by Hillary Avis
Yelena chuckled. “I’m not surprised. Beauty queens have nerves of steel. How else can they stand up on stage in a bathing suit?”
Ruth grinned, but I couldn’t even smile past the lump in my throat. “What if it was murder?” I asked quietly, turning away from the window. Ruth’s smile faded, and the amused crinkles around Yelena’s eyes disappeared, too. “What if Tambra knew the victim?”
“It’s not a murder,” Ruth declared staunchly, her fingers deftly weaving Yelena’s silver hair. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen around here. Don’t get worked up about it. Tambra probably just got spooked.”
She sounded so sure that my shoulders relaxed a little. “Yeah, so. Eli said the dead guy’s been there a while, maybe a couple decades. Tambra would be too young to know him. She was a teenager twenty years ago, right? Just a kid.”
Ruth dropped her comb. She held the braid tight with one hand as she stooped to pick it up again, and I saw an expression briefly flash across her face—she remembered something.
“What? Tell me,” I demanded.
Ruth kept her eyes on Yelena’s growing gray-and-black crown. “I don’t want to start any rumors.”
I snorted. The Do or Dye was the nexus of Honeytree gossip. Ruth was like the vending machine of local rumors. Maybe she was more comfortable passing them along than she was creating them, though.
“We’re among friends,” Yelena said mildly. “If you speak hypothetically, we won’t hold it against you.”
Ruth shook her head, her fingers swiftly weaving the intricate braid. “It’s probably nothing. It’s just when you said Tambra was a teenager twenty years ago, I remembered that she hung around here a lot back then. So did a lot of kids. My grandpa had a soft spot for people down on their luck, especially young people, and the farm was a place they could come hang out when things weren’t so great at home.”
“The bonfires?” I asked. “Walt said something about them. When he saw all the beer bottles I’d dug up, he told me teenagers used to party here.”
“That’s right.” Ruth nodded. “I rarely came to the bonfires. I’d just bought the Do or Dye from the previous owner and between that and selling real estate, I was working eighteen-hour days—I was way too busy to party. But I remember the bonfires were a big thing for a while. And they weren’t just for kids—plenty of adults shared a beer by Grandpa Amos’s fire, from what I heard. He liked building a community and filling it with friends, kind of like I do at the salon.”
“I was never invited,” Yelena said, indignation creeping into her tone. “I considered Amos a good friend, too.”
“I think he stopped having the bonfires before you moved here,” Ruth said. “Fifteen, twenty years ago?”
Yelena nodded. “I moved here when I retired. Fifteen years ago—no, sixteen.”
“Yeah, Grandpa Amos quit having them about that time.”
That caught my attention. Fifteen or twenty years was about how long Eli estimated my skeleton friend had been in the ground. If the bonfires ended around the same time, maybe they were connected. “Why’d he stop?”
Ruth frowned and held up the end of Yelena’s completed braid. “Do you have a rubber band or a piece of ribbon? Even string would work.” I grabbed a hair elastic from the jar by the door and brought it to her. She carefully fastened it around the braid and then tucked the end into the complete crown. She gave the hairdo a pat and then circled the chair, examining her handiwork from all sides.
“I don’t know why,” she finally said, when she seemed to be satisfied with her braid crown. She nudged Yelena toward the bathroom. “Go look in the mirror and see what you think.”
I waited until Yelena was out of the room before I pressed Ruth further. “You never asked?”
“I never thought about it, since I didn’t go to them. I didn’t even really notice when they ended. They just...did. Maybe Grandpa just got tired of picking up beer bottles. Maybe the fire danger was too high one year and people forgot about it. Maybe his back pain was making him crabby. Who knows. The whole point is that it wouldn’t be crazy if Tambra knew something—or someone—connected to the dead guy buried here. Bunch of drunk people, late at night...an accident could have happened.”
I nodded as I thought about all the bottles and cans still in the ground. I doubted whether Amos Chapman ever picked any of them up. Maybe he’d just gathered them up and thrown them into a pit; it wasn’t such an uncommon thing when I was growing up for people to dig a trash pit instead of hauling stuff to the county dump. People would throw all kinds of stuff into their mini landfills, and when they were full, they’d just cover them up and dig a new one.
My blood chilled. What better way to bury a body than in a trash pit, covered with bottles and cans? Nobody would blink twice if you filled it in and dug a new one. And few people would dig past the layer of trash on top, as I did, so the body was unlikely to be discovered, even decades in the future.
I watched as Yelena returned from the bathroom and Ruth touched up some tendrils that had escaped from the back of her hair. Had Amos Chapman killed someone and buried the body here on the farm? If he had, Ruth didn’t know about it—her face was smooth and unconcerned as she chatted and smiled with Yelena.
Tambra certainly hadn’t been so relaxed when she left. She was worried—and in a hurry to go. Perhaps her haste in leaving was because she didn’t want Ruth to hear that her grandfather was a murderer...a murderer who’d slept in my little bedroom. I settled into a chair and tried to shake off the uneasy feeling that my little cottage had once housed a killer.
Chapter 8
“We’re done for the night,” Eli said, shifting his weight to the other foot as he stood on my porch fiddling with his sunglasses like an idiot. It was almost midnight, so it wasn’t like he was going to wear them. Behind him, I could see the forensics team in their jumpsuits setting up a tent over the trench they’d dug to exhume the skeleton to protect it from any possible rain.
Or maybe to protect it from prying eyes like mine.
“I take it that means you’ll all be back tomorrow.”
He nodded. “I really don’t think you should be alone tonight, though.” He glanced toward where Ruth’s car had been parked next to mine. She’d driven Yelena home hours ago, leaving me alone with the bottle of vodka and remains of Anne’s extraordinary cobbler. I didn’t know if it was the alcohol, the sugar, or the gravity of the exhumation going on in my front yard, but I didn’t feel so good.
“I’ll be fine,” I slurred. “Everything’s fine.”
“At least let me check around your place to make certain it’s safe?”
I guffawed. “Safe? Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well. We found the victim’s skull. And unfortunately—”
“The victim?” I swallowed hard. “What do you mean? He didn’t die of natural causes?”
Eli shook his head. “Not unless getting your head bashed in is a natural cause.”
Suddenly my peaceful little farm felt like it was tilting on an axis, shifting from a safe place to rebuild my life to a gruesome murder scene. I felt the blood drain from my face, and my knees went wobbly. “Someone was murdered...here?”
“Whoa, whoa!” Eli caught my elbow before I could collapse to the floor. “Don’t worry, it happened a long time ago. At least twenty years ago, judging by the soda cans that were around him.”
“So what you’re saying is you didn’t catch a murderer for decades. He’s still out there. That isn’t a very reassuring testimonial for your investigative skills.” I shivered and opened the door wide. “Well, if you think a murderer’s been hiding in my closet for twenty years, please, feel free to evict him.”
He ducked his head sheepishly and made a beeline past me to the coat closet, and then proceeded to check under and behind every piece of furniture before heading upstairs.
“You’re all clear. No bad guys here,” Eli said when he came back down a minute later. He eyed the cobbler on the counter behind me
hungrily. I waited for him to ask, but he didn’t. I sighed and made a plate for him anyway, since there was only one serving left, give or take, and if I ate it, I’d sorely regret it. He gave me a goofy grin when I handed him a fork.
“I just don’t feel like trying to Tetris the cobbler leftovers into the fridge. You can sit.” I pulled out a chair for him and sat down in the seat across from it. “But only ’til you’re done eating. Then you have to go sleep in your own bed.” I blushed, realizing that I’d implied he’d be sleeping in my bed if he stayed here.
Thankfully, he didn’t make the joke. He was too busy devouring the cobbler to notice my wording. When he finally looked up from the plate, he grinned at me. A crumb clung to the side of his mouth and I resisted the itch to brush it away. “You’re a good baker,” he said admiringly.
“You’re just hungry from all the digging. Anyway, I didn’t bake it—Anne Sutherland brought it over earlier on the four-wheeler, remember? When she and Walt saw you over here, they figured a sheriff means trouble, I guess.”
“They’re not wrong.” He winked mischievously and pushed his empty plate away. “I’m going to try and get out of your hair as quick as I can, though.”
I thought about my coop-building schedule, which was already completely thrown off by today’s delay. “How quick is that?”
He licked his bottom lip, a habit I recognized from sitting next to him during high school algebra class. He was doing mental math. “Um. A week, minimum? Could be three or four weeks, though, easy.”
My stomach sank. “You’re kidding. A month? How long does it take to dig up one skeleton? I already did the feet for you.”
“Oh, we got him all dug up this evening. He’s off to Roseburg so the ME can do an autopsy. We’ll circulate impressions of his teeth to all the dentists in the county and see if anybody has a record of him so we can figure out who this guy is. Dental records take forever.”
“Surely I can build my coop even if he hasn’t been identified,” I said, frowning as I did my own mental calculations and rejiggered my schedule by a week. I hoped the rain wouldn’t start until after I got the concrete poured for my foundation.
“Well, the forensics team wants to bring in some heavy equipment and excavate a bigger area to sift for potential evidence. You’re going to have a nice size hole in the yard, I’m sorry to say. Don’t worry,” he rushed to finish. “I’ll help you fill it in. I’ve got a little tractor with a loader that I can haul over on a trailer; it’ll be a piece of cake.”
“I have my own tractor,” I said sharply. I did—it was in the barn. Of course, it wasn’t exactly working, but I was sure I could fix it. Pretty sure.
He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. “Well. We’ll try and keep the crime scene small so you can go about business as usual, but the equipment might need to block the driveway now and then.”
I nodded, my eyes trained on the jar of pink Gerberas in the center of the table to avoid meeting his eyes—I knew I was running hot and cold, and he didn’t deserve it. Sure, it was late and I was tired, but that was no excuse. I was the one who offered him dessert and a seat. My mother taught me better than to make a guest feel uncomfortable in my house.
Eli didn’t seem too put out, though. “As soon as we identify the victim, I’ll let you know. Don’t hold your breath, though. Like I said, sometimes it takes dentists weeks to get back to us, and even then, they might not have his records.”
“You should talk to Tambra.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
Eli arched one eyebrow. “Oh yeah?”
I nodded, feeling slightly guilty. I didn’t know why—it’s not like I thought Tambra killed the guy. But I felt bad sending cops her way without telling her first, even if it was just Eli, after she’d come all the way out here on my behalf and brought flowers to boot, no pun intended. “She said something when she was here earlier, when you unearthed the guitar case? It seemed like she might have recognized it. She left in a hurry, so I didn’t get a chance to ask, but maybe she could give you some leads.”
“I’ll swing by the salon and talk to her tomorrow. Thanks. For everything. I mean it.” He paused halfway out the front door, then leaned closer to me and put his arm around my shoulders. “I can stay here tonight if it’ll make you feel safer.”
I was suddenly conscious of the county crew’s eyes on us and the blood came rushing back to my face. I scooted out from under his side-hug. “If you stay here overnight, everyone will be talking. They probably already are talking.”
“So?” Eli straightened and glanced over his shoulder at the forensics team. They quickly got back to loading up their van and pretended they hadn’t been staring up at the porch. “I don’t care what anyone says.”
“Your girlfriend might care. Or fiancée or wife or whoever.”
“Considering she left me for a Portland Trailblazer a few years back, I’m guessing she won’t.” He grinned ruefully. “She traded up.”
I knew how that felt. My face must have shown my sympathy, because he quickly added, “Don’t feel bad for me; I deserved it. I can sleep in my truck instead of the couch if it suits your sense of propriety better.”
I almost took him up on it. Almost. But a nagging voice in the back of my head said I didn’t need him or his assumptions about my sense of propriety. I didn’t need a man watching over me just because things were getting a little spooky. This was exactly the kind of situation I should deal with on my own, now that I was single. I couldn’t call a man every time a scary spider crossed my path, not anymore. Plus, I didn’t need the gossip buzzards circling me any more than they already were.
“I’ll be fine.”
He frowned at me. “‘Fine’ is a pretty low bar.”
“Not for me.” It was meant as a joke, but the truth in it stung. I hadn’t been fine for a while now. Tambra wasn’t the only one with demons buried in her past. When mine came to the surface, they destroyed my life. I hoped hers wouldn’t do the same.
“I’ll keep you updated,” Eli said, his eyes full of concern. “In the meantime—lock your doors, Leona. And thanks for everything.”
Irritation at being told what to do prickled my skin, but I knew he wouldn’t give that kind of advice unless he was truly worried. Nobody locked their doors in Honeytree. They might lock their shed or their gun cabinet, but not their house. If he thought I needed to do that, he was more worried about a potential murderer on the loose than he let on.
I nodded and closed the door behind him, grudgingly locking the deadbolt as he’d instructed. Then I cleared his dishes from the kitchen table and sat there for a minute, flustered for no reason. Thanks for everything? What in the world had I done for him besides act like a pain in the rear? Here I was trying to keep him out, and he was grateful for some unfathomable reason. I swear, fifty-six years old and I still could never understand men.
Chapter 9
A rooster’s crow, nature’s alarm clock, woke me before my phone alarm went off. Anne was wrong—someone in the Flats definitely had chickens. I peeked out the seersucker curtains of my attic bedroom and saw Eli’s SUV was parked next to my Suburban. Eli was standing in the driveway, staring at the person-size hole the forensic team dug yesterday and the pile of loose dirt next to it. Either he’d risen early or he’d never left. I suspected the latter, given the way the hair was sticking up on the back of his head, silhouetted by the rising sun.
I found a pair of polka-dot PJ pants on top of the laundry pile, tugged them on, and headed down the narrow stairs for the front door. I grabbed a hair tie from the jar by the door and wrestled my unruly curls into something resembling a ponytail on my way out.
Eli turned toward the house when he heard the door hinges creak. I leaned out over the porch railing and called across the driveway to him. “You want coffee?”
He shook his head no. “Don’t worry about it. The crew is bringing me breakfast.” He turned back to the dirt pile. I guessed my efforts yest
erday to reduce his attentions had worked. The message had been received: Leona’s not interested. That’s what I wanted, so why did I feel a little disappointed that he didn’t accept my offer?
Probably just my pesky ego, I thought, as I went back inside and put the coffee on. On some level, I’d enjoyed that a man found me attractive for the first time in what—fifteen years?—even when I’d eaten three plates of dessert and was wearing dirty overalls. But that didn’t mean I had to cling to Eli to get that kind of attention. The standards of beauty were different here than in LA and it was going to take me a while to get used to it.
While the coffee brewed, I took a long, hot shower and got dressed—in clean jeans, this time, and a red T-shirt with a chicken on it that said “Hens Before Mens.” Then I sipped my coffee and kept an eye out the window over the sink until the white van returned.
Sure enough, they’d brought a huge Dutch Brothers cup for Eli and a box of doughnuts that they propped open on the hood of the van. The group clustered around the box, and I watched as he chose a chocolate-glazed doughnut and took a bite. My stomach rumbled and I wished I hadn’t given away that last piece of cobbler.
One of the forensic techs reached out and rumpled Eli’s hair where it was sticking up in the back, and the whole group rocked with laughter. They were probably ribbing him about sleeping here overnight. That meant the word was already out and it was only—I glanced at the clock—eight a.m.
Damage control time. I needed to spend the day as far away from Eli as possible so that people didn’t start assuming we were a couple.
I pulled a plaid flannel on over my T-shirt. Far from being unseasonably warm, it acted as a light jacket during these cool, late-summer mornings. When the clouds burned off by noon and the temperatures rose, I’d tie it around my waist, but for now, it was the perfect outer layer. I located Anne’s squeaky-clean casserole dish and, tucking it under my arm, got into my car and headed for the Sutherlands’ house.