Falling for My Ex's Uncle novel · Chapter 7 of 32
Chapter 7: Thumbprint
"That's Royal Gold," I said.
The contest rep looked at me blankly.
"The sauce. It's a grocery store sauce. We don't even have a bottle on site."
"Ma'am, I'm sorry. The rule's the rule. Any mark on the box, it's out." He handed me the bag. "You can file a protest. It won't change the score."
Wick took the bag out of my hands before I threw it.
"Who carried it to the table?" he said.
"I did," Lorrie said. "Nobody touched it. I swear on my mother."
"After you set it down," Wick said. "Who was near it?"
Lorrie's face changed.
She turned around and walked straight back into the crowd.
Twenty minutes later she found us at Mabel with her phone held out.
"The volunteer who checks the boxes in," she said. "Sweet lady, eighty years old, from Arkansas. I asked who was hanging around the turn-in table at one-thirty."
"And?"
"She said a heavy man with a gold watch asked to look at the boxes. Said he was a judge. She let him lean over the cart for a second."
Wick went very still.
"Heavy man," I said. "Fifties. Gold watch."
"Hal's commissary manager," Lorrie said. "Who drove all the way to Memphis and doesn't cook."
"He's here?"
Lorrie pointed with her chin.
On the bluff, by the Kimbrough trailer, a big man in a polo shirt was laughing with a cameraman.
The sun caught his wrist.
Wick looked at him for a long moment.
He didn't say a word.
But he put his body between me and that trailer without seeming to think about it.
"Where's Brice?" I said.
The Kimbrough crew was packing up on the riverbank below the bluff, loading coolers onto a golf cart.
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