Death Threads (24 page)

Margaret Louise jogged her pudgy legs in place, her hands squeezing Tori’s back. “He loved them. Which means I’m going to be on the cover of
Taste of the South
!”

“Do you hear this, Leona? Your sister is going to be famous.” Tori felt Margaret Louise’s grip loosen as they both turned and looked at Leona. “She’s going to be the face of southern sweet potatoes.”

“Sweet Briar’s Sweet Potato Pie,” Margaret Louise corrected with a sparkle in her eye.

“It’s the same thing, right?” Tori gestured toward the living room. “C’mon in, sit down.”

“Actually you’re right in that they’re southern, that was the main requirement Mr. Wilder had. But I took it a step further and made it specific to . . .” The woman’s words petered out as she stopped, midstep, and looked from Leona to the sewing alcove and back again. “Have you been sewing, Twin?”

“Maybe.” Leona’s chin jutted upward as she folded her arms daintily across her white eyelet sweater.

Margaret Louise stepped closer, her index finger pointing down at the floor. “Is that dirt on your white pumps, Leona?”

Leona pulled her feet backward against the armchair. “So what if it is?”

“Did you go out to Gabe’s again?” Margaret Louise accused.

“I most certainly did not.” Leona waved the suggestion aside as if it were utter nonsense. “I went for an early morning walk is all.”

“What was that?”

Leona’s face paled as she shot a look at Tori. “I didn’t hear anything. Did you, dear?”

“I-I . . .”

Margaret Louise set her hands on her hips and looked from one guilty face to the other. “What have you two gone and done?”

Backing up, Tori held her hands out. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Twin?” Margaret Louise narrowed her eyes at her sister only to stop as she scrunched her nose in distaste. “What’s that smell?”

Leona squirmed in her chair.

“Twin?”

“Your bag.”

“My bag?” Margaret Louise repeated.

Leona nodded. “The straw one I borrowed the other night.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed once again. “What did you do to it?”

“I didn’t do anything to it. It’s just that . . . well . . .”

“What?” Margaret Louise demanded.

Leona looked to Tori for help.

Tori shrugged in response.

“Well, it w-was,” Leona stammered. “It was deflowered.”

“Deflowered?” Margaret Louise repeated.

“Yes. Deflowered.”

“I’m not followin’.” Margaret Louise looked at Tori. “What’s she talkin’ ’bout, Victoria?”

“Well, one of Ella May’s bunnies kind of . . .” She stopped and looked at Leona. “Leona?”

Margaret Louise’s sister made a face. “It made a mess in your bag.”

“What kind of a mess?” Margaret Louise’s eyes narrowed to near slits.

Leona shifted in her seat, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap. “I believe you call it a number two whenever you’re talking with Melissa about the children.”

Margaret Louise’s mouth gaped open.

“But we cleaned it out,” Leona insisted.

“We? We?” Tori asked. “I don’t remember you doing anything except planting yourself on that very chair while I cleaned the bag and found a temporary home for the bunny you-you bunny-napped out of Ella May’s yard.”

“You stole a bunny?” Margaret Louise asked.

“I didn’t steal him. He hopped in when I wasn’t looking.” Leona rested her left hand at the base of her neck and fluttered her eyelashes. “You have to believe me.”

“Save the eye flappin’. I’m not one of your male conquests, Twin.”

“Why don’t you tell your sister what you were doing when the bunny hopped into your—I mean, her—purse,” Tori prodded sweetly.

“Do tell, Twin. I can hardly wait to hear this.” Margaret Louise folded her arms across her ample chest.

“I was trying to catch a glimpse of true love.”

Tori snorted. Margaret Louise rolled her eyes.

Leona’s face turned red. “Okay, okay. I just wanted to see him with her. With my own two eyes. It just doesn’t make any sense that someone of William Clayton Wilder’s caliber would fall for someone so—”

“Weird?” Margaret Louise offered.

“Sweet!” Tori corrected.

“I was thinking more along the lines of plain. Simple. Boring.”

Margaret Louise flounced onto the armrest of her sister’s chair. “And? What’d you see?”

Tori felt her jaw slacken. She pointed at Leona, her eyes never leaving Margaret Louise’s face. “You’re going to let her get away with it? You’re not going to lecture her for being nosey?”

“No. I’d rather hear what she found out.” Margaret Louise glanced a grin at her sister. “Because after today, I’m more curious than ever.”

Leona’s eyebrow rose. “Today?”

“Today,” Margaret Louise repeated.

“Why?” Tori asked, unable to resist the curiosity welling up inside her own mind.

“He showed nothin’. No reaction, no recognition, no nothin’.”

“Who are we talking about now?”

Leona waved a dismissive hand in Tori’s direction as she stared at her sister. “You said her name?”

Margaret Louise nodded. “I offered to put the Sweet Potato Pie on the menu for their wedding dinner.”

“And he didn’t say anything?” Tori asked, finally catching up with the conversation.

“Oh he said somethin’.”

“What? What did he say?” Leona grabbed her sister’s knee and squeezed. “What did he say?”

“When he didn’t say anything, I said it again. And that’s when he said it.”

“What?” Tori and Leona asked in harmony.

“Actually, to be technical, he didn’t say it. He asked it.”

“Asked what?” Leona said, her nails digging into Margaret Louise’s skin.

“Who.”

Leona rolled her eyes in exasperation. “William Clayton Wilder, that’s who. So, what did he ask?”

“Who,” Margaret Louise stated. “He asked, who.”

Leona gasped, her hand leaving her sister’s leg in favor of her own mouth.

“He didn’t know who Ella May was?” Tori asked, her thoughts racing to make sense of the verbal Ping-Pong match she’d unwittingly stepped into.

Margaret Louise shrugged, her head shaking as her shoulders rose and fell. “He didn’t have a cotton’-pickin’ clue.”

She methodically worked her way through the stack of books Tucker Wrenwick left behind, her hands instinctively sorting each title into separate piles based on where they were to be shelved around the library. A twice-weekly patron, the elderly man seemed to enjoy history books best—particularly ones packed with photographs.

“Mr. Wrenwick sure does like his books, doesn’t he?” Nina returned from the Civil War section to grab a pile of Vietnam War titles. “Every once in a while I’ll catch him peekin’ his way through the middle pages of a romance novel, but mostly he stays true to his war books.”

Tori nodded, her mind registering Nina’s words on some level. “Uh-huh.”

Pulling the war volumes to her chest, the assistant librarian bobbed her head to the side until Tori engaged eye contact. “Are you okay, Miss Sinclair? You seem mighty distracted this mornin’.”

She stopped sorting, rolled her shoulders backward, and then dropped into the chair Tucker Wrenwick had vacated less than ten minutes earlier. “Yeah, I’m okay, I guess. It’s just”—she traced her index finger down the spine of a stray book—“well, I can’t believe it’s been a week and still no sign of Colby’s body. It must be just horrible for Debbie.”

Nina leaned against the table, her sensibly clad feet extended outward. “I can’t imagine what she’s goin’ through, Miss Sinclair. But at least they’re lookin’ now.”

“Looking?”

“There was a whole pile of ’em walkin’ through the woods on the west side of town on Saturday evenin’ and again most of yesterday. Duwayne said they walked side by side like a human chain.”

Swallowing over the sudden lump in her throat, Tori stared at the petite woman with the dark woven brown hair and the large sympathetic eyes. “Duwayne helped?”

“He sure did, Miss Sinclair. He said pretty much every man in town was there . . . ’cept a few.” Nina set the books on the table beside her hip then wrapped her hands around the edge of the table. “He said some stayed for a short while and some stayed all day. He was pretty much in between.”

She willed herself to focus on Nina’s words as the woman launched into a list of people her husband had mentioned seeing during the search, but it was difficult. Just thinking about groups of men scouring the woods for the body of her friend’s husband was enough to drive her mad. The whole thing—the town’s anger at Colby, the mistreatment of his wife and children, and the violent way in which he’d been removed from his home—was just wrong. And the longer the person responsible was allowed to roam free, the more wrong it became.

“. . . and of course Chief Dallas was runnin’ the show . . .”

There were so many questions roaming through her head at any given minute, yet the answers remained just as elusive as ever.

“. . . and Milo was there. Mr. Johnson, too . . .”

She shook her head against the barrage of questions pestering her thoughts like a swarm of aggravating mosquitoes. “Milo was there?”

Nina nodded. “Duwayne said he was there when he arrived both days and still there when he left.”

She waited for a sense of shock to engulf her, but it didn’t. If anything, shock was the antithesis of what she felt at that moment. Because deep down inside, she knew Milo Wentworth was a good and decent man. A good and decent man who simply had a different way of looking at something. A good and decent man who’d resented being called out for something he hadn’t done . . .

Margaret Louise had been right. Milo had gone out of his way to reach out to Tori at the diner on Saturday morning, his gesture given in the form of an active apology and a commitment to change. She, on the other hand, had brushed him off unfairly.

Pulling her fingers from their incessant tour of Tucker Wrenwick’s final few unshelved books, Tori looked up at Nina, her mouth suddenly dry. “Hey, would you mind if I headed into my office for a few minutes? I really need to make a call . . . I owe someone an apology.”

Nina nodded once again, a shy yet knowing smile starting on the right side of her face and spreading left. “I’ll be fine, Miss Sinclair. Looks like we’ve hit our quiet time of the mornin’.”

“Let me know if that changes, okay?” Tori stood and squeezed her assistant’s shoulder as she headed toward the hallway. “Thank you, Nina.”

When she reached her office, Tori shut the door, the momentary separation from the main room of the library providing the kind of privacy she needed to make her call. Her hands trembled as she slid her cell phone out of her purse and flipped it open. Would he talk to her? Would he hang up as soon as he heard her voice?

The questions were barely completed in her thoughts before their answers came in a moment of absolute certainty.

Milo was different. He was kind. Compassionate. Understanding. And forgiving.

Scrolling through her contact list, Tori found his number and pressed the green button. She pulled the phone to her ear and listened as each subsequent ring went by, unanswered.

Her shoulders sagged as her mind raced ahead to the recorded voice mail message she’d long since memorized . . .

“Hello?”

She remembered the first time she’d heard his message, remembered the way she’d almost called back just to hear it again . . .

“Tori? Are you there?”

Gripping the phone tightly, she cleared her throat, willed her voice to sound calm, steady. “Hi, Milo. How are you?”

“Better now.”

She plopped down onto her desk chair and swiveled it around to face the window that overlooked the library’s grounds. “Now? Have you been sick?”

“No. I just haven’t heard your voice. I missed it. I missed you.”

Blinking against the instant burn in her eyes, Tori nibbled her lower lip for a moment. “I-I . . . oh, Milo, I’m so sorry I got all high-and-mighty the other day. I was wrong to—”

“Hold on a second. You were standing on what was right. I was the one who was being blind and standing on something that really wasn’t important in light of what Debbie was going through,” he said, his voice deep. “I’m not sure what got into me.”

She leaned her head against the seatback and closed her eyes, memories of Jeff juxtaposed against the realities that were Milo Wentworth. “You love Sweet Briar. And you take your job as a teacher very seriously. I can understand why Colby’s article would have upset you.”

“I love people more. Especially you.”

“I was a fool, Tori. Can you forgive me?”