Free If Looks Could Kill by Eileen Dreyer Page B

pockets.
    "You talked to Lawson?" he asked. It wasn't much of a stretch.
    She looked as if she wanted to turn away again. Instead, she shrugged, a small, abrupt movement that neatly telegraphed the news. "I, uh..."
    This must have been uncharacteristic behavior on Chris's part, because Sue was completely at a loss as to how to react. She looked at her friend, and then at Mac, as if searching for somebody to quickly clarify the situation so that she could take appropriate action.
    Mac took a careful step foward. "You wanna talk?"
    Chris Jackson looked as if she'd been hit with a stun gun. Wide-eyed, white, rigid as hell. "Later," she managed, not advancing or retreating a millimeter. "Please?"
    Mac gave her the same passive smile he gave murder suspects when they asked for water before facing his questions. "You bet," he allowed easily, knowing within a hairbreadth just how close to come to a skittish person. The biggest mistake most new interrogators made was pushing too soon, too hard. Mac played his targets like very nervous fish.
    Chris Jackson was hardly a suspect. But she was going to give him something interesting to do, and he wasn't about to blow that off.
    "I'm going down to the Kozy Kitchen," he offered quietly. "Have some lunch. After you talk to Sue, you want to come on over? I'll save you a spot."
    He only waited long enough for her to agree before turning for the door. So, there had been a murder. A puzzle, and on his second day here. He might just survive it after all.
    * * *
    "Three."
    "Murders?"
    Chris nodded. She was feeling better. Thank God for Sue, who'd poured her coffee and watched her pace and listened to her agitated story without comment. Chris still wasn't sure what she was going to do—what she was supposed to do—but at least the first shock had died a little.
    Walking alongside her, Chief MacNamara shook his head thoughtfully. "I'm going to have to do some more reading."
    Chris had met him, just as he'd asked. But the last thing she needed was discussing this with the audience at the Kitchen. Victor and Lester might have kept the news to themselves, but Luella would have been down at the Puckett County Courier in ten minutes flat. MacNamara made it a moot point by asking Chris to walk with him to the county jail to feed Cooter Taylor his lunch.
    "I'm not exactly sure what to do," she admitted, hands once again shoved into her jeans pockets as she sidestepped the tree planter outside the drugstore. There were minute buds on the branches, and daffodil shoots poking up through the dirt in the tub. Chris wished she could stop and enjoy them, that she could step into each and every store along the square and waste her time checking the merchandise, visiting with the people, steeping herself in the routine. It was the special gift of Pyrite, the secret to her sanity. She catalogued the everyday minutiae of this town the way a penitent did martyrs to invoke.
    "What does Lawson want from you?"
    "Validation, I think. Either that, or she really did want me to gaze into my crystal ball and tell her why my books seem to have started coming true."
    "Have they?"
    She wanted to close her eyes again. She wanted to run up and down the library steps a couple of times to work off the sudden tension in her chest. "Yeah," she admitted instead. "I think they have."
    Ghosts to add to her collection. Responsibility to be piled atop the weight already on her shoulders. She wondered how she was supposed to atone for something like this. Murders committed in her name, maybe to get her attention. Chris had never known how to think of life any way but, "Shit happens, and I'm responsible." Well, this shit was something she wasn't going to get off her hands.
    The world had found her after all. That wonderful, magical silence on the phone this morning when she'd pretended that there was no one left out there to get her, had vanished. Whatever was going on up in the suburbs of St. Louis had something to do with her.
    It wasn't