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Seed. Combined with that deep, non-Woodston-looking winter tan and nervous jitters, the clothes were too much like a carefully chosen costume. An outsider’s idea of what an Ozarks hayseed would wear.
    And the way he’d jammed those mirrored sunglasses over his eyes, as if he didn’t want me to get a good look at his face …
    Okay, I’d semi-canceled him as an agent of the Braxtons up to something nefarious concerning me. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t up to something .
    The question was, what?

5
    The answer came to me like one of Harley’s old fly-fishing lines zinging across a creek to hit a target in the water.
    Those binoculars hadn’t been aimed upward to look for birds. At least not until the guy latched on to my suggestion that he might be a bird-watcher. They’d been aimed straight ahead. At Leslie Marcone’s imitation Southern plantation. Was there some connection between the man and the mysterious woman?
    “Does anyone know where this woman came from?” I asked.
    “California, I bet. Or New York,” Skye said, with an air that said anybody who was anybody came from one of those two states.
    “Skye’s from California,” Sandy added.
    “I used to spend practically all summer hanging out at the beach. ’N Trouble and their friends came to the same beach to surf sometimes. I talked to Nick LeClaire a few times.”
    This was obviously important name-dropping, but I was not knowledgeable enough to be properly impressed. I looked to Sandy for explanation.
    “’N Trouble is a rock group,” Sandy said. “Nick LeClaire is the lead singer.”
    From her hothouse complexion I wouldn’t have guessed Skye to be a beach girl. But maybe Little Tom’s narrow beach, without a rock star in sight, didn’t meet her eligibility requirements for outdoor activity.
    Skye went home a few minutes later, and Sandy ran upstairs to start packing for her trip. Spring vacation was next week, and she was going with a mixed group of teens and adults from church to a small town just across the Mexican border for a project at a mission orphanage. The trip had been planned for some time, and Mike and DeeAnn had taken care of all the permissions and paperwork before they left.
    I put the leftover chili in cartons for the freezer and then went upstairs to see if I could help Sandy. “Don’t forget sunscreen,” I offered as she stuffed denim cutoffs in a duffel bag.
    “Right, I’ll need that.” Sandy rummaged in a dresser drawer and came up with a blue plastic bottle.
    “Is Skye going on the trip too?”
    “No. I asked her, but she thought she’d be spending spring break with her mom in New York.”
    “Which isn’t happening?”
    “She said her mom had to fly over to Italy for some last-minute fashion shoot thing.”
    “But she is going to go live with her mother before long?”
    “Her mom’s been in New York since last fall. How long can it take to get ‘settled’? Skye thought she was going to New York at Christmas too, but then her mother had to go to London and sent a bunch of presents instead.”
    Including an expensive watch, I suspected.
    Sandy held up a pair of red thong sandals. Apparently they fell short on some rating standard that escaped me, and she tossed them aside.
    “Skye’s older than you, isn’t she?” Their relationship rather surprised me. I’d thought older girls considered it beneath them to hang out with younger ones.
    “I’m a freshman and she’s a junior. But all Woodston has is an elementary school and a four-year high school, so Skye and I have one class together.” Sandy hesitated, as if she was uncertain about confiding something to me, but finally she added, “Skye isn’t too popular with most of the kids.”
    “She’s very pretty. And she has a car of her own.”
    “But she’s always talking about how much better everything in California is, and how she’s going to be a model and everything. People would like her a lot better if she’d just … you know, be