Pumpkin Spice Lies: A Pumpkin Hollow Mystery, book 16 by Kathleen Suzette (you can read anyone .txt) 📕

She nodded. “Hailey thought she was a sly one, that girl. She pulled a prank on her best friend, Shayna Gates. Shayna used to work here, but left back in December. She regretted ever leaving my employ, of course. She had it too good here. But Hailey pretended that I was interested in hiring her back, and then when Shayna came and asked me about the job, and I told her I wasn’t hiring. You should have seen the look on the girl’s face. She comes from a needy family, you know, and I’m sure that the prospects of a job meant a lot to her. She never should have left to begin with. What I should have done was fired Hailey and given her hours to Shayna. Oh well. But, I suppose I can do that now can’t I?”

“Wait, she told her best friend that you were going to hire her?” I asked.

“Apparently so. Hailey told Shayna all she needed to do was meet with me, and that I was going to hire her back based on her recommendation. Of course, that was all a lie.” She shrugged and straightened up a blouse that was hanging on a nearby rack. “Oh well, some people are so gullible.” She turned around and walked away without another word to us.

I turned to Christy. “I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty angry about something like that.”

I nodded. “Me too. She probably felt pretty foolish, and Betty wouldn’t have tried to make her feel better about it, either.”

“That’s no lie.”

It made me wonder how embarrassed Shayna had been about Hailey making her look foolish. Was she holding a grudge? And did she get even with her?

Chapter Ten

It was Friday night before Ethan and I got to spend any real time together. We decided to go out to dinner at a little steakhouse a few miles outside of town. It was the second weekend of Pumpkin Hollow Days, and tomorrow there would be a craft fair down at the park. The construction work had been finished, the hole filled in, and the barricade removed. It wasn’t a moment too soon because once everyone heard about Hailey’s murder, there were all sorts of lookie-loos hanging around, trying to get a glimpse of where she had been buried.

I looked over my menu and then closed it and laid it down on the corner of the table. “What are you going to have?”

He looked up from his menu. “I’m thinking about a nice juicy T-Bone steak. I love the steaks here.”

“So do I,” I said. “There’s something about a charbroiled steak that I cannot pass up.”

He nodded and laid his menu on top of mine. “I think I’m going to get the baked sweet potato and green salad with ranch to go with it.”

“That sounds good,” I said. “I may get the same thing.” I picked up my glass of tea and took a sip. “So, what’s going on with the case?”

He sighed, sitting back in his seat. “Poor Hailey may have been buried alive.”

I gasped. “Are you serious?”

He nodded. “That needs to stay between the two of us.”

“That’s horrible. Who would do something that awful?” It made me sick to think about it.

His mouth made a straight line. “Horrible is right. I was stunned when I read the report. There was dirt in her nostrils, but it hadn’t made it to her lungs. So the medical examiner isn’t positive.”

“But how? You said there wasn’t any obvious trauma to her body. How did the killer get her to just lay there in that shallow grave?”

He sighed. “The medical examiner found traces of a sleeping medication in her bloodstream. Hopefully, she was completely unconscious when she was buried.”

I groaned softly. “How awful. How could anybody be so horrible?”

He picked up his glass of iced tea and took a long drink, and then set the glass back down. “That’s something I have never been able to understand, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to delve any deeper into the twisted mind of a killer than I have to. Just deep enough to figure out who did it and get them arrested.”

I nodded. “I can understand that.” Sometimes I felt sorry for Ethan. He was fairly sensitive, and I knew that some of these cases he worked on took a lot out of him. I hated it. But I knew that in other ways he enjoyed his job, and he was good at it.

“You know what I want to do tomorrow?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“Come over to the candy store and buy some pumpkin spice fudge, and maybe some caramel marshmallows, saltwater taffy, and just enjoy myself. For a few minutes, I’m going to pretend that I don’t have anything better to do than to eat way too much sugar.”

I grinned. “That sounds like a great plan. There’s a craft fair at the park, maybe we can take a few minutes to take a walk through the park and look at the booths? You didn’t get a chance to go to the vendors’ fair.”

He nodded. “That’s a great idea. I do have to go to the station to do some work, but maybe we can go to the craft fair in the morning.”

“That sounds like fun. Let’s do it.”

The waitress came, and we gave her our orders. When she left, he turned back to me. “So how are Pumpkin Hollow Days going? What are the other business owners saying about it?”

I nodded. “We’ve had a record turnout this year. I’m excited. This only the second year we’ve had Pumpkin Hollow Days of course, but we’ve had a bigger turnout than last year, and that makes me hopeful that this will