“There was a woman here . . . recent. She was asking about you.” She started to shake. “You’re not supposed to know about it.”

Neely Kate gasped. “What? Who?”

My heart slammed into my chest. Had Kate been to see Neely Kate’s grandmother?

Neely Kate looked over her shoulder at me, then back at her grandmother. “Just tell me what she looked like, okay?” Neely Kate asked in an amazingly calm voice. “What color was her hair? That couldn’t hurt anything, could it?”

The older woman was clearly flustered. “She told me not to tell anyone. She told me not to say.”

“Granny, this is important. I need to know.”

“No!” Granny Rivers’s face turned red. “She said she’d kill you if I told! I failed Jenny Lynn. I’m not failing you, too.”

The older woman clearly knew more about what had happened to her daughter than she was letting on, but I was worried she wouldn’t tell us anything.

Neely Kate stood and began to pace, and Jed’s eyes had darkened. “Ma’am, I know you think you’re protecting Neely Kate,” he said, “but she’ll be in more danger if we don’t know who came to see you and why.”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

“Granny Rivers,” I said softly as I slid over to sit in Neely Kate’s vacated chair. “She said not tell us what she said, right?”

She nodded.

“How about I ask you a few things, and you only answer if you feel comfortable?”

She hesitated, eyeing me closely as though trying to figure out if it was a trick.

“I won’t force you to tell me anything you don’t want to. Can we just try it?”

She nodded.

“Okay.” I smiled. “Let’s talk about the time before Jenny Lynn left.” When she didn’t protest, I continued, “Did you know she was seeing an older man?”

“I knew she was hiding something, but I didn’t know what. She wouldn’t come home for days, and she’d show up with things—once a necklace and another time a pair of earrings.”

“From him? The man she was seeing?”

Granny Rivers shrugged. “She never said. I almost accused her of stealing, but I knew better. Jenny Lynn was a lot of things before she left, but a thief wasn’t one of them.”

“Did she ever act scared of him?”

“She was jumpy at the end. Easily spooked and lookin’ out the windows at night. The last week was the worst, and that’s when she finally told me the whole story.”

“And can you tell me the whole story?” I asked.

“No. She told me not to.”

“The woman who came to see you?”

Granny Rivers nodded.

“That’s okay,” I said softly. “Did the woman want the whole story?” She started getting agitated, so I added, “You’re not telling me what you two talked about. It’s okay.”

She nodded, grabbing a tissue from a box on the table. “She wanted the whole story.”

“Did you know who Neely Kate’s father was before Jenny Lynn left?”

She hesitated.

“You don’t have to say it out loud,” I suggested. “You can just nod or shake your head.”

She nodded.

“Did anyone come lookin’ for her after she left?”

She nodded again.

There was no way J.R. would have shown up to do his own dirty work. He would have sent someone else.

“Do you know the name of the person who came to see you?”

She looked away. “No.”

“If I show you a picture, do you think you can tell me if it was him?”

Despite her dubious expression, she nodded and said, “I’ll never forget that man.”

I pulled out my phone and sent Skeeter a text:

I need you to send pic of Thaddeus Brooke’s photo on his driver’s license.

He didn’t respond for a good half-minute, but then he sent the photo, no questions asked.

I held the screen in front of Neely Kate’s grandmother. “Is this him?”

Tears filled her eyes, and I stared at her in shock. This was not the woman I’d met in the bingo hall. I had never expected anything to terrify that feisty woman.

“So this is him?”

She nodded.

“He showed up lookin’ for Jenny Lynn?”

“Her too.”

“So he was looking for something else?” I asked in surprise.

When she didn’t answer, Neely Kate blew her stack. “For God’s sake, Granny, I know you think you’re helpin’ me, but you’re hurtin’ me more by not telling me! What was he lookin’ for?”

Her grandmother stood up and shouted, “A gun! He was looking for the gun Jenny Lynn took from that man!”

Neely Kate gasped. “A gun?”

The older woman started to sob. “Jenny Lynn took if for insurance.”

“You mean protection?” I asked.

“No, insurance. She said he’d shot and killed a man with it. She took it to use for blackmail. I told the man who showed up that if he or the man who’d used Jenny Lynn tried to find her, we’d turn the gun in to the police.”

I sucked in a breath.

Granny Rivers wiped her nose with her tissue. “I told him that she took it with her. He banged me up a bit, then said he’d be back in a week to get it or else. But he never came back. Then the police chief got shot in his house. A burglary gone wrong, they said. Who’s gonna fall for that? The police chief! After the same thing had happened to the owner of the fertilizer plant the week before . . . Everyone thought there was a dangerous criminal on the loose, but I knew that rich guy from El Dorado had somethin’ to do with it.”

“Where’s the gun now, Granny?” Neely Kate asked.

She started crying harder. “She took it with her.”

“Momma took it?”

“No, that woman. She knew I had it, and she demanded I give it to her.”

Neely Kate glanced at me. “How’d Kate know about the gun, and why would she want it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she wanted it for more evidence against her father.”

“So why’d she threaten Granny if she told anybody about her showing up and askin’ questions?”