“Mind?” Finally, a smile teased at her lips. “I’ve been putting this off for months. Couldn’t bring myself to even start. It was so… daunting.”
He found that hard to believe. Alice Sweet wasn’t the kind of woman to shirk hard work.
Bobbing her head, she seemed to be getting over her initial shock. Looking around, she spotted the pitchfork leaning against the wall. “All right. Let’s finish this up. You shovel the soil and I’ll turn it.”
Now this was the Alice Sweet he’d come to know and respect. Ready to roll up her proverbial sleeves and do the hard work. “That won’t be—”
Alice snapped her fingers and snapped erect. “I almost forgot why I came out here. Brooklyn has been trying to reach you.”
Brooklyn. The name sent a jolt through him. The investigator had promised to call with updates on his case, but Clint hadn’t expected to hear anything so soon. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his cell. Two missed calls. Not wasting another minute, he hit return call and listened to it ring.
“I’ll just go back inside.” Alice took a step in retreat and Clint reached out to grab her arm.
Shaking his head, he pulled his hand back, startled by the unexpected jolt that had struck him. “Stay. This is all your doing. Besides, we have no secrets.”
The phone rang twice before Brooklyn picked up. “Clint. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Sorry. Ringer was off.” He was tempted to dry his palms along his jeans, but didn’t want Alice to misinterpret nervous energy for guilt. To ensure she knew he wasn’t hiding anything, he put the phone on speaker.
“Been there, done that. I’m sorry it’s taken this long to get back to you.”
If he considered a week long, Clint wondered how fast did this man usually work?
“We’ve had a bit of a challenge gathering all the right information, but this morning we were able to reach yourneighbor’s wife. We think we have enough pieces of the puzzle to see more clearly.”
Even though Brooklyn couldn’t see, Clint nodded.
“The first thing we were able to discover about your neighbor is that Frank Walker liked to place bets. On anything. The ponies, auto racing, the weather, you name it. The problem, of course, like any addicted gambler, is that he lost—a lot. Dear Frank owed someverynot nice people averywhole lot of money. Did you know his house was in foreclosure?”
His gaze drifted to Alice. “Recently I’d heard it sold in foreclosure, but I didn’t know it back then.”
“Well, he was scraping bottom. His wife had walked out on him by then. She confirmed all of this when we finally tracked her down.”
“Does she know anything more?”
“No, but that was all we needed from her. You and Mrs. Sweet were correct in your suspicions that good old Frank didn’t die from carbon monoxide poisoning. We got our people to take a second look at the autopsy report.”
Clint waited for the other shoe to fall.
“There’s this little thing called blunt force trauma. If the carbon monoxide didn’t do him in, the fractured skull would have.”
When had his life become nothing more than a bad Hollywood movie?
“Here’s where we’ve connected the dots but still need to dot our ‘I’s and cross our ‘T’s. If you keep in mind that your beat up blue pickup was in the driveway when you came home, and shortly thereafter your house is torched. Then remember that your neighbor also drove a similar blue pickup truck, even though not the same make, from a distance, say across the street. If a person is in a hurry, they may not realize the truck was a Ford not a Chevy.”
Clint was doing his best to process all this info as fast as he could, and he wasn’t liking how it was adding up. “Are you trying to say that I was a mistake?”
“I think so. From what we’ve learned from our sources, we’ve more or less pieced it all together. The loan shark wanted to make an example out of your neighbor. Instead, they torched the wrong house.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Almost. Give us a few more days.”
Clint almost choked on his own laughter. He’d waited all these years, would it kill him to wait a few more days?
Chapter Twelve
Not since she was a young bride was Alice this excited about planting a few vegetables in her freshly cleared garden. Once she got over the shock of finding Clint working in what had been a jungle of overgrowth, and put aside the surprise of all Brooklyn had to report, she eagerly worked at his side to finish the prep work.
