No White Knight

The way the sunlight falls through the window over the range lights her up and turns her into gold with sparks of blue-eyed mischief.

The way she smiles like it’s a secret when I almost burn myself grabbing at a cast-iron skillet without a pot holder. All because I got too used to fancy stuff with no-heat handles.

I can damn well tell she’s biting back a snarky comment about city boys being useless or something like that.

It’s almost like she enjoys having me here, and that’s got me seeing the world flipped upside down.

Breakfast is quiet. We go over what we remember from last night—what I saw that she couldn’t with those bastards swarming her, what happened before I showed up. We also agree to be careful firing guns in the air. Those bullets could’ve landed anywhere, including punching through the roof of the barn.

Being heroic is always harder than it looks in the movies.

By the time Sheriff Wentworth Langley shows up, I’ve got a pretty clear picture of what happened.

Libby heard noises outside. She found the lights on and Plath missing from her stall because they’d probably let her out just to draw Libby outside and jump her.

Then they all ganged up on her, and she fought good, but with that many on her, she didn’t have a chance. They threw her up against the wall, started threatening her about the ghost town, the “treasure,” the dead man.

That’s the part we’ll leave out for Barney Fife.

We’ll say they didn’t get the chance to talk because I showed up, but we’re assuming it’s something related to the land dispute. Probably thanks to that prick Declan pretending to be a bank employee so he can pull one over on Libby and Sierra both.

Sierra might be in on it, too.

Libby’s gone quiet. I can get not wanting to turn her sister in to the police, no matter what she might’ve done.

That’s the point where I showed up and chased them off, and possibly shot out one of their tires.

That’s the story we tell Langley.

Close enough to the truth without being absolutely true. At least it covers the parts that matter.

He strokes his mustache gravely as he listens to us, writing a few things down in that notepad he always carries around in his breast pocket.

“Sounds like a right mess, Miss Potter,” he says, putting an extra-gravelly oomph in his voice so we know he’s taking this right serious. “Why didn’t you call it in last night?”

“I just…” Libby wraps her arms around herself. “I was dizzy and freaked out. I just wanted to be safe, and I had Holt here.”

That makes something hot course through me, knowing she trusts me to protect her.

We follow Langley as he does a walk-through around the house and the barn, and then the driveway outside. Signs of a scuffle linger everywhere, dirt torn up, tire tracks. Libby said the guys were wearing gloves, so no hope for prints.

There’s a little spatter of blood we hadn’t noticed before, out in the dirt by the barn.

Could be hers, sure. But considering how she smacked those fucks up hard, I hope it belongs to one of her attackers.

It’s a little weird, if I’m telling the truth, to see Langley being a real cop for once and kneeling down to study the bits of blood caked into the dirt.

He uses the edge of a piece of paper to lift them carefully into a small plastic evidence bag without contaminating anything with skin-to-skin contact.

Wonder if he learned that trick on TV.

Sure, I’m being a little unfair.

He’s a good guy. It’s not his fault that all the weirdness that keeps coming to Heart’s Edge is far beyond a small-town sheriff’s skill set.

Maybe I’m still a little sore he locked me up in the drunk tank after people thought I was the idiot setting fires last winter.

Then again, if he’d been a better cop, I wouldn’t have been able to break out in less than half an hour.

He’s taking this seriously, though, and promises he’ll put out an APB for a semi with a blown-out tire, though that lead’s gonna go cold fast.

There’s no way in hell that asshole wouldn’t change his tire ASAP.

Langley promises to keep an eye out for Declan Eckhard, too, and says he’ll run Declan’s plates and see if he can pull up any warrants and past criminal records.

“Since y’all didn’t see any faces and can’t ID vehicles,” he says, adjusting his hat brim, “I can’t keep him long, but I can at least bring him in for questioning.”

“It’s something,” Libby says with a smile. “Thank you, Sheriff. Maybe if we can be there to watch the interrogation, we might catch something he says that’ll incriminate him?”

“Well…” Langley rocks on the heels of his cowboy boots, moving his mouth like he’s chewing on a mouthful of his own mustache. “We don’t have those kind of fancy interrogation rooms here, you know. The ones with the one-sided mirrors, where you can see in? Maybe you can stand in the other room and listen through the door.”