Page 48 of Found Objects

“Yes.”

She bit her lip as Dakota walked out of the kitchen, saw me, grimaced, then turned around and walked right back through the swinging door.

“Get out here now,” I yelled, then took a seat at the end of the counter. The breakfast rush was over, and we wouldn’t be slammed again until lunch. It was steady, which I was thankful for, as I was able to keep a staff of thirty gainfully employed, but no customers were paying attention to me raising my voice.

Dakota came back out and stood on the other side of the counter, staring at me. She was soon joined by Evie, Lupe, and Gaia.

No one said a word, and I glared at all of them.

They all smiled.

“What is going on?” I asked them.

Dakota cleared her throat. “A very handsome man—and I do mean a very handsome man—came and picked up food for you on Saturday morning. We were all just wondering, you know, how that went?”

“That’s why the ruse?”

“Maybe.” Dakota shrugged.

“You couldn’t have just called me and asked?”

Lupe, who was working her one Monday a month—Taylor Kang needed it to meet her husband in Lewisburg so her son could have a supervised visit with his father and the court-appointed counselor—scoffed loudly. “We all know that if any of us had called you about it, you would have hung up. You tend to be very secretive about your love life.”

“I’m leaving,” I announced, getting up. “I’m closing tonight, I shouldn’t even be here.”

“No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait,” Laura Banks, another of my servers, ordered as she came running up to join the four other women. “Did they really dig up your new neighbors’ yard looking for human remains? I heard the state police crime scene unit was out there.”

I shook my head at her.

“What? If you’re not spilling about your sex life…” She turned quickly to look at the others. “He wasn’t, was he?”

“No,” they all said at once, sounding really put out over that.

Laura’s attention was instantly back on me. “If we’re not hearing about you and the gorgeous man with the biceps and the thighs and the baseball cap and the dimples⁠—”

“I nearly died when he smiled at me with the dimples,” Dakota confessed, fanning her face with a menu.

“—then we should at least get to know why they’re digging up your neighbors’ yard looking for people they murdered.”

I put both elbows on the counter, laced my fingers together, and looked at all of them. “Do you think if the state police found murdered people on the Swann land, perhaps someone would have been arrested?”

They were all quiet.

“That’s an excellent question,” Dakota pointed out.

“Being where we are, in this county that’s hundreds of years old, what do we think is far more likely than newly murdered people?”

Everyone stared at me.

“Oh,” Lupe said after a moment. “I see what you’re getting at. Whatever’s buried out there is probably really old.”

“That’s correct.”

“Ugh, boring. More old dead people,” Gaia said before leaving us to return to the kitchen.

“They do find a lot of them around here,” Lupe stated. And it was true.

“What about the nice man who took you breakfast?” Evie pressed.