Chapter 3

Chapter Three

M y business partner Bruce Wayne Decker was already at work with his crew when I pulled up to the Thatcher residence—not that I was surprised. He and his men usually got started around seven, and it was almost nine. They were all much faster and more efficient than I was at the physical aspect of the business, but RBW had come to life because I loved growing and planting.

I spent most days coming up with designs for clients, while Bruce Wayne handled the logistics of installing the designs I made with my best friend, and sister-in-law, Neely Kate. But sometimes my designs didn't work in the real world. Getting field experience helped me become a better designer…and Joe was right: I liked digging in the dirt.

Bruce Wayne waved as I walked over.

"Sorry I'm late," I said as I surveyed what they'd done so far. "I had to deal with an incident with Ashley at school."

" Ashley? " he asked in surprise. "What happened?"

Bruce Wayne, of all people, would understand. He'd had his run-ins with the law. In fact, I'd met him after being kicked off the jury when he was on trial for murder. I'd seen a vision that had proven his innocence, and since the prosecuting attorney had refused to believe me, I'd set out to clear his name.

I told Bruce Wayne everything, and he listened with a grim expression.

"Is she okay?" he asked when I'd finished.

"I'd like to say yes, but I'm not sure."

He nodded. "Unfortunately, what the kid said is true. Her father is in prison." He gave me a sidelong glance. "And he worked for a bad, bad man."

Pretty much everyone villainized James Malcolm—the "bad, bad man." Very few people realized what he had sacrificed for the county. Sacrificed for me and Hope. He'd lost everything, even his best friend Jed, and some days I struggled with the weight of my guilt.

But I couldn't contradict him. Bruce Wayne had never trusted James, and there was nothing I could say that would change his mind. I'd stopped trying long ago.

"I can't change what Ashley's father did or what happened to him," I said. "I just need to help her get through it."

"Unfortunately, I don't think you can stop it," he said with a frown. "Now that it has been brought up in front of her classmates, they aren't going to forget." He shifted his weight. "Maybe you should talk to Jonah about it."

"Good idea." A few years ago, Jonah, the pastor at New Living Hope Revival Church, had been my counselor for several months. He'd been a rock for me to lean on at a time when I'd desperately needed one. Besides, Ashley loved Jonah, and she might be more willing to open up to someone other than me or Joe.

He grinned. "I'm full of ‘em."

"There's no denying that," I said emphatically. He'd come up with more than half of the ideas that had built up our landscaping business. And now that he had two kids of his own, he was even hungrier for success.

"Tell me where you want me," I said.

"A storm's supposed to roll in tomorrow afternoon—it might even snow—so we're trying to get as much done today as we can."

"Snow?" I asked in surprise. We didn't usually get snow in mid-March, but then again, this was Southern Arkansas. The weather could change on you at the drop of a hat. "Okay, if you're wanting to get this job done quickly, that means I should work in a less critical area. Tell me what to do."

"That's where you're wrong. You can hold your own with the best of ‘em." He sent me to work digging up an area where I'd designed a retaining wall. We needed to build a stable base before we started stacking the stones.

I got to work, and a few minutes later, Bruce Wayne, who was ripping out some bushes about ten feet from me, stared at the street and said in amazement, "Well, I'll be."

I glanced up and saw Neely Kate's car pulling up behind my Suburban and parking at the curb. Neely Kate got out and headed toward us in a pair of jeans and her bedazzled long-sleeved RBW Landscaping T-shirt.

"What's goin' on?" I asked as she approached.

"I thought I'd play in the dirt too," she said as she picked up a shovel and glanced around, refusing to make eye contact. In fact, her eyes looked puffy, like she'd been crying. "What are we doin'? Just digging up a mess?"

While this was hardly the first time Neely Kate had helped at a job site, she wasn't a fan of it. She'd told me once that she didn't need to try stacking a few stones in person to understand why something had gone wrong. "A pastry chef doesn't need to attend a wedding to see why her cake fell over when it's obvious a drunk bridesmaid tackled the groom after he'd screwed her the night before."

I'd nearly told her it wasn't the same thing, but for all of her bluster, she'd be the first one to show up at a job site if one of her designs didn't work. Plus, I knew for a fact that very thing had happened at her second cousin's wedding a year ago.

So why was she here? Based on the state of her eyes, now didn't seem the time to ask.

"We're prepping for a small retaining wall."

"Okay," she said with a sigh. "So I just dig?"

"Dig up over the spray-painted line," I said, gesturing to the orange line Bruce Wayne had already painted on the grass.

"Yeah, okay," she said absently.

I cast a worried look at my friend. Something was definitely wrong.

We started digging, and I hoped she'd confess what was bothering her while we worked. Neely Kate was a talker, and she usually wore her feelings on her chest like merit badges. Then again, I knew from experience that she was plenty capable of keeping secrets. She'd kept some deep, dark ones from me for years, and she'd only told me then because they'd risen up like ghouls in the night to haunt her.

After a few minutes, I asked, "Does Daisy still have a cold?" Neely Kate's daughter was about seven weeks younger than Hope, and they went to the same daycare. Since Daisy was Neely Kate's only child, she tended to be overprotective and got a lot more worried than I did over sniffles and skinned knees.

"Last weekend, she was blowing snot everywhere, but it seems to be getting better." She stopped digging and looked up at me. "Who knew kids had so many bodily secretions oozing out of ‘em?"

"True," I said. "Thankfully, Liam seems to be over his. I'm just dealing with teething now. His molars are giving him fits."

Neely Kate glanced away, and more guilt washed through me. Neely Kate and Jed had adopted Daisy when she was a couple of days old because Neely Kate had been told she couldn't have children after a miscarriage several years ago. She loved Daisy more than life itself, but I knew some part of her wished she could still carry a baby in her own belly.

"Thankfully, that won't last long," Neely Kate said, pressing her foot on the edge of the shovel and shoving it into the dirt. A large thud sounded, and she took her foot off the shovel. "I hit something."

"A rock?" The ground here was full of them.

"No. Something else."

She dug up more dirt and exposed what looked like a piece of wood.

"It's probably a piece of two by four left behind from when they built the house," I said. Over the years, we'd found all kinds of things the builders left behind. Beer cans, wood, concrete. "Remember when Bruce Wayne found a toilet?"

"I do," she said, scooping out more dirt. "What's under here is a mystery." She gave me a grin. "Remember when we used to solve those?"

"That was ages ago, and definitely before we had kids."

She got quiet and dug out another pile of dirt. "Don't you miss it?" she asked, then looked up at me.

"Investigating?" I asked in surprise. I hadn't thought about those days in a long time.

But that wasn't exactly true.

I'd been thinking about James and Ashley and Mikey's dad…and having nightmares about Hardshaw coming back to seek their revenge. But Neely Kate didn't know about any of that. Not even the nightmares. I barely told Joe because speaking about it made me feel like I was giving Hardshaw more power over me. "What's in the water? First, some kid makes fun of Ashley about her daddy being in prison, and then you bring up investigating. It's not like we even got our PI licenses."

"Whoa!" she said, moving her shovel next to her and leaning on it. "What do you mean, some kid made fun of Ashley?"

I told her about my morning and my meeting at the school.

"At least they're taking it seriously," Neely Kate said as she dug more dirt off the piece of wood. I walked over to take a look. It was definitely bigger than a two-by-four. She'd exposed a section about a foot wide.

"Trust me. I'm going to follow up." I drew in a breath. "I can't imagine what Joe's gonna say when he finds out."

"He doesn't know?"

"She told me this morning, and you know how crazy our mornings are."

Her face went blank, and I tilted my head. "Okay, something's goin' on with you. Spill it."

She glanced over at Bruce Wayne and the three other workers. "I'll tell you over lunch because, fair warning, I'm not working out here this afternoon. I'm not a fan of perspiring."

I laughed. "There's a chance of snow tomorrow afternoon and evening, so I suspect it will be getting cooler, not warmer. And besides, no one told you to come out and dig with me."

"The office was too quiet."

Any other day, I would have accepted that statement at face value. Neely Kate was the most extraverted extravert I'd ever met, but I could see that something was bothering her. Had she and Jed had a fight? They didn't have them very often, but when they did, they were usually doozies. Still, she'd never been shy about telling me about their arguments, so it made me think it was something else.

I started digging with her, and within another minute, we'd uncovered more of the wood. Now that it was more exposed, it was obviously not a piece of construction wood. It appeared to be carved.

"It's a box," Neely Kate exclaimed in excitement.

I got down on my knees and started digging out dirt with my hands as I tried to uncover the sides. It was at least six inches tall, and once I exposed the bottom edge, I had Neely Kate pry it up with her shovel. Once one side was lifted, I reached in and tugged it out.

We both sat on the ground as I set the box in front of Neely Kate. She brushed loose dirt from the carvings. An intricate tree was carved on top of the lid, and the sides were engraved with vines and flowers. There were curved wooden feet at the base, but one of them had broken off. The wood was damp, and it stunk a little, but the scent wasn't overpowering.

"What do you think it is?" she asked, holding it up to examine the sides.

"It looks like a jewelry box." I tried to open the top, but it didn't budge. I wiped some of the caked mud off the sides, looking for a keyhole, and finally found a small hole on one long side. "It needs a key. Do you see one in the hole?"

Neely Kate leaned over and scanned the small pit we'd just made. We both rummaged through the loose soil, but a couple of minutes of searching turned up nothing.

"What do we do with it?" Neely Kate asked.

"I don't think it belongs to the homeowners. They've owned the house only a few years." I grabbed my phone out of my back pocket and pulled up my camera app. "I'll take a photo and send it to them."

Still sitting on the ground with Neely Kate, I sent the photo in a text, telling them we'd dug it out of the spot where their retaining wall was going. Jill, the homeowner, called me right away, and I put her on speaker phone.

"What is it?" she asked in excitement.

"It looks like a jewelry box," I said, "but it's locked. Did you guys happen to bury it or know who might have?"

"Never seen it," she said, then hesitated. "But I don't feel right about taking it when it clearly belongs to someone else. The question is, who?"

"We can find out," Neely Kate offered enthusiastically.

I glanced up at her with wide eyes.

"You can?" Jill asked.

"Don't you want to know what's in it?" I asked.

"No," Jill said. "I'd rather return it to its rightful owner." She paused. "Do you really think you can find them?"

"Of course," Neely Kate said before I could stop her. "Piece of cake."

"Thank you," Jill said breathlessly. "Whatever it is, it looks important. I really want the true owner to have it. Of course," she added, "I wouldn't mind knowing what they found in it."

I started to ask her if she knew who had owned her house before she'd purchased it, but she said, "Oh, I've got to go. My client just walked in."

She hung up, and I put my phone in my lap, looking Neely Kate in the eyes. "What have you done?"

Her eyes shone with excitement. "I found us a case. I put it out into the universe, and it answered." She shook her head in amazement. "How crazy is that ?"

"We don't do that anymore, Neely Kate," I protested. "We're landscapers. We have kids."

The sparkle in her eyes dimmed. " You have kids , Rose. I have one."

I reached over and took her hand. "You are an amazing mom, Neely Kate. That has nothing to do with the number of kids you have."

"What if I want more?"

I paused. "I'm sure Jed is open to adopting again."

She bit her bottom lip. "What if I don't want to adopt?"

"Oh, honey." She'd talked to multiple doctors about having a baby, but most had told her she had too much scarring, and that if she got pregnant, the chances of her losing the baby were high.

"Rose," she said, giving me a watery smile. "I'm pregnant."