Killer Moves: The 4th Jolene Jackson Mystery (Jolene Jackson Mysteries) Read Free Page A

Yes, indeed. Sitting beside a box of vanilla wafers were binoculars. Lucille had been conducting intense surveillance on the drilling activities behind her fence for quite some time, so it wasn’t a great shock to find her viewing tools, but it did make me curious.
    Since I had nothing better to do, including sleeping apparently, I took the binoculars out on the back porch and gazed at the eastern sky. The thick Texas air and wispy clouds made a fuzzy haze over the landscape and only a few stars twinkled through. I was just about to give up on spotting a satellite, the space station or galactic cruiser when I caught a flash of light over to the southeast, near the horizon.
    I kept panning the narrow field of vision until I found the light again. From what I could tell, it was probably a vehicle, going up an incline. Since there was only one such non-flat place anywhere around, it had to be at Bob Little’s house. Well, technically, it was now my house, the one on the hill at my newly gifted ranch—the one I hadn’t seen yet. I vaguely remembered something about there being a caretaker at the place, so it was probably just that guy making a security check.
    In reality, I was vague about a lot of things. I’d been so in shock over the whole estate thing that I really hadn’t paid that much attention to the minor details, the major ones having nearly exploded my brain. Now, however, it was right in front of me, and becoming more real by the second—I had to deal with it. A call to the attorney in the morning would be the first order of business. If they had a security service or foreman, or both, I needed to know about it. “And so it begins,” I muttered.
    As I stepped back inside the kitchen, the front door bell rang.
    I jumped, pure fear shooting through me. I slammed the back door shut and snapped the deadbolt in place then crept into the living room. Leaning over the back of the couch, I peeked out the front window onto the porch—and screamed. Like a three-year-old. Or maybe like a thirteen-year-old. Whatever the case, the forty-something fool leaped away from the window and ran to the door, flung it open and grabbed the tall dark-haired man in the sheriff’s uniform and dragged him into the house.
    “You’re here!” I said, stating the obvious, gleefully, perhaps with the abandonment of a child seeing Santa Claus. “I thought you weren’t going to be back in town tonight. I’m glad you are, of course”
    Sheriff Jerry Don Parker did not respond verbally to shut me up. He did, however, respond. Oh, God, did he respond! And you are just going to have to use your imagination about what all happened in that moment and in the delicious ones that followed. Use a lot of imagination!
     
     

 
    Chapter 3
     
     
    I don’t know what time Jerry left that morning, but I do know that he left with a smile on his face. He also left one very happy girl curled up in her old bed with the blue velveteen headboard and worn out mattress. Maybe this Texas thing wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
    A bleary glance at the clock on the dresser said it was only nine, so I hadn’t slept the day away even though I really wanted to.
    Ding-dong. Ding-dong.
    Dammit. Now what? I hurled myself out of bed, grabbed my jeans and shirt and scuttled into them as fast as I could. The bell still rang two more times before I managed to get myself to the door.
    Agnes Riddles stood in the doorway with a big brown sack. “I saw you were here this morning when I went by on my way to the post office, so I thought you’d probably need some food,” she said, stepping inside and heading to the kitchen.
    Agnes was about Lucille’s age, with chin-length light-brown hair, gold-rim glasses, tasteful matching knit separates and a genuinely good heart. She was also one of Mother’s two best friends in the whole world—the down-to-earth sane one. The other was Merline Campbell, and I was never sure how the term “friend” fit into that