B.J. Daniels - Redemption

Kate remembered the note and felt a chill run the length of her spine. She’d put the note in her apron pocket and dropped the apron in the bin by the back door earlier when she’d been visiting with Bethany.

After waving goodbye to Cilla, Kate locked the door, flipped the sign in the window to Closed and told Lou to take the day off. The moment he left, she hurried to the bin with the aprons in it. As she pulled hers out and reached into the pocket, her heart took off at a gallop. Frantically she dug in one pocket, then the other.

The note was gone.

CHAPTER FIVE

KATE WAS FRANTICALLY DIGGING through the aprons in the bin, searching for the note, when she heard a vehicle drive up in front of the café. She ignored it and the knock at the front door. The Closed sign was up. The person would eventually take the hint and leave.

She tried to tell herself not to panic. She didn’t need to find the note. She knew only too well what it had said. So why was she panicking?

Because she didn’t want the note to fall into anyone else’s hands.

With a jolt, she realized it probably already had.

“You must not have heard my knock.”

Kate whirled around to find the sheriff standing in the back doorway. A large, broad-shouldered man in his fifties, he blocked out the sun.

“Lose something?” he asked. He was good-looking, even for a man his age. His blond hair had started to gray, but it wasn’t noticeable except for a little in his thick, drooping mustache. He removed his Stetson as he opened the screen door and stepped into the back of the café, his gaze intent on her in a way that made her heart hammer even harder.

“My grocery order,” she said as she picked up the pile of towels and aprons she’d tossed on the floor in her search, and dropped them back into the hamper. “I thought I left it in my apron. Apparently, I left it somewhere else,” Kate said, pulling herself together. “I thought I’d drop it off on my way to the fair.”

She hadn’t planned on going to the fair. Quite the contrary—she had other, more important things to do. But if the sheriff thought he was keeping her...

“I won’t keep you long,” he said, taking the hint. He stood, turning the brim of his Stetson in his fingers as he looked toward the dining room. “Mind if we have a seat?”

“What is this about?” she asked. She’d seen him go to the general store the other day before coming over for his usual morning cup of coffee. Had Nettie put some bug in his ear? Everyone in the county knew he had a crush on Nettie Benton. Not that anyone could understand what he saw in the nosy old woman.

“Just need to have a little chat with you,” the sheriff said as he took a seat in one of the booths.

Kate tried to imagine what Nettie could have told him. It would be just like Nettie to fill his ear with some nonsense or other. Or even shades of the truth, which could be worse.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“No thanks, Ms. LaFond. I don’t want to keep you from the fair.”

She nodded. Bracing herself, she joined him in the booth, trying hard to hide how nervous he was making her. First the note, and now whatever this was.

“Have you seen this morning’s newspaper?” he asked.

She hadn’t had a chance and said as much.

He pulled a copy from his jacket pocket and shoved it across the table at her. “If you don’t mind taking a look.”

She flattened the newspaper, the sketch on page one practically leaping off the page at her—along with the headline: Do You Know This Man? Kate knew the sheriff couldn’t have missed her startled reaction.

“Have you ever seen this man before?” he asked.

Kate suspected he already knew the answer. The moment she’d seen the sketch, she’d given herself away. Not that it mattered. She couldn’t lie. Jack French had not only seen her with the dead man, he’d also punched him and bloodied the man’s nose.

“He’s dead?” She didn’t have to fake her surprise or the break in her voice.

“He was murdered.”

She leaned back against the booth seat and tried to catch her breath. “Murdered?” She’d heard some of the locals talking about a hobo who’d been found down by the Yellowstone River, but that was more than twenty miles away. There’d been no mention of murder.

The sheriff sat across from her, waiting—and watching her with that same intensity she’d noticed when he’d walked in. “How do you know the man?”

“I don’t know him. I’d never seen him before he accosted me the other night in the alley beside the café. Fortunately, Jack came along—”

“Jack?”

“Jack French. He ran him off.”

“And then what happened?”

“Nothing. The man left, I went upstairs to bed and Jack went on down the street.”

“You say the man accosted you?”

“I had gone for a run. He was in the alley by my apartment stairs. I thought he was drunk, because he obviously had me confused with someone else.”

“What did he say to you?”

“I don’t even remember.” But she feared Jack would, and would tell the sheriff. “Like I said, I thought he was drunk. He wasn’t making any sense. I’d never seen him before in my life.”

“Did you see what he was driving?”

She shook her head. “Maybe Jack did. It sounded like a truck when he took off, but I could be wrong.”

“Jack just happened to be walking by?”

“It was the first time I’d seen him, as well. It wasn’t until the next morning that I learned who he was and that he’d just gotten out of prison.” Why had she said that? She felt a stab of guilt for even bringing it up.

“Did Jack seem to know the man?”

“No. Jack just came to my defense, I guess, when he heard the commotion. He hit the man and ran him off.”

“This was after the man hit you.”

It wasn’t a question, but she nodded anyway and touched her cheek. “He slapped me when I told him to leave me alone or else.”

“Or else?”

“I like to think I can take care of myself,” she said, even more shaken as she realized that she and Jack might have been the last two people to see the man alive. Except for the killer. “I wasn’t very appreciative when Jack came to my rescue. I was too shaken by the encounter with the man,” she added, trying to cover for whatever Jack would tell the sheriff. “Now, though...”

He nodded as if thinking the same thing she was—that she’d been lucky. She glanced at the sketch of the dead man on the front page of the paper again and shuddered. She didn’t even want to think about who might have murdered him. Or why, because she feared the killer would be coming for her next.

The sheriff rolled up his newspaper and stuffed it into his pocket again. “If you think of anything else, please give me a call.”

“I’d be happy to. Like I said, I’m sure the man had me confused with someone else.” If only that were true, she thought.

After the sheriff left, she went upstairs and got the gun she kept hidden in the apartment. Claude had warned her. Apparently it was time to start carrying it.

* * *

I KNEW YOUR MOTHER.

That was the first thing Claude Durham said to her. Kate looked up to find a fiftysomething man standing next to her at the Nevada café where she’d been working, just outside Vegas.

At the time, she’d been standing at the pass-through waiting for her last order of the day to come up so she could leave. She’d been killing time, gossiping with Connie, the older waitress she worked with at the small dive of a café out in the middle of the desert.

“That’s quite the pickup line,” she said to the man. Her feet hurt and she was too tired for whatever he was selling. Not only that, he was also too old for her.