Read A Murderous Glaze for Free Online Page A

elementary school instead.
    It was the sheriff, John Hodges, and I could see by the way he was looking at me this wasn’t going to be pleasant conversation for either one of us.
    “Come to paint some pottery, Sheriff?” I asked in the sweetest voice I could muster. If he could tell I was being sarcastic, he didn’t show it.
    “You’re kidding, right?” he said. “I’m here about Betty Wickline.”
    “Give me a second. I need to turn off the lights and lock the door.”
    That stumped him. “What are you talking about, Carolyn?”
    “I assume you’ve decided to dispense with an actual investigation and go ahead and arrest me. David’s not coming in today, and I’d rather not leave the shop door standing wide open while you haul me off in the back of your squad car.”
    That made him mad—probably not the best tack I could have taken, but I resented even being on his suspect list. Honestly, I was probably the only one on it, knowing the sheriff’s dislike for actual work.
    “I’m not here to arrest you,” he shouted.
    “There’s no need to yell. I can hear perfectly fine. If you aren’t going to handcuff me, then why are you here?”
    “Just because I’m not planning to arrest you this second doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk to you about what happened here. I need that list of people who have keys to your shop.”
    I’d nearly forgotten all about it. “It’s in my purse. Let me get it.” Still smarting from his tone of voice, I handed him my purse. “You’d better retrieve it yourself. You never know, I might have a gun stashed in there somewhere.”
    He looked at the offered purse like it was a snake. “I’m not fool enough to go diving into a woman’s purse without more reason than you’ve given me. At least not yet.”
    I retrieved the list, with no more names added to it than I’d shared with Hannah, and handed it to him.
    He studied it a second, then said, “I’ll look into this.”
    “There’s something else you should know,” I added reluctantly.
    “Well, don’t make me pull it out of you. What is it?”
    “There’s a chance that I might have left the front door unlocked when I left the day of the murder. It’s happened a few times before. Anyway, I thought you should know.”
    “And you’re telling me this now?” He glanced down at the list. “That makes this pretty much worthless, doesn’t it?”
    “I’m not saying that I did leave the door unlocked. I just thought you should know it was a possibility. Oh, there’s something else I should probably tell you. Robert Owens is on your list, and he’s been out of town since before the murder. He went back to North Carolina three days ago to get the rest of his stuff. He’s just moved to Maple Ridge.”
    “I’ll check him out. Since I’m already here, I’d like to ask you a few more questions, if you don’t mind.” I hated orders that sounded like requests.
    “Do I have any choice?”
    “Don’t be that way, Carolyn.”
    “Fine, ask away.”
    He looked at me a second before he proceeded. “There’s no easy way to ask this. When was the last time you saw Betty alive?”
    “I told you that the night I found her body.”
    “Tell me again.” His gaze never left me.
    “She came into the shop that afternoon. We talked for a few minutes, then she left.”
    He raised one eyebrow. “What did you talk about?”
    “Who remembers? It wasn’t all that significant. Something about a firing, I think.”
    “Are you sure you weren’t having an argument?” He was being much too smug for my tastes.
    “Why? What have you heard?”
    The sheriff shrugged. “I understand it wasn’t so much of a conversation as it was a fight.”
    That was all I could take. “Where did you hear that? Tell me who it was.”
    He backed up a step. “It was an anonymous tip, but the whispered voice sounded like she knew what she was talking about.”
    “Then your heroic witness is full of hot air. Nobody was in the shop when Betty was