Edisto Heat by C. Hope Clark

Author:C. Hope Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bell Bridge Books
Published: 2022-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

CALLIE LEFT THE dumpster scene disliking Webb even more. Sweat already glued her hair to her face and dampened her back. She debated whether to go to the station next or to Mark’s. She felt sheepish slipping out on him at dawn. She needed to thank him for the roof over her head, his dealings with the plumber, the insurance adjustor . . . gracious, the meals out of nowhere when she forgot to eat. She owed him big time.

She’d allowed an awkwardness to slip in between them.

However, she didn’t want to fall back into last night’s conversation about how his taking charge at El Marko’s had or had not undermined her presence. Unfortunately, that stood foremost on her mind because of the way Janet had handled the situation at Bikini Bottom and Webb’s reaction as a spectator.

Both times involved Brice. Both times fueled Brice against her. She imagined neither Janet nor Mark seeing things that way, and the more Callie protested about Brice, or about being protected from him by her friends, the weaker and more spoiled she would sound. After all, these folks were in her court.

Too many times she found herself on the defensive around Brice. Gun-shy, she could even call it. He made his personal goal quite evident to commercial business owners and the handful of town employees . . . get rid of Police Chief Callie Morgan. She couldn’t stop his efforts nor his opinions and would appear childish if she attempted to. Her strength came in proving her worth via actions, not words, and in her two-plus years there had been plenty action to show people that Callie understood law enforcement. This Garden of Eden had no clue the crime under its nose until she arrived, and she’d been able to control it, keep it at bay, even hide it behind the scenes in the ultimate effort to maintain the peace, reputation, and economics of Edisto Beach.

Brice’s reasons for his nastiness . . . the why—or rather, the whys— were many and the history too irritating, painful, and private to go into with people. Brice knew her mother once upon a time, intimately, and it hadn’t ended well, the decades in between not having done much to ease his bitterness. Also, Brice had been a rabid fan of Officer Michael Seabrook, and Brice blamed the death on Callie. Everyone knew it, and for a few months afterward the town folk tended to split, siding with one viewpoint or the other. All of them, however, were acutely aware that she blamed herself for not keeping the man she loved alive though a criminal wielded the knife.

That didn’t even count the little things. How she handled cases. The tickets written, or the tickets not written. She presented the department’s activities, budget, and progress at each council meeting. One month he’d accuse her of being heavy-handed, the next she wasn’t doing enough. The rest of the council saw Brice for what he was, a nuisance riding on his grandfather’s legacy, but Brice nagged like a no-see-um in summer.

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