Chapter 23

Friday Late Afternoon …

O ver an hour later Doreen made it to her place again. She collapsed on the patio, all the animals with her again, and all safe. She reached down and hugged Mugs. “Thank you, buddy. I guess you followed them on your own, huh ?” She knew she wouldn’t get any answers from him. With Thaddeus curled up on her shoulder again—as if he had no intention of ever leaving—she had no intention of ever leaving him again either. Also she felt he had forgiven her for whatever she had done to upset him.

She kept petting him and smoothing his feathers, as she tried to calm herself down too. It had been one heck of a day, and she hadn’t had any further check-ins with Mack yet. When she heard footsteps coming across the kitchen floor, she tensed but then relaxed. “There’s no coffee,” she called out.

“We can change that,” Mack replied, with a note of humor.

She smiled over at him, through the open back door. “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired.”

He nodded. “Nothing like finding out that your grandmother has been escorted away at gunpoint, huh ?”

“Right? I still don’t really get that.”

“I don’t either, but I guess Jethro was making some sense to her. According to Nan, he was really grumpy and hadn’t slept in days because of the nocturnal foot traffic. Why was he blaming you though?”

“I don’t know if he was so much blaming me as he thought that I could fix it,” she muttered. “I think he was blaming the fact that I brought so much attention to Kelowna with all these cases that he thought maybe the traffic was a result of that. Nan did share a little bit more information, as I took her home. So, if you need to talk to her, you could head to Rosemoor, but she’s pretty tired as well.”

“No, it’s fine for now. I will need to talk to her, but Darren is on his way over there now. He can do the initial questioning. I figured you probably had as much information as anybody.”

“I would like to think so,” she muttered, “although sometimes I don’t know much of anything anymore.”

He gave a heavy laugh. “Right. That’s exactly how I feel around you sometimes. You come up with stuff so fast and without anybody really having a full understanding. Then you leave the rest of us in the dark, gasping at the speed with which you’ve gotten things rolling.”

“Not this time,” she corrected, “but the good news is, Mugs stayed on Nan’s tail the whole way. Even with Thaddeus on her shoulder from the time I left the house, Mugs wouldn’t leave them alone, and Goliath stayed at Jethro’s gate to let me know which house to search.”

“Which in itself is absolutely fabulous,” he noted, as he reached down to pet both animals. “You’ve certainly got them well trained.”

“I don’t have them trained at all,” she admitted. “That’s the part that scares me. I don’t have them trained, and they can do all kinds of stuff, maybe even more than this, but I wouldn’t know. Or maybe they’re trying to do more, and I have no way of knowing.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it right now,” he said, brushing the hair off her face. “You’ve had quite the day.”

“I have,” she agreed, with a yawn. “What about you? Did you find anybody at Jethro’s neighbor’s house?”

He shook his head. “No, I sure didn’t, but we’ve got a sentry posted to keep an eye out. If Julie’s got any activity going on tonight, we’ll find out.”

“Good. In that case, after this, when you go home, I’m crashing. Hopefully not to wake up until halfway through tomorrow.”

He smiled. “I hope so for your sake,” he muttered. “Honestly I could hope for that for myself too.”

“Thanks for showing up,”

He gave her a mock look of horror. “As if I had a choice.”

She laughed. “No, you really didn’t have a choice in many ways, but I still appreciate the fact that you were there.”

Mack squeezed her fingers. “You sent Tammy home on a bus, huh ?”

“Yeah. It didn’t even occur to me that maybe she should stay in town until we sorted out this mess for good.”

“I was wondering about that too,” he shared, his tone suspiciously neutral. “I guess we know where she is at the moment.”

“I really hope she isn’t part of this,” Doreen murmured. “It makes me feel bad to consider that I might have let her disappear. Not only let her but helped her.”

“I don’t know for sure either way, but it would have been nice if you’d given us the heads-up.”

“But you told me that she was in the clear, and she was only being questioned related to Jed.”

“True, at that time,” Mack noted. “However, as we found out later, she knows a lot more about other things too.”

Doreen sighed at that. “Hopefully she’ll continue to answer questions as she travels across Canada,” she added, with a smile.

“Considering you paid for her ticket, let’s hope she remains on the bus.”

“I paid for the bus ticket, and Nan bought her a few outfits from the thrift store. Nan gave her some running-around money too. Enough to buy a few meals and get back to her mother and her family.”

“That was a good thing that you did,” he stated. “I know times haven’t been easy on you, but you’re always thinking about other people.”

She smiled at him. “I hope you still think so at the end of this,” she muttered, “because if Tammy turns out to be part of it…”

He nodded. “If she is part of it, nobody’ll be happy that you helped an accomplice to murder escape.”