AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I step in behind him, letting his gravitas speak for both of us.
Bea turns around from her work at the bar. She smiles. “Sheriff!” Then she spots me and the smile fades. “Constance.” She holds her head higher. “What can I help you with?”
Rory approaches the bar. “I’m afraid I lost my receipt from the other day. Could you write me out another one?’
She laughs, a flirtatious bubbly thing. “You need it for your records?”
Rory is nonplussed. “Yes.”
Taking a page out of my book. I like it.
“Let’s see. Two IPAs. A Shirley Temple…” She scribbles something out on her receipt pad. “Am I missing anything?”
He shakes his head. “That’ll be it.”
Bea tears it off with a flourish and hands it over. “Is that all I can do for you… two?” Bea begrudgingly regards me.
Rory gestures toward me. “The note, Dr. Chaplin.”
I hand him the note Liliana gave us, the one I had in my lap the whole way here.
He looks at the two notes side by side.
“What’s going on?” Bea asks with rising suspicion.
“I think the handwriting expert will definitely be able to work with this,” Rory says. “What do you think, doctor?”
I look down at the two notes. Sure enough, there are many commonalities in the scribbled writing, markedly the peculiar swooping dot over the lowercase letter “i” in both notes. “Yes, I would have to agree.”
Her eyebrows shoot up in alarm. “Handwriting expert?! What are you talking about?”
Rory cracks a smile, finally, turning Liliana’s note around. “This look familiar, Bea?”
Bea’s eyes fall to the paper. Her expression is indifferent, but her pause is long enough to run a truck through.
“This is a page from your receipt pad, is it not?”
“Might be. Might not. I don’t know who all uses receipts like that.”
Rory looks down his nose at the bartender. “Bea…”
“Sheriff, I don’t like what you’re implying.”
“He’s not actually implying anything, other than you should recognize this piece of paper as having been torn of your receipt pad,” I say very dryly.
Her nose squinches. I can tell she wants to snap at me, but won’t in the presence of not just Rory but the county sheriff.
“Look, Bea,” Rory says as he tucks both pieces of paper away into his pocket. “We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this whole skeleton business at the Wilhelm house. And we’ve just come across some new facts that are interesting, to say the least. We’re wondering if you care to comment on it.”
Bea’s gaze shoots between the two of us, quick and nervous. “You don’t think I had anything to do with it, do you?”
“Yes, we do,” I say as plain as can be.
Rory straightens up next to me. “Trying to go for a more subtle approach, Chaplin…”
“Sorry.” I clear my throat. “We might, we might not.” I raise my brows at him. “Better?”
He veils a laugh between pinched lips.
