Page 121 of Family Jewels

Partof me was already regretting the way we’d ditched Jed.

“Okay,” I said, trying to steady my nerves. “We need a plan so that, one, Miss Mable will talk to us, and two, Homer Dyer doesn’t kill us.”

“Maybe we could lure her away,” Neely Kate said. “You know, like when the police tell crooks they won a Sony PlayStation and they get arrested when they go to pick it up.”

“What on earth would Miss Mable leave for? And even if we found something, she’d be ticked off enough she wouldn’t tell us a thing.” I shook my head. “Seems to me that we’re lurin’ away the wrong person. We’re afraid of Homer, not Mable.”

“I ain’t afraid of Homer.”

I shot her a frown. “Well,Iam. What would that man run after?”

“Money,” Neely Kate said. Then she grinned and shook her head. “No. The necklace. He was lookin’ for it at our office.”

“We don’t have it.”

“But he doesn’t know that,” she said, getting excited. “We’ll call and tell him we have it and Raddy wanted us to give it to him. Then we’ll set up a meetin’ to hand it over and go see Mable while he’s gone.”

“He’s gonna be so pissed when we don’t show, Neely Kate.”

“Do you want to try to stop this war or not? We’ll deal with him later.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “Let’s do it. Do you have his number?”

She glanced at me, then rolled her eyes. Pulling out her phone, she searched through her contacts list and then placed the call.

“You really have Homer Dyer on your contact list?” I asked.

She grinned. “Shoot, no. But I looked up their landline in the white pages the other day. Homer Dyer might pretend to live off the grid, but he’s too cheap to pay for a private number.”

She had a point.

I worried that no one was going to answer—which might not have been a bad thing—but then Neely Kate stiffened slightly and said, “Homer, this is Neely Kate Rivers. We have your necklace.”

Leave it to Neely Kate to deliver news like that without preamble.

“If you want it, meet us at the burned down Atchison plant in an hour.” Then she hung up, presumably before he had a chance to respond. “I’m starving, and you promised me Chuck and Cluck. Now we’ve got time.”

Grabbing lunch on the go wasn’t a bad idea, but the thought of eating all that grease made me queasy. Still, Ihadpromised.

“Okay,” I said. “But then we head straight for the Dyer property.”

“But it only takes fifteen minutes to get there.”

“And it takes ten minutes to get to the plant from their house. When he gets there and we don’t show, he’s gonna come home angrier than a crocodile with dentures, so we need to be gone before he gets there.”

“Good point,” Neely Kate said with a frown. “I should’ve picked somewhere farther away. It was the first thing that popped into my head.”

“I’m not surprised since it was where our big showdown with J.R. Simmons and Kate happened.” I turned to her. “Any more letters from Kate?”

“No.”

“Well, we don’t need more than twenty minutes, so don’t worry about it. It’s not like we’re gonna search their land for the thing. We only need to figure out if Mable had it.”

We rolled through the drive-through so Neely Kate could get her Chuck and Cluck three-piece chicken dinner, and I ordered a questionable wrap and a water. As we drove out to the Dyer property, Neely Kate began to devour her food.

“Are you gonna eat yours?” she asked.

“I’ll wait until we’re hiding out and watching for Homer to leave. I want to examine what’s in this thing first.”