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CHAPTER19
Thursday, July 19th
Another bouquet of daisies greeted me at Calamity Jane’s early the next morning. They lay across my desk, their perky petals beginning to wilt. I wanted to throw them on the floor and jump up and down on them.
I glanced over at Mona, who seemed to be battling the rooster for sunrise bragging rights lately. Her fingernails clackity-clacked away on her laptop, as usual. Her jasmine-scented calling card drifted around me, competing with the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. “When did these flowers arrive?”
“Yesterday afternoon.” Mona looked at me, her eyebrows spiked, her rhinestone-studded reading glasses resting on the tip of her nose. “Speaking of yesterday, where were you?”
“In hell.” I cast a glance at Jane’s closed office door. Light leaked out through the bottom crack. I’d forgotten about the property information that Jane had asked me to dig up until I had Addy settled at home with her new cast.
Grateful for the library’s extended summer hours, I’d grabbed Layne and raced across town. Disappointment had tightened my chest when I didn’t find Doc sitting in his usual chair in the South Dakota room. I’d spent the next half-hour scanning books, all the while lecturing myself about why I needed to pluck this crush I had on Doc before its roots dug in.
I pulled the information I’d copied for Jane from my tote and asked in a lowered voice. “Did Jane notice I didn’t come back from lunch?”
“Of course, but I told her you were showing some houses.”
“Thanks. I owe you.”
Mona waved away my gratitude. “So spill. What happened?”
I retrieved the pink envelope from the bouquet and then dumped the flowers in the trash. “You’ll never believe it.”
“Does it involve a horse skull or a chicken?”
The fact that my life was now predictably threaded with equine and poultry subplots made me want to throw back a couple of Zoloft and chase them with a splash of Southern Comfort. “The latter. Addy followed her chicken into a mine, fell down a shaft, and broke her arm.”
Actually, Addy informed me after we left the ER that she had tripped over Kelly’s footby accidentand stumbled into the shallow, test shaft. Later, long after Addy’s eyelids had drifted closed, I tossed and turned in the quiet dark of my bedroom, wondering if I should have been focusing on Kelly instead of Jeff all this time.
Could Kelly’s obsession with death have had anything to do with the disappearance of the other girls from her swim team? Maybe her morbid fixation, born last summer, had just taken a while to float to the surface. Maybe she’d lied about what really happened to her best friend, Emma Cranson, on that fateful August day. Maybe the other girls had also fallenby accidentinto shafts in some of the many mines littering the outskirts of Deadwood—shafts too deep for anyone to be fished out of alive.
“How’s Addy doing today?” Mona’s question tugged me out of my shadow-filled thoughts.
“When I left home, she was supervising Layne. He’s helping her build a chicken trap.” Addy was determined to rescue Elvis from the mine, even though I’d grounded her from entering any holes in the earth for the next six months.
I stared down at the tiny envelope in my hand, running my finger over my name scrawled in purple ink. Anticipation and dread tightened my stomach.
Mona’s fingernails returned to their key-pecking routine, but her gaze bounced between her screen and me. “Did you have a nice lunch with Jeff Wymonds?”
Mona knew of my suspicions about Jeff and the missing girls. She had never agreed on aguiltyverdict, her jury was still open to hearing more evidence.
“It turns out he’s pretty torn up about his wife leaving him, needs to sell his place to pay what she’s demanding in the divorce settlement, and wants to hire my services.”In bed as well as in real estate.
My cheeks warmed at the memory of his misconception about my profession. However, as Harvey had so kindly pointed out on our way to the Bronco after Addy’s cast-fitting, I now had a career to fall back on when I ran out of unemployment benefits.
“That’s good, right?”
“I guess.”
“Is he still on your list of suspects?”
“I don’t know.” My jury had begun deliberations. While I was swaying toward him being innocent, I wasn’t willing to let him leave my line-up just yet.
I tore open the envelope and extracted the card. My secret admirer’s latest poetic stab filled the front of it.
The roses will be red
On our table with a view.
