Ms. Calculation

by Danica Winters

  “No girlfriend. That’s good.” She said the word as if she wasn’t sure if it really was a good or bad thing. “But why...”

  “I get it. I should have just said it was the medical examiner,” he said, trying to stop the hatchet from falling before he had a chance to escape its blade. “Teasing you was a bad idea.”

  The brightness in her eyes once again disappeared.

  “Yeah, it was,” she said, standing up and making the kitchen stool squeak against the floor. “Look, let’s just go. We got a much-needed piece of the puzzle. I knew she wouldn’t hurt herself. But now we need to find out who was behind her death.”

  He was thankful that she had changed the subject, but with the change he could also feel the emotional distance between them shift and widen.

  “Let’s go to the library,” she continued. “Let’s look more into the email and see if they have anything that could point us in the direction of who wrote it.”

  The library was a great next step, especially when she had been teasing him in the shower.

  “About what happened in there—” He again motioned toward the bathroom, but she turned around and stopped him with a wave of her hand.

  “What happened back there... It was great. I wanted it. You wanted it. But it can’t be. Bianca and this investigation need to come first. I don’t have the emotional space to have anything more in my life.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she interrupted him. “Do you remember when you once told me a dead-end road only needs to be driven once? Well, we both know this thing between us is a dead end. Let’s just stop it before we have the chance to make the same mistake twice. Let’s save us both the heartbreak.”

  * * *

  GWEN LOOKED OUT the car window as they made their way down Main Street past the late-1800s brick buildings that lined both sides. The library was just up the road, a couple of storefronts down from Monica Poe’s antiques shop, Secret Secondhand. It hadn’t been a long car ride, but the silence between Gwen and Wyatt had made it seem like a marathon drive.

  She hadn’t meant to confront him about the phone call when he’d said it was a woman—she wasn’t unhinged or possessive. He could talk to whomever, whenever he wanted. She held no claim, and what claim she had once had she’d willingly given up a long time ago.

  Then again, maybe if she played her cards right she could get back in his good graces—but being jealous wasn’t a good start.

  Yet he had ended their time so abruptly and left the bathroom, and then the way he had teased her... He had made it seem like something more than just the medical examiner. So what else was she supposed to think? Men only acted like that when they were trying to hide something. That was something she knew all too much about, thanks to a handful of relationships that always ended with secrets and lies—not that she had really cared. If anything, she had always been called cold thanks to her general state of indifference toward men and the choices they made—at least men who weren’t Wyatt.

  Was it possible that she didn’t care about what other men did because the only man she really wanted was Wyatt?

  She glanced over at him as he stared out at the road. He had on a pair of aviators that perfectly accented his uniform. Everything about him was all business—and was one heck of a turn-on.

  Yet she’d made her choice and pushed him away. It was just so much easier not to care—emotions were messy and she already had enough of that kind of thing on her hands. If she opened herself up, and listened to the desires that whispered through her, she would only get hurt. Her life and her heart had already been shattered with Bianca’s death—if he hurt her, there would be nothing left.

  He pulled the squad car into a parking spot. Coming around to her side, he opened the door without a word and waited for her to step out.

  “Thanks,” she said as he closed the door behind her.

  He grumbled something unintelligible as he turned away and made his way up to the front doors of the library. She followed behind him, slowly picking her way through patches of ice in an attempt to give him his space.

  If this was what it was going to be like, working with him and his hurt ego, she wasn’t sure it was something she could handle. Then again, she didn’t have any other options. He was the only one investigating her sister’s death. Because Mystery was so small, even though it was now a homicide investigation, there was no one else to turn to and no one else who could have possibly cared as much as he did.

  He would just have to get over it. They had both made the mistake of falling into each other’s arms. Sure, she had been the one to push it forward, but it had been done in a moment of weakness. All she had wanted was to feel again. It had been spontaneous and poorly thought out. There were so many reasons they shouldn’t be anything more than friends—or rather, colleagues. Right now, they needed to concentrate on the investigation. Then maybe they could try again, or at least work on creating a friendship.

  He opened the front door and waited for her to catch up. Even slightly annoyed with him, and trying to ignore her feelings, she couldn’t help appreciating the fact that, regardless of his mood or the events of the day, he was always a gentleman. It was a lost art, and something she had assumed would have been taken from him after his days in the city. Yet, if anything, he was even more of a gentleman than she had remembered.

  She wished she could just ask him all the questions she had, but she couldn’t—not now. There was no question of whether or not she liked him, everyone who knew Wyatt as anything more than a sheriff’s deputy liked him. He was a good man. A man who was built on strong morals and principles, a man’s man—actually, he checked every box on the husband-material list.

  She pushed the thought from her mind as she glanced up into his face, but he looked away as she moved past him and into the library. She couldn’t think about him like this, there was no point to it. She needed to focus. She needed to find justice for Bianca—not a bedroom partner.

  As the library’s door slid shut behind them, the scent of old books wafted toward her. She loved that smell—the odor of wood pulp, ink, glue and dreams of both authors and readers. This one small building, this little brick outcrop in a town of shadowy secrets, had always been her mecca.

  They made their way to the front desk, where the librarian was nose-deep in a book. She didn’t look up until Wyatt cleared his throat.

  The woman jerked, glancing up from behind her reading glasses. “Oh, hi, sorry,” she said, lifting the book like it was more than enough of an excuse for her obliviousness.

  “Completely understand, Frannie,” Wyatt said, with an appreciative nod to her love of reading.

  Dang it. Did the man have to be perfect all the time? Didn’t he know that Gwen was trying to find reasons not to like him?

  “I didn’t see you standing there, Wyatt,” Frannie said with a smile as she gave them both an acknowledging tip of the head. “‘You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.’”

  “C. S. Lewis quote?” Gwen asked.

  Frannie’s smile widened. “A fellow bibliophile, I love it. I can’t say that I’ve ever been able to understand why more people don’t love books.” The librarian slipped a bookmark between the pages and laid the book on the counter.

  “They’re worlds where we can escape. We can live a thousand lives in the pages, or we can live merely the one we are given—I’ll take a thousand lives every time,” Wyatt said with a light chuckle.

  Gwen could have sworn she had seen Frannie swoon.

  “I...uh... Yes.” The woman just stopped short of fanning herself. “Was there something I could help you two with?”

  Gwen had seen Frannie at least a hundred times over the last few years, when Gwen would come to escape the confines of the ranch and find a book that could get her mind off whichever of her mother’s antic
s she had been dealing with, but she’d never seen Frannie smile the way she did when she looked up at Wyatt.

  “Actually, we were alerted to the fact that one of your computers may have been used in a crime. Would you mind if we asked you a few questions?” Wyatt leaned against the counter, taking a passive stance instead of his normal straight, shoulders back, no-nonsense officer stance. It was like he was trying to put the woman at ease, but Frannie kept looking back and forth between Gwen and Wyatt, so much so that Gwen felt out of place.

  “If you don’t mind,” Gwen said, taking the woman’s hint, “I’ll excuse myself and go check out the computer bank. Is that okay?”

  The woman nodded, almost a bit too fervently. “Help yourself. You know where the computers are, Gwen.”

  It came as a bit of a shock that the woman knew her name—it was certainly the first time that she had ever bothered to use it. Did her sudden friendliness have something to do with the fact that handsome Wyatt was there, or was it due to the fact that he was there in an official capacity as a deputy?

  It was funny, but over the last day she had almost forgotten what and who Wyatt was to everyone else. He wasn’t the silly boy from high school who had loved nothing more than AC/DC and laying in the back of his pickup on hot summer nights. No. To others he was the voice of authority, the man who came to their rescue in their moments of terror. He was their hero.

  What would it have been like if she’d allowed him to be hers?

  Ha. No. She could save herself.

  The bank of computers was down a long set of stairs that creaked as she followed them into the belly of the building. The air grew a bit dank and earthy as she made her way into the basement. There was something about the smell that always made the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention. She was too old to be afraid of a smell, but there was just something about it that made it seem dangerous and foreboding.

  She was tough, but for a moment she considered turning around and moving back up into the main library and the safety of the book stacks.

  Whatever. Whoever had sent Bianca the threatening emails from this room wasn’t still there waiting for her like some kind of bogeyman. They were definitely a monster, but it was possible they weren’t responsible for killing Bianca. Maybe her sister had been a victim of merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or not.

  She sighed. She wished they had more to work with. Right now it just seemed like there were so many more questions than answers, and she didn’t see it changing at any point in the near future.

  The computer lab was full of computers from the 1990s, complete with heavy-looking monitors and keyboards so ignored that several of them were thick with dust and she couldn’t see their letters. The place was warm from the heat put off by the ancient machines and it hummed as the beasts struggled in what she was sure was their death throes.

  There were only four computers up and running and, for a moment, she wondered which one the possible murderer had sat at. What had they had been thinking when they’d written Bianca the threat? Had they really meant to follow through with their plan? Was this the first time they’d threatened someone? Was it even the first time they had threatened her sister?

  The room was nearly empty, except for the hanging industrial lights that buzzed as they looked down on her and the six desks that were lined against the dark, nearly black walls. She walked around the room, looking for anything that could possibly point in their suspect’s direction, but there were no loose papers or notes scratched into the wooden desks.

  The place was industrial. Whoever came down here, into what was a modern-day dungeon, had to have had a plan to kill her sister.

  There was the sound of footsteps and the creak of the stairs. The eerie sound made her heart race and she looked up. Thankfully, it was just Wyatt.

  “Did you find anything?” he asked as he walked into the hot room.

  She shook her head. “What did the librarian know?”

  Other than that she wanted to be in your pants? She snorted at the thought.

  “What?” he asked, frowning.

  “Oh, nothing. What did she tell you?”

  He continued to stare at her like he was trying to read her, but she turned away, pretending to look around one of the desks. Just like the keyboards, it was covered in a thick layer of dust.

  “She said there have been a lot of people in and out of the library lately, but she couldn’t recall anyone asking to use the computers or seeing anyone come down here in the last few weeks.”

  The staircase that led to the basement was out of view of the librarian’s desk and, given the way she was buried in a book when they’d arrived, it didn’t come as a surprise that the woman wouldn’t have noticed someone coming or going from the depths. But Gwen was disappointed.

  “What are we going to do, Wyatt?”

  “It wasn’t a completely wasted trip,” Wyatt said as he ran his finger over one of the desks. He wiped the dirt from his finger on the leg of his pants, leaving a streak. “According to Frannie, she ran into Monica Poe when she was opening up her store this morning.”

  “And?”

  “She was sporting a fresh black eye.” He looked at Gwen with a raise of the brow. “Did you slug her when you were at her house?”

  “What?” she asked, completely affronted by the question. “What are you talking about?”

  “So you didn’t hit her?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not. Did she say I did?”

  She and William’s wife had barely spoken to each other before she’d left. And Monica most certainly hadn’t had a black eye when Gwen left. If anything, they’d been more than cordial with each other.

  Wyatt shook his head. “I was just wondering, why exactly were you up at the Poes’ this morning? Did it have something to do with Monica? Or did it have something to do with William?”

  Her stomach clenched. “I don’t know what you’re implying, Wyatt.”

  He glanced down at his pants and, noticing the streak of dirt he’d left, dusted it off. “I’m not implying anything, Gwen. You may or may not know this, but William Poe has a bit of a reputation when it comes to women. He has been with most of the single women in this town—and several who weren’t single. At least that’s the word on the street. No judgment, but I need want to know if you are or aren’t sleeping with William Poe.”

  Her face turned hot with embarrassment. “I am aware of his reputation and I can barely stand being in the same town as him. I can’t believe you think I’d have anything like that to do with a man like him.”

  “Look, you won’t tell me why you were at the Poes’ house this morning, and now Monica has a black eye... I have every right to question you.” Wyatt leaned against a support beam near the room’s center. “If you’re into men like William, I think you were right in assuming we wouldn’t be a good fit.”

  Her hand balled into a fist as she thought of what he was implying and the kind of girl he thought she was.

  “I don’t have anything going on with that pig William Poe. I’d rather spend the rest of my life in a nunnery than have to spend one single second more with him. So you have nothing to worry about.” She flexed her hands as she tried to control her temper. Wyatt wasn’t wrong for reacting as he was. When she’d learned about Bianca and William, her reaction had been far more volatile...and filled with several expletives that she hadn’t unleashed in years.

  “And about Monica,” she continued. “That woman deserves a medal, not a slug to the face, for putting up with a man like her husband.”

  “So you weren’t, and have never, slept with him. Good.” Some of the tightness in his features seemed to slip away. “But you still didn’t answer my question about why you were there.”

  She sighed. “If I tell you, you have to promise to keep the information between u
s. Got it?”

  He pushed away from the wall and looked over his shoulder like he was checking to make sure they were alone and out of the librarian’s hearing distance. “I promise.”

  “I didn’t sleep with him. But he and Bianca... They were having an affair.”

  Chapter Eight

  That changed everything. Wyatt wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or angry with Gwen. How could she have kept a secret of that magnitude from him for this long? She had to have known what implications it could have in their investigations.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked.

  She dug the toe of her shoe into the concrete floor. “I don’t think he had anything to do with her death. That’s why I went to their house, to see exactly what he knew—and just to see his reaction. I had to.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you could have compromised everything? If he’s behind your sister’s death, then you just showed our enemy our cards.”

  She looked up at him with wide eyes. “No. That’s not it. That’s not what I did. I swear.”

  “Then what were you thinking, Gwen?”

  “Don’t come at me like that,” she said, anger filling her voice. “I didn’t want to tell you about their affair because you were Bianca’s friend. You can’t tell me that something like this—her relationship with a married, piggish man—doesn’t change your opinion of her. And if word of it got out...” She paused. “Now that she’s gone, her reputation and our memories of her... That’s all we have left.”

  He stood in silence, unsure of what to say. He wanted to make her feel better. He wanted to take her in his arms and tell her there were so many important things that mattered more than her sister’s reputation in this small town. But then again, he could understand why she was so protective of her sister’s honor.

  He loved his brothers, Waylon, Rainier and Colter. He would protect them just like she protected her sister. Heck, once in the fifth grade, right after Rainier and Colter had been adopted, Wyatt had gotten in a fistfight on the school’s playground. One close-minded little jerk had made the mistake of thinking he could make fun of them for being a different color.