Free Sharpshooter by Nadia Gordon Page A

under the shower, letting the warm water hit the top of her head. A disturbing sensation, almost a tickle at the back of her mind, interrupted her thoughts. Was there any possibility, under any circumstances, that Wade had actually done it?

5
    Wade’s scrawny old arthritic cat, Farber, scampered up a tree and heaved himself stiffly onto the roof of the house when Sunny pulled up. She found the key under a potted rosemary and let herself in. The house was quiet. Only two days earlier it had felt like her second home, now it was filled with troubling, unanswerable questions. She shook dry cat food into a bowl and set it on the deck, then quickly gathered the few personal items Wade had asked her to bring, stuffing them into a day pack she found hanging behind the door. She tossed the pack into the truck and walked down to the winery.
    It was a perfect early-fall day, bright and fresh, especially on top of Howell Mountain. Catelina’s recipe had certainly worked; she hadn’t felt so rested in weeks, and the world looked vibrant and solid again, like when she was a kid. She cut through the yellowed grass to the old barn that Wade had converted into his winemaking facilities. Using one carefully placed finger, she slid the winery door open and slipped inside, noting that she needed to ask Steve Harvey if they had fingerprinted that handle. The air smelled dusty and sweet like any old barn, and at the same time sour and boozy like all wineries. During fermentation the funky smells of yeast and sulfur would be incredibly strong, andafterward, when the new wine had been transferred to barrels for aging, the place would reek like a fraternity house after a big party.
    She waited for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light. Barrels were stacked several rows deep against one wall and two eightfoot-tall fermentation tanks stood against the other. She checked the narrow space behind the furthest tank, where Wade’s rifle had always been kept. It wasn’t there. She went down to the cellar, where the wine aged for a year or two once it was bottled. She poked around the storage room packed with pumps and hoses. She climbed a ladder made of rope and two-by-fours to peer into what used to be the hayloft. The rifle was nowhere. Half an hour later she emerged from the winery, beat the dust off her jeans and sleeves, and headed back to the house empty-handed.
    Wade’s place was rustic verging on Spartan, more cabin than house, and didn’t take long to search, especially for something as big as the .22 Hornet. The gun wasn’t anywhere visible, and neither was the box of shells Wade said he kept in the closet, nor the two spent cartridges he’d put in the garbage. Probably the cops took that stuff, thought Sunny. The gun also wasn’t in the sparse workshop Wade had built out back. His tools hung neatly from their hooks and the workbench was tidy. The storage room held only the predictable supply of fertilizers, wheelbarrows, defunct wine barrels, cover crop seed, coffee cans full of nails and screws, and salvaged scraps of lumber from various projects. By twelve-thirty she’d given up on finding the Hornet anywhere logical. That left just the illogical places, those millions of unknowable places an object can get to without explanation.
    In the workshop, she picked up Wade’s collection kit, an old wooden painter’s box with a handle on top and labeled cubbyholes for samples. On her way out she stopped to grab a smallharvester’s knife with a serrated blade shaped like a half-moon, and reached for the old red gardening gloves that always lay on the shelf by the door, but they weren’t there. She hunted for them briefly, then headed out into the vineyard, gathering fruit samples from each of the eight sections of the vineyard. When she got back she cleaned the refractometer, sorted and squeezed the juice from the grapes, and measured each sample, holding the device up to the light to take a reading. Light bounced off the sugar