Page 70 of Death on Riddle Road

We also both needed to change out of our dog park clothes before our lunch with Evan Ferguson.

Clara’s brows rose, but she didn’t say anything when she dropped me off, because Teague’s vehicle was parked in my driveway.This time he wasn’t leaning against it.He must have gone inside.

My heartbeat rattled.He’d used the key.

I was smiling as I ushered Gracie and Murphy in the back door, but I aimed for casual when I called out, “Teague?”

“Upstairs,” he responded.

Hearing his voice, the dogs thundered ahead of me to greet him.

I found him in my office — a definite disappointment—and not only fully clothed, but still wearing his jacket.

“What are you doing?”I could see what he was doing — using a tape measure on the inside of the closet.I should have asked why.But it’s hard to backspace-delete in a conversation.

“Measuring.Want to be sure I have the dimensions right.The supplies for Amy’s cabinet came in.Might as well get the material for this at the same time I pick those up.”

Amy Keckler lived kitty-corner across the street and had asked Teague to build a custom cabinet in a gap beside her stove.

The project in my office stemmed from a suggestion Kit made to fit shelves over the double-wide filing cabinet in the closet to free up more of the room’s limited floor space.Bookshelves (some built by Teague), desk, desk chair, cushy upholstered chair for curling up in, then throw in a dog bed and you could barely tiptoe to the door.

The shelves Teague made would stay, but one, maybe two free-standing (and mismatched) bookcases could be liberated by the added space in the closet.

“You have time to work on any of this?”I asked.

He took a pen out of his mouth to write down numbers.“Waiting for some information to come in, so have a window to pick up materials.The case will wrap up eventually.Want to be ready to go when it does.”

“But by then school will be open again and last year you said it’s the busy season for a sub.Besides, I meant more generally...You’re going to keep doing carpentry, for other people, for me even though you’re substitute teaching and working for the sheriff’s department?”

He glanced at me on those final words.

Probably not because I’d said them any particular way.

He had no way of knowing I worried that the secret I carried about my past could hurt his future with the sheriff’s department.

“I’ll keep on with the carpentry as much as I can.”

“Why?”

He sat back, his heels coming up off the ground.

“I like carpentry.Makes for a nice change.It’s quiet.”

I side-eyed him.“Hammering, sawing, drilling?That’s quiet?”

He grinned.“In my head.It’s quiet in my head.It’s neater and makes more sense than investigations and way more than teenagers.It’s the next step and the next and the next.Orderly.Instead of a dozen possibilities branching out with a dozen possibilities at the end of each branch and some of those branches crossing over to touch others, until they leave your head buzzing with the tangle.

“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the challenge of teaching or investigating.But I don’t know if I would keep on enjoying them the way I do without the quiet of carpentry.”

“Huh.”

That’s all I said, but his brows rose slightly.He’d read my comprehension in that syllable.“Gardening’s like that for you?Because of the writing?”he asked.

“Yeah.”

The simple act of putting a plant into the ground or yanking a weed out of it blocked out the branching possibilities in my head from writing and investigating...and life issues.Too bad it was late December right now.

Yet it feltconnectingto know he had branching possibilities in his head, too.Despite the fact that my secrets could further tangle his branches.