Something About Sophie by Mary Kay McComas Page B

his work.”
    â€œMother has a couple pieces she’s confiscated under the perpetual IYM ruling of 130,000 BCE .”
    Sophie was not the dullest knife in the drawer. “ I ’m Y our M other.”
    â€œSo you know it.”
    â€œQuite well, as a matter of fact.” They grinned in unison. “I thought it was common knowledge. Right up there next to ‘ Thou shalt not kill’ .”
    Not long after that, they parted on the corner of Main and Market Streets. Ava waved and started up Main to her sporty sedan; Sophie slipped around the corner to Market and her car parked in a small lot beside the museum.
    She was enjoying the peace of a late-summer afternoon—drowsy and muted; birds chirping, a gentle breeze blowing away the day’s heat—and reflecting on all the ways Ava defined the word character . Her lips slipped into a soft smile as she recalled Ava’s relish in recounting an incident of pure sabotage in seventh grade, when she and a friend “borrowed” three goats from a farmer, labeled them 1, 2, and 4 and turned them loose in the middle school—which was dismissed early that afternoon while the faculty scoured the building for number 3. Their three-day suspension had been well worth it.
    She caught the red of her Jeep and sighed contentedly. Wine on the porch with Jesse, another of her wonderful dinners, and she could chalk this Saturday up as one of the nicest she’d spent in—well, since her mother got sick, at least.
    Fishing in her purse for her keys, her buoyed spirits sank like an anchor again when she realized her car was listing toward the back of the small lot. She could feel her blood draining from her face and she broke out in a full-body sweat as she hurried around to the rider’s side and found both her front and back tires flattened, their rims set deep in the rubber.
    One tire would have been a serious bummer. Two flat tires were deliberate and seriously terrifying.
    Instinctively, she spun around to check behind her, to scan the rest of the lot, the old thin hedging that circled it, the worn alley that passed between the museum parking lot and the larger stores on Main Street. Nothing. She searched again, this time including every window and door she could see. Nothing. Still, someone was nearby, watching her; she felt it while the tiny hairs on the back of her neck rose up. With great caution she sidled around to the driver’s side, unlocked the door, climbed in, relocked the doors and called 911. Again.

Chapter Seven
    â€œS heriff Murphy fingerprinted my car. It looks like I haven’t washed it since I bought it. Dust everywhere. But there were so many prints; whole palm prints in some places. If I hadn’t been so”—she shrugged while she searched for the right word. Confused? Angry? Terrified? Nauseous and resisting the urge to cry?—“upset, it might have been more interesting. But all I kept thinking was, Is that dusty stuff going to scratch up the paint on my car?” Her laugh was small but it was all she could muster at the moment. “After that, he called Lonny and had him tow it back to his shop.”
    â€œLonny.” Elizabeth McCarren didn’t seem to know the name.
    She had, however, set Sophie at ease the moment she and Drew arrived at the sprawling two-story colonial home. The place screamed lavish comfort and livability in an understated style— plenty-o-money but not bragging described it best, Sophie decided.
    Cordial, courteous, and engaging—and not nearly as assertive or intimidating as she’d been made out to be—Mrs. McCarren was as graceful and put together as she’d appeared the morning of Arthur Cubeck’s funeral.
    Plus, she was an artful conversationalist . . . or interrogator—both applied. The cross-examine went exactly as Ava had predicted and was just as painless; and she’d diverted the dinner dialogue from any disturbing