And Death Goes To . . .. Laura Bradford

looked down at me. “Trust me, Tobi, you made his job easy in that regard.”

      I raised up on my tiptoes, cupping his face between my hands. “Awww, that’s an awfully sweet thing to say.”

      “It’s the truth.”

      I kissed him hard on the mouth. “Thanks for being there for me tonight, Andy. Having you there meant the world to me, even if I didn’t win.”

      “And you not winning means the world to me. Seriously.”

      ~Chapter Four~

      I tossed my sparkly little handbag onto the catch-all table just inside my front door and tried my best to block out the image of my grandfather accompanying Ms. Rapple onto her front porch and possibly leaning in for a goodnight—

      “Martha is inside, safe and sound.”

      I turned and took in my lifelong mentor as he came through my open doorway with an impressive spryness considering his advancing age and the late night (or should I say, early morning) hour. “That was a quick good-bye,” I said, my tone rather euphoric.

      Grandpa Stu closed and locked my door and then kicked off his freshly polished “party shoes” (his term, not mine) en route to the couch where I, myself, had just landed. “I was afraid if I lingered over Martha’s lips, you’d be asleep by the time I got back.”

      I tried to rein in my answering shudder, but I’m pretty sure I was unsuccessful. Especially since said shudder resulted in a throw pillow (or two) slipping off the couch and onto the floor. If my grandfather noticed, he didn’t let on, his focus now trained on and around the sofa cushion to my left.

      “Did you lose something, Grandpa?”

      He slipped his hand into the gap between the two cushions, felt around, and pulled out the remote control with a triumphant ah-ha!

      “You do realize it’s nearly two o’clock in the morning, right?” I pulled my feet off the coffee table and dropped them to the ground with the intention of standing if my eyes could stay open long enough to do so. “In fact, I probably shouldn’t be sitting here, since this is your bed for however long you’re staying with me.”

      “Sit. Sit.” Heeding his own advice, my grandfather dropped onto the cushion next to me and pointed the newly recovered remote at my TV. “They repeat the eleven o’clock news at two.”

      I watched the screen come to life and then eyed the wiry bald man I called Grandpa. “I don’t understand when you sleep. You’re up when I leave for work, you’re up when I go to bed, and other than an occasional powernap while I’m pulling together dinner, you’re awake. That can’t be good for you.”

      “I’m still here, ain’t I?”

      He had a point.

      Before I could mount a counterattack, he started pressing the channel changing button at such a dizzying speed I had to look away. “Still, I can’t remember the last time I was this exhausted and yet here you are, still revved and ready to go. Maybe you should’ve laid off the Napoleons a little, you know? Sugar before bed really isn’t a good idea.”

      My grandfather laughed and I knew why.

      I, Tobi Tobias, was a sugarholic—morning, noon, and, yes, night. So my lecturing anyone about the dangers of ingesting sugar under any circumstance was, indeed, laughable.

      Rather than cop to my hypocrisy, I changed the topic. “JoAnna really did a nice job with that party tonight, didn’t she?”

      “You scored big with that one, Sugar Lump.”

      And I had. JoAnna Kincaid was truly the best business decision I’d made thus far. In fact, I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t attribute a big chunk of my agency’s success over the past few months to my secretary. Because truly, if not for her, I might have caved under the weight (and unpaid bills!) of small business ownership long before Andy and his brother, Gary, had strode through my front door with my first big break.

      This time when I shuddered, it had nothing whatsoever to do with Ms. Rapple and everything to do with the what ifs that could have been if I had given up.

      No Zander Closet Company ad…

      No shiny new car parked alongside the curb with my name on the title…

      No Andy…

      No St. Louis Advertising Award nom—

      The jingle of Channel Four’s eleven o’clock news yanked me off memory lane in time to see my grandfather point at the TV. “It’s starting!”

      Sure enough, Bryce Waters, the eleven o’clock news anchor, appeared in the center of my fifteen inch screen with a dour expression. “Good evening, everyone, I’m Bryce Waters and this is the eleven o’clock news.”

      “At two a.m.,” I muttered.

      “Shhh!”

      “The St. Louis advertising community is reeling tonight in the aftermath of what can only be described as a horrific tragedy—one that played out in a very heartbreakingly public way. Let’s go to Matt McKeon who is live outside the Regency Hotel, the scene of what is now being described as an apparent murder.”

      I felt the intake of air through my lungs, but the true source of the gasp was anyone’s guess as my grandfather and I stared at each other, wide-eyed.

      “Did you hear that, Sugar Lump? He said murder!”

      I think I nodded, I’m not really sure. But it didn’t matter as we both turned back to the TV and the forty-something reporter standing outside the same ballroom where we’d been less than four hours earlier.

      “It was supposed to be a night of fun and food, a chance to celebrate the best of the best at the annual St. Louis advertising community’s award show. And it was exactly that until the final category of the night—a category tasked with honoring the truly creative elite.”

      I allowed myself a split second of preening at the creative elite tag but it was short-lived thanks to the full screen photograph of Deidre Ryan now gracing my television set.

      “Deidre Ryan was a real up and comer in the local advertising community. Just thirty-seven years old, the mother of two was the brains behind the Books Can Take You Places campaign for the St. Louis Public Library System. The TV and print ads transported us to some of our favorite and most memorable fictional locales in a way that made you want to drop everything you were doing and go racing to the library. That ad earned Ryan a nomination—and subsequent win—for Best Overall Ad Campaign at this year’s St. Louis Advertising Awards Show. But it was while accepting that award this evening that Ryan’s life was cut short in what some are calling an intentional act.”

      The onsite reporter returned to the screen, only this time he was standing beside an older man in jeans and a flannel shirt. “This is Doug Winton, a member of the crew brought in to set up the stage for tonight’s award show, including the elevated platform that gave way beneath the victim. Doug, what can you tell us about what happened tonight?”

      The man, identified as a stagehand supervisor beneath his name, cleared his throat. “My crew has been assembling this exact set year after year for decades now. The same spiral staircase, the same suspended platform, the same video screen, the same red curtains.”

      “Any chance the equipment used to elevate the platform was faulty?” the reporter asked.

      “No. It was checked multiple times, as it always is. And the picture I was shown by one of my guys on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the accident proves that.”

      The reporter leaned closer. “Why do you say that, Doug?”

      “Because the suspension cables were loosened between when I did my final sign-off on the platform’s safety at five o’clock and the accident at ten o’clock.”

      “Sources are telling us an unfamiliar screwdriver was found backstage—a