Apple of My Eye (Tiger's Eye Mystery #7) - Alyssa Day Page 0,34

be needing it. The GYST buses are in the shop, so they're not stopping by until tomorrow."

Susan smiled, but her expression was strained, which told me she had a lot on her mind. "I don't know, Tess. If I take donuts, does that make me a cliché?"

"If you don't take them, Jack will eat them all."

"I'll take them, I'll take them. Being a cliché doesn't scare me."

When the three of us had mugs in hand—coffee for me and Susan and tea for Eleanor—we turned to a more serious subject.

"Have you learned anything? Gotten any fingerprints?" I groaned when I realized what I'd said. Asking about fingerprints from the cut-off finger just sounded awful, for some reason. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"

"What is going on now?" Eleanor aimed a narrow-eyed stare at both of us. "Fingerprints for what?"

Susan nodded, so I briefly sketched out what had happened.

"That's horrible!" Eleanor put her mug down on the counter with a hand that shook slightly. "Tess, you poor thing. I don't know why these awful things keep happening to you."

The pawnshop door opened again, but this time it was Jack. He nodded to Susan and then grinned at Eleanor and held his hands up.

"Don't shoot!"

She put her hands on her hips. "Jack Shepherd. That was one time. And I quit carrying my gun to work."

"That's a relief," I muttered.

Susan just shook her head, wincing.

Jack walked over and hugged her. "Glad to see you again too, ma'am. But am I the awful thing that keeps happening to Tess that you were talking about?"

She blinked. "How—"

"Superior tiger hearing," Susan drawled, rolling her eyes. "Look. I do have some news, and I'm only telling you this now, where Eleanor can hear it—"

"Hey!" Eleanor looked indignant. "What do you mean—"

"You're one of the biggest gossips in town, and we all know it," Susan said, but not unkindly. "Anyway, we had to put out a BOLO—"

"That's Be On the Look Out," I said, secure in the massive knowledge I'd gained from years of dedicated mystery novel reading and true crime show watching.

"Right." Susan took a deep breath and put her coffee mug down. "Tess, the finger belongs to a woman named Ann Feeney who went missing from Jacksonville last week. Any chance you know her?"

All three of us shook our heads.

"I can check my records to see if she's ever bought anything here, but you know I'm just now getting computerized, and Jeremiah did a lot of cash business. Is she old? Young?"

"I'll look in the files," Eleanor said, heading for the back room. We had a couple of file cabinets of Jeremiah's old transactions, filed alphabetically, for the most part. Usually by last name, but sometimes by first name or even by object. My former boss, Jack's late uncle, hadn't been a stickler for paperwork—it's hard to top the frustration of spending an hour searching for Jane Smith's pawn records under J, S, and even C for computer and then finally finding it in L for laptop.

"She's twenty-five," Susan said. "I've got a county-wide search going on right now, and I've put out the word statewide plus called the feds. We're going to find her. I just hope it's not too late."

"P-Ops?" Jack pulled out his phone. "Do you want me to call Alejandro and see if he can lend a hand?"

The P-Ops, or Paranormal Operations division, of the FBI had far more resources than we had in Dead End, and one of their special agents was a friend of Jack's and had become a friend to me and my family too, after he'd helped us with Shelley's adoption.

"I already tried," Susan said. "Alejandro is out on another case, but they put me in touch with someone in his office who's going to look into this and give me a call back this afternoon."

I suddenly remembered the expert Susan had told us was coming to town. "What about the magical resonance expert? Can she do something with the finger?"

"She had a family emergency, so we had to reschedule. We boxed the skeleton up and put it in the evidence locker for now."

I made a face. The thought of the skeleton just hanging out in the jail gave me the creeps.

"What can we do, Susan?"

"I was hoping you'd thought of something—anything—that might give us a clue as to who might be fixating attention on you."

I shook my head. "I wish I had. The only thing we came up with is Brigham Hammermill the Fourth, and he died a couple