Welcome to Blissville

by Walker, Aimee Nicole

  John, Deanna, and their three kids were the last to arrive. I was happy to meet the man that Gabe talked about so much. He was every bit of the jokester that Gabe said he was and their kids were too freaking cute for words. Buddy barked and bounced happily at having children to play with, and it was obvious he was good with them.

  Deanna Dorchester was one of the sweetest persons I had ever met. She set her covered pie on the picnic table and threw her arms around my neck for a hug before she did the same with Gabe. “I’m so happy to meet you both. Thank you so much for inviting us to your home,” she said. You’d think it was an invite to the White House or something by how happy she seemed. “Where can I put my pie?” she asked. I could tell by the way she rolled her eyes that she wasn’t pleased with her husband.

  See, I had puffed out my chest and strutted about like Foghorn Leghorn from my Saturday morning cartoons when Gabe entered me into the bake-off. Deanna looked mortified that John would do something like that to her. I felt a little shitty and a whole lot shallow when she followed me upstairs to put her pie in the kitchen.

  “We don’t have to do this, you know,” I said once she set her carrier down. “We can tell the guys we refuse to play along with their silly games.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Deanna said. “Your pie is going to trounce mine and John will learn to never do this to me again. In a marriage, one spouse’s humiliation is also worn by the other.”

  “How do you know that my pie is going to win?” I lifted the lid off her dessert carrier then said, “Oh.”

  “Oh, is right,” she said then began laughing. “Only a serious baker would recognize a frozen pie that’s been passed off as homemade.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with frozen pies,” I told Deanna. In fact, I’d been known to use them in a hurry.

  She tipped her head to the side and narrowed her eyes at me. “Oh, I would agree in most cases, but I have a feeling your pie will humiliate mine.”

  “My pie isn’t that great,” I lied.

  “Show it to me,” she demanded.

  “Deanna, we’ve just met,” I said in mock horror. “I don’t show ‘it’ on the first date.”

  She laughed and slapped me playfully on the arm then walked over to where I had my pies sitting on the counter. She released a shaky breath as if she was about to uncover a rare, ancient artifact before she removed the foil off one of the pies. “Oh man,” she said when she revealed the perfect, golden lattice crust. She breathed deeply, inhaling the spice of the cinnamon and the bourbon. “It’s what I get for deceiving my husband all these years.”

  It’s not what she deserved at all. So, after we feasted on Gabe’s delicious grilled chicken and enough side dishes to feed a battalion, I did the only thing that felt right. I told the group that I had dropped my pie on the kitchen floor before I could slice it into slivers for the contest. I saw the disbelief in Gabe’s eyes, but he wisely didn’t point out that there was a second pie. I knew my lie would go unchallenged because he wanted that pie all to himself. I apologized profusely, and we all fussed over Deanna’s pie and Emory’s cobbler before we started the cornhole tournaments.

  That time, Mere and I were split up and put on different teams. We decided to pair up with our guys since they showed real promise when we beat them the previous week. I did notice that Kyle and Chaz remained a team and looked even cozier than the last time they teamed up. Like the week before, Mr. Best Seller and Dr. Dimples were my final opponents.

  Gabe pulled me close and lowered his mouth until it was pressed to my ear. “Do not throw the game like you did last week and the pie bake-off today. I’m onto you, Sunshine.” Fine, so he busted me both times, but I had good reasons. I wanted to see Chaz and Kyle hug since it looked like they’d been working up to it as the game progressed. I had been right, and I hoped the connection would spark something amazing between them, but that decision was up to them. I couldn’t throw Deanna to the wolves like Gabe wanted me to, and I’d give him my reasons later—after I annihilated the budding lovebirds at cornhole.

  Halfway through the tournament, a surprise visitor arrived. “Hey, everybody. Sorry I’m late,” Jonathon Silver said, waving awkwardly.

  It was hard to say who was surprised the most between Emory, Gabe, and me. It was easy to see who Emory held responsible for his discomfort when he looked at Gabe suspiciously. He wasn’t the only one either. Gabe mentioned that he would check in with Jonathon but not until after the party because he knew how uncomfortable Emory was in his company. Yet, there he was as if someone conjured him out of thin air or sneakily called him. Gabe shook his head to say it wasn’t him. It sure as hell wasn’t me, and I could tell by the shocked expression on Emory’s face that he didn’t call Jonathon either.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have dropped in on you guys,” Jonathon said, sounding embarrassed and very uncomfortable. His eyes searched the gathering like he was looking for someone and I knew who when his eyes locked on Emory. “What the hell did you do to your beautiful hair?” Jonathon asked as if he had the right.

  Emory narrowed his eyes, sat straighter in his chair, and lifted his chin proudly. “Josh cut it for me.” Jonathon looked at me like I’d given top secret information to a hostile government rather than finish a service I’d been hired to provide.

  “Hey, I do what my clients ask. Emory wanted the Bieber special, and that’s what he got,” I said defensively.

  “Not that it’s your business,” Emory said icily. Jonathon made a beeline for Emory, ignoring his standoffish tone and demeanor. He sat in the vacant seat beside the man and kept looking at him until Emory couldn’t ignore him any longer. “What?”

  “It makes your eyes look even bigger and greener,” Jonathon answered.

  “I don’t have to sit here and listen to this,” Emory replied as if he’d just been insulted instead of complimented. He rose to his feet and practically stomped across the yard in the direction of his house. Unfortunately for him, Jonathon was right on his heels.

  “What’s your problem?” I heard Jonathon ask, but couldn’t hear the rest he said to Emory. It was clear by his body language that he was as confused as hell.

  “Gabe, maybe we should…”

  “No,” Gabe said, wrapping his hand gently around my bicep to prevent me from following them. “Let them handle it.”

  I looked into Gabe’s warm gaze and melted a little. “Okay.” He would’ve been the first person to intervene had he thought trouble was brewing, so I went with his lead. “Ready to finish kicking some cornhole ass?”

  “Yes, so we can get these people out of here, and I can go upstairs and eat both pies.” He rubbed his nose behind my ear. “Did you buy that vanilla ice cream I love so much?”

  “Does your dick get hard when I spin on my pole?” To me, his question was just as absurd. Of course, I bought him the ice cream he liked.

  Gabe’s eyes darkened with a desire for more than pastry, apples, and ice cream. “Let’s get this show on the road then.”

  We beat Kyle and Chaz so bad that they couldn’t believe it. They wanted a rematch, but Gabe rudely told them to go home instead. He wanted pie, ice cream, and sex. No one else seemed to find his behavior odd when they said goodbye, so perhaps I was the only one who noticed.

  The look on his face was priceless when he ran up the stairs and didn’t find his beloved pie waiting for him on the counter. “Someone took the pies home with them by mistake,” he said. “Who takes home two whole pies?” He was disturbed by their selfishness.

  “Gabe,” I said his name calmly to stop the tirade I saw brewing. I opened the oven door to reveal the two pies I’d hidden inside. “I couldn’t leave the pies out in the open for our guests to see after I announced I had dropped and ruined them.”

  The relief on Gabe’s face was sweet and comical. You know what was better than eating pie and ice cream? Eating it buck-ass naked while straddling Gabe with our hard cocks pinned together between our abdomens. It was hard to tell
if the groaning and moaning was due to the delicious dessert or the sensations we were building inside one another. Either way, we got sticky in all the right places and for all the right reasons.

  Josh proved to me on more than one occasion that he was a better man than I was, even though people might argue that point. Sure, he was bristly and abrupt at times, but there was always a good reason for it. I never had a good explanation for the stupid shit I did, like entering Josh into a bake-off without his permission. Hey, at least I wasn’t as clueless as Dorchester, who’d been eating frozen pie for over a decade and didn’t know it. What did Josh do when he found out? He faked dropping the pie to prevent Deanna’s feelings from getting hurt. I’d like to think I would’ve been as kind.

  I had no intentions of breaking the news to Dorchester either, no matter how annoying he was the next day. Not even when he said, “Could you have been anymore obvious that you wanted to have a go at your guy last night? Jesus, you were packing us up and sending us home before the final bag cleared the cornhole. Wow, man, I was embarrassed for you.”

  “Whatever, Dorchester,” I said, rolling my eyes. I had hoped that I wasn’t as obvious as Josh said I was, but apparently my motives were transparent. See, I could’ve let loose with Apple Pie Gate right then, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Or was it Josh’s apple pie you were after?” Dorchester asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about?” I said, grateful I was driving and not looking him in the eye.

  “It’s okay, Gabe. Deanna told me the truth last night. I think Josh is sweet for what he did. I guess it’s also kind of nice how you didn’t just throw it in my face right now,” he added.

  “It was harder than you might expect,” I confessed. “So, how do you think it will go with Lucy Williams today?” I asked Dorchester, switching our conversation to the interview we were about to conduct. Rylan’s receptionist had been on vacation when we first went to her home to talk to her.

  “I don’t know, man. You shot Broadman in front of her so she might not be too friendly,” Dorchester replied with his usual sarcasm. “Good jobs are scarce, and I’m not sure a person can claim unemployment in this type of circumstance.”

  “Maybe I should’ve let him shoot your smart ass with your gun after he knocked you out and took it off you,” I replied good-naturedly. We both knew there was no way in hell I would’ve let that happen. “Save you from a life of frozen apple pies.” I made it sound like a fate worse than death. To be honest, it was really good frozen pie; it just wasn’t in the same stratosphere as Josh’s, so a comparison just wasn’t fair.

  “You wound me,” Dorchester said while covering his heart. “I probably should show you a bit more gratitude when we work together since you made it possible for me to go home to my family that night. Mostly I’m mortified that Broadman got the jump on me,” he added humbly. Dorchester had been plenty thankful, and nothing more was needed, wanted, or required.

  “Nah,” I replied waving him off. “At least it wasn’t a seventy-year-old woman who took you down.”

  “Very true,” he said, sitting straighter in his seat. “Thanks for always making me feel better about myself, Gabe. You have a real talent.”

  “Anything to please,” I said dryly, pulling up in front of the light gray bungalow house on Bay Street. “I hope this goes better than talking to Rylan’s parents did the second time.”

  “Whitworth said they didn’t like you much,” Dorchester said, resuming his smartass demeanor.

  “Not at all,” I replied with a wry smile. “I didn’t care for Broadman’s parents either, so it was okay. Whitworth seemed to enjoy the interview since he’d never seen me in full dickhead mode.” I discovered Whitworth wasn’t as bad as I thought once he let down his guard and I got to know him better.

  “He liked being out in the field doing this kind of work. We spend the majority of our days enforcing warrants and investigating drug-related crimes, so it’s been a different experience for him. Not that I want there to be more homicides and arsons in the county,” he amended. “I’m ready for things to slow down and serve warrants again.” He acted like there wasn’t any danger knocking on the doors of people who didn’t want to be found.

  With Adrian on paternity leave, Whitworth returned to the sheriff’s department instead of us forming a three-man team. He was only a phone call away if we needed him, but I hoped that we wouldn’t. Like Dorchester, I was ready for things to return to the peaceful, small town life I’d come to love.

  “Here we go,” I said, opening my door. Lucy had been pretty hysterical the first time we interviewed her after Broadman’s arrest in the office. It was true that I shot him in the shoulder in front of her, which shocked the woman, but I think the hardest blow was finding the money Broadman stole from Robertson in the office safe. She had seemed very genuine in her denial that she knew anything about Broadman’s activities. The second time around, I wanted to focus more on the motive since we found the connection between Broadman and his victims.

  Lucy at least attempted a smile when she answered the door of her parents’ home. “Hello, Detectives.” She stood back for us to enter her home.

  “Did you have a nice vacation, Lucy?” I asked, hoping that small talk would relax her nerves a bit.

  “Yeah, it was what I needed,” she answered. “Would either of you like something to drink? Coffee or something?”

  “We’re fine, but thank you for asking,” I told her. “We appreciate you agreeing to meet with us this morning.”

  “I’m not sure how helpful I’ll be since I already told you everything I know,” she replied. She might’ve known more than she realized so it was worth interviewing her again. “I’ll try my best.”

  “That’s all we can ask for, Lucy,” Dorchester said, spreading his better-than-good cop routine on extra thick that morning. His charm caused the young lady to blush profusely.

  “Do you recognize the name Nate Turner?” I asked.

  “Besides what I read in the papers and saw online?” she responded.

  “Yes,” I answered. “Do you recognize that name as someone who called the office in the past?”

  “Not that I remember, but none of the people that Mr. Broadman allegedly killed ever phoned the office. They called him directly on his cell phone,” she told us. “I know for a fact that he took a call from Rick Spizer the week that Rick died. I heard him talking on his cell phone through his closed office door. Well, at least he referred to the caller as Spizer.”

  “Lucy, we got copies of Broadman’s cell phone, home, and office records and there were no calls between Broadman and any of his alleged victims.” It was a key piece of evidence any half-decent defense attorney would use in court. Unless… Damn it; I should’ve picked up on it sooner. “He must have used a different cell phone for these calls, and we missed it when we searched his home, office, and truck.”

  “I guess that’s possible, but I had never seen him with two phones, but then again I had never seen him act the way he did when you came to arrest him. See, I’m not very helpful,” she said dejectedly.

  “But you were,” I told her, convinced we overlooked a key piece of evidence. “You’ve seen the faces of the men he’s accused of killing on the news, correct?” Lucy nodded her head. “Had any of them visited the office that you can remember?”

  “Not recently. Mr. Spizer had been to our office during the first land contract negotiations between Mr. Robertson and McCarren Consortium, of course,” she replied. “But not since then and none of the others ever came to the office.”

  “Is there any possibility that they called using fictitious names?” Dorchester asked.

  “Fictitious?” she questioned.

  “You know, clients who called repeatedly but there was no record of them in your system,” he explained.

  “Not that I can recall,” she answered after thinking about it for several moments. “Honestly, there was never a single occurrence where Mr. Broad
man acted in any way other than a kind man who loved his farm and his community.”

  “Thank you for your time, Lucy,” I said, rising to my feet. “Hopefully, we won’t have to bug you again.”

  “It’s no bother, Detectives.” I bit back a laugh when she batted her eyelashes a little extra in Dorchester’s direction.

  “Not a word,” he said to me once we were outside her house.

  “Oh, I see how you are,” I remarked. “You can dog me all you want but turn super sensitive when the shoe is on the other foot.”

  “Jackass,” Dorchester said, opening the door.

  “Cry baby,” I said, rounding the front of my car. “All jokes aside, you know what we need to do now, don’t you?”

  “Go back to your house and eat some of Josh’s apple pie?” he asked.

  “You think I’m going to share my pie with you after the ‘jackass’ remark?” I countered.

  “Okay, probably not,” Dorchester concluded. “Well, it sounds like we’re going to ask a judge for a new search warrant so we can look for the extra phone.”

  “Yes,” I confirmed, “and while we’re waiting for that to come through we’re going to do an internet search to see how many stores there are in a thirty-mile radius that sells disposable cell phones and prepaid wireless minutes.” I thought that was a reasonable radius to begin our quest.

  Dorchester groaned unhappily. “Do you know how many places that will be? Every grocery store, department store, pharmacy, dollar store, and convenience store. There will be dozens of them.”

  I scoffed at him, but he got the final laugh when it turned out there were over a hundred places in the radius that sold disposable phones and prepaid minute cards. “Call Whitworth and have him meet us at the station. We’ll split the list in thirds to get them all done. We’ll show Broadman’s photo around to see if anyone recognizes him.”