Cut and Died

by Jeff Shelby

  “But why would someone do that for a total stranger? I wasn’t even with my car.”

  “Because people out here are nice and look after one another,” I said, frowning.

  He looked puzzled. “Really? People do that kind of stuff for people they don’t know?”

  “Really.”

  I didn’t know if Latney’s generosity would extend to randomly towing abandoned cars from the side of the road, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The residents here looked after one another—some more so than others—so I wouldn’t have batted an eye if we’d gone into town and found Mack’s car in the parking lot of Toby’s, or at the bank. Granted, I didn’t know who might do something like that, but it was at least possible.

  A lot more possible than someone stealing Mack’s car from a ditch along the side of the road during a snowstorm.

  Mack didn’t say anything, just stared at the muffin that was disintegrating in his hand. I glanced down at the floor, at the crumbs that littered his feet. I would definitely need to sweep.

  “Fine,” he said as he peeled the paper wrapper off the muffin. “We can check with people in town.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “After we call the sheriff,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I want it on file that it’s missing,” he said, his voice firm.

  “But—”

  He held up a hand. “No buts. I want my baby back. And I’ll do whatever it takes to find her.”

  SEVEN

  Sheriff Lewis showed up thirty minutes later, and he was not happy.

  “You steal someone’s car?” he groused as he stepped out of the cold and into the living room.

  “Good afternoon to you, too,” I said with fake cheerfulness.

  He grunted and settled his hands on his hips. His white button-down stretched against his stomach sported a stain of some kind, and his khaki pants were damp at the ankles, as if he’d sloshed through puddles to get to my front door.

  “My friend is the one who called,” I said, motioning toward Mack. He’d been pacing the living room and came to a standstill the minute the sheriff knocked.

  He crossed the living room and extended a hand. “Mack Mercy,” he said, shaking with the sheriff.

  Sheriff Lewis grunted again. “So this lady here stole your car, huh?” He glared at me, his narrowed eyes barely visible under his white, bushy brows.

  Mack gave him a puzzled look. “Who, Rainy?” He shook his head. “No, she didn’t steal the car. I’m staying with her.”

  The sheriff’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You inviting strangers into your home now? Sleeping with them?”

  I squeaked with indignation. “Sheriff Lewis! That is completely inappropriate.”

  “I agree,” he said, nodding. “A lady like yourself should be married. None of this living on your own nonsense. Not at your age.” He snorted. “You’ll end up a spinster for sure, you know.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.” I frowned. “I meant it’s none of your business who is in my home and who I am sleeping with.”

  Mack arched an eyebrow and my cheeks began to burn. “Not that I’m sleeping with him,” I said quickly. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe I was having to defend myself. “Never mind. We called because Mack’s car skidded off the road last night and now it isn’t there.”

  “Well, where is it?” Sheriff Lewis asked.

  Mack shoved his hands into the pockets of his dress pants. “Well, that’s sort of why we called you.”

  The sheriff frowned. “I don’t have it.”

  I stole a glance at Mack. He was staring at the sheriff with a look of both befuddlement and horror. As far as I was concerned, it was an accurate response to the elderly man standing in front of us, and it was one I’d frequently had myself during my own interactions with him.

  I took a deep breath. “We know you don’t have the car, Sheriff. What we’re concerned about is that someone else might.”

  Sheriff Lewis’s expression cleared. “Good.”

  “Good what?”

  “Good that someone else has it,” he said. His expression darkened. “Although I don’t see why I needed to come all the way out here for you to tell me this. I was in the middle of watching a golf tournament. Was just getting to the exciting part.”

  I had a feeling that watching a golf tournament was about as much fun as watching paint dry.

  Mack finally spoke up. “Is this guy for real?” he asked, his eyes on me.

  I gave him my best I-told-you-so look and turned my attention back to the sheriff. “I think you’re misunderstanding.”

  The sheriff’s hackles raised. “Oh, I understand just fine, missy,” he said darkly. “You called me out here to help you find a car that you’ve already found. You just feel like wasting my time or something?”

  “We haven’t found the car.” Mack’s voice boomed, and the sheriff and I both flinched.

  “I’m not following.”

  Mack rolled his eyes. “Clearly. Look, we know you don’t have the car in your possession. My concern is that someone else does. Illegally.”

  The sheriff chewed his lip, his moustache dancing as he did so. “So you think someone mighta stole it?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding with exaggeration, relieved he was finally understanding.

  “Hmph.” The sheriff thought for a minute. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  A muscle in Mack’s temple pulsed, and I knew he was doing everything he could to keep his temper in check. “Well,” he said, his voice as smooth as silk, “I was hoping you might be able to file a police report. And then look for it.”

  Sheriff Lewis mulled over Mack’s words. “Suppose I could do that,” he said, stroking his moustache. He reached for the pipe nestled in his shirt pocket and stuck it between his lips. “Alright,” he said, his teeth clenched around the pipe. “Will do.”

  He turned to go.

  “Uh, Sheriff Lewis?” I said, taking a step toward him.

  He stopped, then pivoted on his heel so he was facing me. “What?” he snapped.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He scowled. “Like what?”

  I smiled as sweetly as I could, trying to keep my own temper from exploding. “Like a description of the car?”

  The sheriff managed to look a little sheepish as he pulled a small notepad from his pants pocket. He adjusted his pipe in his mouth, yanked a pen from his pants pocket, and stared at Mack, waiting.

  Mack gave him the description and the sheriff jotted it down. When he finished, he stared at the words he’d written, and I wondered if he was trying to commit the details to memory or if he was simply having a hard time reading his own handwriting.

  My money was on the latter.

  “Alright,” Sheriff Lewis said, snapping the notepad shut. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “So you’ll be looking for it?” Mack asked.

  The sheriff gave him an uncertain look. “Sure. Yeah. We’ll be looking for it.”

  “Good,” Mack said, his eyes on the man standing in front of him. “Because I need to get back home. Soon.”

  I didn’t say anything, but it didn’t stop me from thinking it.

  Good luck was all I could think, because with Sheriff Lewis at the helm, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.

  But I was pretty sure finding Mack’s car wasn’t in the cards.

  Not today, and probably not ever, if Sheriff Lewis was the one doing the looking.

  EIGHT

  “So, what now?” Mack asked, rubbing his hands together.

  The sheriff had left a few minutes earlier, and I’d turned my attention to the tubs of holiday decorations still stacked in the corner of the living room. I’d managed to finish boxing them up last night before heading to bed, but they were still waiting to be stowed back down in the basement. I wasn’t looking forward to the multiple trips up and down the stairs.

  “What do you mean, what now?”
I said. “We wait for the sheriff.”

  I didn’t add that we might be waiting forever.

  Mack toed the floor. He didn’t have his shoes on. “I’m not good at waiting.”

  “I’m aware,” I said dryly.

  He smiled. “I think we should head into town. What’s it called? Whitney?”

  “No. Latney.”

  He snapped his fingers. “That’s right.”

  “I’m thinking we should have lunch,” I said. The muffin I’d eaten before the sheriff arrived had done nothing to sate my hunger. My stomach growled as if to confirm this.

  “But what about what you said?”

  “What did I say?” I asked. I’d said a lot of things.

  “About maybe someone in town towed my car for me.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, nodding. “It’s entirely possible.”

  “So shouldn’t we go look?”

  I grabbed one of the plastic tubs and hoisted it so that the edge rested on my hip. “Right now?”

  Mack nodded.

  I didn’t want to go into town. I didn’t want to go look for his car. I wanted to finish putting away my Christmas decorations, and I wanted my nice, quiet life back to myself.

  “I have some stuff I need to do,” I mumbled.

  Mack glanced at the bins. “Just put this stuff away, right?” He looked around the living room. “You got it all packed up already, didn’t you?”

  I couldn’t exactly lie about that, so I just gave a quick nod.

  “So if I help you put this stuff away,” Mack said, waving a hand toward the boxes, “then we can head into town. And poke around.”

  “Well, we should probably eat, too...”

  He glanced upward, thinking. He snapped his fingers again. “What about that burger pace you told me about?”

  “The Wicked Wich?”

  “Yeah, that’s the place.” He grinned. “They make all those crazy burgers, right? The kid does?”

  I couldn’t remember telling Mack about Mikey and his burger creations, but it was clear I had at some point. “Yes,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

  Mack clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “Let’s go, then. We can look for my car, grab some food, and you can show me all around this place you call home.”

  I shifted the storage tub to my other hip. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go and eat burgers, and I wasn’t totally averse to helping him look for his car, either. But what I was hesitating over was bringing him into Latney.

  Not because I was ashamed of him, or because I worried what others might think. Sure, the gossip mill might crank out a few rumors, but no one would come out and accuse me of the things that had come out of Sheriff Lewis’s mouth a few minutes earlier. Besides, most people in town knew I’d moved to Latney from Arlington, and they knew my work history. All it would take was a quick introduction to Mack for people to put the pieces together.

  So what was the problem?

  I took the bin into the kitchen and headed down the stairs to the basement. The air smelled like a mixture of dampness and fabric softener, and the bare light bulb illuminating the stairwell gave off just enough light so that I could safely maneuver the steps but not see the thick spider webs that hung from the rafters.

  I set the tub down and pulled open the door that led to a storage room I used to house holiday décor. The tree had already been put away, as had the ornaments. Boxes of Halloween and Easter-themed décor were tucked toward the back of the small space, as well as American-themed decorations for Fourth of July. The bins were on my list of things to sort through and pare down, but I hadn’t quite gotten to it yet. I shoved the plastic tub into the room and headed back up the stairs for the next bin.

  I knew what the problem was, the reason I was hesitating over taking Mack into town.

  Because it was mine.

  It sounded selfish, and it probably was, but Latney belonged to me. I’d moved here, and I’d carved out a new life for myself. It hadn’t been perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was mine. I’d started fresh, with a new house and new friends and a mostly new attitude, and Mack represented the very life I’d left behind. I’d known him—and worked for him—almost as long as I’d been married to Charlie. Mack had known Laura when she was a little girl, and I’d taken a brief maternity leave when Luke was born. He’d bought me gifts for my birthday and Christmas, simple, inexpensive things, and we’d worked together on more cases than I could count. He was as much a part of my past as my kids and my ex-husband were, perhaps even more so.

  I couldn’t keep my kids from coming to Latney, and nor would I want to. But Mack represented a different part of my life, the part that I didn’t like talking about in this new community.

  My time working with a private investigator.

  I had found myself embroiled in more mysteries over the last year than most people might experience in a lifetime, and having a history of working in a private investigator’s firm, regardless of the type of work I did there, often meant I was the first person people came to when they had a problem. Bringing Mack into town, and explaining who he was, felt like it would shine a strobe light on my past, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted life to settle into a new routine. No, I wanted life to settle down so I could figure out a new routine.

  It hadn’t happened yet.

  And introducing Mack to the people of Latney felt like it would push that even further out of reach.

  “Rainy?” Mack’s voice pulled me from my thoughts.

  “Yeah?” I responded, moving toward the stairs.

  Mack was lumbering down them, a plastic tub in his hands. “Where do you want this?”

  I felt a twinge of guilt.

  Mack had no idea what I was wrestling with emotionally. He was in town, his car was missing, and all he wanted to do was go look for it and grab a bite to eat.

  And here I was, overthinking it and attaching far more importance to it than was necessary.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time in my life I’d done this.

  “Over here,” I said, motioning to the storage room door that was still propped open.

  He set the bin down and wiped his hands on his pants. “I’ll go grab the other two. Then maybe we can go get a burger? I’m starving.”

  He sounded so hopeful and looked so earnest that I tamped down my reservations.

  There was no reason we couldn’t head into Latney.

  I was being ridiculous.

  At least that’s what I kept telling myself as I trudged back up the stairs to get ready for our trip into town.

  NINE

  Mack didn’t stop talking the minute we got into the car.

  I turned on the heat as we sat in the driveway, hoping the car would warm up before we started driving. It was late afternoon, but the sun had already disappeared behind the tree line, and the icy wind seemed to find its way through every crack and crevice in the car.

  Mack coughed, expelling a puff of white air. “Cold weather sometimes makes me cough,” he explained.

  “I know,” I said, smiling. “It was cold in DC, remember?”

  He grinned. “Yeah, I guess. This just feels colder, you know?” He rubbed at his arms.

  “Probably because you’re not dressed for it,” I said, eyeing his button-down shirt. He hadn’t brought along his sports coat. “Where’s your jacket?”

  He shrugged. “Felt too formal to wear to a burger joint.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Too formal for hypothermia?”

  His smile was self-deprecating. “Way too formal for that.”

  I adjusted the heater, holding my hands in front of the vent, waiting for warm air. Heat hit my fingertips and satisfied that more was on its way, I dialed it up a notch and backed out of the driveway.

  The drive to town was filled with talking. Mack talking. He filled me in on some of the cases he’d worked on recently, and he talked about my replacement, Justine.

  “I think she’s bo
rderline insane,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  “And she’s always telling me she needs breaks and stuff.”

  “What do you mean, breaks?” I asked.

  “Like lunch breaks. Breaks during the day.”

  I glanced over at him. “That’s the law, Mack. You’re supposed to give your employees breaks throughout the day.”

  He frowned. “You never took any.”

  He was right about that. More times than not, I’d eat at my desk, answering phones or typing up notes as I picked at a salad or wolfed down a sandwich.

  “I was special,” I said.

  “Yeah. You were,” he said, and I was surprised at the gruff tenderness in his tone.

  I tried to switch the subject, mostly so I wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving. “So, what else has been going on with you?”

  “I already told you about the cases I’ve been working on,” he said. “Well, as much as I can tell you without divulging too much.”

  “I meant what’s going on with you outside of work,” I said. “You taken any vacations? Seeing anyone?”

  We normally didn’t talk about those kinds of things on purpose—they would just come up in our daily conversations—so it felt a little weird asking him outright about his personal life.

  “No vacations,” he said. He paused. “Actually, I did head up to Massachusetts for a few days this past summer. My niece’s high school graduation.”

  “That must have been nice,” I said. We were just about to hit the outskirts of town and I slowed down, knowing the speed limit was about to change. “Is that where your family lives?”

  “Yeah, my sister. She runs a camp up by the Berkshires.”

  “Is that a town? A family?”

  He chuckled. “No. The mountains.”

  I’d never been to Massachusetts and had never really considered it having much more than a big city that had a baseball team and a harbor people dumped tea into.

  “That must be fun,” I said.

  “Supervising kids who watch and entertain other kids sounds like fun?” He shuddered. “Are you serious?”