Palatino for the Painter

by Jessa Archer

  I reached into my pocket and checked the phone. It had zero bars.

  The cavalry was not on its way. And in the end, maybe that was for the best.

  ✰ Chapter Twenty ✰

  I couldn’t bring myself to simply deliver Bud into the sheriff’s hands, so as soon we hit a pocket of cell coverage, I called Ed and asked him to see if he could get an attorney to meet us at my office. Given how long Ed had served as sheriff, I was hoping he’d know at least one lawyer who would be willing to drop everything at nearly eleven on a Sunday night.

  Bud was silent on the drive into town, but as we pulled into the parking lot behind the office, he looked over and gave me a teary smile. “Thank you, Ruth. For a moment there on the deck, it was almost like Tanya was yelling at me.”

  I shrugged and returned his smile. “I heard her yell at you enough times back in the day. Guess that helped me do a decent imitation.”

  “Do you think I’ll go to prison?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. You were sixteen, though. You’ll have to ask your attorney, but I’m sure that’s a mitigating factor.”

  “But Blevins thinks I killed my mom.”

  That’s the one thing that worried me most in all of this, but I tried to put on a brave face. “You’ll have a lot of people willing to testify on your behalf, Bud. And your friendly local newspaper will be doing its best to dig up any evidence that might help you.”

  He sighed. “Do you think they let you paint in prison?”

  “I think they might,” I told him. “But hopefully you’ll be able to set up your canvas and paint in your own backyard.”

  Ed and Wren were waiting in the front office when we arrived, and Ed said that Cassie was on her way. I probably should have told him to hold off on calling them, because poor Bud didn’t need an audience. But it was too late now.

  Bud flinched when he saw Wren, and I pulled him aside before we joined them. “That’s your first step, Bud. The first step toward making it right. How many times did you sit down in the basement with me and Wren and Tanya, watching movies? Eating popcorn? She’s a good person. You know that. So is James. I can’t make any promises, but I think they’ll give you a chance to make this right if you have the courage to take the first step. You don’t need to talk to her right this minute. You’re still upset. But you do need to do it.”

  Truthfully, I didn’t want Bud to talk to Wren right now. Wren and James would have every right to feel angry about the role Bud had played in James’s injuries. They didn’t owe him forgiveness. But while I didn’t know James well enough to be certain how he’d react, I did know Wren, and I felt sure she’d get there eventually.

  Bud gave a meek wave to the others and then sat down in one of the desk chairs.

  “Are you okay?” Ed asked me.

  “Yep. You found an attorney?”

  “I did. With any luck, D’Arcy Jones will beat Blevins here. I might have called her first.”

  “Thank you.” I gave him a quick kiss. I hadn’t quite decided when I was going to admit to him and Cassie that I’d hit the panic button. I was sure that I’d tell them eventually, but maybe it could wait a bit.

  “You are very welcome. And in fact, I think that’s her now.”

  A young woman in a suit was standing at the front door, looking a bit tousled, like maybe she’d already been in bed when Ed called. He went to answer the door, and I turned back to Bud, who wasn’t alone anymore. Wren was next to him. It was clear from his expression that he was grieving, and that’s kind of Wren’s Bat Signal.

  By the time we’d introduced Bud to his attorney, Cassie and Blevins had both arrived. Cassie wrapped me in a warm, tight hug, and then Blevins leveled an angry scowl at me. It deepened when he saw the attorney seated next to Bud.

  “Jones and Townsend.” He huffed. “Why am I not surprised that the two most annoying women in Woodward County know each other?”

  D’Arcy Jones and I exchanged a look. We hadn’t even been introduced yet. Ed had taken her straight over to her new client. I was now quite certain, however, that she was someone worth knowing. Anyone who annoyed Blevins was a-okay in my book.

  “So let me guess. Mr. Blackburn just strolled into your office, in the middle of the night?” Blevins said. “Where you and your attorney friend—along with Ed and everyone else—just happened to be waiting?”

  “Something like that,” Ed told him.

  “Bud didn’t have anything to do with his mom’s overdose,” I said. “But I think he can fill in some gaps on what happened to his sister and Frank Daniels thirty-two years ago. As long as you ask those questions in the presence of his attorney, of course.”

  Cassie, who was seated at the desk behind me, snickered. That earned her a venomous look from Blevins, but he didn’t say anything. He just stalked over to Bud and began reading him his rights.

  I was at the door a few minutes later when Blevins led him away. Bud looked nervous. I squeezed his arm and whispered, “Tanya would be so proud of you, Bud. So proud.”

  “Proud that he’s being arrested,” Blevins said. “Yeah, right.”

  I barely resisted the urge to kick him in the shin.

  The police car pulled away from curb, followed immediately by D’Arcy Jones in a little white Prius.

  “I’m going to buy her lunch soon,” I told Ed. “She seems nice.”

  “She’s nice unless you mess with her clients,” he said. “Then she turns into a tiger.”

  Wren looked out the window at the receding taillights. “I didn’t quite follow everything he was saying about James. I gather it was this Frank guy—”

  “Frank Daniels,” I told her. “He’s the one responsible for James’s injuries. Bud was an onlooker. And Tanya… Well, Bud seemed to think that she was the only reason that James didn’t die that night.”

  I spent the next few minutes bringing them up to speed on everything that Bud had told me.

  “So Tanya’s parents knew all along,” Wren said. “They just lied to us.”

  “Basically. Bud said they coped by just burying it. Pretending it never happened, and that Tanya was still out there somewhere. But that didn’t work for him. He couldn’t cope with the guilt, both about Tanya and about what happened to James. I don’t think he felt all that guilty about Frank, to be honest.”

  “Nor should he,” Wren said, with more venom in her voice than I’d ever heard.

  “So, how did you talk him down from the ledge?” Cassie asked.

  “Very carefully. Mostly I just reminded him that Tanya had loved him. That she wouldn’t want him to take the coward’s way out. She’d want him to make it right. And I think he’ll try his best to do that.”

  “I hope…so,” Wren said. A huge yawn punctuated the sentence and quickly spread around to the rest of us.

  Cassie laughed. “I think that’s our cue to head home. Tomorrow may be Memorial Day, but we’re hoping to open the new shop—which I think we’re going to call The Buzz—by the first week of July. So between now and then, pretty much every day will be a workday for me and Dean.” She didn’t sound at all displeased about that. I was looking forward to sitting down with her, now that the craziness of the past few days was over, and hearing all about their plans.

  “I thought I had the day off,” Wren said. “But Bud just told me that they’ll be holding the services for Sally Blackburn at Memory Grove, so I’m going to need to meet with her sister tomorrow.”

  “And Ed,” I told them, “has a book to finish.”

  “Nope.” He grinned widely. “I told you I was almost finished, didn’t I? I’d just emailed the draft for Blood and Ashes about two minutes before you called. And yes, I forwarded you a copy. That means I actually get to take tomorrow off.”

  I gave him a fake pout. “I’ve been waiting months, and now I won’t even have a chance to start reading it until Tuesday. The proof is due at the printer tomorrow, and I have to redo the entire front page now.
”

  “So I guess we’d all better go home and get some sleep,” Wren said.

  “Sleep? Who has time for that? I just need one of you to bring me coffee.”

  More Jessa Archer Cozies

  Legal Beagle Mysteries

  Thistlewood Star

  Hidden Harbor Tea Shop

  Knitting Mysteries

  Hand Lettering Mysteries

  Golf Mysteries

  Coastal Playhouse

  Sneak Peek: A Séance in Franklin Gothic (Thistlewood Star Mysteries #3)

  ✰ Chapter One ✰

  The man smiled as the woman leaned in, her eyes bright and shining. She knew exactly what she wanted, and he was more than happy to comply.

  I leaned over the railing and positioned my Nikon to catch a few more shots. These were exactly what I needed for the front page of this week’s Thistlewood Star.

  He knew they needed to hurry, though, so he didn’t waste time with chitchat. The man simply asked the woman’s name and jotted a brief message across the blank page. Then he scrawled his signature below and smiled again before moving on to the next person in line.

  It was a very impressive line, too, especially for a small town like Thistlewood, Tennessee. The Buzz, Thistlewood’s newest business, had been open for three weeks, but this was the official grand opening. It was also the release party for Ed Shelton’s latest mystery, Even in Death. Most of Thistlewood had turned out for the event, along with a smattering of tourists and people from neighboring towns. I recognized a lot of their faces, including a few that I’d pretty much guarantee hadn’t read a book in years. Most of them knew Ed from his years as sheriff of Woodward County. That was before I moved back to Thistlewood, but by all accounts, he’d been a very good sheriff. When an accident had forced his retirement seven years ago, he’d simply shifted to solving fictional crimes instead.

  I’d already gotten one of the shots that I’d use for my article—Ed leaning back against the brick wall, next to a table stacked with copies of his two books. He looked darn good for sixty-one, and I felt a warm flush of pride. He’d worked hard and deserved this more than anyone I knew. And, yes, I would have thought that even if he wasn’t, as many of his fictional characters would no doubt put it, my main squeeze.

  Wren Lawson, my best friend and proprietor of the local funeral home, joined me at the railing that looked down over the main floor of the bookstore. She was carrying a mug of something that smelled like coffee but was barely even beige. A milky white dot that almost looked like a flower decorated the center.

  “What is this?” I asked as she handed me the cup.

  “That is a white chocolate flat white. Your daughter swears it’s coffee. And she says she made it especially for you, so you have to drink it.”

  I glanced toward the counter near the center of the mezzanine where my daughter, Cassie, was serving coffee and slinging pastries like a pro. Dean Jacobs, the local mailman and the owner of the shop, was also behind the counter, but there was no question who was running things. He might be the boss on paper, but he was only around in the evenings and on weekends. He’d hired Cassie to take charge, and she had…with a vengeance.

  “Oh, the perils of motherhood,” I said before taking an experimental sip of the brew. “It’s not bad. But it’s also not coffee. More like coffee-scented hot chocolate.”

  “Dean was onto something with all this,” Wren said, looking around. “Especially upstairs. I had no idea esports was even a thing.”

  “Neither did I.” To be honest, I was amazed that the idea had worked. Not the bookstore, which Thistlewood had needed. The Buzz carried mostly used books, something that’s always welcome in a tourist town. People have plenty to do when the sun is shining, with the Freedom River just a few miles away and a slew of tourist attractions within easy driving distance. Evenings and rainy days, however, generally found people crowding into the diner, just down the street, rather than being holed up in their rental cabins. Escaping into a book was a welcome relief from trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle that was missing five pieces or from listening to the kids whine about the cabin’s lack of Wi-Fi and the cell coverage up here in the mountains, which is spotty at best and often downright abysmal.

  The coffee shop was clearly needed, too. Pat’s Diner was generally packed, and even the takeout line was intimidating in mid-summer. Once you got in, Patsy was quick to tell you that she only served real coffee, not the lattes, espressos, and cappuccino concoctions that so many vacationers seemed addicted to. And the one food truck in the park that had coffee on the menu served up a brew so strong that it could deadlift a horse.

  But the idea of adding an esports area upstairs had been sheer genius. Dean had a contractor soundproof the upper floor and put in twenty top-of-the-line gaming computers. Parents were happy to cough up the cash for their kids—and often, for themselves—to spend a few hours playing their favorite multiplayer games online. And the non-gamers could hang out downstairs, drinking coffee and reading, while they waited.

  In retrospect, Dean probably hadn’t even needed the soundproofing he’d put in upstairs. On the few occasions I’d ventured up to eBuzz to check things out, the large room was nearly as quiet as the bookstore, with each of the gamers wearing headphones. Aside from an occasional whoop of victory, the loudest noise was the hum of the computers.

  Wren finished the last of her own not-quite-coffee and said, “Tell Ed I said congratulations. I’ll just get him to sign my copy next time I see him. I still need to bake some cookies and get some things together for the yard sale. You’re still coming early to help me get things set up, right?”

  “Absolutely. Can’t wait.”

  Wren laughed. “Now you’re just lying. But I do appreciate the help.” She gave me a quick hug and began winding her way toward the door.

  Crowds really aren’t my thing, and now that Wren was gone, my inner introvert was pushing me to find a secluded corner where I could hide out. I’d already gotten all of the information and photos I needed for my story. Normally, I’d go hang with either Cassie or Ed, but they were both working. I scanned the room and noticed Ed’s sister Sherry at a small table in the closest thing to a secluded corner I was likely to find.

  As the youngest of the Shelton clan, Sherry had been a few years behind me in school, so I hadn’t really known her all that well. Ed’s other sister, Kim, had been closer to my age. She was living with her husband out in Texas, where they bought old homes, fixed them up, and flipped them. Made a pretty good living, too, from what I’d heard. Unlike Kim, Sherry had stayed in Thistlewood. She’d married a long-haul trucker, Jason Hanson, who had died of a heart attack a few months before I moved back to Thistlewood.

  You’d never know Sherry had experienced a fairly recent loss to look at her. There was always a smile on her cheerful, round face. She’d simply thrown herself into her work—she ran an online tourism agency—and focused on their daughter, Kate, who had just started her senior year at Thistlewood High.

  Sherry looked up and waved as I approached the table. “Ruth! Will you just look at Ed? I’m so proud of him.”

  “So am I.” I motioned to the empty chair across from her. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Of course. You don’t even have to ask. You know that.”

  I pulled the chair out and sat down. “Where’s Ms. Kate tonight?”

  “Out with friends.” Sherry rolled her eyes. “I told her she should come out and support her uncle, but looking at the crowd, I guess that wasn’t really necessary, was it? And she had an activity with this Thistlewood Hands club. They always seem to be doing something.”

  “Thistlewood Hands? Did they even have that when we were in school?”

  She shook her head. “It’s fairly new, I guess. A service club. They clean up the highways and the park. Hold fundraisers. That sort of stuff.”

  “How’s she doing?” I asked. “I haven’t seen either of you in ages.”

  “Oh, we’re both doing fine
. Kate’s diving straight into her senior year, although it really doesn’t seem like they should start school at the end of July like they do. Back in the day, we used to get the whole summer. Anyway, she’s getting ready to apply to the University of Tennessee. Hard to believe she’s almost grown.”

  “I’m glad to hear she’s planning to stay close to home,” I said. “Has she decided on a major?”

  Sherry laughed. “Yes. Four or five different majors, and that was just over the summer. But I guess most people change their majors at least a few times after they start college.”

  “True. Not me, though. I knew I was going to be a journalist after my first week working at the Star.”

  “Mr. Dealey was so proud of you, too. A friend of mine worked with him during our senior year and she said he bragged all the time about how you went on to work at the biggest paper in the state.”

  “And here I am, right back where I started,” I said, laughing.

  Prior to my move back to Thistlewood, I’d spent nearly twenty-five years, first as a reporter and then as an editor, with the Nashville News-Journal. When they were bought out by one of those large national newspaper chains and began downsizing, they’d offered me an early retirement package. After some hesitation, I’d decided to take it. That was about the same time that my husband, the man I’d been with even longer than I had with the News-Journal, decided he also wanted to downsize. When I’d left for college at age seventeen, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I would never, ever move back to this tiny town. But I’d never sold the house just outside of town that my parents left to me. My best friend, Wren, had already moved back to Thistlewood to run the funeral home. And five years after Jim Dealey’s death, the Thistlewood Star had still been looking for a new owner.