by Jeff Shelby
Mikey cleared his throat. “Say, you don’t see anything I might have missed, do you?”
When no one said anything, I glanced at him. I looked at Gunnar, then back at Mikey. “Are you talking to me?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Um, I wouldn’t really know.”
“Oh, come on,” he said, waving his hand. “Don’t be so modest.”
I frowned. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He tilted his head, and even in the darkness, I could see his eyes dart back and forth before he whispered, “I know who you are.”
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. “You do?”
He nodded, his eyes wide. “You’re a private investigator.”
TWELVE
I didn’t have time to correct him.
Because the front door opened and Vivian stepped outside, shading her eyes against the streetlight so she could zero in on us.
“Rainy, is that you?” she asked.
“It’s me,” I answered, stepping out of the shadows.
Mikey ducked back down, once again out of sight.
Vivian put her heart to her chest. “Oh, thank goodness. You gave me quite a scare.”
“Sorry about that,” I said. “We were just chatting.”
“Did you…did you find…anything?”
I hesitated. I felt bad that I didn’t have any news for her, but I also knew we were still in the window of time where anything was really possible. For all we knew, Leslie was taking a long walk, or visiting with a friend or something. She’d grown up in Latney, so it stood to reason that she might have some old friends she’d want to visit.
“Not yet,” I said. And then, because the guilt was clawing its way up my spine, I added, “But it’s still early. She could be anywhere.” And then, because that could be construed as sounding ominous, I said, “Anywhere safe.”
Vivian put her hands on her hips and sighed. From our vantage point, she looked like a captain surveying the ocean in front of her.
“She’s going to be fine,” Gunnar said, stepping into the light so Vivian could see him, too. Mikey, inexplicably, stayed hidden. “We’ll find her.”
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. There was nothing in her voice that gave any indication to how she was feeling, but I’d seen her when we first got back to the house, pacing back and forth. She was clearly worried, but was probably trying not to show it.
“Have you heard anything?” I asked. “Any texts or phone calls?”
It was a pointless question. I mean, if she’d heard something, she would have told us first thing. But it helped fill the silence, so I asked it anyway.
“No,” Vivian said. “I…I just finished vacuuming but I checked my phone. There weren’t any messages or missed calls.”
Vacuuming? So she hadn’t been pacing back and forth. She’d been…vacuuming. Maybe she was one of those people who needed to be kept busy when she was stressed or worried. At least that’s what I tried to tell myself.
“I checked Leslie’s phone, too,” she said. “I found it while I was straightening up the living room. I…I guess she left it here. There was nothing.”
I let out a soft sigh. “Okay. Well, keep them both close, just in case.”
She nodded. “I will.” She folded her arms, rubbing her biceps as if she was cold. But it was June and even though the sun had now gone down, its warmth still lingered. “You really think everything is okay? That she’s okay?”
I didn’t answer right away. I honestly didn’t know what to think—about any of what was going on. Leslie’s exchange with Shawn had been suspicious. She was missing. She never showed up at the market—or at least the cashier hadn’t checked her out. She hadn’t taken her phone or her car, both of which might be wanted or needed if she’d planned on being gone for any length of time.
I pressed my lips together. The last thing I wanted to do was give Vivian more reasons to worry.
“I’m sure she’s just fine,” I said, my voice over bright. “I bet she’ll be showing up here any minute. She’ll be completely embarrassed by all the fuss.”
Vivian nodded her head slowly. “Well, I hope not.”
I frowned. “You hope not what?”
“I hope she won’t be embarrassed,” she said, “because there’s going to be a whole lot more fuss in a minute.”
I glanced at Gunnar, who was looking at Vivian with a confused expression on his face.
“Oh?” I said. “How so?”
She pointed to the road. As if on cue, a car turned and slowly made its way to the end of Vivian’s driveway. The headlights dimmed and I muttered a curse under my breath.
Vivian was right.
There was going to be a whole lot more fuss.
Because Sheriff Donny Lewis was stepping out of his squad car.
THIRTEEN
“What is he doing here?” I asked as Sheriff Lewis slowly made his way up the driveway.
Vivian rubbed her arms some more. “I called him.”
“Well, I gathered that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “But why?”
“Because my stepsister is missing,” she said stubbornly. “And because I want to find her.”
I started to say something but Sheriff Lewis was only a few feet away now and I knew he’d be listening.
“Good evening, Sheriff,” Vivian called, coming down the steps of her front porch. “Thank you so much for coming on such short notice. And at such a late hour.”
I stole a glance at the watch strapped to Gunnar’s wrist. It was just after nine o’clock.
The sheriff yawned in response. The streetlight bathed him in a soft, yellow glow and I did a double take. He was standing in her driveway wearing…a robe. Burgundy, by the looks of it. My eyes drifted downward, taking in the bare, knobby knees and brown slippers attached to his feet.
I stifled what was something between a gasp and a giggle. “Um, hello, Sheriff,” I managed, trying my best to keep a straight face.
He looked at me, bleary-eyed, and coughed. “What in tarnation is going on?” He saw Gunnar then, and he must have spied Mikey, too, because he frowned. “Is this some kind of party? Isn’t it after curfew?”
“Curfew is eleven,” Gunnar provided helpfully. “And only in public areas. This is a private residence.”
The sheriff harrumphed and yawned again. “What seems to be the problem? And, I’m telling you, it better be a big one, because I was dead asleep. Nothing gets me out the door this late unless it’s an emergency.”
I thought this might be an issue, considering his line of work, but wisely kept my mouth shut.
Instead, I took a step back, trying to distance myself from Vivian and the sheriff’s inevitable wrath once she told him the reason for the call. He was going to be furious that she’d called him because her stepsister had been missing for…three hours.
“It’s Leslie,” Vivian said. “She’s missing.”
The sheriff froze. “Missing?” he repeated. He cupped his ear, like he couldn’t quite believe he’d heard the word. “Missing, you say?”
I decided to say something. I knew it was foolish, and Vivian deserved every bit of the dressing down she was going to get from the sheriff over having called it in prematurely, but the least I could do was try to help diffuse the situation.
“She called it in because she was worried,” I said. “She was expecting her home right away and when she didn’t show up, well, Vivian just sort of panicked.”
Vivian nodded. “I did.”
“And there is probably a perfectly logical explanation as to where she is,” I continued. “I mean, there always is, isn’t there?” I forced a laugh. “So, I’m afraid Vivian might have jumped the gun here.”
“Jumped the gun how?” the sheriff asked suspiciously.
“Well,” I said, fidgeting with my purse strap. It suddenly felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. “She’s only been missing for a few hours. And…well, she’s over eighteen,
so technically we need to wait a full 24 hours before she can be considered a missing person.”
The sheriff glowered. “Says who?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Says who?” he repeated, his voice rising.
My cheeks flushed and I tried to find my voice. “Well, um, that’s standard protocol in all missing persons cases. Wait 24 hours and then call it in. If you do prior to that, the police tell you to wait.”
“Well, I ain’t the police,” the sheriff announced, grabbing onto the belt that secured his robe.
My eyes widened in horror. Was he going to rip it off? Did he have some superhero costume on underneath that would support his last statement?
Much to my relief, he simply tightened the belt, then dropped his hands. “I am the sheriff,” he announced. “And sheriffs do things differently.”
Considering my past experience with him, this felt like the understatement of the year.
Gunnar cleared his throat. He was watching the sheriff with unabashed amusement. “How is that, Donny?”
The sheriff hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his robe. “You got a girl missing and a sister who’s worried sick. Why in tarnation do we need to wait?”
I gaped at him. “What?”
“You heard me, missy,” he said, a scowl on his face. “You think you know everything, coming from the big city, dontcha?”
He didn’t wait for me to respond.
“Well, I’ll tell you something,” he said. He lifted his left hand out of his pocket and pointed at the sky. “Around here, we do things differently. We got a missing person? We’re gonna find ‘em. No one goes missing on my watch. And no crime goes unsolved.”
There were several things wrong with his statements. For one, we weren’t even sure that Leslie was technically missing. And two, there would have been at least two crimes that had gone unsolved if I hadn’t stepped in and started poking around: the bones in the bungalow and the subsequent arson.
But standing there in Vivian’s driveway, watching Sheriff Lewis standing in his bathrobe, pointing to the sky as if he were Poseidon holding his triton over the ocean, it didn’t seem like the right time to mention either of these things.
“If you say so,” I mumbled.
He didn’t hear me.
He was fully awake now, pacing the driveway, talking out loud. Mikey had reverted back to the shadows, and no one seemed to have noticed. I envied him.
“We need a search team,” the sheriff announced. He fished around in one of the robe’s pockets and produced his trusty pipe.
This did not surprise me.
Nothing surprised me anymore.
“I’ll make some phone calls,” he said, but it was clear he was telling this to himself and not to us. “See if we can pull in some reinforcements. But first, the search team. We’ll form a perimeter, fan out…” His voice lowered so I couldn’t hear him, but he was still plotting, making plans.
“Can you believe this?” I whispered to Gunnar.
He just shrugged. “It’s the sheriff. What else did you expect?”
He had a good point.
Sheriff Lewis had taken me by surprise the first time I’d met him. His incompetence as a law enforcement officer had been reinforced with every one of my encounters with him.
As I watched him stick his pipe in his mouth and pull out his cell phone to begin arranging for a search team for a girl he wasn’t even sure was missing, I realized tonight was going to be no exception.
FOURTEEN
Gunnar woke me up the next morning.
Well, actually, it was his rooster.
I blinked a couple of times, startled by the sound of it. It took me a minute to remember where I was. Laying in my bed, on my farm, in the little town of Latney.
Despite having lived there for two months, this still happened to me. I’d sleep so deeply, so soundly, that I’d wake up and for one split second, feel disoriented and panicked as it registered that I was in a strange bedroom and not my familiar one back in Arlington.
And then just as soon as the panic rose, it subsided, because I would remember.
I was home. My new home.
In Latney.
The rooster crowed again and I shifted into a sitting position, trying to wake up.
It had taken me a little while to fall asleep. I’d been wound up after watching the sheriff kick into high gear over Vivian’s missing person report. Was he seeing something I wasn’t? Could he infer, based on the same information that I had, that Leslie was actually in some kind of danger?
I wasn’t an investigator, but I liked to think I knew at least a little bit about protocol and SOPs. And I was pretty sure the sheriff was going about it all wrong.
But who was I to correct him? I was just a new resident in his town, someone who had zero experience in law enforcement.
Gunnar had convinced me to leave prior to the search party showing up, and I’d reluctantly agreed. I wasn’t planning on being a part of anything the sheriff organized, but I also squelched the idea of embarking on my own search. I knew what I knew.
You don’t look for someone who might not really be missing.
I glanced at my alarm clock. It was just shy of six-thirty but the sun was already making its appearance, tinting the sky pink and blue as it began its march across the sky.
I thought about Vivian and Leslie, and wondered if she’d come home on her own or if the sheriff had had to drag her in. Would she have been embarrassed? Angry? My money was on angry.
I stretched and stole a peek out the window. It was Monday, which since retiring from Capitol Cases, held no real significance in my life. There was no place I had to report to, no job I was being paid to go do. My time was my own and while I relished the freedom and relaxed nature of my new life, it also had the tendency to leave me feeling like I was without a rudder. I’d had to try my hand at some self-discipline: setting an alarm clock so I wouldn’t oversleep—although so far, this was rarely an issue, as Mr. Rooster was always up before me—and making lists so I had something tangible to refer to, something that would force me to see some productivity in my day.
I thought about the list that was tacked to the refrigerator. I needed to weed the garden; I’d been putting that off for a couple of days. The chickens needed their coop cleaned. And if the predicted forecast of a cooler day proved true, I wanted to get some baking done. I’d recently started experimenting with bread recipes and had a new rosemary garlic I was itching to make.
The rooster crowed again and I craned my neck to see if I could spot him. Gunnar’s property flanked mine, but his house and barns weren’t visible. The rooster had the run of the place, though, and could often be seen strutting down the gravel road that was within view.
I didn’t see him.
But I did see someone else in my backyard.
A man.
I sat up, suddenly wide-awake. I rubbed my eyes, wiping the sleep away, then narrowed them.
Yes, it was definitely a man.
Not Gunnar. I knew this for a fact. The man skulking around wasn’t as tall, and he was thin, with what looked like blond hair.
I dropped my legs to the floor and raked my hand through my hair, thinking. What should I do?
If I’d been back in Arlington, the obvious answer would have been to call the police. The block I lived on was fine, but it butted up against an area with some not-so-savory folk, and there had been plenty of break-ins and auto thefts over my years there. If some stranger had been in my yard, my M.O. would have been to call police first, ask questions later. Especially that early in the morning.
But this was Latney. People lived by a different set of rules here. I thought back to the number of times Gunnar had just showed up. I’d be in the house, doing something, and glance out the window and see him checking on the chickens or tinkering with my lawnmower or an outside faucet or a loose floorboard on the porch. I’d gotten used to the idea that people just coexisted out here…and often times, tha
t meant they coexisted on your property.
Still, I was pretty sure I didn’t know the guy who was currently walking through my backyard before seven a.m. on a Monday morning. And that left me feeling…unsettled. There was no other word for it. I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t terribly worried, either. I just felt…unsettled.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand, then stilled.
Who was I going to call? The sheriff?
I almost laughed. I was pretty sure that I could be hiding in my bathroom with an axe murderer splintering the door from its frame and he wouldn’t show up to save me. He had no problem looking for a not-missing person, but saving me? I was the last person on earth he’d consider saving. Or at least the last person in Latney.
Gunnar?
I could call him. I opened my contacts and my finger hovered over his name, but I couldn’t force myself to press down.
As much as I appreciated Gunnar and all that he had done for me, I didn’t want him to be a crutch. I called him whenever anything went wrong: with the chickens, with lawn equipment, with a leaky faucet. I’d even called him for help to look for Leslie.
I didn’t consider myself a hardcore feminist who insisted on being the only person capable of taking care of myself, but I also didn’t want to run crying to Gunnar the minute something went wrong.
Declan?
Sure, I could call him. And he would come; I knew this without a doubt. But he lived halfway across town. Granted, it would only take him ten minutes to get here but if he was asleep, that ten minutes could morph into twenty. And the guy inspecting the back of my house might be gone by then.
I set the phone down.
I knew what I had to do. I knew what the only option was.
I needed to go confront him myself.
I yanked off the terry cloth shorts I’d slept in and stepped into a pair of gray yoga pants. I was wearing an old 5K t-shirt, one that was ratty and stained and had been relegated to a sleep shirt. I debated taking it off but then thought the fact that I’d run a 5K before might impress—or intimidate—whomever was in my backyard. I would not mention the fact that I’d walked 4 of the 5 kilometers.
