back there for a while.
Long enough that I started to get nervous.
I checked my rearview mirror. The girl could have eaten a seven course meal in the time that Miss Vivee had been gone.
I craned my neck to look down the long drive. No sign of her or that dog.
She said faster than two shakes of a lamb’s tail?
She must’ve been talking about a dead lamb.
With each minute that slowly ticked by, the knot in my stomach cinched tighter and tighter. It was affecting my breathing and I could feel little beads of sweat forming on my forehead.
I gripped the steering wheel and laid my head on it. Maybe I should go and check on her.
How could I be so stupid to let her go in there?
If that FBI guy knew what I was doing with his grandmother . . .
Oh. My. God.
Bay Colquett would make sure that when I finished my federal time for trespassing at Track Rock Gap and lying to a federal officer, I’d do jail time in Yasamee County. I could hear the judge – “Guilty,” he’d say as his gavel struck the top of his bench. “Breaking and entering, trespassing on private property, aiding and abetting . . . Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.”
Crap.
Chapter Seventeen
I just couldn’t wait any longer. I had counted the number of window panes on the front and side of Gemma’s house, the number of yellow roses climbing up the trellis on her front porch, the number of houses from hers to the corner, both ways, and all the ones on the other side of the street. Twice. I calculated how long it would take an average jogger to run from Gemma’s house to Mims Point Park, Maypop B & B, and the Jellybean Café. Then I had made a mental list of all of the four and five-letter words I could make by rearranging the letters in Gemma Burke’s name. I was working on six-letter words – gemmae, that was an easy one – embark, meager, eureka, bummer, rebuke, umbrae, umbrage, rummage . . .
Wait. Those last two are seven letters.
I slammed my palms on the steering wheel.
This is ridiculous.
I pulled on the door handle and jumped out of the car. I broke into a trot when I rounded the front of the car and headed down the driveway. I didn’t get ten feet down it when Miss Vivee and Cat appeared from around back of the house.
She was smiling and waving a paper in the air.
Oh Lord. Now they’re going to add theft to the charges against me.
“What do you have?” my voice a low, raspy whisper.
“What? I can’t hear you,” she said. Then she held up her index finger telling me to wait a minute.
“Yoo-hoo,” She yelled toward the house next to Gemma’s.
“What are you doing?” I was about to freak out. Was she letting the neighbors know we’d just committed a whole slew of felonies?
Up went that finger again.
“Yoo-hoo. MayBelle. You home?” she said in a sweet, sing-songy voice.
By this time she was standing to the side of – MayBelle’s – I guessed, porch, but still in Gemma’s driveway. I jerked my head around to check and make sure The Roommate hadn’t made her way back from the diner. And jerked it back to look at Miss Vivee. She seemed oblivious to the fact we might get caught and was concentrating on getting “MayBelle” out of the house.
I heard a screen door swing open. I just wanted to dive behind the azalea bushes and hide.
What was she doing?
“Well, I say. If it ain’t Vivienne Pennywell,” the rotund woman clad in a flowered peach duster exclaimed as she pushed herself out the door and came to the edge of the porch. “What are you up to?”
Now we had witnesses.
“And who is that you have with you?”
“That’s Cat. My dog.” Cat let out a yelp.
“No I mean the young woman.” She looked down the driveway at me.
“That’s Logan Dickerson. She’s an archaeologist from Ohio,” Miss Vivee said stuffing the paper she’d purloined from the house into her purse. “She’s down here to do some work on Stallings Island.”
They won’t even have to put me in a line up. Miss Vivee just gave that woman all my vital statistics.
“Logan Dickerson, huh?” MayBelle, committing my name to memory, eyed me suspiciously. “That’s a nice jeep she’s got,” she said pointing to my car. “My Jimbo’s got one just like it. Only it’s black.” She looked at me. “White’s a nice color, though.”
May as