Free Death on Demand by Carolyn G. Hart

wolfed down his fifth sugar-covered doughnut. They sat on the airy porch outside the kitchen. The soft air was fragrant with pine, marsh, and tar; sunlight slanted through the tall sea pines. A blacktopped path disappeared into a dense clump of palmettos, southern red cedars, yuccas, and bayberry shrubs. The beach was only a ten-minute bicycle ride away. For a fleeting moment Annie wished that today could be a holiday for her and Max, that they could go walk down a dune with an October splash of flowering herbs, violet, magenta, yellow and cream, to the long spread of gray sand with nothing more to think of than sun and water and play.
    “I guess I’ll open the store as usual.”
    Max nodded, his mouth full, then said indistinctly, “That’s the best thing to do. Act completely normal.” He swallowed and said clearly, “Besides, I bet a buck they’ll all come by, one by one, to see if you know anything.”
    “Who’ll come by?”
    “Our suspects.”
    “God, I hope not.”
    “Hey, Annie, don’t be silly. This will be our chance to pump them.”
    “I don’t want to pump them. Why should I?”
    “Saulter is a dummy. Anybody can see that. We can solve it.”
    “Oh, no. Count me out. I don’t want any part of it.”
    Max licked a trickle of sugar from the corner of his mouth, and rattled the empty doughnut bag. “We need to do some grocery shopping. Don’t you ever eat at home?”
    Uncertain which argument to pursue first, Annie opted for anti-detection.
    “Max, listen carefully, because I am only going to say this once. I am not a detective. I am not even a mystery writer. I just happen to run a bookstore where a man got murdered. I intend to scrub that floor and rearrange the coffee area and forget it ever happened. Mysteries are a business for me, not a vacation. This is not a game. There is no way I am going to get involved in this investigation—and I mean it, absolutely, positively, and without any shadow of doubt. Period.”
    Max grinned.

T he argument continued on the stairs of the tree house.
    “I’m going to work just as usual. I do not want to talk about murder.”
    “Murders.”
    “It has to be a coincidence,” she said mulishly. “Jill and Elliot didn’t even know each other. He didn’t have any pets.”
    “How do you know?” Max barred her way down the steps.
    Since she didn’t want to go into that, she ducked under his arm. “Look, I’ve got to hurry, or I’m going to be late.” She’d already informed him in no uncertain terms that hewas not coming to the store with her. To divert him, she offered, “I’ll have lunch with you. Come to the shop about one, and we’ll go have a mango sundae.”
    Max took a childish delight in new tastes, and Annie was pleased at her skill in deflecting him. This was not the time to admit that she’d dated Elliot a couple of times and had once been invited to dinner at his house. That evening was enough to frost any interest on her part. Elliot collected West Indian art and artifacts, including voodoo dolls from Haiti. Her appetite had been seriously damaged by his long-winded and ghoulish description of the walking dead.
    Ugh.
    Annie ran on down the steps, then realized her car was still in the crushed oyster-shell lot near the plaza, the closest parking place to her store. Of course, Max had brought her home last night.
    Since he drove this morning in the old mode, fast and hard, there was no time for conversation.
    Annie’s home was on the fringes of the developed part of the resort area. The tree houses had been a builder’s short-lived fancy. She loved living in a remote area, and delighted in the daily surprises of marsh life. Her tree house overlooked the high marsh, and from her sun porch she could watch the never-ending play of light and wind on the thick cordgrass. Salt myrtle, marsh elder, and southern bayberry flourished. A single narrow road snaked inland through palmetto palms and sea pines toward the populated area. Spanish moss