Free A Bad Day for Romance by Sophie Littlefield

butt she’d crushed on the sidewalk. As Stella had surmised, Pearline was happy to help, but wouldn’t be able to come to Quail Valley until Sunday afternoon, a regrettable but unavoidable complication as Pearline was spending much of the weekend coaching a board member of the Kansas City Opera on how to appear more sympathetic to the jury at her Monday morning trial for stabbing her housekeeper with a letter opener after the poor woman dropped her Waterford punch bowl.
    Stella sighed as she hung up, wondering how to frame the news to the Flycocks. Her hopes of getting Divinity out in time for the wedding had been dashed, but maybe Taffy would be suitably buoyed by Pearline’s upcoming visit that she’d be willing to slip away long enough to see her cousin married, and Dotty could be convinced to settle for two-thirds of the Flycock branch of the family tree.
    “She’ll call you as soon as she gets a minute,” Stella told the Flycocks, and then said her good-byes, dragging Chrissy toward the door before she could say anything further to upset Taffy.
    “Nice going,” she muttered, once they were outside the building. “You get Taffy riled up any more, she’s liable to try to storm the cells and then Lloyd’s gonna have to lock her up, too, and how you going to explain that to Dotty?”
    “I don’t get how her and Mrs. McAfee can be twins,” Chrissy mused. “Mrs. McAfee’s pretty cool. And Mr. Flycock, you think that’s his real hair? Plus why’s he always hunching like that? It’s like he figures if he can disappear into that raincoat he won’t have to listen to his wife anymore.”
    “No idea, but hush up, I got something interesting to show you.”
    Stella had Chrissy stand guard on the sidewalk by the entrance while she fetched the plastic wrapped bow from a mound of English ivy on the side of the building. She took the long way back to her Jeep, taking advantage of a storm culvert and a thicket of black walnut trees to shield her from view, and tossed the thing in the trunk before driving around to pick Chrissy up. On the way, she checked the dashboard clock; if they floored it, there would be time for a late lunch, a massage, and a nap before the rehearsal dinner.
    “You gonna tell me what you just plucked out of the bush?” Chrissy asked.
    Stella filled her in, and was rewarded with a whistle. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”
    “Nope, it looks like it’s Divinity that done it.”
    “No, I don’t mean that, her killing someone don’t surprise me in the least. I just can’t believe she managed it with that bow. Only pink bows they make are youth models, and they don’t have a heck of a lot of firepower.”
    “Maybe she has spectacularly good aim.”
    “Mmm.” Chrissy didn’t bother to mask her skepticism.
    “What about you? You find out anything useful?”
    “I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Divinity’s gotten even nastier,” Chrissy said, slumping into her seat and massaging her temples. “And I had to practically pry Lloyd’s tongue off the floor where it fell outta his mouth all drooling. He said he had to oversee the visit but all he done was sit out in a folding chair staring at me.”
    “Well, we got good reason to think Divinity did it, but why?” Stella asked, trying to focus Chrissy’s commentary. “Bryant dumped her, she wasn’t gonna stand for it—something along those lines?”
    “I don’t know… I mean, she really didn’t give me that impression. You know how sometimes a gal will just dig in tighter and tighter the more a guy tries to put her behind him?”
    “Mmm, don’t I know it.” It was one of the biggest ongoing challenges in their line of business—the curious natural phenomenon that somehow rendered a man more attractive when you couldn’t have him anymore. It was most problematic when that man did the kinds of things to a woman that brought her to Stella in the first place, because then Stella had to deal with the twin scourges of first