Stone Cold Crazy (Lil & Boris #4) (Lil and Boris Mysteries) Read online

  Stone Cold Crazy

  by

  Shannon Hill

  Published by Shannon Hill

  Copyright © Shannon Hill, 2011

  E-Book formatting: Guido Henkel

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Author’s Note

  I really did grow up in a small rural community. It should have been named Crazy. Or at least Mildly Disturbed. Given the fact there’s a town called Intercourse up in Pennsylvania, I can’t imagine why Mildly Disturbed couldn’t make it onto a map.

  1.

  Every now and then, something normal happens to me.

  Not lately, mind you. But every now and then. It’s the law of averages. Or is that the law of statistics? I’m not much good at law unless it’s one you can get arrested for breaking.

  ***^***

  I was born Littlepage Eller, and right there is a bad start. If my parents had named me something more reasonable, like Mary or Jane or even Heather, my life would probably have been very different. It’s a hell of a thing to stick a kid with a polysyllabic moniker that is, in fact, a surname. It’s automatic pomp, with a side of circumstance.

  They then nicknamed me “Lil”.

  I’m sure they meant well.

  I’d hold some of this against my parents, but they died when I was a toddler, and left me to my godmother. For that, I am eternally grateful. She wasn’t a fairy godmother, giving me anything I wanted. She was a fierce godmother, and gave me what I needed. Aunt Marge also tried to give me a fine high polish, the kind she and my mother learned at some fancy European finishing school, but despite my DNA, I’m apparently highly resistant to things like grace, tact, and ladylike behavior.

  My DNA is, at the most basic level, why normal is not something that seems to stick to me.

  My mother was Helen Littlepage. My father was Mark Eller. And Littlepages and Ellers despise each other.

  It all started in the 1760s, when the first Littlepage hacked his way into our narrow valley in the Blue Ridge mountains, and decided he’d make his family and fortune here. He was off to a good start when he one day looked around and discovered a guy named Eller was doing the same thing. The town, which back then was named Pleasant Valley, suddenly became a way for the two men to keep score in a very quiet, very intense competition to become The Founder.

  While Thomas Jefferson was building Monticello and a university up in Charlottesville, old Littlepage built a courthouse. Eller countered with a town hall. The Littlepages shot back with a road. The Ellers responded with a bridge. The Littlepages built First Baptist, still home to a goodly congregation here in Crazy, and a testament to Jeffersonian architecture with its red brick and white columns. The Ellers responded with St. Luke Episcopal, in the same style. Over the years, they kept using public works instead of bullets, until our rural county could boast some of the nicest buildings in the whole Commonwealth of Virginia.

  Why, exactly, do the Ellers and Littlepages continue to despise each other? I have no clue. No one does. The feud is like air. It just is.

  In fact, it just was until my parents met, fell in love, eloped, and had me. And then it got worse. The Ellers accused “that Littlepage slut” of ruining Mark’s life. The Littlepages countered with the same, about “that Eller scum”. The feud, which more or less had sunk into a state of torpor, suddenly revved back into high gear.

  Which is why I was, and continued to be, elected sheriff of Crazy. Everyone figures I’d hate both Ellers and Littlepages equally.

  This is only half-true. I am on excellent terms with my cousin Jack Littlepage, and on no terms at all with my uncle, Robert Eller Senior, and his son, Robert Eller Junior. I have never met the female Ellers. I did meet the female Littlepages. Well, Mary Palmer Littlepage, anyway. I can’t really count it as meeting my cousin Lisa, since she was a corpse at the time. Due to her mother’s aversion to Lisa’s Hispanic boyfriend, not that I’ve ever been able to prove it. Or ever will, what with Mary being in France. But my gut knows what it knows, and in a weird way, if it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be on good terms with Jack.

  Did I mention that normal is not something that happens to me?

  ***^***

  I love Crazy. I know I shouldn’t. It’s a small, backwater, two-stoplight one-horse kind of town. I’m a Georgetown alum with a master’s, and I’m an ex-fed to boot. I should be somewhere up by D.C. making money as a Beltway bandit. Instead, I’m making a small living in my small hometown, my days full of small dramas and comedies and downright absurdities. But there’s something special here. Scenery straight out of Eden for a start. A sense that you’ve got bedrock under you. Sure, it can be a suffocating sameness, and there are days I’d like to knock heads together, but…‌it’s home. It’s mine. Blood and bone, I belong here.

  Of course, belong can be taken a lot of ways. There’s people who belong in Hell, too.

  Besides my cousin’s murder, I’ve inherited and given away an accidental three-million-dollar legacy from my Eller grandfather. I’ve shot one of my deputies, who, in fairness, was holding a gun on a civilian at the time. I’ve gotten knifed, run off the road, and most recently kidnapped for ransom in a scheme partly cooked up by my erstwhile secretary, now doing five to fifteen in state prison. I’ve been screamed at, cursed, smacked, kicked, bitten, and urinated upon. I’ve had more happen to me as a sheriff of a tiny town than happened my whole brief career in the FBI and my years as a cop up in Charlottesville combined.

  You know when people say they wouldn’t trade a minute of it? I’m right there with them. Right up until Memorial Day.

  ***^***

  I turned thirty-mumble that spring. I’d added the “mumble” when I went from 35 to 36 to… well, dangerously near forty. It was an age at which a woman acknowledges that her biological clock is no longer ticking, it’s just winding down. Not that I regretted missing out on motherhood. The problem with motherhood is that it comes with someone else’s fatherhood, and I’d never met anyone I’d want to be a parent with. In fact, thanks to Aunt Marge, my love life resembled the Sahara: a lot of dry with an occasional oasis. Other kids got a talk about the birds and bees. Aunt Marge’s talk with me, when I was all of 12, consisted of descriptions of pregnancy, STDs, and custody disputes that would scare anyone into buying a chastity belt and throwing away the key.

  As it was, my romantic history consisted of a few crushes, a few boyfriends, one long-ago fiancée, and just lately, one of my deputies. My human deputies, I mean. I love Boris, but he is a cat, after all.

  Boris is the main male in my life. He’s got mismatched green and gold eyes, a tail that twitches twice in the presence of a lie, and a purr that could deafen you. He’s also black and white, like my police cruiser, and his biggest joy in life is riding in it with me when I’m on duty. Before he adopted me, he lived out of the dumpster behind Food Mart out on Piedmont Road. Since, he’s been twelve pounds of ex-feral fury to anyone laying unwanted hands upon me.

  The human deputy with whom I was attempting romance was Punk Sims. I say attempting, since it’s awkward dating when you can’t date. We called it “hanging out”. Boris didn’t approve. On some leve
l, I don’t think my other human deputy, Tom Hutchins, approved, either, but he didn’t say much. The dating pool in our county is pretty shallow to start with. When you’re a cop, it’s a puddle.

  So far, Punk and I were still working out the logistics of being sheriff and deputy as well as people-hanging-out-a-lot. Like, how do you tell someone at noon that he’s botched the paperwork on a domestic dispute, then gaze into his eyes by candlelight at six? It made me nervous, and fluttery, and jumpy. I hate being nervous, fluttery, and jumpy. It’s so damn girly.

  All that romance stuff was why I’d volunteered to be on duty on Memorial Day. We have a picnic every year in Spottswood Park, full of fireworks, booze, kids running around on a sugar high, and it was easier somehow to do paperwork than to go walking hand-in-hand with Punk along Elk Creek like other couples do. I liked Punk. Quite a lot, in fact. But I hated feeling like a squirrel on a caffeine buzz. Paperwork was safer.

  It was a hot day, low humidity, blue skies, soft breeze. Boris kept pacing from his cat condo to the door to me and around again, tail twitching, eyes eager. I gave in after about two minutes. Paperwork can always wait. Cats refuse to.

  My office is at the corner of Main Street and Spottswood Lane, a loop on which the Ellers built a lot of McMansions. Spottswood Park lies between the McMansions and Main. It was donated by the Littlepages.

  There’s days I wish my name was Eustacia Smith, I really do.

  I could hear the party the moment I opened the office door. I ignored it with my shoulders tight, got Boris settled in his car seat, and headed the other way, past Littlepage Road, our seven numbered side streets, and eventually past Bare Road, at which point Main Street takes a serious eastward turn and becomes Piedmont Road. Then it was out past the mini-mall with Junior’s Lawn and Garden, the grocery, Green’s Pharmacy, my best friend’s beauty salon, and a movie rental place that has survived despite the internet. I went out to the Elk Creek Apartments, in what had once been a sprawling motel back in a day when people thought Crazy might attract tourists. Then I cruised back through town, past the businesses, the houses, and finally past Eller Lane to Spottswood Park. I crossed over Elk Creek on the bridge, where Main Street turns into Madison Pike, and parked in the shade of some oaks. It wasn’t for pleasure. About ten cars were parked illegally, and I had my ticket pad out.

  It’ll tell you what my mood was like that I was thinking some very negative things about people who lived in a narrow valley like ours, in a town that maybe covered a mile of road if you’re generous, and still drove to the park.

  I finished ticketing the illegally parked cars, earning the town about two hundred in fines, and walked over the bridge with Boris riding on my shoulder. Time to see what the fine citizens of Crazy were up to.

  My best friend, Bobbi Rucker Vidur, was sitting in a camp chair near the creek with her husband Raj feeding her tidbits from a plate. She was a month from her due date and looked like she’d swallowed a prize-winning pumpkin. She’d foregone all hair dye and nail polish since she’d learned of her pregnancy, and it was the first time in years anyone had seen her with her hair its natural fair brown. Her feet were in a plastic tub of cool water, and she was smiling at Raj. I melted a little, bad mood and all. Bobbi’s first husband had been an abusive loser, and it did me good to see her so happy.

  Aunt Marge and her live-in beau, Roger Campbell, sat at a picnic table near the iced tea and lemonade. Aunt Marge was sipping from a thermos. I was betting it was her chilled cucumber-and-mint puree. She gave me the recipe, but I never do get it quite the same. Roger, meanwhile, was carefully peeling an apple so that the peel stayed in one piece. His ex-wife, Eileen, could be heard across the park, loudly scolding her ankle-nipper dog for doing something on someone’s shoe. No one who’d met Eileen blamed Roger for preferring Aunt Marge.

  Maury Morse, mayor and owner-operator of Morse Sanitation & Disposal, was wiping sweat off his balding head and arguing with his brother, Delbert. He nodded to me. Del glared. He’d hit me once, and Boris had clawed off most of Del’s favorite tattoo. Del still held a grudge.

  There were no Ellers present, though plenty of Eller partisans were. The feud had divided Crazy into three parties. The neutrals consisted of the Turners‌—‌now down to Aunt Marge, a cousin, and said cousin’s daughter‌—‌and the Brady and Shifflett clans. The Ellers got the Hutchins, Morse, Spivey and Shiflet families, who had dropped two consonants in the course of a feud with their now-distant Shifflett relations. The Littlepages were favored by the Rushes, Campbells, Tuckers and Lincolns. It manifested in subtle ways these days, usually church affiliation and voting for town council, though legend has it there’d been a few fistfights way back in the when.

  No Ellers, but I did find a Littlepage. Cousin Jack, last of the direct line of Littlepages, other than myself. He was near the barbecue pits, wearing a shady, ugly hat, since Littlepages run to pale, cool complexions. I know that because I inherited it from my mother. Sit me in the sun too long, I turn appallingly pink. It’s one of the few reasons to be glad for my Smokey-the-Bear hat.

  I saw Tom Hutchins near the barbecue pits, too. Burly, ex-military, solid as the metamorphic rock under our feet, he’d come to be my deputy from the county police department. His fiancée, Tanya, hovered nearby. She had her hand turned so everyone could see the ring. It was a two-carat diamond solitaire, and it should’ve cost a third of his annual salary. It hadn’t. Aunt Marge had dug out a Cartier tiara from among her many heirlooms, had it broken down into its composite diamonds, and given the big one to Tom. He’d refused to accept it until Roger talked to him about not upsetting kind quasi-elderly ladies who had his mother on speed-dial.

  The remaining ten carats’ worth of diamonds were being made into a choker for Aunt Marge.

  Not far from Tom, I saw Punk, casually sipping a cold beer, and leaning on crutches. He usually wore a prosthesis, but now and then he gave his amputated limb a day off from it. He’d lost the lower half of the leg in a car accident on icy roads, and had been forced to quit his job with the county police. It’d been Tom’s idea to have him help with a case, and I’d been impressed enough to hire him on as a part-time deputy. After we’d lost my secretary to prison this past spring, he’d become full-time. It cost him his disability check, but Punk did not seem to mind. He gave me a half-nod, and kept sipping his beer as he watched some of the older men play horseshoes.

  Boris meowed to be let down. I lowered him to the grass. He gave a sneeze, tail up and waving gently, and set off toward the food tables. Boris gets three squares a day, plenty of high-end food and tuna and salmon, but his inner feral still loves to scrounge.

  I’d spotted Heather Shifflett, our resident graffiti mural artist, sitting by herself with a sketchbook when I heard Cousin Jack hail me. “Just the person I wanted to see!”

  He sounded three sheets to the wind. When he grabbed me and gave me a big hug, I knew he was seriously drunk. Littlepages are not big on public displays of affection. “Cousin,” he caroled, eyes sparkling. “I want you to meet the man who is going to help me transform Crazy!”

  I stifled a sigh. The Littlepages and Ellers regularly try to transform Crazy. Generally, we just end up with a very large, very nice public works project. Like our library, or the elementary school. That kind of thing. “Transform how?”

  “Tourism,” my cousin beamed. He’s a typical Littlepage. Mousy hair, ice-blue eyes that I also have, average height that I don’t have, a little stocky, but good-looking because money means great medical care, and good medical care is a big boost toward beauty. “Really sustainable tourism, none of those flashy resorts, Lil. Good tourism.”

  The only tourists we see in Crazy are the ones who get lost trying to find their way someplace else. I gave up trying to stifle that sigh. “Jack,” I said, “this is not a tourist destination.”

  “It can be,” he said, and tugged me past a knot of barbecue-gnawing Shiflets. I hid my grimace. Aunt Marge raised me to be a vegetarian, and even the smell
of meat tends to make my stomach do some ugly backflips.

  “Jack, I’m on duty,” I said, in case he’d missed the fact I was wearing my uniform and silly hat. “C’mon, Cousin, don’t make me arrest you.”

  Jack laughed. How much booze had he had? Littlepages don’t laugh much. It’s about the only thing they have in common with the Ellers.

  He reached out and clasped someone by the arm. The guy was wearing a hat a lot like Jack’s, one of those sun-shading ones that crumples up into a pocket without losing its shape because it hasn’t got a shape to lose. The guy turned, lifted his head from his plate, and for a split second, I lost the ability to speak out of pure shock.

  “Hello, Lil,” said the man, and in front of everyone in town, or at least the two-thirds of everyone at the park, he leaned in and kissed me smack on the lips like he had the right.

  A lot of things went through my head, most of them profane, but the town was watching. A few of them with gleaming delight, and I don’t mean the good kind.

  I could feel Punk’s stare like a blow.

  Before I said a word, or kneed the man in the groin for his presumption, Boris arrived. Hissing, he scrambled up my trousers and shirt, and as I automatically cupped him in my arms, he yowled his war cry, tail lashing and ears flattened against his skull. It was bad enough Punk had lip-laying rights, but this was a total stranger. One who hadn’t bothered to bring an appropriate bribe.

  The man drew back slightly, then chuckled, and put out a hand to pat Boris on the head.

  Idiot.

  Boris struck. He scored eight scratches before the man could jerk his hand back to safety.

  Smiling sunnily, I said, “This is Boris. He’s my deputy. Boris,” I said to my cat, “this is Steven Kipling.” I rubbed his forehead with mine briefly and added a soft, “Good baby,” before I turned to my ex-fiancée and said, “He doesn’t like people invading my space.”