Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(49)

Her smile had faded the minute he walked out the door to get in his pickup. What remained was the afterimage of his face when she mentioned the rifle.

If he didn’t want her to know he was going to the range on his breaks, why would he leave his rifle in his pickup in plain view?

Then she had a thought that chilled her for a moment. What if Tom was taking someone else to the range? What if there was another woman?

*

CANDY TRIED NOT to let that suspicion eat at her. She didn’t want to taint the wonderful situation she had with Tom. She didn’t want to be the jealous or suspicious lover. Candy couldn’t abide women like that, and she knew Tom felt the same way. His ex, after all, had been one.

So although she was almost entirely able to convince herself that Tom wasn’t straying—why would he when he had her at home?—there was still that jarring moment when he’d revealed something from inside him. She knew Tom had secrets, and he wasn’t a man who liked to share much. His past before he’d divorced and moved to Wyoming was unclear to her. He said he preferred to live in the present.

Which was fine with her, but it didn’t really explain what he’d been doing with his rifle and shooting gear, did it?

Candy knew that often there was one thing that could turn a relationship sour if it wasn’t resolved. From that moment on, everything could go downhill. The assumption was that it would all have to do with lying, but she knew better. That one thing was sometimes too much honesty. That one thing could be when one person in a relationship revealed something very personal that turned the other one off. With Brent, the one thing had been that ridiculous yellow Corvette. With Nicolas, it was when he’d announced he was going bear hunting with his buddies for two weeks without discussing it with her beforehand.

She hoped with Tom that the one thing wasn’t her discovery of his rifle in his pickup truck. She vowed to herself to not let it be. But as she danced through the rooms of the house and into Tom’s book-lined den, she realized she was looking at his possessions with a keener eye than she ever had before, although she didn’t know what she was looking for.

Most of the books on his shelves were dry and uninteresting to her, but they were obviously of professional interest to him. There were lots of college textbooks and very few novels. There was a section on big-game hunting and firearms, but she was used to that.

Candy rarely spent much time in his study. Frankly, neither did Tom. It consisted of floor-to-ceiling books that she’d never seen him read, an overstuffed chair and lamp, and a small antique desk she’d never seen him occupy. There were two stacks of papers on the desk and a legal pad with no writing on the pages. One stack was of opened and unopened bills. The second stack, which was nearly an inch deep, appeared to be of personal checks made out to Tom but not yet cashed. She thumbed through them and was struck by the fact that nearly every one was for five thousand dollars.

The desk had a single drawer in it where he stored an array of pencils and pens. She got the sense from the room that Tom wanted to say he had a study, but he never really used it for anything.

As she strolled by the desk, she reached out and opened the drawer and then quickly closed it again in embarrassment. She looked around the room to see if there were any cameras watching her, but she saw none and she hadn’t noticed any other security cameras on the interior or exterior of the house.

Occasionally, Tom came back to his home for something he’d forgotten during his shift, but when she parted the curtain and looked out the window, she didn’t see his pickup.

She asked herself: So what was she doing? Was she really spying on him as he had accused her of?

Nevertheless, she reopened the drawer and did a quick inventory of the items in it. There were, in fact, only pencils, pens, and paper clips.

Then she thought: Where would a man hide something he didn’t want found?

*

IN THE GARAGE, she looked out the window of the door to once again make sure Tom wasn’t driving up the road to surprise her. The road was clear.

She turned toward Tom’s workbench and tools in the front of the garage. She’d only ventured there once before and that was to borrow a screwdriver to open plastic clamshell packaging containing cosmetics.

Men hid things among their tools, she’d learned from experience. Brent used to hide bags of weed and pornographic DVDs in the bottom of his toolbox. The DVDs were old, from before Brent met Candy, but they must have held sentimental value to him. She didn’t mind that he hid the weed there because if he was ever arrested for possession, she could plausibly deny she knew anything about it. So she’d never said a word about her discovery to him.

Nicolas hid cigarettes in his workbench. He’d made a point to confess to her that he’d once been a two-packs-a-day man but that he’d quit cold turkey back in North Dakota. But she knew he still sneaked cigarettes when he was outside because she could smell smoke on his heavy clothing when he came in.

Like everything else in Tom’s life, his workbench and tools were organized and fastidious. He’d used a black marker to outline the shape of hand tools he hung on the pegboard backstop so they could be returned to their proper place. In his big red rolling toolbox, one drawer was devoted to wrenches, another to screwdrivers, another to dozens of trays of screws, nails, washers, and other things Candy didn’t know the names of.

It was in that catchall drawer, in the back, that she found the cell phone.