He flexed his joint. “Got a bruise that’s darker than my ink, but I’ll be all right.”
I took a sip of the coffee. “There’s a lot of cream and sugar in this.”
He gave me a small smile. “One might say it’s practically hot chocolate.”
“Just how I like it.”
Jayce drove us to a different part of town today, farther from the interstate and with a lot more natural trees. We came to a piece of land like a plantation, with a well-constructed farmhouse in the distance surrounded by a perfectly manicured lawn and a driveway flanked by tall oak trees. It was out of place compared with everything else in this town, except for the outer fence along the road, which was dilapidated and rotten.
Jayce parked the truck next to the road where the driveway began, right on the edge of the property. A pile of new lumber was stacked on the side. “We’re on fence-mending duty,” he announced as he hopped out of the truck.
I frowned at the fence. “What’s the point of keeping that house and lawn so nice if you’re just going to let the perimeter fence go to crap?”
Jayce smirked over at me. “Why pay someone to fix it when you can wait and eventually have it done for free? Even the rich folks in this town are stingy, Peaches.”
The vertical fence posts were still in good condition, Jayce determined after a quick check. It was just the horizontal posts that were broken and rotten. Jayce used a hammer to tear off an old plank, then carried the new one over from the pile by himself. It was about ten feet long, thick and heavy, but he bore the weight with ease.
I held up one end of the wood to the fence while Jayce held the other. He nailed his side into the vertical post, then came over and did the same to mine. He swung the hammer with all the skill of a craftsman, each nail only requiring three smooth blows before it was buried in the wood.
After the first few sections, Jayce and I loaded up the bed of his truck with wood and drove along the fence so we wouldn’t need to keep walking all the way back to the pile. The work was easy but exhausting; even just holding up the planks while Jayce did all the work left my arms drained and noodly.
“Saw you ride by the diner last night,” I said after a while. “On your bike.”
“Huh,” he grunted.
“Where were you going?”
“Nowhere,” he said a little too quickly. “Just out for a ride. It helps me think.”
I studied him for a few moments. I’d hit on something. “You sure? You drove down a little road going off into the middle of nowhere, and came back a minute later.”
His hammer stroke missed the nail head, catching it on the side and bending the nail at a 90 degree angle. “It was a good place to turn around,” he said, flipping the hammer to wedge the bent nail out of the wood.
He was definitely hiding something, but I didn’t think pushing it would make him talk. “I saw Sid and his boys last night, too. They were riding with a cement mixer. Can you believe that?”
“That’s strange,” Jayce said, though by his tone it wasn’t strange at all.
“What was that all about?”
He shook his head, turned his blue eyes on me, and then shook his head again. “Something you shouldn’t stick your nose into, Peaches.”
“I bet they steal construction equipment,” I mused out loud. “I have no idea how much one of those things costs but it has to be more than a normal car. A hundred grand, or maybe even two. Worth stealing.”
Jayce snorted.
“Am I close?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You were totally in a gang of cement-mixer-stealing bikers, weren’t you?” I joked as we moved to the next post. “No construction site is safe from the Copperheads! Oooo!” I made my two fingers into snake fangs and swiped at the air menacingly.
Jayce didn’t think it was much of a joke. “I said don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, come on. That was funny.”
Jayce smirked and looked like he was about to tease me back, but then a car came down the driveway from the plantation house. It kicked up dirt as it went before turning down the main road toward us, approaching slowly. It was a shiny Cadillac, white with gold trim. Something even a seventies pimp would say was gaudy. It pulled up next to us and the window rolled down.
“Beautiful mornin’ under God’s blue sky!” Judge Benjamin declared.