Page 85 of Her Wicker Guardian

Locke glances at the badge on Aaron’s chest, then looks back at him. “Deputy.”

A phone rises beside the pickup. Locke sees it. “Please do not take my picture,” he calls.

The phone stops moving.

Nobody on the shoulder seems to know what to do with the fact that the impossible thing they came to see has just asked them for something completely ordinary.

The man lowers his phone.

Aaron watches that happen, then turns back to Locke. “Were you threatening anybody with an axe?”

“No.”

Aaron gives him a moment before asking the next question. “Were you splitting wood?”

“Yes.”

His gaze shifts to me. “And the kid?”

“He was delivering something for his mother. He heard Locke chopping wood and came around the cottage before I could stop him.”

“Did Locke go toward him?”

“No. The kid saw him, dropped the box, and ran.”

Aaron looks back at Locke rather than treating my answer as the end of it. “That how you remember it?”

“Yes.”

Locke doesn’t look at me for help. He stands there in his green shirt with his hands empty at his sides and answers for himself while Aaron weighs what he’s hearing.

Aaron takes a few steps toward the corner of the cottage and looks into the yard. From there, the growing stack of split firewood beside the workshop is impossible to miss.

The man near the pickup says, “You’re just taking their word for it?”

Aaron turns toward him. “I’m standing here looking at enough split firewood to get somebody through a Missouri winter.”

Tom calls from the work yard, “Not yet.”

Aaron glances back at him.

Tom lifts one hand. “He’s ambitious.”

A laugh almost escapes me.

Aaron rubs his mouth before it can happen to him too. “Right now, the only safety problem I can identify is people stopping on a narrow county road because they want to stare into somebody’s yard.”

Nobody argues.

He turns to the cluster of lookie-loos. “If Rachel invites you onto her property, that’s her business. If she doesn’t, keep moving. If you block this road and cause an accident, that becomes my business.”

The man by the pickup mutters something I can’t hear.

Aaron points toward his truck. “Move along.”

That does it. The pickup leaves first. The other car follows, and the woman who had been trying to see around the cottage gets into a third vehicle farther down the road. Within a few minutes, the shoulder is empty and traffic is moving again.

Aaron waits until the last car disappears around the curve before turning back to Locke.