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“My poor baby,” Cameron said. He kissed her thumb, and then kissed her. “I don’t have much left to do. I’ll finish up and be right back,” he said.
She sighed. “You don’t have to babysit me. I’m okay. Just not much of a handyman.”
He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand.
“Ghost seems ready to be the babysitter,” he said, eyeing how his dog had immediately plopped down at her feet. “And you make a damn fine figure of a woman, so I choose that over driving a nail straight any day.”
“Yes, well…”
“No arguments, and I’m doing all the cooking and cleaning up for the rest of the week, so there’s that,” he said, and went back outside.
Rusty looked down at Ghost. “Thank you for giving up time with your precious boy to spend it with me.”
Ghost’s ear twitched, but it appeared he had nothing more to add.
Rusty leaned back in the chair and tried to ignore the constant throb, but it seemed to be in rhythm to the rise and fall of Cameron’s hammer and really hard to ignore.
Finally, he’d finished and was looking down the length of the porch, checking to make sure he hadn’t missed any spots, when he heard a car turn off the road. He paused, listening, thinking maybe they’d just been turning around. But then he heard the sound of tires to gravel and knew someone was coming to his house.
He gathered up the bag of nails and the caulk gun and laid them on a little table near the door beside the hammer, then moved to the front steps to wait.
A little shock went through him when he saw it was a patrol car from the sheriff’s office, and when the driver parked and got out, he was even more surprised to see Rance Woodley.
He glanced toward the window and got a glimpse of Rusty making tracks out of the living room, and then turned back to his visitor.
“Morning, Sheriff.”
“Morning, Cameron. If you can spare the time, I really need to talk to you.”
“It’s a little cold out. Come inside,” Cameron said.
Rance took off his Stetson as he followed Pope into the house, then hesitated as the white dog suddenly loomed before him.
“Lie down, Ghost. Stay,” Cameron said.
Ghost dropped, but he never took his eyes off the stranger in his house.
“Have a seat,” Cameron said.
Rance dropped. “I’m too rattled to beat around the bush. I just found out the FBI arrested Dewey Zane this morning for that murder out at Barton’s campground. I don’t even know where to start, but it puts me in a bad light. I thought I should maybe talk to those federal agents, and thought you might be able to help, since you’d worked with them some. That Caldwell woman is gone, so I don’t know who to contact. Thought you could give me a name or a number to call.”
“Why does it put you in a bad light, and why do you need to call them?” Cameron asked.
Rance was shaking. “Dewey is a friend. We hunt and fish together. He and Carly have been to my house for meals. He doesn’t have a lot of skills, but he works hard at what he does. Hell, I even introduced him to my ex-wife about five or six years ago when she was still living in the area. She was bartending at Fuzzy Fridays, that bar at the crossroads just over the switchback on Pope Mountain. She helped get him a job there.”
Cameron didn’t know what to think, but he had a gut feeling they’d been chasing the wrong guy.
All of a sudden, Rusty walked into the room and Woodley jumped where he sat.
“Shit! Oh…’scuse my language. I didn’t know you were still around,” Rance said.
Rusty glanced at Cameron, knew exactly what he was thinking because she was of the same mind, then fixed Woodley with a look and started talking. She already knew the answer to what she was going to ask, but she wanted to see his reaction.
“You said your ex-wife got Dewey a job. What’s her name?”
“Melinda Sheets now, but she mostly goes by Lindy these days. We were living around Bowling Green when we divorced. She had a good job at the time, so she stayed in the area.”
“When was the last time you spoke with her?” Rusty asked.
