She slams the door, teeth gritted, and pushes down the lock. Damn reporters. Vultures. Or, in this guy’s case, baby vulture. She should have expected they’d show up for the death of a star of Gary’s wattage, but she doesn’t have to like it. And now because of the little twerp, she and Bess smell like gas. But he got her attention with one tidbit. Had Gary really fired Kelly? She can’t imagine what would be bad enough to make him do that. He doted on the kid. Young lady. She couldn’t be more than seventeen. So, woman—barely.
Working through the to-do list she’d created on the drive yesterday, Maggie decides to call Junior for a report on the investigation. She paws through her bag, but she can’t find her phone. She searches the cab. No dice.
The reporter knocks on the window. “Come on, Ms. Killian. I’d still like a word with you. Tell me about the fire, at least.”
She pretends he isn’t there.
She digs deep to remember where she last had her phone. Boyd rang the doorbell. She was reading a text from Hank. The bathroom at Michele’s. That’s where she left it, dammit. That nixes a call to T-Mobile for a new phone number, at least for now.
Without a backward glance at the baby reporter, she drives away. Since she can’t call Junior, she drops in at the sheriff’s department. It’s noon, and he’s eating from a brown bag at his desk.
“Maggie.” His neck flushes. Junior has never quite realized he’s ten years younger than her, or that she’s not interested. He stands, like a pocketknife unfolding. He scratches his crew-cut hair. “Been hoping to talk to you.”
“I got your message. Left my phone at home. Is this okay, me stopping in?”
He wipes his hands on his trousers, then wraps wax paper around his sandwich and seals it in the bag. “Works for me. Come on.”
He leads the way into a small room with a Formica-topped metal table and a few low-budget rolling armchairs. The walls are bare. It’s a step up from an interrogation room. A very small step.
Maggie sits in a chair. It sinks in on one side of her tush. “You guys figured out who vandalized my shop yet?”
“Not yet. Not much to go on. What’s with the sunglasses?”
“The fire at Gary’s last night. It got my eyebrows and eyelashes.”
“I’m sorry. About that and about Mr. Fuller.”
“Were you able to clear Gary before he died?”
“We can’t much rule anyone out yet.”
“Except for me, I hope. I was in Wyoming.”
“I wasn’t saying . . .” He stops.
Maggie prods him. “Do you need anything else from me?”
“Well, your statement. And I was hoping you’ve had more ideas about who might have done this.”
“Honestly, my money’s on drunk teenagers. But did you look at Rickey Sayles? Or one of Gary’s latest bed bunnies? Jenny was the last one I knew by name.”
“Your renter said she hasn’t seen anyone come and go except Michele. And Gary.”
Maggie can’t resist bedeviling him, especially after he ducked her question. She puts a hand over her breastbone. “You think Michele did it?”
He blushes again. “Of course not.”
“Any direct evidence it was Gary?”
“No.”
“Well, I know you’ll do your job to the best of your abilities.”
Junior looks down. Maggie feels guilty, for half a second.
Then Junior says, “What were you doing out at his place last night anyway?”
She’s surprised. He isn’t usually this direct with her. Or nosy. “A little something called none of your beeswax.”
He looks away from her and toward the ceiling. “The fire marshal called. She wants to work together. Thinks there could be crossover between the vandalism of your shop and the fire that killed Gary.”
“I don’t see how.”
“You said Gary was angry at you.”
“So he told me, and everyone else that would listen.”
“But you were going to see him.”
“We’d buried the hatchet.”
Junior sucks in his upper lip and rakes it several times with his teeth. He twists in the seat of his chair like he can’t get comfortable. “That’s not what the emails between you say.”
Maggie snaps up in her chair. “How are you reading our emails?”
“He left his phone in his car. No password.”
“So read our texts.”
“We did. There’s nothing about you going to his place. Or a buried hatchet.”
Maggie’s brain races. What’s happening here? This feels like it’s a suspect interview in a possible arson-murder case. “That’s bullshit, Junior. I can’t remember the last time I sent Gary an email, anyway.”
He recites an email address. “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Appears you emailed him plenty. And they paint a very different picture.”
“In what way?”
“That he dumped you.”
Maggie can’t help it. She laughs. Obviously her attempts to keep the fact that she’s in love with a cowboy in Wyoming who’s marrying another woman have been too successful. “What? He did not.”
“That he slept with other women and you got mad.”
Maggie stops laughing. “You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
“He always slept with other women. I slept with other men.” And a few women, but she doesn’t volunteer that information. “We had an open relationship.”
“The emails also said he wouldn’t take you back, and you were coming over to make sure he understood you weren’t taking no for an answer.”
Maggie freezes. She never sent any such thing. None of them. Is Junior lying? Or is someone setting her up? But who? And how? One thing is for sure. She can’t continue this conversation without knowing more, and not without her lawyer. She’d talked to the cops once before without Michele, in Wyoming. She’d learned her lesson and good.
Her chair rolls back and smashes into the wall as she gets up. “I came here to talk about vandalism at the Coop, in good faith. Not cool, Junior. We’re done here.”
“What’s that smell?”
“What smell?”
“It’s like gasoline or something.”
“It is gasoline. Leftover from yesterday when I committed arson.” She slits her eyes at him. “As if. I got gas in my truck on the way here, and I spilled some on myself, not that it’s any of your business.”
“Okay. What about your statement?”
“Kiss my ass. There’s your statement.” She rushes out, angry and dazed. She needs to call Michele. No phone. Dammit!
In her truck, she drums her fingers on the steering wheel. What to do, what to do? Think, think, think. Her brain spins like a pinwheel. She puts her hand out as if to stop it, but it speeds up. She imagines little plastic pinwheel fins hitting her fingers.
Fine. She can’t fix everything at once. Or anything at all. After the last week and especially after Gary’s death last night, she’s a mess. She needs . . . What does she need? What will make her better? The answer is usually booze and sex at times like these. But the image in her mind is different, sudden, and strong. A little wooden farmhouse. Her own queen-size four-poster bed. Coffee percolating on her gas stove. Front Porch Pickin’, a simultaneously melancholy and joyful painting of a guitarist by her birth mother, Gidget, hanging over the fireplace mantel.
She needs home. She steers Bess toward her house. After. I’ll consult Michele after.
When she pulls into the small parking lot, her American flag is waving in the breeze from its pole on the front porch. There’s a sign over the door: FLOWN THE COOP. The outside of the house is a kaleidoscope pattern of painted boards, weathered so the palette is muted. Rustic impressionism. Her heart swells. The first time she saw this place, her hopes had been low. So much dirt, grime, and trash. She’d gone treasure hunting in the depths of the barn. Found the rainbow of reclaimed boards stacked against a back wall. In a brilli
ant flash, she’d seen what they could become. She set to work. Bringing the vision to life had given her hope and the strength for the long, hard excavation and restoration project that turned into a new life.
A woman appears, walking down the flagstone path around the side of the Coop. Even from fifteen yards away, Maggie can see she’s wearing heavy makeup, large sunglasses, a voluminous sundress and a floppy hat. Very American-tourist-goes-to-the-beach. It seems like camouflage, but Maggie’s not one to point fingers at the moment. The woman is smoking a cigarette, her eyes cast down. She doesn’t look up, like she’s unaware of Bess, unaware of Maggie. Maggie slams the truck door and hurries to meet her. That brings the woman’s head up. She reverses course.
Maggie chases after her, passing a busy hummingbird feeder and a sign that reads PRIVATE RESIDENCE. “Wait.”
The woman speeds up.
“Leslie?” she calls. She isn’t even sure it’s her renter. Leslie checked in after Maggie left for Wyoming, so they hadn’t met.
The woman pauses with her hand on the doorknob of the other house. Maggie’s home. The one unseen from the road, only accessible from behind the store. “What do you want?”
“Hi. I’m Maggie Killian. The owner. Are you Leslie?” She closes the gap between them.
She nods. “I know who you are.” Her face and startlingly blue eyes have a flat expression that matches her voice. Under the pancake makeup, Maggie thinks she sees a scar on her lip and under her eye, but she’s still beautiful, if icy.
“I’m sorry.” She points at the cigarette. “No smoking at my place.”
Leslie drops her cigarette and crushes it under her sandal.
“Great. Well, I just got back in town. I was checking to see when you’re leaving. It’s today, right?”
“I have two more nights.”
Maggie frowns. She wishes she had the contract with her. She could have sworn that it ended today. But so much has happened in the last week, so many mind-stressing things. She doesn’t trust her brain. “All right, then. I’ll just drop my trailer out back and check on some things in my shop. Sorry for all the traffic in and out after it got vandalized.”
“You should warn people if you’re at a risk for crime.” She talks like an old woman, but it doesn’t look like she’s any older than Maggie is.
“Well, I’m not. Or I haven’t been, anyway. But again, I’m sorry about that. Is everything okay otherwise?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be in and out some. Let me know if you need anything.”
Leslie nods and goes in the house.
“Wait. Your cigarette butt.”
Leslie shoots her a look. “I’ll get it later.” The door closes.
Maggie stares after her, then picks up the butt, pinching it in the middle, her face puckering with disgust. Something about Leslie that she can’t pinpoint seems familiar—Voice? Eyes? Shape and gait?—and at the same time completely foreign. Leslie sure had a lot more personality on the phone and via email. Well, all the deputies and insurance people probably had her miffed.
Maggie pulls her trailer to the back of the property and unhitches it in front of the storage barn. Then she returns to her beloved store, steeling herself for what she’ll find. When she flips on the lights, the devastation takes her breath away. Everything on the shelves and counters has been swept to the floor. Broken glass is everywhere. Items on the wall hang askew. Others lie smashed on the floor. Her favorite installation piece, a photo booth she made of salvaged doors, is splintered and collapsed. A butcher-block table rescued from an old industrial application is covered in red paint. She forces herself to walk all the way in and examine every item. Almost everything will require at least minor repair, and some things will never be the same.
A little more mess sure won’t make it worse. She returns to the trailer and spends the next half hour unloading her Wyoming haul into the barn. She hears a car pull up in front of the Coop but ignores it until the sound of footsteps behind her demand her attention. When she turns to see who it is, she gets a nasty surprise. It’s her customer-turned-competitor, a tiny slip of a man, with more hair in his mustache than on his head.
Before he can speak, she says, “You’ve got some nerve showing up here, Rickey Sayles.”
“I heard you had some trouble.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“You’re a sister in arms. I came to offer my help.”
Maggie huffs. “I don’t need any more help from you.”
“I’d be happy to renew my offer to buy the Coop.”
Maggie gets in his personal space, finger stabbing at his chest, but not touching. “Get off my property now. I’ve told law enforcement about the threats you’re making around town. I’ve got my eye on you, Sayles.”
Sayles doesn’t flinch or back away. He doesn’t even blink. “My offer isn’t going up, Maggie.”
“You can put that offer where the sun don’t shine.”
Looking like a librarian disappointed in a loud patron, he shakes his head. “You know where to find me, then.”
“Oh yes. I most certainly do.” Maggie points toward the parking area.
Sayles disappears the way he came.
Maggie finishes unloading the trailer, fuming and muttering. She brushes dust off her hands, then locks up both buildings and leaves.
She has no idea how she’s going to be ready for antique week, but she will be ready, and she’s not selling out, to Rickey Sayles or anyone else. Starting tomorrow, that has to be her sole focus, round the clock. Heartbreak over Hank and grief about Gary won’t bring them back. Worry about wrong-minded law enforcement won’t pay the bills.
And there’s no way insurance will begin to cover all she’s about to lose if she misses her biggest sales opportunity of the year.
Eight
Maggie drives too fast on her way back to Michele’s. Without the trailer, Bess feels like a horse unhitched from a wagon. Maggie just wants to get away from the mess at the store, the smarmy Rickey Sayles, and the weird vibe from Leslie. The farther she gets from her house, the more convinced she is that Leslie was supposed to have checked out that morning. She would never have left her house rented this close to the antique show. She had always planned to come back from Wyoming and gear up for it.
Suddenly, she’s sure Leslie is lying. Absolutely, positively sure. Maggie doesn’t want to wait to confront her. She wants her house back. She wheels the truck around, barely hitting the brakes as she U-turns. She pushes Bess as fast as she can go through the gravel on the curves. Steering the truck in the center of the road, she makes the last turn before her house and nearly plows into another car head-on.
She slams on the brakes, steering to the right, grateful she left the trailer by the barn and doesn’t have to worry about whether it will jackknife or flip. To her surprise, the sedan stops, too. The driver, a man about her mother’s age, leaps out of the silver car and runs to the passenger door of her truck. Maggie shoves her hand into her bag. It comes out with her pepper spray, which she holds out of sight in her lap. At her door, the man leans over, panting.
Maggie cracks the window. “Are you okay? Sorry if I scared you.”
“Maggie.” He stands up, leveling startling watery green eyes on her. His thin white comb-over has flopped to the wrong side and hangs in a long, limp arc.
It’s been a few years since she’s seen him, but she knows him. Gary’s manager. “Tom.” Tom Clarke. Late of Nashville, but unable to completely hide the Georgia in his voice. “What are you doing out here?”
“Looking for you. Can we talk?”
Maggie feels nervous butterflies in her gut. Something is way off about him. She and Tom aren’t exactly buddies. He’s one of the few people in the world that knew about her and Gary, back when, other than their families and a very few friends. They’ve dined together and watched Gary perform together, but they’ve also argued over what Tom called her unhealthy influence on Gary. She’d backed Gary when he refused t
o move to Nashville and turned down songs better suited for Luke Bryan. That wasn’t unhealthy. It was just less lucrative than what Tom had in mind for Gary.
But now his cash cow is dead. The man before her seems desperate. Then it hits her. Gary was going to kick Tom to the curb. He’d mentioned thievery and other clients. Had he gone through with it? She grips the pepper spray tighter. “What’s going on, Tom?”
“Not here.”
“If you want to talk to me, then talk. You’re sounding like a crazy person.”
“I don’t know who else to talk to. Gary is dead. And I’m afraid people are going to think I killed him. Did he say anything to you about me before he died?”
Um, yeah. But she ignores his question. “Why would they think you killed him?”
He looks around, his eyes wild. “Because I was supposed to meet with him yesterday.”
“About what?”
“That’s not what’s important. What matters is I didn’t show up. I was late. By the time I got there, he was long gone.”
“I’m not the one to tell. You need to go to the authorities.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
He shakes his head violently.
“Did you kill him, Tom?” Maggie holds on to her pepper spray for dear life.
“I’m a lot of things, Maggie, but I’m not a killer.”
“Yes.” She pokes the bear. “You’re greedy, a climber, and a thief, and we both know Gary knew it.”
He stares at her for a moment. “I shouldn’t have believed you would understand.” He runs back across the road toward his car.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
But he doesn’t answer, just wrenches his door open and sprays a rooster tail of gravel as he guns his sedan in the direction of the highway.
Nine
At the Coop, Maggie parks Bess inches behind the bumper of the silver Taurus she assumes is Leslie’s car. She pauses, hands trembling. What the hell had that been about with Tom? He’d scared her. She knows she has to tell the authorities—will any of them believe her? But she’s here now to deal with Leslie. The Tom issue can wait a few more minutes. She takes three deep, calming breaths, then gets out of the truck.
Maggie Box Set Page 33
