Murder Has a Sweet Tooth - By Miranda Bliss Page 0,61

mattered. At least not as much as getting out of that sauna alive.

“Logically, reasonably . . .” I tried to comfort myself with the mantra again, but I couldn’t remember the rest of it. The words floated out of my head, just like I felt I was floating above the cedar floorboards. I made myself take another stab at it. “Logically . . .” I said, but the rest of the phrase failed me. I rubbed my knuckles across my eyes and pressed them to my temples. My head pounded. So did my heart.

“Logibally, reasonically . . .” Was that my voice? It was so strained and muffled, it sounded like it came from a million miles away. “Carebally,” I told myself. “When you’re investigabating a murderous murder, you’ve got to be reasonically logical.”

So reasonically logical I was.

At least that’s what I thought at the time.

I plucked the thermometer off the wall and without even looking to see how high the temperature was, I flung the thermometer at the skylight. I missed by a mile and on the way down, the thermometer clunked me in the head.

I picked up the huge, shallow spoon that’s used to toss water onto the hot sauna coals and tried to crack the skylight with that, too, and had no better luck. When the ladle landed on the floor next to me, I picked it up and hurled it at the door.

Good thing I’m a bad pitcher and the ladle hit the wall instead of the door. Just at that moment, the door opened and Celia stuck her head inside the sauna.

“Annie?” She took one look at me and hurried inside, but not before she propped the discarded ladle against the door. A wave of wonderful, fresh, cool air streamed into the sauna. My clothes were so damp, I shivered.

“Annie?” Celia grabbed my shoulders and gave me a little shake. “We wondered where you were and what happened and—”

“I was being logiable,” I told her. “But I couldn’t get out.”

She looked over her shoulder at the door and I was just not-out-of-it enough to know something was wrong.

“I told you the sauna wasn’t working right. There’s no way it should be able to be turned on from anywhere but right in here. But somebody must have done that. And put the lock back on the door after Glynis, Beth, and I left.” I was the one who was woozy, but Celia swayed on her feet. But if they knew you were in here, nobody ever would have done that. Unless . . . Unless . . .” I wasn’t seeing straight, but I saw that Celia’s complexion turned green. “My goodness, Annie, I know this is going to sound crazy, but it looks like somebody tried to kill you.”

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THAT. I MEAN, SURE, PEOPLE had tried to kill me before. Any number of times. I’d had the brake lines on my car cut. There had once been a doctor who wanted to keep me quiet, and she tried to shoot air into my veins through an IV line. And just recently, Eve and I had been kidnapped by a man who threatened us with a knife. Sometimes I still had bad dreams about that big, shiny knife and the crazy man wielding it.

But really, if somebody wanted me dead, there seemed to be plenty of better ways of doing it. Roasting me alive didn’t strike me as either efficient or decisive.

Then again, it definitely sent a message, and a troubling one at that. Is that what someone was trying to do? Was that someone Edward Monroe? And how far was he willing to go to prove a point?

Thinking through the problem, was I sounding logical and reasonable again? Finally!

That was thanks to the fact that after Celia dragged me out of the sauna, she took me into the house and made me drink a couple gallons of water. Then she poured a tepid bath for me (the tub in the master suite was almost as big as the pool outside) and when I was done soaking, she, Glynis, and Beth fluttered around me like mother hens taking care of a favorite chick.

“This is so awful.” We were back in the kitchen and Celia apparently decided that I needed to replace all the salt that had been sweated out of my system. She shoved a plate at me heaped with Reuben dip and Triscuits. “Somebody must have assumed we’d all left the sauna.