Free Ornamental Danger: a holiday short story (Working Stiff Mysteries) by Kerri Nelson

CHAPTER ONE
     
    "I'm wearing my new sweater dress to the Christmas party, so I hope they have the AC cranked, or I'll just melt!" — Ms. Lanier's Christmas Wardrobe Malfunction
     
    " Now who's gonna bring the hooch to the Christmas social?"
    Ms. Lanier stood over the body of Verna Strength and shook her head with obvious concern. I stared in disbelief at my elderly neighbor who seemed to have misplaced her concern.
    " That's what you're worried most about right now?" was all I could manage to say as I fanned myself in the early December heat wave which was not all that uncommon here in central Alabama.
    "Heck, yes. She made the best General Lee's Eggnog you've ever tasted. Now, she's done gone and taken the recipe with her. Stingy old thing would never share with any of us." As she spoke the words, her head pivoted back toward the former hooch-bringer's kitchen doorway.
    Amazingly, I knew what she was thinking and reached out for her arm before she could make a move. "Leave it. This is no time to be rifling through this poor woman's kitchen in search of a recipe."
    She turned her puppy dog eyes up at me in mock hurt. I returned her expression with a frown.
    She shrugged. "I've already looked for it anyway. I don't think she even had it written down—she was suspicious like that, ya know? Stingy to the last minute."
    "Ladies." The voice of Ty Dempsey sounded from the hallway, and we both turned in unison to greet him.
    His eyes met mine and lingered for a moment more than I was comfortable with. I scratched an invisible itch that had suddenly surfaced on my bare left arm in response.
    "Well, Captain Dempsey has arrived on the scene." Ms. Lanier grinned up at him. His well over six-foot stature cast a shadow over her four-foot-nothing frame, but he seemed to return her smile with nothing less than full-on boyish charm.
    "Yes, ma'am. Sorry to see you under these circumstances. I know you and Ms. Strength were good friends."
    I watched his tanned arm reach out and offer a comforting touch to Ms. Lanier's shoulder. And my eyes followed his forearm, thick with sinewy muscles.
    Sigh.
    Here I was standing over a recently deceased little old lady, and all I could think of was how fun it might be to watch Ty cut the grass with his shirt off. Well, it was December, and I doubted he'd be strutting around bare-chested despite the warm holiday season,  but the memory of just such a vision tickled my brain, and my stomach countered with a little rumble.
    Ty and I'd had a little romance back in high school, but things had been more than strained since I'd returned to town after a decade-long absence. My renewed attraction to him was probably just a sign that I needed more of a social life than Ms. Lanier and my other senior citizen neighbors could provide.
    "Well, yeah, I've known her since…well…since forever. But we weren't that close really. She was kind of a jerk, if you ask me."
    I cleared my throat. Ty cast a glance my way, and I offered a small smile in return.
    "So, you ladies found her like this?"
    We both nodded. But then I added, "Well, Ms. Lanier called me and told me that she'd found Verna's cat wandering around in her yard and was worried when she couldn't get Verna to answer the door…so we found our way in to check on her…"
    "You found your way in?" His eyebrows rose at my choice of words.
    "Yeah…yes. And we found her here…like this. I checked for a pulse, but I can see that rigor mortis has already come and is starting to fade so she's been dead at least eighteen hours." I couldn't stop myself from analyzing the scene from a medical standpoint. I was almost a doctor anyway. I'd come all but one semester short of completing med school just a few months ago.
    "What a minute…you're not answering my question, Mandy." Ty broke my little trip down medical lane.
    "What question?"
    "He wants to know how we got in the house, dear. Yadda yadda…I crawled through the kitty door. It is no big deal."
    My mouth dropped