by Hillary Avis
I needed to tell Ruth what had happened. And more importantly, I needed to keep those kids away from the scene so they didn’t see their mom being led away in handcuffs.
I squeezed past the crowd of rubberneckers, weaved my way through the line of cars patiently waiting to exit the lower lot, and found Ruth right where I left her, surrounded by two sleeping kids and the remains of our picnic in the middle of the nearly vacant field. Though most people had already left the area, empty water bottles, paper American flags, and candy wrappers littered the grass. So much for my swelling feelings of affection for my small town.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” Ruth burst out. “I thought you and Tambra caught a flight to Vegas and left me here alone.”
I shook my head and began silently gathering all the picnic gear up, tiptoeing around Ollie’s prone form and stepping delicately over Dylan’s legs so I didn’t jostle them awake. “This is going to sound crazy, so please don’t freak out and wake up the babies. Tambra wants you to keep the kids overnight.”
Ruth wrinkled her nose, tipping her head to the side. “Why would I freak out about babysitting? Don’t get me wrong—it’s not my favorite thing ever. But I don’t mind watching them now and then.”
I took a deep breath. “Well, the reason she needs a sitter is that she just got arrested for killing McKenzie Masters.”
Ruth gasped and then sat there for a few seconds staring at me, her mouth opening and closing like elevator doors do when someone’s standing on the gap. Open, close, open, close, as she tried to formulate a response.
“No need to ask questions; I don’t have any answers,” I said. “I’m going to take the picnic stuff to your car and then we can haul these kids.”
Ruth nodded mutely. By the time I got back from her car for the second time, she’d wrapped her head around what I’d said.
“McKenzie Masters?” She shook her head disbelievingly as I lifted Dylan off her lap as gingerly as I could. He murmured and nestled into my shoulder. Ruth groaned quietly as she tried to heave Ollie up. “There’s no way I can carry this kid.”
“Here, let me try.” I shifted Dylan so she could take him from me and eyed Ollie’s dozing form. I might not be an Olympic athlete, but after nine months of farming, I could haul fifty-pound bags of feed and bales of straw all day long. Ollie had fifteen pounds on that figure, but if I put my back into it...
OK, I peed a little. But I did get the kid slung over my shoulder. Ruth sighed as she looked down at the picnic blanket. There was no way either of us could swoop it up.
“I’ll come back for it once we get the kids in the car,” I promised. We staggered under our sweetly dreaming burdens all the way to Ruth’s car. On the way, it was hard not to watch what was going on in the upper parking lot. By now, more sheriff’s deputies had arrived and were doing crowd control, waving the remaining onlookers back to their vehicles and directing traffic out to the street. I couldn’t see Tambra’s Prius from here, but I could see an officer unrolling a spool of crime scene tape and roping off the area around it.
“I wish I had booster seats,” Ruth said as we got the kids settled in the backseat of her car and buckled them in. We closed the car doors. Across the roof of the car, she asked me, “Could you tell what happened?”
I shook my head. “Tambra said something about McKenzie being shot. I definitely saw blood. And Eli put Tambra in handcuffs.”
“He can’t believe that she would do something like that to one of her own girls!”
“Well, he said she was a material witness—I guess because McKenzie was in the back of her car. She probably just left it unlocked.”
“She always locks her car.” Ruth’s forehead settled into worried furrows as she bit her lip thoughtfully. “All the kids’ baseball gear got stolen out of the back last year, so she’s obsessive about it.”
“I’m sure there’s a simple explanation,” I said, trying to sound jovial and reassuring. “I’m positive Eli will get it all sorted out in a matter of hours. Take the kids home so they can have a sleepover with Auntie Ruth, and I betting Tambra will be on time for her shift tomorrow.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ruth said.
I hoped so, too. I watched Ruth’s taillights for a few minutes as she inched out of the parking lot behind the long line of cars, and then I headed up the ramp to where my own car was parked. To my dismay, my Porsche was inside the perimeter of the crime scene tape. A swarm of police activity nearly blocked it from view.
I ignored the deputy waving me back and walked all the way to the tape, pointing at my car. “Um. That’s mine. Can I...?”
“This is a crime scene, ma’am.” The officer ma’aming me was so young, I doubted he could grow a full beard. Annoyance prickled under my skin at his condescending tone.
“I get it, I really do. But I need to drive home,” I explained. “No crimes were committed in my car. I was just unlucky in my choice of parking spot. You can’t hold it hostage.”
“You’ll be notified when your vehicle has been cleared,” the officer said, turning his back on me.
Motherclucker. Here I was, stuck in town without a car, one friend in jail and the other one on kid duty. Even Eli was too busy booking Tambra into lockup downtown to give me a ride.
“How am I supposed to get home?” I snapped at nobody in particular.
The young deputy turned around, frowning. “Friends or family, ma’am. That’s not our problem.”
“It’s problem you created, though!” I clenched my jaw as I struggled to keep my temper. “I want to speak to your supervisor.”
“Feel free to file a complaint with Captain Ramirez down at the Honeytree office,” the downy-lipped deputy said, smirking as he surveyed me from the top of my silver-and-blonde ponytail to the hem of my culottes.
He clearly knew who I was and my connection to Eli. Was anything private anymore? I whirled around and started toward the street, then remembered I’d left Ruth’s picnic blanket on the field. I retrieved it and, with the blanket wrapped around my shoulders against the evening chill, began the long walk home along the highway to Lucky Cluck Farm.
Home.
Boots clucked disapprovingly at me from her perch on the back of the recliner when I staggered in the door at well after midnight, my feet a mess of blisters from my cute sandals rubbing my heels and my heart thudding. I’d made the last half-mile on adrenaline alone. There’s nothing scarier than walking on a narrow highway shoulder on the second-highest drunk driving night of the year, let alone when you’ve just left a murder scene.
But I couldn’t just flop on the sofa and call it a night. I switched out my sandals for barn shoes and dragged myself out to the coop to close it up for the night. The sight of all my girls—and my magnificent rooster, Alarm Clock—lined up peacefully on the roosts helped calm my nerves a bit. I closed up the pop door and went back to swap out Boots’s calico diaper for a clean one and swept up the feed she’d scattered around her dish in the bathroom. Then I let her settle back to sleep in an old dresser drawer next to my bed and collapsed in my culottes.
Chapter 4
July 5, Day 2, Tuesday
I woke in the morning to the sound of Alarm Clock’s crow and moaned in pain. Between my scorched skin, tortured feet, and sore muscles in places I didn’t even know I had, I was a mess. I swallowed two Advil before I even made coffee. Then, while it was perking, I threw on a sweatshirt and, Boots hopping on my heels, went out to let the chickens into the orchard.
On the way, I nearly tripped over a pint basket of blueberries that was sitting on my doormat. I grinned and glanced up the hill toward Eli’s farmhouse. He was nowhere to be seen, but I knew he’d left them—he was the only person with a blueberry farm in the Flats. But I also knew that he’d never admit to it.
This was kind of our thing, a game we’d played when we dated back in high school. He had the combination to my locker, and he’d leave little surprises inside it for me. A pack of Doublemint gum, an anonymou
s note, a mixtape he’d recorded off the radio. He always pretended he hadn’t done it, that it was some secret admirer or bit of magic that had made the thing appear in my locker, and I never caught him. But I knew it was him.
I’d forgotten all about it until Eli moved in a month ago, and stuff began appearing on my porch. A pint of blueberries here, a bunch of wildflowers there, a funny newspaper clipping on a Sunday morning. Neither he nor I mentioned it, but just like in high school, I knew it was him. I shooed Boots away from the berries and ducked inside to put them in the fridge, then did my chicken chores despite my screamingly sore muscles. Then I drank my coffee while I washed eggs, got dressed in town clothes that covered up as much of my sunburn as possible, and settled Boots in the bathroom with some treats. After that, I drove to Honeytree to check on my Porsche.
Or I tried to, anyway. But when I went to start the Suburban, the key just clicked in the ignition. The engine didn’t even crank.
Dead battery. Motherclucker.
Of course this had to happen on the one day that my second car was stuck inside the perimeter of a crime scene. Now I needed a ride to town. Of course, Eli wasn’t home—he likely dropped off the blueberries on his way back to work. Ruth had the boys still; Tambra was in lockup. I really needed to make a few more friends, given the number of tight spots I was finding myself in lately!
Well, there was always the tractor. I could theoretically drive it into town. I’d probably make the front page of the local paper when I got there, waving from my tractor with a mile-long line of cars behind me. It’d be like the Fourth of July parade, bumpkin version, starring me as the not-so-beauty queen.
Ugh. I didn’t love the idea of so much attention, but I might have to bite the bullet—poor choice of words given what happened to the real Miss Honeytree—and do it. I trudged toward the barn, wondering whether I should fashion myself a chicken-wire tiara to really send the message home that indeed, I am the kind of crazy chicken lady who rides a tractor into town.
Or...maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe I could use the tractor another way.
I pulled out my phone and did a quick search on “can you jumpstart a car with a tractor.” After finding a million results on how to jumpstart a tractor with a car, I finally found one about how to do it in the opposite direction written by some hayseed who I might have to hunt down and propose marriage to. I know I’d been saying no more husbands, but whoever had the initiative to give this harebrained idea a try and then post about it on the internet was the new love of my life.
A half-hour of fiddling and praying later and my Suburban was running. Grudgingly, but running. I sputtered into town with my fingers crossed on the wheel, hardly daring to come to a complete stop at the stop signs on the way to the high school for fear that she’d quit on me.
To my chagrin, the parking lot was now closed off with orange traffic barriers, and the state police were swarming the area. I couldn’t even see the Porsche in the upper lot because it was blocked by county vans. It didn’t seem likely that they were going to release the scene today. All I could think as I idled at the corner was that one, at least it wasn’t raining, and two, they better not be scratching up my beautiful baby.
The Suburban coughed politely to remind me that she didn’t appreciate my priorities. I chuckled and patted the steering wheel. “I feel you. You and I aren’t the beauty queens around here. We’ve got some junk in the ol’ trunk. But we can get a lot more done, too.”
She shuddered, as if to let me know she didn’t plan on getting anything done today except a visit to the mechanic.
I sighed. “Fine.” With a regretful glance at the upper parking lot, I turned the car around and coaxed her back out of town. We made it through the Curves and headed down the highway past my farm to Duma, where the only auto shop in the area was perched by the side of the road.
Housed in a former fire station, Edison & Sons was run by a man named Gary Edison, who was about a decade older than me and had the gray hair to prove it. Contrary to the name of his shop, he did not have sons. He’d picked the name before he had children, hoping, I guess, that he’d have boys who’d want to share in the family business. But instead, he had two daughters who were uninterested in tinkering with cars and had left the area as soon as they could, much as I had. Edison & Sons was more like Edison & Nones.
Gary waved to me as I pulled the Suburban in front of the office. He motioned for me to open the window and I cranked it down a crack.
“What’s cookin’, Good Lookin’?” he asked, his yellow Hawaiian shirt so loud that it hurt my eyes.
I squinted at him. “I think I need a new battery. The old girl didn’t want to turn over this morning.”
“Oh yeah?” He patted the hood. “Pull her around. We’ll see if Terry can squeeze you in.”
The brick building that housed Edison & Sons had two large firetruck bays, one on either side of a central office. One side was Gary’s personal shop, where he souped-up old VW Beetles to race out in the desert, listened to Jimmy Buffett, and shot the breeze with old timers. The other side was the domain of Terry Turnwright, Gary’s one and only employee—and the one and only person who fixed cars around here.
I cajoled the Suburban to roll the last fifteen yards to Terry’s side of the shop, where a huge rolling door marked “Bay 1” was wide open. Terry, a linebacker of a guy with thinning yellow hair and a matching yellow mustache, gave me a terse nod when I got out.
“Battery trouble,” I said, raising my voice above the country music radio that blared from a speaker balanced on top of his grubby red tool chest. Behind him, I could dimly see a wall lined with pictures of pretty girls, cars, and pretty girls on cars.
“Leave the keys in ’er.” Terry nodded at the little blue Datsun truck that was up on his hoist. “Just finishing up an oil change and then I’ll get right to it. You can wait inside.”
I found a seat in the tiny, Tiki-themed waiting area next to Gary’s cluttered desk. The place smelled like hand cleaner and scorched coffee and was filled with the cacophony of two radios playing different genres of music, one from each side of the shop. I plugged one ear to reduce the chaos and studied the titles on a leaning bookshelf of auto repair manuals to pass the time, looking for the Porsche one. They were sort of arranged alphabetically by car make, but the Prius manual was out of place, in front of the Porsche 911 manual instead of with the other Toyota manuals where it belonged. I slid it out of the bookshelf to move it to the right place and was jarred by the picture on the cover—a green Prius, just like Tambra’s.
The Caribbean beats from the north side of the shop grew louder as Gary opened the door from that side to check on me. He spotted me with the manual in my hands. “Thinking about going electric? Let me give you some advice—don’t.”
“Oh, no—I was just putting this back in the right place.” I smiled at him and slid the manual in next to the Rav4 one.
“Phew,” Gary said good-naturedly, plopping down in the seat next to me. “I always say, ‘Do you want a car, or do you want a computer?’ Because these new cars—they’re not even cars. You might as well be driving an iPad. And when’s the last time you fixed your iPad? That’s right, you can’t. You gotta take it to the Einstein Lab or what-have-you. You want some coffee?”
I eyed the sputtering percolator that was covered in a pastiche of greasy fingerprints and shook my head. Gary stood, sniffed the inside of a mug, then poured himself a steaming serving of something that looked more like motor oil than coffee. He leaned against the shelf of manuals, which tilted slightly to the right under his weight. I scooted my chair away in case the whole thing came tumbling down, but Gary was on such a roll, he didn’t seem to notice.
“We had a Prius in here last week, acting all crazy. Lights flickering, display going out, all kinds of strange problems. Turned out it was the automatic trunk latch malfunctioning. It’d just randomly pop open and set off this cascade of electrical problems. I mean, the trunk has one job, right? To stay s
hut when you close it. Imagine if that back of your rig just opened when it felt like it. Terrible, right?”
I nodded, imagining a sack of chicken feed tumbling out of my Suburban at fifty-five miles per hour.
“A total disaster.” Gary shook his head and then took a careful slurp of his hot coffee. “I mean, anyone could open it at any time. Goodbye, groceries. And hello, random strangers throwing trash in the back of your car.”
A lightning bolt of adrenaline shot through me, stiffening me in my chair. A broken trunk latch would explain how a dead body got into the back of Tambra’s car, even if she’d locked it. I tried to keep my voice calm. “That Prius with the trunk problem. That wouldn’t have been Tambra O’Connor’s car, would it?”
Gary nodded. “Yup. How’d you guess? Not many EVs around here, I suppose. Terry was racking his brain to figure out how to fix the darn thing.”
I swallowed. “Did he? Fix it, I mean.”
Gary shook his head. “Had to order a part. Are you a friend of hers? She was supposed to bring it in today for the fix, but no-show, and she’s not answering the number she gave me.”
“She’s a little held up this morning.” That was putting it mildly. I hoped that when I went to Eli with this new trunk latch information, he’d be able to release Tambra right away, but I was pretty sure the cops would hang onto Prius for a while, though. Like, until they figured out who really killed McKenzie. “I doubt she’ll bring it in today.”
“Lucky you. Looks like you nabbed her place in line.” Gary winked at me and stuck his head through the swinging door to Terry’s side of the shop. “How much longer?” he yelled.
While he waited for Terry’s answer, I gathered my thoughts. This trunk thing should completely exonerate Tambra—she had no motive to kill one of her own pageant girls, she barely had opportunity, and she certainly didn’t have a gun at a picnic with her kids. The only thing that tied her to McKenzie’s murder was the body in her car, and now I had a totally reasonable explanation for how she ended up there: The trunk opened on its own, and the killer took advantage of a convenient hiding spot.
