“That’d be great.”
She seemed satisfied. Of Juliet’s seven—and counting—nieces and nephews, Wendy was the most difficult to talk to. It wasn’t just the divorce, the homeschooling, the tension between her mother and the expansive Longstreet clan—it was the girl herself. She was private, cerebral, defensive and very sensitive. “She’s not like all you Longstreet lunkheads,” Susie would say. And she’d be right, Juliet thought. Wendy was her own person; in fact, last night over dinner, she’d informed her father, aunt and grandparents that she was going vegan. She’d been a vegetarian for two years, but now she was locking down even further, eliminating all animal products from her diet, including milk and eggs.
Joshua had stalked from the table, telling his daughter she’d dry up on a stick and blow away if she didn’t get a grip. In the morning, her grandparents had made her an omelet with cheddar cheese, as if she’d never said a word about her intentions. Offended, Wendy marched up to her room and stayed there. When Juliet headed back out to the lake, she’d noticed her niece up in her window seat, scribbling madly on a pad of paper. Her mother said Wendy wanted to be a doctor. Juliet wasn’t so sure.
“Come on, Spaceshot,” Wendy said, cheerfully clapping her hands at the dog. “Let’s go back to the house. Come on, let’s run!”
The dog didn’t follow her lead and run to the path. He resumed his determined but interminable waddle. But at least Wendy was laughing, and, for the first time since Juliet had arrived in Vermont three days ago, she thought her niece would be okay for the next six months, with her mother in Nova Scotia. At least she’d had the sense not to try to live with her father at his place in town. As a Vermont state trooper, Joshua didn’t keep a regular schedule, and he wasn’t an easy man—even on a good day. He was the oldest of the six Longstreet siblings, Juliet the youngest and the only sister. None of her brothers fazed Juliet, but Wendy wasn’t quite as hardheaded as her aunt—or the rest of the “Longstreet lunkheads.”
Juliet rolled down her pants’ legs and slipped into her sport sandals, then joined her niece and Spaceshot on the path. They crossed the dirt road and picked up the wide, grassy lane that put them back on Longstreet land. To their left, a steep dirt driveway shot up to a small hillside cabin that her family used for guests, overflow family, temporary workers or grandchildren’s adventures. Juliet, Wendy and Spaceshot stayed on the lane, which wound around the bottom of the hill, passing through a stone wall into open fields. They came to a fork, one branch leading up into the apple orchard, the other back down to the house. They took the latter, amid wildflowers and pine saplings no more than a foot tall.
“Why do you always wear a gun?” Wendy asked abruptly.
Juliet hadn’t expected the question. “I’m a federal agent—”
“But not here. You work in New York.”
“That’s where I’m assigned, but ‘federal’ means I’m as much a marshal here in Vermont as I am in NewYork.”
“Well, I would think you’d be able to take off your gun for Sunday lunch with your family.”
It was a fair point, but Juliet didn’t respond. Wendy was accustomed to law enforcement officers in the family. Not only was her aunt a deputy U.S. marshal and her father a state trooper, but another uncle was a police officer in town, and her grandfather was a former state trooper on disability since a shooting had left him with one leg shorter than the other. He’d nearly bled out that night. Juliet was a teenager when the troopers showed up at their door. Wendy was a toddler, her parents on the verge of divorce—she wouldn’t remember.
Juliet had no intention of taking off her gun, for one overriding reason that trumped all others.
Bobby Tatro was a free man.
He’d been released from federal prison in late August after serving a four-year sentence on a nonviolent gun charge, but he wasn’t a nonviolent man. Juliet had picked him up in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Syracuse, where she had been assigned at the time. She’d been transferred to New York almost two years ago.
As she’d cuffed him, Tatro had vowed to come after her when he got out. “Your pretty blond ass is mine, Marshal. You can count on it.”