by Pamela Tracy
Annie stuffed her hands in her back pockets. He was tall. Too tall. She had always had a weakness for tall men. Tall meant she could add a little heel to her sandals. Surely the urge to touch his hair stemmed from her desire to straighten up his clinic, not straighten him up.
Yes, that was it. The need to clean up, to help mankind, the cluttered and the tall.
Only Joe wasn’t looking for help.
She looked from him to his dog. “Are dogs allowed in the restaurant?”
“No, he’ll wait out in the truck.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to leave him here?”
“My last dog would have stayed behind, but Jacko and me, well, we’re a team. About the only time I leave him home is when I go to church.”
“So, you even take him on dates?”
The corner of Joe’s mouth twitched, and Annie had an uncomfortable feeling he was about to laugh.
“Why?” she persisted.
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you always take him with you? Isn’t it an inconvenience?”
“He’s good company. I don’t call that inconvenient. Besides, he cries when I leave him behind.”
“He cries? You’re kidding!”
“No. I’m not sure who had him before me. I found him in the middle of the road during one of my early morning calls.” As if remembering, Joe put his hand on top of Jacko’s head. “He’d been hit by a car. I got him back here, examined him, and found out he had a couple of broken ribs. It didn’t take but a couple of weeks to figure out that he didn’t have an owner.”
Annie looked at Jacko. The dog smiled at her.
Right, as if dogs could smile.
Joe continued. “He didn’t know how to play. I’d never met a dog who didn’t know how to play. And he was scared. He stayed scared for a long time.”
Jacko sat at Joe’s feet, still smiling but now with his head cocked. Annie just knew that if the dog could talk, he’d say, “Me, scared? Nah, never.”
Joe chuckled as he walked to his truck, opened the door, and let his dog jump in. Quickly, Jacko settled in his spot by the passenger-side window and waited for Joe.
“He’s not scared anymore,” Joe said. “Why should he be?”
“And you taught him how to play?” Annie already knew the answer to that.
“Sometimes,” Joe said as slid in beside his dog, “I think he’s taught me more than I’ve taught him.”
Annie slid behind the wheel of her rental and headed for the café. After Joe pulled in behind her and opened the window a bit for his dog, he exited the truck and she followed him inside the café. Not only did it have atmosphere, noise, and dead animal heads, but it was close to a train track. Marlee, the Dalmatian owner, was sitting at the counter along with her daughter, who pointed at Annie’s wrists and gave a grin. What had to be Marlee’s twin led them to a booth, and after a lengthy discussion with Joe about ear mites and how to get her cat to actually swallow the medicine, Missy, who looked more than tired, took their order, promising Annie a fresh cup of coffee.
Annie leaned forward and whispered, “Why does she look so sad?”
Keeping his voice low, Joe said, “The whole town wants to know the answer to that question. She moved back to town awhile back, came to work for her sister, and pretty much forgot how to smile.”
Annie didn’t have time to ask anything else, because a burly man in a police uniform plopped down next to Joe. Annie gave up all hope of bargaining with the enemy. She was clearly outnumbered.
Joe didn’t look all that welcoming as he introduced the newcomer. “This is our sheriff. Steven Webber.”
“Good to meet you finally, Annie Jamison,” Sheriff Webber said. “That’s quite an ad your mother put in our little newspaper. Everyone’s talking about it. Has she been finding lost things all her life?”
Annie squirmed, looking around for Missy and wishing she could get a shot of caffeine before being interrogated. “No, this is a fairly new adventure, perfectly harmless.”
The sheriff looked quizzical, a look so purely cop that Annie wanted to laugh. But now wasn’t the time or place. When she didn’t say anything else, he leaned forward. “She’s not really an armchair detective, by the way. If she were, she’d be back in…?”
“Arizona.”
“Yes, that’s where she said she was from.”
“How did your mother wind up putting an ad in our paper here?” Joe asked.
The sheriff settled back, waiting.
The restaurant increased in temperature. The coffee appeared. Annie took a long drink that didn’t make things any better. Her too tight pants pinched. Suddenly an errant pet hair made its presence known right next to her nose, and she needed to sneeze.
Joe didn’t seem at all uncomfortable. Missy showed up at their table and gave Joe his salad. He looked at both the sheriff and Annie and then bowed his head in silent prayer.
“I’ll have the chicken-fried steak special,” the sheriff told Missy the next time she passed by.
“The order’s already in,” Missy said.
“I’m not sure,” Annie admitted, taking the conversation back to her mother. “She has a couple of friends, classmates really, who formed the armchair detective business with her. They helped find this case, I’m sure.”
“What friends? Are they calling themselves detectives, and are they licensed?” Joe’s face once again showed the dark look from yesterday when he dropped her off all alone in front of the B&B.
The sheriff, too, looked like he was drawing his own dark conclusions. He leaned comfortably in the booth, but Annie wasn’t fooled. This man, who appeared so jovial, wasn’t as receptive to having an armchair detective in town as he’d sounded to be on the phone.
The meeting she’d arranged with Joe wasn’t quite going the way she planned. Instead, it looked like it was two against one.
She didn’t like the odds and suddenly felt hesitant to answer.
“And,” Joe added, “why choose a town as small as Bonner Springs?”
Finally, something she could relate to. “The locale surprised me, too.”
Missy placed a salad in front of the sheriff, who gave her a wink as he asked for more iced tea.
“Whereabouts in Arizona are you from?” the sheriff asked.
“I grew up in Tucson but was working in Casa Grande.”
“Your sisters planning on coming down, too?”
Annie felt Joe’s gaze. How this must look to him. If the sheriff was suspicious of Annie’s family, no wonder Joe had booted her from his truck.
“Mr. Webber, I came here to get my mother and take her home. My father died recently, and she’s just not recovering from it. She’s not out to steal money or anything else. I can assure you of that.”
“How recently?” the sheriff asked.
“Just over a year. We lost him to cancer.”
“You got identification, Annie Jamison?” the sheriff wanted to know.
Annie reached for her purse.
Joe’s hand stopped her. His palm felt warm on the top of her fingers. “Steve, it’s all right. I’m taking care of this.”
“You sure?” Sheriff Webber said.
Joe hesitated, just for a moment, before saying, “I’m sure.”
The sheriff grinned. “Good. That means you’ll be staying around for a while, Annie Jamison. We just might get to know each other a bit.”
Joe answered before Annie had a chance.
“Annie’s going to be busy helping her mother at my dad’s place. I doubt she’ll have time to get to know you.”
Annie’s mouth opened. If this were any other day, any other place, she’d have been annoyed at his medieval behavior, but today she was in the middle of a strange town where the only person she really knew was her mother.
Who was just as vulnerable as Annie.
Chapter Seven
The sheriff’s phone chose that moment to beep. Joe and Annie barely had time to give each other a do-we-know-wha
t-we’re-doing, deer-in-the-headlight kind of look before both of their cell phones sounded, too.
Missy delivered their food just then. Great, everything would be cold when they finally got to eat.
“I know why Mom picked Sunflower, Kansas,” Beth announced without so much as a hello.
“She didn’t pick Sunflower, she’s in Bonner Springs.” Annie pushed her wilted salad aside, appetite gone. The last bit of her coffee was cold.
“Same thing, just next door. I’m on the college campus, standing right outside Mom’s criminal justice class.”
Annie checked her watch and calculated the time. The class should have started twenty-five minutes ago. She asked, “Why are you outside instead of inside?”
“The professor knows his stuff. He started with a ‘You can’t stay here because of insurance purposes’ and ended with ‘I’m going to call security.’”
“I take it he wasn’t afraid of you.”
“Not a bit. Luckily, the two ladies we met at Mom’s were fashionably late. I got to talk to them before they went in.”
“Okay,” Annie said, “so how did Mom wind up in Bonner Springs?”
“Wendy and Alice are from Bonner Springs. Seems the Armchair Detectives decided to advertise on a small scale. They each chose one locale to focus on. The laptop guy is from Elkhorn, Nebraska. He advertised there. Mom, it appears, put an ad in one of the papers that goes out in Sun City.”
“Mom’s not from Sun City.”
“I know that. It’s a retirement community and she knows a lot of people there, but that’s beside the point. The older sister, Alice, still gets the Bonner Springs newspaper. It’s a weekly. All it took was a phone call to a personal friend and their ad was placed. I don’t think they were expecting a client quite so quickly.”
“Alice is from here? What’s her last name?”
“Her last name is Hicks. And her sister Wendy’s last name is St. Arnold.”
“There are a lot of Hickses here.” Annie closed her eyes, trying to think. Opening them again, she looked at the sheriff, who seemed to have no problem eating and talking at the same time. He now sat at an angle, turned away from her. But she could tell nothing got past him, certainly not her words. His phone conversation appeared interesting, too, at least the last tidbit. “I don’t care if he’s a hundred and two, tell him it’s against the law.”
Joe didn’t sit at an angle and wasn’t trying to hide his phone conversation. He had a perplexed look on his face, but Annie couldn’t tell if it had to do with the problem he was solving—“The bluejay is attacking your window because he sees his reflection and thinks another male is in his territory”—or with what he could overhear from her end.
She lowered her voice. “Why didn’t Alice and Wendy come instead of Mother? After all, they know all these people.”
“Seems that’s the problem. They know everybody. Wendy—the one we spoke to, the one who said Mom was in Sunflower, Kansas—wanted to come, said they’d have a great time visiting all their friends and family, including a grandchild. The more I talk to her the more I realize she only has one foot in the world of reality. Alice, the older sister, seems pretty coherent, agreed. They’d have a marvelous time, but that wasn’t what the client paid for. She also said it would be a conflict of interest.”
“Not very professional.”
“No,” Beth agreed, “and guess what else isn’t professional?” She didn’t wait for Annie’s response. “They have a one-page, very vague contract—which they won’t let me see—and payment is one-fourth the value of what is retrieved.”
“Yes,” Joe agreed, “male birds have just as many strange habits as do male humans.”
“So, what have you discovered in the land of Oz?”
“I’m at a booth in a restaurant with Max Kelly’s son and the sheriff.”
“Are you in trouble?” Beth’s voice went from businesslike to guarded. Annie might have been the sister who cleaned things up, but Beth was the sister who kept everyone safe. And if Beth knew how cute Joe Kelly was, she’d realize the trouble Annie was in might have more to do with the attraction factor than with the errant mother problem.
“No, but I can’t talk now. I’ll call you later.”
“Are you sure?”
The sheriff was no longer on his phone. He watched Annie.
“I’m very sure.” Ending the call, Annie tried to settle back, eat her food normally, act like nothing bothered her. But never before had she felt so alone. The sheriff didn’t say a word. He, like Annie, waited for Joe to hang up. When Joe finally did, Annie took a deep breath, but before she could say a single word, the sheriff interrupted. “So, you’re acquainted with Alice Hicks. How is that?”
If Beth were here, she’d advise to say nothing.
But Beth wasn’t here, and Annie was of the mind to be honest but only say what she had to. “I’m not acquainted with Alice, not really, or her sister. They’re the classmates I was talking about. I’ve only met them once.”
“Where was that?”
“At my mother’s house.”
“What kind of class were they taking?”
“A criminal justice class, forensics I think, at the local community college. And from that class, they started a business called the Armchair Detectives.” Annie’s voice rose as she started to get a bit excited. “And involved my mother!”
The sheriff handed the waitress his check and money, put his hat back on his head, stood, and sauntered away. Before he got to the front door he turned and added, “Say no more, Miss Annie Jamison. I understand now. Joe, I wish you luck. If Alice and Wendy are connected with this venture, it’s not a con job. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to end pretty.”
The café’s door slammed behind him.
The other customers halfheartedly went back to their meals, and Annie wondered just how much they’d heard. Based on Marlee’s smile, everything.
Leaning forward and keeping her voice low, Annie said, “Just when I think I’m making sense of this, something new happens. My mom is not a detective. She reads cozy mysteries and, yes, a bit of Edgar Allan Poe, I’ll say that, but if she loses something, she’s more likely to go out and buy a new one instead of looking for the old one.”
“Which is probably why she needs money,” Joe stated.
“She doesn’t need money.”
“Then why is she here?”
“To find your dad’s stupid coins.”
“They’re not stupid, and Alice should have told you that.”
“I repeat, I’ve only met Alice once.”
They sat in silence for a while, Annie eating the crackers that came with her wilted, neglected salad and Joe eating a hamburger that had to be cold. He didn’t seem inclined to finish his fries.
Finally, Annie said, “Tell me about Alice, Wendy, and what the sheriff meant by ‘that doesn’t mean it’s going to end pretty.’”
Joe wiped ketchup from the side of his cheek. “What do you already know about the girls?”
“Girls?”
Joe chuckled and visibly relaxed. It was the first time since he’d figured out who she was that he’d let his guard down—at least in her presence. “That’s how my dad, and just about everybody in town who knows them, refers to them. Of course, they left town more than twenty years ago.” He pushed his plate away. The pinched look he’d worn while interrogating her disappeared, replaced with a smile that made him look a bit rascally.
“Alice taught fourth grade at my school. I remember when she took our class to the old one-room school on the outskirts of town. The town had just started expanding it, turning it into a tourist attraction. You should see it now. It has a fake western town and everything. Back then, though, it was just the historic school and an old outdoor bandstand no one was allowed on because it was falling apart. The town was planning to tear it down and build a new one. Apparently, Alice had some fond memories of the bandstand. She decided she wanted a picture with all of us in it. We climbe
d in, it collapsed.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“My friend Kyle got a good-sized bruise on his cheek. Other than that, nothing more than a few splinters.”
“That’s funny, but not enough to make history,” Annie said.
Joe leaned forward. “Instead of telling someone in authority, she got some of the dads—mine included—to go out the next day and rebuild the bandstand. I didn’t get a scratch when the thing fell, but you should have seen what I did to my finger with a hammer.”
“How did the dads do with the rebuilding?”
“Good enough to fool people into thinking that nothing had happened. That weekend, however, the mayor came out to the old school to give a talk. He positioned himself dead center in that old bandstand. It collapsed right as the newspaper photographer took the picture.”
“Did Alice get in trouble?”
“Luckily, the mayor was Wendy’s husband. He was a single male in a household of females—he had daughters and granddaughters. He had a sister-in-law but no brother-in-law. Even their dog was a female. He knew when he was outnumbered.”
Annie decided to look up the picture next time she was in the library. Any event that was remembered for this long was worth investigating.
“That’s not enough to make the sheriff think something’s going to go wrong.”
“All the kids wanted to be in her class. Every year there was something new. She retired the year I had her.”
A man from across the aisle leaned over and said, “The year I was in Miss Alice’s class, she had everyone bring their bikes to school. She took us out to the playground and we had to ride around and around. When we finished a lap, we had to get off our bike and jump on someone else’s. We did it all morning, always changing bikes and not allowed to ride any of them twice. I rode bikes that were too big for me, too little for me, and one that didn’t have brakes. Then we wrote papers on which bike we thought was the best and why, how much we would pay for it, and who it belonged to, plus how they got it. It’s my favorite school memory.”