After running the first bottle across the scanner, she set it down with an eloquent thump.

Eli suppressed a grin. “How’s your day going, Mrs. Lansing?” he asked.

“‘Bout like you’d expect,” she said, still glaring.

Eli wondered if Gretchen Lansing treated every customer to the stink eye, decided that she was probably civil to most folks, if only to keep herself gainfully employed. Being the sheriff, and thus antagonistic toward her son and husband, he was beneath contempt.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Eli finally replied. She hadn’t exactly said she was having a bad day, but then, she didn’t need to say it.

Gretchen lowered her voice, looked briefly around for eavesdropping managers, and spat, “I’ll just bet you are, Sheriff. You leave my boy alone, you hear me?”

“Or what, Mrs. Lansing?”

“Just leave him be!” Gretchen hissed. “He’s trying to make a fresh start!”

Eli ignored that. “Does Freddie have a girlfriend?” he asked.

Color flooded Gretchen’s pale face, throwing her freckles into sharp relief. “No,” she snarled, “he doesn’t. And if you think you’re going to pin anything on him, you’re dead wrong!”

“Now, why would I try to ‘pin anything’ on poor Freddie. He’s such a good, upstanding citizen, after all. Just like you and Fred.”

For a moment, Gretchen looked as though she might spring across the counter, like some small, wiry, weasel-like creature, all teeth and claws and most definitely rabid.

Eli was reminded of a time when he was a kid, and he and J.P. and Cord had come across a young raccoon up in the foothills, where cottonwoods rustled among close stands of fir and pine.

Thinking the animal was hurt, he’d reached out, meaning to pick it up off the ground, where it lay sprawled and stunned.

In the space of a heartbeat, that raccoon balled himself up and came hurtling at Eli with the force of something fired from a giant slingshot, bowling him over, leaving him flat on his back, with cuts stinging all over his arms and chest and the wind knocked right out of him.

He’d had to have stitches, and a series of rabies shots.

Now, years later, standing in a supermarket, he couldn’t help drawing the obvious parallels between that critter and Gretchen Lansing.

Not much difference, for his money, except that she probably wasn’t rabid.

“I’ll be out to your place sometime tomorrow with official notification of the restraining order I mentioned to your husband and son last night. Make sure Freddie’s around because I’ve got some questions for him. Got that?”

Gretchen finished ringing up his order and then bagging the four wine bottles, each one carefully wrapped, all without saying a single word.

Her thin lips were pressed together hard, and her gaze skirted Eli’s.