Page 19 of Eye on the Ball

“Are you sure he wasn’t there?”

She nodded, hunching into a ball of misery in her seat. “Yeah. I pounded on the door, and when he wouldn’t answer, I went inside.”

“The door was unlocked?” Everybody in Dead End left their doors unlocked, for the most part. It used to drive me nuts.

“What?” She blinked at me. “No, it was locked. I used my key.”

I resisted the urge to smack myself in the forehead. Worse and worse and worse.

“You used your key. And inside, you found?”

“It looked like somebody had sacked the place. Or there had been a big fight. Furniture was knocked over, and stuff was broken and all over the place. I mean, you’d be surprised to learn that Ace is actually pretty neat in his housekeeping. He?—”

“Brenda! I don’t want to hear about Ace’s housekeeping skills. What else did you see? Where did the blood come in?”

“Oh. Right. I’m sorry. I’m so exhausted I’m foggy. There was a smear of blood on the wall between the family room and kitchen, and some on the floor. I may have leaned on the wall with this hand?” She held up the arm in the bloody sleeve again and then dropped it into her lap. “I was worried he might be dead or unconscious in the kitchen or somewhere else in the house. But I searched the whole place, and he wasn’t there.”

“What did the police say?”

“The police?”

“When you called the police to report this, what did they say?” I asked slowly and carefully.

Her eyes widened. “I didn’t call the police. I went home and walked the floor for two hours and then I called you.”

Worst.

Bingo. We’d gone from bad to worse to worst.

“So, what do I do now, Jack?”

I took a deep breath and then slowly blew it out. “Now we call the police.”

8

Tess

Five minutes after I opened the shop, a masked man walked in and tried to rob me.

I knew I should have stayed in bed.

He shoved something approximately gun-barrel shaped in his pocket toward me. “Hand over the goods, and nobody gets hurt.”

Having faced down a lot worse over the past year, I didn’t freak out. Instead, I looked slowly and deliberately around my empty shop. “Nobody? There’s just you and me here. So, do you mean I won’t get hurt? Or that you might hurt yourself?”

“What?” The mask covered the lower part of his face, but his distinctive blue-green eyes narrowed as he tried to puzzle that out. Since I’d known Joe Bob for most of my life, I knew this could take a while, and I didn’t want this … whatever this was … to still be happening when any customers walked in.

I put my hands on my hips. “Joe Bob Turner, what is your mama going to say when I tell her about this at church?”

“I’m not me! I mean, him!”

With two fingers, I pointed at my eyes and then at his. “Should have worn sunglasses, Joe Bob. Your eyes will give you away every time with that gorgeous color.”

He hesitated, but then pulled the mask down. “Aw, Tess. I knew I’d forget something. But you really think my eyes are gorgeous?”

“Really?That’swhat you think is important? Why in the world would you come in here like that? What if Eleanor or, worse, my new employee had been here? You’d have scared Tina to death! And Eleanor probably would have shot you, since Iknowthat’s not a gun in your coat pocket.”

He sheepishly pulled out a Twinkie.