Apple of My Eye (Tiger's Eye Mystery #7) - Alyssa Day Page 0,57

he has to say?"

"We?"

Right. I hadn't told her my suspicions. She had enough on her mind.

We didn't have to wait long. We were in a lull between customers at around three, and I was cleaning the glass on the door when he drove up.

"He's here," I called out, but then I gasped.

"What?"

I just looked at her, speechless.

"What? Tess, what?"

"He brought the hussy."

She threw her polishing rag down on the counter. "The nerve of that man."

Turned out that the hussy's name was Winifred, Win for short, and she was not, in fact, a hussy.

She was Bill's niece.

"He spent the weekend in Tampa helping me move, and I decided it would be fun to come back to Dead End for the Swamp Cabbage Festival," she was burbling. "I haven’t been here in so long, and I wanted to meet you, Eleanor. Uncle Bill talks about you all the time."

He was in Tampa all weekend, not putting amputated fingers on my porch Saturday night, in case I'd the least doubt after meeting Win, which I didn't.

Guess it was a good thing Brig was still alive, because we were running short on suspects.

Eleanor was relieved and delighted, so much so that she was glowing. "Oh, Win, it's so nice to meet you. You two will have to come to dinner at my house."

"I know," I said. "Why don't you take the rest of the day off, Eleanor? It's slow here, and you can spend time with Mr. Oliver and Win."

She put up a half-hearted protest, but then thanked me, hugged me, grabbed her purse, and headed out the door with Bill's niece, both of them talking a mile a minute.

Bill hung back for a minute to talk to me.

"Tess, I just wanted to thank you. I don't know what you did, but it made all the difference. Thanks so much."

He held out his hand but then quickly remembered and gave me a rueful smile.

"No worries," I told him. "Have a wonderful time. I'll see you at the festival."

When he reached the door, I had a thought.

"Mr. Oliver? Is there any chance Win would like to dress up as the swamp cabbage for the parade?"

His mouth fell open. "What?"

I sighed. "Never mind."

It was only a little more than twenty-four hours till the parade.

I was running out of time.

16

Friday dawned bright and beautiful, with no rain forecast for the entire weekend. Shelley, who'd spent the evening with me making Autumn Spice Cake and then stayed all night, was up at six a.m. bouncing around.

On my bed.

Lou gave me a "fix this" look, but I just laughed. The first day of Swamp Cabbage Festival was a great day to be nine years old.

"Why don't we get dressed and go have breakfast at Aunt Ruby's?"

"Yes!"

Jack had called around nine p.m. to tell me he was staying over in Orlando to follow up on a lead, but that a couple of the guys I called his swamp commandos would swing by to check on my house and shop periodically.

"I feel like he's escalating and it has something to do with the festival," he'd said. "Maybe I'm wrong, but better safe than sorry."

Thankfully, it had been an uneventful night, and now we were on the way to a wonderful day, other than the obvious swamp cabbage costume issue.

We were almost done with a giant breakfast Aunt Ruby had "just thrown together" when Jack knocked on the kitchen door.

"That boy has an uncanny knack for showing up when there's food on the table," Uncle Mike grumbled.

I laughed. "That boy is thirty-two years old."

"Thirty-three in December," Jack said, walking in. "Can I do anything to help?"

Aunt Ruby fluttered a dish towel at him. "You just sit down, and I'll fry you up some eggs."

"You're really old," Shelley said, her eyes wide. "How old is your tiger?"

Jack put a hand on his heart and winced before he sat down between me and Shelley. "Ouch. I'll have you know thirty-three is not old. And my tiger is the same age as me, because we're the same."

She put her fork down. "How are you the same?"

"We're two sides of the same person." He flicked the end of one of her braids. "You know how Tess is grumpy and kind of funny-looking in the morning when she just wakes up?"

"Hey!" I poked him in the arm with my finger. "How did I get pulled into this?"

"Yep! But she doesn't turn into a cat. Lou is her own person."

"That's right. But you could say that grumpy Tess