Free Raspberry Revenge by Jessica Beck

ears open. I’ve been trying to call George on his cellphone all day, but it goes straight to voicemail. Where could he have gone?”
    “I don’t see any possible way that he killed Harley, no matter how much of a pain the man was to him.”
    “I don’t either, Grace,” I said hastily. “But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like to hear what he has to say about what happened in his office today. With Gabby gone too, it’s kind of a troubling trend.”
    “That’s one mystery solved, at least. She’s back in town,” Grace said with a smile.
    “What? How do you know that?”
    “I got bored waiting around here for you, so I decided to take a walk through the park to clear my head. I figured maybe I’d get some insights into our investigation, and the worst-case scenario was that I got a little exercise. While I was out, I decided to stroll over to Gabby’s, and I got there just as she was taking the sign off her door.”
    “Where had she been?” I asked. I’d driven right past ReNEWed on my way to Grace’s, but I must have been so preoccupied with the investigation that I hadn’t even noticed the sign announcing Gabby’s absence was gone. Some detective I was turning out to be.
    “She said that she decided on the spur of the moment to close the shop and take a drive,” Grace said. “At least that’s what she told me. Suzanne, she was shocked when I told her that Harley had been murdered in George’s office this morning. There’s no way she could have faked that reaction.”
    “We never really considered her a suspect, so it’s not all that surprising,” I said.
    “With Gabby, I figured that we couldn’t rule her out, even if she didn’t have a connection with Harley. Her first response to the news was a little troubling, though.”
    “How did she react?”
    “Before I even told her that George was missing, she asked how he was taking the news.”
    I thought about it a moment before I spoke. “That’s not that odd. After all, the man’s office is a crime scene. That’s enough to upset anyone.”
    “Sure it is, but then she added, ‘This isn’t going to look good for him,’ and that’s before I even said anything about him taking off.”
    “Why does everyone keep sharing that news?” I asked, a little peeved that Grace had repeated something we were trying to keep under wraps, just as Momma had done earlier.
    “Hey, don’t bite my head off,” Grace said as she held her palms up in a motion to calm me down. “I figured that for most folks in town, it was already common knowledge.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Momma told Curtis, and now you’ve said something to Gabby. I’m afraid that George is going to be tried and convicted by the public before he even gets a chance to explain himself.”
    “I get that, but you have to admit that it’s an awfully big coincidence to swallow,” Grace said. “There’s no denying it, any way you look at it. Taking off around the time his main rival was murdered in the man’s own office has all kinds of red flags waving.”
    “I don’t like the way it looks any more than you do, but just this once, we’re going to work with the assumption that the two facts are totally unrelated.”
    “If you say so, boss. After all, I’m just the hired hand around here,” Grace said with a smile.
    “You’re more than that, and we both know it. What should we do next? I’m afraid we’ve exhausted the questions we can ask our suspects, and short of taking a poll door to door, I don’t know how to stir up any more suspects at the moment.”
    “I wish we could get inside Harley’s office and have a look around,” Grace said. “How hard would it be to do it without Curtis noticing?”
    “Between him and his secretary, I’d say that it was pretty much impossible.”
    “How about his house, then?” Grace suggested.
    “Probably just as tough, but we can’t go there until Jake is finished with it. Even then, he’s probably not going to