He set a steaming mug of coffee in front of her. “Cream or sugar?”
“No, just black, thank you.”
Placing his cup on the table, he started to sit, then paused. “I have some homemade cookies in the jar—oatmeal-raisin, I think. Would you like some?”
“No, thanks. Um, you baked cookies?”
“A friend made them for me.” He settled in the chair opposite her at the small table.
Another friend. Riley O’Neal was one popular guy, she thought, lifting her mug to her lips. “Good coffee,” she said after taking a sip.
“You’re sure you wouldn’t like something to go with it?”
“This is fine. How is your uncle’s friend?”
“I called the hospital just before I left Bud’s house a couple of hours ago. He was doing very well then—shaken up, of course, and sore from quite a few cuts and bruises, but he’ll recover. He’s being kept in for observation—and possibly for his own safety while Dan tries to figure out who tried to fill him full of holes.”
“So it’s true that no one knows who did this or why?”
“That’s what I’ve been told. R.L. denies any knowledge of who it could have been. There were no witnesses to the shooting. Everyone in the houses nearby was asleep.”
“People are scared,” Teresa murmured, remembering the somber conversations in the diner that day. “They say there’s never been anything like this in Edstown.”
“With the exception of the fires Eddie Stamps set, there have been very few serious crimes here,” Riley agreed. “Break-ins, fights, drunk drivers, domestic abuse—we’ve had our share of all those. But drive-by shootings? That’s a new, unwelcome development.”
Teresa gazed into her coffee cup. “I moved here to get my children away from urban violence. I would hate to think it had found us here.”
“I’m not sure there’s any place that’s completely free of crime and violence anymore,” Riley mused. “Edstown’s been slower than some places to come into the twenty-first century, but we’re getting there. Still, I doubt there’s a reason for the locals to start digging trenches or wearing flak jackets. This wasn’t a random shooting or a psycho attacking the first house he passed. This was someone with a grudge against R.L. Someone who knew where he sleeps and targeted his bed.”
“How could someone have an enemy like that without knowing who it is?” Teresa asked in bewilderment. “If someone hates him badly enough to want to kill him, wouldn’t Mr. Hightower know about it?”
“If he knows, he isn’t saying. He told Dan he didn’t have a clue.”
“What about Bud? Do you think he has an idea who shot at his friend?”
“He told me he doesn’t know who it could have been.”
“And did you believe him?”
Riley hesitated for a telling moment before answering. “I don’t know. All I know for sure is that Bud’s having a very hard time dealing with this. He lost one friend this year. He isn’t ready to lose another.”
“One of his friends died?”
Riley nodded. “He died in a fire in January. No one has ever decided for sure if the fire started accidentally or if it was deliberately set. It was a fishing cabin in an isolated location, and it burned completely to the ground before anyone reported seeing smoke. The fire marshal said the exact cause hasn’t been determined.”
Teresa remembered now. “I heard about that one. There was a lot of speculation that the teenager who set all those fires in town might have set that one, too, though he denied it.”
“Yeah. I watched Eddie answer questions about the fires. He confessed to all of them except Truman’s fishing cabin and the insurance office R.L. had owned for more than thirty years.”
“Could you tell whether he was lying?”
Again, a hesitation before Riley’s reply. “I don’t know. But there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him with those two. The prosecutor agreed to drop those charges in return for his confession to the others.”
“You don’t think he set those two,” Teresa reported, studying the look in his eyes.
Riley pushed his hand through his hair again, leaving it tumbled around his face. “I had my doubts,” he admitted. “It seemed too coincidental that the only fires Eddie denied involved two of three longtime buddies. Truman, R.L. and Bud met in junior high school and they’ve been practically inseparable ever since. Through marriages and divorces, diverse careers and the usual temporary falling-outs, they stayed friends. Now Truman’s dead. R.L. watched his business burn and was almost shot in his own bed.”
“And you’re wondering if something’s going to happen to your uncle next,” Teresa finished for him when his voice trailed off.