“Give me a second.”
After dishing some into a bowl and popping it into the microwave, she spent a moment straightening up his mostly clean kitchen while it reheated. She added a couple of the rolls she had brought the evening before and cut up an apple she found in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.
“Here you are. Soups and stews are always better the second day, if you ask me.”
“Agreed.”
“I wasn’t snooping—okay, I was snooping a little—and I noticed you didn’t have milk or bread and the only other banana looked pretty ripe. I can pick those up for you and whatever else is on your list. And if you think something sounds good for dinner, let me know.”
“Stew is fine by me, if there’s enough for one more go-round.”
She raised an eyebrow. “My stew is remarkable, I will admit, but you can’t have it for every meal.”
“You’re not running a short-order restaurant here. I’m fine with whatever. I’ve got frozen dinners in the freezer that will do.”
“Are you this stubborn with everyone or am I receiving special treatment?”
If she didn’t know better, she might have thought the stoic sheriff almost smiled, for a minute there. “My deputies would probably say the former,” he answered.
“That makes me feel a little better. I need to run, but make sure you text me your list. I probably won’t have a chance to go shopping until after Chloe gets home from school, but we’ll bring groceries and dinner around five thirty, if that works. Meanwhile, you’ve also got leftover pie and Louise Jacobs’s shortbread.”
“What else could a guy possibly need?”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SCENT OF flowers again lingered in the room after Andrea Montgomery blew out of his house as quickly as she’d come.
He couldn’t seem to escape it. He shifted in the recliner, wishing he could find a spot that was comfortable for more than five seconds.
It wasn’t only the general discomfort from his smashed-to-smithereens leg or his various other aches and pains that left him edgy and unsettled. Her mention of the Jacobs family next door was even more disconcerting.
He knew Herm and Louise from way back. Louise had been good friends with his mother—in a roundabout way, that friendship had been the catalyst for everything that came after.
When he first moved into Wyn’s house here on Riverbend Road in late summer, he had made it a point of going over to say hello to them. It had been the neighborly thing to do, hadn’t it?
Since then, he had spoken with them a few times in passing, but he worked long hours and their schedules didn’t seem to coincide, plus he didn’t really have an obvious excuse for stopping by.
They had bumped into each other a few times at the only grocery store in town—which was one of the main reasons he didn’t do his shopping in Shelter Springs, five miles away, even though the two grocery stores and the box store there were larger and had a far more extensive selection.
He had decided those rare encounters at the little store in Haven Point were worth the disadvantage of having a choice between only two brands of dishwashing detergent.
He needed to figure out a way to do more than say hello in passing. That was the entire reason he was living here in his sister’s house instead of his perfectly adequate—and certainly more conveniently located—apartment in Shelter Springs, after all.
In some vague corner of his mind, he had thought maybe he would wait until after the holidays before he burst in and shook their world completely. He glared down at the stupid cast. He could still go talk to Herm and Louise after the holidays, but some idiot in a stolen SUV had added a complication he never would have anticipated.
How could he show up now, in this completely useless state, when he couldn’t even go to the grocery store on his own?
Though he wasn’t really hungry, he forced himself to take another few bites of Andrea Montgomery’s delicious stew. His body needed fuel to heal, and the faster he healed, the faster he could return to work.
He was on his third bite of stew when his phone buzzed with an incoming text. He set down his spoon and checked the message from Jackie Scott, the assistant he had inherited from the previous sheriff, asking him a question about holiday overtime. He answered her question, which led to two more follow-up texts in quick succession.
Three texts in a row was his personal limit. More than that warranted an actual conversation instead of an endless string of thumbed communications via text or email.
He quickly found her number on his phone and Jackie answered on the first ring.
“You’re not supposed to be working, Sheriff. You should be resting.”