Free August Moon by Jess Lourey Page A

stop by her store and see what I could find out about Lydia, the employee I hadn’t met yet. It’d also give me a chance to see if I could find any more out about Annika, the suspicious worker. I would much rather be putting my excellent plan into play, but I had given Tina my word.
    When I stepped out of the library, the hazy hot air was as heavy as a hand pushing down on me. Everyone around me was wilting and hugging the sparse shade under business awnings. Across the street, a gaggle of children held rapidly melting popsicles, grape and orange sticky-juice running down their arms. If we didn’t get relief from this weather soon, the lakes were going to be full of boiled fish.
    I spotted Annika before I entered 4Ts. She was in the front display window rearranging some walleye, wood ducks, and beaded earrings. I waved as I entered.
    “Nice day to get in from the heat!”
    She smiled. “Can you hold this bird for me for a minute? I need to dust these bracelets up front and I can’t get to them with this plume in my way.”
    She passed me a stuffed duck, its glass eyes sparkling. If it weren’t for Tina, I would have spit once on the ground for good luck and scrambled out the door. “Sure.” I put my hands out and cringed, certain that the birds would smell their dead comrade on me and seek revenge as soon as I left the store. I held the bread-loaf-sized corpse gingerly, surprised at the silky softness of the feathers and how little it weighed. It had a strange airiness, a cold dead husk of a thing, and it emitted a faint-rotten chemical odor. “Ever think it’s weird to have jewelry and stuffed animals together in one store?”
    She shrugged. “It works. Speaking of, how do you like that yin-yang ring?”
    “You’ve got a good memory.”
    “Just for jewelry. I love it. See this aquamarine pendant?” She leaned toward me so I could get a view of the big blue sparkler around her neck. “Just got it. It’s rare to find an aquamarine this size.”
    “They must pay you well.” I tried to make my smile easy, but I was a terrible actor, and the bird carcass in my arms made it all that much more difficult to feign cheerfulness. Her eyes turned hard, and she snatched the duck out of my hands and turned away.
    “I’m good with money,” she said, her back to me.
    I’ll bet she was. I had a hunch that Tina was right and Annika was supplementing her income on the sly. A hunch was just gossip all dressed up and ready to go out, though, and I had told Tina I wouldn’t report anything that wasn’t concrete. I decided to fish in a different pond. “You know that Lebowski girl? The one who was murdered?”
    That brought immediate camaraderie, as death does, and Annika and I were friends again. She turned to me, her eyes wide. “Isn’t that awful? She worked at the library with you, didn’t she?”
    I nodded, my lips pursed.
    “That must suck. My friend Sally’s boyfriend Rick had just seen her at a party the night before.”
    I wasn’t surprised. Like most teenagers in a small town, Lucy liked to drink with her friends. There wasn’t much else to do at night, and given the number of bars in each town, teens certainly saw the behavior modeled often enough. I had nothing to lose by leading Annika along, however. “Yeah? Did she go to a lot of parties?”
    “For sure. She was a total Frito Lay.”
    “Hunh?”
    “Easy. She was easy. And she liked to whoop it up on the weekends.”
    I withheld judgment. If being a partier was a capital crime, there’d be no cheerleaders left in rural Minnesota. Come to think of it, there wouldn’t be much of anyone left. Just the kids and people in full-body casts. Plus, I knew firsthand Lucy was a sweet person, regardless of what she did in her off time. “More than the usual?”
    “Depends on who you ask.” She tensed a little, maybe sensing I wasn’t jumping on board the “blame the dead girl” train quickly enough. “Why do you want to know?”
    “It’s