by Judy Clemens
“But there are always people around here. How would we know if something was different?”
“I heard it was pretty quiet right around then, actually.”
“Says who?”
“Laura,” Zach said. “She—”
“—was taking care of Bunny,” I said, cutting him off. “She said it was so quiet she fell asleep.”
Zach gave me a funny look, and I shook my head.
“Well, like we said, we weren’t here.” Claire glanced at her phone. “And now I have to go get in line for milking.”
“It’s not near time,” Bobby said.
“It is if you don’t want to wait a year.” She hesitated, then walked off without him. “It’s your time you’ll be wasting.”
“Oh, for—Hang on, I’m coming! See ya, Zach.” He trotted off after his sister.
“Not the brightest bulb, is he?” Miranda said.
“He’s a nice kid.”
“You would say that.”
“Yes, I would, because it’s true. Weren’t you going home?”
Nick slid his hand along the inside of my elbow. “Weren’t you?”
“I was planning on it.”
“Um,” said Zach, “do you need me for anything?”
All three of us looked at him.
“Like what?” I said.
“I dunno. I’m just hungry, is all.”
“So go eat.”
“All right. Uh, thanks.”
“See ya. And congrats again.”
“So,” Miranda said when he was gone. “Can we please go now?”
“You know, you could have stayed home.”
“I wanted to spend time with my brother. Is that so wrong?”
I really was going to strangle the woman one of these days. If Nick wasn’t such a hottie—and a huge piece of my heart—I would be glad to send her packing, never to be seen again.
Nick tilted his head toward the door. “So, you ready then?”
“You two go on ahead, and I’ll be right there. Wait for me outside?”
His curiosity was plain, but he just said, “All right. Come on, Miranda.”
She made a face. “We have to wait for her again?”
“I’m sure she has a good reason.”
I did, but it wasn’t one I liked. It was one of suspicion. And I hoped to God I was wrong.
She huffed, and strode toward the door.
“I’ll just be a minute,” I told Nick.
As he left, I stepped over to Austin’s stall. “Tough competition today.”
He kept cleaning.
“Austin.”
Finally, he stopped, and leaned on his pitchfork. “What?”
“You were here last night by yourself, weren’t you?”
“No.”
“During the concert. Everybody else was gone. You stayed behind.”
“I told you I was there. I just stood in the back.”
“That’s right. What song was she singing when you got there?”
He frowned. “What is this? Why are you asking?”
“Austin, what song?”
“I don’t remember. “Rainestorm,” maybe.”
Okay, so he’d gotten there only a few minutes late. But then, what I was considering wouldn’t take long. “How long did you stay?”
“Till the end.”
“You heard all the songs? The encore?”
He went back to his work.
“Austin?”
He threw a cow plop into the corner. “What?”
“What was the encore?”
“Oh, for—” He stabbed his pitchfork into the straw. “‘Forever Your Country Girl.’ Okay? Are we done now?”
“And after the concert?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you out here again?”
“Of course I was. I checked in on Halladay.”
“Were you alone?”
He froze, his eyes darting everywhere but my face, and my heart rose into my throat. Was his guilt even worse than I thought? Had he done something even more terrible?
“Austin? Someone saw you.” Okay, so it was a little white lie. Or gray, maybe. “And they saw Rikki Raines.”
He stared at me, his eyes wide and shining. “I didn’t hurt her,” he finally said, his voice low. “I would never hurt her. I loved her. I’ve loved her since second grade, when I hit her in the face with a kickball, and she told me it wasn’t my fault. You have to believe me. I didn’t do it. I—” His voice hitched, and he swiped at tears. “She loved me, too. She said so.”
“Austin. Wait a minute. You were friends with Rikki Raines?”
He shook his head. “Not just friends.”
“You were her boyfriend?”
His head shot up. “Is that so hard to believe? I’m not good enough for her, is that it? Stupid farmer kid? Is that what you think?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Austin. Look at me. Look who you’re talking to. You think I look down on you because you’re a farmer? What am I? Huh? What’s Zach? What are most of the people I love? Farmers. Mechanics. Good, blue-collar folks. So don’t give me that crap.”
He sniffed again, and wouldn’t look at me.
“Austin, how could you be her boyfriend, and no one knew?”
He was quiet for a few moments. “Have you seen the papers? Those stupid ‘newspapers’ that tell the gossip from the entertainment world? It’s all about famous people’s personal lives. Their boyfriends, girlfriends, people they hate, people who hate them. There’s no such thing as private anymore. Rikki doesn’t…didn’t want that. She wanted us to just be us. Not us and the world.”
I couldn’t blame her. Not after everything I’d seen about her and that other singer, what was her name, Valerie Springfield, and the guy who supposedly drove a wedge between them. “What about that other guy? The actor from that zombie show?”
He snorted. “She couldn’t stand him. They were at a premiere once and somebody took their picture, totally made it into something it never was.”
“So she and that other singer? There wasn’t really a rivalry?”
“Oh, sure there was. Valerie Springfield hated Rikki, at least that’s what Rikki heard. Valerie thought Rikki was keeping her from moving up the food chain. That there could only be one star from rural Pennsylvania. Stupid, of course. Why would Rikki care? They weren’t even at the same label.”
“Did Valerie hate Rikki enough to kill her?”
He breathed through his mouth, his brain obviously on overload. “I never said that. I don’t know her. Just what Rikki told me, and she thought the whole thing was ridiculous. And lame. I just know I loved Rikki. And I would never, ever hurt her. Not even a little.”
I stepped closer to him, speaking so no one else could hear. “I don’t for a second think you did. But I do think you hurt someone else. You and Rikki put the lemon in the calf’s food, didn’t you?”
He sniffed, and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “It was just supposed to—”
“—be a joke? It’s never a joke when you hurt an animal.”
“It didn’t hurt him. He’s fine.”
“But it could have kept him out of the competition.”
“So? He didn’t deserve to be in the competition, anyway. I mean, she didn’t. Those stupid Greggs deserve everything that’s coming to them.”
“Everything? You mean there’s more?”
“No! I just…” He closed his eyes briefly, and when they opened again, he didn’t look scared anymore. He just looked pissed. “That family thinks they own the world. The fair. Rikki’s career. It’s about time someone told them different.”
“Austin.” I looked at the boy—for at that moment he was definitely a boy, and not a man—and pushed down the anger rising in my gut. “You’ve put me in a horrible position. You know what this kind of thing means. You know what I should do. What I’m supposed to do, if I follow the rules.”
His nostrils flared, and another round of tears gathere
d in his eyes. Not pissed anymore—now he was terrified. “The lemon wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“Austin, you sabotaged another person’s animal. You should be expelled from the fair.”
“Please.” He sniffed and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “Please, Stella, I didn’t mean…and now Rikki’s dead. And the calf won, anyway, right? So it didn’t change a thing. It didn’t hurt anything.”
“Didn’t it?”
“What? What did it do? She still won!”
Dammit, what was I supposed to do? Turn him in, and he’d lose everything. Scholarships, respect, perhaps even his clean criminal record. Did he deserve that? But if I let him go, I was an accessory to a crime. I was an adult, not living up to the rules and regulations expected of us. Especially someone who was sponsoring an animal. Someone who spent her life protecting and caring for animals.
“Stella.” Austin sank onto a straw bale. “It was dumb. I know it was dumb. And wrong. I won’t…I’m sorry.”
I clenched my jaw, already kicking myself for what I was about to do. But, holy crap. How could I destroy the future of this kid? Even if he was a moron. “Listen. If I let this go, which is the stupidest thing I’ll have done in a very long time, you have to promise me—swear on Halladay, or your mother, or whatever keeps you up at night—that you will never, ever do anything like this again. If you so much as consider sabotaging another animal, I’ll be all over you like flies on my manure pit. You understand me? You do something like this, and it’s not just you who will be in trouble. It will be my ass, too, because I turned my back on it this time.”
Austin nodded, not looking at me. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and he clenched his hands so hard he probably left nail marks on the backs of his hands. “I know. I’m…I won’t ever. I promise. I swear. Please. You have to believe me. I’m telling the truth.”
Idiot kid. It was a little late for that.
“But that’s not it.”
“There’s more?”
“Of course there’s more! You could have been one of the last people to see Rikki alive. You were with her just before she was killed.”
He dropped his face into his hands and sobbed. “I never should have left her. She said she would be okay…”
I sat next to him and put my hand on his back. He stiffened.
“Austin, what happened?”
He wiped his nose again. “I got a text, asking me to come by the fair office.”
“At midnight?”
“I know, it was crazy. But I didn’t want to take any chances and miss something. So Rikki said she’d sneak over to our trailer. My folks never stay here, so there wouldn’t be anyone to see her. She couldn’t come to the fair office with me, because, well, there would be too many people around. I thought she’d be fine.” He sobbed again, and I squeezed his shoulder.
“So you got to the office, and then what?”
“Nobody there had texted me. It was just the one old guy there, and he didn’t know anything. So I went back to my trailer, and Rikki wasn’t there. I tried texting her, but she didn’t answer, so I thought maybe she got spooked, and took off. I just texted her that I’d call her tomorrow. I mean, today. Of course I never heard back.”
I drummed my fingers on his back. “Do you still have the text you got from the fair office?”
“No.” He got out his phone and scrolled down. “It was just a number, because I don’t have the office in my contacts, and there was no reason to keep it.”
I wished he had, because it very easily could have been someone luring him away from Rikki. Someone who had access to his phone number. But I’m not sure he’d put that together yet.
“Austin, I know this is hard. Really hard. But you need to tell the cops, not about the lemon, that’s small stuff compared to Rikki. But you need to go. Today. Now. Tell them about the bogus text, and about being with Rikki that night.”
He sniffed, but didn’t respond.
“I’ll give you a little time, but if you don’t go, I am going to tell them this. It’s too important to let go. You want me to go with you?”
He held so still I thought he was ignoring me altogether, or just was too far into his head to hear me. But then he shook his head, so subtly I almost didn’t catch it. “I’ll go,” he whispered. “By myself.”
I waited a few more seconds, then quietly walked away.
Chapter Twenty-four
“Everything okay?” Nick met me outside the barn.
“No, not really. I need to check in with Carla now.” She’d never replied to my text warning her about Watts, and I was worried she hadn’t seen it, and had been blind-sided.
“All right. Do you know where she is?”
I loved that he didn’t question me about why I needed to see her, or why I had steam coming out of my ears. “I’ll find her.” I pulled out my phone, which was getting more use that day than it had in the past several months. Speed dial three, behind only Nick and Lucy. Lucy…I should probably check in with her at some point.
“Hey,” Carla said. I could hear voices in the background, and what was probably an electric fan.
“Where are you? We need to talk.”
“So talk.”
Hmm. Had Watts already cornered her and accused her of killing Rikki Raines? “If this is a bad time—”
“I’m in the rabbit barn. Come on over.” She hung up. All was not merry in Carla Land.
“Are we going, too?” Miranda said, when I informed them where I was headed. “More animals?”
“They’re rabbits,” I said. “Cute. Fluffy. Babies.”
Nick nudged her. “Come on, Sis. It’ll be fun.”
She sighed. “Fine.”
We made a quick stop to get Miranda a corn on the cob on a stick, and found Carla talking with a young girl who was holding an adorable, charcoal-colored lop-eared bunny. Too bad Tess wasn’t there. She would have gone ballistic. Bryan waited a few feet away, sitting on Carla’s vet box, the one Watts thought had been burgled for the Acepromazine. Or where Carla had stashed her murder weapons. Bryan made a face at me which could have meant, “Thank God you’re here,” or “Watch out, she’s in the mood to kill somebody.” Which wouldn’t be good for her future, if Watts got wind of it.
The girl soon put the rabbit back into its cage, and Carla turned toward Bryan. He gestured at me, and she dropped onto a straw bale right next to him, blowing hair off her forehead. “Hey. Sorry I was short with you on the phone. It’s just…this day.” Her chin trembled, and she looked down at her knees.
Bryan put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed, but gazed at me with a helpless please-do-something sort of expression.
I jerked my head for him to move, and took his place beside her. “Can you folks give us a minute?”
Nick immediately guided Miranda to a cage where a pair of rabbits looked like they were made entirely of exploded fuzz. Bryan shifted from one foot to another, then shuffled after Nick.
I knocked Carla’s knee with my own. “Want to talk about it?”
She took a shuddering breath. “You won’t believe it.”
“I think I will. Have you checked your phone lately?”
She jumped, like I’d prodded her. “Crap, I turned the sound off a while ago, because I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I’d be in the middle of checking an animal, or talking to someone, and the dumb thing would go off. Then I was just telling a kid I thought his pig was going to have to be taken home when the stupid phone rang, and it was a terrible time for an interruption. I forgot to turn it back on, and then—oh.” She held out the phone with my text on the screen. “So you know about the detective.”
“I know what she thinks. What did she tell you?”
“Other than that I need to watch my step, and give her a detailed timeline of my whereabouts, and not leave town?”
“She didn’t really say that.”
A grin flickered across her mouth. “No, but she might as well have. But get this, you kno
w how I’ve been saying these 4-H’ers and their parents are running me ragged? They just might be my alibi.”
“I thought I was your alibi.”
“Well, yeah, but then you left, remember? I was checking on a goat late last night, right while you were finding Rikki Raines’ body on the manure trailer. That kid and her parents will vouch for me.”
