Death and Relaxation (Ordinary Magic #1)(7)
“You done with the questions, chief?” Chris asked, his voice gone low.
“Margot, have you been here all night?”
“Up there in the taproom for drinks. Down here for dessert.” She giggled. “Wait! My purse is next to the bed. Should I get it? I have a gun.”
“What?” Chris and I said at the same time.
“Glock 19. A girl can’t be too careful.”
Chris’s eyes went a little wide. Then he just grinned again. Apparently he liked a woman who knew how to look after herself.
“Are you licensed to carry?” I asked.
She nodded and gave me what she probably hoped passed for a serious look. “Gun range every month. Safety first. But I’m a little tipsy. Don’t wanna take it out of the holster.”
“Is it loaded?” Chris asked, taking the words out of my mouth.
She chuckled. “Not much use to me if it isn’t.”
“Do you have anything else with you, Margot?” I asked. “Explosives, maybe?” Yeah, I knew she couldn’t have gotten out to Dan’s house and back here in the amount of time it took to set off the explosion, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to see if she had another line of defense in her Louis Vuitton.
“Uh…explosives? No. One gun. That’s it, I swear.” She blinked hard and looked up at Chris, clearly confused.
“She’s joking,” he said.
I wasn’t, but Margot smiled, then laughed, snorting. Okay, maybe she was a little more than tipsy.
Chris grinned down at her, then gave me the side eye. “Anything else?”
I decided to give the poor guy a break. “I’ve seen enough.”
“Good. Because I haven’t. Lock the door on the way out.” Chris slipped past me and flowed down the stairs like a professional trapeze artist.
He jumped the short distance between the last step and the boat, landing with just enough momentum for him to wrap his arms around Margot, lift her off her feet, and carry her off in one smooth motion.
Margot squealed, giggled, and then both of them were gone from view.
I stood there staring into the darkness, listening to the rhythmic lap of waves, and suddenly felt more alone than I had in years.
I dropped the hatch and dusted my hands.
“At least someone’s having a good night.” I left the warehouse the way I’d come in, and locked the door behind me.
Chapter 3
I SAT outside the brewery, finished up my notes about the conversation with Chris and Margot, and debated driving to Ryder’s house. It was almost five o’clock on a Monday morning. He might be up already. Might be at work already. I could wait a bit and meet him at his office.
Or he might be at home sleeping off his night at the bar.
I flipped down my visor and stared at myself in the lighted mirror. Clear blue eyes with tiny flecks of green stared back at me from out of the smudges of too many sleepless nights. There was a little too much shadow under my cheekbones.
“Dad wouldn’t have worried about waking up someone he needed to question. It doesn’t matter that he’s… It doesn’t matter that he’s Ryder. He’s a witness, so he gets treated the same as any other witness.”
Mirror me looked as unconvinced as I felt. So I kept staring at her until she looked like the professional cop she was.
Myra, Jean, and I had been training under our dad since we were eighteen. Which for me meant I’d been at this job in one form or another for eight years. I knew how to interview a witness.
Pep talk over, I was soon parked in front of Ryder’s house, a nice two-story log cabin on the shore of Lake Easy, just east of town.
Ryder had built the house, with its deck overlooking the lake, with his father before he was out of high school. His dad had moved to Florida just after that and given the house to Ryder as a graduation gift. Ryder rented out the prime bit of real estate for the six years he’d been in college, then for the two he’d lived in Chicago, working for an architectural firm.
Ryder had a way with details, taking a big picture and a pile of random pieces and somehow making them all fit together like it was never a puzzle to solve in the first place. That quality and an artistic eye had landed him a job with one of the top architecture firms in Chicago.
He’d come back to Ordinary a year ago with a client list of his own. I knew he had people wanting his work all over the Pacific Northwest, but he seemed to be trying to spend most of his time here, in his hometown, doing work for easily a third of what he could get paid elsewhere.
I didn’t know why.
He’d come back to town with a duffel bag, a career, and even though I had never admitted it to anyone, my heart.
Ryder fit right back in to the small town pace and life, setting up shop out of a building on Main Street next to the town’s quilt shop and dinosaur museum. Not that Ordinary was on the edge of a building boom or likely ever would be. Vacationing gods liked to keep the town from growing too large.
But that meant Ryder was out of town fairly often at other projects in the state. When our local paper had asked him why he hadn’t set up shop in Portland or Seattle, he’d just smiled and said he needed some time away from the big-city rat race and where better to get away from it all than Ordinary?
The neighborhood was quiet at this hour. A few small windows lit up and birdsong began to stir the air. The scent of salt was fresher here, lake air swallowing it down to a sweetness that spoke of forest and shade and deep, clear water.