Read A Dead Husband (Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery) for Free Online

figure something out, I promise.”  Jessica tried to sound confident, even though she had no clue about where to begin.
    “Okay, Jessica, thanks . Please hurry.” Laura sniffed as she hung up.
    Jessica stripped off her robe and the blasted body shaper .  She climbed into the shower, turned on all the shower heads and let it rip.  The pulsing water beat back the last remnants of fogginess in her brain, though that didn’t mean her life made more sense. Her career and marriage were in ruins, friends were slipping her roofies, and now this. Laura’s husband dead, not just dead, but murdered.  What was she supposed to do about any of it? The tabloid-worthy life she was leading had taken a new turn, from soap opera to whodunit.
    “Shades of V.I. Warshawski ,” she muttered, stepping from the shower. She tried out a steely-eyed gaze. “More like Scooby-Doo,” she said aloud to the woman in the mirror.
    Jessica dried her hair that was precision cut to chin length, a light brown with blond highlights. She had typically worn it longer but opted for something easier to deal with when she had it cut last week .  Given the extent of her current lethargy she just didn’t want to deal with hair.  It actually turned out better than she expected, created the illusion of perkiness or efficiency even though she possessed neither. It’s not that she didn’t want to look decent, she just didn’t have the motivation to work at it.
    Jessica put on a tinted moisturizer with good SPF protection and took what she meant to be a last quick look in the mirror.  She was still carrying a few additional pounds of baby weight from all those failed attempts at beat-the-clock with whacked out hormones, racing against the expiration date on a decaying marriage. The extra pounds were nicely distributed, though. She had never been one of those women who freaked out if she wasn’t a size two. Like that platinum blond on Jim’s arm in the Hollywood rag Bernadette was reading. 
    W hat about those little crow’s feet around her eyes? Not to mention the dark circles under them and her furrowed brow that had not yet been touched by Botox.  Maybe it was time to do something. She wasn’t ready to replace all those hours at the fertility clinic with hours at a dermatology clinic. Or was she? Before she could get into a full-blown argument with herself she left the bathroom. 
    Stepping out of the bathroom and into the dressing room and walk-in closet nearby, Jessica just stood there for a moment.  What was supposed to be a dream room for a clothes horse like her looked more like something you’d find after a serious quake.  There had been a quake in her life, alright.  But not one she could pin on the perpetually active fault lines that run throughout much of California and the Coachella Valley.  An 8.0 on the “life’s a bitch” Richter scale.  No, make that a 6 or 7 rather than an 8.  Finding your husband murdered, in your own home, was even more life shattering than finding your husband, in your own bed, with a twenty-something Hollywood diva. 
    She felt the anger rising at that memory of Jim and that floozy as she surveyed the room.  The disaster before her was not the fault of the room’s design.  The outer walls of the room had plenty of places to hang clothes, with storage above for things like the suitcases and garment bags that should have been emptied.  Stacks of things she had pulled out of boxes or luggage were piled, willy-nilly, on top of back-to-back rows of dresser drawers in the middle of the room.  The room was well-lit with a full length mirror in one corner, and little upholstered benches at either end of the center “island” of drawers. 
    Right now the room was crammed with boxes and suitcases . Some were open with articles of clothing hanging out of them.  Shopping bags, filled with the spoils of afternoon divorce tantrums on El Paseo, added to the clutter. A few of the things she had purchased were hung