They both stared at me.
“Seriously,” I said. “To hell with him. If he wants to stalk around all pissy because I was protecting my cover—something I’m sure he did himself while he was a marine—then he’s welcome to it, but I don’t have to watch. I’m sorry I had to lie to him and even sorrier that I hurt him in the process, but I’m not sorry for lying and if I had to do it all over, I’d do the same thing again.”
“Of course,” Ida Belle said. “We would expect nothing less.”
Gertie nodded.
“Because I’m a professional,” I said quietly.
A professional killer.
Chapter 3
I wasn’t sure whether it was anger or heartache that had me refusing a ride home with Ida Belle, but suddenly, I felt like jogging. It was as though five days of pent-up energy needed to get out of my body before I exploded. So I set out of Gertie’s house at a fast clip and jogged around the block twice before heading for Main Street. With Ally back in her own house, I needed to stock my kitchen with things I could handle. Basically, things that went in the microwave.
Gertie was good for a couple meals a week and Ally was always dropping by a dessert, but I couldn’t depend on either of them to be my personal caterer. I was fairly certain Ida Belle lived on bread and cans of beans. She preferred simple and efficient to elaborate and time-consuming. I had spent my share of time living on only one or two items, but as long as Walter stocked a decent supply of microwave dinners at the General Store, I saw no reason to resort to peanut butter sandwiches every day.
The General Store was busy. A couple of the men I recognized as regulars from the café. They both nodded on their way out. Two of the women sang in the choir at church. There was a young woman with a baby in a stroller at the checkout counter that I didn’t know and a woman with a man in a wheelchair picking out potato chips.
I gave the woman with the stroller another look.
Twenty-ish, five foot four, thin but poor muscle tone. The baby was a much bigger threat to someone like me.
I gave the couple in front of the potato chips a once-over.
Man in his late forties, hard to determine height in the chair but not tall, decent upper body, signaling he’d probably been in the chair for a while. No threat at all.
Woman in her midforties, five foot six, good muscle tone, no discernable threat.
I waved at Walter, who was in his usual spot behind the register, and grabbed a plastic shopping bin.
I’d selected a week’s worth of frozen entrées and was just about to move on to snacks when I heard the bells jangle on the front door. A couple seconds later, Celia’s voice sounded behind me.
“It should be a crime for you to stroll around loose in this town,” she said.
The store went quiet, and I sighed before turning around. There wasn’t a chance in hell she was talking to someone else. The last thing I was in the mood for was a stupid argument with Celia, but short of going the coward route and walking out of the store, it didn’t appear I had a way out. She stood there in the center of the store, hands on her ample hips, her flowered dress hiked up unevenly on the right side. Her face was contorted in the usual scowl she wore when I came into her view.
“I see Deputy LeBlanc is shirking his responsibilities again,” Celia said.
“Carter can’t arrest someone without evidence,” I said, “no matter how badly you want him to.”
“I don’t need evidence to know you’re a lying, scheming outsider. Nothing bad ever happened in this town until you arrived.”
“Same argument, different day,” I said. “And I refuse to waste my time on logic with you. Here’s the bottom line—I can’t be the perpetrator because while the Internet Romeo was working his magic last week, I was in police custody in New Orleans.”
“So you claim.”
“So Carter verified. And trust me when I say, if I were going to pretend to be a secret online lover or whatever, the absolute last person in the world I would do that to is you. I don’t have the imagination or the stomach to even look at you without wincing. If I said something nice to you, much less romantic, I’d cut my own tongue out with a butter knife.”
The woman with the baby choked back a laugh and Walter grinned. Celia sucked in a breath and her face flushed with anger. She shot a dirty look toward the cash register, then glared at me. “You are a lying, thieving tramp, and if it’s the last thing I ever do, I will see you run out of this town.”
She whirled around, clearly intending to make her dramatic exit, but as she took one step forward, her shin connected with the footrest on the man’s wheelchair and she went sprawling into a rack that held toiletries. The rack tipped over, sending a shower of shampoo and lotion down on top of her. One of the shampoo bottles tipped to the side on the rack, and a stream of shampoo trickled over the side and on top of Celia’s head.