Page 70 of Blue Moon Mistress

A flicker in my rearview mirror draws my attention back to the wolf in my back seat. “You don’t need to protect me from a little old lady.”

But its gaze is fixed on the front window on the far side of the house, and when I follow it…

The figure in the window is small, dark… barely more than a silhouette on the other side of the gauzy curtains, but the possibility settles in my stomach like a hard, cold stone.

And for the first time in my life, I actually hope someone owns a racist doll. Because if Mrs. Miller also has a warnaway in her house… either she’s lying about the good, upstanding Christian lady she is, or something is terribly wrong.

Either way, I can’t do anything about it right now. Gripping the steering wheel a little harder than I probably should, I turn my car around and head back home.

And I almost make it.

The lights in my rear view mirror shouldn’t have been a surprise, but that didn’t change the fact I flinched at the whoop of the siren.

Behind me, my ghostly protector growls and I pull off on the drive to the enormous expanse of the Sunrise Memorial Gardens.

“We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.”

I don’t see the wolf jump out of the car—it doesn’t work like that—but before I’ve come to a full stop, he’s gone.

When I roll down my window, to wait for my coming interrogation, I see it slip behind the walls set aside for urns and ashes.

This cemetery had only started taking occupants at the beginning of the nineteen hundreds, but the wolf would probably stay away from those graves.

The long dead tended to be grumpier.

Damp brakes squealing, the Sheriff pulls to a stop behind me and I wait for him to get out and bring up whatever complaint he has this time.

He takes long enough to get out of the car that my eyes wander… To the grizzled front end of his car.

There’s a scratch in his bumper that’s a little too deliberate to ignore. I glare at it in my rearview mirror, but between the mud and the reversed image, I can’t make it out before he steps into the line of the reflection and blocks my view.

“Miss Mathis,” he says, sounding a little too pleased. But when I looked up at him, he wears a scowl, glaring at the empty back seat.

“What did you do with the dog?”

“I don’t have a dog.” I drop my head back to the seat and take a deep breath. “If you keep this up, I’m going to have to sue you for harassment.”

“Don’t lie to me. There was a dog in your back seat. A husky or German shepherd or something.”

I look behind me, even though I know my wolfy friend is gone. “Where on Earth would I have hidden a dog that size?”

Mouth screwed in a line, he turns his glare on me. “Pop your trunk.”

“No.” I’m amazed I manage not to laugh at the barked order.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t have to submit to a search and at this point… I don’t actually know what you’re hoping to find.”

What had been confusion morphs into agitation and he glares at me.

“Why did you pull me over?”

He blinks, like he doesn’t understand the question.

“Even if Ihadhad a dog in my back seat—which we can both agree, I don’t—there’s nothing illegal in that. So, please tell me what you pulled me over for.”

“I don’t know why you’re lying to me.”

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