A pit opened in my stomach as I followed him to the trailer. He held the door open for me, but I lingered just outside. “Should we be here?” I whispered. “I mean, shouldn’t we have a warrant or something?”
“I’m just in the market for some sod.” He pasted on a wholesome smile and directed me inside.
Bree looked up from her computer. “Hey, Mrs. Donovan! It’s so good to see you. But Steven’s not in.” Her head cocked as if I should have known. “He’s off today.”
“I know. He’s got the kids. They’re probably at the animal shelter looking at puppies.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet.” She clutched her heart. I could practically hear her ovaries exploding. Nick raised an eyebrow. I gave a short nod in answer.
He suppressed a wry grin and introduced himself. “I’m a friend of Ms. Donovan.” He placed a particular emphasis on my honorific, his hand moving to my lower back, a little lower than it had before in the lab. Bree’s eyes followed it, and I could see her tuck that morsel of information away. “I’m looking to dress up my yard, and Finlay tells me you’ve got quite a nice selection of sod.”
“We sure do.” She dragged open a file drawer. “I’d be happy to get you a brochure.”
“Actually, a buddy of mine recommended something called Blue Sheep’s Fescue. Do you carry it here?”
“We do, actually. But we’ve sold through our very first batch of it, so it’s all been spoken for. A developer preordered the entire lot over the summer.”
“So you all haven’t sold any of it anywhere else?” he asked. I stepped on Nick’s toe. Bree might be young, but she wasn’t naive about everything.
“Not yet,” she said. “But we’ll be seeding another lot in the spring. I can get you pricing if you’d like to order some.”
“Thanks, but I think I’d like to take a look at it first, if you wouldn’t mind. You said you have some growing here?” His fingerscurled around my waist. A bead of sweat trailed down my side, and I hoped he couldn’t feel it through my shirt.
“We sure do. I’d be happy to take you out and show you. Let me just put a note on the door in case anyone stops by while we’re gone.” Bree opened her desk drawer and withdrew a pack of heart-shaped sticky notes before Nick stopped her.
“I can’t ask you to do that. You’re the only one here, and I’d hate to pull you away from your desk. If you tell me where it is, I can find it myself.”
Bree seemed relieved. She dug around in her file drawer and fished out a photocopied map of the farm. I gnawed on my thumbnail as she marked the dirt road with a pink highlighter, pointing out the square of land Nick was searching for… the plot directly across the gravel road from Harris Mickler’s body.
“Mrs. Donovan… err…Ms.Donovan knows the way,” Bree said, correcting herself as she handed Nick the map. She turned to me and said, “You’ve driven past it before, Ms. Donovan. It’s the very last field before the rear entrance, across from the big fallow plot. The grass you’re looking for has a blueish tint to it. You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks, Bree. You’ve been very helpful.” Nick took me by the hand and led me to the door. “I’ll be in touch soon.”
His shoes crunched over the parking lot in giant, fervent bites. I cracked the window as soon as we were in the car, sweat building behind my knees and under my arms.
“Your ex is a real piece of work.” He glanced up at his rearview mirror, his eyes narrowing on something behind us. “I’ll probably catch hell for this, and I should probably feel guilty about it, but I don’t.” He leaned across the console, took my face in both hands, and kissed me. It was the kind of quick, hot kiss that would havemade my toes curl if I wasn’t so busy wondering how I would look wearing his handcuffs and a pair of orange coveralls. I shoved him back with a firm hand to his chest.
“What was that for?” I asked, flushed and breathless.
“That was for Bree. Because she’s watching out the window right now. And since Mrs. Haggerty hasn’t seen anything quite so newsworthy, I figured someone should tell Steven we’re involved and back up our story. As far as anyone is concerned, we were here on personal business.” His smile was a little crooked. “Let’s go pick out some sod for my house.”
My chest felt tight as he put the car in gear, the air thin as his sedan bounced down the long dirt road through the fields, kicking up brown clouds of dust. Nick parked before we reached the end, just within sight of the line of cedars surrounding the property line of the farm. Behind them, I could just make out the narrow rural road Vero and I had used to get here the night we’d buried Harris.
Nick turned off the engine. He stared at the stretch of gravel in front of us, then at the fields, thoughtfully tapping the steering wheel.
I didn’t dare look left, into the russet-brown lot of mounded dirt where Harris was decomposing. Instead, I stared into the swaying sea of hairlike blue fescue to my right. Nick didn’t have a shovel, I reminded myself as my palms grew clammy. He wasn’t digging anything up—at least not today. All I had to do was keep cool and determine his next move. Then Vero and I could figure out what to do.
“What do you think Feliks and Theresa were doing out here?” I asked in a shaky voice.
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.” My pulse quickened as Nick got out of the car. He walked along the edge of the field where the fescue met the road, pausing to kneel beside a set of tire tracks that hadcrushed a short path through the grass. The tracks had left deep divots where they’d met the gravel, and a wide swath of grass had been torn from the roots, as if the undercarriage of a car had dragged over it. Feliks’s Lincoln.
Too anxious to sit still, I got out of the car, arms crossed against the biting wind that rolled over the endless acres of sod and billowed the thin fabric of my shirt. I hovered behind Nick as he followed the tread marks into the field. They stopped just a few feet into the grass. “Feliks and Theresa probably entered the farm from the rear entrance,” he said, studying the direction of the tracks. “Looks like they backed into the field, just enough to turn around.”
“So they didn’t stay?” I hoped this meant we didn’t have to stay either. “Maybe Feliks decided he didn’t like this farm any more than he liked the others.”
Nick shook his head, hands on his narrow hips as he turned between the tread marks, thinking. “Why would he look at a piece of land that’s not for sale? And why come through the back unless he didn’t want to be seen doing it?” He paced slowly between the tracks, talking to himself out loud, as if he were trying to see this place through Feliks’s eyes. “If he didn’t want to risk being seen here, he wouldn’t have come during the day. He would have come at night, after the office closed, when the place was dark…”
He stood where the Lincoln would have been, his feet straddling the gash at the edge of the field, his eyes seeming to follow the path of the car’s headlights to the precise spot where we’d dug our hole. My breath caught as he stared at the dirt over Harris’s grave. “Zhirov wants this land for a purpose, and he doesn’t care if it belongs to someone else, as long as no one sees him using it. So what’s he doing with it? And why involve a real estate agent if there’s no sale? Unless…”
