Once Upon A Half-Time 2(156)
Right now, I was desperately avoiding my once favorite Kung Pow Chicken. “I have to figure out who burned down my shop.”
“Oh.” Delta paused. She put it together pretty quick. “So Maddox left for good? Hasn’t been back?”
He hadn’t returned my texts, calls, anything. “He’s gone.”
“Did he know you were doing all this?”
“No.”
Delta cautiously balanced the container on her knees and speared a piece of General Tso’s chicken with a plastic fork that already lost a prong. “What’d you find out? Anything you didn’t already know?”
Yeah. I uncovered one big revelation that didn’t help any of us. “It wasn’t Nolan Rhys.”
Delta snorted. “I could have told you that.”
“I swear…it just made sense. He was so obsessed with me and Maddox. But the timeline is wrong, and he would have lost too much money burning it down just to buy the land and rebuild what he wanted.”
“You know who the criminal is, don’t you? Forget the papers and the charts and all the investigations.”
“It wasn’t him.”
“Josie, he went to jail.”
My chest squeezed. Guilt hurt worse than any loneliness. “I know. I framed him for it.”
“You what?” Delta stilled, the fork an inch from her mouth. “Did…you forget to bake the cookies before you ate the dough?”
“I’m serious.”
“Did you happen to leave the gas oven on?”
Goddamn it. It wasn’t a joke. I ruined my life, and I lost the man I loved. All because I was so stupid, so helpless to stop the inevitable.
“Nolan threatened his life, and I knew he was in danger,” I said. “I gave an anonymous tip to the police so they would hold him in a cell until I could get out of the hospital and prove it was Nolan who set the fire.” I kicked the papers at my feet. They scattered. I didn’t bother picking them up. They couldn’t help me now anyway. “It wasn’t Nolan. Goddamn it. It wasn’t Nolan.”
Delta quieted, and I hated it. Without her talking, she could hear the break in my voice. I’d collapse in tears, and it’d do nothing but humiliate me and waste more time that I could have been finding answers and researching. I rubbed my eyes. It hurt, but it stuffed the tears down.
“Josie, when was the last time you slept?”
I didn’t have time to sleep. Not like I could anyway, not with him gone and my mind racing and my heart shattering and my stomach flipping and my body aching—
“I just napped,” I said.
“When was the last time you ate?”
“I’m really, really not hungry.”
“I’m officially worried about you.” Delta sighed. “I talked to Sean. He said you called off from the paper three days in a row. Have you left the house at all?”
“I saw Granddad.”
“Good.” She sounded too relieved. “How is he?”
I didn’t want to answer that one. “Worse. Sullen. He’s not eating much, and the last time I visited him he only said one thing.”
“What was it?”
I gritted my teeth. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“He didn’t say. Just…everything probably. We moved him to the different wing, and he knows we don’t have the money for it. That guilt is killing him, and there’s nothing I can do to…help. I can’t pull him out of this depression.”
Delta shifted the papers on the coffee table and dug out the framed picture Granddad gave me. She flashed the photo at me, and I didn’t realize how much I missed Granddad’s smile until I saw it beaming from that perfect time years ago when the shop kept us all together.
Just another reason to find the man who destroyed it.
I pointed to the wall where I hung police reports and newspaper articles with details on the chief.
“I have two other suspects,” I said.
Delta laughed. “Suspects? Are you setting up an interrogation room in your kitchen? A forensics lab in the bathroom?”
“Chief Craig was blackmailing Maddox.”
Her smile faded. “He what?”
“He paid him thousands of dollars, but the chief was looking for a reason to throw him in jail before Maddox exposed him.”
“Exposed…what?”
“His affair with Chelsea.”
Delta blinked, completely shocked. “But that’s impossible. He’s been married for fifteen years. They have kids!”
Revealing Chelsea would destroy the chief and his family, but exposing the abuse and prostitution? No wonder he wanted to keep it quiet.
I handed her a stack of papers from the town’s zoning office—every complaint and letter and hearing notice about our property line.