What if that had been what most people in New York were really asking? It was the way her grandfather had viewed people. It was odd how being down here had made her question all the assumptions she’d made about her life in the city. She’d learned that the people here weren’t so different despite their accents and food and weird superstitions. What if, despite their fast-paced lives, the people she’d known then had cared every bit as much?
“A black cat crossed Karen’s path and Janice is worried about her granddaughter’s hair coming from her son-in-law.” It sounded ridiculous even to her own ears, but it was apparently a big problem. Her job was to help fix problems. Oh, she’d thought it was combatting crime, but she’d learned. Sometimes it was all about containing the crazy.
Jerry nodded sagely. “Oh, I get it. That black cat is everywhere these days. Nobody’s claiming it. I was hoping the rougarou would eat the sucker. Bad luck. You’re doing a good job, Deputy.”
“Thanks.” She watched as Karen and then Janice made their way around the path to bad luck and got on their way. Jerry nodded as he, too, avoided the cat.
She walked back to her SUV under the watchful gaze of her father.
“You should have given them both tickets,” her father said. “They were breaking the law.”
“Everything was fine. They didn’t hurt anyone.” If she hadn’t been around, someone else would have come along. Janice would have helped Karen, or she would have made it to the end of the street and Jerry would have made sure she got through the intersection safely. The worst that would have happened was a fender bender, and honestly, Herve could use the work. He got pranky when he didn’t have enough to do.
“If this is how you work now, maybe we should reconsider you coming back,” her father said gravely as he got back into the SUV.
She heard a purring sound and the cat was rubbing against her leg, looking up at her with big dark eyes.
She reached down and picked up the cat, who immediately settled down in her arms. The cat was on the thin side.
Zep would know what to do with it.
“Has word gotten out that the deputy can’t resist an animal sob story?” she asked. Yep. She was talking to cats now.
It was far better than talking to her dad.
She had a chance to go back to New York? To start her career again?
She walked to the SUV with the cat in her arms. Hopefully Daisy liked cats. It wasn’t like she would keep the cat. She would make sure it ate something, and when her shift was over, she would drive out to the shelter Zep was volunteering at today and drop the cat off.
She wouldn’t keep it because she wasn’t staying.
One way or another, she was going to leave.chapter tenThe smell of popcorn didn’t make him hungry the way it used to. It made him nervous. He wasn’t a public speaker.
“You okay?” Roxie was still in her uniform. No one else in the world could wear khakis the way his baby could. She managed to make that uniform sexy.
He was in one of two pairs of slacks he owned and his very best button-down. It was what he wore when he got dragged to church on Christmas, Easter, and funerals.
This could be his funeral if he couldn’t handle the crowd.
“You are not okay.” Roxie put her hands on his cheeks and forced him to look her in the eyes. “Zep, this is all going to be fine. They’ll ask you some questions and they will be weird, but you answer them with science and reason and everything will be cool.”
“Yeah, I don’t know that science and reason work with some of our neighbors.” He took a deep breath because she was right. It was going to be okay. What was the worst that could happen? It wasn’t like the town was going to fire him. They hadn’t really hired him in the first place. “Hey, do you think this counts as overtime?”
“I think you weren’t smart enough to negotiate with Armie in the first place, so getting more out of him now could be hard,” she pointed out. “Though I’ve been thinking a lot since I found Sunny. She probably wouldn’t have been wandering around and scaring superstitious people if we had our own department of animal services. The sheriff’s department can’t handle lost animals. If we find them, we have to send them to a shelter an hour away. No one’s looking that far away for a pet. I don’t think most people even know that place exists.”
That had been her excuse for not taking the cat she’d named Sunny to the shelter. It was too long a drive, and he’d just come from there and they had to get ready for the meeting. Except her version of getting ready for the meeting had mostly been playing with the pets. So now Sunny and Daisy were getting acquainted. Or rather Daisy was likely howling in her crate and Sunny was yawning and showing the dog that cats were way cooler because she didn’t need a crate.