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Calen had known he’d see her today, just not this soon. He checked his watch and verified that it was only one p.m., too early for their weekly gripe session about their exes. They reserved those for after work hours.
Emmy went to him, her troubled green eyes meeting his own brown ones, and she leaned in to put her mouth close to his ear. “If one more person asks me if I’m all right, I’m going to smack them with my magic wand,” she whispered.
Calen smiled. Ah, his kindred spirit and hater of holiday cheer. She wouldn’t blurt out any holiday greeting.
“Don’t actually make contact with the wand,” Calen advised, keeping his voice low as well. “I don’t want to arrest you for assault. I’m not sure those fairy wings will fit through the jail cell door.”
She pulled back from him and smiled, too. Sort of. But it was very short-lived. “We have to talk,” Emmy said. “About this.” She pressed her hand to the dirt-splotched sack.
Calen huffed. “Please tell me there aren’t presents in there for me.”
“Uh, no.” She stopped though, her forehead bunching up as if considering the possibility. “Well, probably not. Calen, it’s bad,” she tacked on.
“Bad?” Mick questioned, obviously having heard at least part of what Emmy had said. “Is this number three? You know, like bad news coming in threes?”
“Maybe,” she muttered.
Oh, man. No more bad news, not when they still had to get through the next hours leading up to their weekly griping.
“Come with me,” Emmy insisted, taking hold of Calen’s arm. “If anyone asks what’s going on, I’ll just let them think I’m having a meltdown because of our exes stomping on our hearts.”
There had indeed been some heart stomping, but Emmy had never been one who’d wanted to air her hurt in public. Again, kindred spirits, and they preferred to keep their pain behind closed doors.
“Can’t talk right now, sorry,” Emmy answered someone who called out aHope everything’s okay.
She threaded Calen through the remaining gawkers, then despite the fairy wings, Emmy squeezed them around the longhorns to head toward the sheriff’s office.
“Can’t talk now, sorry,” she repeated when Gladys said she looked lower than a fat penguin’s butt and offered her tea.
Calen didn’t ask Emmy what this was about because any number of people would have heard her answer. He just allowed himself to be led and pitied by onlookers, all the way into the sheriff’s office.
Since Calen had both Mick and another deputy out patrolling, it was just him on office duty today, and that meant the only other person around was the dispatcher/receptionist, Junie Carson, who’d held the job for nearly fifty years. She’d been there when Calen had first pinned on a badge shortly after he’d turned twenty-one, and she’d remained for his five years as a deputy and the following decade as sheriff.
Wearing a Mrs. Santa costume that she donned most days—the woman must have owned a dozen of them—Junie perked up when they walked in. She was probably ready to dole out the merriment junk like everybody else, but Calen immediately cut her off.
“Hold my calls,” he said.
He took Emmy into his office, where he shut the door. Calen studied Emmy to see if she was indeed on the verge of a meltdown. No. This wasn’t the precursor to athey did us wrongrant.
“Okay, what the heck is this all about?” he demanded.
“I found that in the attic when I went home for lunch,” she said, patting the bulging canvas sack she was carrying.
Though the explanation was short, it took Calen a couple of seconds to wrap his mind around it. She no doubt meant the attic of the house she’d purchased eighteen months ago. The house, and therefore the attic, that had belonged to Calen’s father, Waylon, who’d died over two years earlier. Emmy had bought it shortly thereafter because Calen already owned a small horse ranch on the outskirts of town. Calen’s mother had long since passed away.
“Is there something illegal, or dead, in that bag?” he asked.
She didn’t exactly jump to answer. “Yes to the first,” she finally said. “I’m not sure about the second. Maybe.”
Calen groaned. Then cursed.
Hell’s bells. He’d never known Waylon to use drugs, but because of his father’s rotten childhood and the loss of his wife a decade earlier, the man was what everyone called a miserable old coot. Waylon had also had an extreme hatred of all things holiday related, thanks to his unhappy childhood memories. So, maybe his father had . . . what? Severed someone’s finger or something when they’d gushed Yuletide cheer?
But that didn’t make sense.
If any severing had happened, no way would the severee have just kept quiet.
“When I went home for lunch, I heard something scurrying around up in the attic,” Emmy continued, “so I went up to check for mice. There were mouse droppings all right.” She shuddered in anickkind of way. “And this. It was tucked in a corner, so you must have missed it when you cleared things out right after I bought the house.”
