by Tegan Maher
“Well,” I said with a sigh, “I suppose finding dead bodies doesn’t lend itself to a peaches-and-cream complexion. As a matter of fact, I feel pale now that you mention it.”
Her silvery brows shot into her hairline, nearly disappearing underneath the band of her hat. “What do you mean, finding dead bodies?”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” I said, relishing the warmth of my mug. “I found a body in the woods over near the lake. Shot dead.”
She pursed her lips together. “How’d it get in our woods?”
I snorted. “Don’t look at me. I know for sure I didn’t put him there, and I’m pretty sure Dee and Scout didn’t either.”
“Well, I’m sure the sheriff will figure it out soon enough. I assume he’s already out there?”
I nodded. “Yeah, after making it clear he wasn’t pleased that I’d found my second dead person in as many months.”
To my surprise, she laughed, causing the brim of her hat to quiver. “I don’t know him well, but he seems an awful lot like his great-great-grand pappy, and he was a stuffed shirt, too. Why, Winona Abernathy—the prettiest girl in town—had a few too many snoots of her grand mammy’s shine at a church social and laid a lip-locker on him that set the town’s gossips flappin’ their lips for a week. He didn’t know what to do. The man blushed to his roots, then fell backward into the trough tryin’ to get away from her. He married her six months later. We all reckoned it took him that long to recover. Anyway, my point is that he’s probably got a good heart under all that gruff. He knows you’re innocent.”
The warmth was returning to my body as the initial shock wore off, thanks in large part to Maisey’s distraction, and I gave her a small smile. “I sure hope you’re right. It’s not like there’s any evidence I did it or anything. All I did was find him.”
I took a sip of my tea as a car pulled up outside, then turned toward the door when Dee pushed her way in. When her aunt—the first body I’d found—was murdered, she’d needed a place to stay. I’d offered her a place until she could find something better, and it had turned into a permanent arrangement even after she’d inherited both her aunt’s house and café, which had an apartment above it. She was struggling to get the cafe back on track, mostly because it had been a mess for years due to Fiona’s stubbornness, and was about to work herself to death. She hadn’t needed a car when she lived above the cafe, but since she now lived on the other side of the boondocks with me, we were sharing a vehicle.
“Sorry I’m running a little bit late,” she said as she pushed the door shut and toed off her shoes. “I had to pick up the new menus from the printer and drop them back off at the café.” She scrunched up her face. “Sadly, there isn’t going to be a lot to choose from because there isn’t a lot I can cook, at least in large quantities on the fly.”
I got up and followed her to the kitchen, then took the keys from her outstretched hand. “Maybe you can focus more on making it a bakery or a coffee shop or something. You know you’d rather do that than cook.” Though Fiona had relegated her to a server, Dee’d gone to culinary school and could whip up just about any kind of cake, pie, or pastry you could ask for with one hand tied behind her back.
She shook her head. “No. Since Gabe told me I could reopen it if I wanted to, I’ve been thinking about what I want to do with it. And I really think I want to make it a fully functional café again.” She shrugged. “There aren’t a lot of dining opportunities around here, so supply and demand kind of leads me to that decision. I just wish I could cook as well as I can bake.”
I nodded, understanding where she was coming from. I was her polar opposite—I made a mean spaghetti sauce, but ended up burning half the cookies in a batch every time I tried my hand at baking. I was much more a pinch of this and a sprinkle of that type of cook, and that just didn’t lend itself to baking if you didn’t know what you were doing.
Dee looked at me, I mean really looked at me, and touched my arm, her face full of concern. “That’s barely a blip on the radar today, though. Are you okay? I heard you found a body on the property.”
I drew my brows together. “You already heard? It’s barely been an hour.”
She smiled. “You know Linda’s working dispatch today.”
“Of course she is. How could I forget? Still, that has to be some kind of a record.” I shook my head. I was learning that life in a small town had its ups and downs, and I was still on the fence about how fast news traveled. On one hand, I never felt like I was out of the loop. On the other, I cherished my privacy and didn’t like the idea of everybody knowing my business, especially considering I’d decided to open the lodge as a B&B. I wasn’t sure how people would feel about staying in a place where dead bodies turned up.
“What hasn’t made the rounds yet,” she said, pouring herself a glass of tea, “is who it was. Did you recognize him?”
“I didn’t at first,” I said, shaking my head, “but the sheriff did. It’s Frank from the feed store.”
Dee raised a brow. “I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. The guy was a jerk to everybody, and probably a crook to boot.”
“So he wasn’t exactly an upstanding citizen? He seemed okay the few times I ran into him.”
Dee shook her head. “No. He made Fiona look like a decent human being. If he seemed nice, you must not have exchanged more than a few words with him. Even then, I’m surprised.” Her aunt had been meaner than a snake, constantly putting Dee down and talking to her customers like they were stray dogs. It was no wonder Dee was having such a hard time getting the diner afloat.
If Frank was even worse than she had been, that was really saying something. I grimaced. “Yikes.”
“Yeah, yikes,” she said, then glanced at her phone and back at me, giving me a once-over. “Unless you’re wearing yoga pants to work, you better get changed. You’re going to be late if you don’t leave in the next five minutes.”
I leaned over and looked at the face of her phone—she was right. I bolted to my room and shimmied into a pair of jeans and the first t-shirt I pulled out of my dresser. I grabbed a scrunchy and pulled my hair into a messy bun on my way back to the kitchen. “If Gabe comes back up here, will you tell him I went to work?”
“Sure thing, sugar,” she said, tilting her head at me. “Are you expecting him to come back? There weren’t any cars down there when I came home.”
Maisey drifted into the kitchen. “I just popped down there and they’re already gone. I know I had the right spot because there’s police tape strung around the outskirts of the woods.”
For some reason, I’d expected the sheriff to have more questions, but after thinking about it for a second, I realized it wasn’t like he didn’t know where to find me.
I just hoped he didn’t have any reason to. I was seriously over dealing with murder on any level.
Chapter Four
WHILE I DROVE TO THE Dead End, Mercy’s best dive bar and my current place of employment, I thought about the turn of events. What had started as a gorgeous, bird-chirpy day had gone to hell in a hand basket in two shakes of my dog’s tail. Now, no matter how much I wanted to rewind the day and skip my jog altogether, I couldn’t unring that bell. A dead body had turned up on my property and there was nothing I could do to change that. And I was dreading going in and facing everybody because I had absolute faith in Linda’s information dissemination skills.
It didn’t take long to get to the bar from my house, and before I’d figured out how much I was going to tell folks or how I was going to avoid the gossip when I was living squarely in it, I was pulling into the gravel lot. I parked my SUV in the usual spot near the door. That was one of the perks of working at a bar in a small town—though crime was low, everybody recognized it was a little nuts for me to park in the dark outer edges of the lot when I had to walk to my car alone at two in the morning. And I appreciated that.
I turned off my ignition and climbed out of my vehicle. The only other car in the lot belonged to my boss
, Don, and I was positive he was just itching to go fishing for catfish or some other thing I had no desire to ever eat in my lifetime. I was right—I’d barely stepped foot in the place when he blew past me and out the door.
“Hi, Toni. Bye, Toni. I already put away the beer order. Try not to find any dead bodies when you take the trash out,” Don said, grinning, with a wave over his shoulder.
“Funny!” I called to his retreating back before the door swung shut.
“I thought so,” he called back. “Have a good one.”
One of the best things about Don was that he was a water off a duck’s back type of guy. Nothing rattled him and he didn’t care what was going on as long as his bar was taken care of and his various big-boy toys were in fine working order. The bar was littered with pictures of him doing outdoorsy things—riding his ATV, fishing, camping, hunting, and working on classic muscle cars with his buddies. He was at the age where he was ready to slow down and enjoy life, and he wasn’t above admitting it.
I grabbed an empty pitcher off a nearby table as I made my way behind the bar. I hung my keys on a little hook underneath the bar, picked up the television remote and began channel surfing. I wouldn’t be busy for another hour or so, and I knew without looking that everything was stocked and clean. That meant I was gonna be bored stiff if I didn’t find something good to watch. The fishing channel Don had been watching wasn’t going to fly with me, pun intended. And since I was the only one in the bar, for now, I was going to change it to something more tolerable.
I finally settled on a crime drama. I was just putting the remote back under the bar when the door opened and two men walked in. They nodded at me and walked back to the pool table.
I grabbed my apron and tied it on before hustling over to them. “Hey gentleman! What can I get you?”
They were both young-ish, wearing ball caps turned around backward, and could have passed for brothers except for their height. The taller one glanced at me and smiled in greeting as he pulled a pool cue down from the wall. “Whatever’s on tap.”
The shorter one was racking the balls up and nodded in agreement.
“You got it,” I said as I hurried back to the bar. “You hungry, or just thirsty?”
“We’re good,” Tall Guy said. “We’re just here so I can teach him how to play pool.” He grinned at his buddy, who gave him a disbelieving look.
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “Keep it up. Or maybe put some money where your mouth is.”
While they talked smack, I went back to the bar and filled a pitcher, then grabbed two frosted mugs out of the cooler and took the guys their beer.
“Too bad about old Frank.” The tall one pulled a ten and a couple ones out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Keep the change.”
The other one let out a derisive snort. “Hardly.”
“Come on,” the first one continued as he leaned over the table and broke. “It has to be hard on Scott.”
“Right,” his buddy said, cuing up to sink the one ball. “Because his dad was such a good guy. If you ask me, Scott is going to be a lot happier now that his old man is gone.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Wait,” I said, “Scott’s his son? Is that the blonde guy who worked at the store with him? Mid-twenties?”
Tall Guy nodded as he took a sip of his beer. “Yeah, that’s him. And I’m Dave by the way. And this here’s James.”
James bent his head toward me. “Pleasure. You’re the one that bought the old lodge, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, handing him his beer after I poured it.
“So you’re the one who found him then,” Dave said. It wasn’t a question.
“That’d be me,” I said. “Just call me lucky, I guess.”
He gave me a lopsided grin. “Well, I reckon the one good thing about finding him dead in your woods is that he probably didn’t insult you or stick his hand in your pocket while you weren’t looking.”
“True story,” James said. “The only reason any of us tolerated that old coot was so we could use his boat for fishing in the spring and summer, and the cabin for hunting in the fall. You know Scott will inherit all those things, and he’ll still let us use them. We just won’t have to put up with his father anymore. Win-win if you ask me.”
“I suppose,” Dave hedged. “But it was still his dad.”
“Suppose nothing,” the second guy answered, drawing his brow down and cracking the three ball into the corner pocket. “The next time we go fishing with Scott, his asshole father won’t be joining us, and there’s not a single downside to that.”
“We probably shouldn’t have left him alone up there,” Dave said as James took a shot at the five ball and missed.
Dave laughed. “Like we had a choice. He drove the boat to shore, kicked us all off—his own son included—and told us to get off his property or he’d shoot us for trespassing. After we left he probably threatened to shoot the wrong person and they shot him first.”
They quit talking as the game got real, so I meandered back to the bar. I wanted to dig for more information, but they didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and I couldn’t think of a valid way to justify my nosiness. I was just wetting a clean bar towel when the sheriff walked in.
“Gabe,” I said with a slight head nod. “Can I get you a beer?” I doubted he was there to relax, but I figured if he was going to ask questions, he may as well do it with a beer in his hand. Lord knew with the day he’d had, he was probably ready for one. I knew I was.
He shook his head as he glanced around the bar. “Believe me—I’d love to, but I just came in to have a word with those two,” he said as he lifted his chin in the direction of the two men playing pool.
I glanced back at them and nodded. From what I’d heard of their conversation, they’d been with Frank before he’d died. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
He scowled as his eyes cut to me. “Now what makes you say something like that?”
I shrugged my shoulders as I wrung out my rag and draped it over a handle attached to the sink. “Um, because they were fishing with the victim yesterday?”
He sighed. “You should probably let me do the detective work around here. I know you had a hand in solving Fiona’s murder and I appreciate it, but this time, it may not be as simple as a domestic incident gone wrong.”
I put my hands up in a surrender gesture. “Look, that time I was just trying to help a friend, but this time, I swear, I wasn’t interfering in your investigation. They were just talking between themselves and I pieced things together. I wasn’t being nosy, but it’s hard not to listen in when we’re the only people in here and they’re talking about the dude I found dead as a hammer on my property not three hours ago.”
That seemed to pacify him because he leaned against the bar and cleared his throat. He glanced back at the two men before asking, in the quietest voice I had ever heard him use, “So what did they say?”
I rolled my eyes and frowned at the man. “Really? You just told me I should leave the detective work around here to you.”
The Sheriff’s lip twitched. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think he was amused. He took a deep breath and shook his head. “You’re a potential witness and I’m just questioning you.”
I cocked my head to the side, deciding to mess with him a little. I know it was mean, but I couldn’t resist. “So you came here to question me, or you just decided to do it right now?”
The Sheriff pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger as he closed his eyes. I wondered if anyone else stressed him out that much, or if it was just me. “I just decided. If you overheard any good dirt that they wouldn’t tell me, then I’d owe you one.”
“Fine,” I said with an exaggerated huff and a smile. I relayed what little I’d heard, adding on my own opinion at the end. “They definitely didn’t like Frank, but I’d be surprised if they—or at least Dave—had anything to do with his murder.”
He considered that for a
minute. “Why do you only say that about Dave? Why not James?”
I lifted a shoulder. “Nothing in particular. Maybe it’s because he didn’t add any caveats to his dislike. He made it clear the world—including Frank’s son—was better off.”
Some of the tension left his shoulders and a smile spread across his face. “Now was that so hard?”
“Horrible.” I glanced at the two men playing pool.
He grinned. He really was a good guy, and seeing as how Dee had a thing for him, I didn’t want to be too hard on him.
“Seeing as how you dragged me away from a perfectly good box of donuts to come traipsing through Hell’s half-acre to find a corpse, you’ll have to pardon me if I don’t feel too bad about pulling some info out of you. Now I’m gonna go talk to your boys.”
“They’re not my boys,” I said, picking up the rag and wiping non-existent crumbs from the bar. “Knock yourself out.”
He was only back there for about ten minutes, but it seemed like a whole lot longer.
Finally, he came back up to the bar, setting his now empty cup on it.
“Thanks, Toni. You have yourself a good night,” he said as he reached up and slightly tilted the front of his hat.
“You too, Gabe.”
No sooner had he gone than the two pool players slammed the rest of their pitcher and hurried out the door. They didn’t so much as glance my way, and I had to wonder if that was because they’d seen me talking to the sheriff or they had something to discuss with somebody and didn’t want to do it over a cell phone.