Leave Tomorrow Behind (Stella Crown Series) (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-nine

Austin was nowhere to be found in or around the calf barn, and he wasn’t hanging out at the food tent. The combine demo had ended by that time, and he wasn’t at the grandstand. We ran into Mallory and Brady—who had been there to cheer on Brady’s buddy Smashmaster—and they hadn’t seen Austin, either.

“Why are we looking for him?” Nick said.

“He hates the Greggs.”

“Yeah, but so do lots of other people.”

I stopped walking and pulled him to the side of the fairway. Miranda came along, because she was still stuck to us, like flypaper. “Now, look. You cannot tell anyone else what I’m about to tell you. That means you, too, Miranda.”

She frowned. “What am I, a snitch?”

“You’d better not be.”

“She’s fine,” Nick said. “What is it?”

I explained Laura’s revelation about what she’d seen the night before, and Austin’s story about being with Rikki and placing the lemon in the calf’s trough. “I did see him going to the cops’ building during the parade, so at least he listened to me on that account.”

Miranda gasped. “Maybe he killed her, and he was going to confess.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why, because he’s one of your farmer clique?”

“We don’t have a clique.”

“Right. That’s why you don’t think he did…wait a minute, you don’t think he killed Rikki, but you do think he messed with the Gregg’s dairy cows?”

“He brought the lemons.”

“But just because he did the lemons doesn’t mean he did this, too. He promised not to, didn’t he?”

“I know, but not everyone keeps promises, and he could easily have tampered with the Greggs’ grain before heading over to see the cops, while everyone else was at the parade. The 4-H’ers were all out of the barn, gone to ride on the floats.”

“Okay, hang on.” Nick held up his hands, referee-like. “We don’t have to make this a huge discussion, like everything else with you two. We’re just trying to find Austin, right? So Stella can talk to him?”

“More like interrogate him,” Miranda muttered.

“I won’t…it’s not like I want it to be him.”

“Will you two just—” Nick dropped his hands. “Come out to the car when you’re ready to go home. I’ll be trying not to punch something.”

Miranda and I watched him stalk away.

“Well?” I said. “Aren’t you going with him?”

“Um…I don’t think so. He just slipped into his annoyed zone. When he gets like this I leave him alone.”

Annoyed zone. With us. With me. I really was being a pain in the ass, wasn’t I, when it came to Miranda?

“So come on, then,” I said. “Let’s go find Austin. To talk to him gently.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “You want me to come with you?”

“Where else would you go?”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

We’d already checked the grandstand and the food tent, and we knew he wasn’t in the barn. I had Miranda stick her head in the cops’ building, because I didn’t want to get harassed about what I was doing there, and if I had more to add to my statement, but he wasn’t there, either.

“Why don’t you just call him?” Miranda asked.

“Because I don’t generally collect teenage boys’ numbers.”

“You have Zach’s.”

“Because he’s family.”

“He’s not your fam—”

“Wait. I know where we should check.”

Miranda caught up with me. “What I was going to say is, Zach would know his number.”

“Maybe. Ask him.”

“I don’t have Zach’s contact information!”

“Then here.” I thrust my phone at her. “Text him.”

“But…” She stumbled after me, texting while we speed-walked. I hoped she wouldn’t run into anything, including me.

She was done by the time we reached Austin’s trailer. Everything was dark. I pointed to the side of the trailer. “Wait there.”

“But—”

“He’s not going to talk if you’re here.”

She gave a huge sigh, then stomped into the shadows. Good riddance. Although I was going to have to adjust my attitude to get back in Nick’s good graces. Crap. I liked being rude to Miranda.

“Hello?” I knocked on the door. No response. I tried the door, but it was locked, so I knocked again. Something clanked inside, and the door opened. Austin’s mother stood there in pajamas, not exactly happy to be awake. I was surprised she was even there. According to Austin his folks weren’t spending the week with him.

“Sorry to disturb you,” I said. “Is Austin in?”

She peered up into the narrow bed above the driver’s seat, and nodded. “You need him?”

“Please.”

“This isn’t about Rikki again, is it? He’s talked to enough people about that today.”

The cops. “I know. This isn’t about that. I promise.”

“Then what?”

“Can I please just talk to him? It won’t take long.”

Her mouth pinched, but she must have seen something in my face, or remembered that Austin was eighteen and able to make his own decisions. “Just a sec. I’ll ask if he wants to come out.”

She disappeared back into the trailer, closing the door, and I heard mumbling, then a thump, like something dropping from the ceiling.

Austin came to the door in shorts and a T-shirt, squinting. “What?”

“Can I talk to you a minute?”

“I guess.” His mother stood in the background, making no secret of listening.

“Outside?”

He glanced back at his mom, then stepped out, shutting the door behind him. He took a few steps away, out of hearing range, and crossed his arms. “What do you want?”

I searched for signs of guilt, but saw only cranky teenager. “Do you know anything about what’s going on in the dairy barn right now?”

He made a confused face. “You know I don’t have a dairy cow. Why would I know anything about whatever it is?”

I would have bet anything he was telling the truth. “Who else hates the Greggs enough to sabotage their cows?”

His eyes widened. “I didn’t do any—”

“I know. I believe you.” Because I did. He didn’t look like someone who’d broken a promise, or who had harmed a second and third animal that day. My conscience eased. I hadn’t realized just how worried I was that I’d let him off the hook, and he’d done it again, with a more serious consequence. “But someone else got to their dairy cows. Any ideas?”

“How about everybody in the barn?”

“That’s helpful.”

“Well, it’s the best I can do. I’m hardly over there. Ask Claire or Bobby. Maybe they saw something, or know more about the people in that class.” He clenched his jaw. “You really thought I did it, didn’t you?”

“You did the lemons last night, so…” I shrugged. “You do something stupid like that once, you’re going to have to pay the consequences of someone like me not quite trusting you anymore.”

He looked at the ground. “Yeah. I know.”

“What’s your mom doing here?”

He shrugged. “I called her. Asked her if she could come.”

An eighteen-year-old, who realized he still needed his mother. My heart melted even more. “All right. Go back to bed.”

He shuffled around a little, then crept back into the trailer. I could hear his mom’s voice before the door shut, asking what was going on now.

Chapter Thirty

None of us spoke on the way home. Miranda was driving, so she was concentrating on that, which was best for all of us. Nick sat alone in the back seat—his choice—and my foot was throbbing like it had been stepped on by a cow. Oh, right. It had been.

Stupid me, when we got home I took the time to check my answering machine, which was blinking. And stupid me again, I pushed the button. Detective Watts. The bank. Watts again. Another cop. All of which had taken the advice Miranda had put on the recording, and called me on my cell phone. But that didn’t make their messages any less annoying than they’d been on my voice mail. They might have even been worse, since I was exhausted, and worried, and just a little freaked out by the whole harming-cows-thing. Plus, it made me mad again that the cops would think I’d have more information than what I’d given them the night before. I’d found the girl. That was it. Nothing else. I punched the erase button. I’d deal with the answering machine recording when I wasn’t half asleep.

I fell into bed, barely even saying goodnight to Nick. He was asleep within seconds, it seemed, and I expected to follow him to dreamland. But I didn’t. My brain decided it was time to work. And my foot decided that painkillers were not enough to stem the pain. Damn foot. Damn brain. I tried counting cows, but that just made me think of the fair, and I didn’t want to think of the fair. I wanted to think of Harleys and fresh air and grilled hamburgers. Not fried ones, like at the fair.

The fair.

Sigh.

So I might as well go with it—what about the fair was keeping me awake? Dead country singer, whose manure-crusted face kept popping into my head? Misguided teen, whose prank was both illegal and idiotic, about which I’d broken how many rules by not reporting him? Sick dairy cows, harmed by some unknown assailant? My best friend, supposedly sabotaged by a jealous colleague? The cops, who wouldn’t leave me alone, because I was the one to pull the poor dead girl from the shit pile?

Life was so much easier when all I had to worry about was my future sister-in-law’s wedding planning.

I rolled onto my side and propped my foot up on a wad of blankets. Nick lay on his back, his profile beautiful in the faint moonlight coming through the translucent curtains. All I wanted was to run away with this man and not come back until all the questions were answered. Was that so much to ask?

Apparently, yes.

Okay, so connections. Rikki sang for Gregg, the CEO of Sunburst Studios. Daniella ran the salon where Sunburst sent all of their artists for cosmetic expertise, and knew Rikki. Daniella’s niece and nephew had cows in the same class as Gregg’s daughters. Mrs. Gregg and Daniella were talking at the parade. Gregg and his goons had been looking for someone the night before when I’d been on the fairway, shortly before the screaming girl had discovered Rikki’s body. Austin knew Rikki from childhood, and he’d been seen with her the night before, when the two of them had been busy feeding the Greggs’ calf lemons.

But there were tons of other people at the fair. Who’s to say Gregg or Daniella or Austin, or even the thugs, had anything to do with Rikki’s death? In fact, if Gregg was looking for her, didn’t that pretty much mean he didn’t know where she was, which should bring me to the conclusion that he hadn’t killed her? And I couldn’t make the leap from feeding a calf citrus fruits to killing a friend, or even a girlfriend.

Oh, for crying out loud, I was never going to sleep.

Moving as carefully as possible, I rolled out of bed and limped downstairs. Nick’s laptop lay on the coffee table, and I powered it up. When I pulled up the browser, I took note of what he’d been looking at. Flowers. Caterers. Wedding licenses. Okay, so Miranda had gotten ahold of the laptop. That was clear. Further down the history were things that made more sense for Nick. Realtor sites. Weather in Virginia. Stock prices.

I clicked in the search bar and typed in Rikki Raines. Of course all of the first hits, several of the first pages, in fact, were about her death. Mostly entertainment news sorts of places, ET, Perez Hilton,
People
. Lots of photos of her onstage, talking with fans, hanging out with her producer…David Gregg. I studied the pictures, trying to see if there was anything to gain from them, but mostly what I saw was Gregg’s plastic smile and Rikki’s real one. In most of the photos they were surrounded by other celebrities, or people I didn’t recognize, who must have been fans, since the photos had been tagged on people’s Facebook pages.

Bloggers had been busy guessing who had killed her, and why: crazed stalker types, who believed she would love them if she only gave them a chance; girls who thought she stole their boyfriends; even Valerie Springfield, that other singer Austin had talked about, because she wanted the zombie show guy all to herself. Nobody had mentioned Gregg, or his wife, or anybody else who made sense. And Austin was nowhere to be found, which spoke to how well he and Rikki had kept their secret.

I was shocked to see a hit on the YouTube video I’d starred in the night before. I checked to see if there was a way to delete it, but since I hadn’t posted it, there was nothing I could do except watch it and wish I’d had the sense to break that person’s phone—or arm—before he’d had a chance to publish.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to learn about Rikki, except that she was expected to be a contender in the Grammy Awards’ Best New Artist category. A shame that someone so talented, and from all accounts so real, sweet, and filled with integrity, had been taken before she could reach her potential.

I still wasn’t tired, so I looked up the fair’s schedule, making sure I wasn’t forgetting anything for the next day. Nope. Main thing I wanted to see was the dairy judging, and that would take place in the afternoon, which meant I could spend some time at the farm. A welcome change after the past two stressful days. A little time away, and I felt like I’d become completely disconnected. I guess it hadn’t helped that I’d dealt with not just a murdered girl, but sick cows and a best friend who was maybe being set up for a fall.

A photo on the page’s constantly changing headline caught my eye. There was Claire, smiling for the camera, her face next to her gorgeous cow’s. I clicked on the photo and was taken back to YouTube, where Claire had made a video, probably for a 4-H project, about how to prepare your dairy cow for showing at the fair. She went through the whole process of combing, brushing, washing, shining, trimming, and everything you do to make your cow as beautiful as she can be. Her cow, September Breeze, didn’t need that much help. She really was a gorgeous specimen.

I yawned, finally, and decided I was ready to sleep. Or to at least try. I closed the laptop and made my way upstairs. With any luck, I wouldn’t dream about anything except sleeping.