Free JUSTICE Is SERVED (Food Truck 7) by Chloe Kendrick

doubted that many people took them seriously. The nurses at the hospital seemed to have made up their minds without listening to the women.
    “Someone made a huge mess on the tablecloth,” I said. “Mustard all over the place. I was just wondering if you saw who did it.”
    “Mustard?” the woman asked. “How odd. Marie, my sister, she didn’t eat any hot dogs with mustard – nor did I.” I listened to a litany of the various types of hot dogs they had eaten during the reception, and Eunice was right. They had eaten quite a few different types. Yet they hadn’t had mustard, and Eunice had eaten hers plain. That meant neither party had mustard on their dogs.
    I wondered again who had written the word “help.” Now it was looking as though none of the people at the table had written it. So I was back to trying to figure out who out of the 100 guests had ruined the tablecloth.

Chapter 7
     
    When I returned home, there was a message from Gina on the machine. I listened carefully to it twice, trying to catch if there was anything else in her voice. She seemed fine, which meant that she likely hadn’t heard from her aunts, but at the same time, she seemed more reserved than she usually did.
    “Maeve, it’s Gina. I need to talk to you about something. Call me when you have some time, okay?”
    I wondered about her message. While it would sound okay to most people, her typical messages asked me about any deaths around me and any murder investigations. Perhaps being at the center of such an investigation had put her off the jokes.
    Since I wanted to ask about Land’s invitation – and since I’d had so little luck with the mustard, I decided to call her back immediately.
    It rang several times, and I got ready to leave a message when she answered. “Maeve, is that you?”
    Of course she knew it was me, because my number would have come up on the phone. “Yeah, what’s up?”
    “I need to talk to you. Can you come over?” she asked. I was starting to wonder what was up.
    “Sure, right now?” I asked, wanting to see if this was related to Land being in jail. I hoped that I’d learn enough to get him out, though so far, I had not learned anything worth a dime.
    She agreed, and I headed over to their apartment. I knew the place well, because the apartment had been Gina’s before the marriage. It only took me a few minutes to get there; traffic was light.
    Gina was waiting at the door for me. Her normally perky self had been replaced by a sad woman who looked defeated. Maybe I wouldn’t be so fast to rush into marriage.
    “So what’s going on?” I asked.
    “I just found out something, and I need to tell you first. It’s about Land,” she said, looking like she might cry.
    “He’s in jail,” I said, hoping that this was the worst of the news.
    “No, it’s not that. There’s more. Trent has been worried about his two aunts, the ones who sat at Table 15. They’ve been more and more odd in the past few months. Before we knew that Land was your boyfriend, Trent wanted Land to keep an eye on them at the wedding. So we hired Land.”
    I nodded. This wasn’t as bad as I thought. “What is so odd about them that they needed to be watched?”
    “It’s been bad. They do odd things. They make comments. They go to the hospital all the time. We wanted to make sure that they didn’t do something at the wedding to embarrass themselves or anyone else.”
    I told her my story about how the sisters had told me that they’d gone to the hospital the evening of the wedding. “Do you think that’s true?” I asked, wondering if I’d been taken in by the women.
    “Probably, but I would think that the nurses are right. They likely just ate too much and got sick. No one was out to poison them. But the tablecloth is just like something they would do. I knew you’d been looking into that. Trent and I decided to come clean about it and offer to pay for the tablecloth.”
    “That was it. What about the business