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“Dad!”

“What? I'm allowed to notice things.”

Mom laughed, and I couldn't help smiling, even as I rubbed at the ache gathering behind my eyes. “I need to go. I've got things to do, including retrieving my car from the festival grounds.”

“Are they letting people back in?” Dad asked, his tone turning serious again.

“I'll check with the sheriff's office first. I'm not going anywhere near the crime scene.”

“Good man. Be careful, Max.”

“We love you, darling,” Mom added.

“Love you both, too. And please try not to get banned from a line-dancing campground.”

“We haven't even arrived yet,” Dad said indignantly.

“Then you have time to prepare.”

I ended the call before either of them could bring Josiah up again. For a few moments, I sat quietly at the kitchen table, listening to the refrigerator hum. My parents meant well, and I knew they loved me. They also seemed to have decided that my romantic life was a community project requiring their enthusiastic supervision. I wasn't sure whether I found that comforting or exhausting. Probably both, if I was being honest.

Sylvester bumped against my shin, then stared at the cupboard where I kept the box of kibble I occasionally fed him. He had the uncanny ability to remember precisely where I stored it, despite having no legal claim to either the cupboard or its contents.

“You're not helping,” I told him.

He meowed.

I gave him a few pieces of kibble as a treat, because apparently I was just as susceptible to emotional blackmail as my mother. He ate it, rubbed against my leg, and wandered toward the front door. When I followed him, I found a single striped sock lying on the porch. I picked it up between two fingers.

“Sylvester. That is not yours, nor is it mine.”

He sat on the step, tail curled around his paws, and regarded me with serene innocence. I sighed and held up the sock as though he might be moved by the evidence. “And before you start, I'm not going to knock on every door in the neighborhood holding up a sock and asking whether anyone's lost it.”

His ears twitched, as though he considered this a failure of customer service. I put the sock aside for when its owner came looking for it, as everyone knew where Sylvester took his stolen bounty by now. If no one claimed it, I'd ask around. In the meantime, I had a car to retrieve and a town full of people who were almost certainly talking about the murder.

And, judging by the direction my morning had taken, talking about me.

Harbor Lights was already busy by the time I walked there.. Ricky had a client in his chair, another waiting with a magazine open on her lap, and a third standing near the reception desk with a takeaway cup of coffee and the expression of someone who'd come in for a trim but discovered she'd stumbled into the day's most important gossip session.

“Max!” Ricky called when he spotted me in the mirror. “You're late.”

“I'm not late. I didn't have an appointment.”

“You're late to my emotional support system.”

“I'm sorry. I'll try to be more punctual in the future.”

“You'd better. I've been fielding questions all morning, and I haven't even had breakfast.”

That was typical of Ricky during festival week. He could manage three clients, answer the phone, and hold a conversation with someone across the room, but remembering to eat seemed to require an organizational chart and a written reminder. I took the chair beside the window and watched a woman in a pale blue cardigan lean toward the client beneath Ricky's scissors.

“I heard they found Harvey with a knife in his back,” she whispered.

“No, they didn't,” another woman replied. “My cousin said it was a gunshot.”

“Someone told me he was poisoned.”

Ricky stopped cutting for half a second. “Unless Harvey was murdered three different ways, I think we might want to wait for the sheriff to tell us what happened.”