In Shining Whatever (Three Magic Words Trilogy #2)(6)

Kate's detective mind went into overdrive. What had she been doing, and who really killed her? She wished this were all taking place back in New Iberia, Louisiana, where she'd been a detective for the police force. But despite a degree in criminal justice and several years on the force in Louisiana, these days she was a waitress at the Three Amigos and had no badge to give her the rights to ask anyone anything.

She returned to her pew, sat down, and let her mind go back in time.

It had all started fifteen years before. She'd been infatuated with Hart from grade school, but he was way out of her league. Then that summer when she was fifteen and he was seventeen, he broke up with Stephanie for a few weeks ...

She'd met Sophie and Fancy at the elementary school playground late one evening. Fancy was seeing a worthless boy, Chris Miller, against her mother's wishes, and when he showed up, they went off hand-in-hand to the other side of the building. A pickup skidded to a stop, and Hart appeared from the twilight cloud of dust. He sat down on the merry-go-round beside her.

He'd barely said hello when Sophie's mother had driven up and taken her home. But Kate and Hart had talked for another thirty minutes. Her flip-flops had barely touched the ground when she'd walked home. They'd met on the playground a few more times, shared a few kisses, and then the night had come when he had told her that he and Stephanie had made up and were getting back together.

When she got home that evening, her mother gave her the news that they were moving to New Iberia, Louisiana. Her father had the promise of a foreman's job on a sugar plantation. The next night, she met her two best friends at the playground again. Sophie's dad was an oil well driller and his job was taking him to northern Oklahoma. Then Fancy moved to someplace in Florida.

The three friends were split up for the first time in their lives but stayed in touch. Then Sophie moved back to Baird to live with her Aunt Maud, while she figured out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life after her husband's death. Kate's father died in Louisiana, and her mother, Mary, wanted to come home to Breckenridge to be around her large Mexican family. Fancy's grandmother, Hattie, fell and broke her hip, so Fancy offered to move to Albany for a year and teach school there so she could see after Hattie.

Sophie slid into the pew beside Kate. "You are early."

Sophie wore a dark green suit with a lighter green silk shirt, a leftover from her preacher's-wife days. Her kinky, strawberryblond hair had been tamed into an updo and roped down with a big clip. Her eyes were the color of heavy fog, smoky gray.

"Got the time wrong," Kate said.

Fancy joined them from the other end of the pew. "I'm here! Thought I was going to be late. Thought it was at two, but then I called Theron and he said it was two-thirty."

Her navy blue dress and matching jacket fit snugly. At barely five feet tall, she looked more like a little girl playing dress up in her mother's clothes than a bona fide thirty-year-old former schoolteacher.

People began to filter in by twos and threes until the church was almost full. At 2:25 goose bumps tingled on the back of Kate's neck. She'd worn her long black hair twisted up in a severe knot on the top of her head, secured with two wooden picks that resembled chopsticks. She wished she'd worn it down to cover the crimson rash already making her itch.

No doubt about it, Hart had arrived.

He stood for a few minutes at the back of the church, then sat down on the end of the pew right in front of Kate. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"I'd forgotten how handsome he is," Fancy whispered behind the memorial folder.

His blond curls lay on the back of a black Western-cut suit collar, and the aroma of his shaving lotion wafted to the pew behind him.

"You got your forever thing, lady. That fulfilled the three magic words. Me and Sophie don't get ours," Kate whispered back.

Fancy had always said that she would never marry anyone but a Greek god. Blond hair. Six feet tall and built like a ... well, a Greek god. When they asked her if she hadn't married because she hadn't found her Greek god, she'd told them she'd grown up since then and now she wanted someone to fulfill the three magic words. They figured the words were "I love YOU."

But Fancy said they were the promise of a forever thing. Sophie had laughed and said her magic words would be "life after wife." She wanted to know that someone could be true and faithful after the wedding, someone who could give her a life after she became a wife.

Kate remembered her own words well. She wanted a knight in shining ... and that was where she got stuck and couldn't remember armor. She was a detective and couldn't remember a simple word like that. So she'd waved it off with a giggle and said, "a knight in shining ... whatever." They'd teased her about it ever since.

"Please stand for the family," the preacher said.

Hart turned his head slightly when the family started down the aisle. He nodded ever so slightly at Kate but didn't smile. His light green eyes were serious and his angular face noncommittal. She couldn't tell what he was thinking. Was he hurting because of what could have been and wasn't? Was he wishing that he'd married Stephanie?

The preacher said a prayer, and there was a rustling as everyone settled into the pews and got ready for the service. The president of Stephanie's senior class gave the obituary. She was born on this date and died at the age of so many years, months, days, and hours old. She left behind a grandmother, her parents, and a loving husband.