Fudge,I heard Avery say in my head.You mean fudge.
“Nope, this is definitely a ‘fuck’ kind of moment,” I muttered to the empty orchard.
I hesitated. I should call Sheriff Crowe, let her know there was a possible murder weapon in the orchard.
Except… as far as I knew, Beck and Noah hadn’t yet been cleared.
It shouldn’t have mattered — it wasn’t my job to protect them from their actions — but that argument didn’t change the fact that my instinct was to protect them both.
When the fuck had that happened?
I hesitated, then used the hem of my T-shirt to test the weight of the statue, being careful not to leave fingerprints.
It was heavy, but I could lift it. Beck and Noah would be able to lift it too.
Avery? Probably not.
Not that I’d ever seriously considered her a suspect. She’d been right: she didn’t have skin in the game of the controversy surrounding the Hearthstone development. She was in such a hurry to sell the house and bakery so she could get back to the city that any property value increase would come too late to do her any good.
I rocked the statue back onto the base and stepped away from it.
Any motive Beck or Noah might have had for killing Harold was a mirror to my own. Noah’s was probably most personal of all — he’d suffered enough change when Big Ag had bought his family’s farm — but none of us wanted to see Blackwell Hollow changed by Hearthstone.
And having Sheriff Crowe’s forensics team descend on the property could be bad for us all.
36
AVERY
The Blackwell HollowLibrary was in the small cluster of administrative buildings in the town square, next to the police department, which was next to the town hall. All three buildings had been constructed out of the same stately brick, although the police and library buildings were one level.
I carried the transparent slides in a manila envelope I’d found in a kind of supply closet in the hall at home (no, not home, I couldn’t think of it that way) and approached the front desk where a woman in her late thirties sat in front of a clunky old-fashioned computer terminal, her dark blonde hair pinned into a neat bun at the back of her head.
A nameplate sat on the desk in front of her: Iris Fenwick.
She looked up as I approached, and a warm smile washed over her face.
“How can I help you?”
“Hi, I was wondering if you have a projector? Not the laptop kind. The kind to read transparent film.”
She frowned. “We don’t have anything on transparent film here, just microfiche.”
“I don’t need the slides. I have something I want to look at. I just don’t have a projector for viewing them.”
“Ah, I see.” She furrowed her brow. “I’ve never had anyone ask, but I think there might be one in the basement?”
“Is it possible I could use it?”
She stood. “It’s not technically for library-card holders, but I won’t tell if you won’t.”
I exhaled my relief. “My lips are sealed.”
I followed her through the small library, past rows of wooden tables where one older man was reading the newspaper and a girl around my age typed on her laptop, an open textbook on the table next to her.
Iris’s long skirt flowed behind her, her oversized cardigan reaching almost to her knees, her sensible shoes silent on the short-pile carpet. A handful of people browsed the stacks and we continued past them to a door near the back of the building.
Iris pulled a set of keys from her sweater pocket and unlocked the door, then reached in to turn on a light.