Mock Apple Alibi, page 11
“I don’t know a lot,” Josh said. “I’m going to try to find out more. But there aren’t a lot of sources who will know anything about what is happening who will actually talk to me.”
“You be careful,” Erin warned. Mary Lou would not be happy to hear that he was investigating something so potentially dangerous. “If you start asking questions about a third organization trying to push its way into the business here, someone might get… upset.”
“I know. I am being careful,” Josh dismissed her concern. “I’m not going to just charge into the middle of things like an idiot. I know what I’m doing.”
What a teenager perceived as being dangerous and what an experienced adult perceived as dangerous could be very different. While Joshua was a skilled investigative reporter, he wasn’t always as careful as he should be. That would come with maturity and experience. Hopefully.
“Really,” she emphasized. “I don’t think this is something that you should be getting into. It could be really dangerous. Things are really explosive right now.”
“I know,” he agreed bullishly, sticking to his guns. “And I told you I’ll be careful. I’m not a little kid.”
“I know that. I just… you know what Mary Lou would tell you. She’s not here, so I’m just telling you… listen to what she would tell you.”
“Listen to your mother,” Roger echoed.
Erin looked at him, wondering how much of what they had said he had followed. Or was he just echoing what Erin had said?
Roger picked up on more than they knew. He had previously told them about Joshua carrying a gun for protection, something that no one else had been aware of. Josh hadn’t thought that Roger would tell anyone else what he had seen, but when they had needed to know, he had done his best to communicate it, despite his challenges.
“I will, Dad,” Josh answered in a slightly lower, more compliant tone.
Roger nodded. “Be safe,” he said, and patted Josh on the shoulder. “Safe, safe.”
Chapter 21
“I feel so bad for those boys,” Vic said as Erin pulled the car into the garage. “I can’t imagine what it must be like for them to deal with Mary Lou missing right now. After all they’ve had to go through, they shouldn’t have to deal with this too.”
Erin swallowed. “What would be worse is if they lose her permanently.” Her chest felt paralyzed as she considered this. She could hardly draw breath, and her heart physically ached for them. She had grown up without a mother, but that was different from the two of them growing up so close to Mary Lou and then losing her. Especially with the care of their father to consider. Would Joshua have to give up his career dreams to look after him? Would Cam decide to step up and leave his wild life behind? She didn’t see a lot of indications that he would be willing to deal with a disabled father long-term.
“Don’t even say that,” Vic whispered. “They are not going to lose her. The police will find her. They will bring her home.”
Erin swallowed and nodded, hoping it was true.
They closed the car doors and silently stepped out from the stifling hot garage into the cooler air outside. The sun was setting, the heat of the day dissipating.
A figure loomed up in front of them and at first, Erin thought it was Willie, standing there in the dark waiting for Vic to get home. But it was not Willie, and the knit balaclava over the man’s face was obviously not a fashion statement or to protect him from cold weather.
Vic gasped, and her hand snaked under her shirt to grab her gun from its concealed holster. The man struck out, shoving her back into the wall of the garage and pressing his gun to her chest until she withdrew her hand and held both hands at shoulder level to assure him that they were both empty and she wasn’t a threat to him.
“Okay, okay,” she protested. “What is this? A mugging?”
“The girlfriend and the baker,” the man snarled in a guttural voice. “Always sticking your noses where they aren’t wanted. Don’t you know when to quit?”
“We haven’t done anything,” Erin said. Her throat constricted with fear. She could barely get the words out. “We just got back from visiting a friend.”
The gun pointed at her now, and the food she had eaten at the Coxes’ threatened to come back up.
“They’ve just suffered a family tragedy,” she explained, as if she needed to. The gunman probably knew more about what was going on than Erin and Vic did. “We were there to take them some baking and offer our sympathy and support.”
“And to ask questions,” the gunman snarled. “You can never mind your own business. Stick with the bakery and your cookies.”
“Okay,” Vic agreed. “We get it. We’ll mind our own business. We’ll stay out of it.”
The gun turned back to her and again pressed against her chest, even though Vic’s hands were still held up and empty.
“We’ll stay out of it,” Erin echoed.
Where was Terry? Where was Willie? Where was the increased police presence that the police department had promised, knowing Vic might be in danger when people heard about Willie’s new position? Neither clan liked the fact that the leader of the Dyson clan was intimate with a woman from the Jackson family, even if she had been disavowed.
The intruder looked from one to the other, the eyes visible through the mask dark and hard. Erin felt like she was smothering just looking at the balaclava. He must have been cooking, sweat soaking into the material.
He pointed the gun at each of them. “You just stick to your work and stay out of clan business,” he warned one last time.
They both nodded and agreed. He withdrew the gun and slid it into an underarm holster. He turned his back on them and walked away. Erin felt rather than saw Vic grab for her gun in its holster. She reached out a hand to stop her.
“No, Vic, you’ll get us killed!”
Vic pulled away from her, but the split-second that Erin had stopped her for was enough that Vic was no longer sure of her shot, and she let the gun go, leaving it in its holster. She scowled at Erin.
“I had the shot.”
“In the back? How are you going to explain that to the police?”
Vic considered this for a moment. “I wasn’t planning on telling the police.”
“So, what, you and me would get rid of the body? Load him into the bug and dump him somewhere? Dig a shallow grave out in the woods and hope nobody finds him?”
“I wasn’t thinking about all of that.” Vic gazed at the place where the man had disappeared into the woods. “It grates on me to let him just walk away. I don’t do kindly with people threatening me with a gun!”
“I can’t say I do either,” Erin admitted shakily. But she didn’t feel like going after the guy with a gun. She wanted to call Terry and cower under the blankets on her bed with her eyes tightly shut, trying to wipe the images from her mind.
Vic grasped Erin’s arm. “Let’s get you into the house.”
Erin didn’t protest. She let Vic escort her to the back door and input her passcode to let them into the house.
Of course they didn’t get far before Orange Blossom was underfoot meowing that Erin hadn’t been home to feed him when she was supposed to.
“Git out,” Vic said irritably, pushing Orange Blossom away with her foot. “Quit complaining for once and let Erin sit down.”
The pressure on Erin’s arm was directing her to the living room, where she could sit down on the couch, but she didn’t know if she could make it that far. She wobbled toward the kitchen table and Vic ensured she landed in one of the chairs.
“There, you just set a spell and get your legs back under you,” she told Erin, moving immediately toward the teakettle.
“I should call Terry,” Erin murmured. But her phone seemed far out of reach. She couldn’t impress upon her brain the need to reach out to pull out her phone. She felt like she was separated from her body, watching herself. She was a little disgusted with herself for being so weak, collapsing in the chair and slumping there like a jellyfish.
“Don’t worry about it,” Vic told her. “We’ll call him in a minute. Whether it is now or in five minutes don’t make no difference now.”
Erin watched Vic prepare a cup of tea and stirred in extra sugar. She knew this was supposed to help her recover faster from the shock of the confrontation, but she didn’t think it would make any difference to how shaky and overwhelmed she felt.
“Drink it,” Vic told her firmly.
Erin nodded and sat with it in her hand, waiting for her strength to return to the point where she could raise it to her mouth without shaking so badly that she spilled it. The hot tea warmed the mug and felt good in her hand.
Vic pulled out her own phone. Erin knew she was calling Terry and wished they could skip this part and the drama that would follow. Her bed was calling her. She would rather skip over all of the drama and just bury herself in layers of blankets until she was warm and cozy and safe and could just sleep.
Vic spoke into the phone. “Terry, we had an intruder,” she told him baldly. “You need to get home.” She paused to allow Terry time to react to this announcement. “She’s okay. Everyone is fine. But Erin needs you. And if there’s any chance the police could catch up to this guy… I don’t think you can do anything, but you can try.”
She again waited for a moment, then gave a description of the gunman and the direction he had gone so Terry could start the others conducting a search.
“We’ll be here,” she said unnecessarily, and ended the call.
Chapter 22
Erin took a sip of the oversweet tea. It flowed down to her stomach and spread out to her limbs in a warm rush. She closed her eyes and took another drink.
“He’ll be here in a minute,” Vic advised.
“Can you feed the animals?”
“Sure.”
Vic went to the pantry to get Orange Blossom’s food out and apologized to him for being so stern when she had spoken to him earlier. “Sometimes you just have to wait,” she explained. “Sometimes Momma needs something before you.”
She got some vegetables from the fridge for Marshmallow, who waited patiently as usual. Then Terry was at the front door, letting himself in and hurrying to Erin to brush her cheek with a kiss and ask if she was okay.
“I’m fine,” Erin said, “just fine. Nothing happened. Everyone is fine.”
“What happened?” Terry asked Vic. “An intruder in the house?” He looked around for any sign of trouble.
“Not inside,” Vic said. “Out in the yard beside the garage. We got in from work and he was waiting there for us.”
“He had a gun?” Terry already knew this from Vic’s description of the man, warning him that he had a concealed weapon.
Vic nodded. “Yeah. Handgun in an underarm holster. Sig Sauer.”
“Did he threaten you?”
Erin nodded, not wanting to be excluded from the conversation. She was not just a bystander or a child to be coddled. She had been there, and she had eyes, too. He would need both of their statements. “He had his gun on Vic before she could pull hers from the holster. He pointed it at both of us, but mostly at Vic.”
“What did he say? Did you recognize him?”
Erin shook her head. “I don’t know who it was. I was trying to recognize him… his body or voice, but I don’t think it was anyone I have ever met.”
“What can you add to Vic’s description? Or do you disagree with anything?”
Erin thought Vic had done a good job giving a general description of the intruder, including his height and weight and what he had been wearing. The whole time he had been threatening them, she had been looking for something identifiable.
“Uh… white guy. Light-colored eyes. It was too dark to see them very well, but they weren’t brown. Lighter. Probably blue. Maybe green. His hands…” Erin closed her eyes. The images kept intruding on her thoughts; she might as well let them come now and try to use them. She pictured the man’s hand holding the gun. She could see little but the gun when he had been threatening them, but the image was still there in her mind. “The hair on his knuckles was dark. Not blond or red. Brown or black. I think he had a tattoo, but I couldn’t see it very well because he was wearing a windbreaker. It was here,” Erin touched the inside of her wrist. “I could just see the edge of it under his jacket.”
“What could you see of the color and shape?”
“Uh, hard to say. I think red or orange, but the light wasn’t good. It was round. Or that edge of it was rounded.”
Terry nodded encouragingly. “Anything else?”
“One of his nails was blackened, down at the base. Like he’d shut it in a door or hit it with a hammer.” Erin had done both things on previous occasions and knew how painful they were, and knew how the blood under the nail turned black and stayed there for ages until the nail grew out.
“Which finger?”
“Uh… index finger on his gun hand. His right hand.”
“Was his finger through the trigger guard?”
Erin nodded. She searched the image for anything else that might help to identify the man, or at least to confirm his identity if they found him on a nearby street during the search. She didn’t want him slipping through their fingers because she hadn’t been able to give a good enough description.
She opened her eyes. “That’s all I can think of.”
“That’s very good, Erin. For the two of you to be able to give such a good description of a man wearing a balaclava is… it’s extraordinary. Nice job.” He looked at Vic. “Can you tell me any more details about the gun?”
Vic obliged, giving him several technical specifications that went over Erin’s head. About all she would have been able to tell Terry was that it was a silver handgun.
Terry’s radio had been squawking as they talked, but he had turned down the volume so it was barely audible. There was a knock on the front door, and Terry answered it, checking through the peephole before opening the door to Sheriff Wilmot.
“Sheriff,” he greeted.
“How are the ladies?”
Terry nodded. “They’re doing pretty well, considering. How is the search going?”
“We’ve got a perimeter and everyone is out looking for him.”
Considering how few officers were actually on the Bald Eagle Falls police force, and that two of them were now inside Erin’s house, Erin didn’t see how they could have established any effective perimeter or conducted a proper search. A couple of cops searching the surrounding streets would be pretty easy to avoid. And the intruder had left through Erin’s woods. There was no way for them to search the woods, especially at night.
Wilmot could likely see the doubt in her eyes.
“We have volunteers helping surveil the perimeter,” he said. “And I have the staties coming in to help beat the bushes. A couple have already arrived. I know it isn’t much, but we’re doing our best with limited numbers.”
“How about Beaver? Is she helping?”
“Haven’t been in contact with Miss Beaven, sorry. I don’t know where she is right now. She’s not often in town.”
“She is. She brought Cam on Wednesday.”
“She might not still be here today. I’ll leave it to the dispatcher to reach out to whatever agencies she thinks will be able to help.” He looked her over. “You’re still a mite pale.”
Which probably meant she was as white as a ghost. Erin took another long swallow of the hot tea. The sooner she could get back to normal, the more she would be able to help. If she could remember anything else that might help them.
“Well… thank you. I appreciate you helping.”
“Don’t count us out yet,” he said, interpreting her tone as doubting they would be able to find the man. “You never know. We might be able to catch this lowlife.”
Erin shrugged. “Maybe,” she agreed. She wasn’t counting on it. If she hadn’t stopped Vic from plugging the guy in the back, they wouldn’t be having this conversation. She gave Vic an apologetic look, which made Vic grin. Terry raised a brow, inquiring what the inside joke was.
Erin shook her head. “Nothing.”
Vic chuckled. “She’s regretting that she stopped me from shooting him in the back.”
“Oh.” Terry chuckled at that, too. “Well, you know we can’t have you going around shooting private citizens in the back.”
“When he threatens my life and is still on my property…”
“He was no longer threatening you if his back was to you. And he was on Erin’s property, not yours.”
“The law doesn’t care who owns it. If my castle is on this property, I have a right to defend it.”
“Not when he is walking away.”
Vic shrugged. “It’s probably a good thing she kept me from going to jail for shooting a guy in the back, but I think I could’ve gotten off.”
“Probably,” Terry agreed. “People tend to be very sympathetic toward pretty young ladies. Poor, defenseless things being threatened by a big, strong man.”
“That’s right,” Vic agreed pertly. She took a deep breath and released it in a long, controlled exhale. “I’ll admit, my heart is still racing. I was pretty cool while it was happening, but now…” She held her hands out in front of her. They were trembling very slightly. “Just look at that,” Vic said in disgust.
The men, looking at her barely shaking fingers, did not share her negative opinion.
“You’re still cool as a cucumber,” Wilmot told her. “Most people do not stay that calm when threatened at gunpoint.”
“Most people didn’t have the upbringing I did. My Pa woulda given me an earful for letting the guy get the drop on me. And letting him get away like that… He woulda tanned my hide for being such a coward.”
Erin had met Vic’s pa, and it was no exaggeration. The man was not the tolerant sort. He had raised his boys, including the former James Jackson, to be tough clan men.
