A Minute on the Lips by Cheryl Harper

wasn’t low enough.
    Lynn laughed and answered, “How about a bottle of water? Will that do instead?”
    As she returned with the hair color and the water, the bell over the door rang and two ladies entered. When Andi saw Miss Margaret, a retired sixth-grade teacher, and her best friend, Edna, who’d been secretary at the First Baptist Church since Noah built the ark, she sighed in relief. Edna was the biggest gossip in town and didn’t need much to prime the pump. Normally Gram caught up with them at Purl’s Place, the town’s one-stop craft shop, which was run by Andi’s best friend, Tammy, and her mother. With a few well-placed questions, Andi could sit back and soak up the news. They were both decked out in the latest in grandma chic: blinged-out velour sweat suits.
    “Well, good morning there, Sheriff!” Miss Margaret still used her perky, let’s-all-get-ready-to-learn voice when she spoke to anyone under forty. That made sense. She’d been the first person to tell Andi she needed good grades to get into college. Andi probably hadn’t even thought about college at eleven, but it had been good advice and it stuck with her.
    Miss Margaret had helped her get out of Tall Pines the first time. She might not have recommended a double major in Mandarin and Persian Studies, but it’s hard to tell where life’s twisting paths will take a tween. They’d been highly sought after fields for FBI work. For retail jobs in Tall Pines? Not so much.
    “Hi, Miss Margaret.” Andi would have nodded also, but Lynn was slowly moving over her head with a smelly, frothy paintbrush. Every now and then one sprig of hair would flop over her eye. She tried not to think about how ridiculous she might look to anyone who glanced in the window. And she pasted on a smile of greeting for Edna. When the two ladies were settled in chairs with Sue and Rhonda, two stylists in the shop, Lynn threw out the first volley. “Did you hear about the fight Amanda and her husband got into last weekend at the Smokehouse?”
    Everybody knew someone who’d been there at the time, which might or might not have been true but it was a popular place. Apparently George had been spending too much time out on the lake instead of manning the smoker and Amanda’d had enough. Andi squirmed through that conversation, certain her date with the newspaper man would be the next hot topic. She told herself she was hanging on every word because a good sheriff knew clues could come from the most unlikely places. Lynn finished up the hair color and had Andi move over to one of the more comfortable chairs in the waiting area. She took a long drink of water while she listened to the conversation swirling around the shop. When they’d finished enumerating the long list of people who were fighting, going on vacation and coming home from the hospital, Andi cleared her throat. “Uh, Lynn, are we almost done with the first round?”
    Lynn nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Let me go set up for the highlights and it’ll be time.”
    Margaret and Edna continued to flutter and flit through all the juicy stories. Andi watched the hand on the clock. At some point, someone would ask her about Jackie. And if she was lucky, no one would ask her about Mark Taylor. And then it happened.
    “Why, Sheriff,” Miss Margaret said, “I meant to ask you this when we came in, but can you tell us about what happened at the diner?”
    Andi heaved a mental sigh. The best course was to stick with the facts. Any time Andi gave her opinion, it came back through the grapevine as gospel. “Yesterday morning Jackie called me over to the Country Kitchen because someone broke in and took the contents of his safe and his trophies. I don’t have any new developments at this point, but I’ll be interviewing people today. I hope to have some more information for Jackie tomorrow.”
    “The newspaper man was a suspect,” Edna said.
    Miss Margaret tsked. “Some people will try to pin every bad thing on the