Desert Dead by Lorena McCourtney

Author:Lorena McCourtney [McCourtney, Lorena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rogue Ridge Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

MAC

When we got to her little store, Betsy thanked me effusively for taking her to the doctor, including a friendly squeeze of my leg. I was a little startled. Certainly not something I was expecting. I’m beginning to think that woman may have designs on me.

I immediately scoffed at that thought. Ivy sometimes calls me a “silver fox,” but her opinion is probably biased. I’m just blessed that she has designs on me.

Betsy said she’d put a battery charger on her car and that should take care of the non-starting problem. I probably should have offered to do it for her, but at the moment I was a little wary of Betsy and her roving hand. I drove on to our motorhome. As soon as we were inside, I asked Ivy what she was so eager to tell me. I know Ivy, and I could tell there was something.

She told me about seeing the red cord in Mike’s van and that it looked like the same cord we’d seen tied around Warren’s body. “I don’t want to think Mike had anything to do with Warren’s death. I like Mike. But . . .”

“What possible motive would he have?”

“Maybe Warren didn’t approve of his relationship with Jenna.”

Possible. “But killing him seems like a rather extreme reaction, don’t you think?” I liked Mike too. I liked his concern for his mother and his hard work ethic. I liked how he seemed really interested in the message at church on Sunday and the way he treated Jenna with such care and respect. “Mike strikes me as the kind of guy who, if his girlfriend’s father didn’t like him, would just work harder to win his approval.”

“But what if there was something, you know, really unpleasant in Mike’s past, something he didn’t want Jenna to know?”

“Such as?”

“Something foolish or maybe even criminal, maybe something from back when he was in college. Kids do some dumb things in college, you know. Or maybe something even worse. A prison record. Or maybe he did something and didn’t get caught, and somehow Warren found out about it and threatened to tell her.”

A kind of moneyless blackmail? “Too bad we don’t have internet service here. We could see what we could find out about him.”

“Yes! The internet knows all. There’s probably some place in Yuma where we can do it. You know, one of those cybercafé kind of places.”

**

So here we were the following morning, not at a cybercafé but at the local library, which generously allowed even non-cardholders like us to use their public computers. We squeezed around one that wasn’t in use, and after a bit of fumbling with the unfamiliar machine, I got Mike’s name into the search line.

It’s no doubt true that the internet knows all. In fact, sometimes it knows too much and still can’t tell you what you want to know. We got a website for a Mike Redstone landscape service in Pennsylvania. An obituary in Alabama. A birth announcement in Texas. Several Mike Redstones existed on Facebook, none of whom was the one we wanted.

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