Page 89 of Wildflower and Whiskey
“Okay.” He lifted the box gently in both hands and set it down on a contractor bag he’d spread out. Then he cut a thin slice through the tape with a pocketknife, pried the top open with two gloved fingers, and eased back the flaps.
No one breathed.
Inside was a child’s toy truck, a bright yellow plastic thing. The wheels were smudged with something dark. There was a folded sheet of printer paper. Becket lifted the page with two fingers and read.
He didn’t say the words. He passed the paper to me.
YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU.
It wasn’t handwritten. Block letters from a printer.
The room narrowed and then snapped back. I felt Elyna’s eyes on me like a wire. I passed the note back to Becket, and he slid it into an evidence sleeve the other officer held open.
“What’s on the wheels?” Elyna asked, her voice low, too even. She’d fixed her gaze on the toy so she didn’t have to look at the sentence.
Becket leaned in. “Could be grease. Could be oil. Could be dirt from any parking lot in the province.”
I checked the camera from the kitchen feed and connected it to the main TV so Becket could analyze it.
We watched it together. An empty porch at 11:57. A blur at 11:58 and a shadow passing fast, crouching, then gone, head turned away, as if he knew exactly where the camera cone ended. Cheekbone. Hoodie. Gloved hands. No plate in the sliver of driveway the lens caught.
“Professional enough not to smile for the camera,” Becket said. “Amateur enough to step under the chime.” He flicked his gaze toward the device above the door. “It sounded. He didn’t care.”
“He wanted me to know,” Elyna said softly. I turned to her. She’d gone very still. “He wanted me to feel it.”
I had a hard time not punching a hole in my own counter.
Becket bagged the truck and the box. “We’ll dust the tape and the inner flaps. Might catch a rush fingerprint. The note’s a no-lift, but we’ll pull a fiber check.” He lifted his eyes to me. “Keep the house tight. Patrol at the end of the lane. You walk her to the truck for daycare drop and pickup. No routines alone.”
“You think this is Riley?” Elyna asked. She meant,Please tell me this is just Riley being cruel and not something bigger.
Becket didn’t blink. “I think men who are losing money like to remind people they can be found,” he said. “And men who want leverage reach for whatever’s small and close.”
The words hit their mark. Braden clapped at the sound of the evidence bag crinkling, utterly delighted by a sound that made my stomach hurt. I kissed the top of his head and tasted baby shampoo and the faintest hint of apple.
“Leave it with us,” Becket said to me, softer this time. “We’ll run it. Dad wants an update at sixteen hundred. If anything, andI mean anything, feels wrong, you call us right away. Patrol is two minutes out.”
When they were gone, the kitchen felt too bright. Elyna exhaled like she’d been holding her breath through Becket’s entire visit. She pressed her hands to her eyes for a second. When she dropped them, there was a steadiness there that made something in my chest loosen.
“I’m not going to let them scare me,” she said simply, and I watched her in awe.
“Good,” I said, and my voice scraped a little. “Because I’ll die before I let them take anything else.”
Her mouth trembled and then firmed. She stepped into me like the room had tilted that way. I took her in, one hand at her nape, one at her waist. We stood there until the adrenaline eased and the world widened out enough for air.
The afternoon passedwith us trying to occupy ourselves with ordinary, mundane tasks. I repaired a sticky hinge on the mudroom door; Elyna washed Braden’s favorite fox because he managed to throw it in the garbage. Eric dropped off soup while pretending not to see the way my shoulders relaxed when the porch cam showed his stupid backward baseball cap and not a stranger.
By three, the orchard went the color of pewter again, the light thinning the way it did in October before it got dark early, and the snow arrived. I was pacing and checking the feeds. I was so restless that I texted Becket again for the umpteenth time.
Any hits?
Becket:No, I’m working
“You’re wearing a path in the floor,” Elyna said, not looking up from the lower cupboard where she was trying to convince the Tupperware to respect geometry.
“Floor needed a path anyway,” I said.
She closed the cupboard and pushed up to standing. “Come sit.”
