“Ain’t Roy Dean I care about, Stella—only just he’s taken Tucker. Came and took him yesterday morning. Told me he wanted his hibachi back and when I went around back to get it, I guess that’s when he got Tucker ’cause when I came back inside they was both gone.” Chrissy snuffled and dabbed at her eyes, smearing her makeup further.
“Oh no,” Stella said, setting her own glass down and jerking to attention. “That does change things. Shit!”
“Yeah,” Chrissy said, and her glum expression slipped further and a shadow of terrible worry flashed across her doughy features. “That’s about the size of it.”
Stella excused herself, making sure that the plate of Oreos was in Chrissy’s easy reach, and called Sheriff Goat Jones from the kitchen. She was one of only a handful of people with direct access to the sheriff’s mobile number, and that was a result of her only case that had gone terribly wrong, a failure from which Stella would never entirely recover.
Two years back, Lorelle Cavenaugh went missing less than a week after she came to Stella for help. Stella spent forty straight hours searching for Lorelle on her own before calling the sheriff. She invented a story about them being third cousins and Lorelle leaving a terrified message on her machine, which she had just happened to erase, and which oddly didn’t show up in the phone company records.
By the time they found Lorelle, stuffed head-down into a rain barrel at Jack Cavenaugh’s fishing cabin, Stella had promised herself that she’d never again let anything get in the way of a woman’s safety. Not even if it meant danger to herself, or exposure, or bringing in the entire sheriff’s department.
Goat Jones told her she had more stick than a cocklebur after she hounded him to widen the search and ignored every order he gave her to stay away from him and his men while they scoured the county. He called her a few other things, too—the words
Goat said he’d be right over, grousing only a little that she wouldn’t give him any details on the phone. Stella peeked in at Chrissy, who was nibbling morosely at a cookie, and hightailed it to her bathroom, where she got out the modest arsenal of beauty products that she kept in an empty Jif peanut butter jar, and went to work.
It wasn’t that she was fixing up for the sheriff, exactly. Because that would be ridiculous. For one thing, their work generally put them on opposite sides of the law. That alone made the man, if not exactly an enemy, certainly not a person she should be fraternizing with.
And anyway they didn’t run in the same social circles. Goat was a regular at the Friday night poker game at the firehouse—the same game Ollie had played in for years, the game all of Ollie’s old friends still belonged to. Not that it was fair to paint them with the same brush as her dead husband, but they had become a little standoffish since she nearly stood trial for killing Ollie.
Goat got himself invited to the game as a sort of law enforcement courtesy. His deputies, Ian Sloat and Mike Kutzler, had been playing for years, and it wouldn’t have looked right to exclude Goat, even though he was still a newcomer to the area. He had lived in Prosper for only a couple of years, having been hired in to replace old Sheriff Burt Knoll after he died of a heart attack while cheering on his grandson at a go-kart race.
Most of the poker players had lived in Prosper for decades, if not their entire lives. They were courteous to Goat, but maybe “friend” was too strong a word; outside the poker game, she knew they didn’t barbecue together or bowl in the same league or even jaw too long if they ran into each other at the Home Depot. Still, at the rate of four hours a week for two years, that was… oh, hell, a few hundred hours anyway that Goat and her late husband’s drinking buddies shared each other’s company, and in Stella’s book that made Goat guilty of poor taste in the company he kept, if nothing else.
Stella splashed cold water on her face and slapped her cheeks a few times in an effort to get a little color into them. She leaned in close to the mirror and didn’t like what she saw: it had been a while since she’d taken a pair of tweezers to her eyebrows, and they seemed to have made expansion plans on their own. The battle she was waging on her wrinkles, armed with the jumbo tub of Avon Anew Clinical Deep Crease Concentrate that her sister had sent her last Christmas, didn’t seem like it was trending in her favor. The wrinkles were still there, and if she wasn’t mistaken, the ones around her eyes had hatched a plan to reach down and shake hands with her laugh lines.
Stella scrambled through the Jif jar, tossing aside shampoo sample packets and emery boards and a dozen lipsticks in unflattering shades—she was a sucker for those Clinique gift-with-purchase deals—until she found the tube of Avon Radiant Lifting Foundation. Another gift from Gracellen. Praying it hadn’t passed its sell-by date, she squeezed a little onto her finger and dabbed at the worst spots on her face.
Her hair had escaped its barrette and sprang out in an unruly mass. That was entirely Stella’s fault. For most of her life she’d been vain about her thick, wavy light brown hair, keeping it trimmed and conditioned and blown dry. She’d just gotten in a few bad habits in the last couple of years, that’s all. Missing yesterday’s appointment with Jane over at Hair Lines hadn’t helped any.
She grabbed her hairbrush and yanked it forcibly through, ignoring the pain. Unfortunately, taking out the tangles also served to play up the line of demarcation between her gray roots and the shade that Jane had mixed up at her last visit.
Stella was overdue for a goodly amount of maintenance work.
She gave up and put down the brush. She made a face at the mirror, figuring she’d done all she could on short notice.
At the door to her bedroom, she had a thought, and dashed back to the bathroom. She dumped the Jif jar out in the sink and found what she was looking for at the bottom of the pile: a small bottle of White Diamonds. She sprayed behind her ears and on her wrists, sniffed deeply, and added one last spritz down her bra.
In the living room Chrissy had made a sizable dent in the Oreos. “Good girl,” Stella murmured, helping herself to one. “Got to keep your strength up.”
Naturally, Goat knocked on the door just as soon as she had the whole cookie in her mouth. Stella backhanded the crumbs off her lips and swallowed hard as she went to open the door, managing to get the thing stuck in her throat. She had to cough out a greeting.
“Goat,” she gasped, holding the door wide and gesturing him in. “Good of you to come.” A bit of cookie lodged stubbornly and she hacked some more.
“You okay there, Dusty?” Goat asked, but damn the man, he didn’t look so much concerned as amused. Light streaming through the picture window bounced off his shiny bald head and sparkled up his bluer-than-blue eyes, and he gave her one of his sideways grins. “Want me to whack you on the back a time or two?”
“Don’t you dare,” Stella said with as much dignity as she could manage. “Please sit.”
She reclaimed her own spot on the couch and sipped primly at her tea. Once she’d cleared her air passage so that she could talk without spraying crumbs, she gestured at Chrissy, who had managed to get herself more or less into a sit-up-straight position in the chair to greet the sheriff.
“Chrissy, you know Sheriff Jones, don’t you, dear? And Sheriff, this is Chrissy Shaw. She’s one of the Lardner girls. Out Road Twelve, the soybean Lardners.”
There were two strains of Lardners in town. The soybean Lardners were the wrong ones to hail from, if you had any choice in the matter. Ralph Lardner was a lazy mountain of flesh who did more sitting on his ass and ordering his boys around the farm than he did actual labor, and the family skill set lent itself more to quick-and-dirty methods rather than true craftsmanship, so the Lardner sons were constantly patching the siding on the barns and resetting leaning fence posts and attacking late-season weeds with industrial-strength fungicide in watering cans, killing off their mother’s flower garden at least once a year.
The other Lardner in town was named Gray. Ralph and Gray were distant cousins, but it would take degrees in both history and math to trace out the exact nature of their blood relationship. The lineage had split long enough back that Gray’s side had managed to build a modest fortune buying up rich land along Sugar Creek on the south end of town. While Ralph’s crew mined stony, hard-packed dirt for a bedraggled crop every year, Gray had to just look at his land sideways and it seemed happy to send up burgeoning fields of corn, alfalfa, prizewinning squash— whatever he had a mind to grow.
Ralph’s boys seemed bent on following in their father’s sorry footsteps. His girls, on the other hand, tended to marry the first boy who asked, just to get off that unlucky land.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” the sheriff said, shaking Chrissy’s limp hand with exaggerated care
