by Gemma Bruce
Julie was paying for the lock when Elton Dinwiddie strode in. He hesitated when he saw Julie, then said, “Good morning, Julie,” and stood shifting from one foot to the other until she had finished making her purchase.
She was just closing the door, when she heard him say, “Dan, I need a shovel.”
There had been another robbery during the night, this time a mile from town. Cas and Terrence went out to investigate even though it was in the county’s jurisdiction. It had the same MO as their robberies and they had no intention of being left out.
When Cas finally made it home that afternoon, depressed and moody from lack of sleep and no leads, his computer was still connected to the internet where he’d been looking up mentions of Julie Excelsior, when the call came in.
Now, he sat down and stared at the screen with gritty eyes. He’d torture himself with a few more hits and then go over to Hank Jessop’s and turn in his resignation. The county would have to handle this fresh spate of robberies. He was out of his league and he was leaving.
He clicked on the New York Times website and continued to read about the scandal that had broken at Julie’s precinct.
Julie was a cop; not just a cop, a detective. And a good one. He’d read articles about the arrests she’d made, the cases she’d cracked, about her heroism, before he got to the series of articles concerning the bribery charges brought against her partner and several of his associates. But not against Julie. Nowhere did it even mention her in relation to the bribery charges.
He already knew that she would never do anything dishonest, but that was hardly the point.
She must have been laughing at him since the first night he showed up with his unloaded antique .38, incompetent as all hell, and wanting to protect her.
Yeah. It left his ego pretty bruised. That he could take, but if his father was really guilty of a crime, he’d almost led Julie right to his door. Thank God he’d chickened out at the last minute and fudged the last part of his riddle. If he’d told her the bit about thieves, she might be arresting his father this very minute.
But he didn’t really believe that either. Reynolds was a lot of things, many of them not nice, but he wasn’t a crook.
What really hurt was that Julie hadn’t told him the truth. Hadn’t trusted him. Hadn’t cared enough about him to be honest with him. That’s what had left him feeling so battered. He loved her and she didn’t love him, at least not enough.
So he read until the words swam before his eyes and he was filled with self-loathing and anger at Julie. He shut down his computer just as Melanie walked in the door.
“I knocked—twice. You didn’t answer.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“Why aren’t you at Julie’s?” Melanie crossed her arms and glared at him.
“Why should I be?”
Melanie gave him a look. “Besides the fact that you’re fucking her, her house was broken into last night.”
Cas’s stomach clenched. He had to stop himself from jumping out of his chair and rushing over to Excelsior House. “Where did you hear that?”
“The whole town knows. And knows you’re not doing one damn thing about it.”
“She can do fine without me.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“Have you heard she was a cop?”
Melanie’s expression didn’t change, but Cas knew he had surprised her and he doubted if Mel would like the idea, but she surprised him.
“I figured it must be something like that. She’s pretty good at all that self-defense shit.” She uncrossed her arms and took a step toward him. “So she’s a cop. Are you going to let that fuck up everything?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Stop acting like such a dickhead. It’s obvious you got it bad for her. And she’s got it bad for you. I don’t know why. You are such a dweeb.”
“Thank you. I’m sure Julie shares your sentiment.” He walked over to the kitchen, where he started making coffee. What he really needed was sleep, but he knew that would be impossible.
Melanie followed him. “Just swallow it and go see her.”
Ignoring her, Cas poured water into the coffee maker. He reached across her and took a mug from the cupboard. He placed it on the counter.
“She’ll never forgive you if you run out on her again.”
Cas stopped with his hand on the sugar bowl. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do so.”
He turned so fast that he caught her smiling. Any other time, he would have felt gratified; today he just felt pissed off.
“I know all about it. Wes told me.”
“Wes. Told you.”
“Sure. He knew you were probably going to act like a dickhead, so he filled me in on the background.”
“If he weren’t dead, I’d kill him,” said Cas.
“Not funny.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting you were his friend, too.”
Melanie quirked one shoulder, brushing his concern away. “No big deal. I gotta go. Just stop acting like an idiot, okay?”
“I’ll try,” said Cas.
She slouched off toward the door. When she got there, she said, “Hey.”
Cas looked up. She tossed something at him; he caught it automatically. When she was gone, he looked down. He was holding an orange lollipop.
“Great,” he said and tossed it in the trash.
Julie sat in the Beetle outside the library. It was still an hour before closing and she had some serious research to do. If Cas wouldn’t help her figure out the riddle, then the Web would. She scribbled in her notebook, trying to reconstruct the exact words Wes had written. “In marble halls ... soft as silk ...” She tapped her pen on the page. “A golden apple lies within.” And then Cas’s part. Something about no door or was it a lock ... something ... gold.... Something.
She closed her notebook and returned it to her purse. That ought to be enough to get a few hits. She got out of the car and went up the library steps.
Inside, the air was cold except for a halo of warmth cast by a space heater around the circulation desk. Emily Patterson looked up from a copy of the Ex Falls Gazette and smiled. Then she saw Julie and the smile dimmed.
“May I help you?”
Guess I’m not her favorite person. No surprise there. Julie had seen the way Emily looked at Cas the night of the Dance. Her and quite a few others. The town Don Juan. The jerk. “Yes,” said Julie. “So they’re still printing the Gazette.”
The librarian blinked several times. “Every two weeks. More or less. This is the library copy. Would you like to see it?” She began to fold the newspaper.
“No thanks, I came to use your internet connection.”
“The computer’s over there.” Emily stood up, leaned over the top of the circulation desk, and pointed to an ancient Compaq. “Do you need help getting connected?”
“Thanks, Emily,” said Julie. “I think I know what to do.”
The librarian nodded, looked as if she were going to speak, then sat down. “Just ask if you need help.”
Julie nodded and headed for the computer.
After what seemed an eon, she was finally connected. She typed in the first line of the riddle. She got over three hundred hits. She clicked on the first. And there was her riddle on a Victorian parlor games and conundrums site.
In marble halls as white as milk, lined with skin as soft as silk, within a fountain crystal clear, a golden apple does appear. Eureka. She grabbed her pencil to write Cas’s part of the riddle. No doors there are in this stronghold, yet thieves break in and steal the gold. What? She peered at the lines. Cas hadn’t said anything about thieves. She would have remembered that.
Julie stared at the screen. Thieves. And just where was Cas while she had been at the Roadhouse? Doing a little B and E at Excelsior House? Because he thought she was holding out on him?
Julie clicked on the Answer icon. It took another eterni
ty for the page to appear. And at last the words: An egg.
Julie leaned back in her chair. The answer was an egg. A fucking egg. She’d eaten a dozen since she’d been here. And they weren’t holding any treasure.
She fed coins into the printer and printed out the page. Then she went back to the desk. “Thanks, Emily. I’m finished.”
Emily nodded, then looked up. “There’s something in here about you.”
Julie looked at the Gazette. “Me?”
“Yeah. It’s in the Excelsior Examiner, the gossip column.” She pushed the paper toward Julie and pointed to a place halfway down the page.
A description of the Candy Apple Dance naming all the Queen hopefuls and a full description of the decorations. A few arcane sentences about people that made no sense to Julie, and then: “Julie Excelsior, only living relative of Wesley Excelsior, was looking sophisticated in a black knit sheath.”
Hmmm, thought Julie, feeling more kindly toward the writer. “She is the sole heir to what is believed to be an extensive estate. She and Cas Reynolds were looking very happy together. Could the Reynolds-Excelsior feud be ending at last?”
Julie pushed the paper away. Extensive estate. That’s all she needed: to be hit on for contributions by everyone in town. And when Reynolds read the part about Cas and her—she shuddered to think what he might do.
She handed the paper back to Emily. “I’m glad they liked my dress, but they got it really wrong about the inheritance.”
“Aren’t you rich?”
“‘Fraid not,” said Julie.
“What about you and Cas?”
“Just friends.”
“Oh,” said Emily, looking brighter.
Julie left the library on a slow seethe. She didn’t know whether to be angrier over the speculation that she was rich or the innuendo that she was going to marry Cas. God, the men in her life. Donald, the bribe taker; Cas, the cheater.
It wouldn’t hurt her reputation to be thought of as rich. It would serve the town right for being mistaken about her so many years before. But Cas... .
“He cheated,” she told Smitty as she marched into the parlor and threw herself in the wing chair. Smitty sat attentively at her feet while she quoted the new lines. She frowned. Thieves.
Was it a warning? Or an incentive? Or something that had already happened? An idea slowly began to take shape.
She jumped up, walked to the window, and looked out. Then she turned and leaned against the windowsill. “Listen to this. Wes leaves me everything, but there’s no money. Maybe he didn’t hide it. Maybe someone stole it.” She started pacing. “So he poses a riddle that will bring me back here and what? Find the perps? Bring them to justice? He knew I was a cop. Hmmmm. And he gave Cas half because ... he wanted him to help me? Unless it was a warning to Cas, and not me. Wes told me revenge was mine. Did he mean against Cas?”
Cas had arrived in Ex Falls four months before her. He might have stolen Wes’s money. Or at least decided to look for it himself. Hell, he might have even prevented Wes from sending her the letter before he died.
She sank back down in the wing chair. “We don’t know anything about him, do we, Smitty? Except that he’s good in bed.”
Smitty whined.
“Okay. Irrelevant.” She sighed. “Hell, he might be a crook, but I don’t want to exact revenge, and I don’t want to carry on the feud. I just want ...” She lapsed into silence. What she thought she wanted and what she could have were two different things and it was beginning to look like they always would be.
She felt Smitty nudge her leg, then he dropped something in her lap. She looked down; the deflated whoopee cushion lay across her thigh. She picked it up. “Sort of like my ego,” she said and hugged it to her chest. “Okay, Wes. Whatever you want. Though you could have just said so instead of sending me on this wild goose chase. I might be finished by now and on my way ... home.”
Right. She had no home. Unless home was here.
When Julie finished feeding the chickens that evening, she stood in the yard, studying the house. It looked different today, just a dilapidated old house. The turret was crooked and the windows were just plain glass. The yard was pockmarked and the shrubs spindly. And Julie realized she had begun to see the house as it once had been. Bright with fresh paint, the yard surrounded by flowering shrubs. the stained glass windows bathing the rooms in prisms of color.
No color there now. No Wes. No future. It was time to go.
The back of her neck prickled and she turned around. She could have sworn someone was watching her, but there was no one there. She stood for a few more minutes scanning the yard and the trees in the distance.
“I’m going nuts,” she told Smitty and went inside. But she kept making spot checks through the window during the evening and watched at her bedroom window long after she turned out the lights that night. She couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was out there. Watching her, waiting for something.
Cas inspected the Roadhouse parking lot for Julie’s car. When he didn’t see it, he parked his truck and went inside.
Tilda shook her head when she saw him coming. Tonight her hair had a pink streak through the maroon.
“What?” asked Cas as he sat down.
“It’s like Miss Lonelyhearts around here,” she said and handed him a beer.
“What?” said Cas.
“What are you doing here? Can’t you get a date?” She leaned on her elbows and rested her chin on her fists. “Huh?”
“Lay off, Tilda. I’ve had a rough day.”
“Let’s see. Alice Poole should be in soon. They usually come here after the bowling league finishes. Want me to ask her for you?”
Cas picked up his beer; considered throwing it at her, but drank instead. “You know, Tilda, there’s a bar over in Henryville that serves microbrewery beer.”
Tilda laughed. “Then you could keep Henley and Bo company.”
“Finally kicked them out?”
“Yep. Me and trusty Rusty.” She glanced down under the bar.
“Do not bring that thing out. I don’t want to know about it. What inspired you to finally get rid of them?”
“Henley was hitting on Julie again the other night.”
“Oh. Did she deck him?” asked Cas sourly.
Tilda leaned back. “So that’s it. Feeling a little threatened, are we? Worried that she’s tougher than you are?”
“She’s a goddamn cop, Tilda.”
“So?”
Cas looked up from his beer and frowned at her. “You knew?”
“Yeah.”
“How come I just figured it out?”
Tilda winked at him. “Love is blind, I guess.”
Chapter 21
Julie awoke several times during the night to find Smitty at the window, looking out. And as soon as she opened the kitchen door the next morning, he raced up the hill, pissed on the juniper bush and began to snuffle around the shed. He barked. Julie veered over to take a look.
A hole had been started and abandoned.
“Not yours, I take it,” she said and received a look of disdain. “Just stay away from it. You do not want to tangle with a skunk or raccoon.”
She lifted the latch of the mesh gate to the henhouse and Smitty shot past her to begin sniffing around the base of the gazebo.
“Now what?” Julie followed him over and found another hole, bigger and deeper than the first. And she remembered the Pliney boys saying a fox might have gotten Ernestine. A fox hadn’t gotten her, but something was definitely trying to get to her chickens. Fortunately the ground was hard around the building and it thwarted his efforts. But he’d be back.
She counted heads as the chickens filed out of the gazebo, checked on Bill and Hilary, then went outside to stand vigil over the rest of the flock, though she was pretty sure foxes only came out at night.
As soon as they returned to the coop, she put in a call to Maude. “I think I have a fox,” Julie told her.
“I’ll b
e right over.”
Maude showed up twenty minutes later and Julie took her up to show her the holes.
“Doesn’t look like fox to me,” said Maude. “Don’t know what it looks like.” She began checking the perimeter of the mesh fence; Julie followed behind her. “Didn’t get in this way. You didn’t leave the gate open?”
Julie shook her head.
“Didn’t think so. Weird. I brought some sheets of tin to cover the ground around the gazebo, it should keep whatever it is out.” Maude shook her head and Julie followed her back down the hill.
It took both of them to carry each unwieldy sheet up the hill. They laid them around the foundation of the henhouse and weighted them down with stones.
“That should do it,” said Maude, brushing off her hands. “If you have any more problems let me know.”
“Thanks,” said Julie. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Love to, but I’ve got chores at home. They’re predicting a snow storm for the end of the week. Make sure to keep the generator clear. You don’t want the chickens to suffocate or freeze.”
Julie walked her back to the truck.
“Haven’t seen Cas lately,” said Maude. “How’s he doing?”
Julie looked past her toward the orchard. “I don’t know. He seems to have lost the need for my companionship.”
“What you mean is you two had a fight.”
“Not exactly, but he cheated on our deal to share Wes’s riddles. I found out about it. He must be staying away so he won’t have to confess.”
Maude, who had just climbed into her truck, climbed out again. “Why would he cheat?”
“I don’t know.”
“So did you have any success?”
“Solving the riddle? The answer is an egg.”
Maude smiled.
“I don’t guess you have any ideas about what Wes really meant.”
“Not me,” said Maude. “That’s one thing I refused to share with him.”
Julie flashed on the drawer in Wes’s bedroom and bit back a smile.
“Told him I didn’t want to be tempted to tell anybody the answer or be accused of anything nefarious.”