“Not to mention a private property,” Mama added stiffly. She didn’t like all these people hovering around her childhood home.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the flower head on a weed waving in the yard, growing before my eyes. I flashed a quick look at my mother. “Stop it!” I hissed.
She frowned at me. “What?”
I jerked my head to the right. She stuck her chin out and narrowed her eyes like she was trying to figure me out. “You have a twitch, Harlow Jane. What’s wrong with your neck?”
“Nothing’s wrong with my neck!” I lifted my chin this time, trying to get her to look at the garden without alerting anyone else.
She finally looked in the direction of the two-foot-tall black sunflower and the cluster of weeds surrounding it. Her eyes grew round. None of that growth had been there moments before.
“Mama,” I whispered, a good warning in my voice, “you pull it together.”
“Ohhhh,” she murmured. She fisted her hands and relaxed her face. I looked back at the weeds. They were still . . . and didn’t seem any taller. She’d gotten it under control, but not before another flash of light from Madelyn Brighton’s camera went off.
“Miss Sandoval,” I heard the sheriff say, “would you step over here?”
Josie looked at Mrs. Kincaid for reassurance, her brown eyes rimmed with red. Nate’s mother nodded. “Okay,” Josie said, but she looked like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.
“Where’s her fiancé?” Mama mused as Josie stumbled down the porch steps and over the flagstone path away from the little group gathered on and around the porch.
Good question.
The sheriff turned back to me. “We’ll need statements from all of you,” he announced to the group. To me, he drawled, “I’ll need to ask you a few more questions, and we’ll be searching the premises. A deputy’ll be up here in a minute. The rest of you,” he said with a wave of his hand, “go out the way you came and give your names and contact information to the deputy with your statement.”
He flagged down a woman dressed in an identical beige uniform, minus the off-white cowboy hat, and gestured to her. She nodded at him, took out a small pad of paper, and intercepted Karen and her husband as they headed toward the sidewalk.
Mrs. Kincaid threw a look over her shoulder, her gaze seeking her future daughter-in-law. “She’s had a terrible shock. It was her maid of honor. What’s he asking her?” she demanded when she got to the deputy.
“It’s routine, ma’am,” the deputy said.
“Routine.” She scoffed. “It’s not like she had anything to do with this . . . this . . .” She waved her arm toward Nell’s body. “With this,” she finished.
“Like I said, it’s routine,” the deputy said. “Now, if I can get your name and address.”
Mrs. Kincaid’s voice turned curt. “Mrs. Keith Kincaid,” she said, then rattled off her address.
The deputy didn’t seem fazed by the fact that she was talking to a member of Bliss’s founding family. She wrote the information in her notepad. “Thank you. Now, if you’ll wait for your son’s fiancée outside the gate, we’d certainly appreciate it.”
“You’d best find out who did this,” she challenged, wagging her finger at the deputy.
“We’ll do everything we can.”
The breeze kicked up as Mrs. Kincaid glided through the arbor, turned left on the cracked sidewalk, and waited at her car for Josie.
From where I stood, I could hear the gruff rumble of Hoss McClaine’s voice, but couldn’t make out the words.
“I was coming back to do measurements,” Josie said, and I could picture her putting her hand on her heart as she spoke.
The sheriff’s voice was muffled, but Josie’s grew louder. My skin turned cold as she said, “She was dead when I got here!”
I perched on the edge of the rocking chair, my chin on my fist, trying to keep my worry at bay. Mama sat next to me. We both tried to ignore the commotion in the street with neighbors and passersby stopping to stare.
“She’s the one who discovered the body. He’s got to ask the questions,” Mama said.
I stared at her. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“How do you always know what I’m thinking? You’re not a mind reader.”
“Harlow Jane,” she said, “I’m a mother, and that, sweetheart, comes with a whole ’nother set of abilities.”
I sat back and rocked. All I could think about was the fact that Josie was in a mighty precarious position being questioned by Dirty Harry. “Josie couldn’t have done it,” I said.
“You don’t know that. She discovered the body.”
I amended my statement. “I don’t believe she could have.”
But we both knew that since no one had been with Josie when she discovered Nell’s body, she had no alibi.
Chapter 9
The next morning I sat at the kitchen table, my arms folded and serving as a pillow for my head. Now sleep wanted to come? It figured.
The sheriff and his crew had stayed until nearly one in the morning. They’d searched the yard and then I’d let them into the shop. Big mistake. They’d riffled through every last drawer and cupboard, leaving things in worse disarray than they’d already been in.
I was up until three a.m. cleaning up the shop and trying to push away the thoughts running rampant through my mind. To say I was spooked was an understatement. A woman had been killed on my property, after being in Buttons & Bows, and the sheriff and his deputies had searched high and low for clues. What if Nell had been killed before seven forty-five when Mama got here? I would have no alibi. Would I become a suspect?
I’d tossed and turned the rest of the night. But the roosters at Mr. Higgins’s place directly next door didn’t care that I needed to sleep in. That was a peculiarity about Bliss. Zoning restrictions were basically nonexistent. We had tiny farms in the middle of town. You needed an acre for a horse, but a chicken coop was fair game on our quarter-acre lots. By six o’clock, I gave up trying to sleep through the cacophony and crawled out of bed. Not even coffee could perk me up.
A fervent knock on the door of Buttons & Bows made me jump. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the redfaced vintage wall clock hanging exactly where it had been, on the brick column next to the kitchen sink, for the last thirty years. For a moment I wondered if, just maybe, it had finally stopped working because according to the hands, it was six fifty in the morning, and that was way too early for someone to be needing designer clothes. But it sounded like I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been able to sleep.
The pounding on the door repeated itself, followed by a voice. “Harlow! It’s Josie.”
I jumped up. If there was anyone I desperately wanted to see right now, it was Josie Sandoval. Mrs. Kincaid had whisked her away after the sheriff had interrogated her, so we hadn’t had a chance to talk again. “Coming!” I called.
I’d brushed my teeth and pulled on a pair of cut-off jeans and a sleeveless plaid blouse before coming into the kitchen, none of which painted a picture of a fashion designer. Now I darted a glance around the farmhouse kitchen looking for a way to see my reflection. It might be early and the visit unexpected, but I still figured I should look presentable since Josie was a client.
I spun around. No mirrors. Meemaw had been a purist. A kitchen was for cooking and gathering, not primping. The white plantation shutters at the window above the farm sink suddenly rattled. A wave of panic flowed through me. The murder in my front yard had put me on edge. I’d checked all the window latches before going to bed, hadn’t I? Or maybe I’d just imagined I had.