We ate more saltines. My gaze drifted to the booth nearest the hearth area.
“What’s there?” Zeus asked.
“Nothing.”
“You keep looking at it.”
“That was Dad’s favorite place for our family to sit.”
“Oh,” Zeus said, hushed and reverent.
Odin touched my hair. “Do you want to move there, goddess? So that we can sit there? Or do you want to move away? So we can’t look at the booth anymore?”
“No, I like being able to look at it. Remembering when our family was together. We would come here for really special occasions—not just birthdays, but graduation. That sort of thing. We would get the surf ’n’ turf. And you know what we wouldn’t get?”
Zeus held up his hands in mock surrender.
“We stopped coming here once the bank put the squeeze on the farm,” I said.
“First National…” Odin turned his gaze to Zeus. “As long as we’re in the neighborhood, maybe we should make a cash withdrawal. What do you think?”
I spit out my wine. “Excuse me?” I knew that tone.
He wasn’t talking about the normal kind of cash withdrawal, the kind you made with IDs and withdrawal slips and a fun vacuum tube canister. He was talking about the kind you made with masks and Uzis, the kind where the cash was delivered by a tearful teller opening the drawer.
Odin gave me his most sparkling evil smile.
“Odin,” Zeus growled.
“It will be beautiful. We fucking-g shoot out the windows. We trash the place. We take all the money. The same bank robbed twice. That jackal Hank Vernon will look like a fool.”
“Well,” I said. “When you put it that way…”
“We never rob the same bank twice,” Zeus said. “It’s a rule.”
Odin sniffed. That’s what he thought of rules. He looked over at me. “Hank Vernon is the reason your family isn’t sitting there now. He hasn’t paid enough.”
I gazed back at the empty booth. Odin was right—Hank Vernon, owner of First City National Bank of Baylortown, was the reason my parents died.
Hank and his family had been trying to take our land for years in order to mine it for fracking sand. Seven years ago my parents missed some payments because of a fire in one of the sheep barns, and Hank Vernon took advantage of the crisis to make the mortgage payments impossible for them to meet. Out of desperation, my parents left me in charge of the sheep farm and headed out for a two-month gig on a fishing boat in Alaska.
Their boat went over, and they died.
I had only just graduated from high school at the time. Hank and his family tried even harder to take the farm away from us after that. Eventually I’d taken a second job as a teller/object of Hank’s sexual harassment at Hank’s bank. It wasn’t going well. But then the bank robbery happened.
My sisters had paid off the mortgage thanks to our secret donations, but Hank would be the first in line to buy the farm if they were ever forced to sell.
And no, Hank and his family hadn’t paid nearly enough.
“You’re thinking it, goddess.”
“We should concentrate on the positive. Saving Vanessa,” I said.
“I could gut him like a pig,” Odin added.
“Nobody’s gutting anybody like a pig,” Zeus said.
Odin wasn’t listening. He was looking up at that deer head, pulse banging in his throat like a bongo. I hated that he was in pain. I hated that he wasn’t sleeping. I hated that I’d made sleeping even harder for him. I hated that there were cupids and deer heads staring at him everywhere he went around here.
I set my hand on his forearm, and he closed his eyes. My touch had always soothed him.
“Don’t forget, if it wasn’t for Hank, we wouldn’t be together,” I pointed out. “I would never have worked at his bank, and I would never have hated him enough to want to help you guys rob him.”
“So we should give him a ribbon instead?” Odin growled.
Maybe around his neck, I thought, but I didn’t say anything, because Odin was in a state. He really wanted to do something drastic. He drained his drink and headed off to the bathroom.
“He really wants to knock over that bank,” I said once Odin was out of earshot.
“He doesn’t give a shit about the bank,” Zeus said. “What Odin wants is to save you. To make you stop hurting.”
“He’s doing it already. You guys all are. Us here working on the case.”
Zeus unwrapped a breadstick. “Did Odin ever tell you how he got out of that prison?”
“No.”
“It’s his to tell, but when the people he loves are threatened, he can get extreme. The four of us being together has stabilized him a lot, but, well, I’ll just be glad when we get this Andy to ’fess up. It’ll be good to have this pain with your sisters and your past in our rearview mirror. Your touch helps him, still. Did you see?”
“I know. I thought after what happened in Rome that it wouldn’t help him.”
“Your touch is always the best thing for him. We just stay by him. Stay connected. He’s strong. He’ll be okay.”
“I feel bad.”
“Don’t. So you snuck into his bed when you shouldn’t have and it didn’t work out.” Zeus shrugged. “You try things. Sometimes they work, some times they don’t.” He gave me a look. “And sometimes you butt-fuck so hard you hear the angels singing.”
“Yet another thing they didn’t teach us in Sunday school.”
Zeus smiled and twirled my hair end. Brown. I’d been a redhead when I’d lived here last. A redhead with a petite and freckled nose. Now I was a blonde with a blocky nose. A man’s nose.
“Still. He really does seem to want to rob the First City National again.”
“We all want to knock over the First City National, baby.”
“I mean, he really does.”
“Odin’s like a shark—he needs to keep moving, keep breaking rules.”
“I didn’t know sharks liked to break the rules.”
Our waitress delivered the frog legs. They looked and smelled as gross as I thought they would, but Odin came back, and together my guys inhaled the entire basket. You could deep-fry shoes and my guys would go for it.
A half hour later, Thor joined us. As soon as he took his seat, he handed over his phone. “Got a few images for you.”
“Thank you!” I started scrolling through the shots he’d taken. They were all there, all three of my sisters. My heart leaped with every photo. “How did they seem?”
“They seemed good. Really smart and strong. Like you.”
Something in his voice scared me. “What? Is there a but in there?”
Thor frowned. “You’re not going to look through them? Do you know how hard it was to take that many pictures in there without coming off like a lech?”
I put my attention on the phone. My sisters, whom I missed so bitterly. “They look good. Not as upset as they could be. Or at least they don’t show it.”
“Vanessa’s…shaken,” Thor said.
Odin and Zeus wanted to see, and I showed them. “This is Vanessa. She’s twenty-four now. She’s the total craft girl.” I recognized things in the kitchen that Vanessa had made. Some of them were new. “Candace is in community college.”
“Well…” Thor began.
“What?”
“She dropped out. The lawsuit…”
“Fuck. No!”
“She was too distracted to continue—that’s what she said, but I think she didn’t want Vanessa alone to absorb the town’s anger. And there’s no reliable money coming in, anyway. All their food production had to stop. They still do the other stuff, but…”
“The cheese was the main income center. They’re basically unemployed.”
“Except when a Paris Hilton comforter gets sold,” he said.
“Yeah.” That had been our pie-in-the-sky product—the Cadillac of comforters at a wild price tag of twenty thousand dollars. It had been kind of a joke
to put it up on our site way back when, but after I joined the God Pack, it had turned out to be a really convenient way to get money to my sisters without revealing myself. I could only imagine their amazement that people out there were paying that much for comforters.
I slid through and found a good picture of Kaitlin. A senior in high school now. I knew I should focus on the case instead of my sisters, but these new pictures were like water for a person lost in the desert. “What else?”
“They’re scared about Vanessa going to jail. The county hasn’t brought up charges, but if they decide she made that decision to sell bad cheese, she could be going down. It could be manslaughter.” He paused. “It could be a felony.”
“What?”
“That’s what they told me. A peanut plant owner just went down for twenty-eight years.”
The room went hazy. “No,” I whispered.
“It was a historic sentence, but…”
“She would never sell tainted cheese! They told you that, right? She’s done nothing wrong.”
Thor looked grave. Odin and Zeus, too. My guys—my husbands—hadn’t done anything wrong, either. Aside from trying to bring an atrocity to light. And they got a price on their heads for it.
“I don’t know why Andy would lie. I still can’t get my head around it. Maybe he was drunk or something.”
“Ice,” Thor said. “Your sisters are being framed.”
I straightened. Not like I should be surprised. What other explanation could there be? “Who would frame them?”
Thor shook his head and pulled out his notebook to give us the rundown. “Here’s what everyone agrees on: One of the coolers in the cheese production area got accidentally unplugged—they think it got kicked out of the wall. Apparently it happened once before, but this time nobody noticed. A cooler full of sheep brie went unrefrigerated for nearly twenty-four hours.”
“A whole cooler. Ouch.” I said.
“They had to throw it all away.”
“Of course, that’s what you do,” I said. “It’s the law. My sisters would never, no matter how hard up they were for money, they would never sell a soft cheese that got warmed. That didn't happen—it just didn’t—”
Thor raised his eyebrows—not the sexy kind of raised eyebrows, but rather the stop fucking interrupting kind. “That what they said, too. It was all wrapped and labeled and ready for transport to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store, but when they found it unrefrigerated for that long, yeah, they dumped it in the dumpster out back.”
“Exactly.”
“So the cheese is out in the trash. The only other person who knew about the trashed cheese and the cooler thing is this part-time guy, Andy Miller, who helps with the packaging and delivery end. They think Andy took the cheese out of the garbage and brought it to the store along with the new batch.”
“What the fuck,” I whispered.
“What do you know about this Andy?”
“He grew up on the next farm over. He was in my high school—a football-playing farm boy. The most devious thought he’d ever have would be how to weasel out of losing his deposit on a dented keg. He’s a dairy farm kid. And he would take food safety really seriously.”
“Vanessa says Andy’s family has recently approached her to buy the farm if they have to sell. She wondered if that was the plan, to destroy the business so they have to sell.”
“Wow,” I said.
“What?”
“How do the Millers have that cash? And I knew they wanted to expand, but…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I’m telling you, Andy is not a bad guy. Maybe somebody is pressuring him…”
“Your sisters are shocked, too.”
Zeus gave me a suspicious look. “You were friends with this Andy?”
“Sort of.”
“Friends or not friends?”
“Well…” All three of my guys turned to me now. “Nothing,” I said. “We ran in different circles, but we did go on a few dates. But Andy Miller, he dated everyone.”
“He’s an old boyfriend?” Thor said.
“Not really even a boyfriend. It wasn’t serious!”
“Did you sleep with him?” Zeus demanded.
“Come on,” I said. “I’m not going into it. It’s not important.”
“It’s important to me,” Zeus said.
“Seriously?” I said. “Maybe you should sniff my crotch and then sniff his and see if there’s any overlap of scents.”
“We’ll make him sing,” Odin said.
“Dude.” I gave him a dark look.
“Vanessa seemed baffled, too,” Thor said, deciding to take the less caveman road. “She didn’t think he’d do it, either. And Andy isn’t talking to them.”
The waitress finally came by, and he ordered a beer.
“It’s important for a farm like the Millers to expand,” I said. “But to ruin my sisters…it’s not the culture of Baylortown. It’s not what’s done.”
“Maybe not two years ago,” Thor said.
“The whole culture here didn’t change in two years. And with the bad weather this summer, alfalfa hay prices would be high, but dairy prices are low. They shouldn’t have that kind of cash. Unless they’d been saving it all these years, somehow…”
“God, Isis…” Zeus lowered his voice. “It’s hot when you talk like a farm girl. Like a dairy maid…”
“Oh my god, are you thinking about dairy maid porn right now?”
“Kind of,” Zeus admitted.
“Well you better not be thinking hu-cow.”
Thor frowned. “What’s hu-cow?”
“Lactation stuff. Human cow. And no—not happening.”
Thor exchanged glances with Zeus, and then Odin. “It’s even hotter that you know kinds of porn we don’t.”
“Sounds like we need to have a talk with Andy,” Odin said.
“A talk,” I stressed.
I slid through more of the pictures, hating that I couldn’t go tell my sisters that I was here, that we’d be fighting for them, that it would all be okay. Would it be okay?
It had to be okay. I focused on the pictures. “It’s so weird. Our crappy farmhouse. I never thought about taking pictures in there. I never thought I would value a picture of the back of Kaitlin’s head and that old beige refrigerator. Those plants in the window above the sink. Now it’s magical. They’ve been through too much. What with everyone dying and/or abandoning them.”
“Don’t say it like that,” Zeus scolded. “You were forced to do that to protect them.” Fake my own death, he meant.
He was right, of course. Still it felt shitty.
“And you send them money,” Odin growled. “They have that farm because of you. You do the best you can.”
“They deserve better.”
Zeus pulled me onto his lap. “Then how about we kick the ass of whoever is behind this?”
Chapter 5
Maybe it was the giant steak-and-potatoes meal at the Cobblestone under the eerily watchful eyes of dead woodland animals, or the chubby little cherubs staring at us from all corners of Margie Mason’s Bed & Breakfast, but none of us were up for sex that night.
I pulled off my fake nose and scrubbed my face extra hard, making up for all the itching that I’d so badly wanted to do all day, and then I crashed next to Zeus.
The four of us met around the breakfast table the next morning.
Odin looked tired; I guessed he hadn’t slept. It was bad for him to be in a room alone; it was so much better in giant hotel suites, because even though he refused to let me sleep with him, he wasn’t shut up alone with cupids. I thought about what he’d said about that prison. The abuse. People always watching afterward. It tore me up to think about.
There was a couple from Galveston, Texas, also staying at the B&B, in town for a wedding in Dieter’s Corners. Margie introduced us as insurance investigators. They were both teachers, which was good. When you’re faking a profession, you never want to meet som
ebody who is actually in that profession.
We all drank coffee from super-fragile-looking china cups and made small talk while I battled not to tear off my giant glasses and fake nose and do an itch-fest all over my cheeks.
It was going to be a long day, but hopefully the last day.
If Andy was lying, my guys would find out pretty quickly. I could have the nose off by afternoon, though that would also mean leaving town, leaving my sisters behind again. Not that there was a choice.
We set off, heading in the other direction from the Walmart. I stared out the window, taking in the many familiar places and, sometimes, faces in cars. The gas station where I’d use my allowance to secretly buy candy, the music store where I took flute lessons, the drive-in burger place my dad would take us on Saturdays.
Then there were the places I’d forgotten about: the uniform shop, the roller rink, the candy store. The car wash where we never went; we were farm people, so we washed our own vehicles. A few new places had sprung up—a kitschy little coffee shop next to a new Vietnamese restaurant—though I was shocked to see the town’s favorite ice cream parlor, Blue Deer Ice Cream, had closed.
The Millers had a little wooden sign at the end of their gravel drive: Miller’s Acres. A lot of farms took names like that. My parents had come up with Sunny Sisters just before Kaitlin was born. It was a name I’d always loved. Tarnished now, thanks to Andy or whoever had pressured him to pull that warmed cheese out of the dumpster and blame my sisters.
We pulled up.
“You’re sure he’s not going to recognize you?” Zeus and the guys still had this idea that Andy and I were somehow close.
“I promise. They weren’t in our circle of family friends, and he was a grade older than me and just…too cool for me, as it turned out.”
My guys looked at me like I’d uttered that last bit in Urdu. I loved them for it.
“I can’t believe he’d do this,” I said. “I can’t believe anybody would. A man died.”
“That’s probably why,” Thor said. “Whatever he was up to, maybe he didn’t count on somebody dying. So he lied to cover it up. At this point, he’ll stick hard to his story.”
“He’ll try, anyway,” Zeus said.
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