Free Stuck on Murder by Lucy Lawrence Page B

claw. So, um, yeah, I could see them tossing a brick to get in.”
    “Well, don’t just stand there, open the door,” Brenna said. “I’m pretty sure your insurance policy doesn’t cover gossips on a rampage.”
    Tenley hurried across the room, and Brenna braced herself. She had an ulterior motive for talking to the Porter twins. She wanted to know what the scuttlebutt was in town, and they were just the ladies to tell her. It was going to be the gossip equivalent of you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.
    Tenley unlocked the door and the two women yanked it open and marched in. Brenna had repositioned herself at the large worktable in the back of the shop. She had a basket of paper cutouts in front of her that she pretended to be sorting.
    “Good morning, Ella and Marie,” she said. “How are you today?”
    “Spill it,” Marie said. She was bouncing up and down on the balls of her white tennies, looking ready to bust out one of her karate-for-seniors high kicks if Brenna didn’t give her what she wanted.
    “Whatever do you mean?” Brenna asked, playing dumb.
    Ella gnashed her teeth, and Tenley shot Brenna a worried look. Brenna wondered briefly if she and Tenley could take them. She had a feeling the Porter sisters could rumble, and she’d lay odds they fought dirty.
    “You know why we’re here,” Ella said. “So start talking. What do you know?”
    “You first,” Brenna said.
    “What?” Marie gasped, taken aback. “You were the one who fished him out of the lake, you go first.”
    “I want to know what the buzz is about town,” Brenna said. “I want to know what people are thinking and saying.”
    The sisters exchanged a long look. They wore matching running suits, Marie in yellow and Ella in green. Their gray hair sprang about their heads in recently tightened sausage curls and they both favored a shiny, bubblegum pink shade of lipstick.
    As if reaching an unspoken agreement, they turned back to Brenna, pulled out chairs, and sat down. Tenley went to fetch the remaining coffee and doughnuts while Ella and Marie decided who should go first.
    “You go ahead and start,” Ella said. “It’s your turn.”
    “You just want to tell the ending,” Marie said. “You go first. I want to be the one to finish it.”
    “You got to finish it last time,” Ella protested.
    “No, I didn’t,” Marie argued.
    “Yes, you did. You told Jorge Garcia at the flower shop the entire story before I could even say a word.”
    “Did not.”
    “Did too.”
    “Quiet!” Brenna shouted over them. “Now someone start talking or I am taking my information and leaving.”
    The twins studied one another again. It was a silent argument with a lot of raised and lowered eyebrows and put-out humphs. Finally, Marie nodded.
    “Oh, all right, fine,” she snapped. “Save the best part for yourself.”
    Ella gave her a close-lipped smile.
    “Okay, it all started with Marybeth DeFalco,” Marie said.
    “We already know that,” Tenley said. “She’s married to Officer Stuart DeFalco and he . . .”
    The twins gave her identical baleful glares and she stammered to a halt.
    “As I was saying,” Marie began again, “it started with Marybeth, and let me just say, if she wasn’t married to Stuart, she wouldn’t know anything about anything. That girl thinks that she’s in the know, but really she has no appreciation of the history of Morse Point residents, so how could she possibly know anything about anything? Am I right?”
    “Quite right,” Ella agreed.
    “Anyway, Marybeth told everyone who came into Stan’s this morning that you found Mayor Ripley bound and gagged and stuffed into a trunk that was sunk at the bottom of the lake.”
    Tenley and Brenna exchanged a look.
    “Don’t forget,” Ella prodded Marie. Marie looked bewildered until Ella pointed at her neck.
    “Oh, and he had his throat slashed,” she said in an overly dramatic dinner theater stage whisper.
    “No, he didn’t,” Brenna