Page 98 of In Safe Hands
Rory didn’t look upset. “Not your fault. Ian’s just…how he is.” By the sappy look on her face, she liked Ian exactly as he was. “Did the chief determine it was just an accident, then?”
“Probably.” To Daisy, it didn’t feel like an accident. It was one more way the house was turning from a sanctuary into a trap. “Although the repairman said the damage was strange.”
“Strange?” the other women echoed.
“Strange as in deliberate?” Lou asked.
“The repair guy laughed at the idea when Chris suggested it.” Although she knew it was ridiculous to think that someone had intentionally sabotaged her stove—had tried to kill her—Daisy’s stomach was churning.
The other women exchanged uneasy glances. “But did he say it couldn’t have been deliberate?” Ellie asked.
Even in her Chris-induced happy daze, the possibility that someone had intentionally caused the gas leak had been poking at the back of her brain. “No. Who would’ve done that, though? And why?”
“An explosion sounds right up an arsonist’s alley,” Lou said in a hushed voice, as if she were in danger of being overheard. “And you were a witness to a possible dead-body moving.”
“But who? And how?” Daisy repeated, unable to wrap her head around the idea that someone hated her enough to try to kill her. “No one ever comes inside. Only my dad, Chris, our workout group, Tyler Coughlin, and that real estate agent.” As she listed off the names, Lou wrote them down.
“Real estate agent?” Rory repeated.
Daisy grimaced. “We need to have these meetings more often. The real estate agent was showing the house across the street, and they found blood on the ceiling. Chris wanted to get a warrant to search the place, but the sheriff refused.”
“Why?” Lou turned from the notepad. “I would think blood would be suspicious enough to call for a search, especially after what you saw.”
“Tyler Coughlin was here?” Rory interrupted.
A little startled by the change in topics, Daisy blinked at her before answering. “Yes. He’s my grocery-delivery boy.”
Looking grim, Rory stared at the names on the list. “When was he here last?”
The room suddenly felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of it. Daisy barely found enough air to speak. “Yesterday,” she said in a tiny voice. “Right before the gas leak.”
“Tyler?” Ellie sounded shocked. “The sheriff’s son? But he’s a kid!”
“He’s sixteen.” Lou drew a circle around his name. “Old enough to know how to start a fire. And that would explain why the sheriff would try to cover for him.”
“Including the missing arson reports,” Rory added.
Swallowing hard, Daisy thought about bashful Tyler, all gangly arms and legs, who pretended he was grown up enough to like coffee. “I don’t know. It fits, but… Do you think he murdered Willard Gray, too? I don’t think he’d be capable of killing someone, do you?”
“If it was him, he tried to blow up your house,” Rory said flatly, “with you in it.”
Everyone went silent. Daisy tried to wrap her head around the idea that Tyler had tried to kill her. The Tyler she’d seen—the awkward, lonely boy—was a murderer. And Tyler’s father…how much had he known?
“The sheriff knew about the arsons,” she started carefully. “Do you think he also knew about Willard Gray? Or my gas leak?”
“He couldn’t,” Ellie said firmly. “There’s no way. To cover up something like that, Rob would have to be just as much of a monster as his son.”
Rory looked uncertain, but Lou added, “I agree. He seems to really care about people. I don’t think he could have known what Tyler was doing—the killing part, at least—and allow it to continue.”
“What do we do?” Daisy asked, her heart thumping like she’d just sprinted a mile. She wasn’t as sure that the sheriff wasn’t complicit in his son’s murderous activities, but the other women knew Rob better than she did.
Carefully capping the marker, Lou placed it on the coffee table. “You need to call Chris.”
* * *
Chris stared grimly at the notebook with unseeing eyes. “Give me until tomorrow.”
The women looked at each other. “He’s killed people,” Daisy said carefully. “If it is Tyler, we need to make sure he’s stopped before he hurts someone.”
