“Of course we do,” Alice, the shorter one, said smugly. “We always hang around the haunts when the boys go in. That’s if we know where they are. Heard the screaming, saw the three of them scatter like cockroaches. We were also there when the cops showed up and found his body.” She eyed me. “But you weren’t.”
“Oh, so are y’all detectives now?”
Ruth rubbed her face. “No, we’re not detectives. We were hiding in the bushes. Saw Sheriff Blount find the body. She questioned Truck and Slick, and also Mrs. Wilkes. They all talked about you, but you were nowhere to be found.”
I crossed my arms. “Are you insinuating I killed Xavier?”
“No,” Alice growled. “Of course not. Why would you have killed him? It was somebody else.”
“Then what are the two of you doing here?”
Ruth and Alice exchanged guilty looks. “Well,” Ruth started, “we wanted to see if Xavier had any equipment we could borrow.”
I quirked a brow. “You mean steal?”
“It’s not stealing if he promised it to us before,” Alice said. “He said if he ever died, we were entitled to take a look at his stuff, go through it and see if there was anything we could use. Well, the guy’s dead, isn’t he? So now we can plunder his riches.”
I snorted. “I don’t know if I’d call it riches. It was mostly EMF-looking equipment.”
Ruth grabbed Alice’s arm. “She’s seen it.You’veseen it. Tell us, what was it like?”
Voices came from the front door.
“It’s the police,” Ruth whispered. “Let’s get out of here.”
“You broke his window,” I said.
Alice hitched a shoulder. “Maybe they won’t notice.”
Before I had time to argue, Ruth grabbed my collar and pulled me. She was awfully strong for being old. Alice yanked the kitchen door. It creaked. I could feel the sound all the way to my bones. There was no way we were going to escape without getting caught.
I shut the door behind us as the front one opened. Ruth and Alice were already sprinting toward the bushes.
Sprinting?
Yes, indeed they were.
I followed them, clueless as to where we were heading. I pushed away poking hedges in time to see Alice and Ruth jump into an all-terrain vehicle.
“Get in,” Ruth said.
It was a two-seater, and Alice and Ruth had already taken up the bench.
“Where?”
Alice thumbed behind her. “The back.”
The back, as she called it, was nothing more than an open utility carrier meant for hauling things like firewood. It was corrugated like the bed of a truck, yet much, much smaller.
“How am I going to fit in there?”
“You’re small.” Ruth started the engine. The motor roared.
“I think I’d rather walk.”
Just then, the sound of voices came from the back of Xavier’s house. My hair stood on end as I realized the cops had just discovered the broken window. Which meant they knew someone had attempted to break in. Which also meant that in about three seconds they would be crashing through the hedges looking for us.
If they found me, someone who had been at the scene of the crime but had conveniently disappeared, stalking about Xavier’s house, odds were I’d find myself being slapped with a murder charge.
