If Fried Chicken Could Fly by Paige Shelton

Author:Paige Shelton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2012-01-02T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

“Jake, what happened?” I said as I gently touched the puffy skin to the side of his eye.

“I was accosted. Trust me, if I wasn’t so scrappy, it would have been much worse.” I looked at Cliff whose tight face showed he was just as concerned as I was.

“He wouldn’t let me call the doctor. He just wanted you,” Cliff said.

“Tell her the details,” Gram said from the cell.

“When I went back to my office, I headed directly to the archives,” he began. “Betts, I’ve been locking the door obsessively for many years. Particularly now, when there’s been a murder. Maybe getting shot at shook me up more than I thought, but I must have forgotten about locking them. I came out of the archives and suddenly the world went bright and then black and then my eye and head hurt. I was on the ground, kind of on my hands and knees, trying to figure out what was going on when whoever hit me in the eye, kicked me in my side.” “Oh, Jake,” I said.

“The side is fine, believe it or not. I’ll probably be bruised, but not badly.” “How did you get out of there?”

“My horse,” Jake said.

“Your horse?” I asked. Jake didn’t own a live horse, but Patches was his one and only Palomino stick horse. “Patches?” “Yeah, somehow I ended up in the corner where she’s always tethered.” Jake smiled, his black eye puffing bigger. “I grabbed her and started swinging with all my might. I couldn’t see right, black spots everywhere, but I kept getting pumped with more adrenaline whenever the stick landed on something solid.” “So you hit your attacker?”

“A couple times at least, but then…”

“Uh-oh, what?”

“He or she seemed to disappear. I thought I heard a commotion in the back room, so I crawled toward the door that leads to the archives. I still wasn’t seeing right, but I know they left out the back door and once I could see better I realized they took Jerome’s files with them. They’re gone, probably never to be seen again.” “Could you make out the person at all? Did you get an idea of who it might be?” I asked.

“No. When they were hitting me or when I was hitting at them, I never got a good look, my vision was messed up. When they were in the back room I was on my hands and knees and the table was mostly in the way, but I think I saw long black pants.” “Tell her what else you saw, Jake,” Gram said.

“Oh yeah. When they were hitting me, I thought I might have seen red spots on the shoes—random spots and only a few of them. I thought they were just more spots like the black ones in my vision, but Miz, Cliff, and Jim don’t think so.” “Told ya,” Gram said. She seemed perfectly comfortable in the cell.

“Men or women’s?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Jake said.

“Well, those shoes and those archives are somewhere.

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