Nail Biter by Sarah Graves

under human protection.
    “But if you shot 'em clean—game animals I mean, not folks' pets—well, I guess Mac thought that was different.”
    The sweet perfume of olive oil wafted into the room. “Later on he had a business guiding hunting trips. Only the deal was, he would take you into the real backwoods, teach survival skills while you were bagging your moose. Or deer or bear, or whatever.”
    “Uh-huh.” The wine had unlocked a kink in the back of my neck. I finished the glass and set it aside, touched the tender bump rising on my head where I'd banged it coming out from under Luanne Moretti's kitchen sink.
    “But I gather Rickert's in another business now?” I asked, then related what Luanne had told me about him.
    Bella dumped the cooked spaghetti into a colander, stepping back from the cloud of steam. “Drugs? That I didn't know about. Interesting, though,” she said, putting the drained spaghetti back into the pot along with a lump of butter half the size of my clenched fist.
    “What is?” Oh, what the hell, one more glass of wine wasn't going to kill me any more than that butter would, or anyway not immediately. So I poured it.
    “Well, it probably doesn't mean anything,” Bella answered. “But Jenny Dibble mentioned Mac Rickert this morning when I stopped in at her house on my way here to work.”
    I sat up straight. Jenny Dibble was Eugene Dibble's recently bereaved wife. “Really. Why did you visit her?”
    Bella sniffed as if the answer to this question ought to be obvious. “Girl's a grievin' widow, ain't she? Christian thing to do, stop by an' see if she might need anything.”
    Of course. And to pick up any interesting facts that might be floating around while she was there, too.
    “Which, by the way, she's already moving out of.” Bella tasted the sauce with a spoon. “The house, that is.”
    “That didn't take long.” From down in the cellar came a low grinding sound, like a dentist's drill being run on slow speed.
    “Nope. Getting her clothes together, leaving the furniture and so on. All junk, Eugene was an awful slob. I don't think that place holds many happy memories for Jenny,” Bella remarked.
    She took a second taste, larger and more thoughtful than the first. “Married him on the rebound from her first husband, had a daughter already then. Girl's out of the house now, though, has been for a while. I don't know her at all.”
    She shook salt into the sauce. “Anyway, there was a brace of partridges in the kitchen, all ready for the oven, along with the casseroles and other things people had been bringing on account of Eugene, and when I asked her where they came from she said she thought them partridges was from Mac Rickert.”
    She pronounced it the Maine way:
pah-triches
. “Really,” I said, and then because she'd been so informative so far, I decided to tell her the rest of what I'd been up to for the last twenty-four hours.
    “So does all that plus a bag of pills smell like partnership to you?” I asked when I had finished. “Because it does to me.”
    Bella turned, spoon in hand. “Well, I wouldn't know for sure. But I can tell you this much—Mac Rickert wouldn't be caught dead within a mile of that goofball Eugene Dibble unless he had
some
reason.”
    At my questioning look she explained, “When Mac was out an' about more he only hung around with the hunting guys, loggers, some of the commercial fishermen. 'S all you'd ever see him with, not fools like Eugene.”
    Cat Dancing stood up, peered around for possible stray shrimp, and settled herself once more with a soft thump. “And now he's not around at all?”
    Bella shrugged expressively. “That's the other thing. He's around, all right. Once in a while you'll hear a boat, no running lights on a foggy night, or some hunter'll catch a glimpse of somebody a long ways from the road, slippin' 'mongst the trees.”
    She paused, thinking. “Or a car will go missing out of some driveway, stay gone for a day or so,