When the Bough Breaks (Rose Gardner Investigations #6) - Denise Grover Swank Page 0,18

but this is an official investigation. I didn’t tell you earlier because Joe trusted me enough to tell me a few things and asked me not to talk about it. I don’t want to screw that up.”

Her lips twisted as she gave it some thought. “Okay.”

My mouth dropped open. “You’re gonna let this go?”

She lifted her shoulder into a half shrug, then said in a flippant tone, “If you can’t tell me, you can’t tell me.”

I didn’t believe that for a minute. But if she was thinking of poking around, she wasn’t alone. I couldn’t walk away from this, not if Ashley and Mikey were really missing. “Let’s look for Mike’s truck, then start askin’ around.”

“About Mike or the dead guy?” she asked.

I grinned. “If we find out more about the dead guy because of our questions, then Joe can hardly object to you knowing. I wouldn’t have told you anything.”

“Good plan.”

“And I really don’t know much anyway.”

“Okay.”

Either her own impending motherhood had mellowed my best friend, or she was up to something. I supposed it didn’t matter since I was up to something too.

She drove to the end of the street—and the construction. We passed the house Mike’s crew was currently working on, with no sign of Mike or his truck, and I wanted to burst into tears. I needed to see those babies with my own eyes to know that they were safe.

As Neely Kate started to turn, she asked, “Did you see Mike’s truck?”

“No,” I said, “but I saw a sign for his construction company in front of one of the houses. Let’s go inside and ask around about Mike and the kids.”

“Do you have a plan?” she asked.

“Do we ever?”

She laughed as she pulled over to an available parking spot on the road in front of the house. “Sometimes we start with a plan, but it usually goes sideways.”

“Then let’s just trust our guts,” I said.

She glanced at my stomach and flashed me a cheesy grin.

I rolled my eyes and groaned. “Come on.”

As soon as my feet touched the ground, I realized I had a problem—the yard was a dirt pile with massive ruts and there wasn’t a driveway. While the exterior of the house was up, and plywood had been attached to the outside walls, there weren’t any windows in the multiple holes cut into the exterior of the house, let alone stairs to the front door.

How the heck was I going to manage that?

“Maybe I should go in and ask the questions,” Neely Kate said.

I started to argue with her, but then my common sense kicked in. “Yeah. I’ll wait out here.”

As Neely Kate picked her way through the minefield of ruts toward the house, I walked into the middle of the road and started to scan the neighborhood. Mike’s house was two houses and one empty lot down from the house with crime scene tape.

Neely Kate walked through the gaping two-car garage into the house, then called out to the guys working inside, “Hey!”

I put a hand on my belly, trying to figure out where to start first and how to go about it. I’d learned from Mike that the world of contractors in Henryetta was pretty small—everyone knew everyone else, which meant there was a good chance the murdered electrician and Mike had known each other, especially given he’d been murdered in a neighborhood where Mike was working. The real question was if the electrician had ties to Skeeter Malcolm. I’d have to be more careful finding the answer to that question.

A shiny black pickup turned into the neighborhood, driving toward me. I moved to the side of the road as I continued to consider the situation.

The truck pulled over to the side of the road about twenty feet ahead of me, and when the driver’s door opened, a large man wearing jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows got out and started ambling toward me.

“Well, hello, little lady,” he said with a big grin in an accent that sounded like it came from Texas, not Arkansas or Louisiana. “Are you looking for a house for your expanding family?”

It was a legitimate question, and even though he made me cringe, I could work with this. “I’m considering it. I live out in the country, and with the baby comin’, I thought it might be nice to be closer to town.”

He pursed his lips and nodded, as though taking my statement to heart and intending to personally