Fortune's Woman / A Fortune Wedding. Kristin Hardy
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lying motionless on the ground, faceup, and even from here, Julie could see a dark pool of what she assumed was blood around his head.
A third person stood over the body. It took Julie only a moment to recognize Frannie Fortune Fredericks, a frequent volunteer at the center.
And Ross’s sister, she remembered with stunned dismay that she saw reflected in his features.
Frannie was staring at her hands. In the pale moonlight, they shone much darker than the rest of her skin.
“It’s her. She killed him!” the other woman cried out stridently. “Can’t you see? The bitch killed my Lloyd!”
Her Lloyd? As in Lloyd Fredericks, Frannie’s husband? Julie looked closer at the figure on the ground. For the first time, she registered his sandy-blond hair and those handsome, slightly smarmy features, and realized she was indeed staring into the fixed, unblinking stare of Lloyd Fredericks.
This couldn’t be happening…
Ross quickly crossed to Lloyd’s body and knelt to search for a pulse. Julie knew even before he rose to his feet a moment later that he wouldn’t have been able to find one. That sightless gaze said it all.
That was definitely Frannie’s husband. And he was definitely dead.
Ross gripped his sister’s arm and Julie noticed that he was careful not to touch her blood-covered hands. How did he possibly have the sense to avoid contaminating evidence under such shocking circumstances? she wondered.
“Frannie? What’s going on? What happened?”
His sister’s delicate features looked pale, almost bloodless, and she lifted stark eyes to him. “I don’t…It’s Lloyd, Ross.”
“I can see it’s Lloyd, honey. What happened to him?”
The screaming woman wobbled closer on her high heels. “She killed him. Look at her! She’s got blood all over her. Oh, Lloyd, baby.”
She began to wail as if her heart were being ripped out of her cosmetically enhanced chest. Julie would have liked to be a little sympathetic, but she didn’t fail to notice the other woman only began the heartrending sobs when a crowd started to gather.
Ross turned to her. “Julie, do you have a phone? Can you call 911?”
“Of course,” she answered. While she pulled her phone out of her pocket and started hitting buttons, she heard Ross take charge of the scene, ordering everybody to step back a couple dozen feet. In mere moments, it seemed the place was crawling with people.
The 911 operator had just answered when Julie saw a pair of police officers arrive. They must have been drawn to the commotion from other areas of the Spring Fling.
“This is Julie Osterman,” she said to the 911 dispatcher. “I was going to report a…an incident at the Spring Fling but you all are already here.”
“What sort of incident?” the dispatcher asked.
Julie was hesitant to use the word murder, but how could it be anything else? “I guess a suspicious death. But as I said, your officers are already here.”
“Tell me what you know anyway.”
The woman took what little information Julie could provide to relay to the officers, who were pushing the crowd even farther back.
When she hung up the phone with the dispatcher, she stood for a moment, not sure what to do, where to go. She disliked this sort of crowd scene, the almost avaricious hunger for information that seemed to seize people when something dramatic and shocking occurred nearby.
She wanted to slip away but it didn’t feel quite right, especially when she had been one of the first ones on the scene. She supposed technically she was a witness, though she hadn’t seen anything and knew nothing about what had happened.
Julie scanned the crowd, though she didn’t know what she was seeking. A familiar face, perhaps, someone who could help her make sense of this shocking development.
In the distance, she saw someone in a black Stetson just on the other side of the edge of light emanating from the art fair. He made no move to come closer to investigate the commotion, which she found curious. But when she looked again, he was gone.
“Oh, Lloyd! My poor Lloyd.”
The woman who had alerted them with her screams was nearly hysterical by now, standing just a few feet away from her and gathering more stares from the crowd. Julie watched her for a moment, then sighed and moved toward her.
Though she wanted to slap the woman silly for her hysterics—whether they were feigned or not—she supposed that wasn’t a very compassionate attitude. She could at least try to calm her down a little. It was the decent thing to do.
She reached out and took the other woman’s hand in hers. “Can I get you something? A drink of water, maybe?”
“Nooooo,” she sobbed. “I just want my Lloyd.”
Lloyd wasn’t going to belong to anyone again—not his pale, stunned-looking wife and not this voluptuous woman who grieved so vociferously for him.
“I’m Julie,” she said after a moment. “What’s your name?”
“Crystal. Crystal Rivers. Well, that’s not my real name.”
“Oh. It’s not?” she asked, with a perfectly straight face.
“It’s my stage name. I’m a dancer. My real name is Christina. Christina Crosby.”
“How about if I call you Chris?”
“Christy. That’s what people call me.”
Julie offered a smile, grateful that their conversation seemed to soothe the woman a bit—or at least distract her from the hysterics. “Okay, Christy. What happened? Can you tell me? All I know is that we heard you scream and came running and found him dead.”
“I’ll tell you what happened. She killed him. Frannie Fredericks killed my Lloyd.”
Chapter Two
Julie frowned as the woman’s bitter words seemed to ring through the night air.
She still couldn’t quite believe it. She had always liked Frannie. The woman seemed to genuinely care about her volunteer work at the Foundation and she had always been friendly to Julie.
She supposed no one could really see inside the heart of someone else or know how they would respond when provoked, but Frannie had always seemed far too quiet and unassuming for Julie to accept that she had murdered her husband.
“How can you be so certain? Did you see her do it?”
“No. He was already dead when I came looking for him.” She sniffled loudly and pulled a bedraggled tissue from her ample cleavage. “We were supposed to meet here and take off to my place after his obligations at the stupid Spring Fling. He didn’t even want to come, but Lloyd had business tonight he had to take care of.”
Business at the Spring Fling? Who on earth tried to conduct business at a community celebration?
“What kind?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Something important. Someone he had to talk to, he said. Maybe Frannie. Maybe he told her he was going to divorce her for me. I don’t know. I just know she killed him. Now watch—her brother Ross and the rest of the Fortunes are going to cover it all up. They think they own this whole damn town.”
Julie shifted, uncomfortable with the other woman’s antagonism. She liked and respected all the Fortunes. Susan Fortune Eldridge was one of her closest friends and she adored Lily Fortune, who was the driving force behind the Fortune Foundation that had been founded in memory of her late husband.
“Ma’am? Are you the one who found the body?”
Julie