A Bad Day for Scandal

by Sophie Littlefield

  Going barefoot might send a message.

  The sort of message she very much wanted to send.

  Stella waited for a moment so her recklessness could sink all the way in, and then she padded out to the kitchen, putting a little shimmy in her step.

  The kitchen was empty.

  Goat was not in any of the chairs. Goat was not leaning rakishly up against the counter, arms crossed, eyebrow lifted. Goat was not getting a beer from the fridge and giving her a devilish grin over his shoulder.

  Goat, Stella discovered after a few moments of searching, was stretched out on the sofa, long legs crossed at the ankles, eyes closed, chest rising and falling gently with the rhythm of deep sleep.

  For a moment, Stella just watched him, reflecting that a man who could fall asleep in your living room after a long evening of socializing and pie eating and kitchen cleaning was a man who was plenty comfortable with you.

  Which was good. Oh, it was very good. Even when you might have been hoping for a different sort of conclusion to the evening.

  Goat stirred in his sleep, and Stella had the fleeting suspicion that he could sense her hungry gaze on him, and she blinked rapidly a few times to make sure that it didn’t look like she’d been letting herself check out every lanky, muscular inch of him, maybe letting her tired eyes rest a little extra long around his midsection, where crisp cotton khaki covered up features that had been the subject of her frequent daydreaming.

  Goat opened his eyes and yawned, a long luxurious yawn accompanied by a bit of stretching and the pop of a shoulder. As he sat up, he rubbed his eyes and gave her a sideways grin. “My, my, Stella Hardesty,” he said. “You look like a little springtime blossom there.”

  Stella glanced down at the front of her lounge top, which had fanciful flowers embroidered in a loopy scroll. “Is that a good thing?”

  “Oh, heck yeah,” Goat said. “All fresh-like. And I bet you smell good, too. Whyn’cha come on over here and let me get to findin’ out.”

  So Stella went. It turned out that the space under Goat’s long arm, well-muscled from his hobby of rowing himself around in a kayak on the sparkling waters of the Lake of the Ozarks, a habit that certainly gave him a fine hard sinewy wingspan, was a perfect fit for her. As she leaned against his chest and he tugged her in so she was snuggled up close, she almost felt … little, like he’d said. Petite.

  “Oh,” she murmured happily into the Tide-detergent-and-man scent of his pressed cotton shirt. It felt delightful. She peeked down at his broad hand resting lightly on her knee and just for kicks laid her own hand on top of it. Yup. It looked positively dainty there. She couldn’t help a satisfied little giggle.

  “What’s so funny, Dusty?” Goat growled into her hair.

  “Nothing, just, you’re so—I mean, you’re a big man, Goat, and next to you I feel…”

  Safe. Protected. Cherished.

  “Defenseless?” Goat suggested, and the growl got even lower and turned into a sort of purr, the kind of purr the most badass lion in the jungle would make before gobbling up the rabbit trembling in his paws, and it gave Stella a series of goose-bumpy shivers that turned into zingers when Goat shifted her onto his lap like she weighed no more than a sack of feathers. “Like you couldn’t stop me from having my way with you if I felt like it?”

  Stella giggled again as he turned her so that she was looking down at him over a space of a few inches. “Um. Maybe. A little.”

  And then she was kissing the man. She was kissing Goat Jones in her living room, sitting on his lap like a schoolgirl at a football game, and he was sliding his hands down her back, over her hips, drawing her closer against him, and when she was pretty sure she’d run entirely out of breath but didn’t much care, when she thought she might go ahead and asphyxiate happily and expire right there, his hands found the hem of her T-shirt and slipped up under the hem and they were warm and rough against her back and she felt the trace of every callus, every work-roughened fingertip, and she kissed him harder and made a little sound that was kind of the girl version of his low-down hungry growl and then the phone rang.

  Not her phone. Goat’s phone, which she felt in his pocket, pressed in the nether region between his hips and hers, and which he reached for by sliding his hand in between them and sending one last emergency flare up along the nerve endings of her skin, rang the old-fashioned way, in a businesslike series of rings.

  “This is Goat,” he said gruffly, flipping the thing open, and though he made no move to remove Stella from his lap, she slid regretfully off him and rearranged herself awkwardly by tugging her various hems and waistbands back into place and patting at her hair.

  She was pretty sure she was blushing.

  “Uh-huh,” he muttered. “Where? You don’t say! And he was sober?… How bad, would you say? Okay … okay.”

  The conversation went on a bit, Goat asking questions and muttering terse answers, before he finally snapped his phone shut and regarded her with a mixture of regret and exasperation.

  “This was really fun,” he said, and Stella sighed. She wanted to tell him not to worry about it, not to apologize, because she of all people knew what it was like to get a middle-of-the-night summons. When you were in the justice business, there were plenty of nights when one’s own needs, even a need as pressing as finding out what Goat Jones might be like between the sheets, came second.

  “I had fun, too,” she finally settled on. She stood up briskly and dusted off the front of her pants with short little pats, and put a smile on her face. “You want me to fix you coffee for the road?”

  “No, I’m afraid this is more of an urgent-type situation,” Goat said, shoving the tails of his shirt, which had somehow managed to come loose in all that furious making out, back in place.

  He swung in for a peck, somewhere north of just-friends but way south of the fiery kisses of moments earlier, and made for the door. “Thanks for everything. Whyn’t you see if you can save me any of that delicious pie, and I’ll come back for it tomorrow if I can.”

  Of course, he didn’t say where he was going—much as Stella wouldn’t dream of telling him the addresses or particulars of any of her clients. She understood.

  But there, Stella reflected ten minutes later as she pulled up her fluffy down comforter and snuggled deep down into her flannel sheets, was the problem.

  They were on opposite sides, her and Goat Jones. Doing her job right required a certain amount of fast-talking and double-dealing and sneaking around and rule bending and exception making and creative interpretations of the spirit of the law while occasionally avoiding the letter of the law. For Goat Jones, the boundaries were far more precise. He was a man who believed in duty and order, a man who made pledges and oaths and kept them.

  He was a bad choice, a truly terrible choice, for a vigilante such as herself. And she really had to stop. That was the thought she took to sleep with her, so why did her dreams feature Goat striding around in those just-tight-enough department-issue trousers with that service belt slung low and a look of fierce determination on his face?

  Chapter Six

  The lovely dreams were interrupted by the ringing of Stella’s own phone, which she’d left on the bedside table. The fright she felt upon waking splintered into stomach-souring anxiety when she saw that the clock read two fifteen, an hour when the only news was likely to be bad. She pressed the phone against her ear, and in the split second it took her to choke out a hello, managed to cycle through her most fearsome worries:

  Please-Please-Big-Guy-Don’t-Let-Anything-Happen-to-Noelle-Chrissy-Tucker-Todd—

  “Hello?”

  “I don’t guess you managed to get the sheriff in the sack when you got back from Mindy’s, did you?”

  “Holy shit, Chrissy, this had better be good. I think I’m having a damn heart attack.”

  “Well, hold off on that, Stella. You’re gonna need your strength when I tell you where the sheriff is now.”

  “Where … what?”

&
nbsp; “Just tell me, what-all’d you get up to with him last night? And I really hope you got you some in advance, considering what I got to tell you. Like I hope you laid in a good supply of nookie, you know what I’m saying?”

  Stella tried to process the note of trepidation lacing Chrissy’s forced cheer. “Everybody kept their clothes on. That’s all I’m gonna share. Not that it’s any of your damn business.”

  “Well, that’s too bad, Stella, ’cause the sheriff got called out to Porters’ a while back.”

  “Liman Porter’s?”

  “Yup. My sister Lorrie’s youngest started cryin’ and carrying on in the next room just now and woke me up, so I got up and fixed me some leftovers, and Dad left the scanner on, so I heard it. I guess he got called out to Porters’ for a domestic, but now they’re callin’ for extra officers.”

  The patriarch of Chrissy’s large extended family—Ralph Lardner, her father—had a long-standing practice of listening to the scanner the way some folks liked to keep easy listening tunes going in the background. It was a habit born during the days when his large brood of sons were making frequent bad decisions and misjudgments of the sort that resulted in law enforcement attention, and eventually Ralph figured he’d skip the step of getting called down to the station to pick up one or another of his boys for shooting out mailboxes or drag racing by hearing about it firsthand, which gave him a certain respected status with Goat’s predecessor, Sheriff Burt Knoll. The pair spent many a long evening sharing nips from Sheriff Knoll’s desk-drawer flask as the two of them let whatever young Lardner had most recently tested his hoodlum wings cool his heels in the holding cell before Ralph took him home. All that effort had more or less paid off, and Chrissy’s brothers rarely got hauled in anymore, but Ralph had become accustomed to the soothing scratch and static of the scanner.

  “Oh, hell!” Stella exclaimed. “Porters’? You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’d call down there and see what I could find out, but it’s Darja and Dorota on nights.…”

  “Yeah,” said Stella, thinking hard. The regular day-shift desk person, Irene Dorsey, was something of an ally and could often be counted on for a little information on the sly, but the Dzurinda twins—spinster ladies who lived in a tidy rancher next to the Saint Cyril’s and cooked for Father Theodore “Tubby” Green as well as sharing receptionist duties at the sheriff’s department—were sticklers for procedure. Even worse, they’d report straight back to Goat—and probably enjoy ratting her out.

  “So what happened over there, anyway, Stella? You didn’t do anything to Priss that’s gonna leave marks, did you?”

  It wasn’t a serious accusation—Chrissy knew well that Stella never left evidence of her handiwork.

  “No, but maybe I should have.” She explained the evening’s events, from her arrival at the farm through the incriminating pictures and Priss’s threat. “I guess I need to see if I can do some damage control.”

  “You better haul ass,” Chrissy said. “Mike and Ian are on their way.”

  Mike Kuzler and Ian Sloat were the Prosper sheriff’s deputies, and what they lacked in brains and ambition they made up for in a sort of stolid, slow-moving dependability.

  “I can’t go over there. I mean, how would I explain that? Middle of a Saturday night…”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Chrissy said crisply. “Wouldn’t do to just show up there and get creative, I guess. No sense trying when you can just lie down and let this thing drive over you.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say—”

  “Got to go, Tucker’s climbed up into the dog food bin.”

  Stella thought it over for only a few seconds before dialing Goat’s personal number, one he gave out to very few people. She’d come to have it when a case went wrong several years ago, but she made a point of never using it unless absolutely necessary, like when she was bleeding out in a mobster’s lake house and needed rescuing a few months back.

  It had definitely made their relationship a little one-sided, since she was always waiting for him to call her. But that was a less immediate problem than finding out what had happened to the body in Priss’s trunk and if she’d done anything foolish with it and most especially if she’d said anything at all to Goat about Stella’s earlier visit.

  This was not a call she was going to enjoy.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Dusty?”

  His tone wasn’t exactly welcoming, and Stella found herself struggling to get a greeting out. “Hello, Goat, I was just—”

  But Goat cut her off before she had a chance to finish her thought. “What the hell is your scarf doing in Liman Porter’s living room?”

  * * *

  It took a few seconds for Stella to catch up with this new turn of events.

  She’d been wearing the fuzzy pink and silver scarf Gracellen had given her, and she remembered taking it off along with her mittens when she unzipped her coat.

  Because the Porter place had been stifling …

  Because Priss Porter had turned the heat up …

  And the scarf must have gotten wedged into the chair cushions somehow, and when Stella got up to leave, she must have accidentally forgotten it, which wasn’t surprising, considering how eager she’d been to escape the collapse of her criminal career at Priss’s hands.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but it came out like a question.

  “I know it’s your scarf—you had it on when you went out to help Mindy with them sheep of hers.”

  “Alpacas.”

  “What the fuck ever. You had this thing wrapped around your neck when you left. So where’d you really go, Stella? What were you doing over here? And you better answer me quick, ’cause I got the boys on the way, they’ll be here any minute.”

  “I—you saw me when I got home, Goat. I was at Mindy’s. You can ask her. How am I going to get alpaca dung on my clothes at Liman’s?”

  “How do I know that was alpaca dung?” Goat said, his voice in the threatening register of irritated.

  “How about if you send it up to Fayette so your girlfriend can run a whole passel of tests on it?”

  As soon as the words were out of Stella’s mouth, she wished she could take them back. Detective Daphne Simmons, head of the Fayette Crime Scene Unit and presumed future head sheriff of Sawyer County, had a crush on Goat that over the course of a recent case had taken a run-up from simmering interest to full-on sexual bartering. Which, Stella was confident, Goat had refused. But she still couldn’t think of Daphne without an unpleasant rush of jealousy seizing her lizard brain.

  And it certainly hadn’t helped that when Sheriff Stanislas started assigning blame for the recent fuckups, he singled out the Prosper department to receive nearly all of it. Even if Stella didn’t have a thing for Goat, she had as much civic pride as the next person, and it was very difficult indeed to stand by and watch their law enforcement team being forced to eat a giant serving of crow that they hadn’t earned.

  But Goat refused to take the bait. “Good idea. Best put them jeans in a bag just in case I need ’em,” he said. “Leave it on the porch, if you can’t abide the smell.”

  Now he was just being testy. Well, maybe she deserved it: She’d lied to him, and they both knew it. But that didn’t mean she was going to back down.

  “Bet there’s lots of scarves like that. And I hear Priss is back in town. It’s probably hers. What does it matter, anyway?” she asked in a conciliatory tone. “Something gone wrong over there?”

  “Like I’d tell you anything. Stella Hardesty, I trust you about as far as I can throw you, and that ain’t any kind of far distance.”

  As Stella lowered her cell phone back onto the bedside table, she tried to convince herself that she hadn’t just been hung up on, that Goat had just rung off in a hurry.

  But as she tried to get back to sleep, she couldn’t decide if she was more upset about getting involved in some new and unknown criminal dealings or about the complete absence of warm
th in the sheriff’s voice.

  Chapter Seven

  “I’m out on work release,” Chrissy announced, holding up a paper bag as she let herself into Stella’s kitchen a few hours later. Stella had managed to fall back into a troubled sleep before getting up with the dawn. “Mom says she’ll watch Tucker for me today if I’ll help her later.”

  “What-all does she need you for?”

  “I need to help her clean up the rec room. Everybody got to dancing, and a couple of the ceiling tiles got knocked out, plus there’s guacamole in the carpet. Least, I think that’s what it is. And Mom wants to put up her crosses before everyone leaves.”

  “Wow. You’re going to be busy.” Chrissy had described her mother’s habit of observing the Lenten season by decorating each of the house’s street-facing windows with a four-foot cross made from scrap lumber rigged with bathroom lightbulbs; at night, the effect would be not unlike a high-wattage Mount Calvary.

  Chrissy sighed. “I don’t mind, only I can’t help but feel like it’s just a little bit tacky. But the little kids like it, so what can you do? Only Stella, promise me you’ll do up your yard like you used to. I can’t wait for Tucker to see it.”

  “Well … maybe.”

  When Noelle was little, Stella had decorated the front yard for Easter. It had begun with a few plastic eggs hung from the sugar maple, which had been a lot smaller in those days. Every year, she added something new: a family of ducks cut from plywood, painted and mounted on stakes; big plastic pots shaped like baskets, planted every fall with tulip bulbs; strings of pink and lavender lights strung along the eaves.

  Easter had been her mother’s favorite holiday. Pat Collier had loved everything about Easter, from sewing fancy dresses for herself and little Stella, to the corsage her husband always bought for her to wear to church, to hiding dozens of eggs around the yard, to baking a cake shaped like a lamb and frosted with fluffy coconut icing. Pat had been gone for six years, and even after Stella quit observing the holiday with more than a ham sandwich, it always brought back memories of happy times in the warm, safe bosom of her parents’ home.