Seed No Evil Read Online Free

wedding.”
    â€œShouldn’t we be celebrating?”
    â€œYou’d think. But Mom is so miserable, Marco, I promised I’d help her, and I’m hoping you’ll want to help, too.”
    He paused. It wasn’t a long pause, but it was just enough to make me take notice, and in that split second, I wondered several things: Was he tired of hearing about my problems? Did he have an issue of his own that he wasn’t sharing with me? Was it possible the upcoming wedding was weighing heavily on him?
    Amazing what the brain can come up with in a nanosecond.
    â€œWhy don’t we talk about it over lunch?” he said, rising. “You have that lean and hungry look.”
    Marco knew me too well. I wasn’t really lean, but I was always up for a meal.
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    Over bowls of chicken and rice soup, I explained the situation at PAR to Marco, and as Grace had predicted, he agreed to attend the meeting with me, as long as his younger brother, Rafe, would take over for him behind the bar. His willing attitude calmed my former worries to the extent that I convinced myself I’d imagined that pause.
    â€œI’ll give Rafe a call right now,” Marco said, and pulled out his cell phone. “He’s not due to come in until three o’clock.”
    Rafe, or Raphael Salvare, was a ten-years-younger version of Marco. He’d come to town from Ohio half a year ago on orders of his mom, who had decided that if Rafe could drop out of college one semester before graduation in order to find himself, she could send him to big brother Marco to help speed up that process. Marco had instantly put him to work, but it had taken several attempts at other kinds of employment before Rafe had decided he not only enjoyed the bar atmosphere but could actually tolerate working for his brother.
    The plan was for Rafe to manage Down the Hatch once we were married, giving Marco time to focus on his PI business and, more important, time to spend with me. We’d come up with the plan because with my floral business, which occupied my day, Marco’s bar business, which occupied his evenings, and his PI business, which could occupy any given hour of the day, we simply weren’t seeing each other, and I knew that had to change to make our marriage work.
    With a little encouragement from me, Marco had decided that the best solution was for him to keep ownership of the bar but let someone else manage it. Rafe had seemed like a good candidate for the job.
    Marco ended his call and put away his phone, one corner of his mouth lifting in a half smile. “Rafe says hi and, yes, he’ll cover for me.”
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    The meeting was held at the old town hall, a redbrick building with black trim and shutters that had been built in the early nineteen hundreds. We entered the first-floor meeting room through big double doors at the rear and looked for my mom but didn’t see her, so we took seats in back so she could find us. The meeting wasn’t well attended, with only about fifty people in the room. Clusters of people sat in rows on folding chairs that faced a raised platform, the murmur of their voices filling the high-ceilinged room.
    At the front was a table at which sat four women, with a podium to their right. I recognized one of the women as Chairman of the Board Dayton Blaine, a woman in her midsixties. She was taller than six feet and built like an army tank. Dayton had short, dark blond hair with a hefty showing of gray roots, a wide mouth, and a blunt nose. She wore a no-nonsense beige suit with an aqua blouse and an aqua and gray silk scarf around her neck.
    Dayton was a well-known figure in New Chapel. Her prominent family owned a manufacturing business that employed what seemed like a quarter of the population, and their donations to worthy causes were legendary. People didn’t usually cross the Blaines and, in fact, went