Something Borrowed, Something Bleu by Cricket McRae

light slanted behind the classroom building to illuminate the waxy, translucent skin of his face.
His eyes were closed. His chest was perfectly still.
Beside me, Tabby sucked in a shuddering breath as if to compensate for her husband’s lack of respiration. Then, before I could stop her, she shouldered me aside and fell to her knees, reaching for Joe’s shoulder.
I opened my mouth to say God-knows-what—Don’t do that? To comfort her? To swear?—but snapped my jaw closed again in silence as she turned him over and I saw the other side of his head.
Let’s just say it wasn’t round anymore.
Tabby recoiled, scrabbling back like a drunken crab. She almost fell, but I grasped her arms from behind and managed to steady her. Slowly, she stood and leaned back against me. Her rapid breathing mingled with the murmurs of turtledoves in the nearby trees.
Gradually, she calmed. I released her, and she turned to face me. Her ice-blue eyes echoed a resounding sadness. “Joe really did it this time.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Did what?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head.
My eyes returned to the dead man, surrounded by shards of the murder weapon: a glass bottle of heavy cream, by the looks of it. I sighed. My tendency to find dead bodies had apparently followed me across state lines all the way to Colorado.
It was getting so I felt like I should come with a warning label.
    _____
     
     
    The sheriff’s department arrived quickly without benefit of lights and sirens. Tabby and I perched on the edge of one of the landscape timbers that defined the dairy’s small parking lot. We stood up as two men simultaneously exited their respective vehicles and warily approached.
I stepped forward and nodded a perfunctory greeting. “He’s around the corner there.”
The two men consulted each other with a look then turned toward the sound of a siren approaching from the west. A green-and-white ambulance roared down the road toward us. The driver slid to a stop on the gravel, barely missing the Subaru. She boiled out of the cab and started toward the deputies.
Raising my hand, I called, “There’s no big hurry.”
“I think you’d better let us be the judge of that,” said the first deputy.
The two of them looked like Jack Spratt and his … life partner? Short and stout and tall and thin. Both men were clean shaven and wore navy Smokey the Bear hats.
“Of course,” I said, chastened.
A man hopped out of the passenger seat of the ambulance, and all four of them went around the corner. Tabby and I stayed put. I sure didn’t want another look at Joe, and no doubt she felt the same way.
I looked sidelong at her. Her hands were tucked into her back pockets, and her shoulders slumped forward under the invisible burden of her husband’s death. She stared down at the dirt with red-rimmed eyes, unblinking.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
She nodded but didn’t say anything. I encircled her shoulders with my arm and squeezed. There was no response, and after a few minutes it felt awkward enough that I let my hand fall to my side.
Two vans arrived. Their occupants were hatless and one wore a dark jumpsuit. Crime scene investigators? I pointed to where the others had gone, and one of them nodded. They went around the corner, too.
Then another county vehicle came down the road, a big Suburban this time, and the small parking lot was officially full. The SUV stopped. The door opened. Cowboy boots emerged below it, and a large man stepped out. He had thick ginger hair streaked with gray and a luxuriant moustache topped his lip. Broad shouldered, thin hipped, and wearing sunglasses, he looked like a quintessential lawman. He reached back into the car and drew out what had to be a non-regulation hat. Not Smokey the Bear for him, no sir. He clapped the brown Stetson on his head and started toward us.
Tabby watched his approach with wary eyes. He stopped in front of her and nodded. “Ms. Bines.”
“Sheriff Jaikes,” she said.
Under that thick moustache he had thin lips and