Strung Out to Die by Tonya Kappes

to my side.
    “What are you doing here?” I asked Sean as I bent down to pat Willow.
    One pat was all she needed before she snorted her way back to the storage room to get far away from Marlene’s heels.
    It was hard not to stare at Sean and his shaggy blonde hair with natural highlights from working outside in the sun. That was another thing I hated about him. If I wanted those subtle streaks, I’d have to pay an arm and a leg for them, and his sketchy alimony payments wouldn’t allow for that.
    My eyes couldn’t help themselves. They traveled up his tanned and nicely toned legs, followed the lines of his brown cargo shorts, and over the curves of his arms. His black t-shirt emphasized his tan. It was amazing to me that a man wanted to stay tan all year round. He was a carpenter, and he did a lot of outside work, but one of the Divas saw him leaving Tan Your Hide.
    “I got your message and I need to talk to you too.” The way his green eyes pierced my soul gave me chills. He sneezed.
    “Bless you,” I said, not really meaning it. It just came out automatically. “Are you getting sick?”
    He sneezed again. “I don’t think so.” He rubbed his nose.
    There were a couple of customers picking through the clearance bead section at the front of the shop. Marlene walked over to see if they had any questions, leaving me free to speak privately with Sean.
    I crossed my arms to hide my stomach, and I noticed a disappointed look in his eyes. I couldn’t press too hard on my midsection. I was a bit sore from my daily walks. It was good sore,  so maybe the walks around the lake were doing some good. The small ache made me want to walk more.
    He’d never approved of any type of elastic in my wardrobe, and when I’d hit double digits, his words were as dangerous as machine gun bullets.
    “You didn’t let anyone see what size that was when you bought it, did you?” He said once, and then he went down to The Livin’ End and didn’t return until the wee hours of the night.
    “Doug Sloan was killed right there.” I pointed to where his body was discovered just a few short days ago. I continued to separate the beads on the counter that Marlene had started. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
    The customers scattered like flies when they heard me raise my voice.
    “I’m going to get a cup of coffee.” Marlene said, and grabbed her purse from behind the counter.
    “Damn,” I threw my hands in the air, “I can’t afford to run people off.”
    I held my breath to hear what he had to say, hoping he would answer quickly, because I was never good at holding it for long.
    “You saw me leave The Livin’ End that night, right?” He leaned on his forearm across the counter.
    I pushed his arm off the counter. There was no way I wanted to spend a Saturday cleaning the top of the glass because of Sean’s arm fog. I hesitated before I answered. Making him sweat it out made me pleased as punch.
    “Right?” He asked. There was a pleading tone in his voice.
    “Are you talking about when Noah Druck came to question me about me being at The Livin’ End because a little bird told him I was there?” I narrowed my eyes. “Or the fact you might’ve killed Doug Sloan right here in my shop?”
    Sean looked down at his feet and took a few steps back.
    The look was a dead give-away that he was the one who’d told Noah I was at The Livin’ End that night. As much as I wanted to see Sean behind bars, I didn’t think he was a killer or even had the intelligence to use a string of beads. Cracking Doug’s head with a hammer was more his style, not anything to do with fashion.
    “Oh.” His usually bright smile was covered with tightly pressed lips.
    “Did he tell you that Doug was strangled with a strand of beads just like these?”
    I walked over to the hanging shelves and noticed the strand was missing. It was there yesterday. I quickly searched through the other hundreds of strands of hanging beads to