The Coppersmith Farmhouse

by Devney Perry

  I lifted my hand and gave him a two-finger salute.

  “You got it, Sheriff.”

  “Christ, she never listens. Why couldn’t I have a girl that listens?” he asked the ceiling.

  I collapsed into his chest and started laughing again.

  “Love you too, Freckles,” he said to the top of my head.

  And just like the little girls camped out in the living room, I fell asleep giggling and smiling.

  “Georgia?” Jess called.

  “Laundry room!”

  I was moving a load of clothes from the washer to the dryer, a load that took the normal amount of time to wash now that Jess had replaced my older washer-dryer set with the nicer one from his house. I was looking forward to coming back in forty-five minutes to a dry load of clothes rather than to a damp bunch that needed another cycle.

  Bliss.

  He rounded the corner from the kitchen.

  “I just got a call from my realtor. Got an offer on the house,” he said.

  “What? Already? That’s amazing! It’s only been a week.”

  “Yep. You know the guy whose house was torched? It’s him. He’s the buyer,” Jess said. “Realtor said he got his insurance claim. Doesn’t want the hassle of building a place so he’s just going to buy. Offered cash for the house, five thousand less than my asking price, but he could close this month. Wants it furnished too so I wouldn’t have to sell all my shit or find storage. He’d take it all.”

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think I’d be stupid to turn it down,” he said.

  “And you’re not a stupid man.”

  “It would give us some extra cash. I was thinking we could put an addition off the side of the farmhouse. Expand off the office. Add a room or two. Maybe another bathroom.”

  “No, Jess, that’s your money. You should save it. Buy something you want. A new boat or, I don’t know, a nicer truck to haul around the boat you already have,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes and frowned. “Sometimes I feel like spanking your ass.”

  My spine jerked straight. A spanking? Now I was pissed. “What the effing hell does that mean?”

  “Means you didn’t hear me last week at Christmas. Or last night in bed,” he said.

  “Oh right. I didn’t hear you. That’s funny since I fully recall each of our conversations, Jess. But please, explain it to me again. Because I can tell you right now if you so much as raise your pinky finger in the direction of my ass, I’ll make sure—well, I’ll make sure . . .” I stuttered, having trouble finding a threat that would convey just how serious I was.

  “Yeah? You’ll make sure what?”

  “I’ll . . . I’ll make sure you have to eat your own rotten, disgusting, horrible cooking for the next twelve months. One whole year of nasty macaroni and weird salami sandwiches. Except for holidays. No one should have to eat that on holidays. But every other day, you eat your own cooking.”

  He had only ever cooked for us once, but that had been enough. I shuddered and gagged just thinking about it.

  He roared with laughter.

  “I mean it, Jess!” I yelled.

  But he just kept on laughing.

  I stormed out of the laundry room, thinking I needed cookies, but he followed me.

  “Now listen up, Freckles,” he said, picking me up and planting my butt on the kitchen counter.

  I opened my mouth to tell him to eff off but before I could get the words out, he clamped one of his big hands on top of my mouth.

  I couldn’t believe that Jess had just put his hand on my mouth to keep me from talking. My eyes got so big I worried they were going to pop out.

  “I told you at Christmas to get used to me spoiling my girls. That was the same day you told me this was my home. So putting on an addition with money from my previous home is spending it on something I want. I’m spending it on my house,” he said. “So like I said in the laundry room, you didn’t hear me. Are you with me now?”

  I couldn’t respond because his big mitt was still covering my mouth. So I narrowed my eyes and gave him my strongest glare.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “Now about this cooking thing.”

  “Hey! What are you guys doing? Why do you have your hand on Mommy’s mouth, Jess?” Rowen interrupted us.

  “Well, little bit, I needed to make a point to your mother. Thought I’d have a better chance if she wasn’t talking back. But putting your hand on another person’s mouth is something you can only do if you’re a police officer. So don’t do it at school or I’ll have to arrest you,” he lied.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Oh. Okay, Jess. I won’t do it.”

  “Now I got a question for you,” he said to her. “What did you think of that dinner I cooked for you and your mom a while back?”

  “Blech. It was gross. Really yucky. But Mommy bought me that new Tinker Bell movie because I ate three bites of everything.”

  Traitor.

  “Huh. I see.”

  At this point I was over having his hand covering my mouth, so I did the only thing I could think of that might make him remove it. I stuck my tongue out and licked his palm.

  He jerked his hand back quickly, surprised by my tactic.

  “Ha!” I shouted victoriously, raising both arms in the air.

  He wiped his palm while his shoulders started to shake.

  He’d made his point, though the method in which he’d gone about making it wasn’t the best. But this was our house now. So if he wanted to build an addition for potential new family members, so be it.

  “I give up, Sheriff. My only request is that if you have to cut the office down to make a hallway, leave enough room for my chair in front of the fireplace,” I said.

  “Glad we got that sorted,” he said, grinning.

  “Me too. Now if you’ll let me down, I’ll go back to the laundry. Since I’m no longer mad at you, I don’t need to bake five dozen cookies.”

  “How about you let me piss you off again but just enough you feel the need to make one dozen? Chocolate chip?” he asked.

  I gave him one last eye roll, and then I pushed him away so I could hop off the counter.

  And then I made him a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

  I was standing at the kitchen sink, cleaning up the dinner dishes, when I saw a flash of light outside beyond the backyard and into the trees.

  For a minute, I thought the light must have been a reflection in the kitchen window. But then I saw it again.

  Just a quick flash way back in the woods, like someone was walking along out there with a flashlight to guide their way.

  But that was crazy. Who would be walking in the forest at night in the dead of winter? It was only twenty degrees outside. I must have imagined it. So I stood there at the window for five minutes and waited for the light to flash again.

  It didn’t. There was nothing out there. No lights. No people in my trees. Nothing.

  I was paranoid.

  I shrugged it off and finished my chores so I could go see what Rowen and Jess were doing.

  It was a mistake to ignore it. I should have said something to Jess. But by the time I realized it was a mistake, it was too late. Way too late.

  Jess

  “Georgia,” I rumbled into my phone.

  “Hi, Sheriff,” she said. “Have you thrown anyone in the slammer yet today?”

  I chuckled. She always found some new joke or way to tease me about being a cop. I loved it. I loved that she was smart and had a quick wit. That she kept me on my toes.

  “Not yet,” I said. “But it’s looking like it’s gonna be a good day.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s happening?”

  “Got a tip. Couple of guys were up snowmobiling in the mountains and ran across an old shack. Had a real strong chemical smell so they didn’t get too close but thought it was worth reporting. I’m thinking they stumbled onto Wes’s cookhouse.”

  “Seriously?” she asked.<
br />
  “Yep. Driving up now. Milo and Beau are behind me.”

  “That’s so great, honey. I hope you find it. But why is Beau going with you? It doesn’t seem like a real Searchy and Rescuey thing to do,” she said.

  I chuckled again. “Searchy and Rescuey.” Not as funny as “garagey” but it still made me laugh.

  “Beau is Forest Service, Freckles. Snowmobilers reported the shack was on national park land.”

  “Gotcha,” she said. “Aren’t meth houses extremely dangerous? Should you be going near it?”

  “We’re just checking it out. If it is the cookhouse, we’ll call in the state authorities. Then we’ll have a specialized team come in for cleanup.”

  “Okay. Be careful,” she said.

  “I won’t be able to meet for lunch today.”

  This morning, I’d fucked her in the shower before Rowen had woken up. Then I’d watched her get ready for work, something I tried to do every day. I loved watching her bend over the sink as she put on her makeup, her ass sticking up as she leaned in toward the mirror. But my favorite part was watching her fix her hair. She’d blow it dry and when she was done, it would be full and soft. Within the hour, it would settle and take on its normal volume. But right then in our bathroom, with her long hair all big and her body wrapped in a towel, she stopped my heart.

  And gave me a hard-on. It usually took me the entire drive to work to get it back under control.

  This morning while I’d been watching her, we’d made plans to eat lunch together at the deli downtown. Now that I was heading up into the mountains, I’d be lucky if I made it back home before dinner.

  But missing lunch was worth it if I found the cookhouse. I needed this break. I needed to make some progress on all of these fucking open cases. The unanswered questions were plaguing my mind and I was starting to have trouble sleeping.

  It had been over two weeks since Wes’s murder, and both the killer and Wes’s truck had vanished off the face of the earth.

  On top of having a murderer at large, I had made no progress in finding the prescription pain pill dealer. I’d had deputies in plain clothes walking all around town for a month. They’d wander around, searching for suspicious packages stashed in strange places and watching for people hanging around odd areas of town. But nothing had come up.

  And then there was Silas’s trespassing case. I had marked it unsolved but it was still bothering me. I hated unsolved cases, especially ones involving a friend. We’d probably never find who killed Silas’s calf. No witnesses had come forward and unless they did, it would be impossible to make any arrests.

  So finding Wes’s cookhouse, even after Wes was dead, would be a good day. A really fucking good day. I wouldn’t have to worry about someone stepping up and taking over Wes’s production location.

  “I think destroying the source for an unknown but likely large quantity of illegal crystal meth trumps a lunch date with your roommate,” Georgia said.

  “Roommate?” I asked.

  “Just trying it out.”

  “Try something else.”

  “Will do, Sheriff.”

  “Okay. See you tonight.”

  “Love you. Bye,” she said and hung up the phone.

  She ended the call before I could tell her that I loved her too. But I figured I could tell her tonight when I got home.

  Wrong.

  Fuck, it smelled bad.

  Not even the clean mountain air combined with the scent of pine from the trees could overpower the stench of chemicals burning my nostrils.

  We’d come up on the mountain shack about forty-five minutes after driving through barely there trails and winding between trees. It was no wonder that weeks and weeks of searching for the cookhouse hadn’t turned anything up. Wes had built that fucker so far off the traveled trails it was a miracle we’d found it today. A couple of times on the drive up, I’d had to stop and get out to make sure I was following the snowmobiler’s tracks.

  But after one last sharp turn, there it was, sitting in a small clearing of pine and fir trees. It was an old, shitty one-room trailer house. The exterior walls were an off-white color with brown water spots in a couple of places. The door and all the windows were boarded up with plywood sheets.

  Tucked away back in the trees, about two hundred feet off the house, was a propane tank. Wes must have been using gas to run the meth cook stove and heat the trailer.

  “That fucking stinks,” Milo said at my side, covering his nose.

  “No shit.”

  “I think I’ve got a couple extra bandanas in the truck. I’ll go get them,” Beau said and jogged away.

  As I got closer, I felt it. Something was off. A knot was forming in my gut.

  I slowed my progress and walked with more caution, looking around the house to see if I could spot what was making me nervous.

  I knew this feeling.

  When we’d been kids, Silas, Wes and I had played capture the flag on the Drummond farm. We’d each hide a flag and then set off to find where the other boys had hidden theirs. The winner was the first boy to return to our starting point with one of their opponent’s flags. Silas and I had usually hidden our flags in dark building corners or behind large trees. Our strategy had been similar. Find a good hiding spot and then search as fast as you could to find an opponent’s flag before someone found yours.

  But not Wes.

  Wes had always put his flag in a fairly open area. He’d forgo the time spent locating the perfect hiding place to set up traps. One time, he’d set a snare and caught Silas by the ankle. I’d found Wes laughing as he watched Silas swinging upside down from a tree.

  Walking up to the cookhouse felt like walking up to one of Wes’s flags.

  I veered off of my original path to the door and instead went toward a window. Before I opened that door, I wanted a better look around. Maybe I could pry off the board to a window and peek inside the shack.

  But Milo didn’t notice my change of direction. He just kept on walking straight up to the front door and reached out to twist the knob.

  And that’s when I saw it. A trigger on the door.

  “Milo, stop!” I shouted.

  But it was too late. Milo turned to look at me, confusion mixed with fear written on his face. He took a step back but the damage had been done. I’d heard the click.

  And then the propane tank in the trees exploded.

  Gigi

  “What did he say?” I whispered to Maisy.

  We were sitting behind the ER counter where I was on rotation for the week. Everett had been avoiding Maisy since she’d called him on New Year’s Day to tell him that she was keeping the baby, but they’d finally run into each other today.

  “He was, like, normal. It was weird. He acted like he had this summer before we’d even started dating. He was all business, but pleasant at least. He just asked me how work was going in the clinic and if we’d had any interesting patients this week. Weird, huh?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Well, I guess it’s better than being uncomfortable and awkward around each other. Or him being a jerk. Whenever Rowen’s father saw me, he’d call me a slut and a cow—exactly what a pregnant woman wants to hear. If I were you, I would take the all-business Dr. Carlson,” I said.

  “You totally need to tell me about Rowen’s father. I’ve gotten bits and pieces from you this last week but I think I need the whole thing.”

  “Okay,” I giggled. “Though there isn’t too much to it. He’s a supreme asshole. I never plan to see his face again. The end. Have you heard from your parents at all this week since you told them you were pregnant?”

  “Yeah. Mom’s called me every day since, asking how I was feeling and if I needed anything. She’s been great. You were right. After the shock subsided, I think she started to get excited about being a grandma,” Maisy said, smiling.

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “I’ve got to get back to the clinic. Want to have lunch later this week?” she asked.

>   “Yes, just let me know which day,” I said.

  She hadn’t made it three feet from the desk when we heard screeching tires at the ER doors. In the middle of the ambulance entrance was a large, forest-green truck. On the driver’s side door was a shield with the words “US Forest Service.”

  I lost sight of the shield when the driver’s side door flew open and Beau Holt jumped out of the truck.

  Beau, who was supposed to be with Jess and Milo in the mountains looking for Wes’s meth cookhouse.

  Beau, who was sprinting to the other side of the truck.

  Beau, who saw Maisy and screamed at her to bring a couple of stretchers out.

  I stood frozen behind the ER counter as Beau pulled two people out of his truck. Both unconscious. Both unmoving. Both covered in blood.

  My eyes stayed locked on Beau as those two people were taken by Maisy and the other nurses to two different ER bays. I could hear Dr. Peterson and Everett starting emergency triage procedures in both ER rooms.

  Beau walked to me, still standing frozen at the ER counter, with pain and sorrow on his face. His hands were covered in blood that was not his own.

  I kept my focus completely on Beau. Because if I let myself look anywhere else, I knew that I’d see Milo in ER room one with Everett. And Jess in ER room two with Dr. Peterson, who was using EKG paddles on Jess’s bare chest to try and restart his lifeless heart.

  So I kept looking at Beau until I couldn’t see him anymore. Until I couldn’t see anything anymore but the backs of my eyelids. Because I had screwed my eyes so tightly shut that all I saw was black.

  Get it together.

  Get it together.

  Get it together.

  About a minute after I had squeezed my eyes shut, I started chanting. And about a minute after I started chanting, I got it together.

  Somehow I managed to detach my heart from my brain so I could get to work. The last thing Jess and Milo needed was to be in a hospital where one of the few nurses available was stuck frozen at the desk.

  So I let years of practice and experience take over and I walked into Jess’s room completely on autopilot.