Stone Cold Crazy (Lil & Boris #4) (Lil and Boris Mysteries) (15 page)

“He volunteered DNA,” Punk concluded with a grimace. His glance towards me was uneasy to say the least. “Lil, I got a bad feeling. There wasn’t even a set of pliers in the whole place. Guy doesn’t even have a toolbox. He’s kinda nuts, yeah, but I don’t think it’s the kind of nuts that blows things up.”

“We seized his laptop, but I dunno if the state boys’ll find anything on it,” Tom added miserably. “I was sure he was it, but after seeing that house…‌He’s creepy, yeah, but…”

“But,” I agreed miserably. “Damn.”

I walked to my white board and filled in the new information, for what it was worth. Thinking. You note everything to start, then figure out relevance as you go. So what had I noted and not realized was relevant?

Or had I not noted it at all?

I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there until Boris butted my leg hard with his head, and hooked a claw into my leg with a loud “
Mwow
!”

“He’s hungry,” said Punk. He stood nervously by the door, and I saw beyond him that the day had faded to hazy yellow twilight. “Um. Lil. Look. I didn’t mean to, y’know. Stand you up. It’s just…‌Well. Um.”

“Not now, Punk,” I requested. “I’m tired, I’m hungry, it’s late, and I’m totally missing something here.”

To my surprise, Punk snapped, “Dammit, Lil! I been trying to apologize for days, will you let me do it and be done already?”

“Sorry,” I huffed, and hefted Boris into my arms. “Didn’t know I was inconveniencing you.”

He trailed me to my car. “Will you at least look at me?”

All I wanted to look at was a big plate of food. I settled Boris and turned. “Okay, shoot.”

Now he wouldn’t look at me. Great. Just freakin’ great.

“I’m sorry. I meant to go. I chickened out.”

I was underwhelmed. “Fine. Apology accepted. G’night, Punk.”

“Wait!”

I gritted my teeth. I turned again. “
What
?”

He tried puppy-dog eyes on me. Too bad for him I’m a cat person. “Don’t you, y’know, wanna know why I chickened out?”

With my usual tact I said, “No, not really.”

Punk drooped. “Oh.”

I was raised to politeness. Upset as I was, I still said, “G’night.”

Punk caught my car door, and blurted, “I ran into your ex. Steve. Over at Shifflett’s.”

I wasn’t sure why he sounded so defensive. Even Steve had to buy gas somewhere. “So?”

Punk stared blankly at me. “You’re kidding, right?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

Punk turned a deep, embarrassed red, and gestured at himself. “Not exactly God’s gift here. I don’t even have all my arms and legs.”

It’s strange to think men can be as insecure as women. It doesn’t seem to go with the machismo thing. “So you stood me up?”

He shrugged helplessly.

The best I could come up with was, “Okay. G’night.”

He walked off to his car, shoulders slumped. It was irrational, but I felt a surge of anger at Steve. Figures he’d find a way to screw up my life, even if it was by proxy.

***^***

I didn’t know just how much Steve was screwing up my life until I found Margaret Shiflet waiting for me at my speed trap by Junior’s garden shop. Her face was pinched, pale-lipped. “Sheriff,” she said, “you should see this. It is very suspicious in my opinion. Very suspicious.”

To bring Margaret Shiflet out without her make-up on, it had to be her version of a national emergency. I slugged back more decaf green tea in the hopes it would wake me up, and stood in the low-lying mist watching her spread a map on the hood of her car. Boris jumped up and walked across it just to hear her mutter, then sat down in the middle of it. “Fine,” Margaret grumbled, “at least it won’t blow away.”

“All right, Margaret,” I said as I leaned over the map. “What’s wrong?”

“Look.”

I looked. It was a map of Crazy, the kind you get from the county, showing all the property lines and so forth. Some properties were circled in red pencil.

“I marked red the ones that Mr. Kipling is buying or wants to buy. For these people.”

She thrust a business card at me. It was, as she’d said, a big property management company up in Northern Virginia. “I looked them up,” she quavered. “They don’t just manage properties. They build strip malls.”

All of a sudden, I was wide awake. I took a much closer look at that map, connecting the red-circled properties. A whole stretch of properties between the veterinarians and Grenville was circled in red, and so were the vacant buildings on Main. There were a few scattered lots that hadn’t been circled yet‌—‌I identified them as a couple of small hayfields, a few county-owned lots‌—‌but not many.

My pulse sped up. That son of a bitch. While Cousin Jack busily tried to save Crazy, Steve was selling it.

“I haven’t been able to talk to your cousin, but this…” She bit her lower lip, smearing lipstick onto her teeth in the process. “I know I’d make a lot of money, but this isn’t what we want here. We don’t want to end up like Lynchburg and Charlottesville, nothing but big box stores and red lights.”

The likelihood of that was remote. I knew that in my head. The rest of me wanted to start a shooting war.

“We’d lose all our country charm!”

I wouldn’t have called it charm, but I understood what Margaret meant. “What’s this stuff in green? Move, cat!”

Boris did not move until I budged him off by force.

“Those are people who’re selling, but not through me.”

“Who’re they selling to?”

Margaret came as close to tears as possible without smearing her mascara. “As far as I’ve heard, Mr. Kipling.”

The green-circled lots dotted the map. Something about the way they lined up caught at my brain. I turned the map, twisted it, until the shape came clear. That time, I swore out loud. “Son of a bitch!”

On the east side of Elk Hill, Steven was buying up every piece of property he could. A big swath that ran right up to the base of The Pulpit. Enough land for a nice eighteen-hole golf course, or a really nice campground with two-three hundred hookups, or a luxury resort hotel. Enough land that, if Jack succeeded in his plans, Steven Kipling would make a boatload of money selling that land to any takers. Without caring what they did with it, or to it.

“Can I take this?”

Margaret nodded, slumping momentarily in pure relief. “Thank goodness, I knew you’d see it. You’ll talk to your cousin? Stop this?”

“Yes,” I said. What I really meant was, I’d make Steve regret the day he messed with my town. Crazy may not be much, but it’s mine, and I’d be damned if Steve would take it from me. He’d taken enough.

16.

“I
t’s not illegal to buy land. Or make a profit. If it was, I’d be out of business.”

Cousin Jack was right. He was also angrier than I’ve ever seen anyone, in a glacial way. Nobody’d end up a tiny pile of ashes, but there was a good possibility of gravel.

“Though this does explain why he never seems to be
at
Grenville, just buzzing around it,” Jack continued viciously. “Well, I can do two things, Cousin Lil, and I assure you, you will approve of both.”

I tugged Boris off Cousin Jack’s antique desk, its top made of a single slab of black walnut. Boris thinks the world is his scratching post. I think I don’t make enough to cover my mortgage and damages to priceless heirlooms. “Will it involve fire ants?”

Jack could’ve cut diamonds with his glare. “He’s fired, that’s first. What I’ll particularly enjoy, however, is calling my good friends on the board of directors of that company. They will then also fire him. What I can’t do is undo what he’s done.”

I knew that feeling. “So what? We’re done? Next stop, McD’s and WalMart?”

“If that’s what happens…” Jack growled. “Damn him! What did you ever see in him?”

“Someone who saw something in me,” I admitted. I had no pride left at that point. “Look, can we stop the sales? Do
something
?”

He plopped into his office chair, which probably cost two grand, like it was a cheap rocker. “The county will welcome the tax revenue, the town will like the money…” He dropped his head into his hands, held it like it hurt. “I wanted to save this place. Keep it safe. That’s all.”

I watched Boris flop onto a Persian carpet and wash his backside. Cats have no sense of decorum.

“All right, then,” said Jack briskly, and sat up, smiling nastily. “I’m sure we can find some environmental reasons to block anything there.” He stabbed the map between Elk Hill and the Pulpit. “Enough to persuade Mr. Kipling to donate the land to the county. I’ll be more than happy to donate money to set it up as a park, with walking trails. Maybe get it tagged as a wildlife refuge. That we can deal with. Our bigger problem is going to be the property company. I may play golf with the board, but I can’t change their business decisions.”

Visions of garish plastic signs and anonymous storefronts danced in my head. “What will they do?”

“I don’t know.” He narrowed his gaze on an invisible spot on the wall. “I’ll probably find out at the Labor Day charity pro-am.”

“Oh,
goody
.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “I know. Look, Cousin, you can leave most of this to me, but…”

I knew that tone. It was the tone that said I was going to hate the next thing he said. “But what?”

“We may have to accept the inevitable.”

I suck at that. I got up, interrupted Boris’s toilette by picking him up, and said furiously, “So we’re stuck with my ex?”

“Only until he packs.”

I seethed into Boris’s soft fur. “You know what a new strip mall will do. We’ll lose the one we’ve got.”

“I know.”

I hesitated at the door of his home office. “What kind of stores would they bring in?”

“The kind that’ll bring in business. They’re fond of using WalMart as an anchor store, there’ll be a grocery chain, and given the local demographic…” Jack tapped a finger meditatively against a bookcase. “It’ll kill Main Street, and the Food Mart plaza. They’ll lure in local businesses with low rents, then raise them until the local stores are forced out and they can bring in chains. I don’t think we’ll ever see a Starbucks, but we’re probably guaranteed a McDonald’s. Then they’ll push for a better road to the highway. Straighter. More lanes. Then the land along Piedmont will go. They’ll buy it, build on it, and I doubt they’ll let the mountains stop them. Then the WalMart will move out closer to the highway, and take everything else with it, and they’ll sell the first strip mall at a discount, and it’ll be full of dollar stores and payday lenders. It’ll turn this town into a cemetery.”

My stomach turned, for a lot of reasons. “You do this for a living, don’t you.”

My cousin nodded distantly. “Not this, exactly, but yes. I make money. Through investments, but it’s really all the same thing in the end. Assess risk, analyze cost, calculate profit, and invest X to earn X plus Y.”

I knew I hated math for a reason. “And you sleep at night?”

Jack gave an indifferent shrug. “Most of the time, yes.” His eyes glinted coldly. “Don’t worry, Cousin Lil. I’ll find a way.”

Maybe he would. In the meantime, I called Aunt Marge. There’s not a lot the church lady mafia can’t do when it comes to organizing a good old-fashioned gossip vendetta.

***^***

The rest of the day was routine, for a pleasant change, and I went home at five happy in the knowledge that Steven Kipling was fired and out of the Littlepage guest house.

And sitting outside my house, leaning on his rental car.

Before I so much as got out of my cruiser, Steven was at me, snarling. “You got me fired!”

“You got you fired!” I shot back. “And good riddance!”

“You had no right,” he growled, face darkening. “I was doing the job I was hired to do!”

“For which master?” I sniped nastily. I gathered Boris into my arms, pressing my cheek to his soft fur. My blood pressure didn’t drop, unfortunately.

Steven trailed me to my front door. “Nothing in my contract said I couldn’t work a second job!”

“For someone doing the exact opposite what Jack wants,” I pointed out. There was a potted fern by my door. I had no idea why. I set Boris down, and turned, arms folded. “Why, for God’s sake? You can’t tell me he wasn’t paying enough.”

“You talk about saving this place like it’s Versailles, it’s a dump! Bring in some stores, a decent resort, you might get a real town going!”

By my feet, Boris huffed and hunched, ears flat and eyes slitted. He did not like all the shouting. I kept hollering anyway. “We’ve
got
a real town!”

“This?” hooted Steven. “This isn’t a town, it’s a joke! The whole place is a joke!” He reached out and flicked my badge. “You get that out of a cereal box?”

My hand flew up and clamped on his wrist. Our eyes locked. I willed him to understand I was perfectly capable of breaking his arm.

He very deliberately stepped away from me. I released him.

“You’re a fool, Lil,” Steven told me. “A damn fool.”

My chest hurt. Talk about déjà vu. I’d heard this before, in different words.

“You could make a gold mine out of this place, and you want to keep it…” He gestured with his usual energy, shook his head. “Jesus, Lil, what a waste of potential! Why? Why do you always waste the potential sitting in front of you?”

Talk about déjà vu
again
. I let loose the breath I’d been holding. “We don’t define potential or waste the same way you do,” I said wearily. “Get out of here, Steven. And thank God the worst my cousin will do to you is hire lawyers.”

The look he gave me wasn’t scathing. It was pitying. That made it a lot worse. He walked away without a word. I sagged against my front door, my stomach in a knot. I could feel tears right behind my lids, and fought them down. Then I unlocked my door and went in, Boris at my heels. I bee-lined to my kitchen and poured a glass of water, gulped it down, and chewed an antacid. Only Steven has ever given me acid indigestion on an empty stomach.

After a few moments, I went back outside. I contemplated the potted fern. What the hell was a potted fern doing on my doorstep?

I’d bent down to pick it up when Punk popped out of the shadows and came within a hair of getting maced. I’d been so wrapped up in my woes I hadn’t even heard his truck.