There were people all over Mrs. Chen’s property gathering evidence, shooting pictures, and I was glad to see members of her family show up, as well as many friends, who were informed that yes, there had been an issue with the shed behind her home. It was neither a gas line nor ghosts, and the state police were looking at a crime.
Opening the back of the SUV, I put the umbrella in, then darted around to the driver’s side and got in right before the rain started coming down in actual sheets like I’d never encountered in my life. Benji was back in the front seat, and I took the towel he offered me. “Thank you.”
“You’re going to freeze to death,” he prophesized, his gaze heavy on me.
“I—I’ll be fine,” I answered, feeling, for some reason, a bit unnerved. There was something about the weight of his stare, like he was trying to figure me out, that was strange. The color of his eyes, which I had noticed before, wasn’t helping. They were a startling shade of blue. Like blue-blue. Like the color of the sky on a day without clouds. Empirically, they were beautiful, as were the thick black lashes and the equally jet-colored brows. Odd, again, to notice those things in the middle of an investigation, as well as how delicate his features were, the high cheekbones, the sharp angle of his jaw, and the burnished ivory of his skin. His cheeks were flushed from the cold, and when he shivered, I cranked up the heater.
“You won’t be fine,” he promised me, as though he were an authority. “Even men built like you still need to get out of wet clothes.”
“I can wait until I take you all home and get to my hotel.”
He shook his head. “We decided we won’t have you staying at that armpit of a hotel, Shaw. It’s no good there.”
“We?”
“Hi,” the woman who had to be Sian announced from behind me, leaning forward between Benji and I. Delly was squeezed in next to her with her head beside Benji’s headrest. “I’m Sian. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. James.”
“Call me Shaw,” I corrected her, loving the riot of dark, rich auburn hair pulled up into a messy bun and held there by a carved hairpin in the form of a snake.
“Shaw,” she said with a sigh, beaming at me, “this has all been very exciting, but you can’t for a moment think you’ve solved the mystery of who’s been targeting our Benji, can you?”
Her eyes, unlike Benji’s, were not lovely limpid pools of turquoise summer sky, but instead, flashing emerald that reminded me just a bit of my mother’s. It was not a good sign.
“You don’t think the guys in the business of producing meth are the ones who’ve been after all of you?”
She shook her head.
“And why not?” I asked, hearing how belligerent I sounded, almost daring her to dazzle me. “It seems fairly straightforward to me.”
“Let’s start driving in the general direction of my home,” Benji suggested, and reached out and wrapped his hand around my forearm, squeezing for a moment before letting me go.
They all did need to be dropped off before I could check into the hotel. Putting the car in gear, I eased away from the curb and out into the street.
“You see that?” Sian pointed out, I assumed to Delly. “That’s how you do it.”
“Did you note that he checked his rearview mirror, the side mirrors, and turned to look over his shoulder just in case?” Benji quizzed Delly as well.
“Yes, yes,” the young woman groaned. “Holy crap. You get hit one time pulling out into traffic and no one ever lets you live that shit down.”
Traffic? In Rune? Was she kidding? I doubted there had ever even been such a thing in the postage-stamp-sized town. “So tell me why you don’t think the guys cooking meth are the ones after Benji,” I questioned Sian, meeting her gaze briefly in the rearview mirror.
“It should be fairly obvious,” Benji chimed in, hand back on my forearm, this time not moving after the squeeze. I could tell I was cold because I could feel the warmth running from his palm into my skin.
“Enlighten me,” I ordered.
“People call us to check out abandoned garages, workshops, deserted sheds, creepy mother-in-law cottages, all kinds of places because they think, from the level of activity, that they’re haunted,” Sian revealed. “But when we get to these places, anywhere lately, we don’t find anything but blacked-out windows and smells that would singe the inside of your nose.”
“I will confess to thinking it was sulfur the first few times,” Benji apprised me, biting his bottom lip for a moment. “But sometimes when you’re looking for something, you see, or in this case smell, what you want.”