Double Dip Dilemma: A Cozy Mystery (Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book 5) by Constance Barker

 
     
     
    While the weather in Caesars Creek Georgia cools down in November, we do have a few warm and humid days on occasion, much to Stormi’s chagrin. Just as she gets use to the low humidity…Wham!…humid air enters the picture leaving her blond waves like limp noodles trailing down her back. This morning the dew point soared as she scampered into the store, right to the long mirror situated at the back wall behind the ice cream case of my shop The Frozen Scoop. Her face fell as she picked up the end of a few strands of hair.
     
    You have to understand, Stormi’s hair was her crowning glory. This short, curvy and sassy woman could handle extra pounds and gun wielding murderers, but frizz her hair and she’s on the warpath. She marched back to my shoppe’s door, opened it, and yelled into the wind.
     
    “Dang you Georgia humidity for taking the life out of my hair!”
     
    “Get a hat!” I heard someone yell from across the street.
     
    I watched as Stormi waved her hand and replied, “Thanks for the tip.”
     
    She turned around to look at me as the door to the shoppe swung closed. “My hair tip for the day from ol’ Charlie Ledbetter.”
     
    I laughed. Ol’ Charlie, as most of the town called him, was 90, smoked cigars, and drove a souped-up motorized wheelchair from his home two blocks from town. Every day he’d drive the wheelchair to the little hardware store across the street from my shoppe and sit on the bench in front of the store. The thing was, he would drive the wheelchair on the street. Luckily he didn’t have far to go and a slow moving sign was attached to a flimsy pole installed on the back of his wheelchair. So if you were several cars back driving down Main Street at a speed of 5 mph, and up ahead you witnessed the bobbing and weaving of an orange triangle above the tops of the vehicles in front of you, you knew what the hold up was.
     
    However, no one complained. The man was a WWII veteran who stormed Normandy Beach and enlisted in the army when he was 16. He lied on his enlistment form, something many young teenagers of today would never think of doing. Of course, it was different back then, or so I’m told. Not to say there aren’t kids today who wouldn’t fight for their country, but it’s a different generation. Fortunately, I knew two teenagers who were very bright and mindful of others. Samantha, or Sammy, my friend Paige and Bruce’s 17-year-old daughter, and her boyfriend Colton. Sammy helped at my shoppe when she could and Colton was a tech whiz who helped us with the shoppe’s video tapes during a murder investigation. I didn’t know it then, but in a few short minutes, all of us including the teens would be thrust into another mystery.
     
    I opened the cash register and put money in the slots. “You need to buy some kind of non-frizz hairspray Stormi.”
     
    “I’ve tried like 10 different kinds; nothing stands a chance against this darn Georgia humidity blanket. I’ve half a notion to cut it off and be done with it,” Stormi said as she pulled her hair into a ponytail.
     
    “Don’t cut it,” I exclaimed. “Greg would have a heart attack. You know he loves those long locks.”
     
    Greg Manning was Stormi’s main squeeze and one of Caesars Creek’s finest police officers. She’d been seeing him for several months but I couldn’t tell if she was as enamored with him as he was with her. Not that Greg was outspoken with his affection. Being a police officer, he was quite stoic, but once a week a dozen red roses showed up at the shoppe with her name on them. At first, she was excited by the weekly gift, but now it seemed she wasn’t that impressed. Perhaps Greg needed to change it up a bit.
     
    My own love life had received an infusion of late. Brandon, Stormi’s brother and I were dating. I was afraid it would be awkward at first, since we’d known each other since childhood, but it actually wasn’t. We still laughed and kidded one another as we