Candy Apple Dead Read Online Free PDF

fridge for a few minutes and finally emerged holding a container of shrimp fried rice left over from lunch at the Lantern Palace. Sniffing the rice to make sure it was still edible, he pulled a fork from a drawer. “Looks to me like Mills has lost everything. If you ask me, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.”
    I stopped chopping so I could gape at him. “That’s a horrible thing to say. Why do you dislike him so much anyway?”
    “Because he’s an asshole.” Wyatt shoveled rice into his mouth and spoke around it. “He probably started the fire himself.”
    “That’s not funny.”
    “It wasn’t meant to be. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
    I gave the cherries a vicious whack with my knife and glared at my brother. “What are you doing in town so early anyway? What’s the matter? Didn’t Elizabeth fix your breakfast?”
    Something flashed across his face, and his mouth thinned. “I heard about the fire. Thought maybe I’d come see how bad it was.”
    Wyatt and Elizabeth live several miles out of town—just far enough to make a person think twice about driving back and forth without a good reason. Someone must have called mighty early for Wyatt to be in town at this hour. “Well, I guess that proves that the grapevine is alive and well,” I said. “Do you mind me asking who was up making phone calls in the middle of the night?”
    “Nate Svboda.”
    Nate’s been a friend of Wyatt’s since high school. He’s also a patrol officer with the Paradise police department. “Why would Nate call you in the middle of all that trouble just to tell you about the fire?”
    “It wasn’t in the middle of all the trouble. The fire was mostly out when he called.”
    “So he called you in the middle of the night?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    He didn’t have to. I abandoned the cherries and carried sugar and the creamer to the table where mounds of old-fashioned stick candy waited to be bundled into gift jars and tied with raffia ribbon. I don’t care how old people get, they still seem to love those candy sticks, and the jars filled with them are one of our best-selling items during the summer months.
    “It’s barely six-thirty now,” I pointed out. “It takes at least half an hour to get to town from the ranch, and obviously this wasn’t your first stop.”
    “So?”
    “So why did Nate think it was so important to call you?”
    Irritation flashed in my brother’s eyes. “How should I know?”
    “You didn’t ask?”
    “I was tired.”
    I shook my head firmly. “No way. The last time I called before sunup you nearly took my head off, and I’m your sister. Are you telling me that after dealing with the fire for half the night, Nate called you just because? And that you didn’t mind?”
    Growling, Wyatt tossed his fork onto the table. “What the hell is this? The third degree? Nate called me. Leave it at that.”
    His reaction stunned me. Wyatt’s an open book. Honest as they come. Sometimes almost too honest. He says what he thinks, and he means what he says. I couldn’t remember a single time in our adult lives when he’d told me anything but the unvarnished truth, even when I wished he would. I couldn’t prove he was lying now, but I would have bet a prime-rib dinner at the Timberline Grill that he was.
    He was also spoiling for a fight, but giving him one wouldn’t accomplish anything. I kicked my feet onto a chair and gave a nonchalant shrug. “Well, Nate’s a weird duck. So what did he say, anyway? Do they know how the fire started?”
    Wyatt dragged his gaze away from my face slowly and went back to attacking the fried rice. “They’re not absolutely certain yet, but Nate thinks somebody set it deliberately.”
    I sat up sharply. “He thinks it was arson?”
    “That’s what he said.”
    “But why? Who’d do something like that?”
    Wyatt scraped the bottom of the container and licked a few grains of rice from his fork. “I don’t know. Somebody with a