To her credit, Monica always giggled at my lame jokes.
“Shelby, what am I going to do with you?” she said with a little shake of her head, using the same grandmotherly tone she’d used with me since I was a girl.
Monica and I went way back. It’s a little weird when you work with people who used to change your diapers. She joined the sheriff’s department as a secretary right out of high school and had never worked anywhere else over the past three decades. That’s the thing about a small-town place like Mittel County. Loyalty runs deep in these parts. When you find your place in the world, you stay there.
She went back to reading us the latest police reports out loud. Adam and I were both in our chocolate-brown uniforms. Normally, we would be out on the roads together, but it had been a slow Friday so far. I was only half paying attention to what Monica was saying, because my father was in his office behind closed doors, and the muffled conversation inside was getting loud.
“Oh, this is sad,” Monica announced in her high-pitched twitter of a voice as she squinted at the computer screen. “Poor old Paul Nadler wandered away again in Stanton. They want us to be on the lookout for him.”
Adam snorted from behind his cigar. “On the lookout? Stanton is an hour away. Nadler is what, ninety-four? Do they think he’s running a marathon or something?”
“Come on, Adam,” I chided him. “The man has Alzheimer’s.”
“Yeah, I know, but this is like the sixth time he’s walked out of that care center without anybody noticing. Somebody either needs to bell that cat or figure out how to lock the damn door.”
Adam was right about that. Stanton was in the next county over, so it really wasn’t our problem, but I felt sorry for Mr. Nadler and angry that the senior facility couldn’t keep him safe. They typically found him within a couple of hours, but a lot can happen to an old man in that amount of time. Once he walked into a stranger’s house two blocks away and fell asleep in a closet. Another time he actually climbed the hundred-foot Stanton fire tower. Sooner or later, he was going to get hurt.
“Let’s move on, Monica. What else is on the list?”
I was a little too brusque with her, but Monica gave me a sympathetic smile from the other side of the room. She could read my mind. I wasn’t upset about Mr. Nadler’s memory problems. I was worried that someday I would find myself in the same situation with my father.
“We’ve got a report of a stolen pickup truck in Martin’s Point,” she went on. “A white Ford F-150. That is such a nice vehicle. I’ve always wanted one of those.”
I grinned at the idea of tiny Monica Constant driving one of the world’s largest trucks. She rattled off the license plate, and Adam and I scribbled it down in our notebooks. This was the fourth stolen vehicle report this month. It was summer. Cars around Mittel County had a way of going on joyrides when kids were off school. Martin’s Point was a lakeside town fifty miles south of us, which meant it attracted tourist families with bored teenagers who quickly discovered that the locals don’t always lock their vehicles.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Mrs. Norris says she saw a man skulking outside her bedroom window last night. According to her, he was, quote, ‘ogling her lasciviously while in a state of undress.’”
“A state of undress?” I asked. “Was he undressed or was she?”
“I think she was.”
“So we’re looking for a blind man,” Adam joked from the doorway. “That should make it easy.”
I couldn’t help laughing. Adam was right about that, too. Nobody with good eyes would be ogling Mrs. Norris. “Did she give a description of the man?”
“No, she didn’t see him. Her bedroom window was open, and she says he was making some kind of snuffling sound, like heavy breathing. She thinks he came from the motel across the highway.”
“All right, we’ll wander over there later. I’m sure Rose won’t be surprised at another complaint from Mrs. N about one of her guests. Is that all?”
It didn’t matter if that was all.
Before Monica could say anything more, the door to my father’s office flew open with a bang, interrupting us. I saw a slim, tall, annoyingly attractive woman in the doorway, and she saw me sitting at my desk.
“Violet,” I said coolly.
“Shelby,” she said with equal frost in her voice.
Violet Roka and I had been frenemies since high school. My one claim to fame in Mittel County — well, other than being the baby in the Easter basket — was being part of the girls volleyball team that won the state championship in my senior year. Believe me, that’s a big deal in a small town. There’s still a billboard about us on the highway. Violet’s family moved to the area when she was a junior, and she promptly went out for the team and squeezed out my best friend, which didn’t help us get along. She and I became the two biggest rivals with the two most stubborn personalities, but Coach Trina had managed to get it through our heads that we could accomplish more together than apart. The truce lasted until we brought the trophy home. Since then, we hadn’t exactly been close.
At twenty-six years old, she was a newly minted lawyer who’d already gotten herself appointed to the county board after one of the members resigned in the middle of his term. One thing Violet never lacked was ambition. She’d been using her newfound clout to hassle my father about everything he was doing wrong as the county sheriff. I didn’t like it one bit, but Dad let it roll off his back the way he did everything in life.
Violet didn’t linger in the office. She shrugged a purse over her shoulder, clicked across the floor in her sky-high heels, and pushed through Adam’s cloud of cigar smoke into the parking lot. Adam gave her one of his crooked James Dean smiles, but Violet didn’t swoon.
When she was gone, my father strolled into the common area to join us. Adam quickly flipped his cigar to the asphalt outside and hummed an innocent tune.
“What did Violet want?” I asked.
“Oh, she always has something to complain about,” my father replied with a wrinkle of his bushy mustache. “Apparently, now I’m not doing enough to combat climate change.”
“What exactly can you do about that?”
“As you’d expect, Violet had a list prepared.”
“Was there anything else? It sounded like the two of you were arguing.”
“It was nothing, Shelby. Don’t worry about it.”
My father was the most honest man I knew, but that also meant he was a bad liar. I didn’t know what he and Violet had been arguing about, but it was more than climate change. Whatever it was, he chose not to share it with me.
Dad wandered over and perched on the side of Monica’s desk, where he perused the summary of police calls. “Mr. Nadler again? I can’t believe they keep losing that man.” Then without looking up, he continued: “Oh, and Adam? Was that a cigar I saw in your hand?”
“Definitely not, Tom,” Adam replied, although he wasn’t fooling anyone, because the smell had already permeated the basement.
My father sighed and shot me a sideways glance. “How about we solve a little crossword puzzle for Adam, Shelby? Let’s try this one. ‘An unwanted visitor in a tableware emporium.’ Four letters.”
Dad loved crossword puzzles. He and I had spent twenty years doing them together over breakfast in the local café. His clue took me just a moment to figure out, and then I said, “Bull.”
Because a bull in a china shop would definitely be an unwanted visitor.
“You got that, Adam?” my father told him with a wink. “Bull.”
Adam stared at his feet and coughed. “Sorry, Tom.”
“No more cigars in here, got it? Let’s try not to burn down another building.”
“Yes, sir.”