Free The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala by Laura Disilverio

Walter’s Ford, before the town council renamed it to attract the destination wedding business), and Hart had been here only about six months, so it wasn’t an unreasonable question.
    I bit my lip. “I don’t know him, but I saw him at the bookstore this morning and at the auction. I noticed him here earlier, too, when that Eloise person started flinging blood.” Suddenly, I started to shake, the evening’s events catching up to me. Through chattering teeth, I said, “Can I go home now?”
    Hart relaxed his professionalism long enough to hug me and briskly run his hands up and down my upper arms to warm me. “Not quite yet. Hold it together, Amy-Faye. You’re doing great.”
    I’d had to wait while the uniformed police took down the names and addresses of everyone still at the party, and then I’d had to try to remember who else had been there earlier. It was an impossible task because there hadn’t been a guest list—anyone who bought a ticket was welcome to attend. And some people’s costumes had hidden their identity. It was, I slowly realized, a setup to make a murderer’s job much easier; at least, it would make it easier for him or her to escape unnoticed.
    The stake, of course, belonged to Lola. She was so distraught by the idea that an item she had brought to the party had been used to kill a man that I drove her home when the police finally said we could leave. She sat in the van’s passenger seat, eye patch pushed up into her hair, hands clenching and unclenching on her thighs. “I hope the police won’t think I had anything to do with it,” she said.
    â€œOf course they won’t, Lo! You didn’t even know that man, did you?”
    She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Never saw him before. I don’t think he’s from around here. That didn’t keep Lindell from asking me twenty different ways if I recognized him, knew him, or had ever seen him anywhere.”
    â€œI saw him at Gemma’s store during the author panel, and then again at the auction,” I said. “I don’tthink the police know who he is yet. Hart said he didn’t have any ID on him.”
    â€œMaybe it was a robbery, and he fought back,” Lola said. “The self-defense books all say you should just hand over your wallet if you get mugged, not make a fuss, and run if you can.”
    I kept my attention on the road, ill lit this far out of town. I didn’t point out that the robbery theory didn’t account for Lola’s stake being the murder weapon.
    â€œI must have lost the stake when I went downstairs during all that fuss,” she said, raking her fingers through her short hair. “But it wasn’t on the stairs when I went back to look.”
    â€œNo telling who picked it up. It might have been a staff member, getting it out of the way, or a Good Samaritan partygoer planning to turn it in to the Club’s lost and found,” I said.
    â€œOr it might have been the murderer.” Lola turned her head to stare out the window.
    We drove under a streetlight as I made the turn into the Bloomin’ Wonderful driveway, which also led to the small house Lola shared with Axie and her grandmother. In the dark, I couldn’t make out any of the blooms in the fields, although my headlights glanced off the glass panels in the greenhouses. Stopping near her front door, I put a hand on her shoulder. “None of it is your fault, Lo. The killer went for a weapon of opportunity—if it hadn’t been the stake, it would have been something else—a steak knife, a deer antler. I know it feels icky to think that you brought the murder weapon to the party, that you heldsomething that later got stabbed through a man’s guts, but—”
    â€œYou’re not helping, Amy-Faye,” Lola said.
    I shut up. “Sorry.” I leaned over and hugged her awkwardly. “Hart will figure it out.“
    She