Mudflaps and Murder

by Tegan Maher

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I didn’t finish baking until after midnight, and by the time I cleaned up, even with using magic to do most of it, it was almost one. Hunter had come home around ten but had fallen straight into bed. When my alarm went off at five the next morning, I silenced it as quickly as I could to keep from waking him. It was a wasted effort, though, because he was already up and sitting at the table when I stumbled down the stairs.

  He sat at the table checking Facebook on his laptop and drinking coffee.

  “Morning,” I mumbled, smacking my lips and scratching my neck. My mouth felt like it was full of sawdust. “Why on earth are you up at the butt crack of dawn?” To say I’m not a morning person is a gross understatement, and I don’t understand anybody who is. If it’s still dark out, you should be in bed, period.

  “I crashed as soon as my head hit the pillow last night, plus, you were snoring like a lumberjack.” Amusement lit his green eyes, and I mustered what I thought was a smile, but if his expression was anything to go by, I failed miserably. It probably didn’t help that my hair was still mangled from sleep, and I hadn’t taken my makeup off before I’d gone to bed the night before. If I had to venture a guess, I probably looked like a rabid raccoon. At least I knew why my mouth felt like a desert, though. I denied snoring, but I knew good and well I did because I’d woken myself up before.

  There was a cup of coffee sitting in my normal seat to his left, and I sank down in the chair, pulling one leg up under me and yawning. I took an appreciative sip of the coffee and smiled. It was exactly how I liked it. Blueberry with vanilla creamer. Yum. I leaned over and gave him a quick kiss. “Thank you. Sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve you.”

  He scrunched his nose and winked. “Don’t read too much into it, Red. I have good survival instincts is all. You’re terrifying in the mornings.”

  I smiled and wobbled my head back and forth. He wasn’t wrong. “Still, a normal man would bail. You not only embrace the crazy, you make it coffee. Any good fails this morning?”

  One of our favorite things to do while we drank our coffee was to look up epic-fail videos. There was just something about watching people screw up while doing stupid crap they shouldn’t have been trying to begin with that made me smile. If nothing else, I knew at least one person out there had me beat, no matter what I managed to get myself into that day.

  “Nah, nothing we didn’t watch yesterday.”

  I leaned forward. “Talking animals, then.” Those were my second favorites. The ones with the talking squirrels and dogs talking about bacon always made me laugh no matter how many times I watched them. “Quietly, though. I don’t wanna wake Gabi.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” he said. “Unless I miss my guess, she’s out like a light. She didn’t get home ’til three. I ran into her when I got up to get a drink of water.”

  “She’s been doing that a lot lately. She has a mystery man but won’t tell me who he is. She’s gonna be beat at work, though. Sundays are her early days at the office.” She worked for Will, our local vet, as his office manager, but she also served double-time as his vet assistant, and Sundays were farm days. They spent the whole day doing farm visits for folks who needed vaccinations or Coggins tests, or whatever else might be required for larger animals.

  He shrugged. “It’s her candle. She can burn it at both ends if she wants to.”

  With that, I pulled my chair around and we spent the next fifteen minutes watching silly videos. I glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen and groaned. It was almost five-thirty, and it was my day to do chores.

  “I gotta go feed the horses,” I said. “I’m picking Anna Mae up and seven.”

  “I’ll help you,” he said, moving to the Keurig to make us both a cup to take with us.

  “What are you getting into today?” I asked. “Do you have anybody you need to question?”

  He shook his head. “Not this morning. I went out to talk to Andy, Evie’s brother, yesterday, but he’s in Atlanta for a Falcon’s game.”

  My shoulders slumped a little. “When did he leave?”

  “Yesterday morning, so he’s still in the picture as far as witnesses go. And to be honest, I’m starting to think he looks good for it.”

  I glanced over at him as I added a blurp of creamer to my coffee. “But what about the woman the witness saw comin’ out of the tent?”

  “I don’t know. I almost wonder if he and Evie did it together. Maybe they went to get their money from him, one thing led to another, and Jackson ended up with a screwdriver in his gut.” He pulled his cup from the maker and snapped the lid on.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, running the theory past my gut. “It doesn’t feel right. But I’d lay a million bucks on it being her they saw leavin’ the tent. It just feels right to me. Did you figure out where the money went, or at least how much he’s borrowed?”

  He shook his head. “Not a clue. Jim said he didn’t have anything in his bloodstream but beer, and I didn't find anything worth more than a few hundred dollars other than the truck when I went through his place.”

  “Maybe he donated it to the School for Bullying. That seems like a cause he’d get behind.” I was sure he hadn’t donated it to anything worthy, that was for sure. “Did you find anything else at his place? Maybe women’s clothes, or hair on his pillow?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Just a disturbing amount of cosmetic products. I’m not saying a guy shouldn’t take care of himself, but he had multi-packs of tooth whitener, half a dozen different hair products, anti-aging creams, callous softeners, eyebrow wax, and even a mani/pedi kit that was well used.

  I laughed at the appalled look on his face as I skipped down the porch steps. “That’s more stuff than I have, and I’m supposedly a girl.”

  He whacked me on the behind and I turned and gave him a punch on the shoulder.

  “Knock it off, you lunatics,” Max grumbled from his place on the porch. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “See?” I said, raising a brow at Hunter. “He may be cranky, but he’s been alive for five hundred years. I’m pretty sure he knows by now what’s night and what’s day, and this is definitely night.”

  When I flicked on the barn lights, even the horses agreed. Not a single head hung out a stall door. When I walked past Ranger’s stall, I smiled to see the old roping horse lying down, blinking at me in the light. There was hay in his red mane, and he pushed to his feet and gave a whole body shake, sending a small cloud of dust and bits of sawdust flying from his roan body. He gave a mighty yawn, then shook his head and came over to say hello. At twenty-three, he was well past his roping days, but you didn’t dare tell him that. Justin rode him when he came out, though he was getting to the point where he wanted to ride the more energetic horses. Ranger was content to amble along, snitching bites of tall grass from the sides of the trail as he did. That’s okay, though, he’d earned it.

  “Good morning, boy,” I said, giving his neck a scratch as he butted his head into my shoulder. Mayhem broke the moment by banging his feed bucket inside his stall, and Missy nickered and bobbed her head over the stall door. It seemed my horses were much better at being morning people than I was. Giving Ranger a final pat, I headed to the feed room. It didn’t take long to get all thirteen horses fed and turned out, and Hunter threw them flakes of hay while I started on the stalls. Cleaning stalls was another mindless activity that allowed me to think, though, at six a.m., I didn’t expect much from my semi-comatose brain.

  That’s why I was surprised when something potentially useful actually popped in. We had no idea who the blonde from the feed store was, but Harry, the owner, probably did. He was there every day except Sundays because they were closed that day. I don’t know that the man had ever missed a day of work, and he knew everybody. Before my groggy brain dropped the idea, I leaned my poop fork against the side of the stall and stepped out into the aisle. Hunter was cleaning a stall a couple down from mine,
and I paused for a second, thinking how nice it was to have him there. I gave myself a shake.

  “Did you talk to Harry at the feed store?”

  “No,” he said, looking up. “About what?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re supposed to be the morning person, here. About the blonde chick Matt saw Jackson there with.”

  “Oh,” he said, glancing up as he scooped out a wet spot in the stall. “No, I didn’t. I hadn’t gotten around to her yet. I spent most of the day yesterday trackin’ down alibis and trying to figure out where he was spending so much money.”

  “They’re closed today and he goes to his daughter’s on the other side of Greer Mountain for Sunday supper. He refuses to get a cell phone, but he’ll be there at opening tomorrow.”

  “Then it sounds like Matt and I are gonna have time to work on the bikes this morning. Maybe we’ll go for a ride and stop somewhere to catch the game. It’s been a while since we just hung out without all the estrogen.”

  I grinned. “Yeah, you two go beat your chests and watch the Falcons kick some butt. Anna Mae and I will spend some money, but don’t you dare drink and drive on that motorcycle. I know the sheriff.”

  He hmphed. “It’s not the sheriff I'm worried about; it’s the red-headed hellion of a woman he’s got.”

  “You’re a wise man, then,” I replied, and went back to scooping.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Anna Mae was ready and waiting when I pulled up to her place at ten to seven. I’d brought the trailer, because every time I’d decided to leave it at home, at least one of us had ended up buying something too big to fit in the back of the truck. Since I was clear out of supplies and she’d sold several of her larger pieces over the last couple of weeks, I figured we’d be coming home loaded. Hunter had been awesome enough to offer to take the baked goodies down to Raeann so I didn’t have to pull the trailer through town, which is why I was early.

  “Mornin’,” I said. “You ready to go spend some money?”

  She grinned at me, and I was relieved to see the smiling, cheerful woman I knew and loved rather than the emotional train wreck I’d encountered in her shop the day before. It was so rare for her to be off-kilter that it worried me more than it would if it were just about anybody else in my life.

  “Mornin’! Yes, I am. There were about a kazillion different things listed for the first sale because it’s a combined estate auction. Stuff from five different houses all going up at once—can you believe it?” Her pixie-like face was lit up like the Fourth of July, her blue eyes shining.

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  While she chattered on about armoires, bedroom sets, and fine antique silver, I thought about what Camille had asked me to do. Before Katrina had attacked me, she hadn’t done anything that the council could have arrested her four. Sure, she was shady, but they hadn’t had anything concrete on her. If somebody’d had the same chance at her that I now had at this guy, would things have gone as far as they had? I ended up shaking it off. It was an irrelevant question because hindsight is twenty-twenty. I shifted my attention back to a smiling Anna Mae and pushed Camille’s request to the back of my mind.

  “I’m starving,” I said as I pulled onto the main road, being careful to go wide. She had a wickedly deep culvert on either side of the end of her drive, and the last thing I needed was to drop the trailer off into it because my mind’s eye wasn’t on the ball. They’d revoke my country-girl card for sure. “Where’s the auction at, exactly?”

  “Davidson’s, so we have time.”

  That brought my level of excitement up about twenty notches. Davidson’s Auction House was a massive, former warehouse that could easily hold ten houses worth of stuff, and they had high standards. No junk that would need much work, but I’d found some real gems there. Plus, they were close. Some of the places we went to were way out in the sticks, but Davidson’s was about halfway between Keyhole and Eagle Gap, and it would only take us thirty minutes or so to get there.

  Though I typically went for auctions where I could get stuff on the cheap, there were benefits to paying a little more for stuff that I didn’t have to invest as much elbow grease in. Not only that, but every auction had a certain amount of what most people would consider junk. Old oak doors that had been replaced with more energy-efficient ones but not thrown away, old stained glass windows that were broken but ended up in the shed because the owner appreciated the beauty and hated to throw them away just because a corner had broken, you name it and I’d found it.

  Thank heavens for people’s propensity to hold onto things they held valuable and stuck back with the intention of reusing them eventually. That was exactly the sort of thing that ended up being sold in lots because individually, they didn’t hold enough value to take up time auctioning them separately. That meant gold for me. I’d also managed to pick up some nice pieces for the farm.

  “Good, then. Let’s stop at the dimer and grab some breakfast on the way. I’m in the mood for some of Jeanie’s biscuits and gravy,” I said.

  “Sounds good. I could go for some pancakes and bacon.”

  “So,” I said, hesitant to bring it up but curious to know where her mind was at on the subject, “Matt tells me you’re considering moving in together. Are you okay with that?”

  She grinned. “Are you serious?” I’m over the moon about it.” She turned to face me, her expression turning serious. “But we’re worried about you. You don’t exactly have the best of luck

  Though I typically went for auctions where I could get stuff on the cheap, there were benefits to paying a little more for stuff that I didn’t have to invest as much elbow grease into. Not only that, but every auction had a certain amount of what most people would consider junk. Old oak doors that had been replaced with more energy-efficient ones but not thrown away, old stained glass windows that were broken but ended up in the shed because the owner appreciated the beauty and hated to throw them away just because a corner had broken, you name it and I’d found it.

  Thank heavens for people’s propensity to hold onto things that they held valuable and stuck back with the intention of reusing them eventually. That was exactly the sort of thing that ended up being sold in lots because individually, they didn’t hold enough value to take up time auctioning them separately. That meant gold for me. I’d also managed to pick up some nice pieces for the farm.

  “Good, then. Let’s stop at the diner and grab some breakfast on the way. I’m in the mood for some of Jeanie’s biscuits and gravy,” I said.

  “Sounds good. I could go for some pancakes and bacon.”

  “So,” I said, hesitant to bring it up but curious to know where her mind was at on the subject, “Matt tells me you’re considering moving in together. Are you okay with that?”

  She grinned. “Are you serious?” I’m over the moon about it.” She turned to face me, her expression turning serious. “But we’re worried about you. You don’t exactly have the best of luck, and I hate to leave you alone. Before, it was different. Shelby was there, Gabi was there.”

  She had a valid point. I’d been kidnapped a couple of times from my place, though that was back when I wasn’t expecting bad guys to leap out of the corners at me. Plus, Gabi was there most of the time when she wasn’t working. Or at least she had been before Mystery Man had come into her life.

  I scoffed. “You do realize I’m a grown witch, right? I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, and you better not go putting your personal life on hold because you think I need a babysitter. Plus, Hunter’s there most nights, and I’m rarely home during the day.”

  “I don’t think you need a babysitter so much as you need a bodyguard,” she replied, grinning.

  “Still, Matt’s working full time now. It’s not like he’s there through the day like he used to be, and if it makes you feel any better, I’ve decided to have the Big Talk with Hunter. I don’t imagine I’m going to be living at the farm alone for much longer.”

  She gave a little
squeal of delight. “Ooh, when did you decide that?”

  “Last night, as a matter of fact. It’s silly to avoid the conversation because I’m concerned about bruising his male ego. He’s not like that.” I found that just saying the words out loud made me happy. “I’m gonna talk to him as soon as all this is over. It’s been a long time coming.”

  “Good. That makes me feel better.”

  We rode in silence for a while, both of us lost in our own thoughts.

  “Has Hunter found anything new in the case?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing concrete. He does have a couple of leads, but he can’t do anything this morning.”

  “Yeah, Matt said they were working on the bikes this morning, then maybe going for a ride. I sorta hoped that meant he’d solved the case, though I’m sure I would have heard about that.”

  “No, Matt saw Jackson at the feed store a couple weeks ago. He was with a woman, a bleach blonde wearing lots of makeup. Since that describes about a quarter of the women in Keyhole, it doesn’t do us any good, and since Harry always goes to his daughter’s on Sundays, Hunter can’t talk to him until tomorrow.”

  She scrunched her forehead in thought. “A bleach blonde, huh? Are you sure it wasn’t Evie?”

  I whipped my gaze to her. “She was a brunette when I saw her at the country club.”

  “Yeah, that’s a new thing,” she said, her bracelets clinking when she waved a hand. “It’s actually her natural color, but she switched it up for a while. I don’t know why—her complexion doesn’t work with it.”

  “Do you have any idea when she switched back?”

  “No clue,” she said, lifting a shoulder. “Though I did see her last week at the Walmart, and she was blonde then.”

  “So, she could have been the one Matt saw with Jackson, assuming Matt’s never met her.” That was something Hunter needed to know about, pronto. “Will you text Hunter and tell him that? As bad as I hate to disrupt his day with Matt, it could be exactly the break he needs.”