Fate Actually (Moonstone Cove #2) - Elizabeth Hunter Page 0,3
rest of the pinot today or I’m fucked. The temperatures are going to spike tomorrow.”
“Hey.” She tried to use her superpowers for good by putting her hand on Nico’s forearm and giving it a little squeeze. “Relax. I’m sure it’s fixable.”
Nico immediately chilled out. Toni could feel his stress leave him and soak into her. It didn’t do much for the queasy stomach she’d been battling all morning, but there was considerably less tension floating around her.
“Thank you for coming up,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t an emergency.”
“Okay, keys out?” She walked over and stepped up on the running board. As soon as she flipped up the seat, she spotted the problem.
“Okay, well, if you knew a fraction as much about engines as you do about grapevines, you’d be able to figure it out. Someone cut the line on your primary safety switch.”
“The what? Someone messed with a switch?” Nico craned his head. “How do you know?”
She pointed to the cut wires. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious. They put that in there so if the driver falls off, the tractor shuts off. Without a working safety switch there, the engine could be perfect and the tractor still won’t start. I don’t know of any way to bypass it.”
Nico’s face turned red. “Could it be an accident?”
“I mean…” She shrugged. “It looks cut to me. The wires are pretty clean. You’re gonna need to get someone out here to rewire it if Danny can’t do it.” Henry was the winemaker, but Danny Barba was his foreman on the farm and kept all the equipment working. “I’m gonna say at least a couple of hours.”
“Shit!” Nico slammed his hand on the top of the tractor, and Toni heard something fall from the tractor with a thunk.
She hopped down and stared at what had fallen in the dirt. “Oh my God.”
She covered her mouth with the back of her hand. The queasy stomach she’d been battling all morning roared up with a vengeance. Toni ran for the edge of the field and puked into the grass.
“Toni?” Nico ran to her, but she shook her head and waved him back. “What the hell?”
“Finger.” She cleared her throat and tried not to retch again. “Nico, look.”
“What are you…? Oh fuck.”
That was two fucks in one day. Yep, her Aunt Marta was going to be hearing about that one.
But then again, what else were you supposed to say when a bloody human finger fell out of your broken tractor?
Chapter 2
Detective Drew Bisset stood over the lone finger sitting in the dirt, watching with a frown while one of his officers documented the scene with a camera. He was a handsome man with dark brown skin, dark hair and beard, and a medium build, who carried himself with confident ease.
Drew was the head detective at the Moonstone Cove Police Department. He’d moved to town around five years ago, so people still considered him a newcomer, but he was well liked. Toni had met him the year before when her cousin Max had joined the police department, and she had a lot of respect for the man’s straightforward personality.
Toni had gotten to know Drew better when she, Katherine, and Megan were trying to figure out what had caused the near-shooting that triggered their powers. A mystery that involved one student had grown to be a conspiracy that involved students at the university, a hijacked psychological study, a shady professor, and a grad student with secret empathic abilities like Toni’s.
Not that Drew knew about that last part.
He was frowning at the finger. “And you said it fell out of the tractor?”
Toni nodded and avoided looking at the bloody digit. “According to Nico, the tractor was working fine yesterday, no weird sounds or anything, so I flipped up the seat to see if there was something interfering with the safety switch.”
“And the wires were cut?” He scribbled something in a small notebook.
“Yeah. I flipped up the seat and saw the wires there. They didn’t look worn down or anything, like they were rubbing up on anything—nothing like that—the ends were cut clean.”
Drew looked up at the tractor, then back to the finger. “Could someone have been trying to mess with the tractor and gotten their finger cut off? Lost it in the engine or something?”
Toni shook her head. “I guess anything is possible, but you’d have to be pretty inept to lose a finger cutting a couple of wires. They’re not exactly hard to find.”