by Tegan Maher
"Please, call my Noelle." I pulled my phone away from my ear and glanced at the time: three thirty. The jail was open until five, but I wanted to have plenty of time to talk to him. "I'll meet you there in a half-hour if that works for you."
"That works just fine," she said. "And thank you again."
It killed me that I felt such a sense of obligation, especially since there was a good possibility that he was guilty of embezzlement, at the very least.
Addy popped in just in time to look at some of the weird crap we'd bought at Walmart, shaking her head when I pulled out the neon-green Halloween bowl that featured a skeletal hand that dropped when you reached into the bowl.
"What?" I said, sticking my hand in and grinning when I imagined how it would scare the kids at our Halloween party. "Justin thought it was cool."
He looked up from the bag he was digging through to see what we were talking about. "No I di—" I glowered at him and he cleared his throat, realizing his mistake. "I mean, yeah. I thought it was cool."
Addy shook her finger at me. "Shame on you, gettin' a little kid to lie for you."
"Hey! I'm not a little kid," he said.
Rae tsked at us. "You're both little kids. Hand me the pizza Pringles."
Addy curled her nose and popped out, even though I knew for a fact that when she was alive, she'd eat a whole can of those in one sitting.
"I'm meeting Janie Huffman at the jail in a half-hour. Do you think you two can keep each other out of trouble while I'm gone?" I looked back and forth between Justin and Rae.
"No guarantees," Rae said, "but we'll do our level best not to do anything that'll require you to bail us out while you're there."
Justin laughed, and it struck me again what a change had occurred in him already. The problem was, I was getting attached to him when the social worker had made it abundantly clear that I'd only been granted temporary foster status and that anything further would require an in-depth process requiring something like ten forms of ID, five thousand references, an eye tooth, a left arm, and a picture of me in a zebra suit.
Which I found utterly ridiculous when you considered that the last woman he was placed with had apparently been rubber-stamped.
Things would shake out the way they were supposed to though; they always did.
I slipped into the parking lot of the courthouse—the same one where I'd met her, actually—in just under the thirty-minute mark. Janie was already there, standing beside her car and looking a little more put-together than she had the last time we'd met. She still looked tired, but she struck me as someone who met things head on rather than a milk sap who just let life happen to her.
Good. My kind of woman.
We made small talk, sort of, as we walked up the front steps and through the doors, then down to the jail area in the basement.
We asked to see Larry and, after we presented proper ID—mostly as a formality considering it was Smitty and he knew us both—we followed him down a hallway to a green door.
He started to open it, but then turned to us. "Oh, I forgot. Y'all aren't carryin' in any weapons or drugs are you?"
I bit the inside of my cheek. "I know I'm not. Janie?"
Her eyes were alight with amusement, but her face was serious as she held up her right hand. "Nope, me either, Smitty."
He breathed a sigh of relief as he opened up the door. "Thanks, ladies. Just wait in here and I'll bring Larry up. I've been tryin' to cheer him up. He beat the pants off me at checkers. He wanted to play poker, but I feel bad, seein' as how he's got that tic."
How, in a town where the phrase, don't tell anybody translates to tell everybody, did the man not know he had a tic?
Janie and I sat down at the steel table and made small talk for the couple of minutes it took for Smitty to come back with Larry. Once he'd uncuffed him and shut the door, Janie gave him a big hug. He was a tall, lanky guy, and his arms wrapped clear around her.
Once the mama-bear questions about his health were over, they sat down and she made the introductions.
"Noelle's trying to help figure out who really did this, so she's gonna ask you some questions. You be straight with her, you hear me?" She gave him the mom look, and he bobbed his head.
"Yes, ma'am."
I decided to just rip the Band-Aid off. "Larry, they know you were at Wheeler Construction the morning Max was killed, so denying that doesn't do anything other than make things worse. Why were you there?"
"I went to try to persuade him to change his mind about giving me a loan. I'd been to all the banks and none of ’em would so much as look at me because of my income. And there ain't no way I'm living with Scarylou. I didn't think that through much when I married Candy."
"You didn't think much through when you married Candy," Janie muttered.
I wondered if that was just typical mother-in-law animosity or if there was more to it, but I brushed it aside. "Did you talk to Max?"
He nodded, his eyes wide and earnest. "I did. Told me the same thing he'd told me before. Offered me a job. I don't have time to save it slow, though. She's movin' in in less than a month!"
"All right. I assume he was alive when you left?"
"Yes, ma'am."
I searched his face for any sign of deception, but didn't see even a glimmer. I had the option of looking inside his head, but I had a hard and fast policy about that, and if I started bending it to suit myself, the line would blur. Plus, it wouldn't be admissible in court, anyway.
I took a deep breath. Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. "I was out at Walmart today and it looks like they found a huge chunk of cash missing. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that would you?"
This time, he hesitated for a split second and looked down. "No, ma'am. I don't reckon I would."
Janie reached across and pinched him on the arm. "Don't you lie to her, young man!"
He pulled his arm away and rubbed it, giving her a dirty look. "Fine. Yes. I may know something about it."
I raised a brow.
"But not what you think," he rushed to say.
"Then what?" I waited, and took a deep breath.
"I went to work as usual the day I was arrested. When I came out, there was an envelope on my seat, which was weird because the doors were locked."
He looked back and forth between us. "I opened it and it was packed with hundred-dollar bills. I didn't even have time to count it before the cops showed up. I was so freaked out when I saw them, I panicked. I was afraid they'd found out I was there that morning and were coming to arrest me."
Janie was watching his face, her expression blank. "Go on."
"I punched the gas, and when they cornered me out at the old drive-in, I knew I'd stepped in it for sure."
The worst part about his story was that it was so lame that I was leaning toward believing him. I mean, he'd had two or three days now to come up with a better version, and that's the one he was sticking with?
"You gotta believe me." He had that lost-puppy look that made it almost impossible not to.
"So where do you think the money came from?"
"I don't know. But I didn't steal it, and I didn't kill nobody."
He kept his eyes downcast and picked at a string on his jail-issued orange pants, the picture of misery.
I leaned back and thought for a minute. Ten thousand dollars doesn't just magically appear on your front seat, so if he didn't steal it—and at that point, I didn't think he did—then where did it come from?
"Not to be indelicate, but were you seeing somebody?"
"No! I'm not a cheater. But I'd be lyin' if I said I haven't been thinkin' hard about divorce lately. I owned the trailer when we got married, so it ain't marital property. And them women are evil." He shook his head. "She seemed as sweet as her name when I met her."
Janie patted his hand. "They all do, baby. They all do."
I asked a few more questions, but he had nothing more to offer. The source of the money was as much a mystery whe
n we left as when we got there.
Chapter Thirty-Six
On our way out, a young blonde woman with huge hair was making pouty faces at Smitty, who looked decidedly uncomfortable. She was wearing a red gingham shirt tucked into a pair of jean shorts that barely covered enough to make it legal for her to walk around in public. The hooker-red heels she was wearing were so high that it seemed walking in them would break the laws of physics.
Janie stiffened as soon as she saw her. I went out on a limb and guessed I was about to meet Candy. She pivoted as we approached and her gaze raked over me then flicked to Janie. She curled her lip.
"Who the hell is she, Janie?" she demanded, cocking a hip and slamming her fist on it.
I groaned. Great. With no effort whatsoever, I found myself square in the crosshairs of the Great American Ignoramous Trashyblonderidium.
Janie opened her mouth to answer, but I held up my hand.
"I don't see where it's any of your business who I am."
I rolled my eyes as she went into the anticipated head wobble. "Oh, any slutty troll who comes to see my husband shore is my business, sugar."
Did she of the bright-blue eyeshadow and cellulite-dimpled thighs just call me a troll?
"Oh, man," Smitty whined when I changed course and headed her direction. Since we'd grown up together, he knew things were about to take a turn for the worse.
He leaned across the desk and tapped blondie on the arm. "If you apologize real fast, she may let you off with a warning."
I was within about twenty feet of her when Hunter stepped out of another door. He must have recognized the look on my face because he made it between us in about three strides, putting out a hand traffic-cop style.
"Hold up. What's the problem here?"
Candy stepped forward and put her hand on his arm and puckered her face into what I'm sure she thought was a sexy pout. "The problem, officer, is that person"—she curled her lip and nodded in my direction—"was about to attack me for no reason, after visiting my husband in jail."
She pushed her boobs up against him and I saw red. I snaked my hand around him before he could stop me and grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked. The greatest thing about teased hair is that it makes it so easy to get a good hold.
He grabbed my wrist and glared at me. "Let her go," he whisper-yelled over her squeal. I opened my hand and pulled it back, satisfied to see a handful of blonde hair wrapped around my fingers.
Candy stood back up and pointed at me. "I wanna press charges."
I narrowed my eyes at her. "If you're gonna press charges, I'm gonna get my hundred-dollars' worth."
We have so many bar fights and squabbles that if everybody who was involved in one was put in jail, they'd have to build one a new building. Instead, if somebody is lame enough to press charges just because they lost, it's a misdemeanor with a hundred-dollar fine.
Hunter had pushed her off him but still had ahold of me.
Smitty cleared his throat. "If I was you, I'd just let it go," he told her as she tried to fix her hair.
She called me a few things that really shouldn't be said in polite company, then switched to Janie. "You think you're so much better than me? My mama's in the process of packin' her stuff as we speak. I been out at that god-forsaken shack I grew up in all day helpin' her. And she's gonna move in, then I'm gonna divorce your loser son and keep his house. That is, if he somehow manages to not go to prison for murder or stealin' that money from his work."
Janie growled and pushed up her sleeves as Candy continued to run her mouth.
Hunter cut her off. "If you say another word, I’m walking away and letting your butt cash all the checks your mouth’s been writing."
"You can't do that. You're the law." She fluffed her hair.
"Exactly. It's my job to see justice served. And in this case, I'm pretty sure turning these two ladies loose on you would be the correct course of action to achieve that."
She gasped, outraged, but something she'd said caught my attention.
I held up a finger and narrowed my eyes. It had barely been an hour since we'd left Walmart. News travels fast, but not when you're out in the sticks where her mama lived. "What do you mean—money that was stolen from Walmart?"
She twirled her hair and rolled her eyes. "Duh. That money they found on him when he got arrested."
I thought back to something Beth said and decided to bluff her. If I couldn't pull that off, then it was time for me to hang it up.
"You know they have cameras in the Walmart offices that run all the time, right? Somebody said they saw you go into the office with Larry to have lunch with him, and they're looking at that video right now." I paused and you could actually see her trying to think her way through it.
Her eyes darted back and forth, then her gaze turned venomous. "So what? You can't prove he didn't tell me to.” She looked at her shiny red acrylic nails, then smirked. “He threatened to beat me if I didn't steal it. He said he'd throw me out of the house. I had to do what he said or me and Mama woulda been homeless."
Her blasé attitude as she tossed accusations around just to see how they sounded made me sick. And besides that, they make no sense. He’d wanted to money in order to keep his mother-in-law out to begin with.
“You can take up the reason you did it with the judge,” Hunter said as he arrested her.
“All that matters to me is that you just confessed to doing it.”
While he was leading her away, poor Smitty blushed at the words she was using. I saw her gather spit in her mouth, and just before she had a chance to launch it at Smitty, I twisted my finger and gave her hair another good yank, this time magically.
She howled and tripped to the side, twisting her ankle in those stupid heels. For good measure, I split the seam in painted-on shorts when she tried to open her stance to balance herself. Poor Smitty didn't know what to think. Hunter lowered his brows at me, but I just smiled, smug.
I interrupted one particularly colorful string of expletives to ask Hunter if he still thought Larry was guilty of murder now that his main evidence was eliminated. Ten minutes later, Larry was a free man, hugging his mama and thanking me over and over.
I didn't feel like I really did anything other than happen to be in the right place at the right time.
"How'd you know what she did?" Hunter asked as Janie and Larry left.
I shrugged. "I didn't really, until she said that about the money from Walmart. Then I remembered that one of the girls who works there—who is no fan of hers, by the way—said Candy comes almost every day to eat lunch with him so he doesn't talk to anyone else."
Hunter shook his head. "The poor guy."
I don't know about that. He was the one who put up with it. "Anyway, after that, it was just a matter of knowing how minds like hers work. Greedy, impulsive, ego-centric. She saw the safe open, knew it was his responsibility, and probably grabbed the cash when he went to the bathroom or something. She figured if she set him up, she’d get the house. It's not brain surgery, just luck."
"But now you have a problem," I said.
"What's that?"
"You just lost your prime murder suspect."
He put his arm around my shoulders. "Maybe. But an innocent man is free, a guilty woman is locked up, a business has their cash back, and I get a chance to apologize to my girl for being such a pompous jerk."
"Well, your girl may have behaved badly, too. I should have trusted you. So, I'll trust you, you won't go all bossy caveman on me, and we'll get along just peachy."
"Deal."
Chapter Thirty Seven
The day felt like it had been about ten years long by the time I made it back to the house. Shelby, bless her little heart, was cooking when I got there. The delicious smell of pancakes and bacon about made me pass out from hunger, and I stopped in the doorway to watch Addy hover over her, bossing her around and telling her to check the pancakes.
Then it occurred to me—Addy was teaching her to make my a
bsolute, all-time favorite meal: her made-from-scratch, buttermilk-blueberry pancakes. Tears welled in my eyes because that was one of the things I missed about the corporeal Addy the most. Except for her hugs, of course.
Justin was sitting at the table immersed in his video game.
"Hey guys. It smells amazing in here!"
Shelby whipped around, almost knocking the batter off. "Dang it, Noe, you scared the daylights out of me."
I went to the stove and looked in the skillet, then glanced in the oven where the bacon was cooking. It was perfect. She scooped the last of the pancake batter onto the griddle, then grabbed an oven mitt to pull out the bacon, and I set the table and poured three big glasses of milk.
While she flipped the pancakes, I popped the blueberry syrup into the microwave and pulled the bacon off the cookie sheet onto a paper-towel-covered plate.
So he wouldn't complain, I cut up a couple for Max and put them in a bowl along with a couple slices of bacon, the drizzled syrup over the whole thing. He actually thanked me when I called him in for dinner, then ruined it by adding that I should be so subservient all the time. Ungrateful donkey.
Belle popped in right as we sat down to eat and started to ask me something. Addy shushed her, hovering as we made our plates and dug in for that first bite.
"Well? How are they?"
I groaned. Those pancakes were something I'd never thought to taste again. "They're perfect. Shel, great job, and thank you. I was starving." I didn't add that, as much as I loved our expanding family, it was nice to spend time with just us. And Justin, of course.
Shelby blushed at the praise. "Addy told me how to do it. All I did was follow directions."
"They're the best pancakes I've ever had," Justin mumbled with his mouth full.
Normally, Addy would have never let that fly, but she did. Belle, on the other hand, gave him an admonishing look. He chased the pancakes with a drink of milk. "Sorry."
We chatted and plowed through the pancakes. When the stack dwindled to three and all that was left of the bacon was crumbs, I leaned back in my chair with my hands on my belly.
