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The Osbournes were howling by the time Jess got to the point of the story where she’d refused bridesmaid duties.

“You used the word ‘engagement’ just to mess with her, didn’t you?” Jonquil hooted while she turned the potatoes roasting in the oven.

“I did a little bit,” Jess admitted, sipping on her bottled water as she sat at Beth and Jonquil’s kitchen counter. While she was riding emotionally high, physically…she wasn’t feeling great. She felt sort of floaty and disconnected. Maybe she was dehydrated? It didn’t feel possible, given all the water she was drinking, but she had spent an awful lot of time doing Sev’s errands that day, only pausing to eat Dean’s cheeseburger. It had been a delicious burger, but it didn’t equal a day’s worth of nutrition.

Jonquil threw an arm over her eyes while still holding the wooden spoon. In her best Southern belle accent, she asked, “You could have really ramped up the drama and said you had a gentleman caller waiting on the veranda.”

“Trust me. There was enough drama. I was just trying to get out of smacking range,” Jess said.

“You’re not really going to put anything special together for that awful girl and that…well, Tillard’s not awful, really, just sort of a doofus,” Beth said, gluing down a decorative edge on a scrapbook page, securing a photo on a sky-blue background.

“I don’t think so, at least not now,” Jess said, leaning against the counter and balancing her cheek on her palm. “She’s pushing for it, but it just feels ghoulish.”

“It is ghoulish,” Poppy agreed, clicking on the keyboard of her laptop from her perch on the couch. “Just like all the calls I’m getting from media outlets—legitimate and not-quite-so—about the rumors they’re hearing about ‘accidents’ at our facility. It’s only a matter of time before they start camping at the gate like a bunch of turkey vultures.”

“This is why our PR rep has a job,” Sis reminded Poppy. “Forward the calls to her.”

“And if that doesn’t work, have them call me,” Beth said, attaching a sparkly crescent-moon-shaped accent to the page.

“Poppy,” Jess began, “I’m so s—”

“If you say you’re sorry, I’m going to take away your potatoes,” Sis informed her.

Jess clamped her lips shut.

“You were gonna say it,” Sis said, squinting at her. “Weren’t you?”

“You don’t know that,” Jess retorted, even as Sis gave her a look that could only be interpreted as Bitch, please .

“Look!” Beth said, holding up her finished page. It was a veritable phantasmagoria of decorative borders and sparkly quote stickers. “All done.”

“I love you, but you have a scrapbooking problem ,” Jonquil informed her, kissing her soundly.

“Everybody has their outlets,” Beth informed her primly. “ This is how I process interacting with multiple law enforcement officials in one day.”

“Wow,” Jess said, cringing.

Jonquil shot Jess a pointed look.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.” Jess sipped her water. Eager to change the subject, she asked, “What’s the page about, Beth?”

Beth grinned, tapping her finger against the photo of the Osbournes standing by a bannered table full of little jars. “It’s the most recent Chickenhawk Valley Flannel Days Festival. We gave away little jars of body scrub and raffled a chance for a free day of treatments here. It went over really big!”

“Yeah, Sev mentioned something about going to the festival when you were kids,” Jess said. “He said something about a moonshine tasting, which I have to say would be a big no from me.”

Poppy frowned. “Huh.”

“What?” Jess lifted her hand and it felt weirdly disconnected from her body, like it would just float away if she let it. She pulled her arm close to her stomach and pressed it there.

“They wouldn’t have had the moonshine tasting when Sev was around. It was a new thing they added this year,” Beth said. “Moonshine is trendy right now, and the festival committee is trying to connect with the younger-but-still-drinking-age crowd. Trust me, I was there for the discussions of permits. It was protracted…and involved, even for a discussion about offering free samples of pure grain alcohol to the general public.”

Jess snickered, even if she was bothered by the comment for some reason. Something was nagging at the edge of her mind, like a pulled thread in a sweater. But before she could pin it down, Owen opened the door, making way for Dean as he carried an enormous silver roasting pan, covered in foil.

“We have arrived with roast beast!” Owen announced grandly in his big sonorous voice. “Much like a Whovian feast from the Grinch story, it is so comically large Dean had to roast it in the industrial kitchen, but it’s sure to be delicious.”

“I think that’s a compliment, but I’m not sure,” Dean said, shaking his head. He grinned at Jess. “I’m glad you’re here. I was afraid I was going to have to drag you out of the villa as Sev and What’s-Her-Face barked orders at you.”

“It’s a vivid image, and not entirely inaccurate,” Jess admitted.

Dean placed the pan on the counter and peeled back the foil to reveal a perfectly lovely beef roast encased in crispy bacon.

“I mentioned something about a marriage proposal in exchange for a cheeseburger?” Jess said, ignoring the way Poppy, Jonquil, and even Sis went all soft and googly-eyed. “This is so much better than a cheeseburger.”

Dean merely grinned at her. “Slow-paced, long-term, sandwich-based commitment. Besides, Owen here has news even more dramatic than his whole ‘roast beast’ entrance.”

“It was a little dramatic,” Poppy told Owen, just as he kissed her. Behind them, the rest of the family sat around the table while Dean carved the roast. Beth and Owen piled the plates high with hearty servings of meat and potatoes. Jess’s mouth watered, and she took a long drink from her bottle before anyone noticed the gathering drool.

“Oh, right, in this family, I’m the dramatic one.” Owen snorted. As they took their seats, Owen said, “And on that note, I feel it’s now safe to say that Chad’s death wasn’t a tragic sauna accident—I mean, those things happen, but I used what chips I have left within the forensics community to ask ‘hypothetical questions’ of my contacts in the state bureau of investigation. Blister, believe it or not, was downplaying the seriousness of the case—or cases, as it turns out. Given the general absence of deaths this weird in our area, my contacts pulled Chad’s test results. He didn’t die of heatstroke, or at least not just heatstroke. Chad had high levels of a chemical called coprine in his system, really high levels. That led to his overall cause of death, which was sort of total-body ‘blue screen of death.’?”

“Is ‘total-body blue screen of death’ a medical term?” Sis asked.

“So they’re saying he was poisoned?” The blood drained from Dean’s face. “From something out of my kitchen?

Owen shrugged. “It could have come from anywhere, but most of the time, poisons are introduced through food and drink. The fact that no one else at the spa has gotten sick is a good sign, I think, in terms of your kitchen safety.”

“So…Chad’s death wasn’t an accident?” Jess asked, around a mouthful of heavenly potatoes.

Sis raised an eyebrow at her. “Um, yeah, honey, we covered that.”

“Coprine.” Jonquil got a pensive look on her face. “I know that word.”

“But what about Jeremy’s test results? If Chad’s death wasn’t an accident, that means Jeremy’s death probably wasn’t an accident, either. And Dean, didn’t you say there were weird mushrooms in Jeremy’s gut?” Jess demanded.

The rest of the family turned to her, their expressions confused.

Oh, shit. She wasn’t supposed to let on that she knew that.

Why had she blurted that out? It was like a bubble that popped out of her mouth, without any effort from Jess. She put her water bottle aside. She felt like she was drunk, but she hadn’t had a drop of liquor all day. Maybe it was low blood sugar? She scooped more potatoes into her mouth.

“I told her about the morels,” Dean sighed, putting his arm around her. “Considering that she found the body, it was the least she deserved.”

“I didn’t tell anybody,” Jess promised. “I don’t trust anybody in my villa with my favorite lipstick, much less autopsy secrets.”

“So, that confirms it—unless Chad accidentally poisoned himself somehow, this was intentional, meaning there was a murder, here at the Golden Ash. I feel weirdly violated,” Poppy said, sagging against the chair. “And that means Jeremy…ugh.”

Jonquil pursed her lips. “Who would want to kill Chad?”

“Who wouldn’t want to kill Chad? He was a dick,” Sis said. When the rest of the table responded with various levels of facial cringe, she added, “OK, I know that sounds bad now, but I don’t think any of you are going to report me to Blister, are you?”

“As your attorney, I would like to remind all of you not to say any of these things outside of these four walls.” Beth sighed, and then drained half of her wineglass.

Jess propped her chin on both hands, trying to process the information. A lot of people here at the Golden Ash had a motive to go after Chad. Maybe Diana tried to end things with him and he got “insistent” about keeping their thing going? Sev was clearly annoyed with every breath Chad took. For that matter, any of the Osbournes could have poisoned Chad, considering their knowledge and access to plants. And given some of the history between the Hardcastle and Osbourne families—and some of the things people on both sides said about Emma Lee’s disappearance…

Wait.

“What about the Yoni Egg Queen?” Jess asked.

“Never going to stop calling her that, huh?” Beth asked.

After a long moment of consideration, Jess said, “No. She and Chad hooked up right before he died. Or at least, he was leaving her villa in the middle of the night when Dean was walking me back to mine. Maybe Zephyr gave him something? They were drinking together, I think. Hell, maybe she took something, too, trying to get high? Has anybody checked on Zephyr lately? Or Mrs. Treadaway?”

Jess realized she seemed to be talking a lot…like…a lot . That didn’t feel right. Hmm .

“Could Trenton have done this?” Dean asked. “Or maybe Sev? They were the ones who had the closest access to Chad. Would they have had any reason to hurt Jeremy Treadaway? I don’t think they knew each other.”

Jess chewed on her lip considering. “Trenton has never been aggressive. He gets what he wants by wheedling, and he’s the kind of guy who sticks with what works for him.”

“Poisoning isn’t exactly a confrontational way to hurt someone,” Beth noted.

“As for Sev…Well, he’s spent more time around Chad than anyone, so yeah, he probably had the most motive. But Trenton might have caught on to the fact that…something was going on between Chad and Diana. But he wouldn’t have a reason to hurt Jeremy Treadaway,” Jess noted, scrubbing a hand over her face, suddenly feeling very tired. “That I’m aware of.”

“You mentioning coprine is bothering me,” Jonquil said. “I’ve heard it somewhere before.”

“And we are all very impressed,” Dean promised her.

Jonquil rolled her eyes and got up to retrieve a book from the shelf. “This is why you buy books on a variety of subjects. It saves you from questionable internet searches.”

She went through the bookshelf before she finally selected a volume called Fascinating Fungi from around the World . Jonquil put it down on the table and started flipping through the pages until she found what she wanted. She showed the group a photo of a puffy white dome growing out of the ground. It sort of looked like a cross between a dinosaur egg and an evil pope’s hat. “This is an inky cap mushroom. There’s this chemical in it, coprine, that reacts badly when combined with alcohol. It’s nicknamed ‘tippler’s bane.’ Eat enough of them and combine them with alcohol, they can be fatal.”

“I’ve never had anything that looks like that in my kitchen,” Dean insisted.

“Do those grow around here?” Jess asked.

“I’ve never seen them, but I’m not exactly an expert. Um, symptoms after eating include dizziness, nausea, general unwellness. Symptoms can appear within a few hours of eating them,” Jonquil continued. “And if he was putting his body through dehydration in the sauna and booze and who knows what else, they might act even faster.”

“I think Chad was drinking pretty much from the moment he got here,” Jess mused, her mouth suddenly very dry. She swallowed down more water, but it couldn’t seem to make the thirst go away. “Tiny airplane bottles.”

“Yeah, but Chad hated mushrooms,” Dean replied. He took a bite of potatoes and added salt and pepper, even as Jonquil glared at him. The implied seasoning battle made Jess snicker. Dean gave her an amused glance before adding, “He ordered the pasta without it. Jeremy Treadaway, on the other hand, ordered room service almost aggressively, every damn night, the mushroom pasta. Maybe he was poisoned with mushrooms?”

Owen shrugged and pulled out his phone. “Well, Jeremy Treadaway’s death was already being investigated because it was a little suspicious that a grown man drowned in a wading pool.” Owen scrolled through some images on his phone and showed them what looked like a close-up of a jar of beef stew. “Anyway, when I looked at the stomach contents, I noticed that some of the mushroom chunks—”

“Ew!” Beth cried. “Owen, we’re eating.”

Jess put her hands over her eyes. That was an image she would never get out of her head.

“Sometimes someone forgets that their family members have never seen the inside of a human being,” Poppy said kindly. When Jess took her hands off her eyes, Poppy was patting her husband’s back. Under his beard, Owen had flushed bright red.

“Looked wrong,” Owen said, putting his phone away. “OK, sorry, so I don’t want to go into how I know, I guess, but in my opinion, when I looked at the photos from the autopsy, it looked like there were two types of mushrooms. The orange ones, which I see Dean use all the time, and these darker brown ones—which to me, look like morel mushrooms.”

“Dean doesn’t use morel mushrooms,” Sis scoffed.

“Dean said it was possible that Jeremy had picked his own mushrooms and eaten them, because that’s what an idiot would do,” Jess said, nodding. Beth just pinched the bridge of her nose and seemed to pray. Jess figured Beth was asking for legal patience.

“I did say that,” Dean said. “Because in general, amateurs shouldn’t pick wild mushroom and snack on them. And I don’t use morel mushrooms because Granny always said they were bad luck or dirty or something, which, given the situation, kind of makes sense.”

Jonquil shook her head. “Granny said morels were bad luck because you might pick the wrong ones. False morels look like real morels and they’re poisonous. I mean, the person would probably have to eat a lot of them, but poisoning someone’s dinner is pretty bad, karmically speaking.”

Even at the look of alarm on Dean’s face, Jess’s attention slipped into some weird molasses-like state for a second, like she’d nodded off midsentence, but her eyes were still open. She blinked, clearing her throat and taking a deep drink of her water.

“So someone got into your kitchen and mixed poisonous mushrooms into your pasta dish?” Owen was saying when her brain snapped back into focus. “Or do you think Aaron the room service porter is up to no good?”

“People don’t just walk into my kitchen. Ask Jess,” Dean said.

“Nope, I was highly supervised every time I stopped by to flirt with Dean,” Jess said, nodding. “Sometimes Jamie was there and he supervised me, too. He thought it was funny when I made Dean uncomfortable.”

Dean’s brows lifted, but he continued, “And Aaron wouldn’t do that. If he had a problem with Jeremy, he would just beat the shit out of him and be done with it.” Dean flicked through the tabs on his phone, in what Jess assumed was some sort of kitchen auditing app. “Look, Aaron even left notes on the order in the system. He said on several nights he attempted to deliver their food, but no one answered. Quote, ‘It sounded like they were arguing pretty loudly in there.’ He would knock, leave the cart outside the door, and run like…”

Jess’s hearing seemed to go fuzzy and blank, like cotton had been stuffed in her ears. She wasn’t sure how long she stared into space, trying to get her ears to work again, but it felt like a while.

Molasses brain again. This is becoming a problem.

Jess gripped the edge of the table. Something was nagging at her brain. She was missing something, something important. She was having an important thought.

“Chad and Diana were having sex at a low-rent, fish-themed motel,” she blurted out.

Everybody stopped talking. She really had to get this “blurting out things” under control .

“Well, that’s good to know,” Sis told her, patting Jess’s shoulder. “You’re sounding awful tired, hon.”

Jess nodded. Right, time to be quiet. Until the molasses brain goes away.

“I should probably call Blister about the mushroom stuff,” Poppy sighed, standing up. “This seems like important information to the investigation…that’s not going to look great for us as a facility.”

Poppy stepped into the dining room to make her call. Jess stared out the window, watching the tree branches dance in the wind, feeling a weird dread in the pit of her stomach. They reminded her of skeleton fingers, scratching at the sky. They made her think of her mother and the way her hands had grabbed Jess’s arms when she was little. And thinking of her mother was never a good idea.

She blinked up at Dean, who was shaking her shoulder gently. “Hey, I need to go over some things in the kitchen, make sure nothing’s been tampered with. You’ll be safe here, OK? Get some rest.”

“Yep. Be careful.” She inhaled sharply through her nose, like someone woken from a nap. “?’Cause you know, potential poisoner?”

“She makes a good point,” Owen said. “Maybe I should go to the kitchen with you, look some stuff over?”

“I would feel better if you did,” Poppy said.

Jess glanced around the room. The table had been cleared and Dean and Owen were gone. How long had she been staring out the window? She wanted to talk to Nana Blanche. Desperately. Nana would help her bring her molasses thoughts back into order. She would help her sort through all these very inconvenient feelings, just as she had when Jess was a kid. But Nana was on a riverboat rolling… rollin’…rollin’ down the river . And Jess’s phone was still in her room.

A lock of dark hair fell in Jess’s face and she pushed it back, wincing at how her fingers tangled into it. She wasn’t going to be able to brush it at this rate and that would add a fun new level to her self-confidence. Nana Blanche had been the only one who could brush her hair when she was a kid. Thick curly hair was hard to manage without special brushes and detangler and—

Confidence.

Shit.

In her haste to pack, Jess had left her pearls stuffed in a sock drawer at Tranquility Villa.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

The Osbourne ladies were distracted with dinner cleanup. Jess could probably make it to her villa, grab her necklace, and sneak back so fast that they wouldn’t even notice her slipping out the front door. The wind was still playing havoc with the trees, but the rain had stopped, and she managed to grab a flashlight as she left.

Right.

Jess jogged down the path toward the guest villas. At least it felt like a jog, but given the way her flashlight beam was bouncing around, she thought that she probably looked like Frankenstein’s monster lumbering across the moors. She didn’t want to be Frankenstein’s monster. Dean wouldn’t think she was cute if she were green.

What was she thinking about again? Pearls. She wasn’t about to leave her great-grandmother’s necklace down there with that villa of vipers. She’d be lucky if they weren’t already packed away in Aubrey’s suitcase as some weird victory trophy.

“Thieving bi-atch,” Jess muttered to no one in particular. The tree branches seemed to shake their arms in sympathy.

Jess sped along the path from the family houses, hoping that she could get to Tranquility Villa without seeing anybody. Maybe they were having dinner in the men’s villa tonight…to keep Trenton company and persuade him that getting engaged would make him feel better. Because that would work, hitching his wagon to a star that didn’t…. something.

As she passed the thermal suite, she could see Sev on the hill, sort of…pacing back and forth. He was nowhere near the villas, but she wasn’t sure that she could pass him without being seen.

She froze, chewing her lip.

Sev…something about Sev was pecking at the corner of Jess’s brain. Something she was supposed to talk to Sev about.

And suddenly, she felt very vulnerable, out here in the open where Sev could see her.

Why would she be afraid of Sev?

Something was wrong.

Jess looked, back and forth, between the villas and the Osbournes’ compound, promising whatever deities might be listening that if she could just get one place or the other, she would never be stupid enough to end up in this Choose Your Own Adventure for Dummies again.

“No, no, this is stupid,” Jess said, shaking her head and backing up toward the safety of the Osbournes. “I’m not going to go running across a dark abandoned spa facility toward people I don’t trust. Leaving behind the only allies I have. I’m not that high.”

Something sloshed in her hand. Jess looked down at the water bottle. She hadn’t even realized she was holding it.

“Oh, God, I am high ,” she whispered, clapping her hands over her mouth. “I’m super, super, suuuuper high. How did that happen?”

Jess hadn’t smoked weed in ten years…probably. Maybe. She’d never trusted pills, given Hadley’s…history. And she hadn’t had anything to drink today but water.

“Weird,” she muttered.

She turned, stopping midcircle when her eye landed on something glowing white on the ground. Or at least, it looked like it was glowing in the beam of her flashlight.

Mushrooms .

She slipped her flashlight back into her pocket.

Truffles were a mushroom.

That was what she was trying to remember.

Jess’s Big Book of Life Plans: Wrench Gloss…Hemlock…Sprite—Try not to be so high when you’re—Ow.

And that was the last thing she remembered before the world went dark.