Black Widow by Jennifer Estep Page B

wall close to the cash register. My own little tribute to Fletcher, since that was the book he’d been reading the night he was tortured to death in the Pork Pit.
    I hadn’t been able to save Fletcher, but I wouldn’t lose his restaurant too. I would find a way to beat Madeline at her own game, as dark, dangerous, and twisted as it was. I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance, not anymore, so I went over and took the framed book off the wall, along with a photo of Fletcher and his friend Warren T. Fox, taken back when they were young.
    â€œGin?” Silvio asked, wondering what I was doing.
    I came around the end of the counter and handed him the frames. “Here. Keep these safe for me. Please.”
    Most folks would have thought it strange that I was so concerned about a battered book and an old photo, but Silvio nodded and took them without a word, slipping them both into his briefcase.
    â€œMy car is down the block,” he said. “I’ll wait for you there.”
    He nodded, then turned and left the restaurant, opening and closing the door so carefully that the bell barely made a whisper at his passing.
    I walked over to the door and started to follow him, but something made me stop and turn around.
    My gaze swept over the storefront, so familiar with its booths and tables and the pig tracks curling across the floor, but yet so very different right now, with its empty seats and dirty dishes and crushed napkins that littered everything. Even though the sun was shining brightly outside, beating in through the yellow notices taped up to the windows, the interior still seemed dim and dull and sad.
    Hollow, just like my heart.
    But there was nothing I could do to fix it right now, and Sophia needed my help.
    So I clicked off the lights, turned the sign on the door over to Closed , and left the Pork Pit.
    *  *  *
    I locked the front door behind me, hurried down the sidewalk, and slipped into the passenger’s seat of Silvio’s navy-blue Audi. A blue-and-pink pin shaped like the neon pig sign outside the restaurant dangled from thecar’s rearview mirror. Of course, the real sign above the front door was dark now, since I’d turned off all the lights, but the crystals in the pin sparkled in the afternoon sun, as bright, colorful, and vibrant as ever. It comforted me.
    Silvio cranked the engine and pulled away from the curb. While he drove toward the station, I pulled my phone out of my jeans pocket and hit one of the numbers in the speed dial.
    She answered on the third ring. “Yes, darling?”
    Jolene “Jo-Jo” Deveraux’s voice filled my ear, but it wasn’t the soft, sweet, Southern drawl I expected. Instead, Jo-Jo’s voice was harsh, clipped, and angry. I opened my mouth to answer her, but a loud screech-screech-screech cut me off, followed by a series of bang-bang-bang-bang s.
    I frowned. “Jo-Jo? What’s that noise? What’s wrong?”
    She huffed in my ear. “Apparently, someone didn’t like the perm I gave her last week and is claiming that I burned her scalp and made all her hair fall out. A bunch of folks from the health inspector’s office are here, plowing through the salon, scraping paint off the walls, and making a mess of everything. Now they’re saying that I’ve got black mold everywhere, even though I just remodeled the entire salon a few months ago.”
    My hand tightened around my phone. So Madeline had sicced the health department on Jo-Jo too, and from the sound of things, they were demolishing the dwarf’s beauty salon in the back of her antebellum home. I’d wondered why Madeline had spent so much time ingratiating herself with all the civic and other groups in town. Now she was making all those connections and all that money she’d spread around work for her.
    â€œAnd, to top it off, I’ve got a bunch of stuck-up snobs from the historical association here,”