Tressed to Kill Read Online Free PDF

only by the barrage of thunder, and then Mom said what we’d both been thinking. “If only we’d been a few minutes earlier.”
If only. Two of the saddest words in the English language. What if we’d come out five minutes earlier? I watched the wind dance an empty plastic bag across the park until my ears picked up the sound of sirens drawing closer. I stood and waved my arm as a police car skidded into the town hall parking lot, followed by a second car driving more cautiously. The first fat raindrops plopped onto my head as the blue and red lights swirled around me and then the skies opened up. Within seconds, before the policeman even opened his door, I was drenched.
Just great. Could this day get any worse?
Apparently it could.
“Grace, darlin’,” a deep voice drawled as a tall figure stepped out of the police car. “You know I’m always happy to get together for dinner, shug. Or breakfast.” The voice leered. “You don’t have to make 911 calls to have an excuse to see me.”
Hank. My ex-husband. One of St. Elizabeth’s finest.
    Chapter Three
     
     

     

    [Thursday]
     
    “THEY SCRAPED BLOOD OUT FROM UNDER MY FINGERNAILS and put it in a little baggie,” Mom said, pouring our breakfast tea the next morning. After the coroner’s team had zipped Constance’s body into a bag and hefted her into a hearse, and a Detective Washington finally gave us permission to go home, I’d spent the night in my girlhood bedroom in Mom’s house, not wanting to leave her alone.
I choked on a mouthful of Earl Grey. “What? Why?”
Her shrug lifted the hem of her nightgown so her scuffed blue slippers showed. “Probably because they think I did it.”
“Did what?” But I knew.
“Killed Constance.”
“That’s absurd. You couldn’t have.” I poured some Cap’n Crunch into my bowl with hands that shook. In my apartment, I’d have breakfasted on microwave oatmeal sprinkled with berries and a handful of walnuts, but returning to my childhood home also meant adopting childhood habits. Especially comforting ones like sugary cereal. The cheery yellow kitchen with the brick wall and appliances from when I was a teenager felt like a cocoon. The oven dinged and Mom opened it, letting the delicious scent of cinnamon buns drift into the room.
“For later,” she said, divining my thoughts. “When the ladies get here. We’ll close the salon today, in Constance’s memory, but I know Althea and Stella will be here. And probably Rachel, too, when school lets out.” She settled into the ladder-back chair across from me with the pan of cinnamon buns in front of her and began to ice them with little swirls of her knife.
In the early days, after my dad died and she and Althea, also newly widowed, had turned their skills at hair cutting and facials into a business, she used to put out cinnamon buns or cookies or brownies for her customers. Back then, she did the cutting right here in the kitchen and I swept the clippings up in a little dust pan from the time I was five. Eventually, as word of her expertise grew, she turned the front of the old Victorian into a salon and quadrupled her business. The family—Mom, me, and my younger sister Alice Rose—had lived above the shop, falling asleep each night to the lingering odor of permanent solution.
I’d grown up loving the smells of the salon. Although I’d tried college—two years at the University of Georgia—I’d missed doing hair and left to attend beauty school. I’d worked for Vidal Sassoon in Atlanta after Hank finished with the police academy and we got married. Three years later, we got divorced. I stayed in Atlanta for another six months but felt lost and lonely on my own. Atlanta might be less than five hours away by car, but it felt like a separate universe. Now I was back and not too sure I fit in here anymore, either. Small-town life felt confining after almost four years in a metro area of five million. But it had its compensations . . . like homemade cinnamon rolls.
“Why’d you stop making goodies for the