Sweet as Honey (Aster Valley 2)

I ignored her even though she was kind of right. He’d made plenty of statements implying I’d be better off at home, without my shop.

Mikey met my eyes. “Did you see Gene Stanner behind the wheel either time?”

I closed my eyes and shook my head. “No. At the shop, I only saw the tail of the truck as it raced off. But I recognized the beige-and-orange truck and the red bumper sticker. And then yesterday, I recognized the truck and bumper sticker again, but the sun was glaring off the windshield.”

“So it might not have been Gene,” Chaya added. “Which gels with what Kimber said at the drunken girls’ night. That Gene hasn’t gotten behind the wheel since losing his license. Wait. Hasn’t that truck been sitting over at the Chop Shop? Beige with an orange stripe down the side? Not a very common combo.”

Pim lowered his voice. “Supposedly Gene wrecked it and got a DUI at the same time. Jim fixed it up, but Gene probably can’t pick it up from the shop without a license, and Kimber doesn’t want it sitting in the driveway anyway. So there it sits with no one driving it.”

Except I remembered Sam joking about Aster Valley being a small enough town to leave the keys in the car at the auto shop.

“You mean where anyone can drive it,” I corrected with a groan. “Jim Browning leaves all the keys in the trucks once the service has been paid for. That means it could have been anyone. We’re back to square one.”

“No,” Chaya insisted. “Barney knew it was Gene’s truck, and he knows you’re scared of Gene for good reason. Let’s talk this through as if it’s Barney. He takes the truck, tries to scare you in December. Accidentally hits Pim and Mikey which does its job of scaring you anyway. You cling on to him—ouch!”

I pulled my hand back from poking her. “I did not cling.”

“You agree to let him coddle you,” she semi-corrected. “And he gets the dating scenario he’d already begun to tell people about. All goes fine for him until Sam arrives. Patrick does his usual shitty harassment on the highway. Sam enters the picture. Barney recognizes him as a threat and decides to scare you back into his own arms again.”

Pim tapped his chin and continued the narrative. “Barney starts the fire. He probably didn’t mean for it to burn the whole building down. Maybe it was meant to be small, but you probably had plenty of flammable items in there.”

I cut in, nodding. “Essential oils, garlic, cinnamon. Heck, even orange peel has limonene which is a known…” I drifted off when I caught myself digressing. “Anyway, yes. It could have easily gotten out of hand.”

Chaya jumped back in. “He was careful to save Aunt Berry’s notebook before setting the place on fire.”

Mikey sighed. “And brought it to you like a damned hero.”

I thought through more of the week’s events. “The fire was started by someone who went in through the front door of the shop. Barney had a key.”

Mikey was getting angry. “And then he had the gall to take Gene’s truck again and run you two off the mountain road? Is he a monster?”

I nodded slowly, putting the pieces together. “Yes. I think he is.”

“Damn. Now I really wish I’d brought this up at the hospital,” Chaya said worriedly. “I just thought it was bad best-friend behavior to yell at you when you were busy tossing your cookies.”

Tossing my… oh god!

I looked over at Mikey. “He poisoned the peanut butter cookies.”

Chaya asked what I meant, so I explained. “Barney brought me some organic, plant-based peanut butter cookies yesterday to prove there was such a thing. I ate several and then vomited.”

Mikey frowned. “But I had one, and Tiller had one, too.”

I shook my head. “I had like four or five, since he kept talking about how much trouble he’d gone to and wondering if I’d really liked them. But if he used the compound I’m thinking of—”

“The America Pennsylvania one!” Chaya said excitedly.

“Myrica pensylvanica,” I corrected, “which he could easily have taken from my shop. It only works to induce vomiting if you take a higher amount of it. That would explain why you could have one or two and not get sick.”

Chaya was pissed. “And that’s when he planted the beads in the saddlebags. I’m going to kill the little toad.”

Mikey nodded enthusiastically, but Pim shook his head. “Children, children. This doesn’t call for some kind of slapdash payback attempt. This calls for a magnificent, well-planned, and expertly executed vengeance extravaganza.”

We all stared at the older man in awe before nodding our allegiance to the master.

Of course, I was the one a little less sure of everything. “But what if he didn’t actually do it?”

Chaya snorted. “Oh, he did it.”