Free Floodgates by Mary Anna Evans Page B

nerves jangled a bit, but she ignored them.
    “Oh, no, you’re welcome to join us, Jodi. Let me introduce you to my fiancé, Joe Wolf Mantooth.”
    Joe wiped his hand again before offering it to Jodi in greeting. “Nice to meet you. Faye told me…well, I heard you both had a tough afternoon yesterday.” He jerked his head in the direction of the parking lot. “Let me meet you two at the car. I need to wash some more of this dirt off my hands.” He moved quickly toward the park’s public rest rooms with his long, deliberate strides.
    Faye needed to go wash another layer of grime off her own hands, too, but she waited to do that just long to whisper, “Yes, he’s pretty. And he’s not dumb as a post, either. But he is mine.”

Chapter Ten
    Joe hadn’t said much during lunch. He was naturally quiet. He also liked people, and he liked hearing what they had to say more than he liked to talk. But mostly, a large portion of his attention was being devoted to ciphering out how their food was prepared.
    Joe was an artist in the kitchen and, throughout lunch, Faye had enjoyed watching him tear off one piece of bread at a time, just so he could watch the crust shatter. He had put each piece in his mouth and sat there for a time without chewing, Faye figured that had been enough time for him to figure out the ingredients and their proportions. She was pretty sure that Joe had the equivalent of a gas chromatograph in his mouth.
    Tearing each piece slowly gave him a good look at the texture. With Joe’s kitchen expertise, that texture probably told him how long the dough was kneaded, and how long it was left to rise. Faye was confident that, when she got home, she’d be able to have New Orleans-style French bread any time she wanted it, because Joe would have figured out the bakers’ secrets. And she expected to want some of this bread pretty darn often, because it was delicious.
    Jodi had frittered away most of their lunch talking about good liquor and pretty men, without sharing whatever it was she’d learned that she thought would be so fascinating to an archaeologist. Faye hadn’t minded. Jodi wasn’t the only one who didn’t have enough good women friends in her life. Faye could use some more of those, too—the kind who could talk about science as easily as they could talk about the opposite sex, intriguing though that opposite sex might be. And Jodi could certainly steer a frivolous conversation around a hairpin turn and onto serious topics with lightning speed, when it suited her.
    “I only came out to the park this morning because I wanted to talk to that cute little ranger, Matt. Well, I also had something to show you, but I’ll get to that.”
    Somehow, Faye had begun to doubt it.
    “I came to see Matt,” Jodi chattered on with a vivacity that shook her golden-brown curls, “because I don’t like my witnesses wandering away when I’m about ready to ask them some questions. I wanted to tell him so, face-to-face.”
    Jodi always talked with her hands, but this seemed to be a point she wanted to really emphasize, because she put down her sandwich to free up her right hand for gestures. “Also, I wanted to ask the man those questions he cheated me out of yesterday by sneaking away. Tell you what, though—I got more than I came for. For sure. Turns out that he’s related to the dead woman we found. If I’d known that, I’d have been a little more delicate about telling him the victim’s name.”
    Poor Matt. That explained the tears.
    “Who was she?”
    “Her name was Michele Broussard, but he told me that people called her Shelly. They were third cousins, and she was apparently several years older, but they’d spent some time together when they were growing up. Families around here sort of…sprawl. You don’t see all your kinfolk all the time, because you just can’t. Not when there’s two hundred and fifty of them. But still, you know who they are and you have a shared history. Matt took her