by Jessica Beck
Greg looked at the pan, and then he turned to me before Kathleen cleared her throat behind him. She asked softly, “Is there a problem here?”
“Butt out, Sheriff,” Greg demanded, barely glancing back at my sister. “This is none of your business.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Not only are you disturbing the peace, but when it comes to my family, everything is my business.”
Pat spoke up as well right beside her. “You heard the sheriff. You’re not welcome here, and until you can act civilly toward our sister, don’t bother coming back.”
Greg studied us slowly, each in our turn, with an expression of fierce hatred on his face. After a moment, he said, “You know what? You’re not worth the energy. None of you.”
With that, he stormed out of the Iron, slamming the door on his way out.
“Sorry about that, folks,” I said to the people staring mostly at me now. “You all know how breakups can be.”
“Can I help anyone up front?” Pat asked as he lightly brushed my arm with his hand and offered me a slight smile. It was a small and innocent gesture, but the contact from my twin was all I needed to help me settle down.
Kathleen lingered as Pat moved up front to ring up the waiting customers. “Annie, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for the offer, but I didn’t need any reinforcements. I could have handled him by myself, you know.”
My older sister grinned at me. “You’re mistaken, dear sister. I wasn’t here for backup. I wanted to see what was going to happen next.”
I smiled back at her. “I’m kind of glad that neither one of us had to find out what that might have been. Do you think Greg got the hint?”
Kathleen asked, “Exactly what about that display was as subtle as a hint? What did you do to make him fall for you like that, anyway?”
“I rejected him,” I explained. “For some men, it’s the greatest lure in the world, not being wanted. I don’t mean the right kind of men, but some of them.”
“I understand that all too well myself.”
“Sis, what do you think about Albert Yeats coming back to town?” I asked Kathleen, taking the opportunity to get a little inside information from her. “Did the state really just let him go?”
“It’s legit,” the sheriff said. “They can retry him if they want to, but from what I’ve heard, that’s probably not going to happen. He didn’t waste any time getting back to Maple Crest, did he?”
“Pat said he claimed he was here to find the real murderer,” I said.
“I know. Albert said the exact same thing to me,” she said with a frown. “That’s what’s troubling me.”
I touched her arm lightly. “Kathleen, you weren’t the sheriff when all of that happened. You shouldn’t take any responsibility for any of it.”
“I wish I felt the same way, but if my office arrested the wrong man, even if it wasn’t on my watch, then I’m responsible for it now.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, and you know it,” I said.
“It doesn’t have to. It’s just the way that it is.”
“What are you going to do about him?”
“All I can do, which is not much. I’ll keep an eye on him and hope that nothing else bad happens,” she explained.
“What are the odds of that happening?”
“Somewhere between slim and none, I’d say.” Her frown shifted for a moment as she asked, “Are you going to be okay? Do I need to have a word with Greg myself?”
“I appreciate the offer, but I think he got the message,” I said. “Would you like something to eat while you’re here? It’s on the house.”
“Thanks, but I’ll have to take a rain check. No rest for the wicked, you know.”
“I thought it was for the weary,” I supplied.
“Them, either. In the meantime, watch your back, little sis.”
“You do the same.”
After Kathleen was gone, I wondered what had caused Greg to react so violently to our breakup. When we’d been going out he’d been a little possessive, but I’d never seen anything like this behavior until after I cut him loose. Was there more to fear from him, or had he finally gotten the message? Living alone on eighty-two acres of wilderness might frighten some women, but if he tried to come after me when I was at home at the cabin, I was pretty sure that he’d discover that he’d bitten off more than he could chew.
Pat came back to the grill during the next lull up front. “How are you doing, Annie?”
“I’m just dandy,” I said as I scraped the griddle top again. It was a constant job, and it had become second nature to me over the years. “How about you?”
“The truth is, I can’t stop thinking about Greg Andrews,” he said worriedly.
“Funny. According to him, my problem was that I didn’t think of him enough.”
“Sis, you need to take this situation seriously.”
“Pat, what more can I do that I haven’t already done? Don’t worry about me.”
“You could always stay upstairs with me for a while until this all blows over.”
Sharing my brother’s bachelor pad above the store with him was not my idea of a good time. “Thanks for the offer, but we shared a womb together for nine months, and that’s the last time I ever plan on bunking with you. You snore, you know.”
“Even in the womb?” he asked with a grin.
“Even then. Seriously, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, but if you change your mind, the offer’s always open.”
I smiled at him. “I appreciate that, but hey, I’d hate to cramp your style.”
He looked at me, clearly surprised by my comment. “What do you mean?”
“What if Molly Fennel has a sudden change of heart and decides that she can’t live without you?”
My brother frowned, and I wondered if I’d pushed him too far. Molly was his one long-lost love, and I knew that she would most likely hold my brother’s heart forever. “I hate to disappoint you, but it’s not going to happen,” he said sadly.
“Have you even tried lately?”
Pat sighed heavily before he spoke again. “The truth is, I’m getting tired of being the one who always pursues her. It might just be time for me to move on.”
This was serious. In all the years since Molly had first entered his life when we’d all been teenagers, I’d never heard my twin talk about her like that. “Well, if you’re in the market, I’ve got a suggestion.”
“No blind dates, Sis.”
“This wouldn’t be a blind date, you dope. As a matter of fact, you’ve known her for years.”
“What are you talking about?” Pat clearly didn’t have a clue, but he was about to.
“Jenna Lance.”
“The vet? Seriously?” Pat looked at me as though I’d lost my mind. Had he really been that blind all these years?
I took my brother’s hands in mine. “Patrick Marsh, for a normally bright fellow, you can be awfully dense sometimes. Jenna’s had a crush on you for years.”
He pulled his hands away. “You’ve lost your mind, Annie.”
“If you don’t ask her out, I think maybe you’ve lost yours. She’s gorgeous, and what’s more, for some odd reason, she seems to fancy you.”
Pat appeared to think about that for a moment, and then he shook his head. “No. It can’t be. I don’t believe it.”
I just shrugged. “Then it’s your loss. I’m just saying, Jenna’s not going to wait around forever for you to wake up and notice her.”
“Jenna Lance? There’s just no way,” Pat said, and then he drifted back toward the front to wait on a customer approaching the register. Jenna was smart, beautiful, and funny, and she’d had a crush on my brother since we’d been kids. He’d never noticed her before, but maybe with a little poking from me, he’d see her for what she was now. That was enough matchmaking for one day, anyway. I had started working on the next day’s menu when I heard a car backfire outside.
At least I h
oped that it was a backfire, and not a gunshot, though in my heart, I couldn’t be sure.
CHAPTER 4: PAT
I jumped a little when I heard the car backfire out in our parking lot. Between Albert’s sudden reappearance and Greg’s display of anger directed at my twin sister, I was more than a little on edge. Normally I loved small-town life, but today lacked the tranquility that it usually offered. I was a bit off my game for the rest of the day, so much so that even our mostly self-absorbed teenaged employee, Skip Lawson, noticed.
“Are you okay, Pat?”
“I’m fine, Skip,” I said as I tried my best to relax a little. Chances were good that if he could see the tension in me, then everyone else would be able to see it as well. “Any big plans for this evening?”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve got a date. Or at least I think I do. To be honest with you, I’m not entirely one hundred percent sure.”
“Well, that sounds definite. Why the uncertainty?”
He shrugged. “I was supposed to go out with Linda Yeats, but with her uncle showing up out of the blue, I’m not sure if we’re still on.”
“Why don’t you give her a call?” I suggested.
“Sure, I can do that,” Skip said. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”
The three of us usually tried to keep our cellphone use on the floor to a minimum, and never while we were waiting on customers, but the store was mostly empty at the moment, and I could handle anything that might come up. “Yeah, go on, but just this once.”
“Thanks! I appreciate that. Don’t worry, I’ll just be a second,” Skip said as he bolted out onto the front porch to make his call.
When he came back in thirty seconds later, he was grinning broadly.
“I’m guessing that means that your date is still on,” I said.
“You bet it is.” He broke eye contact with me for a moment as he followed up, “As a matter of fact, she wanted to know if there was any way that I could take off early.”
“I don’t see why not. Take off and enjoy yourself,” I said, and he was out the door before I had a chance to change my mind. Well, at least one of the employees of the Cast Iron Store and Grill had a love life, though I shouldn’t speak for Edith. She was cryptic enough about her social calendar. I knew for a fact that Annie’s was in the tank, and mine wasn’t much better. I was beginning to realize that I’d spent too much of my life pining after Molly, and with every passing day, I finally understood that I’d waited long enough for her to show a little spark of interest in me. I needed to open myself up to new possibilities, but Annie’s suggestion that Jenna was interested in me was insane. Jenna had been three grades behind us growing up, and while she might have had a schoolgirl crush on me long ago, I was fairly certain that it was gone by now.
Or was it?
To my surprise, I was closing out the register when the woman herself showed up. Jenna’s black hair was nearly midnight blue in its intensity, brushed back as it normally was these days into a full ponytail. She might have been a stick-thin tomboy back in our school days, but nobody would say that about her now. The thing I noticed most about her at the moment, though, was her smile. Jenna looked genuinely pleased to see me, as though she’d been looking forward to it all day.
“Stop being so ridiculous,” I chided myself silently. Then something else occurred to me. Had Annie called Jenna to set something up between us after we’d spoken, despite my protests? I must have frowned unintentionally at the thought, and what was worse, it was clear that Jenna had noticed it.
The smile faded for a moment. “Pat? Is everything okay?”
“Did Annie call you this afternoon?” I asked. What? Did I actually just ask her that?
“No, I haven’t spoken to her in days,” she said with a hint of uncertainty. “Why, did she need something from me?”
“Never mind,” I said with a sheepish grin, doing my best to extricate myself from that particular train of thought. “I must have been thinking about someone else.”
“Lucky girl,” Jenna said faintly, and then, a little louder, she added, “I just came in to check my mail.”
“It’s good to see you,” I said, doing my best to say it lightly.
Her grin was now back to its full wattage. “You, too!”
Was her response a little too enthusiastic for the circumstances, or was I reading too much into it? Blast it all, Annie had gotten into my head, and now I was making a fool of myself. Still, I couldn’t help watching Jenna’s long legs as she walked to her box, gathered her mail, and then walked back toward me.
She’d caught me looking at her! I did my best to act nonchalant even though I had a hunch that I was blushing, but she smiled a little brighter when I finally looked up at her good-bye.
I was really going to have to get it together.
I was still trying to do just that when I heard a disturbance out front a few minutes later. Someone was yelling loudly, and from the sound of it, trouble was not far behind.
What was going on now?
When I stepped out onto the porch, I found Albert Yeats and Ollie Wilson shouting at each other in front of the Iron. Before I could say a word, I saw Ollie, usually a good-natured guy if ever there was one, swing at Albert and score a direct hit, bloodying the man’s nose and knocking him off his feet in the process. Ollie was a little taller than I was, and a good two inches taller than Albert, but he looked much bigger with the anger that was flowing from him.
“Ollie! Stop that!”
He looked at me, and for an instant, I could see the blind rage in his eyes. It dissipated quickly, but I knew what I’d seen. I moved in between the two men, just in case Ollie wasn’t finished with Albert just yet.
“Have you lost your mind?” I asked Ollie as I stood facing him.
“I wouldn’t turn my back on him if I were you, Pat,” Ollie said, wiping the sweat off his forehead, though the temperature was in the low fifties. Ollie leaned around me, and I wondered if he was about to kick Albert while he was still on the ground, when he told him, “That was just a warning, Albert. Next time it’s going to be a whole lot worse.”
To my surprise, Albert just laughed, making no effort to get up, or even to wipe the blood off his face. “Just remember. You can run, but you can’t hide, Ollie.”
The aggressor was about to say something in reply, but evidently he thought better of it and stormed off toward his car without another word.
I turned and reached a hand down to Albert. “Do you mind telling me what that was all about?”
He took it, and I helped him stand. As I offered him my clean handkerchief, Albert took it and shrugged.
I wasn’t about to let him off the hook that easily. “Seriously? You get decked out in front of the Iron by one of the nicest guys I know, and all you can do is shrug?”
Albert grinned at me, but it was devoid of humor. “I’m stirring the pot a little, Pat. You know what they say. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“Clichés and mixed metaphors aside, you can break a nose, too.”
“This?” he asked with another grin as he wiped some of the blood away with the handkerchief. “In prison, this was an easy Tuesday, if you know what I mean.”
“Fighting might have been fine in there, but it’s not acceptable out in the real world,” I said.
“Spare me the lecture,” Albert said as he tried to hand my bloodied handkerchief back to me.
“Tell you what. Why don’t you keep that?”
“Thanks,” he said. “Who knows? I just might need it again.”
“Does that mean that you’re not done causing trouble yet?”
“Pat, my friend, I’m just getting started.” It had appeared that he’d already forgotten his earlier outburst toward me and my sisters. “By the time I’m finished, this town isn’t going to know what hit it. A great many people in Maple Crest wanted to see Mitchell Wells dead, and I plan on talking to every last one of them before I’m through.”
“Well, if their reactions are anything like Ollie’s, you’re in for a hard time of it.”
“I can do hard time standing on my head,” he said.
It was time to try a different approach with him. “Albert, have you thought about talking to Kathleen about your suspicions? No matter what you think of her, she’s a good sheriff.”
He stared at me a moment before he spoke again. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t place my trust in law enforcement officers, seeing where it got me the last time I did.”
I don’t know what made me say it, but the words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “If you’d like, Annie and I could look into it for you, instead.”
“That’s right. I heard that you two solved Chester Davis’s murder a while back.”
“How did you manage to hear about that?”
“You’d be amazed what you can pick up if you know the right people to ask, even if you’re in prison. I might have been gone, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t keep in touch.”
“Who was your source, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“If it’s all the same to you, I don’t want anybody to know that just yet. All in good time; everything will be revealed.”
That was certainly cryptic enough. “Annie and I can help you, Albert. All you have to do is ask. There’s just one catch, though.”
“Why am I not surprised to hear that there are strings attached to your offer?” he asked me.
“No worries, it’s an easy one. If we agree to help, you have to tell us everything. You can’t hold anything back. It’s hard enough to investigate a murder without credentials or standing, but if we don’t know the truth from our main source, we won’t have a chance. What do you say?”
“Can I think about it?” he asked softly. It was clear that trust didn’t come easily to him, and after his experiences over the last ten years, I didn’t know that I could blame him.
“Take your time, but surely you can see that this isn’t the right way to go about it. If you keep getting in other people’s faces, a punch in the nose might be the least of your worries.”