Free Til a Death Do Us Part: A Bakery Detectives Cozy Mystery by Stacey Alabaster

car.
    Maybe I should bring it up. Try to laugh it off as a joke. I banged my head against the passenger seat and opened the door, climbing out for some fresh air.
    Maybe Jackson isn't mentioning it because it never happened, I told myself hopefully as I paced back and forth across the front of the building. People were coming and going, but there was no sign of Frankie, Jackson or Surfer Dude.
    Maybe I had been so tired I'd only imagined those words coming out of my mouth. Maybe he hadn't heard me?
    Or maybe—and much more likely—he was just pretending it never happened because he didn't feel the same way about me.
    I stopped pacing when I saw Jackson exit the lobby, and I tried to act casual as he strode over to me.
    "Everything all right?" I asked cheerfully. "Was Frankie there?" He'd taken a while so I assumed he must have been talking to someone.
    Jackson cleared his throat. "We've got to go back over everything," he said, "Start from the beginning again." He climbed into the car and I followed suit.
    "You don't think it's Surfer Dude anymore?" I asked, surprised, as I adjusted my visor. What was all this start at the beginning business? Didn't we have a perfectly good suspect?
    Jackson didn't answer. "Let's go back to the precinct."
    Five minutes of silent, awkward car ride later and we were back inside his office. I kept wondering if he was going to address the way things were between us. Instead, he fetched a piece of paper from his folder and laid it on the desk.
    "What is this?"
    "The wedding invite list." It was three columns wide. He pointed to the bottom of the third one and said, "See? You can see that Dylan wasn't originally part of the official list. We added him later." I looked at his name scrawled in pen down at the bottom in what looked like hasty, annoyed handwriting.
    "So he didn't even get a plus one then?" I said.
    Jackson shook his head and scoffed. "No way. I suppose that's why he was sitting with Aunt Cassie, but I still can't figure that one out."
    "Maybe she's just a very forgiving woman."
    Jackson shook his head as he leaned over the list with his palms pressed against the desk. "No matter how many times I look at this, I just can't think who else had a grudge against Aunt Cassie. It's got to be Dylan," he muttered. "I just need to get some real evidence on the guy."
    So Surfer Dude really was off the suspect list? I wanted to ask more, but I didn't want to press it. What had happened in that apartment?
    I took a deep breath. It was now or never. "Jackson, are you sure that Dylan is really the only true suspect here?" I asked, waving my hand over the invite list.
    He looked confused. "Well, if there's a suspect you're holding back from me, I'd like to hear about it." He looked annoyed at the idea that I might be hiding evidence from him. Little did he know, he was likely to be much more annoyed when I told him who it was.
    I took a quick sharp breath and just plunged forward. "What about Emma?" I said, waiting for the anger to dart into his eyes. I ignored it and just kept going. "She is Dylan's cousin, she had just as much right to the inheritance as Dylan did. And maybe she wanted it just as badly. Maybe she wanted it even more than Dylan did."
    Jackson stared at me in disbelief. "Be careful there, Rachael," he warned me.
    I stood up straight and kept going. "She had the perfect opportunity as well. Her wedding day, no one would suspect the bride of ruining her own wedding."
    "Her wedding day," Jackson said, interrupting me with anger in his eyes. "Was her perfect opportunity to marry me. She wasn't planning a murder, for crying out loud. She was planning on marrying me!"
    I looked down. "If she was planning on marrying you," I said quietly. "Then why didn't she?" I looked up at him again. "Where is she now then? Jackson, she's on the run. If that doesn't make her look guilty as heck then I don't know what does."
    Jackson's face was turning bright red. He snatched up the invite list and shoved