Leslie Kelly - Here Comes Trouble

“Perfect,” she said, meaning it. That would allow her the chance to find the B&B where she’d made a reservation, get settled in and prepare to accomplish her objective.

A good night’s sleep would be helpful before going on a clandestine sex campaign.

Hopefully, by tomorrow, Sabrina would have gotten a grip on her libido and would be able to shove her attraction to this sweet, sexy mechanic aside. And focus only on the wicked, soulless playboy she’d come here to expose.

IDA MAE MONROE AND Ivy Helmsley—better known as the Feeney sisters—had been fighting over men since they were two willowy slips of girls. It had started way back in forty-three when Ida Mae was fourteen and her sister Ivy only twelve and Ida Mae’s beau, Buddy Hoolihan, threw Ivy’s lunch pail down the well at his daddy’s farm. Ida Mae laughed, though she did feel a bit bad for Ivy, ’specially since their mama had made corn bread for their lunches that day.

But sisters were only sisters and boys were better. So, deciding she’d give Ivy her pretty new yellow hair ribbon later that night, Ida Mae cheered Buddy on during his tormenting.

Then Ivy began to cry like her heart would break. Just like that, Buddy went all gooey-soft. He apologized to Ivy, put his arm around her and looked at a still-laughing Ida Mae like her heart was black as coal. Ivy batted her lashes at him, stuck her tongue out at Ida Mae…and silently declared a war that lasted for more than half a century.

The sisters had battled over Buddy throughout grade school, but moved on to other boys—and men—as the years progressed. Usually bloodlessly. But not always.

Eventually, after their mama had died, they both left town, married fellas from the outside, and each tried to keep her husband away from her man-stealing sister.

They’d realized, however, somewhere around 1980 when they’d both been widowed—Ivy more than once—that life just wasn’t as much fun without a sister around to love to hate. So they moved back to Trouble and promptly resumed their feud.

Ida Mae called Ivy the black widow spider.

Ivy called Ida Mae the cold-hearted bride of Satan.

But God forbid anyone else call one of the sisters as much as miserly, for the other one would let loose a razor-blade tongue to defend her.

They lived next door to each other, on the north side of town in two ramshackle old houses that had once been Victorian but could now only be called sorry. Some days they sat in Ida Mae’s kitchen drinking tea while arguing over who Buddy Hoolihan had loved more. And some evenings they sat on Ivy’s front porch drinking bourbon while arguing over which of them had the tinier waist back in the day. Sometimes they merely sipped daisy wine and reminisced about the men they’d killed.

Most often, though, they talked about Mama. How she’d laughed. How she’d made the best pumpkin bread. How she’d tanned them when they were bad. How she’d taught them which poison to use on a man who was a little too free with his fists, or who couldn’t keep his man-parts safely buttoned in his own trousers or between his wedded wife’s legs.

This would inevitably lead to arguments about their daddy, whom both of them had loved to pieces when they were children. Whether Mama really murdered him, and whether Daddy truly had deserved it.

Ida Mae thought she did and he probably had.

Ivy thought she did but he definitely had not.

The argument—or any number of other ones—would eventually lead one of them to steal the beautiful Sears, Roebuck urn with the glossy faux mother-of-pearl handles—which was full of Daddy’s ashes—and hide it so the other one couldn’t say good-night to him. Which was why Ida Mae was currently tugging all the flour, sugar, stale chocolate chips and dried-up boxes of prunes out of Ivy’s dusty pantry.

“It’s not your turn to take care of Daddy, it’s mine. I have him until tomorrow night, sundown!”

Ivy was smiling as she watched from the other side of her kitchen. Curling her fingers together and resting her hands on the cracked linoleum surface of her faded, yellow kitchen table, she merely watched, a satisfied gleam in her eye. “Seems to me that he was feeling a little ignored.”

Ida Mae glared at her sister, knowing by Ivy’s expression that she wasn’t even close in her hunt for Daddy’s ashes. Ivy wouldn’t be smiling like that if she were. If her sister had put Daddy on the roof again and Ida Mae had to climb out the third-story window, she was going to snatch her bald.

“I haven’t ignored him.”

“You were gone for two hours yesterday,” Ivy replied. “Two whole hours and heaven only knows where you were. I thought we were going to start talking about the next book we’re going to write.”

Ivy had it in her head that the two of them could be the next Agatha Christie, even though the one murder book they wrote a few years back never had gotten sold anywhere. “Nobody’s been killed around here in years, so we don’t have anything to write about,” Ida Mae retorted, hoping to change the subject.

It didn’t work. “We’ll discuss that later. Now, tell me what sneaky things you were up to yesterday.”

Ida Mae felt hotness in her cheeks, the kind of heat she hadn’t had rush through her since she’d gone through the change twenty-five years ago. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Her hawk-eyed sister noticed. “You’re blushing.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“Why? Where were you? What aren’t you telling me?” Ivy braced her hands on the table. Pushing herself up with her strong, wiry arms, she rose on her spindly legs. She tottered over on those ridiculous high-heeled shoes that her vanity kept her from tossing into the trash heap where they could rest with Ivy’s youth.

The heels put her nose to nose with Ida Mae—another reason Ida hated them—and Ivy took full advantage. Staring so hard her eyes almost bugged out, Ivy pasted on that mulish expression that said she wasn’t going to give up until Ida Mae came clean with her secret.

But, no. Not this one. She wouldn’t.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, she didn’t have to.

“It’s a man!”

Damnation, her sister was a know-it-all.

“Who? Who? Who?” Ivy chirped, like a greedy baby hoot owl opening its mouth for a still-wiggling worm dangling from its mama’s beak.

“Don’t be so foolish…”

Ivy grabbed the front of Ida Mae’s blouse—her favorite one, with the little birds stitched on the collar. She knew how much Ida Mae liked birds because Ivy had stitched the thing herself as a Christmas gift. “Bye-bye, blackbird,” she whispered in a singsong voice as she began to pluck at the threads with the long tips of her nails.

“Stop it.”

“Who is he?”

Ivy wasn’t going to stop. She’d tear the delicate birds right off her blouse, then move on to something else Ida Mae loved, until she got what she wanted. The name. Ida Mae knew it…because she’d have done exactly the same thing.

“All right,” she snapped, determined that one day she would learn to keep a secret.

A joyful smile took ten years off Ivy’s face. Ida Mae made a mental note to not tell any funny stories around her sister when eligible bachelors were in the vicinity.

“Really? You’ll share?”

She’d rather share a bowl of rat pellets. But there would be no stopping Ivy now. “Yes.”

“Who?” her silver-haired sister asked, almost bouncing on her toes like a debutante.

Ivy always had been man-crazy. Unlike Ida Mae, who simply liked men so much she sometimes felt the need to marry one for a while. “Just a stranger.”

“A handsome one?”

“No.”

“Liar. Where’d you meet him?”