Return to Fender Read online

  Table of Contents

  Other Books from Virginia Brown

  Return to Fender

  Dedication

  Caution

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About Virginia Brown

  Promo Page

  Find out who’s trying to kill one of the best-known drag queens in Memphis? No problem. Harley’s on the case. Until someone decides she’s getting a little too close to the truth . . .

  Halloween’s just around the corner and business is brisk at Memphis Tour Tyme. Harley doesn’t need an extra job, but when her pal Tootsie asks her to help Jordan Cleveland, his fellow drag queen, she can’t resist poking around in a mystery. How dangerous could it be for her? After all, Jordan’s the target of the threats, not her. He’s had his brake line cut, a concrete flower pot dropped over his head, a pickup truck nearly ran him down, and someone tried to push him off a sidewalk into heavy traffic. He and Harley think his ex-wife is the most likely culprit, but after Jordan is sideswiped by a car and ends up in the hospital, trouble starts to turn Harley’s way. The next thing she knows, she’s dangling off the side of the city’s famous Peabody Hotel while an anonymous thug tells her to mind her own business . . . or else.

  Things can only get worse, and she ought to heed the demands of her hunky police boyfriend, Mike Morgan, who’s really worried. Even the guests at a local Halloween party start to look like suspects. Maybe the guy dressed up as Jay-Z is out to get her. Or one of the Kardashian sisters.

  But how dangerous can it be to leave the party just long enough to retrieve her brother’s coveted Fender guitar from Tootsie’s empty house? Harley will return safe and sound, right?

  Other Books from Virginia Brown

  Virginia Brown is the author of more than fifty novels in romance, mystery and general fiction.

  Bell Bridge Books is proud to publish these Virginia Brown titles.

  The Dixie Diva Mysteries

  Dixie Divas * Drop Dead Divas

  Dixie Diva Blues * Divas and Dead Rebels

  The Blue Suede Memphis Mysteries

  Hound Dog Blues * Harley Rushes In

  Suspicious Mimes * Return to Fender

  Mystery/Drama

  Dark River Road

  (Winner of the Eppie Award for Mainstream Fiction)

  Historical Romance

  Comanche Moon * Capture the Wind

  Wildflower * Wildest Heart

  Also Available

  Savage Awakening * Defy the Thunder

  Storm of Passion * Wild Heart

  Legacy of Shadows * Moonflower

  Desert Dreams * Heaven Sent

  Wildfire * Renegade Embrace

  Emerald Nights * Hidden Touch

  Wildflower * Wildest Heart

  Jade Moon * Highland Hearts

  Return to Fender

  by

  Virginia Brown

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-307-8

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-290-3

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2013 by Virginia Brown

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Cover Art © Christine Griffin

  :Mfrt:01:

  Dedication

  For my mom, Dorothy Leathers Lipsey, who is pretty amazing herself!

  Caution

  Do not try this at home. What worked for Scarface may not work for you.

  Prologue

  DISASTER . . .

  It had to be a joke. Right? This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. It had to be a joke. A loop of gauzy spider web flapped at her, tendrils streaming like long fingers.

  Harley shivered. Fuzzy light from the full moon flirted behind clouds. She didn’t want to believe her eyes, but the evidence lay right before her: a familiar hat and a corpse, feet sticking up out of the ground, the head still under a mound of dirt. A weathered-looking headstone poked up behind it, leaning drunkenly; thick spider webs strung from the top of it to the bony hands of a plastic skeleton propped up against a nearby oak. It was only forgotten Halloween decorations. The grinning head tilted to one side, and a black rubber spider as big as a dinner plate dangled from a tree limb. It swayed in the wind and cast eerie shadows over the cemetery. Fog hovered above the damp ground.

  It was a scene straight out of a horror movie. Cemetery Man. I Sell the Dead. Grave Encounters 2. And the classic, Pet Sematary.

  It was a joke, right? But what if it wasn’t? What if—no, it had to be a joke. A prank. Someone was trying to punk her. Probably Eric to get even with her for the ferret thing. That’s all it was. A joke. And yet . . . it looked so real.

  Harley shook her head. This was ridiculous. Why be afraid when it was just a prank? She took two bold steps forward. Okay. She’d play the game, and then she’d get even. Still, her heartbeat escalated, and her mouth went dry, and she had to force her knees to bend as she knelt on the damp earth. Her fingers skimmed the turned clods of black dirt. Clumps stuck to her fingertips, and she carefully brushed them away. Slowly, the face emerged. Her stomach dropped. It wasn’t a joke.

  “Holy hell!” Harley yelped and tried to stand up and leap backward at the same time. She didn’t make it. Her feet slipped in the slick mud. Her arms pinwheeled, but it didn’t save her. She landed on the ground with a splat and sprawled on her back. Fear and disbelief clogged her throat and made her heart beat so hard her ribs ached. The urge to run like hell was overpowering. She kicked at the ground to wriggle as far away from the corpse as she could get. Panic set in when she got tangled in clingy filaments of the fake spider web. It clung to her like Silly String. The more she batted at it, the more entangled she became. Finally, with a mighty yank, she freed her hands of most of the web.

  Maybe it was the yank that put her off balance. Maybe not. It felt like she was pushed. Her cell phone flew out of her hand and into the air, and she went backward, tried to catch herself, but her hands skidded in the slick mud, and she slid from the mound and down into a deep hole. She landed with her shoulders at the bottom, her head tilted to one side, and her legs wedged up against the wall over her head. A little dazed from the fall, she blinked a few times, squinted up at a fuzzy patch of light about five feet above her head.

  As she lay there looking up at the small, rough rectangle of dim light, it dawned on Harley that she’d fallen into an open grave. Nightmare. Why hadn’t she paid attention t
o that little voice inside that had told her to stay home tonight? Or to Diva? But no. Now here she was in a grave. And no one around. This was not good.

  She wriggled around and tried to move, but her body only wedged tighter into the soft dirt. Spider web threads still clung to her face and snagged on her hands as she sank deeper into the mud and muck at the bottom. This wasn’t doing it. She’d end up here for the entire night if she didn’t figure a way out—and she had to get out. Whoever had left that body might come back. Now she was certain she’d been pushed. A sense of urgency prodded her to desperation. She clawed frantically at the dirt, succeeding only in freeing clods that fell on her head and tasted awful. She shuddered, then tried again.

  After several minutes of struggle, Harley managed to worm around enough to relieve the pressure on her twisted neck. It was cramped in the hole. Her feet still stuck up in the air, shoved up against raw earth, and her knees were practically under her chin. If she could just get her feet under her, she could stand and pull herself upright, then out of this dank, dark hole. Dammit, what were the odds of falling into an open grave? About par with an actual Elvis sighting, she figured. Yet here she was on her back in an open grave the size of a postage stamp and unable to get out.

  A shadow above her head caught her attention, and she tilted back to squint up at the ragged opening. Nothing but hazy moonlight shimmered at first, but then she caught an unmistakable glimpse of movement. Rescue!

  “Hey!” she shouted, “Hey! I’m down here and can’t get out!”

  There was no reply, no concerned face peering into the hole. After a moment the light disappeared behind a huge shadow, and then a load of dirt crashed down on her.

  Stunned, she scraped it off her face with her free hand and opened her mouth to loudly protest, but another load of dirt dumped into the hole. Harley spit dirt from her mouth, gagging a little. Damn them! What the hell? Suddenly she knew that whoever was up there knew she was down here—and intended to keep her here. Buried alive.

  Why hadn’t she listened to the inner warnings? Why hadn’t she listened to people who had tried to tell her to back off? But she hadn’t. Oh, no. She had to do it her way. Now look. And it had all started out so simply and safely . . .

  Chapter 1

  DISASTER IN Harley Jean Davidson’s life usually started out quietly. Then a simple decision on her part would trigger complications of monster proportions. She didn’t know how she had come to acquire this talent, but it was almost always a source of annoyance to her friends and family. Except her great-grandmother, who considered Harley a lively source of entertainment. However, since Nana was prone to odd behavior on occasion, her opinions were not always to be trusted.

  This muggy October day Harley was late for work, dodging traffic on Poplar Avenue in her little silver car while she listened to Nana protest the weather. A cell phone was not always a good thing.

  “A hurricane is coming our way,” Nana said with absolute conviction.

  “Nana, I doubt a hurricane will hit us. We’re too far from the coast. Memphis just gets rain and wind.” Harley wedged her new cell phone between her shoulder and ear and tried to shift gears, but the phone was about the size of a credit card. It defied her efforts to hold steady and shot out like a greased missile, fell to the floorboard and slid under the clutch pedal. It could have been a bigger problem, but it helped that she’d reached her destination. She wheeled into the parking lot behind the office, put her car in gear, turned off the ignition, retrieved her phone from the floorboard, and resigned herself to waiting out Nana’s “time for meds” conversation.

  Nana hadn’t noticed her brief absence. She was in the middle of blowing a rather rude raspberry, quickly followed by the end of her peeved sentence, “. . . and you know I meant a tornado.”

  Harley rolled her eyes. “Sorry, my deductive powers are a bit slow today.”

  “Well, get with it. Rico was certain he saw a funnel cloud, and he’s so panicky he’s making me nervous. Look at the clouds and tell me what you think.”

  Rico was Nana’s companion of the moment. Who could have known a retirement village doubled as a match-making service?

  Harley peered out the car window. To the west, a thick bank of dark clouds churned over distant Arkansas rice fields and the Mississippi River, racing east toward the offices of Memphis Tour Tyme. The ominous clouds did look like they could hold possible tornados. Nana might be right. Harley decided not to admit it.

  “Tell Rico to relax. Besides, Nana, you’ve never been scared of anything in your entire life. Especially rain, thunderstorms, or tornados.”

  “It could be a hurricane. I’ve never been in one of those.”

  Sometimes Nana’s memory needed a nudge. “We don’t get hurricanes this far from the coast, remember?” Harley reminded.

  “There was Hurricane Elvis. It tore up most of the trees and left people without electricity, walls, and roofs for months.”

  “Those were straight-line winds, not a hurricane. The media called it Hurricane Elvis because it sounded catchy. Trust me.”

  Nana got a bit testy “You might be right. If you’re wrong and this is a hurricane, I’ll be pretty pissed at you.”

  “If I’m wrong, we’ll have bigger things to worry about.”

  “You got that right, chickie.”

  Nana hung up, and Harley laughed. You’d think a great-grandmother in her eighties would sit in a rocker at the home, nodding in the sunlight. Not Nana McMullen. She was a pip.

  It was one of her life’s great mysteries that Harley’s maternal grandmother, Grandmother Eaton, was so different from her own mother, Nana McMullen. But then, Diva, who was Grandmother Eaton’s daughter, was nothing like her mother, either. It wasn’t a criticism; that’s just the way it had turned out. Nana could still shoot out the windshield of a killer’s car. Grandmother Eaton’s idea of danger was putting out her good china. And Diva trusted in psychic energy and karma. Go figure.

  Harley had long ago decided that her gene pool was a direct blend of Nana and Diva. It could be a good thing. Or not.

  She grabbed her backpack and got out of her newly repaired ’91 Toyota, locked it, and walked across pavement that still sent up waves of heat. It’d been a while since it had rained. A good rain might end the drought. The weather was unseasonably warm and dry for October.

  A gust of cool wind and boom of thunder made her move faster to get to the two-story office building Memphis Tour Tyme called home. She didn’t make it. Rain broke overhead, pelting her in hard drops. She finally reached the dry safety of the building before she drowned and ran up the back stairs instead of taking the elevator. It was one way to work off her addiction to Taco Bell’s bean burritos. Plus side orders of nachos.

  Thomas “Tootsie” Rowell sat behind a receptionist desk booking tourist runs and limo pick-ups. He looked up when she came in, waved, and kept talking into a headset and clicking on computer keys. Harley picked at her wet tee shirt to get it away from her clammy skin as she leaned against the four-foot high receptionist counter.

  After a few minutes and three more calls, Tootsie swiveled in his chair and rolled closer to her. He looked at her with a big smile. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Immediately suspicious, Harley braced herself. “I have a feeling I shouldn’t ask, but why?”

  Tootsie ignored her melodramatic clutch at the receptionist desk. “I need you to take over the desk for a few minutes. My cell phone is out, and I need to help a friend.”

  Harley raised an eyebrow. “You have a friend?”

  “Don’t be bitchy. Yes. He performs in the same club I do.”

  Tootsie liked to dress in women’s clothing and sing on-stage. Truth be told, he was more glamorous than most women. Harley had given him all of the evening clothes she had once reluctantly worn. She didn’t mind seeing them go. Besides, she could never pull off that whole beauty queen thing. Tootsie made it look easy. He had auburn hair that he wore in a long ponytail down his back an
d fine-boned features. Like her, he was fairly slender and right around five-six, only he looked much better in sequins and satin.

  “I’m intrigued,” she said as she put her elbow on the desk and propped her chin in her hand. “Does he need help with his make-up? A wig won’t stay on? No, I have it—he can’t get his boobs taped into a deep enough cleavage, and he needs your help.”

  Tootsie gave her one of the looks he used when she was annoying. She smiled. Sometimes he was so easy.

  “No, Harley. Jordan is quite adept at taping his own boobs. This is important.”

  “Important? Now I’m really intrigued. What kind of important?”

  Tootsie pursed his lips. “I do not intend to tell you. You might want to help.”

  “Well, really—no need to be insulting. I’m an expert when it comes to important.”

  “You’re also an expert at mucking things up and almost getting yourself killed.”

  “How unkind of you to mention that. I’m always successful in the end, aren’t I?”

  Tootsie closed his eyes and sighed. “There are many definitions of successful. You defy them all.”

  Harley rolled her eyes and collapsed in an office chair next to Tootsie’s computer desk. “You can be so tacky.”

  “Not to mention truthful.”

  “There are many definitions of truth. So.” She sat forward in the chair and wheeled closer to the desk. “What kind of important? Dangerous kind of important?”

  “Harley . . .”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I don’t really want to get mixed up in your friend’s life. I’ve given up my crime fighting career.”