Crime Times Two

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Praise for Julie Howard

  Crime Times Two

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing

  Also available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc. and other major retailers

  Jowls quivered under the man’s weak chin, and Meredith noted the stained and frayed shirt of someone who spent a lot of time alone in dark rooms, sending out a better version of himself into the virtual world. His eyes were anxious and beseeching at her as though she should have a clear understanding of him and his life. Somehow, over the past hour and a half they’d been sitting next to each other—him playing video games and sharing his life story and her ignoring him the best she could—she had become his confessor and friend.

  Meredith gave him what she hoped was an impartial-though-quasi-friendly smile. She reached for her purse and papers and rose from her chair. “Well. Nice talking with you.”

  The man was lost in his own train of thought and seemed only slightly aware that Meredith was leaving. He shook his head, morose.

  “To make a long story short,” he summed up, “I think my wife is trying to kill me.”

  Praise for Julie Howard

  “It is a pleasure to read Julie Howard's clear, precise descriptions, natural dialogue and compelling story lines. Her characters are finely etched and well used. Julie is a wordsmith well worth reading.”

  ~Frederick Foote, Author

  “For the Sake of Soul” and “Crossroads Encounters”

  “The cast of characters that populate Hay City are warm and inviting, but be careful. There's danger in the Idaho air that might just keep you up turning pages.”

  ~Greta Boris, Amazon best selling author

  “A Margin of Lust”, book one of “The 7 Deadly Sins”

  “This book grabs you from the start and you can't let go until the end. Add Julie Howard to your must-read list!”

  ~Sylissa Franklin, Author of the Sierra Scott mysteries

  Crime Times Two

  by

  Julie Howard

  Wild Crime, Book Two

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Crime Times Two

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 by Julie Howard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: info@thewildrosepress.com

  Cover Art by RJ Morris

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Mainstream Mystery Edition, 2018

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-2189-9

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-2190-5

  Wild Crime, Book Two

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To all the wonderful people at my writing groups who inspire me to keep writing ‘one hour at a time.’

  Part One

  The heart is a wild thing. It hunts and hungers all through one’s life.

  Don’t ever take another’s devotion for granted. As easily as love comes, it goes.

  Sometimes it strikes out.

  Chapter One

  The computer screen blinked and faded to black. A half second later, the lights in the small library flickered off. Meredith Lowe stared at the dark screen and groaned. “Oh hell.” She didn’t have time for this.

  The man sitting at the computer station next to hers gave a loud sigh. “Second time this week,” he muttered. “Power company’s doing some work on the road behind here; the men keep hitting the lines.”

  Meredith stared at the dark screen in the dim light coming through the lone front window. She hadn’t saved her homework and it was due before midnight tonight. Only, she didn’t have until midnight. Her five-year-old daughter, Jamie, needed to be picked up from kindergarten in a couple of hours, and there was no computer or Internet access at home. A couple of her Hay City friends offered to let her use their personal PCs which would save her the trip to the Twin Lakes library, but she’d relied on others too often in recent months. It was time she stood on her own two feet.

  “How long until the lights come back on?”

  She glanced at the man, but his head was now on his chest, eyes closed and breathing deeply. All that role-game playing must have tired him out, she thought.

  Meredith peered around the small community library. Forty minutes from her home in Hay City, the place was situated in a decaying strip mall, sandwiched between a former gift shop—now boarded-up—and an insurance office. The place consisted of one reasonably sized room, with two walls of books, a corner dedicated to movies and three computers, and a solitary librarian who continued reading her book by flashlight. Aside from the napping man and the librarian, the only other patron was a sour-faced, middle-aged woman checking out the supply of romance paperbacks.

  Twin Lakes, a small town within the vast area covering High County, was up a steep, winding road tucked in a notch of the Sawtooth Mountains and possessed the county’s only library. The town also housed the region’s only doctor’s office, which was strange because the high mountain location with deep snows at least three months of the year made it accessible only by snowmobile during winter months. Anyone throughout the vast county unlucky enough to break a leg on a ski slope or from slipping on ice would have to drive much farther than Twin Lakes to find a doctor.

  What is a chemical bond?

  Meredith forced herself to think about the question she’d been answering on her homework before the screen went blank. She'd written the answer twice already, deleting the response once before getting the words right, then seeing the text pop into darkness when the power failed.

  Here’s a better question, she thought: Why is a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, living in the middle of nowhere, taking an online college chemistry course?

  It’s because I’m a mother of two, she answered herself. I can’t keep on like this, struggling to make a living. My kids deserve a better childhood than mine. After a childhood filled with poverty and speckled with homelessness, she vowed she'd do anything to prevent her children from repeating that same life. At one point, she even considered murder…

  She still didn’t know what her ultimate goal would be with college, but her friend Honey advised her to start with a class or two while she was making up her mind. Idaho’s state college offered online classes in nearly everything, so Meredith took a deep breath and enrolled in Chemistry 101. Even though she’d taken a part time job at the
hardware store, her small pool of money ebbed away as each month passed. The money she'd tucked away in her savings account once seemed like a fortune. Unfortunately, the bills rolled in as reality came calling. The pay at the hardware store was only minimum wage, which took care of the utilities and a few groceries. If she didn’t find other options for the future, she and her kids were going to starve. As it was now, they’d had to resort to meatless Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to make the funds last.

  The man next to her opened his eyes. He turned toward her, tilting his head to one side, and examined her with interest. “You sigh a lot.”

  She didn’t turn her head. “You snore.”

  “My wife tells me the same thing,” he admitted. “But tell me, if my snoring’s so loud, why wouldn’t the noise wake me up, too?”

  She kept her gaze glued to her dark computer monitor, willing the machine back to life. If she didn’t respond, maybe he would leave her alone.

  “Still dead.” His tone was glum.

  The words seemed to spur a separate train of thought; his gaze wandered to a corner of the room which he gave a blank stare. The words also flickered a memory in her mind. Her husband Brian. Her no-good, cheating, dead husband. Murdered by his girlfriend’s grandfather. The situation still sounded too bizarre to be true and that was just the start. There was an illegitimate child too, tethering her and her own two to Brian’s secret life. Someday, her kids would learn the truth about their father, and their half-brother. She hoped that day could be delayed as long as possible.

  The months since Brian’s death had been busy and staying in motion kept her from going crazy. For a time during the investigation, when she’d been the prime suspect, she operated one step below full-out panic. With the real murderer now in prison, she had a chance to focus on her children and their future. Atticus was a toddler, learning new words every day and busy getting into everything. Jamie started kindergarten and returned home filled with excitement about new songs, ideas and friends. Meredith spent hours in her garden, staking up tomatoes, plucking weeds, planting marigolds, and harvesting zucchini. Her skin was bronzed, the former peeked look to her face disappeared, and working in the sun intensified the golden highlights in her ash brown hair. Long evening walks down the path toward the mountains tightened her calf muscles and filled her with a feeling of serenity she’d never experienced before. Idaho had grown on her, in a way she hadn’t expected when Brian moved them there in the spring.

  It was Honey Stohler, the older woman who befriended her early on, who pushed her into taking a college class. Like a mother hen clucking around a wayward chick, the woman showed up at the house at unexpected moments with food, advice and a sympathetic ear. Two months earlier, she bustled in, carrying five jars of homemade applesauce and an online course catalog.

  ****

  “Can’t hurt to browse the classes that are offered,” Honey had told her, tucking the jars away in a cupboard in Meredith’s kitchen.

  Nothing stopped Honey; her large, comfortable figure shouldered its way wherever she traveled. She popped in, often without notice, explaining that only strangers called before a visit. Soon after Meredith first moved to Hay City, the nosy woman’s sharp eyes spotted the bruises on her shoulders and recognized the trouble she was in. Friendless and frightened at where her life was headed, she welcomed the friendship and they’d bonded over a common past with bad men.

  The older woman was a pure force of nature. She tsk-tsked after she examined the inside of Meredith’s cabinets, then got to work tidying and organizing. She rearranged cans of corn and beets, lining them up in an orderly fashion, then stacked ramen and dried pasta in a different cupboard altogether. Plastic cups disappeared into a lower cabinet where Jamie and Atticus could access them; the hodgepodge of water glasses and chipped coffee mugs were put next to the sink.

  At first, Honey’s forward manner took Meredith aback, but she now took the woman’s non-stop interference and brassy demeanor in stride. In any case, the cupboards had needed a good tidying and if someone else wanted to do it, she didn’t mind. The fact was a long time ago, this had been the other woman’s house so …

  At the time, Meredith pursed her lips at the idea of re-enrolling in college. It didn’t work out well the first time. She’d met Brian, gotten pregnant, dropped out and headed down a rabbit hole that ended in betrayal, abuse, and murder.

  “I don’t have the money, a computer or Internet access,” she protested. “Strikes one, two and three.”

  “Problem solved.” Honey raised a hand, counting off solutions on each finger. “One, sell Brian’s truck. That’s money for the classes. Two and three, you can use the computer over at the county library where the Internet is free.” A broad grin crossed her face. “I’d call that a home run.”

  Meredith thumbed through the catalog, still uncertain. “I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t know what I want to do. Or be.”

  “Doing nothing always gets you nowhere,” Honey answered in a brisk tone.

  The multitude of classes and options in the thick catalog made Meredith’s head swim. A world of opportunity jumped off the pages in front of her. She could ignore them or…

  “Someone called wanting to buy the truck last week,” she murmured out loud. “I just couldn’t deal with it then and said I’d think about his offer.”

  “What’s to think about? You’re not keeping it, are you?”

  Meredith shook her head. She wanted absolutely nothing to do with the truck. Brian was shot in the vehicle, after which it was taken away as evidence. For months, it sat in a police lot in Mountain Home, the next large town over, waiting for her to move it. Every couple of weeks, someone from the station would call and ask when she was picking it up. After a while, their sympathy for her situation reached its limit. In the last call, they warned if she didn’t have it removed, they would auction it off at a fraction of its value.

  The previous week, a man offered to buy it, saying he would deduct the cost of cleaning from his offer. He’d added it didn’t bother him about what happened inside; but he also deducted a hefty sum from the price, considering a murder took place in the truck. He assured her few would make so generous an offer.

  “It’s settled then.” Honey closed the cabinets one by one and picked up the phone. “What’s this guy’s number?”

  ****

  The truck money bolstered her bank account considerably, giving her little reason not to take a class. Meredith had flipped back and forth through the thick catalog, chewing her lips raw, until she finally settled on Chemistry 101. The class fulfilled requirements for nearly every major and she always did reasonably well in high school science classes.

  The next hurdle, of course, was the forty-minute drive three times a week to use the computers at the Twin Lakes library. Between getting Jamie to and from school, taking care of seventeen-month-old Atticus, and juggling a part-time job, she found herself breathless most of the time. Two months into the class, however, she was grateful that she'd been pushed into it. Staying busy kept her mind off the events of the previous year.

  It didn’t hurt that the trip up the long mountain road from Hay City was both breathtaking as well as calming, just what she needed at this point in her life. Views of towering peaks above and the green valley below flickered in her line of sight as she wound her way higher and higher up the mountain.

  Meredith was disappointed but unfazed by the fact there were no lakes in Twin Lakes. In her short time in Idaho, she’d learned that nothing could be taken at face value. If her own town of Hay City had no hay and the town of Mountain Home wasn’t in the mountains, why would anyone expect lakes to be in a place called Twin Lakes? There were several theories about why the founders thought the name was appropriate for a lake-less area, but there was no recorded history so no one knew for sure. She arrived at the conclusion town names in Idaho were picked based on wishful thinking, although she didn’t know what this said about the people who’d named their towns Sli
ckpoo, Dickshooter or Malady.

  All of a sudden the overhead lights flickered, buzzed and then popped back on. The computers began the process of restarting and she squared her shoulders. She needed to bang out her homework and start back down the hill to get Jamie. She dragged her thoughts back to her homework.

  What is a chemical bond?

  She tried to recall what she'd written before. It’d been so perfect. Something about glue that holds atoms together. Or was it molecules? Or both?

  A chemical bond is the glue that…

  The man next to her shifted his chair a fraction closer and made no motion to leave. The odor of corn chips and perspiration drifted her way as he mumbled, “Guess I should head back home.”

  She ignored him, trying to stay focused.

  …holds atoms and molecules together. This bonding creates more complex…

  “My wife’s at work and I’ve been doing all the cooking lately,” he complained. “She says she’s tired of hamburgers and spaghetti, but what else is there to do with hamburger? I try to get creative, but she just complains, then complains some more until my head’s about to explode.”

  Voices echoed from the counter; Meredith heard the romance fan talking to the librarian. “I keep mine in my backpack.” She spoke with authority on the subject, with the confidence of someone who knew they were right about whatever they thought, said or did. “All the necessities of life. My book, my wallet…my gun.”

  Eyes wide, Meredith swiveled in her chair. Guns made her nervous. Only a few months earlier, she'd held one in her hands, pondering whether she could kill her husband. She’d been desperate to get out of the disintegrating marriage, one that surely would have led to murder—hers or his. The cold steel of the weapon in her hand made her realize she couldn’t commit murder. But she’d considered it, hadn’t she? Guns were all around her in this rural part of the state: hanging on racks in trucks, tied to the back of ATVs and now apparently, in backpacks, too.

  The librarian, short and round with a head full of dark curls threaded with gray, emerged from behind the counter to talk to the romance reader. The librarian wore a holster, a detail Meredith somehow missed earlier. A gun was in her hands, being admired by the customer. Meredith realized she was holding her breath.