Page 36 of Apple of My Eye
"Hey, Susan. Have a donut. Coffee's on too." I reached for my phone, surprised to see Mr. Holby's face on the screen.
"Hello?"
"Good morning, Tess. I'm calling to say that we're having some logistical problems here. Both of our buses are in the shop unexpectedly, so we're going to be coming through tomorrow instead of today, if that's okay?"
"I hope it's nothing serious?" The GYST tour ran on a shoestring, and I imagined fixing mechanical issues on those buses wasn't cheap.
"Not too serious, luckily. One bus is having routine maintenance, but the other is running choppy, and I'm not going to get out on the road in a faulty bus with a couple dozen senior citizens." He chuckled. "Not that I'm a spring chicken myself."
"You'll never get old, Mr. Holby," I said, smiling. "Take care. We'll see you tomorrow."
I looked up to see Eleanor waving frantically and pointing at herself. "And Eleanor says hi."
"Tell her hello. See you in the morning, kiddo."
We hung up, and I sighed. "Well, you may as well take one of these boxes of donuts back to the office with you, Susan. I won't be needing it. The GYST buses are in the shop, so they're not stopping by until tomorrow."
Susan smiled, but her expression was strained, which told me she had a lot on her mind. "I don't know, Tess. If I take donuts, does that make me a cliché?"
"If you don't take them, Jack will eat them all."
"I'll take them, I'll take them. Being a cliché doesn't scare me."
When the three of us had mugs in hand—coffee for me and Susan and tea for Eleanor—we turned to a more serious subject.
"Have you learned anything? Gotten any fingerprints?" I groaned when I realized what I'd said. Asking about fingerprints from the cut-off finger just sounded awful, for some reason. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"What is going on now?" Eleanor aimed a narrow-eyed stare at both of us. "Fingerprints for what?"
Susan nodded, so I briefly sketched out what had happened.
"That's horrible!" Eleanor put her mug down on the counter with a hand that shook slightly. "Tess, you poor thing. I don't know why these awful things keep happening to you."
The pawnshop door opened again, but this time it was Jack. He nodded to Susan and then grinned at Eleanor and held his hands up.
"Don't shoot!"
She put her hands on her hips. "Jack Shepherd. That wasonetime. And I quit carrying my gun to work."
"That's a relief," I muttered.
Susan just shook her head, wincing.
Jack walked over and hugged her. "Glad to see you again too, ma'am. But am I the awful thing that keeps happening to Tess that you were talking about?"
She blinked. "How—"
"Superior tiger hearing," Susan drawled, rolling her eyes. "Look. I do have some news, and I'm only telling you this now, where Eleanor can hear it—"
"Hey!" Eleanor looked indignant. "What do you mean—"
"You're one of the biggest gossips in town, and we all know it," Susan said, but not unkindly. "Anyway, we had to put out a BOLO—"
"That's Be On the Look Out," I said, secure in the massive knowledge I'd gained from years of dedicated mystery novel reading and true crime show watching.
"Right." Susan took a deep breath and put her coffee mug down. "Tess, the finger belongs to a woman named Ann Feeney who went missing from Jacksonville last week. Any chance you know her?"
All three of us shook our heads.
