“Okay. What is up with you?” Lou demanded.
“Me?” Although she tried, Daisy couldn’t stop smiling. “Nothing.”
“Uh-huh. Liar. Who else here thinks Daisy’s lying?” She raised her hand, and Rory and Ellie joined her.
Laughing, Daisy caved. “Fine. Chris and I are kind of…well, we’re dating now.”
While Lou whooped with excitement and Ellie called out her congratulations, Rory looked confused.
“I don’t get it. Weren’t you dating before?” she asked.
“We were just friends,” Daisy explained. Lou coughed and raised her hand again. “We were!”
Once the laughter died down, they asked her a million and one questions. When she was blushing hot enough to spontaneously combust, she called a halt to the interrogation.
“Aren’t we going to talk about the murder? Isn’t that why we’re meeting tonight? Please?”
“Fine.” Lou conceded, flipping to a blank sheet on the oversized notepad. “Who wants to talk about dead people?”
“First,” Ellie said, her expression changing from amusement to concern, “I want to talk about Daisy’s gas leak yesterday. What happened?”
Her stomach twisting in remembered fear, she gave the other women a condensed summary of the incident. “Is Ian in a lot of trouble?”
Rory shrugged. “Not as much as after he went into his dad’s burning house against orders. He’ll have to do some of the nastier tasks around the station for a week or two, and then he’ll be off the hook. Chief Early knows he’s not going to change.”
“I’m sorry,” Daisy said for what felt like the hundredth time.
Rory didn’t look upset. “Not your fault. Ian’s just…how he is.” By the sappy look on her face, she liked Ian exactly as he was. “Did the chief determine it was just an accident, then?”
“Probably.” To Daisy, it didn’t feel like an accident. It was one more way the house was turning from a sanctuary into a trap. “Although the repairman said the damage was strange.”
“Strange?” the other women echoed.
“Strange as in deliberate?” Lou asked.
“The repair guy laughed at the idea when Chris suggested it.” Although she knew it was ridiculous to think that someone had intentionally sabotaged her stove—had tried to kill her—Daisy’s stomach was churning.
The other women exchanged uneasy glances. “But did he say it couldn’t have been deliberate?” Ellie asked.
Even in her Chris-induced happy daze, the possibility that someone had intentionally caused the gas leak had been poking at the back of her brain. “No. Who would’ve done that, though? And why?”
“An explosion sounds right up an arsonist’s alley,” Lou said in a hushed voice, as if she were in danger of being overheard. “And you were a witness to a possible dead-body moving.”
“But who? And how?” Daisy repeated, unable to wrap her head around the idea that someone hated her enough to try to kill her. “No one ever comes inside. Only my dad, Chris, our workout group, Tyler Coughlin, and that real estate agent.” As she listed off the names, Lou wrote them down.
“Real estate agent?” Rory repeated.
Daisy grimaced. “We need to have these meetings more often. The real estate agent was showing the house across the street, and they found blood on the ceiling. Chris wanted to get a warrant to search the place, but the sheriff refused.”
“Why?” Lou turned from the notepad. “I would think blood would be suspicious enough to call for a search, especially after what you saw.”
“Tyler Coughlin was here?” Rory interrupted.
A little startled by the change in topics, Daisy blinked at her before answering. “Yes. He’s my grocery-delivery boy.”
Looking grim, Rory stared at the names on the list. “When was he here last?”
The room suddenly felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of it. Daisy barely found enough air to speak. “Yesterday,” she said in a tiny voice. “Right before the gas leak.”
“Tyler?” Ellie sounded shocked. “The sheriff’s son? But he’s a kid!”
“He’s sixteen.” Lou drew a circle around his name. “Old enough to know how to start a fire. And that would explain why the sheriff would try to cover for him.”
“Including the missing arson reports,” Rory added.
Swallowing hard, Daisy thought about bashful Tyler, all gangly arms and legs, who pretended he was grown up enough to like coffee. “I don’t know. It fits, but… Do you think he murdered Willard Gray, too? I don’t think he’d be capable of killing someone, do you?”
“If it was him, he tried to blow up your house,” Rory said flatly, “with you in it.”
Everyone went silent. Daisy tried to wrap her head around the idea that Tyler had tried to kill her. The Tyler she’d seen—the awkward, lonely boy—was a murderer. And Tyler’s father…how much had he known?