Running for Her Life (9 page)

“Because they can be temperamental and expensive and sometimes even difficult to start, but every man still wants one.”

It was an old joke but it set Nicholi and Toby off again, with Andy joining in. Jake continued to sip his coffee, looking at her over the rim of his cup.

With a good-natured smile, Tara refilled all the coffee cups. “When you all get done amusing yourselves,” she said, “I’ll be happy to take your orders.”

“I’m ready,” Jake said.

She pulled an order pad out of the pocket of her khaki skirt. “Pancakes and bacon. By the way,” he added, his voice much lower, “after I left your house last night, I had a conversation with Donny Miso.”

“Why?”

“He left the picnic just before the egg toss. I wanted to know what he did after that.”

Donny didn’t have any reason to harm her. Heck, she’d even paid him cash just to help him out. If she’d paid him by check he’d have lost his unemployment benefits. The guy was down and out on his luck. She knew what that felt like.

“And?” she prompted.

“I found him at the Double-Pull Tap. Evidently he likes his lemonade with some vodka mixed in. He’d had a few before I talked with him. Said he’d come straight from the picnic. Bartender vouched that he’d been there since about the time I saw him leave. He wasn’t at your house.”

“I hope you didn’t scare him. He seems pretty fragile right now.”

“The man is a drunk. You’re better off without him.”

She didn’t think so. Donny probably did drink too much and he’d been acting erratic lately, but still, she needed a dishwasher. And Donny had left a message on her voice mail just that morning, asking if he could come by that afternoon.

* * *

T
HREE HOURS LATER
, Tara was stirring the cream of broccoli soup when Alice Fenton popped back into the kitchen. The woman who had been first her landlord, then her friend, wore a flannel shirt, blue jeans and scuffed loafers. She was four inches taller than Tara and probably carried another thirty pounds, making her an imposing figure, even at the age of sixty. Her face was lined, but her eyes were still clear and sharp. Not for the first time, Tara wished it could have worked out between her and Bill. Alice would have been a great mother-in-law.

“Nice plywood on your door window,” Alice said. She hugged Tara and ignored Janet, who stood at the grill making the last of the day’s pancakes before they switched over to lunch. Janet turned slightly, so that her back was to Alice.

Tara didn’t expect any different. She knew there was no love lost between the two women—they’d had an argument some fifteen or twenty years earlier and neither seemed inclined to put it in the past. Janet had a son about the same age as Bill Fenton, and Tara thought the issue had something to do with the two boys.

Shortly after arriving in Wyattville and seeing the animosity, she’d discreetly tried to get the details. Neither had been forthcoming, and it drove her crazy that the two people she cared about most in Wyattville couldn’t stand each other. She’d contemplated asking someone else about it but hadn’t wanted either Alice or Janet to think that she was stirring up gossip about them.

“Welcome back,” Tara said. Fifteen minutes earlier, through the service window, she’d caught a glimpse of Alice and Henry in the dining room and had assumed the woman would make a beeline back to the kitchen at her first opportunity. Henry, knowing he’d get the lowdown from Alice on the way home, had stayed in the dining room, talking with other farmers.

“You should have called us before we went out of town that morning to see Bill. We would have stopped in to help you clean up the mess.”

It wasn’t an empty promise. Over the past fourteen months, Alice and Henry had both been very helpful. When the dish machine had sprung a leak, Alice had made sure that Henry was there to fix it. And when rain had soaked through the roof, and then through the ceiling tiles, leaving puddles throughout the restaurant, Alice had been on her hands and knees, right alongside Tara, mopping up the mess.

“What exactly happened?” Alice asked.

She had no doubt heard a couple versions by now. One of the few negatives about Alice was that she liked to gossip. In her favor, she did try to have her facts straight.

“Some kid was sharpening up his throwing arm,” Tara said.

“Is that what the police say?” Alice picked up a tomato and squeezed. Evidently it met inspection because she put it next to the others waiting to be sliced.

“Yes,” Tara replied. “That’s the only reasonable explanation.” Of course, they didn’t realize that Michael Masterly didn’t have a reasonable bone in his body. Irrational. Temperamental. Judgmental. Those were all better adjectives. And he was a master at hiding it.

She shifted over and stirred the sauce that was bubbling in the large pan on the burner next to the soup. Today’s special was spaghetti and meatballs. Janet’s parents had brought the recipe with them from the old country, and Tara had almost passed out from pleasure the first time she’d tasted the dish. She wasn’t the least bit offended that Janet didn’t trust her to do anything but stir.

“That teenage hoodlum should have to pay to replace the window,” Alice said.

“The window is getting fixed this afternoon. But maybe
the hoodlum,
” she said, winking at Alice, “could mop my floor for a month. That would be a nice trade-off.”

“I heard the new interim police chief helped you clean up the mess that night. What’s he like?”

Decisive. Maybe even bossy. Sexy as heck. “He’s a big-city cop who is helping out an old friend. I get the feeling that the pace here is a little slower than what he’s used to.”

“I thought I might have him over for dinner. With Chase gone, the man is probably knocking around in that empty house. And I thought it might be a nice opportunity for him to meet Madeline.”

Now, that made more sense. Bill’s twin had moved home after her divorce last year. For a couple months, both adult children had been living in the house with their parents. Based on a few of Bill’s comments, Tara had always thought he sought refuge at Nel’s to avoid Madeline.

For Alice and Henry’s sake, Tara had tried on several occasions to have a conversation with Madeline but the woman hadn’t given her the time of day. Alice wasn’t the only person who gossiped in Wyattville, and Tara had heard several versions of Madeline’s latest exploits with a married man who lived just outside of town.

Madeline liked men. Tara bet she’d really like Jake. “Matchmaking?” she asked, trying hard to keep her tone light. The idea of Madeline getting her claws into Jake was disturbing.

“What if I am? But I’d like you to come, too.”

The spoon slipped out of Tara’s hand and sank in the heavy sauce. Janet turned to look at her—she was frowning. Tara hastily grabbed some tongs and used them to fish the spoon out. All the while, her brain was scrambling to think up a way to refuse. Was she really expected to watch Madeline flirt with Jake all night? Unfortunately Alice didn’t take
no
well. That might also have been what led Bill to hide out at Nel’s.

“I’m pretty busy here, Alice. And I’ve got a stack of paperwork to go through.”

“Nonsense. You need to eat. And I don’t want it to be too obvious, you know. Please.”

Act normal.
She couldn’t make this a bigger deal than it needed to be. And Alice had helped her so many times. “Okay. Just tell me when.”

“Tonight. I already stopped at the police station and he’s available. I took the liberty of telling him that you’d be joining us. We’ll eat around seven.”

It took everything Tara had to keep a smile on her face. “Great. See you tonight.”

The woman was almost out of the kitchen when Tara stopped her. “Hey, Alice, did you and Henry happen to stop by my house late yesterday afternoon?”

“Why?” Alice asked. Her neighbor appeared a bit startled, and Tara wondered if she’d been too abrupt in switching topics.

“When I got home after the picnic last night, my front screen door wasn’t closed. The latch doesn’t catch quite right. I thought maybe you’d needed to come inside for something. I know Henry has some old tools in the basement still.”

Alice smiled. “Honey, we didn’t get back into town until late.”

“That’s what I thought. Never mind, then.”

“I’ll just have to make sure Henry gets that door fixed for you.”

“No problem.” She didn’t want the door fixed. She needed all the early warning signals she could find.

Chapter Seven

Jake cruised through Wyattville. It didn’t take long. Main Street was less than three blocks long. There was Nel’s, Frank Johnson’s drugstore, a hardware store, a resale clothing store, another restaurant about the size of Nel’s, Chase’s law office, a bank, a decent-sized grocery store, the Double-Pull and a smaller bar. Flanking each end of town was a church. If you were Catholic, you headed south. The Methodists went north.

If you needed a doctor, a dentist or an accountant, you drove to Bluemond. There was a smattering of retail on the side streets, mixed in with residential housing. A day-care center, a tailor, a couple gas stations and a psychic. He smiled at that. Maybe he should get an appointment and find out what he was going to do when he left Wyattville.

His boss expected him back. He’d been okay at hearing that Jake needed a little more time off, but he had made it clear that he wanted Jake back in the saddle.
“You did the only thing you could have,”
he’d said.

Maybe that was true. He’d worked side by side with Marcy for almost eight years. He had trusted her, admired her work ethic and enjoyed her quirky sense of humor. He’d listened to stories about her nieces and nephews and mowed her lawn when she’d sprained her ankle. He’d helped her drag home a Christmas tree and patched a hole in her ceiling when the rain was leaking in. He’d given her dating advice and she’d done the same for him. He’d had at least one beer with her most every Friday night.

There’d never been anything sexual between them. He’d considered her a friend, and if there’d been warning signs, he’d ignored them.

Nobody had any idea that she was part of one of the bigger illegal drug distribution rings in the city—that she’d been on the inside, providing information to the bad guys, making it easy for them to always be one step ahead of the police.

Then, somehow, she’d fallen out of favor. Maybe she’d gotten greedy or maybe her loyalty had been in question. For whatever reason, the bad guys had set her up, had made sure that information was passed on to Jake and others that put her square in the crosshairs.

It could have been an easy bust. She’d had the drugs on her. But she’d decided that she wasn’t going to make it easy. Maybe had known that from the beginning it might turn out this way—after all, prison was no place for a cop. Her first shot had killed Officer Howard, her second had damned near killed Jake, had come inches from nicking a major artery and he’d have bled out. But inches mattered, and he’d gotten his own shot off and then it had been over.

But it hadn’t really been over. He’d been left to make sense of the whole mess. And maybe he’d accepted this assignment because he’d known that he needed a place to hide out. A place to heal.

And while it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t terrible, either. He felt bad about how he’d discounted the assignment initially and the jokes he’d made with his family about how he’d be writing parking tickets and getting stray cats out of trees.

Since arriving in town, he’d busted two teenagers who were shoplifting from Frank Johnson, responded to a domestic disturbance where the estranged husband was violating an order of protection and attended a tricounty gathering of law enforcement to discuss the status of meth production in the region. Tomorrow, he’d be meeting with the bank to discuss security because smaller banks were becoming bigger targets for thieves. Next week, he’d be meeting with the principal of the grade school who had asked him to assist in developing a stranger-awareness program. Evidently an eight-year-old in a neighboring community got approached right before school let out for summer.

It was kind of fun actually. In the city, he’d become pretty specialized—working a lot on drug- and gang-related crime. And for every idiot he put away, five more took his place. The game went on.

He could see how in a smaller community a cop retained his skills because the assignments were all over the map. In fact, when Alice Fenton had come to the station this morning with the look of a woman on a mission, he’d been prepared to take a complaint of some kind. Had already pulled out a blank report in anticipation. When she’d invited him to dinner, he’d been so surprised that he’d said yes without even trying to think up an excuse.

Of course, maybe that had something to do with the fact that she’d mentioned that Tara would also be in attendance. Last night, when Tara had come to the station, calling out Andy’s name, her tone almost desperate, he’d thought the worst. And for a brief second had contemplated firing the young man. Then he’d realized the absurdity of that action. First, he was merely the interim chief. He didn’t have the authority to make unilateral personnel decisions. And second, how was he going to explain it?

I was jealous of his relationship with a woman who won’t give me the time of day.

Yup. That had a nice ring. It was a good thing he might be giving up police work, because when it got out that he’d lost his mind, nobody would touch him with a ten-foot pole.

When Tara had explained why she needed police assistance, he’d been skeptical. Hell, a monkey would have been skeptical. But she’d been so damn adamant about the door. But then, once they were inside, she’d seemed to readily accept that she’d either imagined the whole thing or somehow been wrong.

Something wasn’t right. He’d known her for only a few days, but he’d bet that she didn’t have a flighty bone in her body. She was solid. She ran her own business and appeared to be doing a bang-up job. He had stopped in the other restaurant in town and had been unimpressed. The food had been okay, the service fine, but there’d been no warmth, no feeling of inclusion that was ever-present at Nel’s. The difference was Tara Thompson.