The Root of All Trouble

The Root of All Trouble

Copyright 2013 Heather Webber

www.heatherwebber.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, except for brief quotations used in articles or reviews, without permission from the publisher.

Chapter One

T
hou, Nina Colette Ceceri Quinn, from now on will heed severe weather warnings despite the complete unreliability of local meteorologists.

Black clouds loomed overhead and hail pounded my truck as I took a left out of my office
's parking lot. The self-important weatherman on Channel 13 had been gleeful this morning as he warned about possible thunderstorms, straight-line winds, and tornadoes.

I hadn
't believed him. Mostly because he'd been warning of the same thing for the past two weeks and nothing had come from it except for a few sprinkles.

Late springtime in this area was, as a rule, unpredictable.

I'd lived in Freedom, Ohio, a growing suburb just north of Cincinnati, nearly my whole life and had been affected by truly severe weather only a couple of times.

But after seeing those tell
tale clouds, I vowed to never take the forecast of impending doom lightly again. Once a commandment, always a commandment.

"
Pouting doesn't become you," I said to my employee Jean-Claude Reaux.

His car was in the shop, and he was hitching a ride with me to meet up with his cousins—whose construction company happened to be working across the street from my house.

I regretted making the offer of riding with me.

Sitting in the passenger seat with
his arms crossed over his chest, he flexed his muscles in an attempt to cheer himself up. "Don't talk crazy, Nina. Everything becomes me."

"
Silly me," I teased at his serious tone.

This storm was shaping up to be one of the worst I
'd seen. I sent all my employees at Taken by Surprise, Garden Designs home when the hail started. Even though we weren't working an outdoor jobsite today, I didn't want to take chances with the weather and their safety.

Plus, it was Friday, and we
'd all been more than ready to go home. We'd been in planning meetings all day for our upcoming makeover of my new neighbors' back yard, which was to take place this weekend. All-day meetings felt like a special form of torture, especially with my colorful crew. Don't get me wrong. I loved my formerly felonious employees, but there was only so much a girl could take before I felt the need to escape. Far, far away.

The early dismissal had come at the perfect time. Tension had been rising inside the office thanks to some good-natured ribbing gone wrong, and it was good to send everyone home before a fight broke out.

I didn't do well with bloodshed.

I
'd seen a lot of it, too, over the past year, with all those homicide cases I'd been caught up in. I'd become a bit of a dead-body magnet. It wasn't a label I was proud of.

At the heart of the office tension was Jean-Claude and Kit Pipe, another long-time employee. Jean-Claude didn
't like people teasing him—especially where his family was concerned, and Kit just couldn't help himself from poking fun—especially when there was such an easy target.

All it had taken was one crack from Kit and the rest of my employees had joined in, perfectly demonstrating a pack mentality. Jean-Claude should have known better than to take the joking personally, but he
'd been on edge lately, and I hoped that didn't mean he was harboring a guilty conscience about some sneaky scheme or another. He was forever cooking up new schemes.

Shooting me a dirty look, Jean-Claude went back to flexing. He
'd worked for me for years now, having come to my company the way most of my employees did: through my cousin, Analise Bertoli, whose job title had just changed. She used to be a county probation officer, but now she was a "correctional treatment specialist," a designation she had embraced so whole-heartedly that she promptly ordered new business cards.

Speaking of Ana...I peeked in the rearview mirror, and saw Kit, my second
-in-command, driving behind me in his big bad Hummer. He and Ana had been dating for a while now and were quite serious. He'd been pressuring her to move in with him, but she was holding out for an engagement ring before that kind of commitment. I wished he'd hurry up and ask. I liked the two of them together. A lot. It made perfect sense that Kit was following me so closely—he lived directly across the street from my small bungalow and was on his way home as well.

Thunder cracked overhead, and as much as I wanted to press the
gas pedal to the floorboard, I forced myself to creep down the road. Water covered the asphalt, obscuring any dividing line, and visibility was only a few feet in front of the truck. What seemed like every piece of litter in the county flew by the windshield,
Wizard of Oz
style. I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised to see Miss Gulch on her bike whizz past. It was that kind of storm.

Glancing in the mirror, I noticed the dark circles under my muddy green eyes, and if those weren
't bad enough, the rain had wreaked havoc with my hair. Strands of light brown stuck out every which way.

At nearly two in the afternoon the sky was as dark as night. Fast-moving clouds hugged the ground, murky fingers dipping low, swirling into funnel shapes. All it would take was one to touch the ground, and a tornado
would be born.

Chewing the inside of my cheek, I worried about my sixteen-year-old stepson Riley, who was still in school this time of day—it was the last week of classes before summer break. The school wouldn
't release the kids into this mess, so that was reassuring, but I would have felt better if he was home.

Though, really, the location of his
"home" was as murky as the swirling clouds. Technically, he lived with my ex-husband Kevin, but he spent a lot of time at my house in the Mill, an older, settled neighborhood of Freedom also known as the Gossip Mill.

I
'd also been seeing a lot of Kevin—mostly because he went out of his way to see me. He wasn't quite wooing me, trying to win me back, but he was walking that line, testing those waters.

I didn
't know what to think about that, so I tried not to. Most of the time. Hardly ever, really.

Okay, I
'd been obsessing.

Sue me.

I pushed the gas pedal down a little more and tried to keep my mind occupied with something else, anything else, other than this storm. "You shouldn't be so sensitive," I said. "You know how they are."

"
They" being my other employees. They were a crazy lot, but I loved them all like family.

Jean-Claude
's wavy hair was pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. "I take talk of my family seriously. We have a reputation to uphold."

I gripped the steering wheel and concentrated on the road so I wouldn
't laugh. Jean-Claude's family was one step removed from the Sopranos.

All right, they weren
't that bad. Most of them, like Jean-Claude, were reformed. But the criminal tendencies were still there, underneath the pretty surfaces.

"
This is all your fault," he said to me.

"
How so?" I asked, lifting my foot off the gas as the truck started to hydroplane.
Almost home, almost home.
I let out a breath of relief as I felt the tires grip the road.

"
They're your friends. You got me into this."

He wasn
't referring to the other employees, though I did consider most of them friends. He meant Perry Owens and Mario Gibbens. I'd met the couple last year on the set of a reality TV show (long story), and Perry and I hit it off right away. Mario was still warming up to me—mostly because he considered me a bad influence on his partner.

Sheesh
. Funny how a few murder cases could affect a reputation.

They
'd recently moved out of the city and into my neighborhood. The Mill, once a geriatric demographic, was slowly turning more urban as younger people moved in and, well, the older people...died.

Some not from natural causes (also a long story—or stories, I should say).

Right around Christmastime, there had been a murder in the neighborhood. The house where it occurred had sat empty for months. The bank foreclosed, and Perry and Mario decided it was the perfect chance to put down roots in an up-and-coming neighborhood.

It helped that they bought the place for a fraction of its worth, because the murder had scared away all the other (sane) buyers. Perry and Mario had moved in a month ago and had immediately started demolition. When they found themselves over their heads with the construction, they decided to hire help
who promised up and down that the job would be done in two weeks.

"
Whoa now," I said. "I believe you were the one who recommended your cousin's company as a contractor. I recall I tried to talk you out of it."

I
'd tried to talk Perry and Mario out of it, too. But in this economy, they couldn't turn down Reaux Construction's bargain basement bid on the job. Work had started two weeks ago, and was supposed to be completed at the end of this week.

They were nowhere near done.

None of them could say I didn't warn them that hiring the company was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea. They were Reauxs, after all.

I hadn
't been the least bit surprised by the delays or when, just two days ago, the company's lothario foreman, Joey Miller, went out for "lunch" and never came back. I thought the company, owned by Jean-Claude's cousins Delphine and Plum, was better off without the guy. He'd given me the heebies.

The cousins were why Jean-Claude was in his current snit.

There hadn't been a day since that Jean-Claude wasn't teased by his coworkers about his colorful kin. Delphine and Plum were...interesting. Everyone in my office had gotten to know them well because Perry and Mario's yard was the one we were making over this weekend. Our paths crossed a lot as my crew took measurements and worked up a design plan for the yard.

Ordinarily, Taken by Surprise specialized in
surprise
garden makeovers, but I could never turn down a friend in need of a backyard makeover—and Perry and Mario were in desperate need. Winter—not to mention the bank's neglect—hadn't been kind to their yard, not that it had ever been well-maintained.

I slowed to a stop at a red light and watched the traffic signal bounce in the wind. Rain slashed the windows, hail pounded, and I spotted trees uprooted all along the stre
et. My pulse pounded in my ears and my palms began to sweat.

Jean-Claude gave up on flexing.
"Just because my cousins look the way they do, dress the way they do, and talk the way they do doesn't mean that they can't get the job done. They and the rest of the crew will be done in no time."

Riiiiight
. "Name one thing that's been completed there this week."

Wind buffeted the truck as I turned left, into the Mill. Trees were down in here, too, along with power lines. I steered the truck around broken branches.

His lips puckered. "Delphine and Plum are getting the lay of the land, a feel for the job, the energy of the house. Plus," he said, "Delphine can't find her favorite hammer and she's paralyzed without it."

"
That's a bit dramatic. A hammer is a hammer."

He scoffed.
"Said like a layman."

My calluses begged to differ, but I didn
't want to argue.