Free A Fatal Slip by Melissa Glazer Page A

Grounds?”
    “We get a lot of people here, Carolyn. I can’t be expected to remember all of them.”
    Nate climbed into his battered old Subaru and sped away, nearly spraying me with gravel as he left.
    How odd. Was it a rule that the business owners in Maple Ridge had to act oddly today? If so, no one had bothered to give me the memo. No matter. There was a killer on the loose in our small town, and I was sure of only one thing:
    my husband wasn’t who the police should be looking at. But knowing Sheriff Hodges as I did, I had a feeling the only way the real culprit would be brought to justice was if I had a hand in the investigation myself, no matter what anyone else thought about it.

Chapter 5

    “Carolyn, is your cell phone turned on?” David asked as I came back into the shop. “I’ve been trying to get you practically since you left for lunch.”
    “I don’t know. Let me check.” I pulled it out of my purse and saw that I’d let the battery die again. Desite Bill’s constant nagging about keeping the phone charged, I still forgot to do it. “It’s dead. Do you know where I put that backup charger?”
    “Forget about that,” David said. “It’s not important right now.”
    “How can I get any calls if my battery’s dead?” I asked as I rooted around in our junk drawer near the register.
    “You need to worry about that later,” David insisted. “Would you stop digging around in there and listen to me?” Something in his voice told me he was serious, but I was sure he could wait a few seconds.
    “Here it is,” I said as I pulled the charger out and closed the drawer. I plugged it in, then docked my phone in the receptacle. “Now, what’s so urgent?”
    “The sheriff came by looking for you. From the way he acted, he was ticked off about something.”
    “How could you tell? That’s his natural state of being,” I said.
    “Maybe so, but he said he needed to talk to you the second you got back to the shop. Here’s his number.”
    David held one of the sheriff’s business cards out to me, but I didn’t take it. “Just put it on the counter. I’ve talked to him so many times in the past few years I know his number by heart. I’ll call him later.”
    “Carolyn, I don’t think he was kidding about this.”
    I let the sigh forming on my lips escape. “I know I need to talk to him, David, but I just can’t face him right now. I will later, I promise.” I looked around the empty shop. “Has it been this dead since I left?”
    “No, there’s been a steady flow of customers. I signed up two coeds from the university for a pottery lesson. There’s just one problem.”
    David wouldn’t meet my glance, so I knew something was up. “What is it? What’s the catch?”
    “They want me to teach them, and not Robert.”
    Robert Owens, my part-time pottery teacher, was in all honesty turning out to be more trouble than he was worth. Still, he was a gifted craftsman, and despite his occasional rude behavior, the man could teach ceramics from A to Z. I’d be lying if I said his finished work in my display window didn’t raise the level of what we had to offer for sale, too. While I wasn’t ready to cut him loose, I didn’t want to aggravate him to the point of making him leave on his own, either. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. You know how territorial he is about his teaching.”
    David scowled. “That’s not fair, and you know it. I can teach a beginner class just as well as he can. You should know they both said if Robert was teaching the class, they weren’t interested. Come on, Carolyn, give me a chance. We don’t have to tell him what I’m doing. It’s still your shop, isn’t it? This is important to me.”
    I thought about what it would mean if Robert quit when he found out I’d let David teach one of the classes. Then I realized I could afford to lose him more than I could afford to alienate David. There might be a way out of it yet, though.
    “I thought you