He laughs once. “What’s her name?”
My pulse spikes, and then I remember he doesn’t know. “Who?” I play dumb—it’s worked for me in the past.
Besides, there is no way in the world I’m going to tell him a thing.
“The girl you’re texting.”
“Sadie,” I lie.
Jimmy’s eyes narrow slightly, but he shrugs, letting it go. “Tell her Uncle Jimmy said hello.”
“I will, when you’re Uncle Jimmy again and not the annoying cop who keeps showing up accusing her family of vandalism and thievery.”
“Fair point. Anyway, if her family would stop being annoying townspeople, I would be able to do actual police work.”
Oh, he left that door wide open for me. “Squirrels causing trouble again? Or maybe it was that they ran out of your favorite coffee at the Loop?”
The Loop is our very inconvenient convenience store. Nothing is ever in stock, and if you do get lucky, you need to check the expiration date. The coffee, if you can call it that, tastes like mud and ash, and the people they hire to work there are either drunk or…stupid.
No one goes there, except for the fact it’s the only store in a twenty-mile radius and sometimes you have no choice. Mostly, Jimmy doesn’t.
“You’re really funny. Keep it up and we’ll take a trip to the station to do a more thorough interrogation.”
He says that as if I’m scared. “By all means, let’s waste your time.”
“Just keep walking.”
As we enter the office, Harper looks up and groans. “You.”
“Hello, Sunshine.”
These two are more like siblings than anything. Although, I think Jimmy had a crush on her a few years ago, and Harper shot him down, hard. Which is comical because anyone brave enough to try to date Harper would need a weapon. Each of my sisters is unhinged, but in the best ways.
Fallon is the youngest and the “oops” baby. My mother was completely shocked when she found out she was pregnant with her. My father trotted around like a peacock, preening about how he stillhad it. I try to erase that period from my memory. However, Fallon perfectly rounds out our family. She’s doing her best as a single mother after losing her fiancé in college. He died suddenly, and she spent two years trying to find her way through the grief. Lord knows I can relate to that.
Veronica is the closest in age to me. She was supposed to be a boy named Ronny, so they improvised and named her Veronica but called her Roni instead. She hates it. I continue to call her that just to piss her off.
Then there’s Harper. Each family has one sibling who doesn’t quite seem to fit. Harper is blond, where we all have brown hair, and I swear that girl spits fire. She’s unapologetic, and I’m actually afraid of her, like everyone else is. She works on the farm, doing the bookkeeping and mainly trying to keep my father out of trouble, which is a full-time job on its own.
Jimmy loves to piss Harper off, though. Since we were kids.
My sister leans back from her computer. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here on an official investigation,” he explains.
I finish the rest of it off since he’s being evasive and I don’t have time to fuck around. “Seems someone did something to the Gatlins again, and we’re the first suspects.”
Jimmy laughs once, correcting the statement. “Onlysuspects.”
“Of course we are, because if we weren’t, Officer Idiot would have to actually do some police work.” She turns to him. “Don’t worry, I know you can do it, Jim.”
“You’re annoying.”
Harper shrugs. “And you’re ugly, but here we are. None of us did anything to them. None of us care about them. None of ustalk about or to them. None of us worry about them. None of us even think about them, right, Tristan?”
“Right.”
Wrong. There’s one Gatlin I’ve been thinking about, talking to, and worrying about, but I’ll cut my tongue out of my mouth before I admit to that.
