On Fridays I’m sharing a chapter a week from one of my books. The first book is Souls Lost. If you wish to purchase it to read faster, you can find it at your favorite retailer. Find chapter 1 here.
It took Taran nearly fifteen minutes to get to the coffee shop where Ed Hyer had his morning coffee. Saunders Coffee House was an independent shop that had been in Corbin Meadow for twenty years. Taran was old enough to remember it going in just as fancy coffee had become a thing. Everyone was talking about Starbucks, but the company, like so many, didn’t seem to know Corbin Meadow existed. Not, of course, that they were everywhere twenty years ago, but they were in the news.
Rather than lobby the large conglomerate to come to their town, the townsfolk, not being particularly hopeful that such a thing would work, particularly given that it rarely had in the past, Jay Saunders had rented space in one of the buildings on Main, where handcrafted furniture items had once been displayed. He hadn’t taken the whole building, just a portion of it, which had given old man Keller, who owned the place, the idea of sub-dividing the building into several smaller rentals. Now the coffee shop sat next to a printer, which sat next to a toy store, which did surprisingly good business considering the size of the town.
With the rain coming down, Taran could hardly see the signs for the buildings, driving from memory as much as anything, creeping along in case there was another person so foolish as to be on the road in the rain. He hadn’t been welcome at Zoe’s any longer, and although it had thundered ominously when he’d left, she hadn’t suggested he stay a bit longer, maybe have a cup of coffee, until the storm passed.
Instead she’d shut the door before he was barely through it, forcing him to turn up his collar and make a run for the car. Even if he’d remembered an umbrella, it was just windy enough that he doubted he have managed to stay any drier under one than if he ran for it. Fortunately Zoe’s parents hadn’t had one of those homes that was set back too far from the street, merely two and half car lengths, and he’d made that run quickly. He’d been able to slide in without worrying about unlocking the door because the crime rate in Corbin Meadow was all but non-existent.
Except for when women were killed.
Taran had listened to Ed when Frank had interviewed him after Jodie had died. Ed hadn’t had much to add but Taran wanted to come at this differently. Did Jodie have some inkling of what had happened to Bethany Shields? Because it sounded like she had called her daughter to come because of her death. And if she had an inkling, had she said anything to Ed?
It had been two years since she’d died. Taran wasn’t hopeful that Ed would remember, particularly if it had been just a passing comment, but he had to ask.
He was lucky to get a spot, a nice angled parking spot put in perhaps five years ago in anticipation of some growth to the city, cutting the sidewalks in half and narrowing the main road. It put him nearly in front of the coffee shop, which was open, the red letters shining bright through the veil of rain. There were awnings over most of the sidewalk, too, so once he got to the sidewalk, he’d be good. Taran opened the car door, surprised at the drench of water on his leg before it was barely out of the car.
There was a warm, humid smell in the water that he didn’t like. This wasn’t an ordinary fall shower. This was tropical. He had a feeling it was going to last a lot longer than the usual storm bursts did, dropping a half an inch in a few minutes. This would waterlog the streets and the hills. They’d have flash floods down by the creek, which was probably already about to burst its banks, though fortunately the homes nearby were on higher ground. There was one road that would be cut off. Taran would have to get someone out there to put up a few cones and tell people the road was closed or they’d cut through, thinking their trucks were raised high enough to get through the standing water.
He made a run for the awning before switching on the radio that hung on his shoulder and talking to Mattie, telling her what he needed her to have Johnny take care of. Fortunately the call went through despite plenty of static, but Mattie seemed to understand. She lived out that way so he didn’t have to educate her on why he needed someone to go do that.
The coffee shop, which no one called Saunders, it was always just the coffee shop, smelled of coffee beans and wet dog, though there were no dogs in the place. The smell was probably from all the hunting dogs that had left half their fur on the jackets of the old men sitting around the table towards the back by the wood stove. No fancy fireplaces there. The wood stove was real and they stacked real wood nearby so patrons could stoke it up as high as they wanted, which periodically caused some arguments.
Ed Hyer was among those men, and like the others, his face turned towards Taran, a worried frown crossing it, almost as if he knew Taran was there to speak to him. Other than Ed and the four men he always drank coffee with and the girl working the coffee machines, the barista or whatever, there was no one else there. Even the group around Ed looked a bit slim.
“Can I talk to you, Ed? Maybe over here?” Taran asked thinking it would be better if he did the interview in private.
“If you’re asking about Elaine, maybe we can all help,” Derek Price said quietly. There wasn’t a challenge in the voice, though Derek could readily challenge any officer. There was just a certain level of sadness that made Taran wonder if he’d missed a budding romance between the old woodworker and the librarian.
Reed Hudson pulled out a chair and pulled it over near the stove, which wasn’t going, fortunately, considering that it was already stuffy and warm in the place despite the air conditioning that was blowing from overhead. Taran gave in, taking it. He pulled out his notebook, tucked safely inside the plastic bag that he’d gotten from Zoe when he’d attempted to stay a bit longer.
“What’s happening?” Derek asked. “Saw the sheriffs. Heard you were doing the questioning around town.”
“I had to call them in,” Taran said, like an apology, although he wasn’t sure why he was giving one. Taran watched Derek’s hands, the most worn part of him, covered in scars as well as creases. His face was creased almost as much, and those lines seemed to droop down from his cheeks as if the thin bones of his body couldn’t quite hold the extra skin up. Even his navy blue T-shirt and worn blue jeans seemed to droop, an interesting feat considering he was seated.
The men—Derek, Ed, Reed, Simon, and Matt—all nodded at him.
“We were saying it was smart to do that,” Simon spoke finally. He had a thin voice that was hardly more than a whisper, probably due to years of smoking and then treatments for lung cancer. If Derek was droopy, Simon was skeletal, and Taran often worried when he saw him at the grocery that the poor man was going to fall over. Taran didn’t know where there was enough muscle there to hold the bones upright.
“But how can I help?” Ed asked.
“Just wondering if you remembered Jodie saying anything about Bethany before she died. If she had ideas about why Bethany was chosen,” Taran said. He waited while Ed thought.
Ed was the palest of all of the men, although Simon was coming close. At one time Ed had been a redhead, a ginger they would call him now, with freckles all over the place, but age had just made him look faded, though you could always tell when he’d been in the sun because his whole head turned pink.
“Jodie liked Bethany,” Ed said. “Beth. They went to lunch at least once a week, discussing city things. I know she was upset. But she had no idea why Beth was killed.”
Taran nodded. “I was just wondering because I talked to Zoe and she mentioned that when her mom had called her, it was almost like she worried she might be next.”
Ed sighed and leaned back in the chair. He reached for his coffee mug but it was empty, so he just turned it around on its spot on the tiny table that sat between his chair and Matt’s. He had one of the wooden rockers, as did Matt. The others sat in low Adirondack style wood chairs with no cushions. Only Taran had a plain chair, wooden and wide, comfortable for a few minutes but not half the morning.
“Jodie worried about things a lot,” Ed said. “She was super excited because of the Jack Lyle thing which had happened a few weeks before Bethany was killed. She worried about the town and what it was coming to. She thought what had happened to Beth was something big, bigger than we knew and it was bad, but beyond that she couldn’t have said. Before Zoe got here, probably even before Bethany died, Jodie threw herself into contacting a bunch of other high tech companies, asking them what they needed to locate a new office in Corbin Meadow and then meeting with the mayor about how she could make the town more desirable. I think Beth was doing a lot of the research and Jodie was doing the contacting. They made a good team. I know they’d had their heads over a map of the city, looking at new places for re-zoning for another subdivision if they got more companies to relocate.”
“And Amanda,” Ed added, “Amanda had been working with the women, offering advice on what they were going to need to ask for as far as money for a larger police force if all their plans went through. I always heard she’d have taken over for Frank if she’d hadn’t been killed. Had a good head for finances.”
The last wasn’t a diss, Taran knew, only a fact. He could do the work but didn’t take to it like Amanda did. She’d been something else.
The others were shaking their heads in agreement but also in sadness for the loss to the town. The three women who had died, now four, were all important. All good, hardworking women. These were men who believed that they should have protected them better than they had. Taran wondered how many other women they would fail.
Chapter 13 will be coming next Friday. Don’t want to wait? Find the book here.
