Wyatt nodded. “I have added an extra patrol car to watch the area around your house. They’ll drive by with greater frequency, so if anyone is overly interested in your property, they’ll get caught or at least won’t be as easily able to grab you. Seeing a patrol car more frequently is a good deterrent.”
Jake didn’t want to discount Wyatt’s plan, but worried that someone seemed to be after him. He wondered how far this person would go to get him. But he appreciated that the sheriff was taking steps to guard him. He said, “Good. Thanks for stopping by to let me know, Wyatt.”
“Sure thing. And so that you have full disclosure, Beryl Ashcraft is my wife’s cousin.” He grinned.
“Huh. Lots of cousins in Alienn.”
Wyatt said quietly, “Truth.”
“Are you going to give me a speech about decorum or question my intentions regarding your wife’s cousin?” Jake asked.
“Nope. Not my business. But I do like Beryl. And from the sound of it, she likes you, too. I wish only the best for the two of you, whatever happens.”
Jake nodded, then remembered something. “Does Beryl have any brothers?”
Wyatt narrowed his eyes. “She does. Three of them. Why?”
Jake shrugged. “No reason. A customer came in earlier who looked a little bit like her.”
“Okay. Well, good luck.” Wyatt was out the front door before Jake could ask why he needed good luck. He hoped Beryl’s brothers weren’t going to bypass decorum or a request of his intentions and simply beat the snot out of him for daring to date their sister.
Chapter Thirteen
Beryl and Francine moved further into the produce section of the Supernova Supermarket. It smelled fresh and clean, just like it always did. The strawberries were a big problem. The two of them slowly returned to the pyramid of perfect strawberries.
“I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before, but now that I’ve seen them, I can’t un-see the perfection, you know what I mean?” Francine said.
“Yep.” Beryl realized this might be anotherreallylong day. And it had started out so joyful. “I cannot even make up a story for how these particular strawberries ended up here.”
Francine snapped her fingers. “Wait a minute. I was just coming in when they were delivered this morning.”
“You were? Who delivered them?” Beryl asked.
She paused, as if thinking through something troubling. “Actually, I didn’t put it together before now,” Francine said. “The truck that delivered the strawberries was one of the Alienn Mining Co. bauxite trucks.”
“The mine?! Why? We don’t get produce from the mine.”
Francine shrugged. “I’m sorry. I guess I wasn’t fully awake when I saw it. I didn’t sign for them, one of Lex’s early morning workers did. I just saw a sticker with a picture of a strawberry on the side of one of the boxes that came out of that truck.”
Lex Stanley was the Supernova Supermarket’s warehouse manager.
“It’s okay, Francine. You don’t have to say sorry. It’s not your fault.” Beryl forced herself to calm down and looked around to ensure no one could overhear them.
Beryl took a deep breath. “Let’s pull these and take them back to the stockroom. We need to sequester all the boxes and check inventory to make sure none of these pints of strawberries got sold to the general human population.”
Francine nodded. “I’m hopeful because the one container we found by the checkout was in the return basket, probably because it wouldn’t ring up correctly.”
“Fingers crossed, but I will need a full accounting to ensure none of these are out and about in Alienn’s human world being consumed. Especially since we don’t know where they came from, not exactly anyway.”
Francine grabbed an abandoned grocery cart from nearby and together they stacked all the pints of strawberries in it, quickly pushing them back to the stockroom. There were twenty-two pints from the pyramid and one from the return basket, which equaled twenty-three pints. That odd number did not reassure Beryl that there wasn’t at least one carton of perfect strawberries out and about somewhere in town. But if they had not been rung up at a cash register, that led to a thought that perhaps one box had been stolen.
“When was the last time a crate contained an odd number?” Beryl said, knowing she sounded resigned to the fact she was going to have to play mystery sleuth searching out where the twenty-fourth box of strawberries had gotten to today.
A chore she did not relish.
Francine didn’t answer right away, but her expression was filled with concern when she said, “Uhm, that would be never. Here’s hoping that perhaps one of the pints ofstrawberries never made it out of the stockroom. Maybe it was damaged.”
“Yep. I’m simply hoping it wasn’t stolen and taken out of the Supernova Supermarket to parts unknown.”
