Black and Blueberry Die (A Fresh-Baked Mystery Book 11) by Livia J. Washburn Page A

days...but that day’s not here yet.”
    “How’d you and Danny wind up puttin’ in this shop together?”
    “We knew each other over in the sandbox.”
    “Sandbox?” Phyllis repeated.
    “Iraq,” Sam and Brian said at the same time.
    “Oh. You were in the army together.”
    “That’s right.” Brian smiled. “Grew up twenty miles apart, him over in Weatherford and me here in Benbrook, and they had to send us to the other side of the world for us to meet.”
    “From what my son said, I didn’t think Danny saw any combat.”
    “He didn’t. Neither of us did. We rotated in and out of the place during one of the relatively peaceful stretches and spent all of our time working on vehicles. We used to hear mortar attacks and small arms fire and IEDs going off, but none of it ever came close to us.”
    “You were lucky,” Sam said.
    Brian nodded and said, “Don’t I know it. Anyway, after we got to be friends over there, we talked about going into business together when we got home. It seemed like a good idea, and this is the sort of work we knew, so...” He shrugged. “We’ve been at it for a few years now.”
    “Has it been successful?” Phyllis asked. She already had a pretty good idea what the answer was, but she wanted to know what Brian would say.
    “We’ve kept our heads above water,” he replied. “Just barely sometimes. It takes a while to build a business.”
    “You made it past the first year,” Sam pointed out. “Most of ’em don’t, statistically speakin’.”
    “Yeah, but now it’s just me. I don’t know if I can do enough work to keep the place afloat, and anybody I could hire for what I can afford to pay wouldn’t be any good.” Brian shook his head. “Right now I’m just doing the best I can and taking it one day at a time. It’s a cliché, I know, but what else can I do?”
    “Well, we wish you luck,” Phyllis said.
    “There’s something else you can do,” Brian said. “Find out who killed Roxanne and get Danny out of jail, so he can come back here and give a guy a hand!”

Chapter 10

     
    “Well, if you went in there thinkin’ that fella was a suspect,” Sam said as they drove away from the paint and body shop a few minutes later, “I reckon it didn’t pan out very well.”
    “You don’t think there’s any chance he could have killed Roxanne?” Phyllis asked.
    “Why would he? As far as I can see, Danny bein’ in jail hasn’t done anything except put him in a bind. He’s liable to lose his business. He doesn’t have any motive for hurting Danny or Roxanne.”
    “What if it was a crime of passion?”
    Sam glanced over at her but didn’t take his eyes off the road for long.
    “You mean if there was somethin’ goin’ on between Brian and Roxanne?”
    “He’s a good-looking young man, she was a good-looking young woman—”
    “A good-looking young married woman.”
    “If the past few years have taught us anything, Sam, it’s that a lot of people don’t take their marriage vows very seriously.”
    “I always did,” he said.
    “So did I. But we’ve seen plenty of evidence to the contrary.”
    “That’s true, I suppose,” he admitted. “Depressin’ly so, sometimes.”
    “Yes.” Phyllis nodded slowly. “But we have absolutely nothing to indicate that might be the case here. I suppose I could ask Danny about it...”
    “He might not give you a straight answer,” Sam cautioned. “They might’ve kept it a secret from him, or he might not want to admit it, even to himself.” He frowned in thought. “I suppose I could drop in on some of the other businesses around there and maybe ask if anybody ever saw Roxanne over there when Danny wasn’t around. Once or twice might be a coincidence, but more than that...”
    That wasn’t a bad idea, Phyllis thought. Sam might not be a veteran detective, but with his aw-shucks, friendly-old-geezer demeanor, he could get anybody talking about almost anything without them ever realizing he was