Death by Devil's Breath by Kylie Logan

the room and scooped up the Chili Chick costume I’d left on a chair when I ducked out to talk to Bernadette. As soon as Sylvia came back from lunch, I’d get into the costume and start dancing again. But until then . . .
    Well, until then, I had the Palace to mind.
    A group of middle-aged women trooped in, ooh ing and ahh ing, looking around, and asking questions. Big points for Nick. While I took care of them and rang up their sales, he didn’t take the opportunity to run.
    In fact, once the ladies were gone—shopping bags with Jack’s face on them in hand—he said, “So tell me about Jack and Bernadette. What’s the connection?”
    I refused to let him see how relieved I was that he’d finally seen the light and come to the realization of how important this might be. I’d been looking for Jack since the moment Tumbleweed called and told me I had to get to the Showdown because Jack was missing. And I’d gotten absolutely . . .
    My shoulders drooped.
    Nowhere.
    No one had seen Jack. No one had talked to him. The cops back in Abilene insisted there was no sign of foul play, and though Gert, she of the too-cute dishtowels and crockery at the shop next door, had thrown out a couple tantalizing hints that she might know something, she wasn’t talking. In fact, she insisted she couldn’t.
    Now—finally—I felt as if we might be on the verge of finding out something, and just imagining that Bernadette might be the break I was looking for made me feel as if I’d pop right out of my skin.
    So Nick wouldn’t notice and accuse me of being too imaginative or too optimistic or just too plain stupid to know not to get all excited about something it might not be any use getting excited about, I reorganized the bags of peppers and jars of chili powder the women had messed up in their buying enthusiasm. “Bernadette worked at the Showdown. A long time ago. That should be some kind of clue right there. It was a long time ago.” I looked at Nick over the bottles of cumin, paprika, and oregano I’d stacked in a Sylvia-worthy tower. “Anybody who holds a torch for a guy that long—”
    “Oh, come on.” Nick leaned a forearm on the counter and smiled at me over a display of Thermal Conversion. It’s one of our most popular chili powders simply because it’s a middle-of-the-road sort of spice. Not too wimpy, not too hot.
    That is, until that smile zipped through the air between us. I swear, the SHU (that’s Scoville Heat Units, the scale used to measure the spiciness of a chili pepper) went up a couple thousand points in every single jar of Thermal Conversion.
    “Are you telling me there are guys you forget?” he asked. “Just like that?”
    I wasn’t sure where the conversation was headed; I only knew it was a direction I didn’t want to go. Heat or no heat—and believe me, when Nick looked at me that way, there was plenty of heat—we were talking about Jack. About finding Jack. And finding Jack was the main reason I was traveling the chili circuit. Well, that, and getting away from the creditors who were all over me like ants at a picnic once Edik drained my bank account and maxed out my credit cards.
    “I don’t think fifteen years qualifies as just like that. And it’s been about fifteen years. You think she would have moved on by now, don’t you?”
    “Like you would.”
    I grabbed a bag of tepin peppers and winged it at him. Too bad Nick had such good reflexes. I aimed for his stomach, but he caught it in midair. “We’re not talking about me,” I reminded him. I shouldn’t have had to. “We’re talking about a woman who knew my dad fifteen years ago and still has pictures of him surrounded by candles.” Remembering the altar in the closet, I shivered. “Sheesh! Some of the pictures looked like they’d been taken back in the day. But some of them looked like they’d been printed off our website. Come on, Nick, admit it. That’s downright creepy.”
    Nick tossed the bag of tepins back to