Free Love You to Death by Melissa Senate Page B

recent former boyfriends, were the victims of attempted murder.”

    He might as well have punched me hard in the stomach. “What? What are you talking about?”

    “Ted Puck was murdered the day his engagement announcement hit the paper, Abby. An announcement that you yourself admitted to seeing. And now two other exes—who broke up with you—reported attempts made on their lives just days after ending your relationship. If you do not have an ironclad alibi, Abby, for both dates, I will be back with an arrest warrant. Just because you adidn’t use your brother-in-law’s gun doesn’t mean you didn’t get your hands on another one.”

    I had to sit down. This was crazy.

    I took a deep breath. “Which former boyfriends?” I asked.

    He sat down across from me and f lipped a page in his ever-present notebook. “Riley Witherspoon and Tom Greer.”

    “You’re telling me that someone tried to kill Riley and Tom? That’s what you’re telling me?”

    “That’s what I’m telling you,” he said.

    “So someone is going around trying to kill my ex-boyfriends,” I said. “Am I on Mars? Am I on Punk’d? Is this one very long joke? A bad long joke?”

    “Oh, it’s no joke, Abby.”

    “I didn’t kill anyone! Or try to kill anyone!”

    He stared at me. “So clear yourself. By telling me where you were over a year ago, on December 22 at 7:15 p.m.”

    “December 22?” I repeated. “I have no idea.”

    “I’d find out if I were you,” he said. “Do you have your calendar or appointment book? The twenty-second was a Saturday.”

    “Oh wait, I remember—that was the day after the holiday party at work. Tom e-mailed me like five minutes before the party to tell me he wasn’t coming after all, that he’d met someone else. That day.” I rolled my eyes. I’d spent almost three hundred dollars on a little red dress for a party I probably would have blown off, only to be blown off. “The twenty-second, the day after the holiday party, was Opal’s engagement party. I remember because Opal originally wanted to have her party on the twenty-first, but she actually changed the date for me. Tom was supposed to come with me to Opal’s.”

    “So you were at Opal’s engagement party the night of the twenty-second?” he said, jotting something down. “What time to what time?”

    “I got there at five-thirty to help set up,” I said. “I didn’t leave until after midnight.”

    “Who did you spend most of your time with at the party?” he asked. “I’ll need witnesses to verify that you were there at various times.”

    “Opal can. Olivia, too. My stepmother. I talked to a guy for a while, a friend of Jackson’s. He’d just been dumped, too, so we commiserated for a long time, actually. Honestly, I forget his name, but you can ask Jackson.”

    “I will,” he said.

    “So what exactly happened to Tom?” I asked.

    “You might want to put on some coffee before we get gory at seven in the morning,” he told me.

    I gnawed my lip. “Gory? How gory?”

    “How’s that coffee coming?” he asked.

    “This isn’t Dunkin’ Donuts.”

    He glanced up at me and smiled. That smile was his ticket out of jail. Too bad mine didn’t have that effect on him.

    I got up and headed into the kitchen, glad for the reprieve. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what had happened to Riley. Or Tom. Gory didn’t sound good. It sounded as if they were eaten by grizzlies. Not that either was a hiker. Or camper.

    Five minutes later I brought two steaming mugs of coffee into the living room. “First, can you tell me something, Detective? Why the crack-of-dawn visit?”

    He took his mug and sipped it. “I wanted to catch you before work. It’s easier to talk in the home versus the workplace.”

    I wrapped my hands around the hot mug. “So I’m ready for the gory details.”

    “Someone pushed Tom Greer in front of a speeding truck at 6:00 p.m. last December 22. He was waiting at a crowded intersection