Priced to Kill

by Margaret Evans

  She hadn’t gotten but a couple of hours of sleep and slowly walked to the door, considering he was probably coming over to yell at her. She punched in the code, turned the knob, and stepped aside to let him in, then re-punched the code to secure the door after he pushed it shut. He waved her ahead to go first to the kitchenette where they could have a talk.

  As if waiting for her to say something, he stood at the entrance to the kitchenette and folded his arms, a large envelope against his chest. He hadn’t taken off his hat, a sure sign it was an official visit.

  She stood at the other end of the small kitchenette, looking down at her feet. Finally, she spoke.

  “If you’ve come to yell at me because I got us into this, there’s not much you can say that will make me feel any worse than I do.”

  “I came to get your signature on the printed statement you gave to the officers yesterday. I also want you to know that you’re damned lucky the poison you absorbed from handling that quilt was not worse.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  He pulled out the papers and set them on the little table, glanced about, then pulled a pen from his pocket.

  “Have a seat, Laura.”

  She sat, reviewed the statement she had given yesterday and signed her name to it. Then she looked up at Connor for the first time during his visit.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I think you just need to remember that you’re back in the fishbowl of a small town where everything you say and do is noticed and passed on to someone else, or a bunch of someones. Like your work at the library. Your sneeze in the morning becomes bronchitis by noon and pneumonia in the hospital by dinner. Just be careful.”

  She nodded, her eyes downturned once again, but he’d seen the welling in her eyes. She’d never shown him tears before—ever—this was something new. She had done anything rather than admit to tears or show them to him…in the past.

  He took off his hat, crouched on his heels next to her at the table, caught her eye.

  “Hey.”

  She looked upward so the tears wouldn’t spill over the banks.

  “I almost got you killed,” she said. “If I hadn’t wanted that furniture so badly, we wouldn’t have gotten into that mess.”

  “He would have found another way to get to us. He knew we were onto him.”

  “But—”

  “And I think we did that together. I wasn’t as vigilant as I could have been. But remember, we also got out of it together.”

  She smiled a little at the memory.

  “Me and my great idea with the loose screw? The knife in your boot is what saved us.”

  He shook his head and kissed her cheek.

  “And the dowels in the chair that didn’t come loose? Whose crazy idea was that?”

  “Well, it did get us on the floor where you could reach your knife.”

  “And the phone you shoved up your sleeve? We couldn’t have called for help without that. It would have been a really long and cold trek back to the highway in the bitter cold of that storm. We might not have made it.”

  She touched his hair as he continued.

  “Together. Getting into trouble or out of it. That’s what you and I have always been good at. Together. Just remember the fishbowl. And I’m very grateful you didn’t die from handling that quilt. Harry let the de-tox team in to get it and scrub everything down. We caught the woman; she hadn’t gotten that far and your remembering the license plate number helped a lot. She told us everything, whose idea it was and how it was carried out, her part in it. She admitted everything and didn’t seem to care anymore because Dorr turned out to be someone who wasn’t ‘nice’ to her. She actually feared he might try to get rid of her so the money didn’t have to be split in two.”

  “So between my brains and your pocket knife, we got out?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, knowing she was trying to escape mentally and emotionally from the evil from they had just escaped.

  “I’m sorry,” he continued, “that you had to witness that shooting.”

  “Well, at least she shot him and not us. They gave me something to sleep tonight and tomorrow night and the next night, in case I needed it. Are you coming for dinner?” she asked, changing the subject as he rose to leave, shoved the signed paperwork into the envelope and closed the flap.

  “I wouldn’t miss it. We still have a date whether it’s a day late or not. Don’t cook; I’ll bring food after I get off work. Maybe I’ll even tell you what happened eleven years ago with Eric Williams.”

  Connor showed up around six-thirty with a bag full of Chinese take-out in one hand and a bottle of good wine in the other. Laura lit a candle on the little table in the kitchenette.

  During dinner, they made small talk and her imagination blew the secret all out of proportion and when they had finished eating, Connor once again looked as if he would not share it. They opened and read their fortune cookies. Laura wouldn’t share what hers said. He helped her clean up, put away the leftovers and stowed all the seasoning and sauce packets on a shelf on the fridge door. He corked the wine bottle and got up to leave then turned back.

  “I forgot something.”

  He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

  “Thank you for being patient with me until I was ready to tell you something I’m not proud of.”

  As she stood in his arms, she listened without interruption to the story of a boy who’d spent his early teen-aged years keeping his hands off a girl he liked and keeping everyone else away from her, as well. She’d heard this part before, and waited for the new, unknown parts.

  He spoke of a time that changed everything, the day her parents were killed, the day when Rose took Laura away to live with her in Maryland, the day life stopped, his loss of focus and purpose, his intense anger with it all.

  When he hesitated, she remained silent and still, giving him the time to tell it as he needed to, just as he had given her the time to tell her own bad experience.

  “About two weeks after you left, we were all back on the practice field. I missed catching the football several times, and Williams called out from his safety position that I wouldn’t have missed it if my cheerleading squad of one had been there. He meant you. You could have heard a pin drop on the field. Then something snapped. I turned and looked at him, and he took off. Must have had daggers in my eyes. I can’t remember everything that happened next, I remember Jack Flynn yelling at me, and I just know I was chasing Eric, and he tripped over a cooler with drinks and hit a bench. Broke his jaw. I remember standing there looking down at him, bleeding and in pain, didn’t know his jaw was broken and I didn’t care. I stepped over him and walked away. Don’t know where I walked, but it was hours before my dad found me at the edge of town. I got benched indefinitely, and Eric was out for the season. I never went back.”

  “Why not? I know you would have worked your way through it.” Now she understood why there were no football trophies in his office beyond his first two years of high school. And he had so much talent and promise. It made her sick.

  “I couldn’t trust myself. Even the coach wanted me to come back, but he mentioned I’d have to watch my anger.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I studied, graduated with decent grades, went to college, and then the Academy. That’s where I learned to channel my anger.”

  They were both silent a moment.

  “Connor, you know that Eric brings on his own disaster. I’m not going to say it wasn’t your fault he broke his jaw, but he did start something he had to know would get you riled up.”

  “He wouldn’t have run—”

  “But he never showed any of us respect. He was always making up stories about him and me. I wanted to throw a pie in his face or put a banana peel on his front step. He was awful.”

  Connor nodded.

 
“He made a lot of people angry. But he’s turned his life around.”

  “With selling insurance? And I thought you told me he was on his third wife and he drank too much.”

  “Yes, but he has turned his life around.”

  “You say that, but I don’t see any evidence of that. He still shows up in my shop to try selling me insurance. He’s a real pest.”

  “I know, but he has still turned his life around. Trust me.”

  “So neither one of you went into a football career, not even in college,” she commented.

  “We both made independent, conscious decisions not to go that direction. And we both ended up with huge student loans we’re trying to pay off when we might have had athletic scholarships.”

  “I know about those loans,” Laura murmured. “Working on my own.”

  She laid her hands on his chest.

  “Hey, I’m proud of you.”

  He looked at her as if she were crazy.

  “You didn’t kick him when he was down.”

  “I didn’t help him, either. He was hurt. Wired up for most of a year. He was out on the practice field, still wired up, the next summer. We never spoke of it again. He played pre-season and then quit.”

  “A quiet truce between you or did he learn his lesson?”

  Connor shrugged.

  “Hard to tell with Eric, but he never tried anything like that again. We just don’t talk about it.”

  “I maintain that Eric Williams brings on his own problems. He always will. Leopards don’t change spots.”

  He kissed her.

  “Thank you for telling me,” she said softly as he turned away, held her hand and brought it to his lips at the door.

  “I’m not proud of it.”

  “I know. I can see that. But I also see the bigger picture and beyond it. I know you can’t let it go, but can you put it aside so you don’t have to worry so much about it?

  “You sound like your mother.”

  “Well, it’s not all the apple falling close to the tree, but more a matter of being smothered by a clutch of counselors for about eleven years. It makes sense.”

  “I have to get back to work; some paperwork I have to finish up on the incident, shooting, and arrest. They’re never happy when someone takes your gun away from you.”

  “I know. I remember my dad talking about that.”

  But he pulled her back in his arms for a few more minutes.

  “You know you didn’t have to share this.”

  “Sure I did. You told me your worst experience in Maryland. We’ve always shared. I couldn’t not tell you. I just didn’t want you to think badly of me.”

  “How could I?”

  “Well, it’s the day after Valentine’s Day, and our first date is already one day late.”

  “I think we had a very memorable first date yesterday,” Laura said, smiling and reaching up to kiss him. “Tonight’s the dessert.”

  forty-four

  Three days later.

  Laura was rummaging through her father’s box again, rereading his notes, when she got the text that Connor was at the back door. She ran down the stairs to let him in, saw he was carrying a plastic container which looked suspiciously like it was holding food.

  “Some of Mom’s muffins made with your apple butter,” he said and watched her face light up.

  She locked the back door, took the container and indicated he follow her up the stairs.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m happy to see you, too,” she said when she heard him grumbling behind her in the sitting room. When he didn’t respond, she turned around to see what the problem was.

  Connor was looking longingly at her father’s La-Z-Boy with what she was certain were fond memories of sitting in it until the day Lieutenant Keene caught him.

  “Go sit in it and put your feet up. He would want you to, I’m sure of it. Fifteen minutes to dinner.”

  She thanked him for taking care of the furniture and loading it into the work room.

  “Oh that was Max and Nicky,” Connor responded, referring to his two best friends, Nick Rayles and Max Downey. “And I found out what Willow Wright was hiding. She just got out of a bad breakup with an abusive boyfriend in South Carolina and was afraid he would hunt her down. We’ve got the guy on our watch list now. She did buy your car and with it being a small town, it was inevitable you’d run into her often. So just an innocent coincidence.”

  That was interesting, Laura thought, pulling silverware from the drawer. It surely explained why Willow was so reluctant to talk about her past and where she was really from.

  “Oh, and also, Will told me you’d want to know that Grumpy Gus figured out the recipe for some fudge you liked. Not sure what that meant, but I’m passing on the message.”

  Her eyes lit and a smile grew. Connor glanced around her apartment and spotted the white board behind the curtained, folding screen.

  “Go ahead and look,” she said, setting the table and lighting a candle.

  He stared at the screen, then at her, then back at the screen.

  “Let’s eat,” he said, and they sat at the table, concentrating on their shredded beef barbecue sandwiches and wine.

  Finally, Connor spoke. “You know, this goes way beyond just the odd coincidences of the Rage family members being the victims of so many so-called accidents.”

  She nodded.

  “Are you looking into who was living in the town at the times of the accidents?”

  Again she nodded.

  “Find anything interesting?”

  “Not yet,” she responded after swallowing a sip of wine. “But you know I will. And I have a new hypothesis that maybe they changed their names over the years, too, so it wouldn’t be so obvious that it was one of them.”

  He was silent a moment.

  “Well, if anyone can figure out this mess, it will be you. Let me know when you’re at the point where you need our help.”

  Laura glanced at the cat that Connor couldn’t see and spotted the root beer lollipop packet in its mouth. Empress Isabella was giving her another clue to follow, if only Laura could figure out what it and the other items from her father’s box meant.

  “Hey, Connor, is this a date?” Laura asked, looking up from her food, holding her wine glass.

  “Did you ask me to come over for dinner?”

  “Yup.”

  “Are you actually feeding me dinner?”

  “Yup.”

  “Then it’s a date.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Our second date. And so different from all the other times I invited you over to dinner and you ate the food. But I need your brilliant mind to help me with a puzzle.”

  That’s when he knew he was in trouble.

  As they finished eating and cleared things away, Laura laid out the four objects from the box her father had stored at the Fitzpatrick house on the table. There they were: the root beer lollipop, the mini baseball bat, the Matchbox car, a small furry toy animal. She stood near the table, watching him study them, perhaps hoping for a magical pronouncement.

  Connor picked up the car.

  “This is a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. Expensive car, don’t know if they even make them anymore, but way more costly than a Tesla.”

  He picked up the root beer lollipop in his other hand.

  “Didn’t we used to get these at the old medical center when we were little kids?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This one’s odd,” he said, setting the first two objects down and picking up the wooden bat. “It doesn’t look like a real baseball bat, but it’s definitely some kind of stick. And the little furry animal? I have no idea what that is. Why are they important?”

  “Because we’re going to have to figure out what they all are and what they mean. They are clue
s to the murders of my parents.”

  He rose and looked at her then, considering what may need to happen. Maybe it was time to start sharing the file with her. He really hated to do that, though. There were photos she shouldn’t see. Perhaps just some of the paperwork? It would have to be on the sly and not even his father or Harry could know.

  He played with a lock of her hair, pulled her close and kissed her.

  “I like dating you,” he whispered in her ear.

  “Me, too. I was kidding about the other times you ate over. There really is a difference, isn’t there? We don’t have to pretend we’re trying to catch up.”

  “Um-hmm,” he mumbled in agreement, taking her face in his hands and tipping it up to his, kissing her forehead, then each cheek.

  “And we don’t have to pretend anything at all because I like being with you.”

  “Ditto.”

  “And now even more importantly, we also have to figure out what we’re going to do for the St. Patrick’s Day parade and gala. Since you’re more Irish than I am and it’s your birthday,” she said, “I expect a lot of ideas and help from you.”

  He just laughed, wondering what was in store for him. Whatever Laura planned would not be boring.

  As he held her close, she looked over his shoulder at the cat now curled up on the microwave, its tail lazily waving back and forth in front of the latched door, and winked at it. And it may have been her imagination, but she was pretty sure the cat winked back.

  Coming Soon From Margaret Evans!

  Hanging By a Thread

  Second Treasures Mysteries, Vol. 3

  Laura Keene’s adventures in Raging Ford, Minnesota, continue as she searches for the truth behind the deaths of her parents. In Vol. 3 of the Second Treasures Mysteries, Hanging by a Thread, Laura discovers threads hanging from a garment in her thrift shop—a suit less than a year old but belonging to a young man who left town long ago, or so everyone thought. During the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade and gala, a terrible discovery is made and a story of blackmail, jealousy and greed put Laura and her friend, Connor Fitzpatrick, at risk when they face a killer desperate to keep his secret buried.