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I swallowed hard, finding my gaze locked to his. “Worse. She doesn’t eat, she doesn’t shower. Not unless I practically force her. If it wasn’t for her family, I think she’d fade away.”
He stared into my eyes a moment longer before turning back to the bar. “That’s hard. I’m sorry you have to go through all that. My mom wouldn’t have wanted that for her.”
Ian’s mother, Susie, had passed away about 11 years ago with uterine cancer. She and my mom had been very close, to the point where I often wondered if Susie’s death had been a springboard to my mother’s eventual unraveling. It was a good reminder that for as crazy as my mother could make me, at least I still had her. Ian had no one to drive him nuts, as only a mother could.
“Well, that’s why I’ve been doing a little digging of my own,” I said, sticking my hand into my pocket. No better time than now to hand the letter over. Maybe Ian could make better sense out of the whole thing. “My cousins and I had this bad feeling about Angie Pine…”
He stopped me with a slap of his hand on the table. “Are you kidding me, Hazy? Digging around? You’re not a cop.”
I frowned. “I know that.”
“Then why are you butting in where you don’t belong?”
The angry rash was back. I folded my hands in my lap to keep from scratching at it. “Excuse me, but you’re the one that put me in the middle of this thing. I’m not going to sit around quietly while my family gets torn apart. I hate to break it to you, Ian Larson, but I’m just not that kind of woman.”
He sighed, annoyance heavy on his breath. “Just tell me what you found and then let me do my job. Can you at least do that?”
I wasn’t going to make any promises, but he must’ve taken my silence as affirmation because he waved his hand for me to continue.
“As I was saying,” I pulled the letter out of my pocket, “we got this bad feeling about Angie Pine and just so happened to come across this letter between her and Mr. White.” I handed the creased page to him and looked over his shoulder as he read it. “Looks incriminating, doesn’t it? Maybe Angie killed him for revenge. She wanted part of the award and he wouldn’t give it to her. Makes sense to me.”
His frown grew deeper the further down the letter he got. Finally at the end, he folded it and looked back up at me with suspicion. “I don’t suppose you came across this letter yesterday evening, say, sometime around 3:00 p.m.?”
I chuckled nervously and reached for my cider. “Um…I don’t know. Might’ve been sometime around then.”
“Tell me you didn’t break into her shop and steal this letter.”
My hand made a zipping motion across my lips. “I’m not telling you anything.”
He sighed and unfolded the letter again, rereading it slowly. “I’m not sure this is proof of anything, Hazy. Yeah, they didn’t like each other. But half the town didn’t like Allen White.”
Frustration bloomed in my gut, but I ignored it and remained glued to my stool. “Well, maybe not. But we also talked to Laura Blight today and she told us that Allen and Angie really had a serious feud going on. And, while we were there, his neighbor came over. Boy, did that guy have a serious bone to pick with Allen. He told us he was glad Allen was dead.”
Ian’s face went from a light shade of pink to dark purple. “You talked to witnesses?”
Uh, oh. I might’ve said too much. Leaning back onto my barstool, I bit the inside of my cheek. He didn’t look too happy. “Yeah, we might’ve run into a couple people.”
“That’s it.” He abruptly stood, abandoning a half-finished beer. “I’m warning you, Hazy. Don’t get involved. This is police work. If you keep interrupting, I’m going to have to arrest you for interference.”
My mouth fell open and my cheeks began to burn. “You can’t do that…”
“I can and I will.” He threw two bucks next to the beer and stuffed Angie’s letter in his coat pocket. “The next time I catch you interfering, you’re going to spend the night in jail. This is your only warning.”
He sped out the door, leaving me to sulk alone at the bar.
Chapter 13
I didn’t stay at the club for long. The late evening found me walking home alone, lost in my own thoughts. For as crazy as Ian could make me, I hadn’t intended to make him angry. This wasn’t about him. A killer was still out there; that much I knew. And the sooner we found him or her, the sooner my family would be at peace again.
But then again, maybe that was a lie. A month in Uriville had done little to bring back the spark in Momma Tula’s eyes. This morning I had to serve her breakfast in bed since she wouldn’t get out from under the covers. When I went back for lunch, she’d eaten maybe two bites of her waffles. Not even her favorite foods could tempt her.
Brunick Manor came into view at the end of the road. I pushed up the hill toward it, feeling the sweet burn in my calves. Kat was probably already snoring away in bed, his little cloven feet pointing straight up toward the ceiling, his pink belly exposed. Not feeling ready for the companionship of my crazy aunts, I turned at the corner of the house and headed toward the dock in back. Lake Apolka was a pool of black ink beneath the night sky. Bullfrogs echoed along its banks, calling to each other in a cacophony of mating calls.
I walked out on the dock and sat on its edge, dangling my feet into the water. As a child, I never would’ve stuck my feet into its murky depths. Aunt Viv had told me one too many stories of creatures that liked to lurk in water and steal away naughty children. Fortunately, I’d outgrown those stories, although my heart still skipped a beat when the water next to me began to ripple.
“What are you doing out here alone, child?” Grammy Jo trudged into the water next to the dock, a towel draped around her torso. Her bare skinny legs were visible even in the moonlight. “Come to join Grammy for a swim?”
A shudder went through me. Swimming naked with an old woman wasn’t exactly on the top of my list of things to do tonight. There were many things I wanted to see in this world, but that wasn’t one of them.
