by Kym Roberts
Isla gave a faint, wry smile, then released my hand. “I think they found me.”
Mr. Andrews chuckled and I got the distinct impression he was trying to lighten the mood. “The way I hear it, you found them.”
I couldn’t hold my tongue any longer. “What happened?”
Mason smiled apologetically in my direction. “Isla decided she had something to tell the Judge this morning that couldn’t wait.”
Isla nodded in agreement. “It couldn’t.”
“She took off on her own without checking out at the front desk.” Mr. Andrews turned to Isla. “You had all of us scared half to death.”
Isla’s cheeks pinked as she waved her hand in dismissal. “Nonsense. The courthouse is just a few blocks away, and that nice officer brought me back.”
“You walked to the courthouse with your bad hip?” My disapproval may have seeped into my tone.
Isla sat up straight and threw back her shoulders with pride. “I reckon I did, and I gave them all a piece of my mind when I got there . . . including that cheating husband of mine and that tart, Ava James.”
Chapter Three
The front doors to the Book Barn Princess swished open on their automatic tracks, but the little buzzer didn’t ding as my best friend came running into the store. If Scarlet wasn’t so frantic I might worry about the stupid doors being on the fritz again. Instead, I focused on the high pitch of her voice as she yelled, “Bobby Ray’s in trouble!”
I slammed the register drawer closed and came out from behind the counter. “What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know,” Scarlet panted. Barely over five foot, Scarlet had the kind of body I dreamed about as a teenager—all curvy and luscious—the kind high school boys got tongue-tied over. Except in high school, Scarlet was a book nerd with glasses and dull brown hair who wore oversized T-shirts. Absolutely nothing like the ginger bombshell who was now grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the door.
“Where is he?” I asked as I dug my store keys out of my pocket.
Scarlet barely slowed down for me to set the alarm. “I got a call from Daisy. She said you weren’t answering your phone.”
“I left it in my apartment.”
That earned an eye roll from Scarlet. “You need to carry your phone with you, Charli.”
“Hello? I’m working at the Barn. We have a phone. Why didn’t either one of you call me here?”
“Daisy was a little flustered, and I thought it was better I came to get you in person.”
Scarlet was one of those people who talked a hundred miles an hour. I couldn’t stop her, couldn’t make her yield to get a comment in edgewise, nor could anyone else. In the past, I’d wondered if she would ever turn off her nonstop dialogue that covered topics ranging from gossip to fashion to politics to scientific studies about beauty products. Apparently, tonight was the night. And it kind of scared me. “Scarlet, what’s going on?”
Scarlet paused and turned to face me. “I’m going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to freak out.”
“You’re already freaking me out. Just tell me.”
Scarlet’s words poured out of her. “Bobby Ray is over at the Judge’s house, and there’s a body on the ground.”
When my eyes nearly bugged out of my head, Scarlet rushed to tell me the rest. Her voice, however, was muffled by overflow of blood pumping through my veins.
“I don’t know who it is. No one does. But Daisy said it’s definitely a body lying under a yellow police blanket.”
My hand shook from adrenaline as the wind blew my hair in my face and made locking the Barn door that more difficult. By the time I had the store secure, Scarlet had the single front door to her little BMW Isetta open and we hopped inside. I slammed the door harder than I meant to and immediately apologized. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She grabbed my seat belt and buckled me in before putting on her own and starting the car. I don’t know if it was the buzz of her little engine or the word police reverberating through my head that woke me out of my temporary shock, but I had to know if the sheriff was on the scene. “Is Mateo there?”
“That’s what Daisy said.”
I nodded but was immediately distracted with thoughts of the conversation I’d had with Isla earlier in the day. Isla was close to my daddy, but Isla had accused the woman I’d seen leaving my father’s house that morning of having an affair with her husband, the Judge. The woman my daddy was interested in, was also apparently the other woman in Isla and the Judge’s marriage. And Daddy and I had a mutual hatred for Judge Sperry—the old man who’d been the town sheriff when I was a kid. The same sheriff who was present every single time I made a mistake in my youth. He’d put handcuffs on me once, taken me to jail, and put the fear of God in me as he spouted numerous verses from the Bible. My daddy never took kindly to the Judge preaching to his daughter.
No one could anger my daddy the way Judge Sperry did.
I sent a prayer up into the universe, hoping God was more forgiving than vengeful. Please don’t let the Judge be dead at the hand of my father.
Scarlett drove the ten blocks to the Judge’s house, taking the corners faster than I thought her car could handle. It seemed every turn was made with divine intervention. As we approached Tenth Street, the strobe of emergency lights bounced off the houses throughout the neighborhood. People lined both sides of the street. Huddled against the increasing strength of the spring breeze, they peered toward the crime scene and talked to their neighbors.
Access to Tenth Street was blocked off two houses away from the Judge’s by a patrol car parked at an angle. I could see another patrol car at the opposite end of the block, barricading the entrance to the street at the intersection. A white van marked CSU was parked across from the Judge’s house in the midst of the area the police had marked off as their crime scene. The back doors were flung open and two crime scene techs were digging in bags in the back of the vehicle. Three uniformed officers stood guard at different sections of bright yellow tape that seemed to encompass a large amount of the normally quiet neighborhood.
An unmarked black Dodge Charger police cruiser was parked on our side of the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape. I scanned the scene looking for a familiar face, but it wasn’t the sheriff’s face that turned my already flopping stomach. It was the long lump covered with a yellow blanket that I spotted on the manicured front lawn in front of the Judge’s house, and I prayed it wasn’t anyone I knew.
As if my prayers were answered by a warped universe, I saw him. Dressed only in a dark colored robe with his gray hair unkempt, Judge Sperry was kneeling on the grass in front of his house, his face a mask of grief. I shouldn’t have felt an overwhelming sense of relief when I saw the old man, but I did, because it meant my worst fear hadn’t come true. Daddy hadn’t taken out years of pent-up anger and killed the man. No, my daddy stood a few feet away talking with the current sheriff and owner of the Dodge Charger, Mateo Espinosa.
Who was lying dead in the grass?
Scarlet double-parked her car and turned off the ignition, effectively forcing me out of my frozen state.
“You can’t park here,” I told her.
Scarlet rolled her eyes and opened the door. “That cop guarding the crime scene tape closest to us is Sally Ferguson. She’s got an appointment in the salon tomorrow morning. I don’t think she’d like her blond locks turned green.”
My head snapped back toward Scarlet as she pushed me out of her car. “You wouldn’t.”
Scarlet pulled herself out of her vintage car and closed the door. Dressed in a long-sleeved blue floral print pencil dress, she looked as amazing at nine o’clock p.m. as she had when she opened up her Beaus and Beauties hair salon at seven o’clock that morning. She was still wearing her five-inch heels that made my feet hurt just looking at them. I was also envious of her perfect ginger-colored hair that di
dn’t block her view on a windy day like the mass of curls I brushed off my face for the third time since we’d exited the vehicle. My attempts to keep my curls from obstructing my view were fruitless.
“Of course, I wouldn’t, but she doesn’t need to know that. Besides, no one is leaving this street anytime soon.”
I wanted to go to my dad, but he was busy with Mateo and hadn’t seen us arrive. We approached Daisy and her husband Jessie by walking through a couple front yards. We reached their position in the middle of their driveway in a matter of minutes. The older couple was holding hands like teenagers until Daisy saw us approach.
“Young lady, I’ve been trying to call you for the past thirty minutes,” Daisy scolded.
“I’m sorry. I left my phone in my apartment.”
Jessie came up and put his arm around my shoulder. “Don’t give the girl a hard time, Daisy. Can’t you see she’s worried half to death?” Jessie winced as soon as the word left his mouth, and Daisy pushed him away to wrap me in a tight embrace.
“That’s my husband,” she whispered in my ear, and a lock of her gray hair blew across my face, hiding my view of my father on the other side of the holly hedge that divided the Mahans’ yard from the Judge’s. A tall metal arbor stood in the middle of the long row of bushes allowing access between the yards. A yellow piece of crime scene tape, however, blocked our entrance. “Everything is going to be okay, Princess. Mateo will take care of your daddy.”
The last thing I wanted was comfort. I needed answers . . . yesterday. I gently pushed her away.
“Do you know who died?” I asked. Deep in my gut I was hoping some stranger had just keeled over from a heart attack or an aneurysm or had tripped and broken his neck—anything was possible.
“No, dear. By the time we came out to see what the ruckus was all about, the officer had already covered the body.”
Scarlet asked the question I was dying to hear the answer to. “Was Bobby Ray already here?”
“He was when we came outside,” said Jessie.
“Nobody else?” I prayed there was someone else. Someone Daddy had cajoled into giving him the smoking gun. Someone he disarmed in hand-to-hand fisticuffs. Someone he’d taken out with his pocket knife a moment too late to save the person under the blanket . . . but then there’d be two bodies.
“The Judge was with him and they were arguing,” Jessie explained.
I winced. That was the last thing I wanted to hear.
Daisy shook her head. “That’s my husband, always stirring up the women.”
If I could find some humor in this whole mess, I’d think Daisy’s comment was funny . . . but I wasn’t laughing. I was worried my daddy was in over his head. If he and the Judge had been working together to save whoever was under the blanket, it would look better for my daddy—the Judge too.
I grasped onto that. The two of them would never work together to kill someone, that much was certain. If my dad ended up being a suspect, that made the Judge just as big a suspect. Unless there was another witness. I gazed down the street lined with neighbors.
“We should go talk to people,” I suggested to Scarlet.
She pointed at the two men in wrinkled suits standing directly across the street from the crime scene. They were taking notes on identical steno pads as they spoke to the residents, one at each end of the front porch. “I think the detectives are doing that now.”
“That’s them. This is us.”
Jessie tried to stop my mission before it began. “Princess, I don’t think your daddy—”
“Would want me to do anything? If I was over there standing next to a dead body, he’d have made his way through the crime scene tape to stand by my side no matter who stood in his way. I’m just going to ask a few questions.”
I turned toward the street as a gust of wind rustled the trees and blew something through the arbor that flattened against my leg. I looked down to see a piece of paper wrapped around my shin like a pair of skinny jeans from the force of the wind. Grabbing it, I began to ball it up, until I saw dark splatter marks running across the face of what appeared to be a letter in the dim lighting.
“What’s that?” asked Scarlet.
Something told me the piece of paper was important, but I couldn’t make it out in shadowed driveway. “I have no idea. I can’t really see it.”
The four of us huddled together as Jessie lit up the piece of paper in my hands with his cell phone and a collective gasp passed through us. Dark crimson splatter marks covered the letter, which was addressed to the Judge.
“What’s it say?” asked Jessie.
Daisy’s voice seemed to echo through the neighborhood even though it was barely above a whisper. “Is that blood?”
“Read it, Charli,” Scarlet urged.
I cleared my throat and looked around to see if anyone was watching, but everyone seemed to have their eyes and ears glued to the Judge’s house. “Judge,” I began to read, “I can’t take this anymore. I’m causing you problems with Isla, and John Luke is demanding I choose between him and you. I’m so sorry to disappoint you. I know this is a bad time, you must feel like you’re losing everyone, but please know you will always be in my heart. Ava.”
“O.M.W. you don’t think that’s Ava under the . . . under the . . . you don’t, do you?” asked Scarlet.
I looked up into her troubled eyes. “I don’t know.” I thought of the woman I’d caught making the walk of shame that morning from my daddy’s front door. “Jessie, take a picture of this.”
“What in tarnation for?”
“I . . . I . . .” What could I say? That my dad was having an affair with Ava and was mixed up in some kind of ugly triangle between the Judge and Ava?
“That’s my husband.” That was Daisy’s favorite phrase. She used it to claim Jessie as hers and to tell other women to back off her man, to make fun of Jessie’s actions, or to ridicule him no end. At the moment, I was pretty sure she was using it to shame him into doing as I asked. Especially when she pushed Jessie’s hand that held his phone over the half-crumpled note from Ava and said, “Do as you’re told and take the picture.”
Jessie snapped the picture as we all huddled over the letter. The sound of a masculine throat being cleared outside our circle caused us to jump in unison at the intrusion.
“Charli Rae, please tell me you are not interfering with my homicide investigation.” Normally, his voice warmed me from my core out. Today, Mateo’s voice sent a shiver through my body . . . and it had nothing to do with chemistry.
Chapter Four
My investigation hadn’t started as planned. Mateo was immediately irritated that I’d read his piece of evidence, and when I questioned how I could have known it was evidence in the case without reading it, he immediately warned me not to meddle.
“This case belongs to my detectives,” he said. “Keep your nose out of it, Charli Rae.”
Mateo never used my middle name unless he was irritated or being all sheriffy. By now, he should have known all that did was raise my dander—like I’d raised his. We stared each other down like a pair of prickly pears—heat rising to our necks and sharp barbs ready to be thrown if one of us said the wrong thing. Then he pulled out a pair of gloves from his back pocket and took his anger out by snapping them on his hands with a pointed glare in my direction before he took the letter.
“Where did you get this?” he asked.
“It smacked me in the leg.”
When he looked at me dubiously, Scarlet backed me up. “All she did was bend down and pick it up. It must have blown through the arbor.”
Everyone turned and looked through the arbor that linked the two yards.
“Did anyone see the letter before it hit Charli’s leg?” Mateo’s tone told all of us he didn’t have time for games. Jessie buckled and started to confess our crime of photographing Mateo’s evidence bef
ore turning it over.
“I—”
A pinch from Daisy on Jessie’s backside kept her husband’s mouth shut as he rubbed his rump and glared at his wife.
“Did you want to add something, Jessie?” Mateo asked.
“No, no. I just think it’s a tragedy.”
“Yes, it is. But we’ll find who did this.” Mateo turned back to his crime scene with his piece of evidence in hand.
Up until that point, I wasn’t sure if he’d seen Jessie taking the photo of the letter before he’d walked up and scared the bejeezus out of all four of us. I had no doubt Jessie would have confessed if not for Daisy’s warning, and I was happy she’d interfered. Yet if Mateo ever found out about the photo, he’d be more than prickly.
In my defense, I’d planned to turn over his precious piece of evidence as soon as I identified it as an important piece to the puzzle in the murder of Ava James. Granted, if I’d been alone when I found it, I probably would have held on to the letter for a little while longer. I was well aware that would have put a hitch in his chain of custody for that particular piece of evidence, but I was worried about my daddy. I still wasn’t sure if he was a witness or a potential suspect. He wasn’t in cuffs, which was a good sign, but he wasn’t making any effort to walk across the lawn and come talk to me either.
Knowing that Mateo’s loyalty was to the job—to the law and to justice—no matter what the cost, made me fidgety. My loyalty was to my daddy. Period. If that meant I had to clear his name, or God forbid, build his defense, then so be it. I would do what it took to take care of him. But there wasn’t a smidgen of doubt in my mind about his innocence. We’d been down this road once before when his girlfriend had been killed a little over a year ago. Now he was facing a second murdered girlfriend. The man had to have the worst luck with love of anyone I’d ever known, and I was more than a little worried about him.
Watching Mateo walk away with the letter suddenly seemed unacceptable. I needed more information. I ducked under the yellow crime scene tape, ignoring its bold message, and took off after him.
