Troublemaker by Linda Howard

Several people waved at her as she passed: Harold Patterson in the Broad Street Barbershop, Doris Brown as she entered the bakery she owned and operated, as well as Mayor Buddy Owenby, who was walking well now after having broken his ankle this past December while deer hunting. The mayor kept curtailed hours, too; his was a part-time job like hers, and he owned the small grocery store that served the town. Bo was fond of Mayor Buddy; he’d served four terms and was in large part responsible for keeping the little town as viable as it was. It had been his idea to turn over running the town as much as possible to the younger generation, thereby keeping them involved and, most of all, there . Hamrickville hadn’t seen a large drain of its younger citizens toward greener pastures.
    As many people as waved to her, twice that many waved to Tricks. She knew who they were waving to because they yelled, “Tricks!” as the Jeep rolled by. It seemed as if everyone in town knew her pet. For her part, Tricks sat in the passenger seat with her tongue lolling out and a big, happy golden-retriever smile on her face. For all her diva ways, Tricks had the typical retriever nature, sunny, without a lick of dignity, and always ready to play.
    Several miles out of town, Bo took a secondary road and drove a couple more miles before she reached her driveway. Her mailbox was on the opposite side of the road so she drove past the driveway, checked for any traffic either behind her or in front of her before swerving onto the right shoulder to give herself a wider turning axis, then left across both lanes of the road to pull onto the opposite shoulder just short of the mailbox. She’d performed that maneuver so often there was a crescent-shaped track worn out in the shoulder on both sides of the road.
    The mailbox was set far enough off the pavement and the shoulder was wide enough that other vehicles had plenty of room to get past. And if anyone didn’t like it—well, tough shit; she was the chief of police, and even though she lived in the county instead of inside town limits, no one in the sheriff’s department was going to hassle her over something as mundane as how she collected her mail. She didn’t get a whole lot of perks with the job, but she’d gladly use the ones she did.
    She put the transmission in park and got out, tugging hard on the door of the battered mailbox because it was slightly warped from being attacked by a couple of teenagers with a baseball bat. She pulled out the usual assortment of sales papers, flyers, a bill or two, and one thick oversized envelope that didn’t have a return address. Huh. Bo eyed the envelope, examining the postage—just the right amount, a post-office sticker rather than extra stamps—and the location and date. It had been mailed three days before from New York City.
    Double huh . She didn’t know anyone in New York City—or state, for that matter.
    Common sense told her a mail bomb would come in a box, not an envelope, even if she had any reason to be wary of a mail bomb, which she didn’t. Hamrickville wasn’t exactly a hotbed of crime, or of anything else.
    She flipped the envelope over and looked at the back. Blank. The envelope was a heavy cream-colored paper, about the size for a largish birthday card. And it was definitely addressed to her, using her formal name of Isabeau instead of just Bo.
    It wasn’t her birthday. Nowhere close.
    A pickup truck blew past with a toot-toot of the horn and a wave: Sam Higgins, school bus driver. She returned the wave, then curiosity got the better of her and she put the rest of the mail on the Jeep’s hood so she could open the envelope.
    The card she extracted did indeed say Happy Birthday . In full, it said Happy Birthday to a Wonderful Sister . What the hell? She had a couple of half-brothers and/or -sisters whom she’d never met; she considered herself an only and liked it that