One Potion in the Grave: A Magic Potion Mystery Read Online Free

who’d been burned by a relationship one too many times.”
    Like I had. Almost literally in my case.
    “Sometimes, sugar,” she drawled, “it’s fun when things get a little hot, if you know what I mean.”
    I tipped my head. Right about now, a little heat sounded good. Really good. It had been downrightglacial in my bedroom for a good long while. “Fine,” I said, reaching for the phone. “I’ll call. But only out of concern for Katie Sue.”
    Ainsley laughed again, not buying my excuse for a moment. She knew me too well.
    We’d been best friends just shy of forever. Her mama claimed I was a bad influence on her baby girl, but Ainsley and I both knew she masterminded most of our crazy schemes. She’d stuck by me through thick and thin, including my two broken engagements to Dylan Jackson, my arrest (it was a misunderstanding, I swear), and of course when I was suspected of murder. I loved her like a sister and wasn’t sure what I’d do without her.
    Many years back she fell hard for a man who didn’t seem to know she existed, so she hatched one of her famous plans to catch his attention. Carter Debbs didn’t know what hit him—literally—when Ainsley ran him over with her car.
    It hadn’t been an accident.
    After that Ainsley became a somewhat reformed wild child, the change coming about because she decided she needed to clean up her act to be the wife of a preacher man. They’d been married almost eight years now and had three kids. Twin four-year-old boys, Toby and Tuck, and three-year-old hellion Olive (who I thought should have been named “Karma” because she was so much like her mama).
    Dylan didn’t answer either of his phones, at his house or his office, so I left a message at both, asking him to call me back. Part of Hitching Post’s quaintness was that it was cell-phone free—there wasn’t coverage within townlimits—so getting hold of someone right away was quite the challenge.
    “So what do you know about the Calhouns?” I asked Ainsley again, revisiting my original question.
    Wrinkling up her nose, her violet eyes sparkled. A lovely yellow sundress accentuated her generous curves. “I know about as much as you do,” she said with a shrug. Her light brown hair had been recently cut into a choppy layered bob that swung as she worked. The hairdo exemplified everything about Ainsley. Refined but a touch untamed. “They’re like the peaches in my backyard. Pretty on the outside, rotten to the core on the inside.”
    “Wait a sec.” I studied her. “You didn’t use those peaches in the cobbler you brought in yesterday, did you?”
    Mischief twinkled in her eyes. “Why? You been feeling puny?”
    This was why she was a
somewhat
reformed wild child. Every once in a while the crazy popped right out of her, like a jack-in-the-box.
    Shaking my head, I nudged Roly off my mouse pad and fired up my desktop computer. She yawned and stretched and gave me a suspicious look while twitching her long whiskers. To reassure her all was well, I ran a hand down her fluffy spine, and she curled into a ball once again.
    I wasn’t sure what I could discover about the Calhouns online that I didn’t already know, but I aimed to find out.
    “One thing I’ve been wondering on,” Ainsley said, pointing the feather duster at me, “is why Landry and Gabi’s wedding was moved here to Hitching Post. It wassupposed to be at a fancy estate down near Mobile, wasn’t it?”
    Everyone round here had taken to calling the soon-to-be newlyweds by their given names. The whole Calhoun family, in fact. Warren, Louisa, Cassandra, and Landry. As though we all knew them personally. Thick as thieves. Tighter than ticks. The Calhoun family better watch out, or they might have to set a few more—like a few hundred—plates at the family’s Thanksgiving meal. The town had adopted the lot of them—whether they knew it or not.
    “And wasn’t it supposed to be a thousand guests?”
    “The Calhouns told my mama that