Page 7 of Eagle Eye
I started to shake my head, but stopped, wincing. Bad idea. "Nope. I'll be fine. See you soon."
Logan waved to me, his cocky grin back in place, but now I knew it was a cover for his genuine concern over his sister, so I waved back.
"I'll see you soon, Tess Callahan," he called out.
"Don't bet on it," Jack growled.
I pulled out of the driveway, blowing out a huge breath of my own when the pain in my head dissipated. Maybe it had just been the stress of the confrontation that had given me a headache?
I shrugged and turned on the radio, adjusting the volume to low, and only realized after I'd been on the road for five minutes that Jack had never once mentioned the missing statue to Logan Mackenzie.
Could it be a coincidence that the eagle shifter had arrived in town the morning of the disappearance? One of the biggest things I'd learned over the past year is that there seemed to be rarely any genuine coincidences in life. At least with crime and criminals.
I shrugged again. I was perfectly happy to help figure out what had happened to the statue, or even what was going on with Logan's sister, so long as there were no threats to our lives this time.
I really, really should have known better.
4
Tess
By the time I parked the Mustang that my newly discovered banshee grandmother had given me next to Uncle Mike's F-150 at his and Aunt Ruby's farm, my headache had calmed down to a mild pain in my temples and a bit of an ache at the back of my skull. Not anything even worth taking medicine for, but still unusual for me. I'd never been prone to headaches and couldn't remember having one in years.
I grabbed the two pies I'd stopped off to get and held the door open for my cat Lou to follow me out. Lou was mostly a homebody, but she loved Uncle Mike with a serious passion and always enjoyed a visit to the farm. I had a feeling secret tuna snacks were involved, but I'd never called him on it. Uncle Mike liked to pretend that cats were only good for living in the barn, but I always caught him with Lou in his lap getting pets and ear scratches.
My sister Shelley came racing out of the house and shouted "LOU!" when she saw us, and Lou gave me a glance filled with feline resignation.
"No more painting her toenails," I reminded Shelley when she scooped my cat up into her arms. "She wasn't a fan."
Shelley, nine going on sixteen, rolled her eyes at me. Every time she did that, I had a guilt flash over my own eye-rolling phase and what I'd put Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike through when I was her age.
"I know, I know, Tess. Can I take her to the barn? Uncle Mike is working on his SECRET PROJECT!"
Shelley spoke mostly in capital letters and exclamation points these days, but we were all so happy that she was healing from the trauma of her mom and grandparents' deaths that we weren't even going to try to curb her enthusiasm anytime soon.
I smiled at her excitement. "Did you ever find out what the secret project is?"
It could be anything. Uncle Mike was a farmer, handyman, and retired engineer who could fix the irrigation system or build a rocket to Mars on any given day. And you could be darn sure his projects would all work perfectly.
I could never have afforded to buy, renovate, and maintain my house if I hadn't had him to help and to teach me how to do things myself, which he'd done my whole life. Aunt Ruby has pictures of five-year-old me carrying a wrench almost as big as I was, following him off to the barn to work on the tractor, and I could change a tire on Aunt Ruby's car by the time I was ten. (Aunt Ruby had a steel-trap mind in a sweet, Southern princess body, and it was a given that nobody would ever expect her to change a tire.)
Shelley starting jumping up and down, her pigtails bouncing. "It's a PUPPY!"
I blinked. "Uncle Mike is building a puppy?"
Another eye roll. Okay, I deserved that one.
"No, silly. He's building a PUG PALACE because I'm getting a PUG PUPPY FOR CHRISTMAS!" She started dancing and singing, swinging Lou around, and I put the pies on the hood of my car and rescued my cat after she shot me a narrow-eyed, feline glare.
Lou would put up with a lot, including making friends with a five-hundred-pound tiger, but being swung around would never be acceptable.
"Okay, bye Tess, bye Lou," Shelley sang out, kissing my cheek and the top of Lou's head. "Uncle Mike says I have to help build. I learned to hammer NAILS!"
With that, she ran off, leaving me grinning at the continuation of the Uncle Mike legacy. There would be no helpless females raised in his house, as he liked to say.
I thought about following them, but Aunt Ruby opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. "Hey, sweetheart. Come on in. You can help me with lunch."
I put Lou down on the ground, so she could go sniff around the flowerbed, and retrieved my pies. "Is that girl ever going to calm down, do you think?"
