It would be better for him to hear it from you than to discover it on his own.

  Nate’s voice still echoed in my ears. For a moment, I wished I’d asked him to come with me. But I had to face this on my own. It was my disaster, after all.

  I climbed up the stairs to the front door, pausing for a moment to check the directory on the wall inside. The chief’s office was on the first floor, right down the hall. Once I turned in that direction, there’d be no going back. I’d be committed to confessing.

  I walked down the hall, feeling like I was going to the executioner’s block.

  There was a receptionist for the chief’s office along with the county attorney and the sheriff. I didn’t recognize her, which was just as well. This visit wasn’t something I wanted shared on social media.

  She looked up expectantly. “Yes?”

  “I need to see Chief Fowler.” I was amazed that my voice was steady.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  I shook my head. “He’ll want to talk to me. Tell him it’s Roxy Constantine.”

  The receptionist picked up her phone and dialed a number, turning away from me as she spoke.

  Of course, I wasn’t absolutely sure Fowler would want to see me. Maybe he’d be too busy. Maybe he wasn’t interested. Maybe…

  The receptionist glanced up at me. “Go on in. He’ll see you now.”

  So much for hope. I opened the office door and stepped inside.

  Fowler was sitting at his utilitarian, city-issued desk. He gazed up at me with that same unsmiling, inscrutable look he always seemed to wear. I wondered if he ever smiled. Probably not at people like me, people he suspected of murder.

  I cleared my throat. “I have some things to tell you.”

  He gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit down, Ms. Constantine. I’ve been expecting you.”

  That speech wasn’t reassuring at all. Did that mean he’d had his suspicions confirmed by other people? Was he expecting me to confess? I dropped into the chair, clutching my purse in my lap.

  I wasn’t sure how to start, but getting to the point seemed like a good idea. “Brett Holmes was blackmailing me. Well, sort of. He was trying. He hadn’t actually succeeded.” I bit my lip.

  Fowler had picked up his pen to take notes on a legal pad, but he put it down again. “What was he blackmailing you over?”

  “We worked in the same restaurant in Denver a couple of years ago. It was a pretty famous place.” I gave him the name and paused, but Fowler shook his head. He didn’t look impressed.

  “Oh, well, it’s been on TV. Anyway, I worked there for about six months. One night I was working late, and the chef who owned the place was there, too. He told me to help him out in the pantry, and when I got there he…” I ran through all the euphemisms I usually used: attacked, assaulted, jumped. Screw it. I was talking to a cop. “He tried to rape me. I managed to grab a can of tomatoes and I hit him in the head. It kind of stunned him, and I got out before he could pull himself together.”

  Fowler had stopped writing for a moment. He stared at me. “Go on.”

  I took a breath. I’d gotten through the toughest part. “The next day, the manager fired me. And he said the chef would say I’d gone with him willingly, and that I’d gotten pissed when he wouldn’t give me a promotion in exchange for sex. I think that was to keep me from going to the cops.”

  Fowler paused again. “Did you go to the cops anyway?”

  I shook my head. “I came home to Shavano. I was done with Denver. And Denver was done with me, pretty much.”

  Fowler folded his hand on the desk. “Okay, so how does this affect Holmes? Was he there that night?”

  “No. After I left Denver, the chef told his version of the story to a lot of different people, just to make sure nobody was going to believe me, I guess. He told everybody in the kitchen.”

  I remembered the sick feeling in my gut when I heard about the story having been deliberately spread after I left. I’d thought if I was gone, the chef would shrug it off. But apparently he’d wanted to make sure I’d never have any credibility if I tried to claim he was a predator.

  Fowler wrote a quick note on his legal pad. “And this is where Holmes comes in?”

  “I guess so. He heard the rumors somewhere and he remembered them when he took the job at High Country and found out I lived here. He asked me out a couple of times, and he made some references to Denver when he did—how much better he was in the sack than the chef, that kind of thing. That creeped me out, so I avoided him from then on.”

  “So the blackmail was he’d tell other people about you and this chef?”

  “He might have implied that, but I think he’d already told people what he’d heard about me, so that wouldn’t have been much of a threat. What he did was different.” I paused, sorting through what I hadn’t told him yet to figure out what I wanted to say.

  Fowler gave me a non-smile. “I’m all ears.”

  “Okay, you remember the day I ran into you going into Evelyn Davidson’s office?” I certainly remembered it myself, but who knew how memorable it had been to Fowler?

  “You had the cardboard box with the jam.”

  “Right. That was because Evelyn’s working with this television show, Sweet Thing. They travel around the country checking out desserts, and they’re due to come to Shavano this summer.”

  Fowler nodded, as if he was following me so far.

  “I brought my jam for Evelyn to taste, and she was impressed. She said she’d already bought my stuff and liked it. I thought I had a good chance to be on the show. Then on that Saturday two weeks ago, Brett came to my booth at the farmers market. He told me he was friends with the producer of the show and that he could get me on whether Evelyn liked my stuff or not. If I’d have sex with him.”

  I blew out a breath, taking a moment for my pulse to slow down. It still pissed me off to think of Brett making that offer, as if I ought to be eager to go to bed with him since it would get me on TV.

  Fowler looked up at me again. “This was the weekend when you had the fight with Holmes?”

  “I told him I wouldn’t go out with him. And I wouldn’t have sex with him, even for a spot on a national TV show. He didn’t take it well. We started yelling at each other and he grabbed me. He was shaking me when Nate pulled him off.”

  “Did Robicheaux know about this situation in Denver?”

  I shook my head. “Not then. I told him later.”

  Fowler paused for a long moment. “So there’s more to this story, right?”

  “Yeah.” I cleared my throat. Spilling my guts was thirsty work. “I talked to Evelyn at the farmers market on Saturday. She said I wasn’t in the running for the TV show any more. When I asked her why, she hemmed and hawed about problems with my reputation. I finally got her to admit it was about what had happened in Denver. She said my bad reputation might be a distraction from the focus on the town, so she wouldn’t recommend me for the show.”

  Fowler stopped taking notes again. “Holmes got to her?”

  “She wouldn’t admit it, but I’m pretty sure he did. Not many people in Shavano knew what happened. Brett must have spun quite a story for her.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice on that last bit. It still annoyed me that Brett had gone to so much trouble to get back at me. And that Evelyn had let him.

  “So this was Holmes’s idea of revenge?”

  “Probably. I think he wanted to make me sorry I’d turned him down. And maybe he was miffed about losing a shoving match with Nate.” Which made Nate sound like another target of Brett’s wrath. “Nate didn’t know who he was,” I said hastily. “And I doubt that Brett knew Nate, either.”

  Fowler gave me another of those dry nonsmiles, as if he knew I was trying to keep Nate out of this. He wrote another note on his pad, then he paused again. “Anything else?”

  I shook my head. “That’s all of it. I don’t know if it has anything to do with what happened to Brett, but I figured it would be better if you heard it from me instead of from somebody else.”

  Fowler looked like he was weighing that statement. “Probably true.”

  “I guess if that’s all…” I started to stand up, but Fowler held up his hand.

  “Hang on a minute.”

  I sat down. What now?

  “This chef you clocked in Denver, was there any police report on that?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t file one. And since I never heard anything from the Denver cops, I assume the chef didn’t file one either.”

  “Right.” Fowler looked down at his notes again, then at me. “Where did you hit him?”

  “Where… I told you—in the pantry.” Keep up, Chief.

  “Where on his body,” he said patiently.

  “Oh.” I paused, trying to remember. I hadn’t been aiming. “On the side of the head, I think. I mean, he was on top of me and I was just, you know, trying to get him off.” I stopped, taking a deep breath. My heart was racing. Flashback time.

  Fowler gave me a glance that might have been sympathetic, although it was hard to say. Sympathy didn’t seem to come naturally to him. “With a can of tomatoes, you said?”

  “I grabbed it off the shelf behind me. I didn’t know what it was at the time, just that it was heavy.”

  “Right.” He wrote down something else, then glanced up at me. “Okay, thanks.”

  I stared at him. That was it? That was so not it. “Why did you want to know?”

  “Know what?” Fowler’s expression was inscrutable again.

  “Know where I hit him. Why is that something you were interested in?”

  There was a long moment of silence while we stared at each other. I had the feeling Fowler was debating with himself whether he wanted to answer me or not. Finally he sighed.

  “Brett Holmes was killed in his restaurant on Saturday night around eleven.”

  “Yes, I know.” I hadn’t known the time, but I’d known the rest. The hairs on the back of my neck were beginning to stand on end.

  “He was attacked from behind. Someone struck him on the back of his head with a heavy object. It fractured his skull. He died very soon after that.”

  My face felt warm, but the rest of me felt very cold. “Do you know what the weapon was?”

  “We have an idea.” Fowler’s lips moved into another of those humorless smiles he seemed to specialize in, but he didn’t say anything else.

  I pushed myself to my feet. At that moment, I really wanted to be out of there. “I guess that’s all, then.”

  He nodded, still with the smile. “For now. If I need more information, I know where to find you.”

  “Right.” I turned and slunk out the office door. I should probably have told him goodbye, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  It’s better he hears it from you. Oh yeah, right. It’s always better when the suspect incriminates herself rather than making the cop do it.

  Because, of course, that’s what I’d done. Along with providing myself with a very good motive for killing Brett, I’d also given Fowler a run-down of my previous criminal history, including the fact I’d once brained another chef with a can of tomatoes late in the evening in the chef’s own kitchen.

  I hadn’t killed him, but maybe that just counted as a practice session before I got down to the business of giving Brett Holmes a skull fracture.

  Means, motive, opportunity, and a history of violence. I’d just put myself in the prime suspect category. Nice going, Roxy.

  Chapter 14

  I drove to the farm in a daze. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, not even Uncle Mike. The task of explaining that I might be arrested—and it would be because I’d stupidly put myself in the crosshairs—was more than I could face right then. So I decided to do what I usually do when I’m upset about something. I exiled Herman to the main house, and I started cooking.

  I was all set to make more strawberry preserves. I had a couple of flats from Uncle Mike, along with two more I’d bought from one of our neighbors who grew more berries than we did. I never claimed to make all my jams with Constantine fruit, but I did use Colorado fruit for everything I could.

  Once I got the jars sterilized and the kettle going for the preserves, I started working on the rest of the strawberries, washing and hulling and chopping and sometimes mashing, depending on what I planned to do with them. I set some of the chopped berries aside for dinner and took a time out to stir up some biscuits for short cake. I got them into the oven around the time the first kettle of preserves was ready to be processed, so I filled the jars and loaded up the water bath canner. Shavano and environs are around eight thousand feet in altitude, which means I have to let the jars process ten minutes or so longer than people canning at sea level. That extra time allowed me to set one jam kettle to soak while I got another load of strawberry jam going, more strawberry basil this time.

  In the midst of all of this, I got the biscuits out of the oven and began contemplating what I’d make for dinner. Preferably something that required most of the afternoon and some intricate preparation so that I’d be concentrating on getting it right rather than on what I’d done wrong.

  All this activity was supposed to numb my mind into blankness so my brain wouldn’t have any space for worry. As it turned out, though, my brain was perfectly capable of handling two batches of jam, a couple of sheets of biscuits, and some spinach lasagna while still considering the very real possibility that I’d be sent to the slammer for a murder I didn’t commit.

  Whenever I let myself dwell on the possibilities, panic welled up in my gut and I had to fight tears. I spent a lot of time talking myself out of that panic, telling myself that Fowler must realize I wasn’t some kind of master criminal, providing the police with incriminating information just so that I could thumb my nose as I walked away.

  But maybe he thought I was too dumb to realize how incriminating the information had been. He didn’t know me well, after all. I could be a genius criminal or a spectacularly stupid criminal, and in this case the result would be the same.

  You should have kept your mouth shut. That seemed obvious. If I hadn’t told Fowler about my life in Denver, he’d have had no reason to assume I was a suspect other than the scuffle at the farmers market.

  But what if he’d found out about Denver on his own? There was always the chance that he might have been able to do that. Evelyn had to know some of what had happened, although she might not know I’d hit the chef on the head. Who knew what Brett had told his fellow cooks? Who knew what rumors he’d been spreading about me, particularly after I’d pissed him off?

  Fowler would probably have heard stories about it eventually. If he’d heard them from someone else, he might have had a Eureka! moment where he deduced I had a grudge against Brett and a history of violence.

  But for all I knew, he’d had a Eureka! moment when I’d told him about the chef. Maybe behind that impassive expression he was dancing with glee, having found himself a first class suspect at last.

  I’d just pulled a set of jars out of the canner and was ready to begin the whole process again with the next batch when someone knocked on my cabin door. This was a fairly rare occurrence since only a few people knew I lived in the cabin rather than the main house. I figured it was probably Susa, since Uncle Mike would just have walked in (and I was very glad he hadn’t done that yet).

  I threw the door open without taking the time to check myself in the mirror because Susa had seen me in various states of disrepair through the years we’ve known each other. Me looking decrepit would be nothing new.

  Only it was Nate Robicheaux standing on my doorstep, looking gorgeous in his jeans and a Robicheaux’s Café T-shirt. At the moment, he also looked worried.

  I blinked. “Nate? What are you doing here?”

  “Checking on you. Or I thought I was. When I got your voice mail three times in a row, I got nervous.” He still looked concerned and slightly wary. I must have been showing a little more disrepair than usual.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, cursing inwardly. Maybe I’d have a chance to run a brush through my hair later. “I must have forgotten to turn my phone on. Come on in. I’ve got to dash.” One of my many timers had gone off, but I wasn’t sure which one.

  Nate trailed behind me as I pulled the jam kettle off its burner. The jars were lined up waiting. He watched me as I inserted the funnel and filled each one, leaving the mandatory quarter inch of headspace.

  “You eyeball that?” he said finally.

  “You do it long enough, you know what a quarter inch looks like.”

  “Right.” He leaned on the kitchen counter. “How can I help?”

  I started to tell him that he didn’t need to. But then I thought about how much I’d done and how much I had left to do.

  And how tired I suddenly felt.

  “How are you on lasagna?”

  “Cooking or eating?”

  “Both, I guess. But cooking for now. I chopped up some spinach and boiled the noodles, but I haven’t gone much beyond that.” I gestured toward the fixings on the counter. I’d meant to get back to them, but events were slipping away from me. That happened when I had too many things on my mind. And right then, my mind was overwhelmed.

  Nate grinned, stepping to the sink to wash his hands. “My lasagna has been known to bring strong men to their knees. You’ve got stuff like onions and cottage cheese and mozzarella, right?”

  “And marinara sauce. And parmesan. And pretty much anything else you could want. Just ask. How long will it need to bake?”

  “Around an hour.”

  He rolled up his sleeves, and I checked the clock. Amazingly enough, it was after four and I was famished. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast when I’d been almost too nervous to chew. I grabbed a biscuit and returned to my jam. At least we’d have something decent for dinner.

  Nate and I worked side-by-side, happily enough. He figured out the kitchen layout pretty quickly, and after that he didn’t bother to ask me questions like where I kept the oregano. I stopped worrying about just how bad I looked and concentrated on the jam, although I took a quick bio break and pulled the scrunchie out of my hair.