Page 24 of A Rose of Steel
But who would kill a man on his wedding day? And why?
I hadn’t paid much attention to anyone at the wedding, even after Bumper had gone down. I thought he was having an asthma attack and I didn’t want to get pulled into Auntie Zanne’s stuff. I had kept my blinders on.
Now I wished I had paid attention.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture the people at the wedding. After Bumper lost consciousness. For the most part I had been love-stricken and hadn’t seen much. I’d only heard bits and pieces, people murmuring. Crying. Whispering.
Then I’d gone into emergency mode. Those people that I needed to get out of the way now were only a blur to me.
Eyes shut, I tried to think of everything that happened that might give me a clue to how someone could have gotten to Bumper, the once happy soon-to-be-groom, now it seemed to me, a murdered groom.
Chapter Twelve
Once I came to that conclusion, I knew I needed to call my cousin, Pogue Folsom. He was the sheriff in Roble and if my hunch was right, he was going to have to get on this right away. All of this spinning around in my head–thoughts of dastardly deeds, a person or persons doing away with someone at their wedding—had to be shared. I just hated to see Pogue go through it again.
Yep. We’d just got past one murder.
The very first murder in Roble’s long, illustrious recorded history. Okay, so probably other than a zero-crime rate, there hadn’t been much else to Roble’s history but that, however, was changing fast. One murder at a time.
It hadn’t even been two months since that murder and it too had entangled Auntie’s business up in it.
When I moved from Chicago, Auntie Zanne had come up and spent the last two weeks with me. She’d hoped to make the transition easier on me, but it didn’t help. I cried the entire train ride back, so disappointed that I was right back where I started. And things didn’t get any better after we arrived.
Josephine Gail was standing in the rainstorm that had ushered us in. Soaking wet, she was waiting for Pogue to arrive. She wouldn’t speak to us and it was impossible to get her out of that storm. Pogue had to fill us in once he got there. He told us that there was, according to Josephine Gail, an errant body in the funeral home. One, she determined, that had been murdered.
She was right.
The Annual Crawfish Boil and Music Festival was the backdrop for solving that murder. Now it looked like a wedding was going to be it this time.
I blew out a breath, picked up my cell phone and punched in my cousin’s number.
“Hi Pogue,” I said.
“Hi,” he sounded groggy. I glanced at the time on the computer. It was later than I thought.
“Did I wake you?”
“Sort of. You alright?”
“Yep. But after I tell you what I have to say, you may not be.”
“What Romie?” he said, his voice with a little more vigor.
“You’re not going to like this.”
“Like what, Romie? Can you just tell me?”
“You sitting down?”
“How cliché,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Do I need to sit down?” he asked, seemingly exasperated with me already. “Because I am laying down.”
“I guess that’ll work,” I said.
“Just tell me.”
