“Piper okay?” Jonah asked, sounding pissed.
“Fine,” I answered. “She’s…”
“Right here,” Piper said softly. “I could hear what was going on. Everything okay?”
Jonah looked over at Piper, and his second of inattention had us all going down.
All of a sudden, the woman had a knife in her hand, and she was aiming it at Jonah’s throat.
The commotion that she caused had me stepping back wrong and falling unceremoniously over a goddamn birdbath full of disgustingly foul water.
Jonah took a knife to the thigh, falling backward onto his ass.
The woman pulled the knife out of his thigh, and Jonah kicked her at the same time Piper took aim.
That was when Piper put a bullet in the woman’s head.
“Well, shit,” I said, looking at the mess.
“I aimed for her shoulder, but you kicked her and…shit.”
That was when Piper threw up.
***
Jonah
I was tired, my wife was asleep in my lap, and I’d answered this man’s questions so many times that I had no clue if I could hold onto my patience much longer.
“Why was she here?” the detective, his name was Rolf, asked again.
“Jesus Christ, Rolf,” my brother growled. “He’s told you a hundred goddamn times what she was doing. And he’s put it word for word what she said. Swear to Christ. He can’t give you any more than he has.”
Rolf shot my brother a quelling look, but Downy didn’t back down.
“You’ve questioned him so long that his wife’s fallen asleep in his lap.” Downy pointed at Piper. “She was in an accident today. She found out that she’s pregnant, with triplets no less, and then had to deal with shooting that woman. You’ve gotten every piece of information there was to get. How about you do a little research into her…”
“No need,” I heard from behind me as Jack, the man that I’d discussed working on my bike with, strolled into my house like he owned the place. “I went ahead and did some checking on this woman. Glad that you drew it out this long, it gave me some time to pull up everything that I could find.”
I scoffed.
But Downy was right. I was at the end of my patience. I wouldn’t be answering questions for much longer unless they officially put me under arrest.
Jack had impeccable timing.
“Brita Anthony Melbourne,” Jack said as he threw the stack of papers down onto the table separating me and Piper from Rolf.
Rolf picked the papers up, but Jack continued to speak.
“Thirty-two years old. Married Juarez Melbourne five years ago. Divorced after one. Property was sold to Jonah Crew. Melbourne dies of a suspicious heart attack, leaves everything to his final caretaker instead of his ex-wife, who was his only surviving family. Did a search on this property, too. Turns out during the war, there was a suspected train robbery, and all the findings from that robbery were buried near a well where a baby fetus was said to have been killed in.”
Everybody was silent for a few seconds after they digested that news.
“And this is all hearsay?” I found myself asking.
Jack nodded.
“Apparently he shared this information with his ex-wife and the caretaker,” Jack murmured. “That caretaker being my daughter, Catori.”
Jack’s daughter was a home health nurse. She worked in and around town, and I’d met her when I’d brought my bike to Jack. She’d been in her company car and had smiled at Jack like he hung the moon.
Catori walked in seconds later with her hands behind her back, looking like she was scared to death.
Jack put his hand around her and said, “Go ahead and tell them what you told me.”
“When Juarez was dying, he talked about some fortune that his father’s father buried on the property. Juarez told me that he talked frequently with his ex-wife about it, and how she was obsessed with finding it. Though, Juarez was convinced that it was just a tall tale that his father liked to tell people,” Catori explained. “From what he told me, Juarez thought his ex-wife was a bit overly obsessed with finding it. She used to call him every day while I was there and talk to him. I was there for an hour, but in that time, she’d call no less than six times.”
Rolf snorted. “Typical woman.”
Catori’s eyes focused on Rolf.
Rolf stiffened.
“As cool as this story is,” Rolf said then. “That woman still committed murder.”
“I was stabbed in the thigh,” I said, pointing at my throbbing thigh. I’d been and gone from the doctor, and luckily where I was stabbed was mostly just flesh. Though, if she’d aimed upward and inside slightly, she would’ve caught me in the balls and I wouldn’t have been sitting here so patiently. “My wife did what she thought she needed to do. If I hadn’t kicked the woman in reaction to her stabbing me, she would’ve only sustained a flesh wound. My wife is a highly trained individual. She aimed for the woman’s shoulder.”