Grimacing, she said, “I keep thinking he’ll get tired of it and give up. But if not . . .” She gave a half smile. “I’m developing a plan.”

I deeply wanted to know details but figured I’d be better off not knowing. Plausible deniability and all that. She asked for recommendations for new or upcoming releases, and we talked books for a few minutes, then parted amicably.

A few minutes later, when I was standing inside the fabric walls of a booth selling jams, jellies, and salsa, I heard a quiet male voice say, “Did you hear about the Breece Farm?”

My ears practically swiveled. Please, I thought desperately, please don’t let me hear about a discovery of Ryan’s cabin. Please . . .

“No,” said another voice. “But I haven’t seen Ian or Felicia in weeks.”

“Remember their new well?” asked First Voice. “It went bad last fall, right? They had to spend thousands to get a new one drilled, to get down to the good aquifer.”

“Sure,” said Second Voice. “I remember. What was it, eight hundred feet down?”

“More than. Well, now their second well went out. You know, the one they use to irrigate the hoop houses and water the stock?”

“Oh, man,” said Second Voice. “They were scraping to find the money last fall. Now what are they going to do? If they can’t irrigate the hoop houses, they’ll lose their spring and early summer product.”

Both voices moved off. I peeked around the end of the booth and saw the backs of two thirtyish men in brown canvas jackets and jeans as they walked away.

I felt a pang of empathy for Ian and Felicia Breece. Two expensive projects when you didn’t have the money for one was going to hurt their finances badly. How were they going to raise the money?

But I was avoiding the real question, so I took a deep breath and faced it.

Was one of the money-raising methods stealing a Conti statue? And, when that proved lucrative, stealing it a second time? Only getting caught in the action and committing murder?

Chapter 16

Back home, I wandered from room to room, dusting a little, tidying a little, and thinking a lot.

“John Pinnock,” I told Eddie, who was sometimes following me so he could criticize everything I did and who was sometimes curled up in a big Eddie ball wherever the sun was hitting something upon which he could flop himself. “Still a suspect. And he’s driving Sylvia nuts, so doesn’t that mean he’s really vested in keeping anyone from living next to him year-round?”

Eddie, at that point lounging on the wood floor just inside a parallelogram of sun, yawned.