Buzz Off - By Hannah Reed Page 0,4

and I decided to move to Moraine, by selling us the family home for a very low price—making it affordable enough for us to also buy the house next door as well as the market. My dad had died several years ago, dropping at the age of fifty-nine from a massive heart attack, and Mom never got used to living alone. After the house closing, Mom moved in with her mother, my sweet-apple-pie Grams, who was presently looking happy and pretty with a daisy from her garden tucked into her little gray bun.

Unfortunately, all my mother’s genes came from my ornery grandfather’s side, not from my grandmother’s. Mom had a negative outlook on life. Worse, since the house sale, she thought she owned me.

“Are you coming in?” I asked, noticing that they weren’t getting out of the car.

Grams leaned over Mom to join the conversation. “We’re going to the beauty shop over in Stone Bank,” she said. “We only stopped because we saw you outside and wanted to say hi.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking on the job,” Mom said, puckering her lips in disapproval. “You aren’t serving alcohol inside the store, are you?”

“When’s your appointment?” I said to Grams, who caught my hint.

“We have to go, Helen,” she said to my mom. “Or we’ll be late.”

My mother hated being late for anything. “Fine,” Mom said.

Grams pulled out at a snail’s pace and disappeared from sight.

I stood on the curb, considering the virtues of a hot cup of coffee.

While I went over my limited beverage options—coffee from Koon’s Custard Shop or more champagne, which would have been the absolute wrong decision—Hunter Wallace, my first high school flame, pulled up at the curb in a Waukesha sheriff’s SUV and decided for me.

I’d get neither.

As Hunter rounded the SUV, his body language screamed official business. He’s a member of the Critical Incident Team, aka C.I.T., which comprises law enforcement officials from the surrounding towns and villages. They respond to anything considered high risk. The C.I.T. would swing into action, for example, if we had a hostage situation or a gunman entrenched on a rooftop. Not that we get much of that kind of crime. C.I.T. also handles potentially risky situations like search warrants and arrests, but again, not much of that action around here.

Although last year, when Stanley Peck had summer workers staying at his farmhouse, C.I.T. had to break up a drunken shooting incident that left poor Stanley with a hole in his foot.

Stanley, all sixty-plus years of him, still owned one of Wisconsin’s disappearing farms, although he leased out most of his acreage to other farmers. His wife, Carol, had died that year. I thought about how lonely he must’ve been without her, and how that emptiness might have been the reason he invited temporary summer workers to stay with him in the first place. Rumor has it Stanley did the shooting himself and blamed it on his houseguests, but since he has deep-rooted family ties and is as local as you can get, the town sided with him and sent the so-called rabble-rousers packing.

Stanley still had a slight limp.

Because Hunter looked so businesslike, my eyes swept up to The Wild Clover’s bell tower. I didn’t see any gun-men up there. Stanley Peck was inside the store, but last I looked, he hadn’t been toting any dangerous weapons—visible ones, at least.

“Hey, Hunter,” I greeted him, taking in his tight jeans and untucked, button-down blue shirt with rolled sleeves. The shirt matched the blue of his eyes.

Hunter lived about ten miles north of Moraine and worked in the City of Waukesha, which was twenty-five miles southeast of my town. Our paths hadn’t crossed on a daily or even weekly basis in the two years I’d been back in Moraine. We didn’t see much of each other in the fourteen years that I had lived in Milwaukee, either (between the time I went to college there and when I came back, with a lot of baggage in the form of Clay Lane). Still, Hunter was usually happy to see me when we came face-to-face here and there. But today he wasn’t in a joking, flirtatious mood.

“Story, I need your help,” he said. “Right now.”

“Sure.”

“I see Grace Chapman’s car. Is she inside?” He motioned to the market.

I nodded, sensing this wasn’t the best time to invite him in to toast my newly single status. “What’s up?”

“I have bad news. Stay put. I’ll be right back.”

With that he yanked open the door and disappeared inside.

What could