t talk right now, but if you come by the bar tomorrow afternoon, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

He lifted his bushy eyebrows.  

“Why not now?”

“Because…” I started saying, trying to think of a good reason other than the fact that I wanted to introduce him to his soulmate. “Because Courtney’s in here right now, and she’s not going to like it if she finds out that I’m talking to you.”

He thought about it for a few moments, and then shrugged.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll talk to my editor about pushing the feature back a day.”

“Okay,” I said, reaching for the door handle.

“Wait, uh, before you go, do you know if Dale had any enemies? Anybody that might have wanted him dead?”

“Come by tomorrow,” I said, walking through the door, leaving Robert Reese chewing on the tip of his pen.

I pulled out my phone, my fingers flying across the keyboard as I sent Beth Lynn a text message asking her to meet me at the bar tomorrow afternoon.

That same old feeling of excitement rushed up inside of me. The way it sometimes did when I was about to bring two people together.

It had been a long, long time since I had the feeling.

And it was almost enough to make me reconsider my prospective retirement from matchmaking.

Almost.

Chapter 47

“How the hell are you, Dry Hack?”

I had expected the place to be empty, being that it was still supposed to be closed. But it appeared that Dry Hack had found a way in.

Dry Hack Jones, the grizzled regular who spent much of his waking hours at The Cupid, sat as his regular barstool, drinking his regular sauce of gin and tonic.

Johnny played from the speakers, singing about being busted.

“Well, hey there, Bitters,” he said, lifting his eyebrows. “I didn’t expect to see you back here again.”

He patted me lightly on the back like we were old bar buddies. Which, we kind of were by now.

“Nice seeing you too, Dry Hack.”

“Did Courtney hire you back?”

“I’m here just until things get settled,” I said. “I didn’t want to leave Courtney out to dry.”

“Dale was a real fool letting you go like that,” he said, shaking his head.

He looked up at me.

“Not that I’m speaking ill of him… he, uh, just made a mistake. That’s all. God rest his soul.”

Dry Hack made the sign of the cross before throwing back the rest of his drink.

I didn’t blame him. It felt weird talking about Dale like this, in the place where he had died.  

When I had walked in, I had half expected Dale to be here out of reflex. During the early afternoons when I’d come in to start my shift, I’d usually find him sitting at the counter, drinking brandy-spiked coffee, reading the sports section of the paper where he’d study up on the bets he planned to lay that night. He didn’t usually say hi. Instead, he’d start in about something I needed to do before I’d even gotten a chance to take my jacket off.

I always hated that about him. Him, sitting there all afternoon drinking, ordering the rest of us around the way he did.

But death had a funny way of making you feel bad about disliking a person.

I shivered.

I took Dry Hack’s glass away and fixed him another gin and tonic before heading to the back office.

Courtney sat in the middle of the floor, stacks of papers all around her, almost in the same exact position I’d left her in the night before.  

She was shuffling through them with violent motions, looking like she hadn’t gotten one moment of sleep.

She looked up when she heard me at the door.

“All of our money,” she said, looking right through me. “That bastard gambled away every last cent and more.”

She bit her bottom lip, which was stained with her usual shade of bubblegum pink lipstick.

“He’s ruined us.”

I stood there, not sure what to say to that kind of admission.

It didn’t surprise me, Dale having done that. We all knew he was a compulsive gambler.

But I didn’t think any of us knew he was in
that
deep.

It had probably been a miracle that they’d held onto The Cupid for as long as they had. 

“Courtney, I—” I started saying, not sure where I was going with it.

She kept looking at me with a vacant expression that kind of gave me the chills.

“You know, that boyfriend of yours came in here this morning,” she said.

“Raymond?” I said.

She nodded. I was going to tell her he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore, but I held my tongue. That small distinction wouldn’t really matter that much to her.  

“Had a lot of questions for me,” she said. “Told me that someone had… someone had…”

She started sobbing, the way she had when she first found Dale’s body.

“
Someone
killed him,” she squeaked out in between wails.

I went over, extending my arms to her, trying to be supportive. It didn’t really come naturally. Still, I tried.

“Officer Rollins said that someone had brought the ox down on him,” she said. “Bashed his head in on purpose. No accident about it.”  

She wiped at her nose with the back of her sleeve.

“Oh, Bitters, why? Why did this have to happen?”

She started sobbing again. A dribble of spit dropped from her mouth.

I felt downright awful for her, but didn’t know what else I could do.

I suddenly heard footsteps coming down the hall. I turned back, surprised to see Dry Hack standing there.

He rushed in like someone had screamed “fire.”

“You poor girl,” he said in a tender voice.

He kneeled down and put his arms around Courtney. She latched onto his arm, and sobbed into it.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, stroking her hair. “It’ll all be just fine.”

He sort of rocked her back and forth in his arms, and I suddenly had a strange sensation that I shouldn’t have been there watching them.

The same kind of uncomfortable feeling you might get when you see a couple kissing a little too passionately in public.

Then suddenly, she pushed him away violently, sending the old veteran careening off into the wall.

“This is your fault, you know,” she said, a sudden and unexpected rage in her eyes. “This is all your fault, George. If you hadn’t… then God wouldn’t have…”

He stared at her, a strange expression on his face.

It wasn’t lost on me that she had just called him by his real name, something I had never heard anyone else do.

She got up, and brushed past me, nearly sending me off balance too. Then she bolted down the hallway, disappearing into the front of the house.

Sobbing all the way out the front door.

I looked back at Dry Hack.

But he had trouble returning my stare.

Chapter 48

“You what?” I said.

“I need you to come down to the station.”

“Right now?”

“Yes. Right now.”

Raymond’s voice was cold and steely. Like he was doing his best to keep a professional tone.  

“Why?” I said. “What about?”

“What do you
think
about, Loretta?” he said, his voice strained with that typical anger of his.

“Forgive me for wanting to know why I have to drop everything just because you say so.”

“It’s about your former employer,” he said. “We have a few questions. It would
behoove
you to get here as soon as you can.”

I hated when he used words like
behoove
to make himself sound smart. Because he wasn’t tricking anyone. Especially not me.

But I quickly realized that I didn’t really have a choice. If I didn’t go there now, he’d be here within 20 minutes, making a big scene out in front of the saloon for the whole town to see.

“Fine,” I said.

He started saying something else, but I hung up the phone before I got the full gist.  

I decided to lock up The Cupid, being as Courtney had abandoned it. Dry Hack had left too, looking as guilty as a dog caught eating a chicken.

I grabbed my coat, and walked out through the heavy wooden doors, into the frosty, foggy early afternoon.

It was weird, but seeing Dry Hack and Courtney fight like that had given me a strange feeling.

And what she had said, about Dale’s death being Dry Hack’s fault.

What did she mean by that? She’d thrown the word God in there somewhere. What was she talking about?

The way he had swooped in and embraced her… that wasn’t something strangers did.

There was more in that hug than friendly consolation.

Then she used his real name when she yelled at him.

I couldn’t help wondering how long this had been going on for.

And about whether I was the only person to know.

Or if someone else knew.

Or
had
known.

Chapter 49

“You what?”

“We found your prints on the jukebox. Fresh prints.”

I sat back in the beige plastic chair, looking up at Raymond and his sidekick, Officer Bart Botkin, in the room they had told me was just an office, but that I was now beginning to suspect was an interrogation room.

I glanced at the digital recorder sitting on the desk in front of me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Of course my prints were. I work at the saloon.”

“Yours, and only yours, were found on the jukebox,” Raymond said, hovering over me, trying to intimidate me with his shadow.  

But if he wanted to scare me, he wasn’t going to get very far. I could see through Raymond Rollins’ B.S., same as you could see through a worn-out t-shirt strung up on a laundry line.