Making It Right (Most Likely To #3)

Miss Gina looked at him like he was a little short on brain cells. “Look at me.”


She wore loose pants, a top that hid her aging belly, and that same long, gray-streaked hair blew in the breeze. She looked like a woman who never left the sixties. “Half this town thinks I’m a little crazy. The kids in this town have always used my place as a safe haven when they had nowhere to go. Put those things together and then have me crying foul when Sheriff Ward ended up with a hole in his head, and something tells me I’d find myself in all kinds of trouble. Besides, I did smoke pot back then. And it wasn’t legal.”

“Not every questionable character is a bad reference.”

“If an agency had come around, asked the right questions, I would have made sure they knew my feelings. But they didn’t. And when Jo returned and took over for her dad, I knew she was looking. I figured it was only a matter of time before she found something.”

“Only she hasn’t found anything.”

“That’s cuz she’s too close. There are things about her father she doesn’t know and might not be receptive to hear if they came out.”

Gill stared at Miss Gina. “What kinds of things?”

She smirked. “I’ll tell you, but I’d like to see just how good of an FBI agent you are, Mr. McHottie.”

He laughed. “McHottie?”

“That’s what the girls call you.” She swept his frame with a smile.

He was more than a little creeped out.

“I’m going inside,” he said, twisting the door handle.

Miss Gina laughed.



Jo glanced at her watch. They’d be up at the cabin by now. Walking on the memories of her father’s life. She should be there, with them.

The place tore her up. Letting Gill see her like that would open her in a way she wasn’t ready for. No, it was best he was there without her bias, the one thing she couldn’t remove from her sideline investigation into her father’s death.

While Gill and Miss Gina climbed the mountain, Jo drove the short street over and one block down to speak with Karl and Caroline while Drew was in school.

She should have called Karl the second she left the school. If it were her son, she’d have asked for the same courtesy. Having Gill in town was a distraction, proven by her lack of thought. Even if Karl was continually making her job harder, Drew was his son, and he had the right to be pissed at her actions.

Jo knocked on the Emerys’ door, stood back, and waited.

Caroline answered. In her midfifties, she could have passed for her early forties. She had the gift of good genes and an organic diet, according to the things Glynis had told Jo over the years. At five foot five the woman didn’t have the history of walking a runway of America’s Next Top Model, but she was known to turn heads. Unlike Karl, Caroline had a kind face that the people in town loved and respected. Not that the town didn’t respect Karl . . . but in his case, they had no choice but to.

“Hi, Caroline,” Jo said when the woman answered the door.

Her sheepish smile and quick study of the ground told Jo her presence there made Caroline uncomfortable. “Hi, Jo.”

“Is Karl here? I’d like to talk with you both about what happened yesterday.”

“C’mon in.”

Jo followed her into the house, her belt making noise as she walked.

Caroline yelled Karl’s name before turning to her. “I’m sorry Karl bothered you last night. I told him it could wait, that if anything terrible had happened you would have come to us right away.”

“Thank you for that, Caroline, but I should have come to you anyway.”

“Damn right.” Karl stood behind her, leaning against the door frame leading into the family room.

“Karl!” Caroline’s voice held a friendly warning.

“Can we sit down?” Jo asked.

“Of course.” Caroline switched into hostess mode, asked if Jo wanted something to drink, sat when she declined.

“I need to apologize,” Jo started, staring directly at her deputy.

He waited.

“I’m sorry. I should have called you when I left the school.”

Karl stared.

Jo kept the conversation going. She explained what Richard had told her, what Drew confirmed. “. . . outside of Betty believing there are ghosts at the high school, there really wasn’t any harm done. Mason pointed out that Betty isn’t in the best of health, and that was the concern that should have been thought of.”

Caroline tilted her head to the side and placed her hand over Karl’s. “It’s not a big deal.”

Karl and she exchanged glances, and some of the edge over his features softened. “That was for us to decide.”

The man wasn’t letting Jo off the hook. “It won’t happen again,” she assured him.

He conceded with a nod and Jo left without another word.



Running Lob Hill sucked ass. Drew’s dad wasn’t talking to him, and Coach Ward drilled him hard with extra laps and zero sense of humor.

Drew knew the sheriff had been hiding a smirk at least once during the confrontation in Principal Mason’s office the day before, but today it was narrow lines on her face and attitude. You’d think he’d been found getting stoned in the gym bathroom.

He hated River Bend more every day. How his parents had landed in such a small town and stayed there wasn’t something Drew could find a logical reason for. Maybe if his dad was together enough to have been elected sheriff, his desire to live there would make sense. But his dad wasn’t the sheriff, he was the deputy. And hell, his dad could be a deputy anywhere.

Drew pushed through the remaining three hundred meters of the Lob Hill climb, tagged the tree that had been touched by hundreds of teenage hands in the past, and made his way back to the school. His thoughts shifted to the weekend. A weekend free of a track meet, which meant he could party. He could really use a break. Adults weren’t the only ones to have stress. Between school, track, his parents, Tina being entirely too hard to get, and constantly having the question “What’s going to be your major in college?” thrown out at him . . . Drew was a walking nerve. The only stress relief was rigging the TV in Mrs. Walters’s room. That shit had made him this side of famous for the senior class at school. The CIA should be hooking him up, he decided.

Drew slowed his pace as he ended the hill run and found Coach Gibson.

He rested his hands on his knees to catch his breath. “I’m done,” Drew told his coach.

Coach Gibson stood with his arms crossed over his chest, his eye following the sprinters as they ran their drills. “Coach Ward has you running that hill for the next week.”

Drew rolled his eyes. “I know.” And mowing lawns. Good thing Mrs. Walters liked her flower garden, so the lawn he needed to mow this weekend wasn’t that big.

From the corner of Coach Gibson’s mouth he heard, “So that app you used to turn on the TV . . . what was that?”

Drew took a moment for the question to register. “Uhm, there are a few of them. Depends on your phone. I used Gizmode.”

Coach Gibson’s head nodded a couple of times. “On the app store?” he asked.