Page 63 of Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

She smiled, but it looked forced. For all her bluster about besting our grandmother, I knew deep down that Dixie wished the woman would just love and accept her. I’d hoped for the same thing for over a decade when I’d been banished. But our grandmother was set in her ways and not likely to change now. Maybe moving out from under her roof would help improve all of our relationships.

“Have you considered what you’ll do with the house when you move in with Luke?” she asked.

I blinked in surprise. “Who said I was movin’ in with Luke?”

“I know he keeps askin’, which means it’s just a matter of time before you do.”

I leaned against the windows overlooking the fields and sighed. “Just because Luke Montgomery wants something, doesn’t mean he’s going to get it.”

But I had to admit that his pressure to get me to bend to his will wasn’t sitting right with me. Sure, a successful relationship was all about agreeable compromise, and I also conceded that Luke had made quite a few compromises to be with me, most notably dealing with my notoriety, but I’d sold part of my soul to save this land by agreeing to filmDarling Investigations, and I wasn’t about to just walk away from it.

I had no idea who would win this particular battle. Or if there would actually be a winner. But now wasn’t the time to think about it. We had a case to investigate.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Summer

We left the farm and headed back out to the Brewer property, taking a survey of the property that Dixie had pulled up. We arrived around eleven o’clock and walked around for an hour, not finding anything useful. And as predicted, despite the fact that it was fall—and supposedly cooler—we were hot and sweaty. But this was southern Alabama, which meant it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see temperatures over eighty degrees in October. I was just about to call the search off when something caught my eye.

I pointed to a bundle of cut flowers lying on the ground just inside the edge of a small grove of trees. “What’s that?”

Only a few feet in front of me, Dixie turned around and gasped. “Someone’s been out here.”

“And pretty recently,” I said, bending over to pick them up. “Look how fresh those flowers are.” I knew by touching them that I could be destroying evidence, but I was realistic enough to know that no one was going to be searching them for fingerprints.

After giving the bouquet a thorough once-over, I glanced up, then noticed a path through the grove. “Let’s check that out.”

Dixie trailed after me as I headed down the path. We only had to walk a few feet before we found a stream of water that had carved a deep rut through the trees. The path continued on the other side.

“It’s heading east,” Dixie said, “toward Rachel’s property.”

“She doesn’t own the land adjacent to the Brewer property anymore,” I said, “which means she’s cut through somebody else’s land to get here.”

“If she’s the one who left the flowers,” Dixie said. “It could be somebody else.”

“True,” I said, looking the flowers over—a mix of daisies and roses that appeared to have been cut from a bush. The bouquet was wrapped with a piece of twine, the ends of which were tied in a bow.

“A woman did that,” Dixie said. “No man’s gonna take the time to tie up some flowers that nicely.”

I cast a glance over my shoulder to her. “Do you think these were left for Bethany?”

“Maybe,” Dixie said, “but why wouldn’t they leave them over by the stock pond?”

That was a question neither of us had an answer to. We both spent several minutes examining the ground, trying to find some sort of clue as to why the flowers had been left. The bundle had been in a small circle of smashed-down grass surrounded by overgrown weeds, all about ten feet from the creek. I had no idea why it had been left in this location, but I’d bet money that Rachel was the one who’d put them there.

Dixie walked over to the creek. “We’re already out here. I say we follow the trail and see where it takes us.”

I hesitated but only for moment. We would likely be trespassing on somebody else’s land, but if we got caught, I figured we could just tell them what we were up to, or at least some version of it. We spent the next ten minutes following thetrail, climbing a couple of fences, and walking through weeds. Neither one of us was surprised when the path ended in a copse of trees with Rachel’s house several hundred feet to our right.

“Okay,” Dixie said, wiping the sweat off her brow. “We know that Rachel’s the likely source of the flowers. Now what do we do about it?”

“I say we stick to the original plan,” I said. “We get cleaned up at Luke’s place, then concentrate on finding out Tim’s last name and figure out if we can talk to him.”

“We should call Linda,” she said, holding up her phone. “She texted me about ten minutes ago, saying she got my number from a mutual friend and feel free to call or text if I had any more questions.”

I frowned. “A mutual friend? That sounds shady. I hope it wasn’t Maybelline.”

“Nothing to be done about it now.”

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