buried her face in her hands, and Jake sat next to her in the chair. She gasped, pulling her hands away from her face. “Sheriff, my sister didn’t kill anyone. I’d swear it on the biggest stack of Bibles Pecan Creek has.”
“Of course Lucy didn’t kill anyone,” Jake said, surprised but seeing the logical conclusion Sugar had reached. “She was out with us all evening, and she was with you and Maggie all day getting her cancer check-up in the big city.”
Sugar raised her head. “That’s right. We weren’t here for most of the day. We left early this morning. And Lucy didn’t spend the night here last night.”
“No one murdered him,” Sheriff Goody said. “He looks like he popped one, if I had to guess. We’ll see what the ME has to say.” He wandered off, making some more calls.
The ambulance pulled up, its red lights flashing in the dark. “Sugar, Lucy wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Jake said. “She literally doesn’t have a bit of mean in her.”
Sugar looked at him. “How do you know?”
He knew about the dishonorable discharge that involved an officer—and that could only mean Lucy’d probably turned down an asshole but didn’t kill him—and he knew Sugar had a bit of a temper on her due to the story the ex had inappropriately shared. He looked at the woman he loved. “Your sister’s still a child at heart. It’s why she and Bobby make such a great couple. He needs all that innocence in his life.”
“Lucy?” Sugar blinked at him, her eyes rimmed with tears.
“Well, yeah. Sugar, she’s still your little sister. She’s always going to be that. She’s happy being the baby. She acts tough. She even fooled me in the beginning. But trust me, Lucy is a candle of innocence in a dark world.”
“Oh my God,” Sugar said, her voice awed, “J.T. Jake Bentley, you may have just gotten crossed off my list of rat bastards. Maybe.”
“Leave me on a little while longer. If I’d known all I had to do was say nice things about your family to win you over, I’d have been under your window with a guitar, singing odes to Cassavechia women.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sugar said. “You might be more of a hero than you realize.”
Not really. But as long as she thought so, Jake was willing to bask in the glow of hero worship—at least for a little while.
The ambulance took the dead man away about an hour later. Lucy and Bobby had arrived, and so had Maggie and Lassiter, and no one spoke in the darkness. They sat around on the porch glumly, not sure if they should be sad for the dead man, or worried about why a dead man had showed up in their house.
“It’s gross,” Lucy said. “Why’d he pick my bed?”
Bobby rubbed her shoulders. “Probably because it was just right,” he said, but the joke kind of fell flat. It didn’t seem to matter; her sister snuggled up on Bobby’s chest anyway, fairly repulsed by the turn of events.
“Why’d he pick our house?” Maggie wondered. “Paris, did you even bark at him?”
Paris waved her golden plume and smiled her enthusiastic, welcoming smile. If anything, Paris would have let the stranger in, if she’d had opposable thumbs with which to open a door, Sugar thought. “Paris isn’t a guard dog. She’s just a companion.” She hugged the golden retriever’s neck, burying her face in the fur for comfort.
“We’ll know what happened soon enough, I hope.” Jake settled on the porch next to Sugar. She put her knee next to his, enjoying the warmth.
Sheriff Goody joined them on the porch. “Well, I think I have a general preliminary idea of what brought our visitor to Pecan Creek.” He held up a piece of paper. “This was in his pocket. It’s a Google map of this house and some notes on the side that reference something on the Internet called Nuts, Grunts and a Mutt—A Hot Home Business Gets A Sexy Start.”
“Uh-oh,” Lucy said.
They all looked at her. “That’s my blog,” Lucy confessed.
“What?” Sugar stared at her sister. “Why do you have a blog?”
Lucy looked embarrassed. “You remember when we decided to do the whole diary thing?”
Sugar and Maggie looked at her.
“Diary, not blog,” Sugar said. “Go on.”
“Well,” Lucy said, “it was boring writing in a journal.”
Sugar looked at her sister. “A blog was better?”
“Well, I could sex up a blog, so to speak,” Lucy said. “It kind of grew faster than I thought it would.