Monday morning, I woke up with a pizza hangover and a plan. Jack and I’d stayed up till midnight, arguing things out and jotting them down on the whiteboard he’d brought from Jeremiah’s home office. Details of what happened at the jail must not have gotten out yet, because I didn’t have to spend any time talking Aunt Ruby off the ledge when she called me full of plans about the Alaskan cruise that I had no intention of taking. Then Jack turned back into a tiger and curled up on the floor next to my bed. I’d slept through the night without a single nightmare—at least, none that I remembered—so I felt pretty good.
I showered and dressed, getting ready for the day. I was going to work, naturally, but I’d promised to call Jack if anyone suspicious showed up in the shop. Jack was going to Jeremiah’s house to search through every piece of paper in his home office to find out if there were any records of the sale of the gun to the sheriff. There was just something about that gun that felt like it was the key to a lot of things, but I wasn’t sure why.
In the kitchen, I poured myself a cup of coffee and looked at the whiteboard that was propped up on my desk, against the wall.
“It made more sense last night,” Jack said, standing in the doorway and tilting his head at the board. I noticed his hair was wet.
“I know. Half of what seemed like reasonable theories last night seem like wild speculation this morning. Did you go home?”
“Yeah, I went home for a shower, but first I went out patrolling. There’s no evidence that anyone was here during the night snooping around.”
“Did you expect there would be?” It was bad enough they’d been at my shop; I didn’t want them at my house. Not that the bad guys would care what I wanted. People who caused other people’s heads to explode probably didn’t worry about the niceties of a person’s sense of privacy.
He shook his head. “Not really, but I try to expect the worst. Then I’m more prepared for it.”
I drank some more of my coffee, staring at the board. “Okay. What do we have? Jeremiah and Chantal were killed the same way and left in the same place. The sheriff doesn’t seem to be able to find any clues to either murder.”
“The same sheriff, by the way, who mysteriously ended up with Jeremiah’s prized gun, with no good explanation of how he got it,” Jack added.
I poured bowls of cereal for both of us. Jack made a face, but I laughed at him. “I’m sorry, you carnivore, but we’re not having meat for breakfast today. I need to get to work soon.”
We sat down at the table, and I pointed my spoon at the board. “Back to the sheriff. He has a long history of arresting the Kowalski boys, and then suddenly he doesn’t anymore.”
“Hank Kowalski is dating Chantal. Gator is dating Chantal. Hank won the lottery or is coming into money, somehow. Walt, Hank’s brother, is suddenly overly interested in Shelley’s coin-find money. Chantal and Melody, Shelley’s mom, are friends,” Jack summed up.
Lou meowed at me from the corner by her food dish. I hopped up to give her some Fancy Feast and fresh water, and then I walked over to the whiteboard and added a name.
“Olga Kowalski,” Jack said. “Why her?”
“She keeps coming up again and again. She performed the magical resonance testing on the shop after Jeremiah died. She took custody of Shelley after Melody died. And of course, she’s Hank and Walt’s mom.”
“You think she might have bribed the sheriff to quit arresting her boys?”
I looked at him. “And the sheriff used the bribe money to buy the gun from Jeremiah? It’s certainly possible, but why wouldn’t Jeremiah have told me that?”
“Maybe money problems? He was embarrassed? I don’t know. We’re still on square one when it comes to Jeremiah’s death.” He shook his head in disgust. “He sold the gun to the sheriff, so there was no reason for the sheriff to shoot him over that. Jeremiah didn’t have anything to do with the Kowalskis—neither Hank nor Walt, right?”
“Nothing that I knew about. He didn’t like them much, but in a general sort of way. Nothing specific.”
It was all making my head hurt. I was starting to feel like we were never going to figure it out, but I didn’t tell Jack that. I didn’t want him to think I was giving up hope. Even if, possibly, a tiny part of me was.
Unexpectedly, my day at work was perfectly ordinary. A nice, normal number of customers. Nobody tried to shoot me, stab me, or make my head explode. I was happily calling it a win when I realized that my standards for “ordinary” had lowered considerably. Gone right down the crapper, as Uncle Mike would say.
Just then, the phone rang. I glanced at the screen. Speak of the devil, er, engineer. “Hey, Uncle Mike. What’s up?”
“Did you hear about the man at the jail?”
I sighed. I’d known it would get out fast; I was only surprised it had taken this long. Belle must have been taking a day off yesterday.
“I did. It’s pretty scary. Is Aunt Ruby okay?”
“She doesn’t know about it yet. In fact, that’s why I’m calling. Her sister in Georgia has to go into the hospital. Some minor surgery that might turn out to be more. A biopsy, I think. Anyway, Ruby is really upset because her sister didn’t tell her about it until now, so we’re driving out there. We’re leaving in a couple of hours.”
“Don’t worry about anything, Uncle Mike. I’ll go out and feed the animals and—”
“No, you won’t. I’ve got that all set up with a neighbor. We trade off when either one of us goes out of town. But that’s not the point. We want you to come with us.”
I stared around the shop, feeling a big, fat case of déjà vu rush over me. First Molly, and now Uncle Mike. I knew they were trying to protect me, but still, I wasn’t all that happy about the way everyone seemed to think I could just walk out of my shop like it didn’t matter. Like my job was a hobby. I’d worked hard for several years to earn my manager position before Jeremiah died, and he’d clearly seen something deserving in me when he put me in his will. I wasn’t just going to up and abandon Dead End Pawn at the slightest sign of trouble.
Even for exploding heads.
Especially when the head that had exploded had no connection to me.
“Tess?”
“I’m not coming. Thank you for the offer, and thank you for caring about me. But that man in the jail had nothing to do with me, and I still need to find out who was threatening me and why, and what happened to Jeremiah. I’ve got Jack, which is like having my own one-tiger army, so you can quit worrying about me so much,” I said, with a lump in my throat.
It was a strange feeling, like part of me was finally growing up. I wouldn’t always be able to run to Uncle Mike to solve my problems and kiss my boo-boos. This was a problem I needed to solve myself.
“Ha. Quit worrying,” he scoffed. “Just wait till you have a child. You never stop worrying about them. Ever. I’m dropping the Remington off at your house on the way, with a box of shells. I’m sure soldier boy can remind you how to use it.”
I laughed, even though my eyes were burning a little bit. “Soldier boy? Really? You didn’t like Owen, and now you’ve got something against Jack too?”
“I liked Owen just fine. The boy just bored me to death. And are you trying to tell me something, comparing Jack to the dentist?”
Oh boy. I hadn’t even thought of that. Definitely not.
“Goodbye, Uncle Mike. Drive safely and text me when you get there. Give Aunt Ruby a kiss for me. And I promise to be careful, so you don’t even need to say it.”
He grouched and blustered a little bit more, but we both knew that he was going and I wasn’t. I’d passed a threshold to independence, if only in my mind.
Jack showed up exactly at six, when I was locking up. He roared into the parking lot on his motorcycle and pulled up next to me with a flourish.
“Show-off,” I muttered. “Oh, look at me, I can park.”
Jack switched off the bike, removed his helmet, and grinned at me. “I heard that.”
“Stupid tiger hearing.”
“Actually, you’re right. A tiger’s sense of hearing is superior to all of our other senses. It’s the swiveling ears.”
I pointedly stared at first one, then the other, of his decidedly non-swiveling human ears.
“Yeah, it carries over to some extent, though. We’re also very sensitive to high-pitched sounds. That’s why your singing sounded like an animal in pain to me,” he said helpfully.
“Wow. Thank you so much for that. Should we go get dinner, then? Or will my high-pitched voice annoy you too much?”
Jack look confused, then sheepish. “You don’t sound high-pitched when you talk… Ah. Sorry. You look great while you’re singing, though.”
“Too little, too late, buster.” I stomped off to my car, wondering how much singing lessons cost, and whether the basics—like terrible pitch and the complete failure to recognize a song’s actual tune—were fixable. Then I decided I didn’t care, so I turned my radio on high and sang along with it all the way to town.
The special was fried chicken. Jack raised an eyebrow, and I nodded, so he asked for four specials. He must be running low on meat, or he was a really huge fan of cornbread.
“Shapeshifter metabolism,” he said. “We have to eat a lot, or we get cranky.”
“Pie’s on the house,” Lorraine said.
“What kind do you have?”
“I’ll bring you one of each, honey. Tess?”
“Just the special, thanks, Lorraine.” I handed her the menus that we hadn’t looked at and waited until she bustled off to ask Jack about his day.
He dumped the sugar packets out of the little porcelain box and started rearranging them one by one. “My day was a total bust. If Jeremiah ever had any records about that Colt, he doesn’t have them anymore. I would’ve thought he’d have paperwork about the history of the thing, at least, after the way he talked about it.”
“The provenance,” I said. “That’s the record of ownership. It helps prove authenticity. I know he had extensive documentation on the origin of the gun-- newspaper clippings from the time period of the O.K. Corral and things like that. He showed them to me often enough.”
“He doesn’t have them anymore. Maybe he sold them to the sheriff along with the gun.” He slid the sugar box back and proceeded to dump out the tiny packets of jam and start building a tower with them.
“Did you find anything interesting at all?”
“Not really. Jeremiah was the opposite of a packrat. He had a big shredder in his office, and he clearly used it extensively. It was half full of paper, and his filing cabinets were neat and organized.”
I nodded. “I noticed that when I went in with Mr. Chen to look for the papers he needed for the estate, and to determine what Jeremiah’s final wishes were.”
Jack’s hand jerked, knocking the tower of jam over, and he started building it again. “Thank you for that, by the way. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to take that off your shoulders.”
“I was happy to do it for him,” I said honestly.
I glanced around the room while Jack built Mount Jam. More than a few people were staring at us, which didn’t really surprise me. But a lot of them were giving Jack really dirty looks, and that did.
When Lorraine came back to the table with our salads, I asked her about it.
“Oh, that blowhard Lawless was in here this afternoon, stirring up trouble. He was hinting really broadly that he suspected Jack of having something to do with that poor girl’s death. I tried to set him straight, but he told me I was just a waitress and didn’t know what I was talking about, so I spit in his lemonade,” she said, smiling so broadly I was afraid her false teeth would fall out.
“I kind of love you right now, Lorraine,” Jack said, grinning right back at her.
“You hush that talk. I’m at least ten years too old for you.” Lorraine—who was seventy if she was a day—winked at him and headed off to her other tables.
“So, nothing at all in Jeremiah’s office that might give us any clue as to why all this is happening?” I started moving croutons to the side of my salad, out of my way.
“You don’t like croutons?”
“Bread’s evil cousin,” I told him.
Jack gave me his “there’s something seriously wrong with you” look, but then he shook his head. “No. Nothing at all. There was one thing that I found odd, but I don’t know how it could have had anything to do with his death.”
“What was that?”
Lorraine and a helper showed up with our plates of food just then, so we waited until they unloaded everything onto our table and left.
“Jeremiah had a framed photo on his bookcase of himself with Melody and Shelley Adler at SeaWorld. Did you know anything about that?”
I slowly put my fork down, staring at him. “He what? He took them to SeaWorld? No, I never knew anything about that. I knew he liked the two of them—Shelley, especially—but nothing like that. And if he kept a photo of them, the day must have meant something special to him. I never noticed it when I was in his office with Mr. Chen.”
Jack finished the chicken on his first plate, slid the mashed potatoes and corn from plate one onto plate two, and set the empty plate aside, all without breaking stride in our conversation. It was quite impressive, really.
“He mentioned her a few times to me when I called, now that I think about it. I didn’t really pay any attention,” Jack said.
“Maybe he had hopes that when you came back to settle down, you’d settle down with Melody, and you could all become one big happy family,” I said, trying to think it through rationally. “He did like to tell me how much he wished he could have grandchildren one day, and how much he would spoil mine.”
Jack looked flabbergasted. “Me and Melody Adler? I can’t even imagine that he would think that it was a possibility.”
By the look on his face, he seemed intrigued with the idea, though. I stabbed my chicken perhaps a touch too violently, because Jack’s eyes widened.
“Moving on to exploding heads,” I said.
“You really are a strange woman, aren’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
He pointed to his plate, and I rolled my eyes.
“Okay, fine. If you’re going to be squeamish, we can wait and talk about exploding heads over pie and coffee,” I said, shrugging.
Jack shook his head. “Ruby would be so proud.”
“Shut up and eat your chicken.”