LITMIR.BIZ

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the thing herself as a Christmas gift. “Bye-bye, blackbird,” she whispered in a singsong voice as she began to pluck at the threads with the long tips of her nails.

      “Stop it.”

      “Who is he?”

      Ivy wasn’t going to stop. She’d tear the delicate birds right off her blouse, then move on to something else Ida Mae loved, until she got what she wanted. The name. Ida Mae knew it…because she’d have done exactly the same thing.

      “All right,” she snapped, determined that one day she would learn to keep a secret.

      A joyful smile took ten years off Ivy’s face. Ida Mae made a mental note to not tell any funny stories around her sister when eligible bachelors were in the vicinity.

      “Really? You’ll share?”

      She’d rather share a bowl of rat pellets. But there would be no stopping Ivy now. “Yes.”

      “Who?” her silver-haired sister asked, almost bouncing on her toes like a debutante.

      Ivy always had been man-crazy. Unlike Ida Mae, who simply liked men so much she sometimes felt the need to marry one for a while. “Just a stranger.”

      “A handsome one?”

      “No.”

      “Liar. Where’d you meet him?”

      She wasn’t lying. The stranger hadn’t been what you’d call handsome. More like, startling…striking. Vivid. That was a nice word for Mr. Potts.

      “Where?” Ivy pressed, reaching for Ida Mae’s collar again.

      “He moved into Stuttgardt’s old house.”

      Ivy wrinkled her nose. “That one…he was a nasty bad man.”

      “I know. Remember when Mama threatened him with a rifle if he didn’t stop coming to pester her into selling that land between his place and hers?”

      “Those clocks…”

      “The scandal…”

      They met each other’s eyes, sharing a quick, unspoken memory. Ida Mae half hoped her sister had gone off the scent and would forget all about the stranger. Ivy was almost as fascinated by murder as she was by men, and Wilhelm Stuttgardt’s had never been solved. The old German clockmaker had been dead and buried for five years but he was still talked about nearly every day. His villainy—and the money he’d stolen from the town, not to mention the pension funds he’d taken from his own employees at the clock factory—was fresh in everyone’s minds. Even her sister’s.

      Stuttgardt had lived in Trouble for more’n thirty years, but most folks still called him “the German.” Or “the Clockmaker.”

      Or just “the Thief.”

      He might have moved here at the age of twenty, planning to bring his silly, fussy clock-making business into their quiet, small community, but to Ida Mae’s mind, he’d never been one of them. She hadn’t been surprised that he’d eventually stolen anything he could get his hands on, bankrupting Trouble so that a few short years later it’d had to prostitute itself like a cheap street whore to stay alive.

      And she most definitely hadn’t been surprised that someone had made him pay for his crime. Pay hard.

      “Oh, yes, he was a bad one. Someone took care of him, though, didn’t they?” she said, hoping Ivy would now be good and distracted.

      Today, however, wasn’t her lucky day. Ivy wasn’t distracted for long. “Now, tell me everything about him. This newcomer.”

      Sighing, knowing she had no choice, Ida Mae began the tale. She told her sister about how she’d met the latest resident of their small hometown while picking over the badly wilting lettuce at Given’s Grocery in town.

      His name was Mr. Mortimer Potts. And despite his long, wild white hair, he was a gentleman. A true, noble, old-fashioned gent the likes of which hadn’t moved to these parts in many a year.

      And Ida Mae knew, by the gleam in her sister’s eye, that even though she, herself, was seventy-seven years old and Ivy seventy-five, they were once again about to embark upon their favorite pastime. Competing for a man.

      Maybe to the death.

      

      SABRINA COULDN’T DECIDE which was worse: staying in a tiny old B&B called the Dewdrop Inn, or the fact that it was run by a pseudo-nudist. At least the innkeeper, who had introduced himself as Al Fitzweather when she’d arrived yesterday at the crusty old house pretending to be an inn, was only a nudist on the weekends, and only in the backyard. Unlike the Dewdrop Inn, which was always as nauseating as its name would imply.

      She was still hearing Nancy’s laughter through the cell phone a full minute after she’d described the first day of her assignment in Trouble. While waiting for the laughter to stop, she concluded that the inn was worse than its owner. His dangly bits probably couldn’t compete in grossness with the fake grape arbor complete with Cupid statue, the heart-shaped bed and mirrored ceiling in her room, and the eight-person hot tub that probably contained the DNA of the last eighty people who’d been in it.

      The Dewdrop obviously longed to run off to the Poconos to be a star in the honeymoon biz.

      “So have you seen Mr. Hot Stuff yet?”

      Sabrina dropped the curtain and stepped away from her window. No longer distracted by the sight of her landlord—who, since it was a weekday, was mercifully clothed while doing yard work—she was able to give her full attention to her boss.

      She almost tossed out a quick, instinctive reply that, yes, she definitely had seen Mr. Hot Stuff, and he was an adorable mechanic who liked merry-go-rounds. One whose name she hadn’t even asked for, though she supposed she could excuse herself for that—the man had been attractive enough to make a woman forget her own name.

      But for some reason she wanted to keep that encounter to herself. “I haven’t. But I have made a connection and am going to get introduced to his grandfather today.” She threw off the instinctive dismay the word grandfather brought to her mind. “Max Taylor is staying with him, so I should have him directly in my line of sight within a few hours.”

      “Okay, but what about in the meantime?” Nancy said. “Have you learned anything that could be useful in defending against a possible lawsuit brought by the loverboy? That is still the objective, right?”

      Oh, yes, it definitely was. Sabrina ticked the whole plan off in her mind: stop the lawsuit, get the book into print so it could make a big splash, earn a promotion because of that big splashy book, and make more money so she could take care of Allie. Should be simple—four little steps to her goal.

      Too bad they suddenly seemed huge and insurmountable.

      “Yes, it’s still the objective.”

      “So what have you found out?”

      She perched on the edge of a desk, on which sat a greasy phone book blackened with graffiti drawings of bearded men and enormous phalluses, and a Bible blackened with graffiti of bearded Jesuses and enormous crosses. “I’ve heard people talking about him. According to my waitress last night, he’s Saint Max, the new benevolent lord who’s come to help his grandfather save them from disappearing off the map.”

      Huh. More likely he was working on making the panties disappear off every attractive young female in the vicinity.

      “From the sound of it, if there’s a town that should disappear from the map, it’s that one.”

      “Trouble, Pennsylvania, has definitely been hit with some hard times.”

      Not just hit with hard times, it’d been smacked about the head and shoulders with them. Then dipped in a tar of misery and feathered in dismay.

      “Makes the city look a little more appealing, huh?”

      “Philadelphia,

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