by Jeff Shelby
I stared at him. “Excuse me?”
“Chicken coop,” he said. “I’m gonna build your coop today.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I have a free day,” he said, “and I owe it to you.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Yes, I do,” he insisted. He pushed off the trunk and took a step toward me. “You’ve had a bit of a rough start here in Latney, and I’m gonna make it up to you. Well, at least my part in all of this. You want chickens, I’m gonna build you a coop. That old one I was gonna set up for you has some rotten wood. Wouldn’t last but a year or two with the winters we’ve been having. So I’ll build you a coop and we’ll go from there.”
He was right about two things: my first week in Latney had been rough, and I did want chickens.
I took a deep breath. My handsome neighbor wanted to do something to make those things better for me, even though he hadn’t been altogether truthful in the beginning, and even though I still wasn’t one hundred percent sure that I trusted him.
I stole a quick glance at him, at his thick biceps and his dimpled, lopsided grin and his green-gold eyes that were currently sizing me up, and felt my heart hiccup inside my chest.
Who was I to stop him?
THIRTY SIX
Stripping wallpaper was probably my least favorite thing in the world, right up there with root canals and giving birth. So even though I wasn’t in any hurry to start, I did want to get home so I could hopefully sneak peeks out my bedroom window and watch Gunnar put my chicken coop together. Maybe he’d go shirtless for the job; it was warming up, after all. And maybe I’d get up the nerve to invite him in for some iced tea or lemonade. I didn’t let myself imagine much more after that because I feared that my life might become a made-for-TV movie if I let my mind start working like that.
A loud horn blasted as I rounded the curve to my farm, and I swerved to the right. It blasted again, and I glanced in the rearview mirror. A huge blue pickup truck was bearing down on me and I pulled over to the shoulder, irritated that this guy was in such a hurry that he was acting more like a DC cab driver than a country farmer.
The pickup screeched to a halt directly in front of me.
“What the—?” I muttered, a sliver of apprehension mingling with my exasperation.
Dawn Putnam hopped out of the driver’s side and slammed the door shut. She marched toward me, a murderous expression on her face.
I debated whether or not to get out of the car and quickly decided that was the best option. I didn’t want her towering over me, and I didn’t want to be trapped in my car if I suddenly had to make a run for it.
“Dawn,” I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible.
“Don’t ‘Dawn” me,” she spat.
“What seems to be the problem?” But I already knew.
“Why were you talking to my husband?” she practically screeched.
“At church?” I kept my eyes on her. “Because he came over to say hello?”
If she were a vampire, I was pretty sure her teeth would be sunk into my neck already. “I’m aware,” she seethed. “I saw the two of you.”
She made it sound like we’d been caught making out in the broom closet. “Yes,” I said evenly. “You did. We were talking. He wanted to know how I was doing. Because he’s kind and friendly. Which I have to say is about the opposite impression I've gotten from you.”
Dawn’s frown stayed planted on her face.
I should have been afraid of her. She had a horrible temper and she’d been inches from running me off the road. But, like my encounter with Sheriff Lewis, I was done with being bullied, especially by a jealous wife.
“Look, I don’t know what your marriage is like or what’s gone on in the past,” I said, keeping my eyes locked on hers. “I don’t know if he’s given you reasons to be jealous in the past or if you really are just borderline psychotic. But I will tell you this: your husband is one of the few people in this town who actually appears to be a decent human being. Which is more than I can say for you.”
She practically snarled at me. “Why—”
But I wasn’t done. “So I don’t care what you think of me or what you need to say to your husband but do me a favor and leave me out of it. Because I’m not interested in your husband and I’m definitely not interested in being your friend.”
“I don’t need friends.”
I nodded. “Then that would explain a lot. Keep doing what you're doing because it's working.”
Dawn deflated a little and I couldn’t tell if it was because my words were hurting her or because her anger was subsiding. Either way, I felt a little bad. I wasn’t a mean person, but I was certainly acting like one. And it had been surprisingly easy.
“I…I might have overreacted,” she said.
Might have? I almost laughed, but decided a better tact might be to keep quiet and let her speak.
“I don’t like it when he talks to other women,” she said.
“I noticed,” I said dryly.
“He’s gone a lot, you know,” she said, running a hand through her short hair. “And it’s…hard.”
“Has he given you a reason not to trust him?”
She shook her head. “No. Because if he did, he knows he’d be missing a couple of body parts, courtesy of me.”
I knew exactly what body parts she was talking about. “Well, I don’t know what he does when he travels, but I can tell you that he has been nothing but friendly with me. And by friendly, I mean just that. Nice. Not flirtatious. No innuendo. I think he's taken pity on me and I appreciate that. The friendliness, not the taking pity.”
Dawn swallowed. She was still breathing hard, and a muscle twitched in her jaw. “I still don’t like it.”
“Well, I don’t like being run off the road by jealous wives.”
She glanced at the pavement and toed the loose gravel with her shoe. “I wasn’t gonna run you off the road.”
“Could have fooled me.”
One corner of her mouth quirked up into something that resembled a smile. “I’m like a Doberman.”
“All bark?”
“Mostly bark,” she corrected. “And sometimes I bite.”
At least she was honest; I’d give her that. “Well, quit barking at me,” I told her. “And you don't have to bite. We chatted about being new in town. How he fixed the tractor.”
She frowned. “That was it?”
“Yes. That was it.” I paused. “Well, we talked a little about the Konraths, too. Davis.” I figured I’d better tell her everything, just to come clean. I didn’t want her thinking I was hiding anything.
She wrinkled her nose. “Why?”
“Oh, Martin just told me that he was bad news. Something about the trouble he got into back in high school.”
Dawn nodded, her usual frown back in place. “Got that right. He’s nothing but trouble.”
“Still?” I asked. “I don’t know. He seems pretty nice to me. Was sorry about what was going on with the farm and stuff.”
Dawn kicked at the gravel again. “Don’t you believe a word he says,” she said, her voice laced with venom. “That man knows nothing but lies.”
I cocked my head. “You know him well?”
She blew out a breath. “You could say that. Dated for a couple of years back when we were kids. He couldn’t tell the truth to save his life.”
I was starting to think her distrust of men was deeply rooted. And that her and Martin’s feelings about Davis were probably a little slanted.
“Well, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Not that I plan on spending much time with him.” I thought about Davis’s offer of dinner and wisely decided not to mention that. It just might set Dawn’s head spinning, Exorcist-style.
“You don’t want to,” she said sharply. I jerked my head up and she tried to soften her tone. “That family is just plain weird.”
I was pretty sure most of the people in Latney were odd—possi
bly from another planet—but I was curious. “Why do you say that?”
“Just are,” she said. “Anyone who moves dead bodies has a screw loose.”
I stiffened. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” she snapped, and I had to remind myself that she wasn’t necessarily angry at me but with the world in general. “That family digs up dead bodies. Every last one of them.”
THIRTY SEVEN
My first instinct was to sit so I could fully absorb the news Dawn had just shared, but we were standing on the gravel shoulder of a county road and I was pretty sure I’d end up with rocks in my underwear if I tried. So I did the next best thing. I leaned against the side of my car.
“They do what?” I asked.
“You hard of hearing?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “How old are you, anyway? Fifty? Sixty?”
I swallowed back my irritation. “I am not hard of hearing,” I said, refusing to answer her question about my age. “I’m just having a hard time…understanding.”
“I thought you were one of those liberated, educated women.” She said this as if it were a bad thing.
“I am a liberal, educated woman,” I countered. “Which is why I’m having a hard time understanding why someone would dig up dead bodies. What do they do, go in and rob cemeteries? Steal things out of coffins?” I’d worked for a private investigator and my imagination was running wild.
She shot me a look of pure disgust. “Why on earth would someone do something like that?”
“You just said they dig up—”
“Dead bodies,” she finished. “Yeah, they do. Their dead bodies.”
My head was spinning. “What?”
Dawn heaved a sigh. “That property of yours, the one you just bought? There was a cemetery on it, back out behind the pond. You been out there?”
I shivered and shook my head no. I’d seen the pond, sure, but I hadn’t ventured down the makeshift trail on the far side of the water, the one that led past the boathouse and through the woods. Marcia, my real estate agent, had mentioned that the trail went to a clearing, but it had become overgrown over the years. I’d put it on my list of things to explore later, when the weather was warm and I’d taken care of the millions of other things on my To Do list. But now Dawn was telling me that there was a cemetery back there. Wasn’t that something a real estate agent should disclose to a buyer? Were there rules about letting people know they were buying property filled with dead bodies?
“Len wasn’t crazy about leaving his people behind,” Dawn said.
“His people?”
Dawn rolled her eyes, clearly thinking I was one can short of a six-pack. “You know, ancestors.”
“So…so he dug them up?”
She nodded. “Well, technically, no. Davis did the digging. They tried to hire out but no one would touch it. And, well, I don’t think Len was willing to spend much money. So Davis offered to do it—for a fee, of course— and rented a backhoe and did it himself.”
“What…what did they do with the…remains?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “No idea. I’m sure they’re somewhere on his daughter’s property. She has space. Not sure if they’ve buried ‘em or what. And I don’t really care.”
“Do you know…” I swallowed. “Do you know if Willie Konrath was buried there?”
“On your farm?”
I nodded.
She shrugged. “No clue. But where else would he be? He lived here and died here, so stands to reason he’d be buried on the family’s land.”
I nodded again, but inwardly, I was feeling like the biggest heel ever. The dots on the page were suddenly becoming crystal clear.
There had been no crime.
Old Uncle Willie’s bones had been dug up on purpose.
And accidentally left behind.
THIRTY EIGHT
I didn’t like being wrong. And I didn’t like admitting it.
But, getting back in my car and making the rest of the drive home, it was the only thing I could think about.
I’d been wrong about so many things. Wrong about my neighbor. Wrong about the sheriff. Wrong about Len.
And, yes, there were still things that didn’t quite add up, things I was still questioning. Why hadn’t Len or Davis come clean about the bones? Why not just tell me what they’d been doing? Because if they had, the mystery would have been solved right then and there.
But maybe they had been embarrassed. Or maybe they’d needed a permit or something (did permits for exhuming human remains exist?) and didn’t want it to get out that they hadn’t gone through the proper channels. Or maybe they’d simply forgotten Uncle Willie hadn’t made the final move. I could envision a pile of human remains in that old, abandoned bungalow, just waiting to be transported to their new forever resting place.
I shivered again. The idea of digging up bones creeped me out. But this was the country, and there were a lot of things I didn’t understand about country life. Maybe this was another one to add to the long, long list.
I pulled into my driveway and was surprised to see Gunnar already there, unloading chicken wire and wood from the bed of his truck. I swallowed my disappointment at the sight of his dark gray t-shirt: abs would have made me feel a little better, or at least served as a nice distraction.
He grinned at me as I stepped out of the car. “What took you so long?”
I wasn’t sure how to tell him I’d almost gotten run off the road by the local tavern owner and then had a discussion about bones and bodies. “Uh, I had a quick errand to run.” I glanced at the pile of wood in the driveway. “That’s a lot of wood.”
He unloaded one more piece of wood, then wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “You need a lot of wood to build a good coop.”
“You know you don’t have to do this, right?”
“Least I can do,” he said. He reached into the bed of the truck and pulled out a tool belt, then strapped it around his waist. “Gotta prove I’m one of the good guys, don’t I?”
“You don’t have to prove anything.”
He slotted a hammer in the tool belt and grabbed a box of nails. “Well, I’m going to,” he said, winking at me. “That’s a promise.”
I swallowed hard. I was pretty sure I’d been wrong about Gunnar, too. He didn’t have any nefarious reasons for not telling me about his offer on the farm; I was sure of it. It was exactly what he’d said: he didn’t want those details to get in the way of our being friends. And what had I done? Gone and assumed the absolute worst about him.
And he wasn’t the only one. My stomach filled with dread as I catalogued the other people I’d accused of planting bodies and killing people and starting fires. The sheriff. Len Konrath.
I couldn’t explain the fire, but after finding out about the cemetery, I was beginning to wonder if there was a simple explanation for that, too. Maybe Gunnar had been right; maybe there were some oily rags that had spontaneously combusted. Or maybe the can of lighter fluid I’d found out back had tipped over and the sun had hit a piece of grass that ignited a spark that caused the whole place to go up in flames. It sounded far-fetched, sure, but no crazier than a family moving their dead ancestors and accidentally leaving one of them behind in an abandoned bungalow.
“Rainy?”
I startled. While I’d been lost in thought, Gunnar had stopped ten feet away, watching me.
He eyed me curiously. “Everything okay?”
I nodded, probably a little too eagerly. “Yes, everything’s fine.”
“Good.” He pointed to the right of the house, to a small patch of lawn that abutted a long line of trees. “Thought we’d set the coop up there to start, right along the shelter belt.”
“Shelter belt?”
“The trees there. They were planted to protect the house from the wind. We can put the coop there so the birds are protected from the heat during summer and the wind come winter. They’ll get a little insulation being so close to the house, and you won’t have to trek too far t
o take care of them. Sound good?”
He’d put way more thought into the care of my future chickens than I had. “Yes, that sounds perfect.”
With a satisfied nod, he hefted a couple pieces of lumber and began moving them to the far side of the house.
I trotted after him.
He turned to look at me. “You stripping?”
“Excuse me?”
“The wallpaper,” he said as he set the boards against the side of the house. “Still doing that or wanna help me out here instead? I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t enjoy your company.”
I blushed and tried not to stammer. “Oh, um…I was actually thinking of running another errand real quick.”
The idea had come to me suddenly.
“An errand?”
“Yes.” I dug my keys out of my purse so that I’d be less inclined to change my mind. “I need to pay Len Konrath a visit. You wouldn’t happen to know where he’s living now, do you?”
THIRTY NINE
Gunnar did, in fact, know where Len was living. After giving me a confused look that I knew was an invitation to tell him what my errand consisted of—an invitation I refused—he gave me directions. Considering the town was small and I knew where all the landmarks were that he mentioned, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be hard to find.
“You okay going on your own?” he asked. He was back at the pile of wood by the truck, picking up more pieces.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I won’t be long.” I smiled. “And then I’ll help you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “No stripping?”
I bit back a chuckle. “Maybe some other time.”
His answering grin was slow and sexy and melted my insides. “Hmm. I’d like to be around to see that.” And then, with a wink, he added, “Wallpaper removal has always fascinated me.”
This time I couldn’t quell the giggle that threatened to escape. He laughed, too, and with a wave, sauntered back to the side of the house with another load of wood.
Going to visit Len Konrath had been a spontaneous decision, but it felt like it was the right thing to do. I’d done and said some things I wasn’t proud of, and I knew the one thing I could do that would begin a reset on my time in Latney would be to apologize to the man I’d been hardest on. Was he a crotchety old man who probably should have told me that the bones I’d found were there because of his ridiculous idea to move his ancestors’ remains? Yes. But I shouldn’t have flown off the handle, and I definitely shouldn’t have accused him of arson or murder. We’d both said hurtful things, but I wanted to be the bigger person and offer up the first apology. Hopefully, that would set in motion a whole chain of events and Latney would end up being the happily ever after I’d hoped it would be.