“Tell you what, if I’m not going to renew my lease come July, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Thanks, Ronnie. I appreciate that.”
We shook hands again. Suddenly her fingers tightened around mine, so hard that I couldn’t break free.
My heart rate accelerated and I stared at her. “What is it?” I whispered, but she didn’t answer, her eyes unseeing and almost opaque.
The skin touching mine turned ice-cold. I knew she wasn’t faking it, and my heart beat even faster. She was silent for so long, my hand was freezing by the time she finally let go.
“What?”
Ronnie shook her head, looking as shaken as me.
“Something. I don’t know what. But you’re in danger, Daisy Buchanan, there’s no doubt about that. Watch your back.”
• • •
On Saturday, Angus held the auction for Harriet Kunes’s vast collection. We all agreed to help out because he could use the extra hands on deck.
Martha and Cyril volunteered to man the snack bar, Eleanor said she would check people in and assign bidder numbers, and I offered to help move merchandise up to the stage. Betty Backstead would be logging in the winning bids on her laptop.
Joe had promised to come, too, but on Saturday morning when I was ready to leave, he decided he was too busy with his miniatures. After a brief, tense exchange, I walked out of the house, slamming the door behind me.
The auction building was situated on three pastoral acres just outside of Sheepville, across from the Backsteads’ white stucco farmhouse. It was a low corrugated metal building, and I was glad the weather had turned cooler because there was no air-conditioning inside, only a few ceiling fans. With the way some auctions and some bidders heated up, it could get brutal in there.
As I pulled into the lot, I glimpsed Eleanor’s red Vespa zooming up behind me in my rearview mirror. Cyril’s pickup truck was already parked outside. Eleanor and I walked into the auction house together, past the reception area to the snack bar, where Martha was setting up two large slow cookers.
“I’ve brought my famous buffalo wings and spicy meatballs today. That should keep the men happy.”
“Oh, aye? Tha’s a right spicy meatball tha sen,” Cyril growled, appraising Martha from the rear as he turned the coffee urn on to brew.
Eleanor made the motion of sticking a finger down her throat, and I chuckled as I walked on through to the main auction space. Rows of wooden folding seats that Angus had salvaged from an old theater sat in the center of the concrete floor.
“Yo, Daisy!”
I turned around as I heard the familiar husky voice of Patsy Elliott. She and her daughter came rushing up to me, and I bent down to give Claire a hug. She clung to me, unwilling to let go. I sometimes thought that even though we weren’t technically related, these two meant more to me than some of my real family members.
Patsy was tall, with dark curly hair and blue eyes, and lean curves that generated lots of tips at the diner. The classic healthy freckle-faced Irish girl. Claire had dark hair and would be tall, too, when she grew up, but that was where the resemblance ended.
Her heart-shaped face and huge eyes under arched brows would almost be too exotic for Millbury when she eventually blossomed into womanhood. Angus had nicknamed her “Legs” because she had the longest legs compared with her nine-year-old body.
“Sorry I haven’t stopped in your store in, like, forever,” Patsy said. “I’ve been run off my feet with waitressing, and helping with the auctions. Plus, do you have any idea how much freaking homework they give kids these days? I’d like to smack some of these teachers.”