Read 2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 for Free Online

grill out the only window in her cell cum office, and closed her door. Both the door and the window were new. Bars had been replaced with studding, drywall, and door and window stock from Home Depot.
    Ike settled into his chair, gritted his teeth at its squeal, and picked up the phone. He needed to talk to Ruth. Everyone in town knew he and the president of Callend College for Women were an item. The townsfolk preferred not to talk about it. They liked Ike and could forgive him this one foible, and if he wanted to hobnob with the hoity-toity folk up on the hill, well okay. Eventually, they agreed, he’d come to his senses.
    He rolled his chair close to the door, kicked it shut, and winced at the ominous rattle it produced. His office had glass panels, starting halfway up, for walls. His predecessor had insisted on it. The story went around he didn’t trust his deputies, afraid one of them would challenge him in an election, and he needed to keep an eye on them at all times. None of them dared to run as it turned out. But Ike took him on in the general and won in a landslide. The town’s major concern since then: if Ike left, would the sheriff’s office revert to its former corrupt torpor? It was a problem that worried Ike as well.
    “President Harris’ office,” Agnes Ewalt warbled.
    “Good afternoon, Agnes,” Ike said. “Is your boss in?”
    “Is that you, Sheriff?”
    “Yes, Ma’am, it’s me.”
    “Just a moment, I’ll see if she can speak with you.” Agnes Ewalt shared the townsfolk’s disapproval of their relationship, only in reverse, so to speak. Ike decided if, in the unlikely event he and Ruth Harris ever married, he intended to get Agnes Ewalt pie-faced drunk, make her stand on a table and sing “I love Townies” to the tune of I Love Paris .
    “Hi, Sheriff,” Ruth said, music in her voice. “Are you behaving?”
    “Serving and protecting, Ruth, serving and protecting—I’m on tonight.”
    “I know,” she said and paused. “Ike, you’re the boss. You don’t have to pull shifts with the deputies. Why do you do it?”
    “I can’t ask them to do something I wouldn’t do.”
    “Ike, they know that. They know you’d back them up any day, any way. You don’t have to prove anything to them.”
    “Okay, then put it down to stubbornness. I came into the police business through the back door, sort of. I still need the experience.”
    “That’s nonsense, Ike. You do it because no matter how much you want to convince yourself you are done living on the edge like you did in your CIA days, you still need the rush—maybe just a little one.”
    She had a point. He had not thought about it, but she might be right. Did he? Those days had been dangerous and heady. If Zurich hadn’t happened, would he still be drifting in and out of Europe, a pawn in intelligence chess?
    “Enough psychoanalysis, Doc. You up for a late date? I’m off at eleven.”
    “At eleven, I will be in bed, asleep, and alone. I have put in one hellish week and I have another coming. We have student transfers in, transfers out. Faculty who were spooked by the robbery business and loss of the art collection have jumped ship. I am going crazy trying to find replacements and at the same time getting classes started on Monday. Do you know anybody who can teach freshman English?”
    “I met a guy today who thinks he’s mastered about everything there is to know in that department. He gave me a lecture on usage.”
    “Really? Who?”
    “His name is Blake Fisher, the Reverend Mister.”
    “He’s the pastor or minister or whatever they call them at the church with the ridiculous name, isn’t he?”
    “Priest, and Stonewall Jackson is not a ridiculous name, and if I were you, my Yankee friend, I would not say so in public, not in this part of the world.”
    “Well really, Ike, what kind of religion are they promoting when they name a church after a slave-owning, states rightsspouting, secessionist civil war