Streak of Lightning
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STREAK OF LIGHTNING
CLARE O'DONOHUE is the author of the Someday Quilts series as well as the Kate Conway Mysteries. She is also a freelance television writer and producer.
Clare O'Donohue
SOMEDAY QUILTS MYSTERIES
The Lover's Knot
A Drunkard's Path
The Double Cross
The Devil's Puzzle
Cath
edral Windows
(A Penguin Special e-Book)
The Double Wedding Ring
KATE CONWAY MYSTERIES
Missing Persons
Life Without Parole
A SOMEDAY QUILTS MYSTERY
A Penguin Special from Plume
Clare O'Donohue
A PLUME BOOK
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013
REGISTERED TRADEMARKâMARCA REGISTRADACopyright © Clare O'Donohue, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
eISBN 978-1-101-61585-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“You think you can hurt me? You can't. I will end your life.” The voice was loud and the threat convincing.
I was outside of Everything Pizza, and safe from the tirade going on inside the restaurant, but even I was a bit intimidated. There was nothing I could do except wait for the situation to calm down. Jesse Dewalt, the chief of police in Archers Rest, was inside, and if anyone could handle the town bully, it was Jesse. Through the screaming, I could hear him quietly mediating the situation.
I did feel bad for him, though. He'd gone in to get us a couple of slices for lunch and found yet another crisis, courtesy of the restaurant's owner, Joe Proctor. Who Joe was screaming at or why I didn't know. But it didn't really matter. Joe had had a problem with nearly everybody in Archers Rest at one time or another. Including me.
A few weeks before, I'd parked my car in front of his store. It was legal street parking, but he still yelled. That was Joe's reaction to every slight, real or imaginedâthe mailman delivering late in the day, kids playing on the sidewalk, or customers who took too long to finish their mealâno one was immune. And for better or worse, the town was so used to him that we barely even noticed anymore.
“Are you doing anything special for New Year's?” Lori Proctor asked me as we heard a loud crash coming from inside the restaurant she owned with her husband. She had met me on the sidewalk and stopped me from going in, so now we were just standing in the cold, acting as if there were nothing odd about it.
“Jesse and I are going to New York City later today, so we'll be there to ring in the New Year,” I said. “What about you?”
From inside the restaurant, I could hear Joe yell, “You are a punk, you hear me? I can take you down anytime I want.”
Lori blushed, but otherwise her face remained calm. Like me, she was doing her best to ignore Joe's latest outburst. Though, unlike me, she had decades of practice. “No, nothing special,” she said through a thin, tired smile. “Joe and I are always so exhausted that we just fall into bed when we get home. I don't think we've been up late since we took over this place.”
Lori was, I guessed, in her mid-fifties. She was quite pretty; her light brown hair had a few streaks of gray and her skin a few lines, but she was a woman who, with a good night's sleep and some peace and quiet, would make heads turn.
“I know where you live, where you work, where you buy your groceries. I know everything about you, and if you mess with me again, you'll regret it.” Joe was sounding a bit tired. His threat had lost its edge. That was a good sign.
After a few minutes, Rich came out of the shop looking shell-shocked. “Hey, Nell,” he said, his eyes downcast. He nodded in Lori's direction without ever looking at her. “Hey, Mrs. Proctor.” He walked forward quickly, heading in the direction of Jitters, the coffee shop where he worked. Rich was just eighteen, slight and sweet, and although he'd had a few minor brushes with the law, he was a good kid. He was also, I assumed, the latest victim of Joe's one-man terror spree.
Jesse walked out of the restaurant holding a small pizza box. “It might have gotten cold,” he said. “It took a little longer than I thought.”
“I'm so sorry, Jesse,” Lori jumped in. “It's just . . . he's worried about the bills, that's all. It's hard to make a living with so few tables, and Joe just gets frustrated. . . .”
“It's fine. It's all over now.”
She nodded and seemed relieved. She smiled at me and started to go inside, but Jesse stopped her. “Lori, I know I sound like a broken record, but you don't have to put up with this. I can help.”
“He's a sweet man. Really, he is,” she said. “He just gets upset too easily. I keep telling him one of these days it's going to kill him, all that anger and stress, but . . .” She shrugged her shoulders.
“It's not him I'm worried about. If you need me, if you need help for any reason . . .”
She patted Jesse's arm and then went inside without another word. I wondered how many times Jesse and Lori had had that conversation.
“Couldn't we do something?” I asked him as we walked back to Someday Quilts. “Couldn't you arrest him?”
“I'd love to, but he hasn't broken the law. When I walked in, he looked like he might lunge at Rich, so I had to hold him back, but I don't know if he would have done anything. As far as I know, Joe's never laid a hand on anyone, including Lori. He screams, he makes threats, but I have no evidence he's ever gone farther than that. He's just a jerk, and unfortunately there's no law against that.”
“Well, there should be. He's a WOMBAT.”
“A what?”
“It's a quilting term,” I explained. “Waste of money, batting, and time. Sometimes when you're making a quilt, something doesn't work. Maybe it's the design, or the fabrics, or you've made some big mistake in the sewing. You can change itâadd things, take things awayâbut the truth is sometimes nothing will help. Rather than put any more time into it, you have to just accept that it's a loss and move on.”
“That's a pretty good description of Joe. Trouble is, I don't think Lori agrees. At least not yet,” Jesse said as we reached the quilt shop where I worked. “So what do quilters do with WOMBATs, anyway?”
I thought about it for a second. There were lots of things quilters did with the quilts we'd given up on. We traded them with friends who saw in them what we no longer did; we turned them into dog beds, donated them, cut them up and repurposed the fabric; or we just threw them in the trash and chalked it up to experience.
“Does it really matter,” I said, “as long as they're gone?”