Death Threads (14 page)

Margaret Louise slowly removed her hands, her mouth tugging downward in sadness. “I reckon.”

Tori let go of the handle and swiveled her body to the left, her gaze moving between the woman in the backseat and the woman in the driver’s seat. “We need answers, real answers—whether we like them or not. We owe that to Debbie and the kids.”

“I agree,” Margaret Louise said, her normally boisterous voice more than a little subdued. “But I know what answer I don’t want.”

Leona shrugged. “None of us want that answer, Margaret Louise. But there’s something to be said for being realistic as well.”

Ignoring the last comment, Tori took the helm of the conversation once again, her mind willing her heart to blot out Leona’s words. “While it’s true Gabe Jameson may need protection as much as Colby did, it’s also true that Colby’s article unveiled a truth that Gabe’s own family has kept under wraps for well over a century.”

“Ahhh,” Leona said knowingly. “I get it now. As angry as most people are at Colby right now, Gabe has reason to be even angrier.”

Tori nodded. “Absolutely. Because when talk of the article dies out, people won’t remember who let the cat out of the bag any longer. They’ll—”

“Remember whose cat it was,” Margaret Louise finished in triumph. Pointing toward the building just beyond Gabe’s home, she narrowed her eyes. “Should we split up? Maybe you and Leona go to the house while I check out the barn? You know, take advantage of Gabe bein’ occupied by the two of you?”

Leona crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Do you think we just fell off one of your turnip trucks, Margaret Louise?”

She looked a question at the perfectly coiffed woman. “What are you talking about, Leona?”

The woman rolled her eyes upward and then settled them on the woman in the driver’s seat. “Do you want to tell her or shall I?”

Margaret Louise’s face reddened but she said nothing.

“Tell me what?” Tori demanded.

“Do you know what’s in that barnlike shack, Victoria?” Leona posed.

“Answers, I hope.”

“While that would be splendid, dear, I think there may be another reason my dear sweet sister has so generously offered to enter the danger zone.”

“Why? What’s in there—” She stopped as reality dawned. “That’s where he makes the moonshine, isn’t it?”

“Really?” Margaret Louise asked on the heels of a theatric gasp of surprise. “I had no idea.”

Leona tilted her head a hairbreadth as she studied her sister angelically before grabbing for her antique clutch and snapping it open. Reaching inside she extracted a piece of folded white paper and handed it to Tori.

Wordlessly, Tori unfolded the paper, her gaze falling on a series of colorful doodles that filled the page. Doodles that resembled some sort of step-by-step process alongside a crude drawing of two squares—one big, one little. A smiley face filled the center of the big square. “What is this?” she asked as Margaret Louise tried to grab it from her hand.

“This is the moonshine making process from start to finish.” Leona’s index finger swept across the page as she briefly explained each doodle. “And these squares . . . are those buildings.” The woman extended her hand down the middle of the front seat. “The blue square is Gabe’s house . . . the building you and I are supposed to visit first. And the red square is the barn in the back . . . the one she wants to search on her own.”

Tori pinned Leona’s sister with a look of amusement. “Why’d you draw a yellow smiley face inside the red square, Margaret Louise?”

Ripping the paper from Tori’s hand, Margaret Louise crammed it into the pocket of her polyester sweat suit and pushed her door open, her rounded form rising from the seat. “You can laugh all you want. But when Gabe hands you one of his samples . . . you’ll be beggin’ me for crayons so you can draw a few pictures of your own.”

For someone who’d been chomping at the bit to visit Gabe Jameson, the nervous flutter in her stomach as they approached the door was more than a little surprising.

But now that Tori was actually there, staring at the warped front door that hung precariously from its rusty hinges, all thoughts of securing answers for the Calhoun family had faded into the background. In their place were new thoughts. Unsettling thoughts.

What if the man who resided on the other side of the door really did abduct Colby Calhoun? Would they find Colby safe and sound as Margaret Louise was desperate to believe? Or would they be forced to bare the news she and Leona thought more likely—news that would forever destroy the lives of Debbie and her two children?

And if Gabe Jameson was behind it all, how far would he be willing to go to keep his actions hidden?

Casting a sidelong glance at Leona, Tori felt a surge of guilt wind through her heart. Just because she hadn’t thought things through clearly didn’t mean her friends should suffer. . . .

“Leona, if you don’t want to do this . . . I understand. You could just go find Margaret Louise and wait in the car together.”

Leona stopped, pointed at her dust-covered pumps, and sneered. “Perhaps that would have been an offer better made five minutes ago, dear?”

“I’m sorry, Leona. I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to find Colby and bring him home to Debbie . . . one way or the other.” She looked from Leona, to her own dirty white heels, to Gabe’s shacklike home that brought the notion of fixer-upper to a whole new level.

“That’s changed now?” Leona carefully pulled one foot up and wiggled it back and forth in an effort to dislodge some of the dust. When it failed to achieve the outcome she sought, she set it back down and sighed.

“Huh?” Tori pulled her gaze from the front of Gabe’s home and fixed it on her friend. “What’s changed?”

Looking down at her off-white summer suit, Leona began furiously wiping dirt from the thin fabric, her face contorted in disgust. “You’d think people would be more considerate of others and clean up their homes.”

“We’re outside, Leona.”

The woman stopped wiping at her clothes long enough to look up at the house in front of them. “And you think inside will be any different?”

Tori shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does if you’re no longer interested in finding Colby.”

She turned her head, stared at the woman beside her. “Where on earth would you get the idea I don’t want to find Colby? It’s why we’re here.”

Resting her hands on her hips, Leona peered at Tori over the top of her glasses, her voice resembling that of a preschool teacher who’d hit her patience quota. “You just said I should go sit in the car . . . that you hadn’t been thinking . . . you’d just wanted to bring Colby home one way or the other. Is this ringing any bells, Victoria?”

“I just meant I didn’t want you in harm’s way. That’s all.” She gestured toward the house as a sudden movement behind the front curtain—or was that a bedspread?—caught her attention. “Shhh. Someone’s in there.”

“Well, isn’t that why we’re here?” Leona elbowed her way past Tori and stepped onto the front porch—a slab of wood propped atop a series of bricks that ran the length of the Jameson home.

“Wait, Leona, we need to talk this thr—”

Without waiting for Tori to finish, Leona raised her fisted hand and knocked on the front door, her nose crinkling. “Good heavens, dear, what is that awful odor? It smells like something died right here on this-this front whatever-you-want-to-call-it.”

Grabbing Leona by the wrist, Tori kept the woman from repeating her knock. “Do you really think it smells as if someone—”

“I said some
thing
, not someone.” Leona pulled her arm free of Tori’s grasp and knocked once again. “My money is on Gabe’s supper not Colby Calhoun.”

“Leona!” Tori hissed through clenched teeth.

“It’s what you were thinking, dear.” Leona’s hands dropped to the sides of her skirt, smoothing away wrinkles from the dust-coated material as the door in front of them cracked open.

“Whudev’ you sellin’ lady, I’m not buying nothin’.” A man of about seventy peeked his head between the wall and the door, his bushy gray eyebrows forming a
V
in the center of his forehead. “I gots everythin’ I need.”

Leona stamped her foot on the wood slab, the sound echoing outward as Tori simply stared, her gaze traveling over the man’s head in an effort to see any sign of additional life inside.

Spreading her arms outward like wings, Leona narrowed her eyes at the man. “Is it necessary to be so rude? Do I really look like I’m selling anything?”

The man’s dark brown eyes slowly made their way down Leona’s trim body as a slight smile overtook the scowl that had graced his face just seconds earlier. “I might be inclined to change my mind on not buyin’ nothin’ if I thought you might be for sale, Ms. Elkin.”

Tori’s mouth gaped open as Leona paused momentarily to preen before striking the man over the head with her clutch. “Didn’t your daddy teach you better manners than that, Mr. Jameson?”

“Wooo-eeee, I gots myself a real ’ive fireball on my front porch. I can see why my brother paraded you ’round town when you first came here. You’re feisty and fancy all in one purty package.” Slowly, the man’s hand cracked the door open a bit more as his eyes left Leona and fixed on Tori. “And who might you be?”

“I-I’m Tori Sinclair.” Stepping forward, Tori extended her hand to the man in the doorway, her gaze darting back and forth between him and the ever-widening interior view. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

His mouth widened into a bigger smile, revealing a few missing teeth and an assortment of crooked ones in the process. “Why, Ms. Elkin, have you been tootin’ my horn ’round town again? People gonna talk if ya keep that up . . .”

Leona’s finger shot outward, its tip barely grazing the man’s nose. “There’s nothing to toot, Mr. Jameson. And if there’s talk, it has absolutely nothing to do with me.”

A cloud passed across the man’s face as Leona’s words hit their mark. “Oh there’s talk. Lots of it. Nasty letters, too.”

Tori’s ears hijacked her limited visual inspection. “Nasty letters?”

“Yes, ma’am. But that’s not all—no sirree. There’s been shootin’, too.”

“Someone’s shot at you?” Tori asked as her mind raced to establish some sort of order for the questions begging to be asked. “Who? When? Where?”

“Don’t know who. Though I’ve got me some ideas.” The man’s hand traveled upward to his chin, a day or two worth of stubble covering the sides of his face. “Happened just today. In this very spot. Can still see the marks.”

“Where?” Tori stepped back, her visual inspection taking on a new stretch of territory that included the exterior boards of Gabe Jameson’s home. “I don’t see any holes.”

“They weren’t shootin’ with rifles, ma’am. Near as I can tell it was tomatoes . . . or maybe cherries.” Stepping onto the porch, the man made his way over to a series of red-stained boards to the right of his front window. “Now I’m not the best housekeeper—”

Leona sniffed, her arms delicately crossing in front of her body as her chin jutted in the air, the antique silver jewelry that graced her wrist and fingers glistening in the last of the sun’s rays. “ ‘Not the best’ implies you try, Mr. Jameson.”

“Leona!” Tori reprimanded from the corner of her mouth. “Now is not the time to be petty.”

“Petty, dear?”

Amused, the man waved his hand in the air. “No need to worry none ’bout Ms. Elkin and me. My grandpappy used to say squabblin’ between a man and a woman was a sign.”

“A sign of what?” Leona asked as her hands found her hips.

“Feelins.”

Tori laughed as Leona’s mouth dropped open. “You know something, Mr. Jameson? I think my grandfather used to say the same thing.” Resisting the urge to see her friend’s reaction, Tori took control of the conversation, steering it away from Gabe’s obvious interest in Leona and back toward the task at hand. “Any chance it was simply the work of teenagers bored with summer break?”

“Nope. It’s the work of someone angry ’bout what’s happened. ’Bout the truth comin’ out.” The man leaned against the house as he fixed his gaze on some distant point far beyond where they all stood. “Seems the truth ain’t somethin’ people want to hear when it ain’t as pretty as the lie.”

“You mean the fact that your family’s moonshine burned Sweet Briar to the ground all those years ago instead of Yankees?” Tori asked, the need to peek inside the home all but gone.

“Yes, ma’am. Seems this town can only be proud of fixin’ themselves up if the Yankees were the one to break ’em. Don’t seem to matter none that bein’ burnt to the ground is bein’ burnt to the ground. An’ buildin’ up again is buildin’ up again.”

No matter how you sliced it, the man was right. Then again, she hadn’t been raised in a town that celebrated its rebirth as an annual ritual complete with a festival and parade. If she had, maybe she’d feel differently.