Page 42 of Best Served Cold

“You became friends with them after you found out they were sleeping with your fiancé?” the bartender asks incredulously, oblivious to another customer’s attempt to flag her down.

“They didn’t know he had a fiancée,” I say quickly, not wanting her to get the wrong idea about Hannah and Briar. “They thought he was single. He fooled all of us, and he’s still lying about it.”

A muscle at the corner of her jaw twitches. “Thatbastard,” she says. “I just started here a few weeks ago, so I don’t know him, but I know the type. My ex two-timed me, and I burned his underwear in the trailer park grill. This man doesn’t deserve your tears, honey. They never do. Let yourself learn from it and move on. Move on big.”

“Oh, that’s not a bad idea,” Dottie says sunnily. “As long as he uses cotton, it’s a natural source of fuel. You could brown marshmallows over them and have a party. Do you have a key to Jonah’s apartment, dear?”

I look at her in disbelief. “No.”

I’d mailed it back to him without a note.

“Ah, oh well,” she says, sounding disappointed. “We could have planted some crystals and herbs around to help reform his character before seeing ourselves out. Maybe Rob will let us in.”

“You might be better off letting it go,” the bartender says, pouring a couple of ginger beers. “I’ve got another friend who broke into her ex’s apartment to put Nair in all of his shampoo bottles, and she got caught red-handed by the dog walker. Mind you, she ended up dating the dog walker, so it worked out okay. But he could have called the cops.”

She slides the ginger beers across the counter to us and insists they’re on the house.

“Thank you. But, uh…yeah I don’t want that to happen. Any of it,” I say. “But I’m not surehe’lllet it go. He texted me from a new phone this afternoon, saying he loved me. And last night his brother warned me that he’s planning some big gesture at the brewery where I work. I don’t know if Jonah changed his mind after last night, but?—”

The bartender’s shaking her head. “He’s one ofthem.”

“Them?”

“The kind who want you more when you’re not interested.”

“Yes, I’m concerned that may be the case,” Dottie says, tsk-tsking. “I haven’t wanted to trouble you with this, dear, but Bear and I had to send him away from your house the other day. It got a little heated.”

“Bear really yelled at him?” I ask. Bear is such a kind older man, I wouldn’t think him capable of it. He runs a support group in his free time and is always donating baked goods to every cause in town.

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. But I did tell him that his aura was very bleak. That might have been heavy news for him.”

The bartender laughs. “You might want to let your friend here loose with her crystals. I doubt this guy’s going to stand down easily.”

A feeling of unease creeps over my neck, but I try not to let it show. I don’t want to give Jonah that power over me.

“Oh good,” Dottie says, clapping her hands. “I have a few lovely stones in mind. If they can’t help him be decent, then nothing can.” She purses her lips in thought. “In this case, I think we’d settle for mediocre.”

I turn to the bartender, “Uh, on a related note, do you know why my ex was banned from this brewery? That’s what the bouncer said last night.”

“Bouncer?” she asks, laughing. “We don’t have a bouncer. You must be talking about Pat.”

“Is he here?” I ask warily. He looked pretty intimidating. I’m not enough of a wannabe private investigator to want to interrogate him by myself, but I have a feeling Dottie would do fine with him. She could get a stone to talk.

“No,” she says, “but I’ll find out for you.”

I consider telling her that I suspect someone who works at this brewery was also taken in by Jonah, but Dottie gives her head a firm shake. “Let’s enjoy our drinks, dear girl,” she tells me in an undertone. “Then we can call thatdelightfulyoung man to pick us up. Why, we’ll make a whole afternoon of it.”

Something tells me she’s not referring to Otis.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ROB

“Thank you, Rob,” Sophie says for the fiftieth time. Or maybe sixtieth.

I picked her and Dottie up from the ginger beer brewery after she sent me an SOS text.

Or at least that had been the plan. Dottie had talked me into getting one of the nonalcoholic ginger beers and sitting with them “for a spell.” To be honest, it hadn’t been that hard for her to talk me around. “Come join me. Me andSophie,” she’d said, and I’d caved.

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