Free Ginny Gold - Early Bird Café 01 - Rise and Die by Ginny Gold Page B

relaxed Jenna was. She’d been expecting her to be withholding and standoffish. But she was just the opposite.
    “Makes sense. How did families take it? They must depend on you.”
    “Yeah, I was worried about that too. But it was okay. I offered them each a free night of babysitting in the future.”
    “That seems like a fair trade.”
    “Honestly, I just needed a day off too. I wish I had someone working for me, or a sub I could call once in a while.”
    Kori could relate perfectly. “I hear you. This week I’ve been thinking the same thing. Hey, you didn’t hear anything when Tessa was killed, did you?”
    “Thankfully no. But I did see a car with New York plates at her café on Monday. I never saw the driver and haven’t seen the car since. But that was the first thing that crossed my mind. It must have been someone from her past.”
    “Her ex-husband is in town. He’s from New York. It could have been his car,” Kori suggested. Everything Jenna was offering seemed legit and like she didn’t know enough to be guilty. Kori also didn’t think she was hiding anything, like Nora had suspected.
    “I’ve seen a second car from New York since Tuesday when she died but not the same one. This one that’s in town now is white. The one I saw on Monday was red.”
    “What kind of car, do you remember?” This could be the information Kori needed to help Zach find the murderer before Detective Gunn put Kori behind bars.
    Jenna shook her head. “Some fancy thing that’s never in Hermit Cove. Not even tourists drive that kind of car. We usually get a lot of SUVs or family type cars, you know? This was a Jaguar or Mercedes or BMW. Something that stuck out like a sore thumb.”
    “You know what you want yet?” Kori asked, changing the subject but making a mental note to remember Jenna’s description.
    “Yeah. Just a blueberry muffin. You toasting them?”
    “I can. Butter on it?”
    “Lots. Thanks.”
    Kori got to work in the kitchen buttering the griddle and cutting the muffin in half. She was suddenly hungry herself and realized she hadn’t eaten anything since she’d gotten up. She grabbed a strawberry muffin from the warm oven and added hers to the hot griddle as well.
    “Rumor has it that you’re involved in this somehow,” Jenna said, shocking Kori into speechlessness and making her turn around to face her. Jenna was clearly studying Kori’s reaction to the accusation.
    “What makes you say that?” Kori asked as calmly as she could.
    “Well, of anyone in town, I probably saw the most of Tessa. She didn’t have good things to say about you. She thought you were out to get her.”
    Kori laughed but she could hear the falseness of it as it left her mouth. “I didn’t know you two were close. She’d only been here a couple weeks.”
    “I wouldn’t say close but given the proximity of my home business to her café, we bumped into each other pretty regularly. Mostly just small talk but hers seemed to center around you and your past relationship with her at school and in New York.”
    Kori was flabbergasted. She’d had no idea that Tessa had been talking about her behind her back. She would have confronted her and attacked the problem head on but now she had to live with whatever stories had been tossed around. And they had to be stories. Kori couldn’t think of a single time that she’d been anything but civil to Tessa.
    “I can’t say we were close friends but I never thought of us as enemies,” Kori told Jenna.
    “Well, I just thought you should know. Thanks for the muffin,” Jenna said as Kori placed it in front of her.
    Then Kori dug into her own breakfast and tried her best not to look at Jenna again. She was lucky that more customers started coming in only minutes later.
    At eleven thirty, there was an unusual lull in business. Kori usually worked straight through without a single break. So after looking up Betsy’s payment time on Tuesday—seven twenty three, which would have put