The Heirloom Murders - Kathleen Ernst [42]
Roelke pressed his knuckles against his forehead. “Chloe—”
“Dellyn is my friend, and I’m worried about her. I’m afraid she might end up depressed herself.”
“I don’t want that to happen,” Roelke said, in a patronizing tone that could not have been calculated to annoy her more. “But I still have a job to do. When it comes to that, you need to back off.”
“You need to back off,” Chloe snapped. “And leave Dellyn alone.” She scrambled from the squad car and slammed the door. She was aware of Roelke watching as she unlocked her own car, slid inside, started the engine, and pulled away.
“Neanderthal,” she muttered. She drove down Main Street carefully. She wouldn’t put it past him to ticket her for going two miles over the limit.
When she reached Dellyn’s house she braked and pulled over. She briefly considered knocking on her friend’s door again. But … no. Dellyn wanted to be alone. And Chloe understood the feeling of being besieged; of knowing that the last tattered scrap of the energy needed to interact with other homo sapiens was about to disintegrate.
That was a big part of why Chloe wanted to help. She knew how
it felt to be broken. She knew how it felt to be alone. She knew how it felt to try, and try, and try, and still feel every sense of mastery over her own life drift away.
And when Chloe had hit the sucking muck at the absolute bottom of her personal well, one person had saved her: Ethan, her best buddy, who had put his own life on hold long enough to get her firmly started on the long climb toward daylight.
A lamp blinked on in the attic window. Dellyn, back to work on the artifact inventory.
Chloe had never known how to thank Ethan for helping her. Until now. “You’re not all alone,” Chloe whispered to Dellyn.
Then Chloe pulled back on to the road. As she left Eagle she realized that her hands ached, and she loosened her death grip on the steering wheel. “No way I’m backing off, Officer McKenna,” she muttered. “No frickin’ way.”
She knew Roelke would do everything possible to track down whomever had attacked her in the barn. That was police business, and she was happy to leave it to him. But she also doubted that he’d give any credence to Dellyn’s theory about the Eagle Diamond.
Might someone actually be searching for the diamond? Or even information about the diamond? It was hard to imagine. But criminals weren’t the brightest bulbs in the box, now, were they? Besides, what mattered most was that Dellyn believed it possible. And Dellyn needed to have someone on her side.
“OK,” Chloe told the windshield. “Time to learn more about the Eagle Diamond.”
First, she’d need to keep helping with Dellyn’s inventory project. Perhaps they could unearth her father’s missing files about the diamond. That would provide some comfort, and probably shut the whole stranger-seeking-diamond theory down cold.
Second, she’d look for more information about the diamond herself. She was a curator; she knew research.
Chloe slowed as she reached the outskirts of Palmyra. Suddenly she flipped on her turn signal. “And third, talk to Libby,” she said. Two minutes later she knocked on Libby’s door.
Libby’s eyebrows raised in surprise when she saw her visitor. “Chloe!”
“Sorry to drop in unannounced,” Chloe said. She could hear Libby’s son complaining about something from the next room. “I was driving by, and just have a quick question. Would it be OK if I invited someone else to come to our next writers’ meeting?”
“Justin, I want the Legos picked up, and the whining to stop, by the time I get back there,” Libby called over her shoulder. Then she turned back to Chloe. “Who do you have in mind?”
“A friend of Dellyn’s. Her name is Valerie Bing. She recently moved back to Eagle from … well, I don’t know, from someplace. She’s