Page 40 of Justice & Liberty

“He wasn’t much of a fan of women.” Hunter crossed to the chairs next to the bookshelves and motioned to one, while sitting in the one facing it. She set her coffee cup on the table next to her, ignoring it for the time being. “I think his second wife left him a long time ago, and he never forgave our entire gender for her fortuitous escape.”

I couldn’t hold down a chuckle at the notion, but also, good for her. Well, except that she’d left at least one child—her own—to be raised by the old monster. Saving yourself was reasonable, admirable even, but saving yourself to the detriment of innocents...well, that was something else.

“But what we need to find is something that changed,” Hunter said, then leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and met my eye with her intense gaze. “Because Ephraim and this town have been in an awkward stasis for decades, and while everyone disliked him, no one even went out of their way to avoid him. No one disliked him enough to kill him.”

“So for someone to have killed him, that needed to change, for at least one person.” I considered, and then nodded to myself. That actually made sense. I didn’t think like an investigator, but when Hunter spelled it out like that, it seemed obvious.

She finally sat back, picking up her coffee cup and taking a sip. “Technically, the best suspect I can think of is my own brother.”

I seated myself in the chair she’d pointed at, sipping at my own drink. I had to admit, Walter made an excellent coffee. “Why your brother?”

“He’s working with my dad these days. Last year he billed Collins for some dental work, and the old man decided it cost too much and he wasn’t going to pay. So Hayden sent the account into collections. The old man threw a fit and threatened to sue. It was a big old nothing burger, because no lawyer in their right mind would take up the case, and Martin Hayes is spineless, even for a lawyer.” She stared blankly at the wall of books, then shook her head again. “Nope. No chance, not even as annoying as it was. I mean, Hay harassed me for months when I decided to join the military out of high school, because good Quakers don’t kill people.”

“Quakers?” I...sort of asked. I knew there were a lot of Quakers in the area, but honestly, I didn’t know all that much about them.

“My whole family,” she said, in a tone that said she was agreeing with me. “And since Quakers are pacifists, it’d have to be something more impressive than an unpaid dental bill to make my brother violent. Last violent people in my family line were Barclay and Edwin Coppock. Well, and me, I guess. But I agree with my dead cousins. Sometimes you have to set aside a belief in order to protect a more important one.”

Her dead cousins...it all came back to me in a rush. The brothers who’d accompanied John Brown to Harper’s Ferry in eighteen-fifty-nine. One had died there and the other had escaped back to Iowa, only to have the governor of Iowa refuse to arrest him, allowing him to escape into Canada. They had been local folk heroes, at least in the eighteen-hundreds, and we’d learned about them in school. Hunter meant setting aside their belief in pacifism in order to protect human rights.

A worthy trade, in my opinion, but I wasn’t a pacifist.

“I mean, honestly, I didn’t suspect your brother to begin with. Maybe I’m being naive, but he’s a dentist. I’ll bet he has a lot of obnoxious customers he’d like to smack, but people would talk about it if he did it.”

She laughed, nodding. “Yeah they would. One of the many reasons I didn’t go into the family business. That, and I think sticking my fingers into the mouths of strangers is kind of gross.”

I lifted a brow. “Only people you know?”

“There’s at least got to be dinner first, right?” She smirked back, and I wanted very much to lean into her. I wished I had a sofa in the shop suddenly. She scrunched her nose, and somehow still managed to be the sexiest thing in town. Maybe the whole damn state. “Besides, people like Lucy Beasley go there. Imagine sticking your hands in her mouth.”

I cringed, but then considered, cocking my head. “I mean, at least she’d have to shut up?”

We both had a good laugh at that, and it lasted longer than the rather weak joke should have warranted. But then, there wasn’t a whole lot to laugh about in the situation, and we hadn’t gotten anywhere figuring out who killed Ephraim Collins. Still, it was...good. Hunter would help me figure everything out.

Even if I had to go through every spell in my family grimoire to get there.

21

We spentmost of the morning and afternoon discussing half the population of South Liberty, their ties to Ephraim Collins—or rather, their standing beef with him—and whether it seemed likely they’d have killed him. Or in some cases, whether it was remotely possible for them to have killed him.

“It would help if we actually knew what he died of,” Hunter said, sitting back and watching me flip the store’s open sign to closed. We’d eaten lunch together in the shop, just some sandwiches that Walter had brought over after he’d cleaned up the coffee shop, and I was considering asking her home for dinner.

Was that weird? Was it too fast? Too much like a date when we were supposed to be investigating a murder to help my childhood best friend?

She’d put her arm through mine earlier. That meant she was interested, right? She was definitely interested in women, but I was pretty sure that—that I was going to keep torturing myself with it until I knew for sure, because what if I made a move and I was wrong?

Terminal embarrassment.

I’d always suspected I would die of shame over my own awkwardness. It was one of the reasons I let the world lead me, instead of jumping into new things. No rejections if you let everything come to you.

I was still stewing in my head over whether Hunter was actually interested in me, like a kid who was about to write a note that said “do you like me? y/n,” when I remembered something.

“Sheriff Parker said it was poison when he came to my house. He said Ephraim got himself poisoned. Does that help?”

Hunter frowned, then shook her head. “Not really, unfortunately. Not unless it was some kind of rare, hard to get poison.”

She opened her mouth to continue, but engine noise grabbed both of our attention to the front. That was...loud. No one I knew of in town drove a vehicle that made that much noise, unless someone had lost their muffler.

Hunter, on the other hand, brightened, grabbing her cane and using it to push up out of the chair. She winced a little, and I wasn’t sure whether it was her injury, the inactivity of the day, or both. None of my business unless she offered to chat about it, though, so I just raised a brow at her. “Does someone in town drive a car like that now?”

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