by Misty Simon
“Um, no?” Stupid lilt at the end of my sentence, on what should not have been a question.
He shook his head with his hands on his hips. “The winner of the tournament gets top dollar for supplying Jerry with tomatoes for the month, then having the tomatoes stewed and made into his famous Beef and Barley for the rest of the year. It’s thousands of dollars. Thousands, Ivy, and it could be exactly what I need to put in my own greenhouse. Irma never wanted for anything in the last twenty years. Yes, the contest started out as a Fair Day kind of thing, but then Jerry opened his restaurant, and it became so much more than just a good tomato. It became being comfortable for the rest of the year and wanting it all over again every year.”
“I had no idea.” I was baffled, but that was not unusual. “I really had no idea. Well, then, let’s get home and think our way through this judge thing, board up the house like it’s Fort Knox and the tomatoes are gold bars, and make sure no one sabotages your chance at making me a kept woman.”
He ran a hand along my neck and settled it just inches above where I wished it would go exploring if we were in a more private place. “My chances of tomato perfection would increase tenfold if I could just have a gnome or two back in the house.”
I stepped back. “Absolutely not.” Had to draw the line somewhere.
****
When we returned to the house, I took a long, hot shower and then called in to Charlie to make sure everything was running as it should. He said that Rukey had been in for a moment, but Charlie had scared him off by offering him our latest sale on men’s thongs. Apparently, Debbie had also been there, and she told Rukey that our business was off limits. Woohoo!
I was clean, happy, and ready to dig into this wholeheartedly. I snuck back into the bedroom and pulled out an envelope that I definitely should not have and should not have taken.
When I said earlier that I put everything back where it belonged at Mac’s carriage house, I might have been exaggerating a little. The thought of that guy at the mailbox still haunted me, and that he should not have been there and should not have been collecting mail that didn’t belong to him reminded me of the way Pickle Guy had been putting flyers in mailboxes even though it was illegal. It got me to thinking about other illegal things.
Ben had gone to work to get his column in on time and to also write a piece about us being chased by a speedboat. It might be local interest.
It might also have someone coming out of the woodwork who might have seen the whole thing go down, or someone who knew the boat.
So I had time to go through my secret stash that Ben would not be pleased I had.
It was only a few things, really. The one I was looking for was the indecent picture. I looked at it, placing my hands over the exposed body parts so that I could concentrate solely on the only face in the photo. And lo and behold, I knew I had seen that face before but couldn’t place it. It was Mailbox Guy.
I really had to start getting some names around here so I didn’t end up with too many guys and not enough real clues.
So what did I do now? Was I going to go tell Ben I had the picture? Try to cut the picture up so just his head showed? I most certainly was not going to walk around with a naked picture in my possession and flash it to anyone I came across in hopes someone might know who it was. If Officer Rukey was looking for a violation from me, that would certainly be a real one.
In the end, I realized I had to confess to Ben that I had the picture. Not all the stuff, because I would be putting that back at my earliest convenience, but definitely the picture.
It was with heavy feet that I entered the news building, but then I realized this could be really big. What if Mac had been blackmailing this guy, whoever he was, over the picture, and he’d finally demanded too much and got killed in the process? Maybe he was a master wasp keeper. I had heard of people being able to get flies to do specific things with music. Why not wasps?
I walked down the hall to Ben’s office, passing by Harlow’s office, where Chloe was nowhere in sight. This was a good thing, because I didn’t want to have her overhear that I had trespassed in her uncle’s house. But I was curious to question her about the guy and how they knew each other, or if they even did, since he’d called her Carmen and her name was definitely Chloe.
I tentatively tapped on Ben’s door, rehearsing how the picture had fallen accidentally into my purse and how when I was looking for a hair tie, I’d come across it and remembered seeing it in the carriage house, and maybe it was fate that it had come into my possession, because it was the Mail Guy.
Not that I actually went with that when Ben yelled out for me to come in.
I did start off by placing myself in his lap and cooing at him about how awesome he was. Which was probably more transparent than if I had tried the lie.
“What did you do?” he asked.
I tried the affronted look, and that wasn’t flying, either, so I sighed and handed over the picture.
“Just look at the face and tell me if it looks familiar. Don’t look at the body parts, just the face.”
“That’s a little difficult when his dingaling is a-dangling along right in the front of the picture.”
I covered up the other parts of the picture with a note card and he was better able to see.
“He’s familiar.” He drew the words out in that way he had when he was thinking hard. “Very familiar.”
I couldn’t wait any longer for him to figure it out. “It’s the guy from the mailbox last night.”
He rocked back in his chair. “Jesus, it is. But you know who else he is?”
I was almost afraid to ask, but when has that ever stopped me? “Who?”
“Standford Jarius Moorehead the Fourth.”
I felt like that should have meant something to me, but I shrugged until Ben told me the story.
****
The Moorehead family had brought horses into our little spit of county generations ago and had bred some of the most amazing stock ever to race across the plains of the United States of America. But then all their success was wiped out with one generation of dishonest and money-hungry people who’d bred wrong and injected the horses with all kinds of chemicals to get them to run faster and harder and win. In the end, it killed the horses, and though the name was still one with a rich history and was revered in some circles, there was no more money to back up the prestige.
And then along came Standford. He’d been an okay student and a mediocre rider, but he could charm the birds out of the trees, and that’s exactly what he did to the last remaining Brighton girl almost thirty years ago when he wooed her for her parents’ new money in an effort to regain his family’s status.
Especially since his only cousin was Pickle Guy, who grew grass for a meager living.
Most people could tell it wasn’t a good marriage from the beginning, but the story was old—old family name marrying new family money, and one richer than the other. This one, though, had the woman holding the purse strings very tightly.
And so the rumors began that Ford—as he preferred to be called—became a ladies’ man while Francesca looked on, not interested in her husband, only in his name and the circles it could get her into.
Ben and I looked at each other over the photo.
“You know, that birthmark could be significant right there on the inside of her…”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, but we can’t exactly ask all the ladies to lift their skirts so we can identify her. And even though it’s nearly bathing suit weather, I am not going to be found standing on the beach and be accused of being a crotch watcher.”
Ben sat back in his chair with his fingers steepled under his chin. I had given up sitting in his lap some time ago to pace back and forth.
“How are we going to find out?”
A knock sounded on the door, and Harlow let himself in without waiting for anyone to acknowledge him. He threw a folder on Ben’s desk. “I need more concrete evidence on this boat before
I can run that. I can’t just tell the story that way. It seems too fantastic and like you’re thinking about writing some kind of serialized novel.”
His orders given, Harlow turned to me, kissed me on the cheek, and then got a glimpse of the picture in my hand. I wasn’t fast enough to whip it behind my back before he made a grab for it.
“Who is this guy? I feel like I know him, and I’d surely like to know if someone else is banging my girlfriend.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Are you serious?” Ben asked in a tone that very closely mirrored the one that was sounding off in my brain. I think we’ll call it incredulity. (Good word, but oh, my Lord!)
“Yes, I’m serious. See that birthmark right there, the one that looks like Texas? Well I am very familiar with where exactly that is, and what it does to her when you touch it.”
“Too much information. Way, way, way too much information,” I squeaked.
“Oh, come on, Ivy, surely you have a spot or two that Ben has found over the years that makes you scream.”
“Not your business. What is your business, though, is that we want to know if this is definitely her.”
“Without a doubt.” He looked again. “And weirdly enough, I haven’t seen her in two days, when normally she’s all but sitting on my desk every minute of every day. Maybe I’ve been replaced by this oldster.”
He wasn’t much older than Harlow, but I was not going to be the one to point that out. Right now my brain was trying to wrap itself around the fact that Ford should have known her name was Chloe. Was he deliberately trying to mislead us? Or maybe he really didn’t know who she was. And who had taken such a compromising picture? Had the two people featured in the picture known about it at the time? The angle was weird, and I was pretty sure it couldn’t have been done with one of those selfie sticks, but how else would they have gotten that shot? And, lastly, why on earth was it in Mac’s carriage house stash?
The questions just kept piling up, but I had no answers to go along with them.
****
Another trip to Mac’s house. I was feeling confident we might be able to get somewhere this time. We were looking for Chloe. She hadn’t told Harlow she was going anywhere—she had just disappeared. If something was going on, and the mail guy was getting rid of people connected with that picture, then Chloe could be next, or maybe she already was a victim. We wouldn’t know unless we looked, and something was telling me to go have a look at Mac’s house again.
Of course, it’s not always good to listen to that something, since sometimes it leads you into bad situations.
As soon as we parked at the end of the street again, we strolled along the road. I was getting more exercise in this week than I’d had in years, and surprisingly today was not as hard as yesterday had been. Go me.
We were just about to turn into the driveway to at least take a peek in the windows when a car roared up behind us. I wasn’t sure who I thought it might be, but I surely wasn’t expecting to be thrown on the ground and my wrists zip-tied behind me before I could draw a breath to scream. Rukey was in fine form and had Ben on the ground, too. He was a one-man attack force.
“I’ve got you for trespassing, you criminals.” The relish in his voice could have drowned a hot dog.
We were docile enough as he shoved us into the back of his patrol car. Ben told me to be quiet while Rukey ran around the front of the car to hop into his seat and put in a call to the station that he was coming in with criminals.
At that point I couldn’t keep quiet. “Help!” I yelled. “Get Bartley and tell her to meet us there! I’m afraid for my life!”
Rukey snapped off the radio and turned to glare at me with daggers in his eyes that were so sharp I wasn’t sure they couldn’t have sliced a tomato right in half if thrown from twenty yards.
Hopefully we’d actually be driven to the station now instead of onto some back road and left in a ditch to die. Shit.
****
He did drive us to the station, but he took the long route through the woods, which made me almost pee my pants a few times.
That was one time I probably really should have kept my mouth shut.
However, when we got there, Debbie actually was there with her hands on her hips and a look that was fiercer than the one Rukey had thrown over his shoulder at us in the car.
“Get them in a room, and then you are relieved from duty for the rest of the day. I have put in a call to Jameson. He will be here tomorrow to deal with you. You are not to return to work, and you will make no arrests, or bother a single person, until that man comes in to deal with you and your stupidity.”
“I don’t take orders from a woman,” he said, all snarly and quite honestly very stupidly, as far as I was concerned.
“That is the last one you’ll take from me.” She turned her head. “Officer Jared, in here now. Strip and lock.”
What the hell was strip and lock?
It was not long until I knew exactly what it was. Jared rushed Rukey, took him down to the ground, stripped his uniform and all his accoutrements off without a single word. Then again, Rukey was saying enough for both of them. He was left in a set of boxers with smiley faces on them and a white undershirt. And then the lock part came in when he was escorted to a cell and thrown a pair of blue scrubs.
“Now you’ll sit there until Jameson gets here. I don’t want to hear one single word out of you unless it is prefaced by ‘Please, ma’am.’ ”
She turned her back on him, then walked to the front again to stand with us and heaved out a sigh that was so big I was surprised it didn’t ruffle my bangs.
“Now, let’s go into Interview Room A, which is as far away as possible from that mongrel. We’re going to talk about why you were out taking a stroll by Mac’s house when you had to drive there to get out and stroll. There are ten other miles of places you could just as easily walk without setting foot near the dead man’s place.”
****
The chair was hard under my butt, and I couldn’t find a comfortable spot no matter how I tried. Every other time I’d talked to Debbie, even about murder investigation stuff, we had usually either been in my house or somewhere else that had comfortable chairs and no two-way mirrors. I had no idea who could be on the other side of that mirror.
It might even be Jared.
At least there wasn’t a second detective, or any kind of cop, in here, so I knew that today Debbie would be playing the part of the good cop and the bad cop.
“What the hell were you guys doing there? I have a headache, the department is falling apart, and every time I turn around I have to get you out of some scrape or another with that asshole.”
I looked to Ben, and he minutely shook his head, but I wasn’t listening.
“That asshole has been following us around for days, trying to catch us doing something, anything, wrong. I don’t know what stick is up his ass, but he is not a good addition to our town. Where did you get him anyway?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m not at liberty to say, and I’m the one asking the questions here.”
Not quite bad cop, but not quite good, either.
“Ask away then, but first you might want to see this.” I was taking a huge risk, but I had to if we were going to get out of here and maybe save Chloe. Who knew where she could be? If my theory was right she could be in some serious trouble from Ford.
I put the picture down on the table, and Ben tried to snatch it back.
“What is this?” Debbie was faster and grabbed it first. I took her through us seeing the guy at the mailbox; I left out the part about how I got the picture and threw her own words about not being at liberty when she asked me where I got it. I laid out a possible blackmail scheme. She listened, I’ll give her that, before she started yelling at me.
But in the end she had nothing concrete to keep us on and let us go. I tried not to look at Rukey sitting in that cell in his blue scrubs and not smirk. At least I averted my head before I let the s
mile form on my lips. He could rot there, for all I cared, and I was not going to feel one whit of remorse for putting him there. He was a menace to our society, worse than I was. I did not want him anywhere near this place when my kids came back. God knows he would probably find something wrong with them playing in the back yard and have Child Protective Services out to take them away from us.
It might be that he hated us for no reason, but I felt like there was something more under those heated looks and the way he followed us around. There had to be. I’d never seen him before, and I really hoped at this point to never see him again.
****
Walking into our house after retrieving the car from Mac’s neighborhood, I collapsed onto the couch. I was tired, I was confused, and quite frankly I wanted my routine back. I would even sacrifice the rest of my vacation gladly for this to all be over and move forward with my life. I still didn’t know what made Rukey so fixated on us, but it had to be something.
I asked Ben about it.
“I’m going to do some research on him. There is something definitely off there. It had occurred to me that he was on the scene of that crime awfully fast when you found Mac dead. How did he know to be there? We’ve never had officers continuously patrol like he’s doing. It was almost like he knew.”
“So you think he might have been the killer?” Wouldn’t that be handy, to already have the bad guy behind bars and not have to have my normal final confrontation before we brought in the bad guy?
“I don’t know what to think, but there are too many questions and not enough answers.”
“I was just thinking that earlier.”
He smiled at me. “Of course you were, since our great minds think alike. Why don’t you take a nap before we get back to this? Hopefully by then I’ll have some more info, and we’ll have something to work on. I’m expecting a call from Harlow any time now. He was going to go look for Chloe to see if he can find her. I’m going to do my research, and then I’ll run over to talk to Thelma Boden. She’s the new judge. I want to run something by her and the other judges.”