“You remember Ridley,” I said to Jay.
Jay smiled politely, but when he didn’t blush or stammer like every other man in town did in her presence, I fell just a little deeper for him.
“So, what are you two kids up to tonight?” Ryan asked, as if the appetizers and drinks offered no clues.
“Just having a little dinner,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice.
“Us too,” he said and clapped Ridley on the back of her shoulder. “Ridley can really tie on the old feedbag now that she’s in her third trimester.”
Ridley, instead of being offended, threw out a throaty laugh. “Yeah, I can’t seem to get enough these days.” She swirled her hands around her perfectly shaped bump and I felt a pang of something deep within. “I sometimes wonder if I am incubating a baby lion with all the cravings for red meat.”
“Oh, that’s just a Sanford for you.” I said it before I even thought about it, and then immediately regretted it. It was an intimate comment, exposing my deep and thorough knowledge of the Sanford family. Ryan’s eyes found mine. I felt the unidentified emotion again and wondered if my ovaries hadn’t heard the news that Ryan and I were over.
“Well, I think you look super healthy,” Jay said. “Enjoy your dinner.” Translation: move along, people.
Ryan held my gaze for a moment too long. “Yeah, you guys, too.” But before he turned to walk away, he said, “Hey, did you hear about Thad Davenport getting arrested?”
“Wait—what?” I said. I dug out my phone from my purse and sure enough, Gail had texted me fifteen minutes ago: Thad arrested. Tab throwing one hell of a fit.
This was big. I looked up at Jay, an apology cocked and loaded.
“I know that look—I’ve given that look. Go.”
“You’re the best.” I kissed him goodbye. “I’ll make it up to you.”
Without so much as a glance at Ridley or Ryan, he held the side of my cheek close to his and whispered, “I’ll hold you to that.”
CHAPTER 5
I heard the yelling before I even walked inside the sheriff’s office.
“Are you out of your mind?” Tabitha, red-faced and wild-eyed, was screaming at Carl Haight. “You let him go right this minute or I will sue every last person in this room!”
“Tabitha—I mean, Miss St. Simon,” Carl struggled to retain his professional demeanor. “You need to calm down or I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
When I walked in, no one even looked at me. Every employee of the Tuttle County sheriff’s office was watching the dramatic showdown between Carl and Tabitha.
“How could you even think Thad could do something like kill his own father? It’s ridiculous!”
“Miss St. Si—”
“He’s a well-respected cardiac management specialist!”
“Miss St.—”
“He can’t even kill a spider! He puts them onto little slips of paper and takes them outside, for Pete’s sake! In all my life I have never seen such a gross miscarriage of justice, not to mention complete idiocy!” She spat the words like bullets from a machine gun. No one dared interrupt her or attempt to step in between the two.
As the former target of several Tabitha rants, I wasn’t intimidated. I walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Tab? Can we talk for a second?”
She had the wild look of a jaguar that had been interrupted mid-kill, but after a second, sanity returned to her eyes. “Fine,” she huffed, then jabbed a finger in Carl’s direction. “But this is not over, Haight. You got that? I’m going to get the best freaking lawyers money can buy and sic them on you and this two-bit operation you’re running!”
“C’mon now.” I led her toward the front steps of the building.
“Can you believe this?” She leaned against the railing just outside the building. “Thad—a murderer? It’s insane.”
“Just slow down a minute,” I said in what I hoped was a soothing voice. “Tell me what happened.”
Tabitha smoothed her long dark hair and tucked both sides behind her ears. She took a deep breath before explaining. “Acting-Sheriff Haight said he wanted to take our statements, but I knew something was off when they separated us. I was with Butter, who basically just asked me a bunch of inane questions that I’m pretty sure he was reading off of a Google search of ‘What to ask people after they find a dead body,’ all the while eating an entire pound of pistachios, mind you.” She rolled her eyes.
“But Thad was in another room with Carl forever. Once they finished up, everything seemed fine, and Thad and I were about to leave when Carl got a phone call from Dr. Mendez in Richmond. He said that in addition to the knife wound in Arthur’s chest—which we already knew about—there was something else. Results from the quick tox screen showed high levels of digitalis in Arthur’s blood.”
“What’s digitalis?”
“They use it to treat heart-rhythm problems. But Arthur didn’t have any heart problems.”
“Okay . . .” I waited for her to put this all together for me.
“Duh. Thad sells Digoxigon, a form of digitalis.”
“Wait—what? I thought Thad was a cardiologist?”
Tabitha gave me a look that might as well have turned me to stone. “No.”
“But you just said that he is a cardiac management specialist, isn’t that the same thing?”
Two peach blooms appeared on her cheeks. “He is a cardiac management specialist—for Helder Pharmaceuticals.”
“So he sells drugs?”
Tabitha’s blush deepened, the peach blossoms morphing into the redder blotches of anger. “Yes, technically he is a pharmaceutical sales representative. But he is in the upper echelon of sales for Helder, and reps their cardiac-care medications.”
I was dumbfounded. Tabitha loved to throw around that her fiancé was a cardiac specialist, and even inserted herself into conversations with library patrons about heart health issues, citing her expertise as a result of her fiancé’s line of work. She knew people assumed he was a doctor and never once corrected that perception.
“I never said he
