She laughed, the sound was surprisingly husky when she was kind of a tiny thing. “No, but I suppose the questions are a bit of a professional hazard. I’m a writer. Currently working on a story sort of based on Hope Town. Maybe. Brain is constantly in book mode at the moment.”
Royal wasn’t sure what to make of that. Her. This.
Before he could decide, a car pulled up and parked in the little lot behind the building.
“Oh, that’ll be Rosalie,” the woman said.
But Royal would have known the woman even without the name supplied. Vaguely anyway. Rosalie Kirk was a private investigator with Fools Gold Investigations out of Wilde. She harassed the detectives a lot, and occasionally the deputies if she had a case that lined up with police work.
Plus, she was married to Duncan Kirk, former professional baseball player. Pretty well-known around these parts, even if Royal had only been in these parts a few years instead of his whole life like most of them.
Rosalie walked up, carrying a big potted plant. She looked Royal up and down. “You harassing my cousin?”
“Why would I do that?”
“He’s not harassing. He was asking if I needed help,” the woman supplied. She smiled kindly at him. “Thank you. But I bet Rosalie and I can handle it.”
He didn’t point out to either one of them that hehadn’toffered to help. Just nodded and walked away. Maybe he gave the lady a backward glance, just because she was…he didn’t have the right word for it. Something about her was…off-putting, and he didn’t know what. And he was supposed to be looking for things that felt off, wasn’t he?
“I’ll run up and put yourhappy new placeplant inside, then come down and help,” he heard Rosalie tell her.
Happy new place. New shelves. She was moving in. Rosalie’s cousin.
Which was when it clicked—why she looked familiar. The moving truck.
She’d been the brunette in the truck with Copeland Beckett, though out here in the sun her hair edged toward red.
But Royal figured that was all he needed to know about her.
Even if that laugh kept coming back to him throughout the day, a haunting sound he couldn’t quite get rid of.
Chapter Three
Three Weeks Later
Franny felt like she’d settled in quite well. She had a routine—one that got her out of the house most mornings for a walk, a coffee—except on Mondays, and soaking up the whole ambience of the town. Then she’d be home late morning, make some lunch and get to work…or trying to work anyway.
On Mondays, since the town businesses were mostly closed, she went to either the library in Sunrise or Bent to do some research, then swung by Audra’s or Rosalie’s for dinner—or they all met in town and ate out, sometimes with Vi and her kids.
Vi was Audra and Rosalie’s cousin on their dad’s side who lived in Bent with her husband and kids. Her husband who was a detective at Bent County with Copeland.
Those little ties always made Franny smile. Back in Washington, her life had always been so…small. They didn’t have family, and while she’d hadfriends, it wasn’t like her life here.
Which was good. She was feeling really positive about it…or tried to be, since she didn’t have much to show for three weeks of work. She didn’t usually get hung up on research when she was writing, preferring to focus on character and emotional arcs. The mystery when she got toward the end and had to figure out the bad guy, but she’d learned over the years that no book was the same and apparently this one was going to be difficult in the beginning.
That was fine. She had time.
She told herself that while lying in bed one morning, upfartoo early, but her mind turning in circles.
She’d found out so little about Hope Town, aside from its early history as a frontier town. But it’s new history? Basically nothing. And when she asked a few of the residents, she’d been met with a lot of changes in subject.
Maybe that’s all she needed, she told herself as she got out of bed, giving up on sleeping to a normal hour. A mysterious town. She could make up the mystery. She didn’t need to discover Hope Town’s.
“But Iwantto,” she muttered to herself. Which wasn’t a way to get things accomplished, meet her deadlines or make herself happy, but she just felt…stuck in this need to know.
Well, feeling stuck was for people who didn’t have to make a living. Today she was writing that first chapter come hell or high water.
But first she needed coffee and, with any luck, a cinnamon roll the size of her face. She went to the window in her bedroom. It looked out over the parking lot behind the bakery. If Albennie’s or Lia’s cars were there, she’d head downstairs and beg for some before-hours service. If it was empty, she’d have to make do with the healthy food she’d been foolish enough to stock her place with, thinking living above a bakery meant she shouldn’t have snacks on hand.
