Fatal Fiction (A Book Barn Mystery) Read online

  I turned away, took a bite of cookie, and followed it up with another sip of tea, then looked at the sheriff, purposely getting lost in his eyes. They were gorgeous and nothing about them reminded me of the past.

  I wondered how well he knew Marlene. Probably better than I had. To me, Marlene was the Realtor in the company jacket who always had a smile on her face. We’d never really spoken beyond me ringing up a book for her in this very store or waving good morning to her when Cade picked me up for school in his vintage Camaro. I looked at Cade, a grim expression marring his face.

  Sheriff Espinosa got back to the business at hand. “We were going to walk through the store so you could show me how you found Ms. Duncan. If you can stand, we can move to a more comfortable area until you’re ready.”

  Cade took my tea and I pulled my purse off, lifting it over my head. I stood up and they both reached for an elbow. I’d like to say I turned away their assistance, but I didn’t. My blood sugar was low, I hadn’t eaten all day, and the last time I’d fainted from blood sugar issues I was sixteen and working the register behind the counter.

  Once I was on my feet, I made sure my dress was still in place and shook off both of their hands before reaching for my tea.

  “It’s good to see you, Charli.” Our fingers touched and Cade used that mischievous smile that I’d loved when I was younger. Even now, it had the power to make me wonder what if...

  My spine stiffened. “‘Holy mother, you’re back,’ doesn’t sound happy to see me.” I took another gulp of tea and thought a strong glass of Amaretto Sour would have been better, but the sweet tea would do the trick—just as Cade knew it would.

  He had the good manners to look embarrassed. Of course he would. He was a Calloway through and through, part of the political machine that had run the town and county for decades. The strong family ties were evident in his square jaw, tall frame, and hazel eyes. If anything, my high school boyfriend was taller and better-looking than the last time I’d seen him.

  Which was disappointing. I’d secretly hoped he’d turned round through the middle and lost his hair. No such luck.

  I changed the subject. “Have you seen my dad?”

  “No, not for a couple days. He told me he was selling the business last Tuesday, when we were having breakfast at the diner. He didn’t tell me you were coming back to town.”

  “Why did you come back?” The sheriff had pulled out his little notebook and was writing quickly across the pages as Cade took my elbow and led me to the tea area.

  It was spooky how familiar the room felt. Every small detail sank into my psyche, bringing me back to the time when I’d sat on the floor with colored pencils scattered around me and I’d drawn my vision for my father to see. From the lace napkins with the store’s initials embroidered at the corner to the wire-back chair I sat in and the deer antlers attached to the wall—a sanded-down version of a coatrack.

  “Ms. Warren?” The sheriff’s pen stood poised to write on his pad of paper.

  “I told you: I needed to sign the papers so my dad could sell the store.” I laid my purse at my feet and took a healthy gulp of tea and another bite of a delicious sugar cookie with frosting.

  “Couldn’t that be done by fax or mail?” he persisted.

  I wouldn’t admit I’d asked the same question. I swallowed the tasty bite of sugary goodness and replied, “Marlene called me yesterday and said there was a buyer lined up, but they needed the papers signed today or the buyer would back out. She said my dad would pay for my airline ticket and expenses. All I had to do was show up.”

  “And you came?” He sounded skeptical.

  “It worked with my schedule.” More like it was the saving grace in my schedule, but neither one of them needed to know what I would have faced if I’d stayed in Denver.

  “So your father didn’t call you?” Espinosa looked up from his pad.

  “No. Marlene said he’d meet me at the airport. When no one showed, I took a cab.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to your father?”

  I didn’t hesitate because I had nothing to hide. “When I was eighteen.”

  Cade inhaled rather sharply. Obviously, he hadn’t known how bad my relationship with my dad had been since I’d left town. The sheriff just stared and waited for me to finish.

  I ignored his attempt to get me to explain my estranged relationship with my father and waited for his next question.

  “Who’s buying The Book Barn?”

  Surprisingly, Cade corrected the sheriff before I could. “It’s The Book Barn Princess.”

  For some reason his butting in and using my nickname grated on my last nerve. I turned away from him, kicking my purse and blocking him out in the process. “I don’t know and I don’t care. I came to sign on the dotted line and leave.”

  I really needed to leave.

  “Because staying would mean you’d have to face things,” Cade interjected.

  “What things?” Espinosa quickly asked.

  “Nothing.” I refused to look at Cade. I knew my tone got under his skin by the sound of air flowing through his nostrils. I chose to ignore it and focused on the curious glint my response created in Sheriff Espinosa’s eyes.

  He looked back and forth between us, waiting for one of us to say something. Cade clearly wanted to argue but wisely kept his mouth shut. The fact that my lips were pressed so tightly together they were barely visible may have had something to do with his decision.

  The sheriff continued with his questions. “What time did you arrive at the store?”

  “Around one o’clock,” I responded.

  “Was there anyone in the store at that time?” His question sounded accusatory, as if maybe I was hiding something . . . or someone.

  “No, it was empty . . . or so I thought, but then I heard someone moving around upstairs.” I glanced at Cade. His arms were folded neatly across his chest, as if he were the one who needed answers.

  “Your father wasn’t here?” The sheriff’s tone continued to be accusatory and I didn’t like it one bit. I wasn’t covering for anyone, especially my own father.

  “I already told you, he wasn’t.”

  “You and your father are estranged?”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  Then his questions went in a direction that made me even more uncomfortable. Back to the subject that had left me flat on my back: “Were you against selling the store?”

  “I wasn’t happy about it. The store was my mom’s dream, but Marlene explained how bad things were.”

  “Did that make you angry with her?”

  “I wasn’t happy. Period. The last thing I wanted to do this weekend was come back to Hazel Rock.” Actually, there was something I was avoiding even more than my hometown, but that was information neither one of them needed to know.

  Then the sheriff let loose with something almost as shocking as a heifer birthing three calves. Heifers don’t have calves, let alone three. “How did you feel about Marlene dating your dad?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He didn’t even blink an eye as I nearly missed setting my glass of tea on the table. “Are you telling me you didn’t know your father was going to marry Ms. Duncan?” he asked.

  “No!”

  He nodded and jotted something down on his notepad. I hoped it said find another suspect. But I knew bad karma was stuck to me like the stank of an angry skunk.

  “Have you ever seen the belt that was around Ms. Duncan’s neck before?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, not wanting to explain but certainly not about to lie.

  His eyebrow arched once more. An expression that said: Don’t hold back information from the police, Charli.

  I sighed and confessed the whole truth, knowing I was neck deep in the Rio Brazos without a leg to stand on. “That was my belt. I made it in high school.”

  It was Cade’s turn to suck in some air. He knew exactly what belt we were talking about and apparently hadn’t heard how
Marlene died. Now he knew. Marlene had died with the same belt he’d taken off my body and playfully wrapped around my wrists the last time I’d seen him. The playing had stopped right then and there. It was a memory I’d tried to forget.

  Something brushed up against my leg. Like a cat, only harder. Much harder.

  I squawked and scooted my chair back, then stared at the image painted on the front of The Barn that had come to life at my feet. Black, beady eyes blinked back at me. Long, pointy ears twitched. Sitting on its hindquarters, with its front claws hanging down against its vulnerable hairy underbelly, a pink armadillo stared up at me like a dog begging for a treat.

  My purse lay at my feet, on its side with the contents spilling out for everyone to see. I scooted away from the rodent, willing to sacrifice my last five dollars to the weirdest creature I’d ever seen . . . in a bookstore.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “That’s Princess,” Cade and Sheriff Espinosa said in unison.

  “Why is it pink?”

  “A freak of nature, we think. Possibly a crossbreed between two different types of armadillo,” Cade explained.

  The sheriff stuffed his notepad and pen into his shirt pocket, then pulled a pair of rubber gloves from his back pocket.

  It was about that moment I realized the pink armadillo had added something else to the mix of papers, tampons, dollar bills, and lipstick spilling out of my purse.

  “Don’t move,” the sheriff ordered.

  I wasn’t going to argue with him. Cade, on the other hand, ignored him completely. He moved behind me and rested his hands on my shoulders. I wanted to wrench myself away, but instead I let myself enjoy his steadying touch.

  Sheriff Espinosa examined the contents of my purse up close and personal. I had no doubt he was cataloging the brand of my feminine hygiene products along with the logo of my Bobby V. Merrill Elementary School pen. The item that interested him the most, however, was the yellow and black scarf laying over the top of my purse. The one item I didn’t recognize but instinctively knew spelled trouble.

  “That’s not mine,” I blurted out.

  Cade squeezed my shoulders, his fingers digging in sternly. “Don’t say another word, Charli.”

  “You’re right. It’s not yours. There’s only one person in this town who wears a Yellow Jacket Realty scarf.” The sheriff’s brow didn’t arch this time. If anything, it lowered and became deadly serious as he rose to his full height. “The woman who planned to marry your daddy and died on the floor in the back room of your store with your belt around her neck. The woman who was going to sell the business you begged your daddy not to sell.”

  “There’s been a big misunderstanding, Mateo,” Cade said.

  The sheriff interrupted. “Ms. Warren, could you stand up please?” Once again his question didn’t sound like a request.

  My tongue started tripping all over itself. “Wh–wh–what for?”

  Cade’s fingers slipped away and I suddenly felt very alone, until he stepped in front of me, protecting me from the long arm of the law that wanted to reach out and snatch me out of the chair where I’d parked my behind.

  “Mateo—” Cade started.

  The sheriff didn’t let him finish, “I’ll kindly ask you to step aside, Cade.”

  “Sheriff.” Cade’s voice was deeper, darker, almost threatening.

  But there was a new sheriff in town. One that didn’t answer to the Calloway name.

  “Mayor, the last thing you need is an obstruction-of-justice charge before the upcoming election.” Both men stared at each other.

  I looked around the two of them, expecting to see Cade’s father in all his haughty, southern man-in-charge glory walking into the store, but the sheriff wasn’t looking at a senior version of Cade. He was looking directly into the eyes of my ex-boyfriend. The new political leader in town, who caved faster than his daddy ever would have. Cade stepped to the side so I could get a front-row view of the lawman unsnapping his handcuffs from the belt on his hip.

  “Ms. Warren, you’re under arrest for investigation of the murder of Marlene Duncan.”

  I blinked and stood up, looking from the man with the gorgeous brown eyes to the other man, who’d started to take a stand a dozen years too late. Only the sheriff met my gaze. Cade turned on his heel and beat feet to the front of the store.

  As I turned around and placed my hands behind my back, metal bracelets clanked on my wrists and I heard the buzzer at the door announce Cade’s departure. Once again, Cade Calloway had walked out on me in my time of need. Only this time it wasn’t his daddy’s election at stake. This time it was his own.

  That action alone seemed to satisfy the little rodent I’d forgotten all about. I looked down at Princess, who blinked at each one of us and then waddled toward the stairs, the pale pink leather plates of her shell waving good-bye with her every movement. I watched her jump for each step, which seemed to take an incredible amount of effort, yet she never tired and continued her way up the steps to the loft above. That little ball of energy had just sealed my fate with her innocent stare and so-ugly-she-was-cute smile.

  But I wasn’t fooled. By dropping that scarf on my purse, she’d set me up for a fall better than any man in town ever could. And this time I couldn’t run away.

  On the bright side, I had a place to stay for the night. The town jail cell couldn’t be that bad, could it?

  Chapter Four

  A lot of people say, “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” In my case, I shouldn’t have expected any of the stupid birds to survive. Hazel Rock, Texas, didn’t have a jail. The jail cell I’d been threatened with as a teenager was gone, a thing of the past like the crotchety old sheriff who’d held that threat over my head. The new sheriff transported me to the new county jail twenty miles away, where I was asked to give up everything in my possession—my purse, my phone, my jewelry, the laces from my boots . . . even my socks. That’s when the sheriff with the dreamy eyes abandoned me. He left me with a young female deputy who wasn’t interested in me at all, or at least that was the impression I got from her unsympathetic response to my request to sit with her outside the glass cage. I was a murderer in her eyes who belonged on the inside.

  She fingerprinted and photographed me with a nasty gray towel around my neck that reeked of body odor. My objections were once again met with that same dull look, her eyelids half closed, as if I was keeping her from her nap. Her brown hair was pulled back in a loose braid that tucked underneath itself at the back of her neck. She was polite enough, just not willing—or maybe incapable—of showing compassion for someone like me—an inmate totally out of her element in the filthy detention center.

  In the past, I’d compared my job of being a kindergarten teacher to being held in a prison for eight hours a day. But now that I knew the reality of jail life, I realized my comparison was totally off-base. My kids with snotty noses, skinned knees, and the occasional confession of “Oops I didn’t make it to the restroom” weren’t all that bad. My classroom didn’t smell of the sickeningly sweet odor of sweat, filth, urine, blood, and . . . was that feces? I was scared to accept the possibility. Whatever it was, it was all mixed up with the scent of bleach and a hint of bologna.

  If the stench wasn’t bad enough, the air conditioning in the jail was set to a permanent arctic blast that you’d think would clear out the odorous stank.

  It didn’t.

  Because the room temperature was thirty degrees below my comfort zone, I’d been forced to beg for the blue paper pants and shirt I was currently wearing under and over my dress. I was a fashion nightmare freezing my backside off on the solid concrete bench that also served as my bed. Despite being new, my cell looked like it’d already been through hell and back. The light gray paint that covered the walls and my bunk was darker in the frequently used spots and had graffiti scratched into it.

  As I read insult after insult carved into every inch of my cell, one thing became clear: most inmates knew
diddly-squat about proper grammar. My five-year-old students could turn a phrase better than the previous occupants housed in this cell.

  Unfortunately, my boredom led to an overactive imagination. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the previous occupants had used to write their vulgar comments on the paint. I needed answers to the wrong questions. Such as did they use the buttons on their shirts to write, “the po-pos on the take” without an apostrophe or a verb linking who was “on the take”? Or did they use the snaps on their jeans to say they should have sexual relations with a cop in a much more vulgar form? Surely they didn’t use their teeth? I shivered at the images my mind created and decided to stick with the idea that they probably used long manicured fingernails.

  Every woman in Texas had her nails done. It was a rite of passage.

  Through it all, one fact rang true in my head: All of this was happening because I’d returned to my hometown to help my father out of a pickle. That alone burned my butt more than a rancher’s red-hot branding iron. I fumed and paced for the first couple of hours until the deputy informed me I’d end up with blisters on my feet if I kept that up for my entire seventy-two-hour hold. That’s how long it would be before the prosecutor decided whether to bring me up on charges.

  Seventy-two hours?

  Everything got real when she put a time frame to my incarceration, and fear replaced my anger. Fear that this situation wasn’t just a short-term misunderstanding but rather a lifelong sentence. Fear that I could end up staying here—with three concrete walls and a fourth made out of solid glass that faced the booking desk. With a smell so bad, I wondered what the deputy behind that desk had done wrong to deserve such a lousy assignment.

  It got even worse when the detective arrived and what I thought was an escort to his office turned into a short trip to a small interrogation room with two chairs and a small table. For the first time in my life I saw the Miranda warning in print. The bald-headed Detective Youngblood didn’t read it to me but rather passed me the piece of paper and asked me to read it.