Death Before Decaf by Caroline Fardig Page A

anything to do with that?”
    Feeling better by the second, I admitted, “My knee may have made contact.”
    Seth grinned at me, impressed. “I guess you don’t need me to beat him up for you, then. Need another drink?”
    “Please.”
    Seth didn’t ask any more questions on the subject, so we sat in silence for a while, listening to the musician onstage. His style was much like mine had been—acoustic, singer songwriter–type music. He was quite good, although I didn’t recognize his name. There was a small dance floor in front of the stage, and a few couples were dancing.
    “Gertie tells me you used to be a singer,” Seth said, startling me.
    “Um, right. Used to be.”
    “Were you good?”
    I hesitated. I had thought I was pretty good, and my small-venue concert tours had done well. However, my career had still gone down in flames. “I was okay.”
    “So why are you working at a coffeehouse instead of being up on a stage somewhere?”
    “Long story.” It was also a story I didn’t care to tell.
    He slid over until he was sitting next to me and draped his arm around the back of the booth. “I’ve got time.”
    Even though I liked being so close to him, I still wasn’t ready to open up. My stage-fright issues were some heavy shit. “I meant I don’t like to talk about it.”
    His mouth pulled up in the corner. His lips looked awfully kissable. Yep, Seth was going to be the perfect distraction for all of my troubles. “You don’t want to talk about much, do you?”
    I looked at him. “I don’t want to talk at all.”
    Picking up on my cue, he leaned toward me, taking my face in his hands and gently brushing my lips with his. I melted into him, pressing my lips to his. He responded by putting his arms around me and pulling me closer, his kiss becoming deeper and more urgent. Seth certainly knew what he was doing, and I got caught up in the moment.
    He pulled back and looked at me, smiling. “Dance with me.”
    I agreed, and he led me out to the dance floor, where we did a lot more kissing than dancing. Seth was a fantastic kisser, he was interesting and funny, and he was incredibly handsome. So why in the hell were my thoughts suddenly straying to Pete?
    —
    Seth drove me back to Java Jive, where I picked up my car. He kissed me good night (a lot) and said he’d see me tomorrow. I went to my apartment and did what any woman who was interested in a new man would do: I cyberstalked him.
    The problem was, although “Seth Davis, professor of film studies” got several Google hits, none of them showed that he had anything to do with Vanderbilt. I searched around on Vanderbilt’s website and came up empty-handed. He had told me that he just started working there at the beginning of the semester, but seriously, why wouldn’t their website have been updated? It didn’t seem very Vandy-ish of them to not provide up-to-the-minute information. Oh, well. I was sure there was a reasonable explanation for it.
    It wasn’t terribly late, so I shifted the focus of my cyberstalking to Charlene’s three suspects. The bar fight guy would be impossible to find until I went back to The Dirty Duck and found out his name. Dave’s sister Gina’s baby daddy, Billy McClintock, was simple to find mainly because he had a very open Facebook page, not surprisingly filled with a lot of public Facebook fights and rants. Dumbass even had his address listed for all the world to see. After some more searching, I realized that it was the address of the house he shared with Gina, which he had just gotten kicked out of. Oh, well, it wouldn’t hurt to talk to Gina, too, and maybe I could get his new address from her. There were several Ron Hatchers in Nashville, which wasn’t too surprising. He was a bookie, so it wasn’t like he advertised on social media, but the right Ron couldn’t be terribly hard to find by asking around. My problem was that I didn’t know who to ask. Maybe Pete would.
    I called Pete. “Hey, if I were