Di knew the back read, “Prospector’s Diner—Sit and Rest a Spell!” Aunt Mary had run the wording by all her customers to see if they could improve on it, before she bought a bunch to sell at the fête.

  Seeming pleased to see them, Jeanine asked—rather hopefully, he thought, “Getting something to go for the boys in blue?”

  Her dark red lipstick brought out her natural smile, which had rather been lacking before, given how beleaguered she seemed with the grumbling crowd.

  Of course, the local boys were actually in khaki, but Di knew she’d said it for the crowds, so they wouldn’t rebel when she let them inside. Mac helped, too, by allowing Peewee to make friends with those waiting, a part he played admirably.

  “Mid-morning coffee run,” Di nodded.

  “Makes sense,” Jeanine agreed, cocking her head. “Go on in. Aunt Mary’s been wondering when y’all would need supplies.”

  That Aunt Mary was a town fixture was only made truer by the fact that her own granddaughter referred to her by that name. And it was true, too, that, often, the diner sent over something partway through the day to the sheriff’s booth, but it would have been impossible to ask Aunt Mary anything there, so coming to make the order seemed the perfect excuse.

  As Peewee said goodbye to his new, adoring fans, they headed inside.

  Fortunately, there, things were a bit more orderly, as only the booths were occupied, and Mary had left the counter clear for to-go orders. Right now, there was only an Indian couple and their two kids at the other end waiting for their food. While the father looked worn out already, the mother was clearly entirely taken up by amusing her kids.

  When Mary saw Di and Mac, she gave a huge grin and came to take their order personally. She was a white woman whose blonde hair was in big ringlets and a snood like her granddaughter’s, although the strands were starting to go gray. She too had on jeans and the t-shirt, which she was evidently seriously pushing.

  “Local faces!” she whispered, clearly pleased. “Thank heaven.”

  For a second, Di got a bit of an ache.

  But I don’t WANT it to be Aunt Mary!

  Still, the mayor had been hanging out at the diner right before his speech, and, if anyone were going to poison him, it would be someone with access to his food.

  “Been quite an event, hasn’t it?” Mac started them off, clearly seeing as much as Di did that Mary was willing to stop and chat a bit.

  “Crowded,” Mary agreed. “But the t-shirts are selling fairly well.”

  As this wasn’t getting them toward where they needed to go, Di tried again.

  “Not the usual fête, though, with the mayor collapsing and all.”

  Mary rolled her eyes.

  “Good riddance. May he rest in peace and all,” she addressed the ceiling. “. . . but that man never had my vote. Womanizer, cheat, embezzler . . .”

  Probably seeing their looks at that last one, she amended.

  “Well, might as well have been, anyway. He’d take money from anyone and everyone with zero interest in helping anyone but himself.”

  She leaned in closer.

  “Do you know that man was trying to get me to sell up and move out? Can you imagine this town without the diner? With some sort of McDonalds or somethin’ in its place?”

  She rolled her eyes, and Di was pleased that he wasn’t having to figure out what and how to ask her anything, although part of him wished she’d stop incriminating herself.

  “We’ll be way better off with Velveteen,” she nodded emphatically. “At least she understands how important local business is to this town and isn’t trying to turn it all over to the billionaires.”

  When she paused for half a second, Di wondered what he could say. She’d pretty much backed up all his theories, and she’d had access to the mayor and his food, as well.

  “Still, it’s bad to see someone go like that,” Di tried to redirect her. “He could have been voted out next year.”

  “Mm, not good for the fête, it’s true,” Aunt Mary seemed to think she was agreeing. “But as to voting out . . .”

  She rolled her eyes again.

  “That man was stuck in here for good. He’d probably have tampered with the results, if he didn’t simply pay everyone off or find some excuse to purge the voter rolls of all the people who didn’t like him. Trust me.”

  She held up her hand.

  “It’s better this way. Now, whatcha need?”

  As they only seemed to be allowing Aunt Mary to dig a deeper grave for herself, Di gave the group’s coffee and snack order.

  Nodding, she murmured, “The usual, then,” and pulled away from the counter. “You kids go on and see a little of the fête. I’ll have Rufus and Enoch bring it over as soon as it’s ready,” she assured them of her two main, twin delivery men, who were actually both exceptionally intelligent and on scholarship at UNC. It wasn’t their fault they’d been named after their rather backwoods grandfathers and were working for spending money on their summer vacation.

  With that, Di headed out with Mac and Peewee. Only once they were out, had waved a goodbye to Jeanine, and were well away did he whisper to her, “I kinda wish we hadn’t done that.”

  “Yeah, she does seem pretty proud of it, if she’s the one.” Glancing up at him out of the corner of her eye, Mac added, “But it would be pretty bold talk for a possible suspect.”

  Of course, no one in town knew that Doc MacDougal had decided the mayor had been poisoned. The rumor mill had firmly established that he’d died as a result of his various vices. A few still even seemed to think he’d be back, like a vampire.

  “Yeah, I know,” Mac continued, clearly sharing his thoughts. “But still.”

  Di sort of agreed but didn’t think that most of the people in town exactly knew how to act like a good murder suspect. In a town where the last official murder had been in 1965—and was still a feature in the local, one-room history museum—it wasn’t exactly what they’d expect halfway through the fête.

  Chapter 6—Hanging Out With Peewee

  It took them a while to make their way back to the booth, Mac wanting to see some of the crafts. While Di knew he should have left her to it, any excuse to be near her was not one he was turning down.

  It was half an hour later, then, that they were returning with a transformed Sgt. Peewee, who was now trotting along while wearing a frog costume.

  When Di had given Mac a look at this choice, she’d simply shrugged and said, “What? He’s undercover.”

  The gaze Peewee had given him—as much as he could see around the green frog costume which was half over his face—was eloquent.

  “Besides,” she went on. “Any more lost kids will be less likely to cry with him around.”

  And Di had to admit that was probably true. It was hard to feel too sad with as ridiculous a sight as a Boston terrier dressed up as an amphibian.

  When they returned to the tent just as Rufus and Enoch were delivering the food, the men—well, except Alex, who did raise an eyebrow—didn’t even notice the change in the dog and were mostly whining about how long it had taken.

  While Di made a bit of a point of defending himself, he didn’t try too hard, knowing that they weren’t listening, anyway. He was mostly in the department to bring the team together by having someone to bully. It had been his place there for two years, so there was no reason to question it now.

  Well, the men all did this except for Alex, who was in much the same place, although not quite as picked on. After all, Di was a bit of a pacifist, whereas everyone suspected that, if pushed too far, you’d end up on the other side of Alex Martinez’s fist.

  Besides, there are advantages to being overlooked. Hopefully, no one’s going to notice that I’m actually questioning anybody.

  There were a few more hours of mostly sitting around after this, although he wandered out around the booths a few times, as well. Although he wanted to find a reason to question Nora, either her booth or Velveteen’s was always too busy to try to get near her casually, and there were simply too many others around to even think of talking to the sheriff unheard.

  Mostly, then, he sat and occasionally gave a lost visitor directions.

  There were very few moments of interest.

  Once, he caught and returned an escaping poodle to a couple when they accidentally dropped the leash.

  Another time, he weaponized the “velvet voice of death” to break up two women who were arguing over who would be the one to buy an afghan he’d knitted in the UNC Tarheels colors and pattern, by promising the other that Velveteen could get the artist to create another one and mail it later, which her assistants saw to without any suspicion that Di was the artist in question.

  At one point, he watched the sheriff get into some sort of inexplicable tiff with Nora, although there was no way to know over what.

  And he also bought and gave out a few bottles of water to some of the stall keepers who were overwhelmed and hadn’t had a break in a few hours, occasionally taking over for ten minutes, so they could make a run for the bathrooms.

  In other words, typical fête duty.

  By the time the other men of the Prospector’s Rest Sheriff’s Department were heading to lunch in staggered shifts—or out keeping an eye on everything—and Di found himself alone with the sheriff and Sgt. Peewee, it was nearly 2 p.m.

  Peewee had collapsed on a towel on the asphalt in his frog costume staring up at Di in intense boredom, which Di couldn’t blame him for. Still, sitting there and petting what he could get to of the dog around the frog costume, he asked Pommelroy, “Have any of the fêtes been this eventful before?”

  Pommelroy stared at him, all 200 or so pounds of stereotypical, small-town, Southern, white sheriff.

  “Whatcha mean, Goode?” he asked suspiciously.

  Di shrugged innocently.

  “I mean the mayor dying. Have there been any other heart attacks or medical emergencies at the fête before?”

  Although still looking a bit curious as to what had brought this on, Pommelroy seemed to think about it.

  “Only a case or two of near heat stroke a few years ago, in that nasty hot summer we had. Weren’t you here?”

  “Weeell,” Di hedged. “Before I joined the force, I was just a local, y’know. I maybe came one day, looked around, and went home. Or possibly hung out down at The Gold Mine with my friends.”

  The mention of their local, handmade ice cream creamery made the sheriff lick his lips, and Di wondered how long he’d be able to talk to him before Pommelroy took off for a triple scoop.

  He pressed on quickly.

  “I’ve never been around when someone actually collapses and dies like that.”

  “Yeah, death ain’t pretty,” the sheriff agreed, but he didn’t seem entirely saddened by it. “Still, if it had to happen to anyone, it might as well be that idiot Pocket.”

  Suddenly, it occurred to Di how to play this—as the stupid kid who needed things explained to him. It fit the sheriff’s idea of him, anyway.

  “My granny always said Mayor Pocket was good for the town,” he mentioned innocently, staring off at one of the stages, where there was a group of five-year-olds in sparkly prospector costumes doing a dance routine. None of them quite seemed to be in time with each other and at least one was standing stock still and staring off in confusion at her mother, but that was the charm of preschool dance.

  Actually, too, Di’s grandmother would rather have spit on Mayor Pocket than vote for him, but he was certain the sheriff barely took in most of the town.

  Proving it, Pommelroy shrugged.

  “Well, he did a good job bringing in a lot of money, that’s for sure. We’ve got more billionaires now than most of this state does. Or their vacation homes, anyway.”

  Although Di would not have counted any of this as a benefit to the town, the sheriff said it proudly, and it occurred to Di that Pommelroy had not been particularly pleased having to arrest or hold the VanRowe kid. If the state police hadn’t demanded it, he’d never have done it on his own—even with the human trafficking.

  Not noticing Di’s thoughts—as no one on the force ever noticed much about him except to make fun of him—the sheriff added, almost to himself, “Hopefully, Velveteen will figure that out soon enough. She certainly likes money, anyway.”

  Although Di doubted this—Velveteen felt firmly that the town was for the crafters and the locals and not for some snotty rich people—he continued to press.

  “Some of their kids, though . . .” he noted, seeing if he could get more, and still trying to look entirely innocent and a little dumb.

  The local mothers had already had to band together to keep their daughters from any dates with the rich boys, since they were well aware that said dates were more likely to end in rape than a marriage proposal. While it was possible that some of the kids were nice, as the VanRowe son showed, too many of them were simply raised with the idea that consequences were things that happened to other people.

  After all, the police department in the next town over, Prospector’s Heights, had had to create a special unit to help clean up the kids who routinely killed themselves by driving their luxury cars straight off the mountain in their dumb races. They were just thankful none of the locals had been killed yet.

  The sheriff simply laughed.

  “Dumb kid stuff. Nobody gets hurt.”

  Through a definite feat of will, Di managed not to show his disbelief at this statement, still attempting to innocently listen.

  Seeming to think about it, Pommelroy shook his head.

  “No, the one thing Pocket got right was bringing in money to spread around. The place is better for it.”

  Although Di suspected that every single resident disagreed, this declaration had gotten his brains going.

  I wonder if Pocket spread it around to the sheriff, too.

  The late mayor had certainly had his hands deep in the billionaires’ pockets, and the sheriff might be seen as an essential person to bribe to be sure the billionaires’ kids didn’t get charged with anything.

  But, even if that’s true, how would I find out?

  Certainly, he couldn’t get a search warrant for the sheriff’s accounts.

  Maybe I can have a chat with Cole?

  They’d been friends in high school, and he was now a manager at the Prospector’s Rest Credit Union, which was where most of the people in town did their banking, rather than have to go two towns over to get to a branch of a bigger bank.

  Of course, most of what the sheriff had said didn’t seem like much of a motive. True, he was probably on the take, but that was sadly no surprise. Why kill the golden goose who was paying him off, though?

  Still, Di didn’t get a chance to think into this any more, as Miles showed back up, grinning. If he’d been up to his usual trick, he’d have been hanging out at The Feminine Mystique, praising all the ladies, as they tried on new dresses. Still with his all-star quarterback, white, blond looks—which were probably going to last him another year or two—he’d typically get a few dates that way from the unsuspecting, visiting girls.

  From his grin, it had worked as usual.

  But he’d apparently heard the sheriff’s last comment and seemed confused, breaking in.

  “I thought you said the mayor was an idiot to let in the state police, ‘cause they never know when to leave well enough alone.”

  It was no surprise he was confused. Miles Spencer was not a thinker. He needed to be given express instructions on what opinions he should have by whomever had power over him. If this opinion changed, he often had trouble keeping up.

  Suddenly, Pommelroy’s look was venomous.

  “You need to know when to keep your big mouth shut, boy,” he growled, and standing up, headed out of the booth. “I’m goin’ out for some ice cream.”

  For once, Spencer looked genuinely hurt.

  “What’d I do?” he wondered, clearly unused to being anything but the sycophantic golden child.

  But, his suspicions mounting, Di merely smiled at him.

  Thankfully, the boy was easily distracted.

  “And why’d you dress Peewee like a frog?”

  Although meeting Peewee’s look of wounded dignity, Di didn’t answer. The boy’s brain was like a goldfish’s, anyway. He’d forget soon enough.

  For now, Di had things to think about—none of which he’d know how to handle, even if he could figure them out.

  Chapter 7—Whispers about Poison

  It was about 5 p.m. when Di finally had a chance to get close to Mac and out of earshot of the others, as they were on their way to give their dinner orders to Aunt Mary.

  It had occurred to Di that they should probably be careful about upsetting the woman if they didn’t want to go the way of the mayor, but, so far, he didn’t think they’d said anything she could take offense at. Mostly, she’d done the talking.

  “I had a chat with Velveteen’s assistants,” Mac noted, before he’d filled her in about what the sheriff had said. “From their perspective, at least, Velveteen is pretty thoroughly peeved at having to play mayor, so I think we’re right that she’s out as a suspect.”

  Nodding, Di agreed and told her about his conversation with the sheriff, as they walked slowly toward the diner.

  Listening and nodding, Mac pondered, “Well, I always suspected he was on the take, so that’s no surprise. But you’re right. Why kill the mayor, when he’s making him rich?”

  Playing devil’s advocate, Di added, “Well, apparently, it was the mayor who forced the sheriff to work with the state police to arrest the VanRowe kid.”

  Mac stared at him like he was crazy, the late afternoon sunlight shining off her brown hair in a way which made her look like she had a halo. Di had to try not to sigh, as she went on.

  “That’s nuts. He’s the local law enforcement. If the state police say, ‘jump,’ he’d better already be reaching for the ceiling.”

  “I don’t think he sees it that way, though,” Di shrugged.

  Leading him back toward the table where she’d bought Peewee’s frog costume earlier, Mac shook her head.

 

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