They hung up. Jack didn’t need to tell the women what his mother had said as they’d listened to it all.
“We’ll go see Flynn right away and get him to postpone the funeral. We need more time.” Sara looked at Jack. He and the sheriff weren’t exactly buddies. “Maybe you...”
“Should stay home and wash my truck?”
Before Sara could speak, Kate said, “Stay home and try to remember everything you can about Cheryl and her mother.”
“I think I can do that best beside the pool.”
Kate wished she could stay with him, but she didn’t say so. She changed into a dress, and Sara into pants and a blouse—nice clothes for visiting the sheriff. After Sara talked to Heather and gave permission to set up a research team in her house, she and Kate got in the bright yellow MINI Cooper and headed into town. Kate drove. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”
Sara gripped the armrest hard. “Sure. Go ahead.”
Kate grimaced at her aunt’s obvious reluctance to talk of personal matters. “My mother said you used to weigh a lot.”
“I did.” Sara’s relief made her exhale so hard the papers on her lap fluttered. “I lost it. Turn here.”
Kate pulled into the parking lot and they got out. “I gain weight really easily and Mom said I get it from your side of the family.”
“She still eating brownies before she goes to bed?”
It was disconcerting to hear someone talk of what Kate thought only she knew.
“Yes.”
“With maraschino cherries in them?”
“Oh, yes.” Kate’s voice was full of longing as she held the door open for Sara. “And almonds.”
“Howeve
r did you resist them? I know I wasn’t able to.”
“An evil thing called a scale.”
“The Medlar iron lady. Pure torture.”
They stopped in front of the desk and a tall, good-looking young man in a brown uniform with a deputy badge pinned to his chest asked how he could help them. He was trying to hide it, but he was blinking at Sara as if she was a movie star.
Suddenly, Sara was smiling and sounding as though the deputy was the most interesting person she’d ever met.
He was glowing under the attention. “I’m sure he’s not busy. Come on and I’ll show you in.” They followed him.
Kate whispered to Sara, “If you’d given him an autographed book, he might have fainted.”
“Then he’d go online and say that he didn’t like the scene on page 268. The rest of the book was great, but he gave it one star because that scene reminded him of something bad that happened to him when he was a kid. Or worse, he found something that wasn’t politically correct.”
She sounded so fatalistic that Kate started to ask questions—but then they saw the sheriff. They’d caught him eating a doughnut and he didn’t like being found out.
Kate expected Sara to use her charming persona, as she’d done with the deputy, but she didn’t. Maybe the contemptible things the sheriff had said before were too much for her.
They sat down and looked at him across his big wooden desk.
“We want to postpone the funeral to next Friday.” Sara’s tone had no softness to it; she was meeting with an enemy.
“No,” Sheriff Flynn replied in the same tone. “Anything else?”
When Sara started to speak again, Kate put her hand on her aunt’s forearm. “We’d like to put on a memorial service for them,” Kate said with a smile. “And Aunt Sara wants to pay for a funeral and a burial site. They deserve that, don’t you think?”