“Four aisles to the right.”
Sam wove his way around barrels and boxes until he found the fourth aisle. Tansy stood on her tiptoes with a flashlight aiming at the shelf above her head.
“What are you looking for?”
She sent him a wry grin, and he laughed.
“You lost your phone again?”
Tansy nodded. “I think I had it last down here.”
“When was that?”
She dropped to her feet. “Yesterday. Maybe.”
No wonder Joe was after Sam for updates. She was the worst with her phone.
Sam sighed and checked out the shelf she’d been trying to see. No phone. “What were you doing down here? What were you looking at?”
Tansy turned her face away from him. “Just checking out what was down here.”
Plausible. Almost believable. Except for the fact that she always turned away when she didn’t want to lie.
“Tansy.”
Her head dropped slightly as she puffed out a breath. “I was trying to decide how to answer a couple of emails.”
“From?”
She turned to check out the nearby shelves. He searched the ones she couldn’t reach.
“The Department of Defense wants me to make some things for them.”
That wasn’t surprising. “You going to do it?”
She shrugged. “Depends. I sent them back some conditions. We’ll see if they agree.”
“What conditions?”
That earned him a grin. “A guarantee of consequences if any of my creations get turned into weapons or used for anything other than their original purposes.”
He laughed. “Smart girl. What else?”
“What do you mean?”
He kept in the sigh. “You said emails. Plural.”
“Just some stuff from back in Sacramento.”
Which she obviously didn’t want to talk about. He’d try a different tack.
“I take it that’s connected to why you decided to move to this property you’ve had for over a year.”
Tansy shrugged and moved around to the next aisle. This one looked to be filled with tools and buckets of screws and nails, bits and pieces of wood.
He picked up a chisel set probably passed down to her grandfather. “Looks like you come by your reuse-it philosophy from your grandfather’s side.”
Tansy smiled. “Koko was definitely a big influence. I remember him talking about how to listen to the planet, how the spirit of the planet was there, waiting for us to listen.”