by Alyssa Day
“Nice. Very nice,” he said.
In seconds, she was gone, dancing her way across the room to the door. We left money on the table for the bill, plus tip, and followed her.
Jack waited until we’d made it outside, and nobody else was within earshot, and then nodded toward the truck that he’d parked next to my car. Shelley had chosen to ride with him, naturally. “I’m going to go snoop around Chantal’s place. I don’t know if she has any connection to Jeremiah at this point. Probably not, if she was out drinking with friends the night she was killed. Maybe somebody got high and accidentally shot her.”
I shook my head. “Except for one problem. Why would they leave her at the pawnshop? Everybody knows you can dispose of a body in the swamp and it will never be found until somebody cuts open a gator one day and sees bones.”
I said it matter-of-factly, because it was hard to be squeamish when you’d grown up in Dead End.
“Yeah. The coincidence just doesn’t work for me. Was somebody leaving a message? If so, why? For you? For me? None of it makes sense at all, and I’ve never liked things that don’t make sense.”
“Has the P-Ops agent talked to you yet?”
“The who?”
I explained about Agent Vasquez and his story about a job offer and questions about the sheriff and the Blood Moon. “Sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but there was Walt, and then Shelley.”
Jack had started laughing when I got to the job offer part, and he was still smiling. “Me as a fed. That’ll be the day. I wonder what he meant about the Blood Moon, though.”
“Are you going to go all nuts when it happens?”
He got a pained expression on his face. “Yes. I always have a mad catnip festival on Blood Moon.”
“Really?” I contemplated exactly what that would involve.
“No, not really. Sheesh, Tess. Only wolves and the Dark Fae really pay attention to the Blood Moon, I think. Oh, and the witches, of course.”
“Why the witches?”
“It does something freaky to their magic, I think. But only for witches who practice black magic, so it’s nothing to worry about. We would have heard if Dead End had any of those here.” Jack opened the truck door. “I should get going. Standing around speculating isn’t getting us any closer to figuring out who killed Chantal or my uncle.”
I really needed to get back to work, but some impulse made me look up just in time to catch the expression of profound sadness in his eyes. “Want company?”
“I was hoping you’d ask.”
*
Chantal Nelson had lived in a small apartment building near the fire station. I wasn’t quite sure when she’d moved into town, but it hadn’t been more than a couple of years ago. We Dead Enders tended not to ask nosy questions about people’s backgrounds. It worked out better for everyone that way.
A large palm tree stood guard in front of the office, where a faded sign was taped to the door.
Welcome to Pleasant Acres
Free First Mo W/Dep
Absolutely no fire-breathing pets
“Pleasant Acres? Sounds like a cemetery,” Jack said. “Didn’t it used to be called something else when that old guy who only wore overalls with no shirts owned it?”
“It was Windsor Farms, then it was something with Shores in the name, and then the old guy just called it The Apartments,” I recalled. “Being ironic before ironic was a thing, I guess.”
“Or just literal. The man didn’t own a shirt; I doubt he was a hipster,” Jack pointed out. “Anyway, should we ask permission now or just break in and ask forgiveness later?”
I pointed to the smaller, handwritten sign in the window and read it to him. “Out to lunch. Back at 3 p.m. Don’t call me.”
Jack looked at his watch. “That’s a late lunch. It’s only two, now.”
“Think we should call her?”
We stood there on the sidewalk, grinning at each other like fools, and I had the unpleasant niggle of a thought that Owen and I had never fallen into such an easy rapport, even though we’d been out on several dates. Mostly, Owen was nervous and I was edgy; sometimes it was the other way around.
I had the feeling that Jack had never been nervous a day in either of his lives.
“Let’s just go look. Do you know what apartment?”
I froze. That might have been a good thing to find out. There were six.
Jack shrugged. “Well, how hard can it be to find out? We can look in the windows. We can—”
“Read the mailboxes,” I said, pointing. There was a rectangular set of six boxes set back in an alcove, each one neatly labeled. Chantal had lived in number three. We quickly figured out that it was the apartment on the far right side of the building, on the bottom floor. Okay, that was easy enough. Now, though, how did we get in without a key?
“Are you going to pick the lock? Bust the door down? Do some secret tiger moves?”
Jack shot me a look and then reached out and tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked.
I was a little bit disappointed.
“Secret tiger move,” Jack said dryly. He stuck his head in and looked around, took a deep sniff of the air, and then motioned grandly. “It’s empty. After you.”
I hesitated, glancing around to make sure nobody was watching me, like Sheriff Lawless or the P-Ops agent, then walked right into the apartment as if I belonged there. When I looked around, though, I saw something that neither my mystery novels, nor any TV show or movie I’d ever seen, could have adequately prepared me for.
Nobody had trashed the place.
Chapter Eleven
“Nobody trashed the place,” I said, and Jack looked at me like I was a moron. Or maybe I just felt like a moron. “It’s just…the criminals always trash the place, looking for something vital to the investigation. We don’t have any trashing. So is there nothing vital here?”
Jack sighed. “You read a lot of fiction, don’t you?”
“Fiction is the spice of life.” I took a couple of steps into Chantal’s apartment, suddenly shivering with a hideous sense of intruding into her privacy. What right did I have to be here, after all? I wasn’t police, or a P.I., or Nancy Drew.
“There may be nothing vital. But there’s also no red jacket in this room or in the coat closet,” Jack said, closing the closet door. “Maybe it’s in the bedroom? But if not, does that confirm that she never made it home that night? And is that evidence that suggests an accidental shooting rather than anything to do with Jeremiah’s death?”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to walk into her bedroom. It was the ultimate invasion. Stalling for time, I wandered into the kitchen and took a look at the photos on her refrigerator, while Jack had a quick look in her bedroom.
You could tell a lot about a person by the things they stuck on the fridge door. (And if the fridge door was bare, that said something too.) The big grouping of pictures on Chantal’s fridge, for example, told me that she was a happy woman who liked to party, and that she owned a crap ton of little smiley-face magnets. She was holding a beer bottle in many of the pictures, surrounded by people doing the same. A lot of them had been taken at the Swamp Rat. But the three photos displayed across the freezer door were different.
They were people I knew.
“Jack, look at this. I didn’t realize Shelley’s mom, Melody, was friends with Chantal,” I said.
He crossed the room and looked over my shoulder, and I could feel his warm breath in my hair. Suddenly, I felt like shivering for a different reason, and I wanted to smack myself. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong guy.
“Shelley looks just like her mom,” Jack said. “Cute and happy. She was maybe a year or so younger in these?”
“Yeah, probably. These were taken at the Dairy King over by Lake Kissimmee. See that red cup the sundae is in? That’s shaped to look like an upside-down Ohio State baseball cap. The owner’s a rabid Buckeye fan.”
“And? You suddenly have a burning need to talk football?”
<
br /> I rolled my eyes. “No, just pointing out that it’s a forty-five minute drive from here. You wouldn’t go all that way for ice cream and take pictures with somebody if you weren’t close, right? I don’t know. It’s probably nothing, but why do these connections keep showing up? Jeremiah and Chantal are killed in the same way. Chantal and Hank Kowalski are dating. The Kowalskis and Melody are cousins. Now we discover that Melody and Chantal are good friends. Something is weird as hell, and it doesn’t feel like just the normal small-town fishbowl kind of weird.”
Jack nudged me aside and bent down to look at a photograph in the middle of the door. It was mostly covered by a flyer for Judd’s Pizza, which was why I hadn’t noticed it, but as soon as he moved the flyer aside, I gasped.
“Who is it?” He took the photo of a huge, burly biker in leathers with his arm around Chantal off the fridge.
“That’s the guy who threatened to punch Jeremiah in the face about a year ago. He left town, and we never saw him again. What in the world was he doing with Chantal? Or more to the point, what was she doing with him?”
Jack clenched his teeth so hard a muscle twitched in his jaw. “Why am I just hearing about somebody threatening Jeremiah now? Did the useless sheriff ever look into him?”
I groaned, wondering what else I’d forgotten to tell him. This would be easier if he could just read my mind. Although, no. Never mind that. I didn’t want anybody rummaging around in my mind. It was a strange and twisted place in there at least half of the time.
“Yes, he did, and the guy had lots of proof that he was on the other side of the country when Jeremiah died. That’s probably why I didn’t even think of mentioning him. His name was Gator. I don’t know what his real name was. He went by Gator, and he was another collector. He was passionate about oil and gas signs, and he and Jeremiah had some blowup about a Buffalo.”
Jack growled a little bit and rubbed his face with both hands. “Let’s get out of here. I need some fresh air and maybe an English-to-Callahan dictionary, because I thought you just said that my uncle was fighting with this Sons of Anarchy reject over a buffalo.”
I didn’t see the problem until I thought about it from Jack’s perspective. “Oh no, not a buffalo. A Buffalo. I’ll explain on the way.”
“The way?”
“Yeah. Take me back to Beau’s to get my car. I need to spend the afternoon at work, and then this evening we can go to the Swamp Rat and talk to some of the people in these photos and see what they know.” My head was starting to ache again. The coincidences were flying, fast and furious, and I still really didn’t like them.
Jack pulled out of the Pleasant Acres parking lot and glanced over at me. “The buffalo?”
“Oh, right. So this guy was huge into collecting oil and gas signs,” I began.
“The ones that used to hang at old gas stations? Porcelain, right?” Jack had grown up with Jeremiah, so it made sense that he understood right away.
“Yeah, they come in metal too, and even cardboard, but this was a porcelain Buffalo Motor Oil sign. Gator was desperate to find one to complete his collection. He practically ordered Jeremiah that if one ever came into the shop, we should save it for him.”
Jack laughed. “Jeremiah loved being told what to do so much. I bet that went over really well.”
“He told the guy that he’d see what he could do, and didn’t promise anything, but I think he still planned to keep an eye out. After all, obsessive collectors will pay the highest prices for things,” I said, always ready to be practical about making money.
“So?” He stopped at the stop sign and waited for a woman and her three kids to cross the street toward the bank.
I sighed. “So, one came in that the owner sold us outright, didn’t want to pawn it. Pristine condition. Gator hadn’t left us a phone number, though, so we just put it out in the shop. Naturally, another oil and gas collector happened to be on the GYST bus the next day, and boom. We sold the sign for a great profit.”
“The GYST bus?”
I explained about the Golden Years folks, and our deal with Mr. Holby.
Jack grinned. “Jeremiah always was a wheeler-dealer. So this Gator came back, I’m guessing.”
“Gator came back.”
After we’d parked on the street back at Beau’s, next to Mr. Kemper’s ancient Plymouth Valiant, Jack shut off the ignition and turned to look at me.
“Cue big blowup? This jackass threatening to punch my uncle?”
I nodded. “Exactly. Gator had heard in town about the sign, I guess. I wasn’t there, but Jeremiah told me about it afterward. The way he told it, it wasn’t much of a fuss. But I heard from another customer who’d been in the shop that she was afraid it would turn into a physical fight.”
Jack’s hands tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “I should have been here.”
“Well, you weren’t,” I said briskly. “Neither was I, but Jeremiah was perfectly fine then. Gator never touched him and, like I said, he had a solid alibi for the time of the murder.”
“For the time of that murder,” Jack said darkly. “What about Chantal? And even lowlifes have friends who might be willing to do them a favor.”
I shook my head. “For a sign? It wasn’t some priceless Picasso. It was an oil sign, and there were plenty of those made, even though there aren’t that many in such good shape left to find. I just can’t see anybody getting mad enough to hire a hitman—or even ask a buddy—to kill a pawnshop owner over it.”
“You never know about people,” Jack said, staring intently at Sheriff Lawless, who’d just walked out of Beau’s.
I couldn’t argue with that, so I got out of the truck. “I’ll see you later.”
“Molly said nine. I’ll pick you up at eight, so we can get a table,” Jack said, clearly remembering how packed the Rat could get on a Friday night.
“It’s a date,” I said, but then froze. “Not a date, a plan. It’s a plan. I’ll see you then.”
Jack grinned at my babbling. “See you then.”
I got in my car and then made sure not to clutch my head until after he’d driven away.
*
Eleanor was glad to see me, and I sent up a silent prayer for an uneventful afternoon at the shop. I needed to start inventory and decide what we were going to put on sale to try to liquidate. I walked into the back room to get my clipboard and stopped dead.
While I’d been out with Jack, Eleanor had taken a stab at repairing Fluffy’s tail.
“Duct tape?”
Fluffy, never a specimen of beauty to begin with, had suffered sadly from her gunshot wound. Now, though, instead of a gaping hole in her tail, she had about a foot-wide band of silver duct tape around it.
“I fixed it while I ate my chicken salad,” Eleanor said proudly.
“That’s—that’s—” I didn’t have the words.
“I know, right? Good as new.” She laughed. “It’s not like it’s worth anything. I thought you weren’t taking this from Otis anymore, anyway. What did you give him, five bucks?”
I cleared my throat. “Ferghrmph.”
“I didn’t catch that, Tess.”
Backing away, I grabbed my clipboard and made a break for the door to the shop. “Okay, thanks for fixing it. Fluffy can just be our shop mascot from now on.”
Because nothing said “successful business” like an old, dusty, busted, duct-taped, taxidermied alligator.
To my great delight, the rest of the afternoon was calm and peaceful. A little boring, even. I was busy taking inventory and appreciating the quiet at around three o’clock when Eleanor reminded me she had to leave.
“My grandson has football practice, and Dave can’t pick him up today,” she said.
“Sure. Thanks. Have a nice rest of your day.”
She grinned. “It certainly has been exciting. I can’t wait to tell everyone about the tiger in the shop.”
Oh. Bad idea. Although everybody in town knew Jack was back, so what
could it hurt? Maybe the news of the tiger would even warn off whoever was using the shop as a body dump. But was that what we wanted? Wouldn’t that make it harder to catch him, her, or them?
“I already told my entire card club,” Eleanor said, making my internal debate about keeping it quiet entirely moot. Of course, the only surprise was that I hadn’t expected it. The whole event would probably be on the front page of the weekly Dead End Journal on Monday.
I spent the next couple of hours taking inventory and waiting on the few customers who stopped by, but for once the time seemed to drag. The remnants of the past two days of adrenaline rushes, probably. I wanted to be out investigating instead of working.
“Because you’re ridiculous,” I said, talking to myself out loud like a crazy person, but still making sense. It was ridiculous. This was my job, my business, and my future. I needed to get tangled up in murder investigations like Fluffy needed a hole in her head to match the one in her tail.
Still, when six o’clock rolled around, I was more than ready to go. I checked all the locks, turned off the lights, and headed out. Since it was still early January, sunset had come and gone around quarter to six. I noticed our porch light had burned out again, but it was still dusk. I could see perfectly well, so I’d change it tomorrow. Right now I just wanted to get home, eat something light, and get ready for my not-a-date with Jack.
I glanced at the unfamiliar black truck parked on the side of the road just past the entrance to my parking lot, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Kids liked to leave their cars there when they met up with their friends and piled into one or two vehicles to go out and do whatever teenagers did on Friday nights these days. Sometimes there were half a dozen or more parked there by eight o’clock. Molly and I had started the tradition, actually, when she used to pick me up after I finished working the after-school shift for Jeremiah.
The memory of Jeremiah standing at the door of the shop and admonishing us to be careful and to call him if we found ourselves in any trouble made me smile. As I opened my car door, I thought about how nice it was for a memory of him to make me smile instead of making me sad, and I wondered if that meant I was on the path to healing from his loss.