Findings by Mary Anna Evans Page B

was brought up here in this bar.” She gestured at her own establishment and its seedy-looking customers. “He knows that drunken brawls don’t ever end well.”
    “So they got him for underage drinking?”
    “And assault. Punched the local tough guy’s lights out. He was a juvenile and it was a first offense, so they slapped him on the wrist. Hell. I smacked him harder than that when I heard what he did. Men shouldn’t be allowed to drink ‘til they’re forty.”
    Faye observed that instituting this law wouldn’t put much of a dent in Liz’s mature clientele.
    “But that happened years ago, before he even started college.” Liz sighed. “He and the law have gotten along just fine ever since.”
    “Then it’s gotta be a woman,” Faye said. “I bet he got his heart broken.”
    She squinted in Chip’s direction. He didn’t look lovelorn. Shaggy chestnut hair and a confident stance made him look more like a heartbreaker himself.
    He was chatting with a group of Civil War re-enactors, still half-decked out in their military finery. One of them landed a punch on Chip’s upper arm, the kind of punch men give when they like you. Everybody was laughing as he took their dirty dishes. “Well, he’s never been such a big ladies’ man, but he usually has a serious girlfriend. Not now, but usually. When a relationship goes south, he just crashes and burns. I always have to pick him up and dust him off. Give him a lot of hugs. Tell him some stupid jokes. Make a few cookies…”
    Faye stifled the urge to giggle at the image of Liz as a cookie-baking mom.
    “Don’t you laugh. I make ’em. I eat more of ’em than I strictly should, but I make ’em.”
    Liz waved her spatula in Faye’s general direction, so Faye tried not to keep giggling. She hadn’t giggled in a while. At times like this, women friends were good things to have.
    “Since he always hits rock-bottom when some girl dumps him,” Liz went on. “I’ve kind of settled on woman trouble as the explanation for why he dropped out. Maybe he needs to take up with a smart, pretty archaeologist.”
    Joe bristled. He was getting very good at that.
    “Don’t look at me,” Faye said quickly. “What is Chip? Twenty-two? I’m old enough to be his…hip young aunt.”
    Yeah, right. At thirty-eight, Faye was plenty old enough to have had a youthful indiscretion that resulted in a strapping young man like Chip. That thought called for another cup of coffee. Heavily laced with some of Joe’s bourbon.
    Liz turned back to the griddle, wielding her spatula over an array of eggs being cooked every-which-way. Four of them, scrambled, were quickly dumped in front of Joe, before Liz bustled off to find someone else who needed feeding. Joe had done his share to help Emma get rid of all that surplus funeral food. Faye glanced sideways to peek at his flat, muscled abdomen. Where did he put all those calories?
    Faye had cleared half her plate before she noticed the prickly feeling on the back of her neck. She turned and scanned the room. It was full of people who appeared…perfectly ordinary. They looked pretty much like Liz’s usual crowd—loud, jovial, and decked out in extremely casual clothing. In other words, they looked like pleasure boaters, fishermen, and hunters.
    Given recent events, two of them might also be killers.
    Faye slid her eyes to the left. Two…interesting-looking…young people sat at a table in the corner, and they’d sat there before. She knew their names—Wayland and Nita—and she knew that they were shrimpers and that Wayland, the last in a long family line of shrimpers, had inherited his boat from his father. The plain bands on their left hands told her that they were married. But that was about all she knew. They’d always seemed harmless enough, but now Faye found herself wondering. Were the lightning bolts and eagles tattooed on their arms Nazi symbols? Did their close-cropped hair make them skinheads?
    Nita, in particular, was