Page 71 of Grimstone

“We have an arrangement.”

The sheriff snorts, giving me a look. “I bet you do.”

* * *

“Well, I hatehim,”Jude says when the sheriff is gone. Jude made himself scarce the moment the cruiser pulled into the yard. Wish I could have done the same. “Did you have to make him mad, though?”

“Me makehimmad?” I sputter, furiously sweeping shards of broken pottery into a wet, jumbled pile. “Didn’t you hear that horseshit? He’s not gonna doanything! He barely even looked around.”

“Yeah, but now you got him looking at our permits…”

“That was just a stupid threat,” I say sullenly. But now I’m second-guessing myself.

“You don’t have to be so antagonistic,” my brother remarks, with no apparent sense of irony.

“Oh, yes please, give me all your pointers on etiquette, rudest person I know…”

Jude shrugs. “I was smart enough not to talk to him.”

“I didn’t have that luxury.”

“Don’t be a martyr.”

I extend my arms on both sides and hang my head like I’m being crucified. Jude laughs.

I tell him, “The sheriff said the bone came from a dog.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“But how did it get in the sink?” I pause in my sweeping, leaning on the broom, staring at the dark hole of the drain.

“It is weird….” Jude says with a sideways glance. “When all the doors were locked.”

“I wasn’t sleepwalking!”

“Okay, okay.” He holds up his hands. “Then I’m back to thinking it was your new boyfriend.”

“Don’t call him that.”

“Or maybe your other new boyfriend…”

“Please tell me you’re not talking about Tom.”

“Why not?” Jude shrugs. “He’s always perving on you. And he’s a total lush—he coulda got drunk and tried to break in and knocked all the shit off the shelves.”

In a way, the chaotic mess does feel more like Tom than Dane, from whom I’d expect something a lot more…calculated.

“But that doesn’t make sense, either,” I muse. “Because the first time I heard the piano, Tom hadn’t started working here.”

“The piano?”

“Yeah. The first time I heard it playing was the first night we came. I hadn’t met Tom yet, or even called him.”

“Right…” There’s nothing obvious in Jude’s tone, but something in his expression, in the slight purse of his lips, is starting to piss me off.

“I heard the piano playing!”

“Nobody said you didn’t.”

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