by Hillary Avis
My eyes opened wide—how could she toss out something like that right after our conversation about throwing around wild accusations? But then I saw her smirk.
“See?” she asked triumphantly. “I told you—it’s just not cool.”
I shook my head. “Too soon. Too soon. Go bail out your brother.” I nudged her and she opened the door to the sidewalk.
“Thanks for the ride. I was just upset earlier and didn’t mean what I said—don’t hold it against me, OK?”
“We’ve been friends for too long.” I waved her out and she slammed the door. The abrupt noise made the Magdas chuckle and fuss in their carriers. It was time to get them home. I watched Ruth’s back disappear into the sheriff’s office and then headed out of town with my three restless passengers. As I wound my way through the Curves, I wondered if I’d be able to go twenty-four hours in this town without picking up another batch of lucky clucks.
Well, it was all the more motivation to get the coop finished. And the plans I’d drawn up originally—plans to house four dozen layers this year and that many again next year—would need to be expanded. Maybe doubled. In a way, it was lucky that I’d dug up a skeleton and slowed my coop-construction schedule. If I’d proceeded as planned, I’d be short on space by a long shot.
I was so lost in thought by the time I hit the Flats that I didn’t notice the flashing lights behind me until Eli—of course, it was Eli—hit the siren.
I jerked the Porsche over to the shoulder and rolled down my window. “Seriously?” I asked as soon as he approached. “I thought I washed you out of my hair!”
“I followed you out of town,” he said.
“Obviously.”
“License and proof of insurance?”
“Isn’t this harassment? I don’t think I was even speeding.” That was a lie. I probably had been, but I wasn’t paying attention to the speedometer. I was pretty sure Eli would have pulled me over whether or not I was speeding, though. I rummaged in my purse and handed him my ID.
He didn’t even glance at my license, just held it pinched between his fingers. “Actually, I wanted to apologize.”
I squinted at him. “You pulled me over to say you’re sorry? For what?”
“I’m sorry because I broke my promise. I said I wouldn’t hold it against you if you pushed me away, and I did. I took it personally, and I might have left you in danger.” He shook his head, his eyes darting to the Sutherland blueberry farm on the other side of the ditch and then back to me as though a murderer might jump out at any moment.
I rolled my eyes at him. “First off, I wasn’t in danger. Rusty is a dope, not a killer. And secondly, why can’t you act like a normal person and just come by the house?”
He handed my driver’s license back to me and smirked when I swiped it out of his hand. “Admit it—you wouldn’t have listened. You’d shut the door in my face. I have to hold your ID hostage to get you to stop for a second.”
“I’m going to run your foot over in a second if you don’t step back from my car.”
Eli shook his head. “No, you’re not. Because you promised you wouldn’t hold it against me, either, remember? Let me come help you, Leona. You need the extra pair of hands now that Rusty’s locked up.”
“Ruth is bailing him out right now,” I said stubbornly.
“It’ll take hours to process him. Might as well get a foundation trench dug while you wait for him to show up—if he shows up. You don’t want to get behind schedule.” He winked at me.
Irritation prickled under my skin. He couldn’t use my own schedule against me! “I’ll be fine. Worry about your job, not mine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a casserole to deliver.” I started rolling up my window, but he put his hand on the glass to stop me.
“My job is to keep you safe,” he said, leaning close enough that I could smell the Doublemint gum on his breath, same as he chewed in high school. Some things never changed. Back then, he’d tear a stick in half and give me one piece when we were done with football and cheerleading practice. The rush of mint, the rush of meeting in secret behind the bleachers, the rush of kissing him flooded my senses. Had it ever been that intense with Peterson? I doubted it.
I flushed, angry that I was so affected by the vivid memory. “I don’t see what that has to do with my kissing coop!” I snapped, heat blooming behind my collarbone—great timing for a stupid hot flash. I blew air up to cool my forehead and fanned myself with my hand.
“Kissing coop?” His forehead furrowed as he tried to work out my meaning.
“Chicken!” I said. “Chicken coop!”
A slow smile spread across his face. “Why were you thinking about kissing, Lee?”
“I wasn’t!” I turned the key in the ignition. “I’m going now.”
“I’ll follow you in,” he drawled, still grinning.
“Don’t you have a murder to investigate?” I asked tartly. “Keeping tabs on me isn’t going to solve it.”
His cheeky smile disappeared. “But it’ll keep you safe.”
“Just let me go already. Keeping me safe doesn’t keep Honeytree safe!” I pointed at his badge. “I’m just one person, but you have a whole county of people to protect.”
He set his jaw stubbornly. “I let you go once, thinking you were just one girl, and I was wrong. I’m not going to lose you again.”
My heart, that I thought I had hardened like a rock, turned out to be more of an eggshell than a piece of granite and cracked slightly at the pain in his words. But he was being stupid. I was just going home, not entering a murderer’s den.
“Are you going to write me a ticket?”
“Of course not. Unless you need my number again?” He jokingly reached for his ticket pad.
“Then I have work to do.” I put the Porsche in gear, waited a half-second so he could get his foot out of the way of my back tires, and peeled out, making a sharp turn down Anne’s driveway. I sidestepped the busy forensics team to knock at the door, but nobody answered, so I left the casserole on Walt’s chair on the porch. Maybe Anne wasn’t in a talking mood. I didn’t blame her.
When I turned down my own driveway a couple hundred yards down the road, I was annoyed to see Eli’s SUV follow and turn in behind me. I pulled up to the house and put the car into park, grabbed the chicken carriers from the back, and tried to make it into the barn before he caught up, but he was too quick for me, darting between me and the barn door.
I saw his face change as he took in the view behind me: my Porsche and the Suburban next to each other in front of the house. From this angle, he could clearly see the GO HOME scratched into the Suburban’s paint. His face went pale.
“Go away, Eli.” I tried to step around him, but he blocked me and I let out a frustrated screech. “I know what you’re going to say. You’re worried. But it’s fine. I’m fine.”
“You don’t know that,” he said stubbornly. “When did this happen? Last night?”
“Night before,” I mumbled.
He gaped at me. “You knew about it the last time I was here? When I took Rusty into custody? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want you to be like this.” I gave him a pointed look.
“I could kick myself for letting you talk me out of staying here. I can’t believe I listened to you when you were receiving death threats!” He cursed under his breath and began pacing back and forth in front of the barn door, muttering half-sentences. “Trying to keep her safe...never listens. What’s the point? Lost cause...standing guard...”
Oh, brother. I didn’t have time to deal with his drama. “People have their opinions. It’s not a death threat—it just says I should get out of here, and to which I’m not going to pay any mind. If you want to guard my property, you can do it at the end of the driveway. The other end,” I added pointedly. “You’re in my way.”
He stopped and held out his hands pleadingly. “I can’t just sit there! I’ll go crazy.”
“Then go do your job.”
/>
“I can’t!” he burst out suddenly. “I have no leads in the case. I have nothing. Zero. Nada. What am I supposed to do? Go sit at a desk in my office and twiddle my thumbs and wait for the forensics report to come back?”
“Well, you’re not going to find any leads here, just a bunch of chickens and dirt and chores that aren’t done because I’ve been caught up in doing your job for you.” He opened his mouth, stunned, and I finally maneuvered around him, carefully balancing the two chicken carriers so their passengers wouldn’t be jostled too much. I set my back against the sliding barn door to open it, but of course it didn’t budge.
He reached above my head to add his weight to the door and it finally creaked open. He followed me inside the barn, hovering as I added the Magdas to the stall with Cher and Phyllis. “Doing my job? How do you figure?”
The Polish hens didn’t even seem to notice that the Magdas had joined them, at least not until the Magdas began exclaiming over the dish of layer crumbles. Then they rushed over and tried to defend their dragon hoard but spent most of the time crashing into the wall behind the food dish while the Magdas ignored them, happily filling their crops with feed.
Satisfied that the two groups of hens weren’t going to murder each other, I turned back to him. “Well, I don’t know, Eli. How is it that you have zero leads, but I have one?”
His eyebrows nearly hit his hairline. “You do?”
“Yep.” I leaned back against one of the barn posts and enjoyed the look on his face for a little longer than necessary. “Wanna hear it?”
His breath, which he’d apparently been holding, flooded out. “Yes, of course.”
“Remember how Mike Spence said Sherman Dice used to play poker with them? Well, I found out that he quit the game because he was tired of how much Zeke and Walt argued all the time. Apparently, they really got into it.”
He gaped at me. “How’d you find that out?”
“I was at the feed store this morning getting chicken stuff and Sherman told me.”
“I asked him about Walt yesterday afternoon, and he didn’t have a thing to say! Neither did Zeke at the pawn shop, for that matter.” Eli crossed his arms indignantly, frowning at the memory of his failed questioning. “Guess I need to have another chat with Zeke. Actually”—he narrowed his eyes at me thoughtfully—“you’re going to have a chat with Zeke. I’m just going to listen in. It’s pretty clear that these old farts aren’t going to open up to me. But a pretty lady like you...”
“Oh, no,” I said. I backed away and busying myself with refilling the chicks’ feeder, my cheeks burning at the implied compliment. He didn’t mean anything by it, but for some reason it still made me blush. “I don’t have time to play detective just because you’re bad at it, mister.”
“Oh, yes you are! You’re going to help me out and then you’re going to let me help you out. Even-steven.” Eli grinned triumphantly. “You know you can’t run that trencher by yourself. Your trench is going to be all wackadoo if you try. And you have no idea if Rusty is even going to show up. Plus, my services are free.” To underline his point, he pushed up one of his uniform sleeves and flexed, wiggling his eyebrows for extra effect.
I couldn’t help giggling at his ridiculous expression. And I had to admit he was right. I couldn’t count on Rusty and I’d have to trench by hand if I went it alone. Now that my dream coop had to be larger than my original plans, that meant a lot more linear feet of foundation—and a lot more blisters on my palms.
“Do we have a deal?” Eli asked.
I sighed. “Fine. We have a deal.”
Chapter 32
Unlike Honeytree, with its quaint, compact downtown, Duma had no town center. Instead, a series of short streets were strung out along the highway for a mile, like legs on a centipede—a centipede with a fifty-five mile-per-hour speed limit. I took the speed limit more as a suggestion and kept the Porsche’s accelerator pressed nearly to the floorboards all the way to the pawn shop, enjoying the feel of the wind in my hair and leaving Eli in the dust. What was he going to do, pull me over?
I parked in front of Zeke’s Antiques, where a sign in the cloudy window read “Buy, Sell, Trade.” I didn’t wait for Eli to get there. If he wanted me to be his undercover agent, surely he didn’t want me to hold hands with him on the way through the door. I didn’t know Zeke, but I knew pawn brokers made their business on sniffing out shysters and cops.
An electronic beep sounded when I stepped through the door, and right away I noticed security cameras all over the store. Unlike most local businesses, Zeke’s Antiques had apparently joined the twenty-first century. I pretended to be interested in a display of vintage cameras until a man approached me from the side, leaning into my field of vision. He wore thick glasses with large, outdated frames, brown wide-wale corduroy pants, and a wooly cardigan that uncannily matched his mahogany skin tone, giving him the appearance of a nearsighted bear.
“Are you a photographer?” he asked, blinking drowsily.
“Oh, no. I’m just browsing. I’ve never been in here before, so I thought I’d stop by.”
“New in town or just passing through?” He folded his hands over his comfortable belly and leaned back to get a better look at me. “I’m Zeke, by the way.”
I held out my hand to shake. “Leona Davis. Used to be Landers? My dad had a chicken farm on the other side of Honeytree thirty, forty years ago.”
He grasped my hand and squeezed warmly. “Of course, I remember your dad. Did some business with him now and again. I thought that place sold a while back, though.”
I nodded. “It did, when Dad passed. I just bought the old Chapman farm. You know, the apple orchard on the Flats? It’s next to the Sutherland U-pick.”
Sadness flashed across Zeke’s face. “Pity about your neighbor.”
“You knew Walt?” I kept the question light and moved on from the cameras to the jewelry case so he couldn’t see my expression.
“I sure did. He’s an old timer; we go way back. Played cards together for years, and he pawned stuff here occasionally, too.”
“Oh?” I smiled in what I hoped was a neutral, pleasant way, even though my heart was hammering in my chest. Where the heck was Eli? He was always around when I didn’t need him and missing when I did. “Had Walt been in recently?”
“As a matter of fact, he was.” Zeke adjusted his glasses and frowned. “Why do you ask?”
I froze. I asked because I wanted to know if you got in an argument with him and possibly killed the guy. I couldn’t really say that, though, could I? I decided to lay it on thick. “Well, I’m good friends with Anne, actually, and I thought that if Walt had pawned something recently, maybe I could buy it back for her. You know, as a memento.”
“Funny you should say that.” Zeke gave me a puzzled look and, never taking his eyes off me, walked around to stand behind the counter, where shelves held rows of fat ledgers labeled by year, price-tagged items that hadn’t yet been put out on the shelves, and shoeboxes with last names scrawled in Sharpie that presumably held items to be picked up. I wished desperately that I could see his hands—were they still in the pockets of his fuzzy sweater, or were they reaching for a weapon under the counter? Suddenly this nearsighted bear didn’t seem so harmless.
I swallowed hard, blinking as innocently as I could. “What’s funny?”
I was relieved to hear an electronic beep behind me. Zeke looked past me and nodded to Eli, who gave him a half wave and headed for a display of clocks that was near enough to eavesdrop on our conversation at the counter.
Zeke turned his attention back to me. “Well, funny because the reason Walt came in was sort of about Anne, too. He wanted to know if I’d sold a telescope that belonged to him maybe twenty years ago. He said it was stolen off his porch. You know he liked stargazing,” he added, giving me a sad smile.
I nodded. I didn’t know about stars, but Walt definitely liked neighbor-gazing.
“Anyway, I told him I don’t pass stolen go
ods. Not then, not now. I don’t run that kind of shop.” Zeke directed this last statement very pointedly in Eli’s direction. “I told you that yesterday, Sheriff.”
Eli laughed and stopped pretending to be interested in the clocks. Shrugging, he said, “I’m glad to hear it, Zeke. Leona, you really shouldn’t have started without me.”
Zeke took off his glasses to peer at me and then put them back on again. “Huh. I guess I’m not as sharp as I used to be. I thought you came to shop; I didn’t peg you as a snitch.”
“I’m not,” I said, suddenly irritated. I’d been getting somewhere with Zeke until Eli flubbed his part. “This guy just follows me around.”
Zeke smirked, but the humor didn’t reach his eyes. “Lucky you. Well, if you’re not going to buy anything...” He made a walking motion with his fingers. “I got nothing more to say.”
Eli nodded sheepishly. “We’ll let you get back to business.”
“Wait. You said Walt came in asking about his stolen telescope?” I shook off Eli’s hand on my arm and leaned over the counter, resting my elbows on it.
“I did say that.” Zeke stepped back warily. “So what?”
“And you also said it had to do with Anne. I don’t follow.”
Zeke waggled a finger at me. “Oh no. Oh no. You aren’t going to pull me into this. How am I going to remember some twenty-year-old deal?”
I pointed to the shelf of ledgers behind the counter. The labeled years went back three decades or more. “Looks like you keep excellent records.”
“How am I supposed to keep a record of something I didn’t sell?” Zeke set his chin stubbornly, the loose skin of his neck wobbling slightly as he shook his head disbelievingly. I shared his disbelief—despite his claims of innocence, Zeke was definitely hiding something.
“Then you won’t mind me looking at your books?” Eli asked gently. “I mean, if it’s not there, it’s not there, right?”
Sweat beaded on Zeke’s forehead and he quickly swiped it away with the sleeve of his sweater. “I don’t have to show you anything without a warrant. Go on now, Sheriff. You know that.”
