That damn woman must have had her face plastered to the window of her house, just waiting for something to happen, with how quickly she got out to her back yard to see what was going on.
Leo gives her a quick wave over his shoulder, otherwise ignoring her as our little group continues walking until we get to the edge of the woods that run behind all the houses on Emma Jo’s street. We don’t get more than five feet into the tree cropping and thickets before we find the source of the smell. Leo quickly puts up his arm to stop the three of us from coming any closer while he continues walking a few more feet and then stops.
We ignore his outstretched arm and move right up next to him, gasping in one collective breath when we see what Leo is staring down at: a yellow pie plate that’s been licked clean, with two dead raccoons lying on their sides next to it.
“So THAT’S where it went!” Emma Jo exclaims.
Leo looks back at her in confusion and I quickly wrap my hand around her arm and give her a squeeze of warning to shut the hell up, but she doesn’t take my subtle hint and just makes things worse.
“I mean, that’s where THEY went. The raccoons being the they in question. I haven’t seen them in a few days and I got worried. Because RACCOONS in the wrong hands could be dangerous. RACCOONS in the wrong hands could kill people,” she rambles.
Leo looks back and forth silently between us with a raise of his eyebrow while I quickly try to fix her word vomit.
“Dangerous on account of the rabies. You know, raccoons having rabies and all that and rabies being deadly,” I add with a nervous chuckle, not fixing her word vomit AT ALL.
“So, you’ve seen these raccoons before?” Leo questions Emma Jo.
“Our Emma Jo is just like Snow White! Animals from all over the land flock to her and want to be friends with her, even rabid raccoons,” I reply lamely while Leo turns away from us and squats down by the raccoons.
Jesus, STOP TALKING, PAYTON!
“Until they eat one of her pies and realize she poisoned them,” Bettie whispers from the other side of me.
I give her a quick jab to the ribs with my elbow right before Leo stands back up and turns to face us with the pie plate in his hand.
“Emma Jo, isn’t this one of yours? Looks like they ate whatever was in it and then just keeled over,” he states, bringing the plate up closer to his face to inspect it.
“What? No! That’s definitely not one of mine. It’s yellow, and I hate the color yellow,” Emma Jo quickly replies. “All of my pie plates are in my kitchen and accounted for, and I definitely don’t have any yellow ones!”
Leo flips the plate over in his hands and then tips the underside in our direction with another raise of one eyebrow, and we can all see clear as day an engraving stamped on the bottom of the plate that says Property of Emma Jo Jackson. I see Bettie shake her head and bow it out of the corner of my eye, and I wait for her to toss her hands up in the air and call us idiots.
“What Emma Jo meant to say is that she hasn’t always hated the color yellow, isn’t that right?” I ask, turning my head and widening my eyes for her to fix this before it gets more out of hand than it already is.
“Right!” she quickly pipes up. “It was more of a recent decision, actually. I read an article in Good Housekeeping that yellow dishes cause cancer, so I threw out every dish I owned that was yellow.”
“And these raccoon friends of yours just pulled it out of the trash and dragged it into the woods so they could bake their own little raccoon pies?” Leo asks, narrowing his eyes at Emma Jo and then sliding the same questioning glare in my direction.
“Right! Exactly! And look at that, they probably died from cancer. I feel so much better now about throwing out all of those yellow dishes, don’t you, Payton?” Emma Jo asks.
I just nod my head like an idiot, already feeling like the lowest of the low for not telling Leo about the pie, quickly feeling much worse about the whole thing the deeper and dumber I go with more lies, especially with the way he’s looking at me right now. Like he doesn’t believe a word out of my mouth and he doesn’t know whether to be hurt or pissed after what happened between us in the last twenty-four hours.
“Sheriff, if you’ll excuse us, we need to make sure all of the yellow dishes have definitely been removed from the kitchen, just in case. Also, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could get rid of those poor raccoons for me,” Emma Jo tells Leo with a smile as she grabs my arm and pulls me quickly toward the house.
Bettie takes one last glance at a pissed-off-looking Leo and then makes a run for it, jogging to catch up with us.
“PAYTON!” Leo roars from the woods when we get to the side corner of the house.
“SORRY! CAN’T TALK NOW! I’VE GOT CANCER TO CURE!” I shout back to him over my shoulder, watching him stand there by the dead raccoons with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face, until Emma Jo yanks harder on my arm to get me to move faster and we disappear around the side of the house.
“Jesus God, how have you two not been arrested yet?” Bettie complains when we get to the front of the house.
“Shut your face, do you know what this means?!” Emma Jo asks her excitedly when we stop at the top of the front porch.
“That you probably won’t get the death penalty because you’ll fail the psych evaluation?” Bettie replies dryly.
“No, this means we officially didn’t kill my husband with a poisoned blueberry pie!” she answers, clapping her hands together like a toddler while jumping up and down happily.