After I dropped Neely Kate off at her house, I stopped at the Piggly Wiggly on the way home, leaving Muffy in Mason’s car. I hadn’t been in the grocery store since an unfortunate incident right before Thanksgiving involving a shopping cart and a can display had resulted in my equally unfortunate arrest. I halfway expected alarms to go off and security guards to tackle me, but the only one who seemed to notice was Bennie, the guy who’d replaced Bruce Wayne’s best friend as a bagger.

I knew Bennie from Jonah’s church. He was in his twenties and had Down syndrome. He’d asked me to come see him while he was working, so he was excited when I walked through the door. He waved, his face breaking out into a huge grin. “Hi, Miss Rose! You came to see me!”

I gave him a quick wave. “Of course!”

“You’re gonna let me bag your groceries, aren’t you, Miss Rose?”

I gave him a warm smile. “I wouldn’t let anyone else do it.”

The cashier turned and gave me a glare.

I sighed as I pushed my cart toward the produce aisle. I should have expected some animosity from the staff. Even if the incident hadn’t been my fault.

Since Muffy was in the car and I didn’t want to leave her for very long, I only grabbed what we needed for the next few days, but the pile was bigger than I’d expected. I made it to the checkout lane and had put most of my items on the conveyor belt when Miss Mildred’s voice grated out from behind me.

“I thought you’d been banned from the Piggly Wiggly.”

I turned around to see my former neighbor standing in line behind me. The octogenarian looked the same as ever—cranky—only there were some new faint blue streaks in her white hair.

I lifted my chin. “I guess that’s just proof you can’t believe everything you hear.” I pulled a bag of pasta out of the cart. “I like what you’ve done with your hair.”

She patted the top of my head. “What happened to my hair is none of your business.”

Fair enough. I turned my back to her.

“Are you still living in sin with the assistant DA?”

“I could argue that the answer to that question is none of your business, but I have nothin’ to hide. So if you’re asking if Mason and I are still living together, the answer is yes.” I set a container of strawberries on the conveyor belt. “What have you been up to, Miss Mildred? Have you stalked any other neighbors lately?”

“The neighborhood has been remarkably quiet since you left. Murder and mayhem are at an all-time low.”

“You can’t blame Miss Dorothy’s death on me. That was Jonah Pruitt’s mother.”

“And then there was the bank robbery.”

“I was an innocent bystander. Besides, you weren’t even there.”

She pointed her finger at me. “I heard about your job at that stripper club. God rest your poor momma’s soul.”

“I never stripped! I never even took my clothes off!” I protested louder than I’d intended. She didn’t need to know Neely Kate had taken a disastrous turn on the stripper pole.

A mother with two small children was rounding a corner just then, about to head down another aisle. Her mouth dropped open and she gave me the stinkeye as she shoved her poor preschool-aged boy on the other side of her, away from me, as though my presence might somehow infect him. Only she pushed him a little too hard and he crashed into a cereal box display on the endcap. An avalanche of boxes came crashing down on him and his mother.

“Look what you did!” Miss Mildred shouted, louder than any loudspeaker could hope to be. Every person in the front of the store turned their attention to her.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I shouted. “I wasn’t anywhere near that display!”

The store manager walked toward the cash register as Bennie—who was sacking my groceries—stared, taking everything in.

Miss Mildred narrowed her eyes and pointed her finger at me. “You are a menace to society. I’m gonna start a petition to have you kicked out of town.”

“You can do that?” If so, maybe I could somehow get Hilary kicked out on her rear. But my excitement over possibly evicting her was short-lived. I quickly remembered Joe saying if he had the authority to force her out of town, he would have done it by now. “Well, I guess that’ll give you some excitement to take your mind off how boring the neighborhood’s become without me.”

That wasn’t the reaction she’d wanted, but she clamped her mouth shut.

The mother of the boy was trying to dig him out from under a pile of boxes while her little girl started sobbing. “I lost my brother!”

The store manager had rushed over to help, but he kept throwing glances my way that clearly said he was trying his best to figure out how to blame me for the latest mishap.

Thankfully, the cashier said, “That will be one hundred and thirty-six dollars and fifty-nine cents.” Her tone let me know she was just as eager to be done with me as her boss was.

Bennie was bagging the last of my items. “Look, Miss Rose. I was careful with your eggs.”

“You did a great job, Bennie,” I said as I dug through the cash in my wallet. The girl was crying louder and her brother had joined in the chorus, although not because he was hurt—he was upset his mother had dug him out of his new fort. The afternoon had gone from bad to worse and I just wanted to go home. When I realized I didn’t have enough cash, I handed the cashier Mason’s credit card.