Shepherd's Crook (13 page)

thirty-seven

The metal handle of
the deadbolt wouldn't budge. As I spun around to face Evan, my right hand slipped into my pocket in search of keys to use as a weapon and my left arm rose to block whatever might be coming. But Evan wasn't looking at me, and as his hand moved past my ear he said, “That damn thing. I thought I had fixed it.”

I sidestepped and nearly tripped over Nell, who jumped out of my way and wagged her tail at me. I looked at Evan's hand. His thin fingers gripped the deadbolt handle and turned it, and he said, “You have to sort of pull and twist to make it work.” He turned toward me, and the muscles of his face shifted as if he'd been shocked. “Janet?”

My voice wouldn't work.

“What's wrong?” A series of emotions danced across his face and his eyes softened. “Oh, jeez. You're frightened.” His hands gripped the back of his head and seemed to pull it toward his chest. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. I … It's been …” He let his hands drop and stood straight, looking into my eyes. “I'm sorry.”

As I watched a muscle in his cheek twitch, I could barely resist the urge to grab his shoulders and shake him. The need to run had been replaced by a need to know what was going on. “Is Summer available? I saw her truck—”

“No.”

I waited, and finally he spoke again.

“I mean, she's not here. She's, uh … she's out.”
Out?
As in “not home,”
or as in “out cold”?
Evan signaled me to follow him to the kitchen.
I hesitated to go deeper into the house, but Nell seemed relaxed, and her master's demeanor was more defeated than threatening, so I followed along.

The kitchen walls were a dingy
pink-yellow
putty color that probably needed painting a decade earlier. A single chipped mug sat next to a tipsy pile of catalogs, mail, and miscellany on a wooden table that might have been called shabby chic in another setting. In the gloom of the curtained kitchen it was just shabby. The soles of my shoes made soft sucking noises with every step.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Sure.” I didn't really want coffee, but my curiosity meter had hit tilt.
Don't get involved,
a little voice screeched at me, but the other one, the
oh, what can it hurt?
one, was louder.

Evan refilled his mug and poured one for me, moving as though he had sandbags strapped to his limbs. Neither of us spoke. He set the mugs on the
beat-up
table, gestured to a chair, sat down across from me, and leaned his crossed forearms on the table. It rocked in response, and I lifted my mug before the contents could add to the pattern of stains on the tabletop. Evan didn't seem to notice.

“Do you think Summer will be back soon?” What I really wanted to ask was where in the world she had gone on a Wednesday morning without either of their trucks. Nell laid her head on my knee and gazed up at me as is to say, “I've been wondering that too.” Evan didn't answer, so I went on. “I mean, it's fine if something came up.”

“If I'd known you had a lesson scheduled, I would have called you,” Evan said. “I, uh … I don't know where she is.”

“No problem. I'll just call later to reschedule.”

Evan stared at me for a moment before he said, “No, I mean I really don't know where she is. I haven't seen her since Monday morning.”

Something tingled in my chest. “Monday?”

He nodded.

“Have you called the police?”

He shook his head and pulled an envelope from under a catalog and laid it in front of me. “I ripped it, you know, opened it, thought, well … I lost the other part, but you can still get the gist of it.” I recognized Summer's neat round letters and began to read.

did some things back in Reno, bad things, me and Ray. They found us, those

uys. I'm sorry they hassled you Ev. Don't worry, I'll be fine.
I'm going
I can

art over. Sell the sheep if you want - Al Russell's number is in my phone. He'll

d sell the shop inventory too. Don't try to find me. Be safe. Forgive me. S.

n't call the police
.

I read it twice. When I looked at Evan, his expression was blank. I picked the envelope up and looked inside, but it was empty. “What's she mean? Was there something in here?”

Evan shook his head, but he didn't meet my eyes. My first thought had been that she left him some money, but that made no sense. I had always gotten the impression that they got by with not much to spare. If there had been a letter inside, she wouldn't have written the note on the outside. Then an image of Ray's body hanging in the storage room intruded, and a cold shriek filled my head. I remembered the look of terror on Summer's face when she saw the two thugs on Sunday, and couldn't help thinking that their appearance and Summer's disappearance were not coincidental. Had they done something to her? Had she done something to herself?

“So she knew Ray before, back in Reno?”

“Seems so.”

Another thought intruded. What if she hadn't been afraid of the two men? What if she thought the thugs had told her husband something that made her afraid of
him
? Something about her and Ray. My
self-defense
instinct reawakened and my thigh muscles tensed.
The husband is always the first suspect when a wife dies or disappears. Leave.

But Evan stopped me.

thirty-eight

I was about to
excuse myself when Evan spoke, and his voice was so placid, I didn't move. “I went to pick up printer cartridges on Monday, and when I got home …” He tilted his head back and seemed to collect himself. “I figured she was in the shop. Around one I made lunch and called her cell, but it was here, on the table.”

“She left her phone?”

He sniffed hard and nodded.

Her phone. Her truck. Her dog.
Who leaves home without at least one of those?

“So I went to get her. She forgets to eat sometimes when she's busy.”

I should be so lucky.
“And she wasn't there?”

“I checked the barn, and then the pastures. She was nowhere.” He touched the envelope with his finger. “This was in the bedroom. I didn't find it until later.” He sniffed. “She's just gone.”

Silence held us still for a moment. When I finally broke the spell, Evan flinched as if I had snuck up on him.

“Evan, I saw you with those two men on Sunday.” When he didn't answer, I pressed on. “I saw the guy poke you in the chest.”

“Just guys I know.”

“Look, if you can't tell me, maybe you need to tell someone else. Maybe you need to talk to the police.”

He shook his head but said nothing.

I set my mug to the side and leaned toward him. “I saw Summer's reaction to those guys.” I was stretching the truth a bit, considering I hadn't noticed Summer watching them until I saw my photos, but the revised version was close enough.

“Summer wasn't there,” Evan said, staring at me.

“No, but she was watching. And then she ran away.”

Evan frowned. “I don't know why she'd do that.”

Yes, he does.
“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I …” He seemed to drift away.

I thought of my little encounter with the men at Dom's Deli and was suddenly angry. “Evan, who are those guys? I need to know, because the skinny one sort of threatened me—”

“What do you mean?” Evan came back to life. “Threatened you how? Why?”

When I retold the story for the second time, it didn't sound quite as scary and I ended by saying, “I guess it wasn't really a threat, but it felt, I don't know, strange.”
Scary.

Evan stared at me for a long moment before he said, “That does sound like a threat. Do you really have photos of them talking to me?”

“Yes.” I told him about the photos of his encounter with the men, and of Summer watching and, apparently, running away from them.

“That can't be right,” Evan said, peering out the window and then grabbing the coffee pot to refill our mugs. “She doesn't know them.”

“Maybe she was looking at something else,” I said, knowing I was right about her reaction to the men. “Evan, you still haven't told me who they are.”

He dropped into his chair with a thud, sighed, cleared his throat, and spoke. “A while back I got into a little trouble. Gambling. Money.” Something like a laugh punctuated the last word, and he went on. “Isn't that rich? I never gambled at all when I lived in Nevada.”

“Wait. You were in Nevada?” Maybe the conversation Giselle overheard wasn't about Ray. What was it she heard Hutchinson say? “He picked the wrong bookie,” if I remembered correctly. We had assumed they were talking about Ray. Had they meant Evan?

Evan's brow crinkled. “Yeah, for a while. I went to Reno with my
brand-new
computer science degree to find work, but without a master's, I ended up waiting tables in a casino restaurant.”

“But you didn't gamble? So where—”

“A client in Cleveland …” He slumped into the back of his chair and sighed long and hard. “I was there setting up a system and one night … I was drinking and trying to be one of the guys, throwing money around at a bar. I ended up at a
back-room
poker game with some guys who were, well, let's just say they weren't computer geeks. Jack Daniels did my thinking for me, and before I knew it I was in deep.”

“How deep?”

“
Forty-six
grand and change.”

“Whoa! And you borrowed money from the wrong people?”

He shook his head. “I signed a note for this place.”

“The farm?”

“And those two guys are here to collect?”

Evan let out something between a snort and a groan, but didn't say anything. I was about to ask how he could sign over the farm without Summer's agreement, both legally and morally, but Evan looked like he might burst into tears. I decided to change directions.

“Did you know Ray in Nevada?”

Evan shook his head. “No. He answered Summer's ad for a
part-time
stock man. Just a coincidence that he's from Nevada.”

Sure it was.
“Small world.” I turned my mug in circles while I thought, and then said, “Isn't Summer also from somewhere out west?”

He nodded. “North of Reno, near Winnemucca. Her family raised sheep.”

“Did you get married in Reno?”

“No, we … I got sick of waiting tables and decided to leave.” His forefinger started tapping the side of his cup and he pursed his lips before speaking again. “We're not actually married. We're planning to … well, we were planning to get married eventually.”

And unless you added her to the title, that's how you signed the farm away all by yourself.
“Then Summer's name isn't Winslow?”

“No. She just thought it would be easier to call herself that.”

That seemed very odd to me, unless Summer was hiding from someone.

“What is her last name?”

“Smith.”

Really?
“Did you really meet in Reno?”

For the first time since I'd arrived, he smiled. “Yeah. Talk about a whirlwind. I was actually waiting for the bus to Salt Lake City and she sat down beside me at a diner, you know, at the counter. She had all that wavy red hair and those green eyes and …” His cheeks reddened and he cleared his throat. “It wasn't just, you know, physical. I mean, she was—is—gorgeous, but that wasn't it. We started talking and hit it off, and when I told her I was leaving town, she said she'd go with me.”

“How romantic.”
How completely crazy!
I got that Evan was ready to move on for a better job, but what about Summer? Now I was sure she had been running from something, or someone.

“Yeah. I thought she was kidding, but an hour later we had cashed in my bus ticket and were roaring east on U.S. 50 in her truck.” The muscles in his face softened, and he went on. “They call it the loneliest road in America, but it sure didn't feel that way.”

“I imagine not,” I said, thinking about the first flush of love. I knew I was lucky to still feel that with Tom after a year together. As I considered the pain Evan must be feeling, I knew it was time to take our conversation down another road, so I said, “And then you came to Indiana?”

“We spent a week camping in Great Basin National Park, and by the end of that, we were in love. I could hardly believe how lucky I was to have a woman like Summer fall for me.”

I could hardly believe it either. In fact, I was pretty sure Summer had seen him coming and had taken full advantage. He was her ticket out of whatever she had fallen into in Reno.

Evan continued the story. “We spent another month taking odd jobs across Utah and Colorado, and then came here.” He looked around the kitchen. “My aunt needed help after her husband died. This was her place, and when she passed away a year later, she left us the farm, an ancient mule, and a dozen barn cats.” He let out a long sigh. “It was a
no-brainer
. I love this place. When I was a kid, we'd come to visit for a few days at a time. Me and my brothers. My aunt had no kids and she liked having us around.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“We had a ball.” Evan chuckled. “And my mom got some rest. Raising five boys couldn't have been a picnic.”

We sat quietly for a few moments, and then I remembered the Purdue diploma that hung in Summer's office. “When did Summer go to Purdue?”

“Oh, that.” A puff of air escaped between Evan's lips. “That was Summer's idea. She thought having a degree would make her more credible, but …”

I waited, but Evan's story had stalled. I said, “She never went to Purdue?”

“She went for a weekend seminar on managing sheep. She got a certificate, and she used that …” He faded away again.

“She faked a diploma.”

Evan nodded. “She learned about sheep and weaving and all that other stuff as a kid, but she felt, I don't know, embarrassed about not having a college degree. Or high school.” He finally looked directly at me, the light in his eyes throwing out a challenge. “She's smart. Really smart. And she reads a lot.”

“You don't have to convince me,” I said, and it was true. I had never thought of Summer as uneducated or uninformed.

“The sheep and wool and all that were her thing, and she's been making money the past couple of years. I get enough freelance gigs with software companies to keep things running. We're doing okay.” He laid his head on his arms and mumbled what sounded like, “At least we were.”