THE WAY JOYCE HAD REACTED WHEN SHE SEEN ODELL WITH THAT woman told me that she was not going to forgive him and stay married. I was glad to know that we’d got the results we wanted. Well, at least it looked that way. I didn’t want to jump the gun, though. Yeah, Joyce had exploded and disappeared. But after she calmed down, she could still forgive Odell and stay with him. That was my biggest fear. Because then all our plotting and planning would have been for nothing.

Willie Frank’s truck chugged along, rattling like it was on its last leg. Or wheel, I should say. Every time we hit a pothole, the cab trembled, and smoke seeped from under the hood. Willie Frank put a lot of money into getting repairs done on this piece of junk. But it still broke down every now and then anyway. I hoped that didn’t happen to us. Especially today when so much was happening. The last thing I wanted to deal with was us having to find another way home. Like Joyce was going to do.

Milton gazed at me from the corner of his eye and let out a weary sigh. “Say something,” he grunted.

I exhaled and rubbed the side of my neck. My head was aching, and my chest felt like a elephant was sitting on it. If I was feeling this bad, I couldn’t imagine how Joyce was feeling. “What if she can’t find a way home?”

“Well, we can’t do nothing about that now. We tried to find her. And even if we had found her, how do you know she would have got back in the truck with us? There ain’t no telling what went through her mind when she realized we had set her up. Don’t worry about how she getting home. Shoot. Joyce got a lot of friends and a daddy with wheels. She might have already called one of them by now. Besides, there’s probably bus service between Hartville and Branson. Put Joyce in the back of your mind. We need to be thinking about what we going to do when things explode.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yvonne, Odell is going to go stark-raving mad when he finds out we let the cat out of the bag.”

“We’ll deal with that when it happens. But there is something else I been worried about. How do we know Joyce wasn’t involved in Odell making that call to the sheriff? She could be just as conniving as he is, but better at hiding it.”

“Pffft. You talking way out of your head. Joyce? She ain’t the kind of woman who would do nothing like that. She is so ditzy, I don’t think she’d even know how to be evil. If she had been involved, I don’t think she would have kept coming to the house.”