Free Grab & Go (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 2) by Jerusha Jones Page A

By the time I’d reached the Gonzales’s house on foot, my eyes and nose were streaming from the frosty air, and I couldn’t feel my ears, toes or fingers. Traipsing about in the frigid dark forest required better equipment than I currently owned. The way things were going, I needed to plan on more of the same.
    This time, I decided to borrow Sidonie’s old, boxy Volvo. Variety is the spice of life. It’s also good not to set patterns in case anyone is watching. Our Snoopy consort hadn’t raised any objections to our pretense of neighborly concern last night, so I was hopeful that our side trip had slipped under their radar.
    Clarice had strongly — vehemently — objected to my taking this venture solo. But the possibly tapped phones — my original one and Skip’s — were a problem. Someone had to monitor them for potential ransom calls, but they couldn’t leave the premises without arousing suspicion. Which meant she was stuck holding down the fort and the phones.
    I probably should have given her more warning of my plans, but I’d wanted to keep the inevitable argument as short as possible. Disagreeing with Clarice is an exhausting undertaking. She’d eventually relented and sent me off with a shoulder bag stuffed with snacks and a thermos of coffee.
    I’d left her something to stew on — one of the copies of Lee Gomes’ contact list. I’d handed it to her without comment. Her eyes had flicked back and forth over the pages, her mouth puckering into a tight knot, and she’d dropped heavily onto a kitchen chair.
    When she did glance back up at me, her eyes were huge and worried behind her cat’s eye glasses. “Cinco and Nueve. And — and Freddy.”
    When I’d found Skip’s extra bank accounts — the ones he’d allegedly used for money laundering — and the notebook in which he’d tallied how much money belonged to whom, Clarice and I had made a list of his top clients, the ones he still owed money to. We’d labeled them Numero Uno through Nueve since at the time we didn’t know their real names. We’d since identified a few of them, but their numbered monikers stuck in our minds.
    Freddy Whelan was Skip’s lawyer and general counsel for his carwash business, Turbo-Tidy Clean, who had rather inconveniently never returned my calls after Skip was kidnapped.
    I’d nodded. “Makes you wonder why Skip bought this place. Proximity? Did he offer this property rent-free, all expenses paid, for the boys’ camp as a charitable cover? It would fit with his push to fund the foundation I ran — placing emphasis on his honorable activities in order to hide the bad.”
    “Now, you don’t know that for sure,” Clarice had warned.
    “Patterns. I don’t like it.”
    “I’ll do some research—” she’d waved her empty hand toward the ceiling, indicating the possibility of invisible listening ears. Then she’d crumpled the corner of the pages in her fist, a fierce scowl angling all her wrinkles horizontal.
    The farther south I got, the more treacherous the driving conditions became. The air temperature must have been warming because what started as the tiniest specks of swirling snow turned into bouncing ice pellets. The thick, steel-gray clouds sank lower and squelched any hint of a sun rising behind them.
    Twenty miles later those pellets became splatty, and ice chips slithered across the windshield on a film of water which the wipers struggled to keep up with. I clenched the steering wheel with aching hands and motored through. It felt exactly like what I was doing inside my own mind, too — motoring through, not lingering over the icy stabs of hypocrisy or worry or indecision. If I hesitated even for a moment, I was terrified I’d become paralyzed, as though my brain and body would seize up, rendering me ineffective.
    I struggled with the urge to self-justify, that somehow the names on Lee Gomes’s contact list turned my conscripting of a minor, however willing he might have been, for a