Feeding the Fire (Rosewood 2)

Chapter 1

“You know, there are days when I’d consider setting my house on fire if I thought that sexy thing would show up and save me,” Vera Reynolds declared as she eyed the passing fire truck filled with gorgeous firefighters.

Pepper heard a lot of things working at Curls, the only hair salon in Rosewood, Alabama. As in any small southern town, the beauty parlor was one of the best places to get the pulse on the local happenings. She didn’t need a subscription to the local paper. Frankly, anything Clark Newton reported in the Rosewood Times was old news to her by the time it hit the front page.

Pepper and her boss, Sarah Hudson, the owner of Curls, were always kept fully abreast of town gossip. If people didn’t sit in their chairs and talk about their own life’s drama, they’d come armed with information about someone else’s. At any point in time, Pepper knew all about the town romances, who was in a spat over property lines, who spent the night in the drunk tank of the local jail, and who had sabotaged a Rosewood Garden Club member’s prized fern.

It was a small town, low on actual crime but always high on drama. Although there was nothing she could do to keep from hearing the gossip, Pepper tried very hard not to spread it. She knew how easily it could come back to bite her. Instead, she liked to play the role of salon-chair therapist. They talked, she listened and made thoughtful noises while working on their hair.

But sometimes, like today, she just didn’t want to know. And since Miss Francine and Miss Vera always scheduled their appointments together, today meant double the trouble, and no escaping the gossip.

Instead of responding to Miss Vera’s declaration, Pepper worked at sweeping up the fine hair on the floor from Sheriff Todd’s trim. The man had almost no hair and yet he showed up for a cut every four weeks, like clockwork. Pepper felt bad actually charging the man.

“What sexy thing? Who was that?” Francine Doyle asked. “I can’t see out the window with this dryer over my head.”

“It was Grant,” Miss Vera said.

“Who?”

“Grant Chamberlain!” she shouted over the noise of the dryer as pieces of foil flapped in her hair.

Pepper winced at the sound of that name. Unlike Miss Vera, she had been dodging Grant Chamberlain since high school.

The scrappy little freshman had had the nerve to ask her to the fall formal her junior year. He wasn’t even old enough to drive them to the dance, but that hadn’t stopped him. For whatever reason, he’d decided he wanted Pepper, and no matter how many times she told him no, he’d always come back around a few weeks later with another proposal.

Dating a Chamberlain might be a feather in the cap for most girls at Rosewood High, but not for Pepper. She’d tried to avoid that whole family, which wasn’t difficult considering they lived in the antebellum mansion on Willow Lake and she’d lived in a trailer off the highway. Life was hard enough being poor and unpopular. Dating a freshman her junior year would’ve earned her merciless teasing by the other kids at school. Even if he was a Chamberlain.

Pepper looked up in time to see Miss Francine’s lips twist into a grimace of distaste. “You are a dirty old woman,” she snapped. “That child is barely out of diapers.”

Pepper and Sarah shared a look of amusement but didn’t respond. Sarah returned to working on Miss Vera’s hair with an almost undetectable shake of her head. Pepper went into the back room to dump the dustpan and get fresh towels.

“He’s old enough,” Miss Vera muttered, turning back to look into the mirror. With one finger, she pulled at some of the wrinkles on her face, tugging until she looked ten years younger.

“I’m just too old. Hell, I wouldn’t know what to do with a hard-bodied man like that if I had one sitting in my parlor.”

Pepper turned off the dryer and checked the foils in Miss Francine’s hair. The heat had helped the color process faster, and she was ready to have the dye rinsed out.

“And how would you know he’s hard-bodied, Vera?” Miss Francine asked on her way to the shampoo station. “Are you the Peeping Tom they’ve been talking about in the newspaper?”

“Very funny,” Miss Vera replied with a dry tone. “You shouldn’t joke about something like that, Francine. That peeper is serious business. There’s a pervert in our midst.”

“Have they caught the peeper yet?” Sarah asked.

“No,” Miss Francine said. “From what I’ve heard, Sheriff Todd has had seven reports of someone peering in women’s windows at night. My niece Olivia was one of the victims. I think she was the second one to report it. She said she was making a late dinner one night, looked up, and saw two eyes staring back at her through the kitchen window. Her back door wasn’t locked, either, because she had just let her dog back into the house. Whoever that was could’ve walked right in and done God-knows-what to her.”