Introduction

It's not fair to say that trouble happens every time PJ Sugar is around, but it feels that way when she returns to her home town, looking for a fresh start. Within a week, her former teacher is murdered and her best friend's husband is arrested as the number-one suspect. Although the police detective investigating the murder?who also happens to be PJ's former flame?is convinced it's an open-and-shut case, PJ's not so sure. She begins digging for clues in an effort to clear her friend's husband and ends up reigniting old passions, uncovering an international conspiracy, and solving a murder along the way. She also discovers that maybe God can use a woman who never seems to get it right.

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Excerpt

Chapter ONE

PJ Sugar would never escape trouble. Clearly she couldn’t
shake free of it—regardless of how far and fast she ran. It had
followed her from Minnesota to South Dakota to Colorado
to Montana, down the shore to California, and finally over to
Melbourne Beach, Florida, where it rose with teeth to consume
what should have been the most perfect night of her life.
She stood on the shore, her toes mortared into the creamy
white sand, the waves licking up to her ankles and, with a
cry that sounded more like frustration than fury, threw her
linen espadrille with her best underhand pitch. It sailed high,
cutting through the burning sky, disappeared briefly in the
purple haze of night, then splashed into the ocean.
Gone. Along with her future.
A seagull soared low, screaming, pondering the morsel it
may have missed.
“PJ, come back inside.” Matthew’s voice sounded behind
her as he trekked out onto the beach, kicking sand into his
loafers, looking piqued as the wind raked fingers through his
brown, thinning hair, snagged his tie, and noosed it around
his neck. He dangled her oversize canvas purse from his hand,
as if it might be a bomb.
Ten feet away, he held it out to her like a carrot. “They
haven’t even brought out the crab legs yet. You love those.”
“Oh, sure I do. Right along with brussels sprouts and
pickled herring.” She’d been so soundly ensconced in happilyever-
after land she’d failed to see that the man she wanted to
marry didn’t even know she hated crab legs.
Pretty much all shellfish.
Thanks to the fact that she was allergic to it.
Matthew lowered the purse, as if her words stung him.
“Really?”
PJ shook her head, her mouth half-open, not even sure where
to start. Behind them, calypso music drifted out of Dungarees
Restaurant, festive themes for happy couples. Twinkle lights
stringing along the thatched roof overhung the porch, and
the piquant smell lifting off the grills on the patio snarled her
empty stomach. Maybe she should go back inside, pick up the
wicker chair she’d knocked over.
He owed her dinner, at least.
She stood her ground, forcing him to march her belongings
across the sand.
“Here’s your, uh . . . suitcase.” He held it out to her, letting
go before she had her hand on it. It dropped with the weight
of an anvil onto the glossy sand.
“Hey, that’s my personal survival kit—show some respect.”
She scooped it up, realizing she’d been entirely too civil dur-
ing his execution of their relationship. “You never know when
you’re going to need something.” Laugh all he wanted—if a
gal was going to haul around a purse, it should be filled with
all things handy. Tape to shut someone’s mouth, for example.
Or a flashlight to guide her way home across a black expanse
of shore.
“Sorry.” He stuck his hands into the pockets of his khakis,
his sports coat like a warning flag as it whipped around him.
“C’mon, PJ, come back inside. Please. It’s cold out here.”
“Seriously? Because ten minutes ago you were telling me
how I wasn’t the girl for you. How, after nearly a year of dating,
on a night when I expected—” Nope, she wasn’t going
there. Wasn’t going to give him the slightest satisfying hint that
she might have come to dinner tonight hoping—convinced,
even—that he’d actually take a knee and put words to what
she thought she’d seen in his eyes. Devotion. Commitment.
How could she have cajoled herself into believing that
perfect Matthew Buchanan, church singles group leader and
seminary student, might see a pastor’s wife in her?
Maybe she wasn’t exactly the picture of a pastor’s wife, with
her curves, dark red hair, too many freckles spraying her nose as
if she were still fifteen. She’d never considered herself refined,
more on the cute side, her height conspiring against her hopes
of being willowy and elegant. But her eyes were pretty—green,
and honest, if maybe too wide in her face. And she’d cleaned
up over the years. Even if Matthew didn’t think her beautiful,
couldn’t he see past her rough edges to the woman she longed
to be—a friend of Jesus, a woman of principle, a servant of
grace? a girl who’d finally outrun her mistakes?
Apparently not.
She should be flinging herself into the surf right behind
her espadrille.
“Expecting what, PJ?” Matthew had a faraway, even stricken,
look in those previously warm eyes.
PJ couldn’t believe she was actually answering him and in
a tone that betrayed her disappointment. “I just thought we
were heading somewhere.”
“Like the missions trip to Haiti? You wanted to go on that
with me?”
She stared at the place between his eyes, pretty sure she still
had her shortstop aim. Her grip tightened on the other espadrille.
“No,” she said slowly, crisply. “Not the missions trip.”
“Oh.” Wonder of wonders, he got it then, his face falling
as he replayed his rejection. “I’m sorry. It just isn’t working
for me.”
What did that mean exactly? Wasn’t working? Like she
might be a cog that fouled up his perfect image? Clearly he’d
forgotten the depths from which he’d climbed. Especially
since, in her recent memory, he’d been a Budweiser-drinking
surfer.
“You said that.” PJ hauled her bag up to her shoulder and
curled her arms around her waist as her sundress twisted
through her legs. She turned away, watching the ocean
darken with its mystery. She never really swam in the ocean,
just waded. The riptides and the unknown predators that
lurked below the surface scared her. She tasted the salt in the
cool spray that misted the air, heard hunger in the waves as
they chewed the sand around her feet. She sometimes wondered
what lay beyond the shore, in the uncharted depths
of the sea.
And if she’d ever have the courage to find out.
“It’s just that, I want to be a pastor, and . . . ,” Matthew said,
his voice closer to her.
“And?” She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, fighting
a shiver.
“You’re just not pastor’s wife material.”
PJ refused to let his epitaph show on her face and found a
voice that didn’t betray her. “Do you remember the last time
we were out on the beach together?”
“What? Uh . . . no . . . wait—a couple weeks ago, we got
ice cream on the pier.”
PJ closed her eyes. “That wasn’t with me.”
Silence. She didn’t temper it.
“Then, no.”
“It was the night of the sea turtles. Remember, we had to
use flashlights because they made all the residents along the
shore turn off their outside lights? We had our arms woven
together to keep from losing each other. I remember wondering
if it was possible to read your thoughts, because I couldn’t
see your face.”
“We nearly walked on a sea turtle coming to shore,” Matthew
said, reminiscence in his tone. She glanced at him, and something
like pain or concern emerged on his face, edged in the
shadow of whiskers.
PJ turned away, back to the ocean. “I kept thinking—that
turtle mama’s going to bury her babies onshore and never see
them again. She was going to leave them to fend for themselves,
to struggle back to the sea, tasty defenseless morsels
diving into an ocean where they’re the main course.”
She stared at her shoe, dangling in her hand. The wind ran
its sticky fingers through her shoulder-length hair, tangling it
into a nest. Gooseflesh prickled her skin—she was cold and
hungry, but she’d wrap herself in seaweed and dig a bunker in
the sand before she’d return to the restaurant with Matthew.
Probably she could even find something to eat in her so-called
suitcase.
“Do you think they made it?” She wasn’t sure why she asked,
why she prolonged this moment, their last. Probably trying to
unravel time, as usual, figure out where it had snarled, turned
into a knot.
Matthew dug his foot into the sand, watching it. “If they
were supposed to, I guess.” He sighed. “Let’s go inside, PJ.”
PJ ran her eyes over the profile she’d previously—about an
hour previously—told herself she loved. His sharp jaw, that lean
rectangle frame. Barefoot, she still came to nearly his chin.
She wanted a taller man. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
He frowned.
“I’m not doing this ‘let’s be friends’ thing with you.”
“But we were friends before.” He reached for her and she
dodged him, raising her shoe.
“Back away.”
“Whatya gonna do, PJ? Bean me with a shoe?”
“Don’t tempt me.”
He shook his head. “See, this is why we’d never work out.
I need someone who is . . .”
“Perfect? Doesn’t show her emotions?”
He raised his shoulder in an annoying shrug. “Pastor’s wife
material.”
Now he was going to get hurt. “Oh, that’s rich. Coming
from a former surfer with a scar where his eyebrow bar used
to be. What happened to ‘Ride the waves, PJ, and see where
they take you’?”
His eyes darkened. “I’ve changed.”
And apparently she hadn’t. “Good-bye, Matthew. And by
the way, yes, I hate crab legs. Because I’m allergic to them. Pay
attention.”
She kicked up sand as she marched across the beach, thankful
she could see her condo/motel/efficiency—depending on
who she talked to—in the distance. She’d give just about anything
for her Chuck Taylors to run home in. But she’d dressed
to kill, or at least for love, this evening in a floral sundress and
new espadrilles that gave her a sort of out-of-body feminine
feeling. She needed her Superman pajama pants and a tank
top—and fast.
“PJ! Don’t run away!” Matthew’s voice lifted over the surf.
“Running away is what I do best!” She didn’t turn.
“Why do you have to be such a drama queen?”
Okay. That. Was. It. She spun around, dropped her bag to
the sand, and with everything in her, hurled her other shoe at
him, a hard straight shot that any decent first baseman could
have nabbed or at least dodged.
His four-letter snarl into the night put the smallest of smiles
on her lips as she turned away.
The restless ocean stirred into the sounds of the club music as
she hiked up the beach. She clung to the shadows, avoiding the
pool of light from houses and condos, restaurants and cafés.
Not pastor’s wife material.
She broke into a little jog, hiking up the confining circle
of her hem.
Angling up the sand, she hopped over the boardwalk toward
her building. Brine-scented sea grass brushed the walkway,
carpeted the trail to the two-story Sandy Acres motel/apartment
complex, the half-lit sign now reading only “Sa d Ac es,”
a term that seemed particularly apropos as she opened the
metal gate alone, again.
Around the patio area, rusty pool furniture glimmered
under the tinny, buzzing fluorescent lights. A horde of moths
flirted with death around the heat of the bulbs; the earthy
palmetto smell tangled with the coconut oil smeared onto the
deck chairs, tempering the sharp odor of chlorine. Hip-hop
thrummed under her downstairs neighbor’s door, and wet
towels taunted by the wind slapped the metal rail above her as
she climbed the stairs to her unit.
Home sweet home.
A temporary home. Three years could mean temporary. In
fact, until tonight, she’d already been mentally packing, giving
away her garage sale wicker and, finally, her Kellogg High
School Mavericks sweatshirt. Maybe even Boone’s leather
jacket, the one she’d stolen the night she left town. It seemed
an uneven prize to all he’d cost her.
Her skin prickled as she fought the dead bolt.
Boone had probably forgotten the girl who wound her arms
around his waist and dug her face into the leathery pocket
between his shoulder blades as he roared them away from
Kellogg on his Kawasaki.
Loneliness met her in the silence, the lights between the
slats of the blinds striping the bedsheet that cordoned off her
so-called bedroom. Her faucet dripped, and she dropped her
key onto the counter, surrendering to the habitual attempt
to turn it off. Then she ca-lumped her bag onto the chair,
folded her arms, and stared out the window at the dark, hungry
ocean.
Almost without realizing it, she clamped her hand over
her left shoulder, high, near the apex, where the word Boone
marked her in flowery script.
Beep. Behind her, the answering machine beckoned her
away from the past and what might have been.
Boone was probably in jail or, worse, reformed and married
with children. The great taboo, he wasn’t mentioned in her
mother’s phone calls; his name wasn’t scrawled in her letters.
She was sure he’d forgotten her, just like everyone else had.
Beep.
Forgotten that she’d left Kellogg, Minnesota, accused of
a felony—an accusation too easily pinned on a high school
senior whose reputation indicted her without trial. Her only
crime had been abysmal judgment in men and allowing her
heart to trespass into places her common sense told her not
to tread.
A crime, apparently, she kept committing.
Beep.
Forgotten that her mother cut a deal with the director of the
country club, one that included a full tank of gas and promises
of a new kitchen. Her mother’s instructions to her included the
phrase “just until things blow over.”
Beep.
Perhaps things had blown over long ago. Perhaps she was
the one not ready.
Beep!
She pushed the Play button as she opened the freezer. Please
let there be ice—
“PJ, it’s me.” Connie. The fact that her sister’s attorneysolemn
voice tremored made PJ close the freezer door.
“Don’t panic.” Of course not. Because Connie never called
her without some earth-shattering joyful news: I passed the bar.
I bought a house. I’m having a baby. I’m getting married again!
PJ forced herself to remember that dissecting all that joy
was the dark news of husband number one’s death. No one,
regardless of how successful, thin, wealthy, and smart, deserved
to be woken up at 2 a.m. by the police and asked to identify
her husband’s remains. Or those of his mistress, with whom
he’d been traveling when his car went off the road.
Still, PJ could hear panic under Connie’s voice. Especially
when Connie continued, a little too quickly.
“Okay, listen, I know you don’t want to hear this, but . . . I
need you to come home.”
Connie took a breath. And PJ held hers.
“Mom’s been in an accident.”
Everything went silent—the hip-hop beating the floorboards,
the far-off hunger of the ocean, Matthew’s criticism
in her ear. The years rushed at her like a line drive knocking
her off her feet, regrets scattered like dust in her shadow.
Then Connie sighed and hung up. The beep and time signature
noted no further messages.
PJ reached for the phone.

Connie sounded as if she might be on her fourth cup of coffee
in some cement-lined corridor, tapping out the hour in her
Jimmy Choos.
“PJ, where have you been? Mom’s already had her cast set
and is in recovery.”
“Please, Connie, not now. Just . . . what happened?” PJ
pressed the phone tight to her ear and paced to the window,
the ten-year near estrangement with her mother hollowing her
out. Had her mother forgotten her silent pledge to carry on,
to be waiting if and when PJ summoned the courage to point
her car north?
“She fell on the tennis court and broke her ankle.”
The window’s cool surface broke the sweat across PJ’s forehead.
Tennis? “For pete’s sake, Connie, I thought . . . oh, man
. . . Don’t call me again.”
“PJ!”
“What?”
“Don’t you want to know how bad it is?”
PJ sank into a chair. “How bad is it?”
“They casted her ankle; her bones are secured with a pin.
She’ll be out of the hospital tomorrow. But I need you to come
home. I’m getting married in a week, and I need help.”
Married. Of course. PJ had seen a picture of Sergei, Connie’s
fiancé, and seriously wondered why a double-degreed lawyer
might be marrying her tae kwon do coach. But who was she to
question—after all, she, a near felon, had dreamed she might
pass as a pastor’s wife.
“I thought you two were eloping.” PJ had managed to catch
her breath and now returned to the freezer, cradled the phone
against her shoulder, and dug out the Moose Tracks. As she
opened the lid, crystallized edges and the smell of freezer burn
elicited only a slight hesitation. She lifted a spoon from the
dish drainer cup in the sink.
“We were flying down to Cancún, but Sergei’s parents
couldn’t get a visa for Mexico, so I planned a little soiree at the
country club. But the thing is, I have vacation time coming,
and if I don’t use it, I’ll lose it. So we need to get away now if
we want a honeymoon, and Mom certainly can’t watch David
while she’s in a cast. I need you, Peej.”
PJ leaned a hip against the counter and cleaned the sides of
the carton, the chocolate swirls melting against the roof of her
mouth—sweet with only an edge of bitter.
“So let me get this straight—it’s okay that you weren’t going
to invite me to the sunny sands of Mexico to watch you tie
the knot with Mr. Muscle, but you want me to leave my life
and return home at your whim?” She kept her eyes averted
from the threadbare wicker and the chipped Formica table
and stomped the floor once, real loud, hoping the boyz in the
hood might hear her over the rap.
On the other end of the phone, Connie’s voice wadded into
a small, tight ball. “I know how you feel about Kellogg and
Boone and especially Mom, and frankly I don’t blame you. I’ve
even tried to respect your decision. But it’s time to come home.
You have family here. I need you. David needs you. . . .”
PJ tossed the empty container into the sink, licked off the
spoon. Down the street, a car peeled out in a hurry, and a dog
barked in disapproval.
“You know how I feel? Really? Because you got to stay,
Connie. After graduation, you went on to college, to a life.
I left town right after the ceremony, a Tupperware bowl of
fruit on the seat beside me, praying my ancient VW Bug
would make it to the South Dakota border. I’ve spent the past
ten years wandering from one tank of gas to the next, trying
to figure out where I should land. You lived the life Mom
dreamed for you—”
“You lived the life you dreamed for yourself.”
PJ flinched, Connie’s voice sharper than she remembered.
She stared out the window, wondering if Matthew still stood
on the beach, a hand to his bruised head. “Is that what you
seriously believe?”
Silence on the other end made PJ rub her fingers into her
eyes. Connie had become an unlikely ally over the past ten
years, mediating between PJ and their mother, once in a
while sending her enough to cover her rent. However, it still
wasn’t so easy to share the limelight with the sister who was
wanted.
As opposed to being the one left on the proverbial doorstep.
Being adopted sounded so endearing to everyone but
the adoptee. The fact that Connie had been born just a few
months later, close enough to share the same classes in school,
constantly earning better grades and more awards, only served
as a constant reminder that PJ hadn’t been good enough, even
from birth.
“I’m sorry,” PJ said, letting a sigh leak out. “I’ve had a rough
night.”
“Then come home, PJ. If only for a couple weeks. Or longer.
You can stay with me until you find your own place.”
“Did you ask Mom?” PJ winced, hating the question and
that she didn’t yank it back. Hadn’t she learned anything?
“I asked. Even if Mom won’t admit it, she needs you.”
PJ stood at her screen door, staring out at the now starsprinkled
night glistening on the rippled landscape. The Milky
Way streamed across the sky, heading north.
“Please?” Admittedly, it was the closest to pleading she’d
ever heard from Connie. “I need you.”
“How long before your wedding?”
“Six days. Sunday at two.”
PJ hung up without promises and walked back outside, over
the boardwalk to the beach. The wind had chased the clouds,
and a diamond chip moon hung in the sky, surrounded by the
jewels of the night, brilliant and close enough to wrap her fingers
around. She pressed her bare feet into the sand, then lifted
them out, listening to the water slurp, then fill the imprints.
Finally, she stared out again at the ocean and wondered how
many turtles really made it back to the sea.
... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. PJ begins the book on the night all her dreams are dashed. Have you ever been in a place where you thought something was working out and it was completely the opposite? What did you do about it?
2. PJ has an old boyfriend back in Kellogg that she can't forget. Why do you think he has such a tie to her heart? Have you ever run into an old flame? How did it make you feel?
3. PJ doesn't want to go home because she's ashamed of something that happened in the past. What was it, and what are her deeper reasons for not wanting to return? Do you have anything in your past holding you back from returning home?
4. PJ returns on the day of her sister's wedding. Why is that particularly difficult for her? What would you have done in her shoes?
5. Why do you think PJ's relationship with her mother is so strained? What does PJ learn about her mother that changes her opinion of her and their relationship?
6. PJ feels like she's a terrible friend for leaving Trudi in a difficult situation ten years ago. Have you ever felt this way? What have you done to try to make up for it?
7. Connie, PJ's sister, has Russian in-laws. Did you find them endearing or annoying? Have you ever traveled to another culture, and how do you think you'd do with foreign in-laws?
8. Why is Davy so antagonist toward PJ, and why do you think she bonds with him? In what ways does she see herself in Davy? Have you ever dealt with a difficult child, and what did you do?
9. When you first met Jeremy, did you trust him? Why or why not?
10. PJ is torn between two men. Which one do you think is the best for her and why?
11. What spiritual lesson does PJ learn by returning to Kellogg and sleuthing out Ernie's murder?
12. Do you think PJ will make a good P.I.? Why or why not?

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