A Parfait Murder Read Online Free Page A

sniffed and lifted her chin. “We hooked up at a party to mark the start of summer.” A hard laugh escaped her. She waved the papers in her hand, and scrunched up her face in mock seriousness. “‘On or about June twenty-second,’” she intoned. Then the starch went out of her spine. “Alice was due on March fifteenth, but she was born on Valentine’s Day.”
    She dropped her chin and stared at her hands, resting limp in her lap. “She was so tiny. My little peanut.”
    “Hey, Mom! Aunt Tally!”
    My heart leaped into my throat at Alice’s excited shout. She tumbled into the tiny booth with Kyle Mason, my employee and Alice’s boyfriend, practically on top of her. She looked around at the crowd of solemn faces and giggled. “Look, Kyle, it’s everybody!”
    Kyle folded his lanky body around my little slip of a niece, his arms encircling her. If he could have cradled her in bubble wrap, he would have.
    They were an unlikely pair. Kyle had finally won a war of attrition with his high school teachers and graduated in June, while my precocious seventeen-year-old niece already had a year of college under her belt. Kyle dressed in shades of black and mumbled on those rare occasions he opened his mouth, while everything about Alice was as bright and crisp as line-dried linens. Still, the physics of romance could not be denied. Kyle and Alice had pined for each other for over a year before she finally surrendered to the hormonal gravity between them, and now they were inseparable.
    Alice wiggled a little in Kyle’s grasp, more settling in than struggling. “Hey, Mr. Harper. I finished that biography of Virginia Wolfe you recommended. Pretty cool.”
    For a heartbeat, Finn stared at Alice as if she’d sprouted a second head. Then he muttered something about a deadline and, with a perfunctory wave in my direction, slipped around the teenagers and disappeared. I guess the fact that he wasn’t technically family had suddenly hit home. Lord knows, a part of me wanted to run off with him. But the stricken look on Bree’s face held me back.
    “Jeez. What’s everyone so glum about?” Alice asked.
    During the moment of silence that followed, I watched the play of emotions on her elfin face. Her mischievous smile faded into puzzlement and then her cloudless eyes widened with dawning alarm.
    “Mom?”
    Peachy gave Bree a nudge. “It’s gonna be all over town, Bree. No sense playing coy.”
    Bree caught my gaze, her eyes pleading with me to save her from this. It about broke my heart.
    I couldn’t spare her the talk with Alice, but I could provide her with a little privacy.
    “Kyle,” I said, “I know you’re not on the schedule, but why don’t we head back to the A-la-mode and spell Beth for a bit?”
    Kyle looked down at the top of Alice’s strawberry blond head. The lines of his lanky body drew taut. He wasn’t a dumb kid. He had to know something was really wrong, and I loved him for wanting to protect Alice. But Finn had the right idea: this conversation was no place for anyone but family.
    “Kyle?” I prodded. “Let’s go.”
    Alice’s lashes fluttered as she looked up at him. “It’s okay,” she whispered.
    I took him by the arm, prying him away from his girl, and ushered him out of the booth. Without a word, we cut across the stretch of prairie grass behind the food stalls heading toward the asphalt pad where fair vendors could park. My beat-up GMC van held a prime spot on the near edge of that lot, and I smothered a sigh at giving it up.
    Kyle hung back, dawdling, casting nervous glances back over his shoulder. Finally I heard the scuff of his Chuck Taylors in the sunbaked dirt as he stopped in his tracks.
    I halted, too, and faced him.
    “Miz Tally, do we really need to go to the A-la-mode?”
    Like I said, the kid wasn’t stupid.
    “No,” I conceded. “Actually, Beth needs the hours.” As my business had picked up, I’d finally hired another employee, a wifty woman with a young son to