“What time is it, Lyle?”
His friend looked at his watch. “A little after nine. Why?”
“I’m going into town.” He brushed past his foreman.
“At this time of night?” Lyle asked, turning to follow. “Just what do you think you’ll find?”
“I don’t know,” Jace said, turning. “But I sure can’t stay here twiddling my thumbs.”
He didn’t give Lyle a chance to respond as he headed for his truck. A few moments later, he was heading toward town. On the way, he made a few phone calls. He was good friends with all the local shop owners, having grown up in a town where almost everyone was on a first-name basis. He apologized for the lateness of the call as he asked the baker and florist if Lily Mae been in that day. They’d not seen her. Neither had the banker, not that it surprised Jace; he figured she’d withdrawn the money at an out-of-town branch on her way to the airport.
When he noticed he was all but driving on fumes, he pulled into the local convenience store to gas up. Jace swiped his card to pay and was leaning against the side of his truck, waiting to fill up when he heard someone call to him.
“Jace?”
He looked up to see local postmistress exiting her car. “Oh, hey, Miss Edmunds.”
“You’re looking glum,” she observed, punching her numbers in the automated keypad of her pump before inserting the nozzle into her car. “You okay?”
At first Jace started to lie and say that everything was fine, that he was just tired. But he decided it may not hurt to ask everyone he could about his missing fiancée. “You saw Lily Mae yesterday, right?”
The postmistress glanced from the rapidly ticking numbers of her pump back to him. “Yeah,” she said hesitantly. “Why?”
Jace tented his fingers and rubbed his brow. “I came home today and found her missing. I’m worried sick.”
The usually chatty postmistress didn’t immediately reply, which surprised Jace. Instead, her face took on a concerned expression as she removed the nozzle from her car, closed the gas cap, and turned back to Jace.
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “It may be nothing, but it may be something.”
Jace straightened up. “What?”
“Something happened yesterday when Lily Mae came in to mail her letters. She had some mail waiting. One of them was a certified letter. She didn’t look at it before signing for it; said it was probably something to do with her mother’s estate. But when she looked at that letter she just went all kinds of shades of pale, Jace. Then when she opened it, she started crying.”
“Who was it from?” Jace was asking the question before Miss Edmunds had completely finished her statement.
“I don’t rightly know, but…”
“But what?” Jace could hear the desperation in his own voice.
“I did something, Jace,” she said. “Something that could get me in trouble.”
Jace pulled the nozzle from his truck and jammed it into the pump before turning back to Miss Edmunds, resisting the urge to shake the information out of her. “Tell me…”
She looked around and lowered her voice. “She tossed the letter and the envelope, but I took them out of the trash.” She paused. “I’m not supposed to do that. It’s none of my business what folks get. But something just told me to…”
“Where is it?”
She inclined her head toward the building down the street. “The post office. I tucked it away.”
A few minutes later, they were at the back entrance of the post office. Jace waited while the postmistress entered to emerge a few moments later with the letter and envelope. Jace was so grateful that he hugged the postmistress, thanking her over and over and promising not to tell anyone what she’d done.
Then he sat in the truck and read the letter over and over.
“Girl,” he said. “What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into?”
Chapter Thirteen
“Where to, cowgirl?” The driver laughed at his own joke as Lily Mae climbed into the back of his cab.
She didn’t acknowledge his joke, even if she could understand it. In her white sleeveless dress, ponytail, and cowboy boots, she looked—as her grandmother would have said—‘fresh off the turnip truck.’ But that’s what Lily Mae had intended, to arrive at Tony Orzo’s office transformed into someone he’d no longer be interested in.