Shiver : 13 Sexy Tales of Humor and Horror - Aurora Belle - Страница 43

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“You still have your gloves on,” Sawyer pointed out. “You carry the underwear back and I’ll take the lipstick.”

I groaned, but reached down for the thong anyway.

“What if it belongs to George,” Sawyer asked, making the disturbing images playing in my mind even more disgusting than before.

“No! Stop,” I groaned, closing my eyes as if that would help.

Sawyer laughed, enjoying my misery far too much.

We were almost back to the room when Sawyer glanced over to me. “You never answered my question from earlier,” he pointed out.

“What question?” I asked, even though I knew what question he was referring to.

“Are you single? Or are you seeing someone?”

I blew out a puff of air and decided to give him a straight answer. “Single. Super single. I don’t think people get more single than me. Your grandmother is my best friend and the last person she tried to set me up with was forty years older than me and was getting fitted for dentures.”

Sawyer burst out laughing, forcing me to crack a smile. If I couldn’t laugh at my sorry excuse for a dating life, then who could? Oh right, everyone.

“Well, once you solve this case, you’ll have people banging down your door for dates.”

I rolled my eyes playfully. “Yeah, but no one will be able to understand my life as a detective. They’ll want to pin me down and force me to start a family. They won’t understand my craving to get out there and clean up the streets.”

Sawyer nodded. “Ah, yes. The life of a detective.”

“I didn’t choose the detective life. The detective life chose me.”

His smile widened. “Maybe when you get tired of the grind, you can come see me.”

We were skirting toward dangerous territory, and I wasn’t sure where our jokes ended and our true feelings began.

“You’re too young to wait for me. You deserve to have someone who can be there for you now,” I mocked with a serious tone.

“Don’t you tell me what I need,” Sawyer quipped.

I couldn’t keep it together after that. I cracked up and shook my head as we turned the corner into the dining hall.

“Finally!” George called.

“There you guys are,” Anne sang.

“We’ve been sitting here for an hour waiting for you guys,” Sandy groaned, still sitting on the floor, but looking less like a corpse than she had when we’d left.

Everyone was talking over one another as we walked in, clearly annoyed with how long we’d been gone.

“I’m sorry! We were on the trail and we couldn’t stop. But we found some clues,” I said, gesturing to Sawyer to lay them down on the table in the front of the room.

In a perfect row they all sat there together: the bloody knife, the letter from the lawyer about the will, the tube of red lipstick, and the awesomely out-of-place banana hammock.

“What? What is this thing on the end? It looks like a headband or something,” Anne said, reaching down to pick it up and already aiming it for her head.

“No!” I yelled, stepping forward to yank it out of her hand. “Anne, that goes on someone’s butt. It’s underwear.”

Her eyes grew two sizes as she realized her mistake. Sawyer couldn’t stop laughing for a solid minute.

“There’s still something missing,” I said as I strolled up and down the table, eyeing the evidence and mulling it all over in my head. Someone wanted Gwyneth dead so that they could reap the benefits of her will, but who? I ran through the evidence in my head again.

“Yeah, I have nothing,” I said, throwing up my hands in defeat and turning around to look around the room. No one else seemed to know what was going on either, and a part of me, a very big part, suspected that maybe George hadn’t actually made it so the case could be solved anyway. He probably just wanted to lead us on a wild goose chase to teach us the art of acting or some bullshit like that.

“Has she had that purse the whole time?” Sawyer asked, drawing my attention over to Sandy, aka Gwyneth, who was still sitting on the floor. Directly next to her there was a small brown leather purse. I’d noticed it earlier, but I hadn’t realized that it was part of the game. I thought she’d just brought her purse with her.

I glanced over to George to see his eyes light up, and I knew that Sawyer was on the right track.

“Get the purse!” I shouted dramatically. Sawyer grabbed it and flipped it open as I watched over his shoulder. The only thing inside was a small folded piece of paper. The contents of which were the final clue we needed to solve the mystery.

The letter inside of Gwyneth’s purse was short and straight to the point.

“Oh my god! Gertie you are such a hussie! Or rather, your character is,” I said, pointing to the older woman who was wearing a sly smile. Our suspicions were confirmed even more when we saw that Gertie was wearing bright red lipstick in the exact shade that we’d found inside of the lawyer’s office, aka the janitor’s closet.

But still, the underwear didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the evidence.

Not until I ran through the character cards again inside of our packets.

“Latin underwear model!” I read aloud, watching as Sawyer connected the pieces at the precise moment I did. “They were in on it together!”

Gertie threw her head back dramatically and rested the back of her hand on her forehead like a bad soap opera actress. Her maid’s outfit only made her appearance even better.

“You have no proof!” Gertie protested with a dramatic flare. “Antonio is my lover, not Hannah’s and we’re going to run away together! There’s nothing you can do to stop us!”

“That’s what you think.”

I reached into my packet to pull out the very last item: a pair of plastic handcuffs. I circled one around Mr. Tennon’s wrist (Antonio Ricardo) and one around Gertie’s wrist (Izzie Jenkins).

“You have the right to remain silent, anything you say, can and will be used against you in the court of law.” I paused and looked up at Sawyer. “Is that how it goes? I really want to sound like a detective.”

He laughed, pretending to puff on his pipe. “I honestly don’t know, but we solved the murder and I think it’s time to celebrate.”

After we took a group picture with big cheesy grins, everyone stuffed their props back into the packets and headed toward a table of refreshments set up along the back wall of the dining room. There was lemonade and coffee on one side and little finger sandwiches, cookies, and bite sized candy on the other.

I tossed a few things on my plate and then went to sit down, ravenous from all of my detective work.

I didn’t notice Sawyer approaching me until he sat down across from me at the table.

When I glanced up, he feigned shock. “You were a girl this entire time?!”

I laughed and shook my head as if he were ridiculous. Which he kind of was. “I know. It’s scary how well I can pull off looking like a dude.”

He winked and then took a bite of his cookie, and by bite, I mean he ate half the cookie and then wolfed down the other half immediately after. I would eat cookies like that too if I could have gotten away with it. Sandy would have called me a lesbian if I ate that quickly. Which made me think, Sandy probably didn’t even know the definition of a lesbian.

“So are you going to head to that party of yours soon, Sawyer?” Anne asked as she sat down on the empty seat beside me at the table.

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